A Time to Die

"A lion?" Claudia asked.

"Not just any old lion." Riccardo shook his head. "Frederick the Great has come at last."

Sean turned away and beckoned his men to come to him. The three of them, Job, Shadrach, and Matatu, squatted around him in a circle and Claudia and Riccardo were forgotten as they pla

"The trick is going to be getting him to come in before nightfall," he told them. "We all agree that the only way to do that is to set up a fresh bait for him and build a new hide. The lionesses have rumbled this one, and old Fred is going to be as suspicious as all hell. He's going to lurk out there until well after dark or until we can entice him in somehow."

Sean sat down between them and was silent for a moment.

"You know, Capo, sometimes for a good friend, someone I can trust, I'm prepared to bend the rules a little." He spoke deliberately, drawing with a twig in the dirt between his feet, not looking at Riccardo.

"I'm listening." Riccardo nodded.

"There may be only one way we will get this lion," Sean said softly. "Jacklight him."

They were silent for a long time, and though Claudia did not know what "jacklight" meant, she realized Sean was suggesting something beyond law or decency, and she knew her father was tempted. She was angry with Sean for putting temptation in her father's way, but she knew better than to intervene. She kept silent and willed her father to refuse to give in to temptation.

Riccardo shook his head. "No, let's do it right."

"We can try." Sean shrugged. "But he has been shot at over a bait and wounded once. It won't be easy."

They were silent again for almost a full minute. Then Sean went on. "The lion is a nocturnal animal. The night is his time. If you truly want this lion, I think you'll have to take him in darkness."

Riccardo sighed, and shook his head. "I want him very badly, but not badly enough to kill him without respect." Sean stood up. "It's your safari, Capo," he agreed quietly. "I just want you to know that there are not many men I'd make that offer to. As a matter of fact, offhand I can't think of anyone else I'd do it for."

"I know," Riccardo said. "Thank you, Sean." Sean walked back to the fig tree to help his men to lower the remains of the carcass so the pride could reach it.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Claudia asked her father, "Jacklight?

What's that?"

"Putting a spotlight on an animal after dark and shooting it in the beam. It's illegal, highly illegal."

"The bastard," she said bitterly.

Riccardo did not react to her denunciation but went on softly, "He was prepared to put his career on the line for me. That's one of the best things anyone has ever done for me."

"I'm proud you refused him, Papa, but he's a bastard."

"You don't understand," he said. "You can't possibly understand."

He stood up and walked away, and immediately she felt a throb of guilt. She did understand. She understood that this was his last lion and that she was spoiling the pleasure of it for him. She was torn between her love for him and her protective instinct for that marvelous animal and her sense of right and justice.

"It should be easy to do the right thing," she thought. "But it so seldom is."

So over the days that followed, they hunted the old lion with ethical tactics, providing fresh bait for him and the lionesses. Riccardo shot the buffalo Sean pointed out to him, another barren cow, and then, two days later, a decrepit bull with horns worn down to stumps and his ribs showing through his bald, mud-caked hide.

Each day Sean moved the bait or repositioned the thatched hide, to find a location the black-maned male would feel sufficiently confident to approach in broad daylight. Evening after evening, they sat in the hide until an hour after darkness had fallen and then drove back to camp dejected and discouraged. When they visited the bait again the following morning, they found that the lion had fed, leaving his mane hairs and his huge pad marks to tantalize them, and had departed again before dawn.

Cursing the beast bitterly, Sean changed tactics. He lowered the remains of the rotten bait on its chain so lionesses and cubs could reach it readily. By this stage, it was mostly dried skin and gnawed bone. Five hundred meters up the river, he hung a fresh carcass at a height only the big lion could reach in a tree that stood alone in a glade of shoulder-high dry winter grass. He hoped that without the harassment of the females and cubs the lion might come earlier to the bait.

To make him feel even more secure, he placed the hide across the dry river-bed in the fork of a teak tree. It was a mac han platform fifteen feet above ground level. From the mac han they had a view across the white sand of the dry river-bed.

Sean did not clear all the grass around the bait tree. He wanted the lion to feel protected by good cover. He merely opened a keyhole in the grass, barely as wide as the body of the lion, through which they could see the carcass.

"If he comes, you'll have to wait until he rears up to feed, Capo," he explained as they went into the mac han an hour after noon to wait out the long drowsy hot afternoon.

Sean allowed Claudia to bring a paperback copy of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa to read. "Just as long as you don't rustle the pages," he warned her.