just so, like a pallbearer lugging one corner of an invisible coffin. He laughed and smiled easily, but he had attentive, chilly eyes, the color of lead. Those eyes made Christian think, randomly, of the moons around Saturn, airless places where the seas were acid. Peter and his father enjoyed a good shoot, would yell with pleasure when a bullet thwacked into the hide of a crocodile or raised a puff of dust off a buffalo’s flank. The way Fallows killed, it was as if he himself were the weapon and the gun was only incidental. Pleasure didn’t come into it.
The lion’s tail lifted slowly and slapped the dust. Lifted—held in place—and thumped the dust again. The big cat lay toppled on its side.
For a time Fallows sat alone with his lion and the others hung respectfully back. Fallows stroked its wet muzzle and stared into its patient, still face. Perhaps he spoke to it. Christian had overheard Fallows saying to Mr. Stockton that after he got his lion, he might give up hunting, that there was nothing left to go after. Stockton had laughed and said, “What about hunting a man?” Fallows had looked at him with those chilly, distant eyes and said, “Hunted them and been hunted by them and have the wounds to prove it.” Peter and Christian had debated, ever since, how many men he’d killed. It delighted Christian to know a no-kidding agent of death.
Some Saan ranch hands materialized out of the night from their own hideaway, and a cheer went up at the sight of the dead lion. One unzipped a canvas cooling bag and dug in the ice for beers. The tail struck the ground again, and Christian imagined he could feel the earth vibrating from the blow. But then Christian had a colorful imagination. Stockton helped Fallows to his feet and handed him an icy Urbock.
Peter pinched his nose. “God. Smells like shit. They ought to groom them before a hunt.”
“That’s the chickens, dumb-ass,” Peter’s father said.
The tail rose and fell with a whap.
“Should he shoot it again?” Christian asked. “Is it suffering?”
“No. That’s one dead cat,” Stockton said. “Never mind the tail. They do that. It’s a mindless postmortem spasm.”
Christian sank down by the lion’s head, sketch pad in hand. He stroked the lion’s vast, trembling mane, tentatively at first, then more firmly. He leaned close to one velvety ear, to whisper to it, before it was all the way gone: to say fare thee well. He was only barely sensible of Peter hunkering down beside him and the two older men talking behind them. For the moment he was alone with the lion in the profound stillness between life and death, a separate and solemn kingdom.
“Will you look at this paw?” Peter asked, drawing Christian back to the now. Peter lifted the lion’s great limp foreleg, spreading the leathery pads with his thumb.
“Hey there,” Fallows said, but Christian wasn’t sure who he was talking to.
“Make a hell of a paperweight, wouldn’t it?” Peter asked, and growled, and waved the paw at Christian in a lazy swipe.
The paw extruded smooth, sharp hooks of yellowing keratin. A tendon in the foreleg went taut. Christian sprang, throwing his shoulder into Peter’s chest. He was fast. The lion was faster. Fallows was faster still. Old, and broken more than once, but fastest of them all.
Fallows hit Peter, who jolted into Christian, and all three of them slammed into the hardpan. Christian felt something snag his shirt, as if the fabric caught on a branch for a moment. Then he was flattened under the other two, and all the breath smashed out of him. Fallows kicked, turning onto his side and rolling the rifle down off his shoulder and into his hands in one fluid motion. The barrel settled into the soft underside of the lion’s jaw. The gun went off with a shattering crack that made Christian’s ears ring.
Stockton’s beer slipped out of his hand and hit the dirt, where it spouted foam. “Peter? Peter! The fuck is wrong with you?”
Peter was the first to struggle out from the pig pile. He left Christian and Fallows sprawled in the dirt, both of them panting for breath, as if they’d collapsed together after a hard sprint. The old soldier groaned exquisitely. Peter stood over them, staring down at the lion in a dazed sort of way and slapping his own bottom to get the dust off his shorts. He remained in a foggy-eyed trance until