was thrown, and as we struggled to our feet, rubbing our bruised buttocks and exchanging glances of wounded commiseration, the chalicotheres fled. I was so afraid that Helen’s heavy fall might result in the miscarriage of our child that the nearness of the crouching leopard did not greatly trouble me. I began running toward Helen, intent on embracing and comforting her.
The leopard sprang from nowhere, swatted me across the chest, and immobilized me by sinking its canines into my skull. Helen screeched and scrambled away. I was glad to see her saving herself. She could hardly hope to rescue me, and, Ngai be praised, my own discomfort was minimal. A helpful mechanism of my preconsciousness had switched on, shunting both hurt and fear into a sensory limbo beneath my dreams. My neck snapped, but I had already relaxed so completely that the noise seemed like a burst of light rather than a crack of pain.
Dragging me between its legs, the leopard struggled across the savannah to a tree.
The landscape turned upside down. The leopard, setting and resetting its claws in the tree trunk, hoisted me to a convenient fork about nine feet from the ground. Here it wedged me into place and, holding one rough paw on my lower spine, began to feed. Its teeth tore inward through my kidneys, pancreas, bowels; and its tongue lapped speculatively at my warm, rich blood.
Neither terrified nor pain-racked, I died into the night.
Hunger awakened me. It was still too early for the habilines’ aubades, and the two-legged corpse under my paws was good for another meal only if I ate daintily and paced myself. This was not my style. I shifted the body and devoured as much of the stringy, acrid flesh as I could stomach. As I was eating, an upright figure appeared on the plain about forty feet away. This was the female companion of the nearly hairless biped I had stunned and dragged aloft. Except for the low-slung tumor of her pregnancy, her profile had a graceful slenderness. I lifted my head from the ravaged carcass to see what the female intended to do. She came stalking on a leisurely diagonal. Her progress toward me was hypnotic. I considered the desirability of making another kill and found the notion attractive. The fetal sweetmeat in the woman’s womb would make a fine dessert.
Suddenly she made a sweeping motion with her arm.
A rock or a hard-shelled nut ricocheted off the tree trunk past my head. I flattened my ears and roared, but the roaring did not daunt her. In fact, it may have provoked her, for she let loose a barrage of invisible missiles. I could not see them, but I could feel them. One struck me in the upper lip, cracking a tooth.
I sprang headlong to the carpet of grass and furiously rushed my tormentor.
She did not quail away, but passed her club from one hand to the other and braced her feet to accept my charge.
I hesitated. The carcass on which I had been feeding slithered from my tree, a pudding of torn flesh and splintered bones. This female habiline, I realized, was avenging a loss, not merely ordering up dessert, and her steadfastness arose from the urgency of her purpose. I had to be equally firm to triumph over her. Ignoring her mate’s fallen body, I resumed my charge. At the last instant, however, she danced aside and thwacked me on the hindquarters with her club, shattering a vertebra and so pitching me sidelong to the ground.
Although I bucked over to my belly, the woman was astride me before I could regain my feet. Her gnarled legs clutched my flanks like calipers, and her fingernails raked through the astonished vermin in the matted fur behind my head. I howled, but my dinner had settled in me heavily and I could not get off the grass. What ignominy. I had never suffered such humiliation before. I was terrified that she would kill me where I lay. The pain from my shattered vertebra was almost unbearable.
And then the female began to sing. Wrenching my ears and directing my gaze toward the moon, she divested herself of a canticle of harrowing purity. My fear evaporated, and the pain in my hindquarters surrendered to the hallucinatory loveliness of her song. Without dislodging the female habiline I got to my feet. Then, under her strong, forgiving hands, I lumbered off toward Mount Tharaka.
The lady and the leopard.
Entering the Minid village without alerting its sentry,