Rama II

20

BLESSED SLUMBER

The little girl had been alone for al­most two hours before she really understood what was happening to her. Omeh and one of the younger priests had placed Nicole right near a small, brackish pond, surrounded on all sides by the high grasses of the sava

At first Nicole had reacted as if the entire experience were a great game. She had taken out her kit made of antelope hide and carefully inventoried the contents. She had mentally divided the food into three parts, pla

Nicole’s next activity had been to create a mental map of her location, paying special attention to any landmarks that would help her identify the brackish pond from a distance. She was an extremely organized little girl and, back at Chilly-Mazarin, often played by herself in a wooded vacant lot very close to her house. In her room at home Nicole had maps of the wood that she had carefully drawn by hand, her secret hiding places marked with stars and circles.

It was when she came upon four striped antelope, grazing calmly under the steady afternoon sun, that Nicole first understood how utterly isolated she was. Her first instinct was to look for her mother, to show Anawi the beautiful animals she had found. But mother is not here, the little girl thought, her eyes sca

She remembered that she wanted to find another source of water and walked off in the direction of a large grove of trees. The little girl had no idea about distances in the open sava

She reached the trees about an hour before dark. She was delighted to find that she had fortuitously stumbled upon a small oasis in the middle of the great stretch of sava

Seven-year-old Nicole stopped swimming and treaded water for several seconds, looking around the edge of the pool for her clothes. She didn’t see them. Puzzled, she sca

There was no way to quell the panic. It overpowered her in an instant. Her eyes flooded with tears, a wail broke from her throat. She closed her eyes and wept, hoping that this was all a bad dream and that she would wake up in the next few seconds and see her mother and father. But when she opened her eyes again, the same scene was still there. A half-naked little girl was alone in the wilds of Africa with no food, no water, and no hope of rescue before the middle of the next day. And it was almost dark.

With great effort Nicole managed at last to control both her fright and her tears. She decided to look for her clothes. Where they had been before, she found fresh prints of some kind. Nicole had no way of knowing what kind of animal might have made the tracks, so she assumed that it was one of the gentle antelope that she had seen that afternoon in the sava

As the light faded she followed the tracks along a tiny pathway through the trees. After a short trek she found the antelope hide, or rather what was left of it, discarded on the side of the path. The kit was torn completely open. All the food was gone, the water flask was mostly drained, and every­thing else had fallen out except the unguents and the tuber. Nicole finished the water that was left in the flask and put it with the tuber in her right hand. She discarded the messy unguents. She was about to continue follow­ing the path when she heard a sound, halfway between a yelp and a cry. The sound was very close. The path opened into the sava

There was a small rise fifteen meters before the end of the grove. From that vantage point little Nicole saw the source of the yelp. Two lion cubs were playing with her green dress. Their watchful mother was on the oppo­site side, staring out into the sava

Back near the pool she resisted the urge to jump up and run pell-mell into the sava