A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,77
out a lion that’s a nuisance. But just because he’s a man-eater doesn’t mean his cubs will be.”
“But they might,” I pressed.
“Then I’ll kill them, too. Happy?”
“No! You are the most contradictory person I’ve ever met—a white hunter who doesn’t like to hunt?”
He sighed. “Delilah.” The softness of my name stopped me in my tracks. He was looking at me, really looking, as if the strength of that looking could teach me to understand him. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I saw what happened in the States when people were given free rein to hunt buffalo. There used to be millions of them roaming the plains. Now they’re gone, vanished into nothing, and with them went all the tribes that used to survive on them. It’s a whole way of life that just isn’t there anymore, and that’s a tragedy. It’s more than a tragedy, it’s a crime, only no one is ever going to swing for it. The one thing Roosevelt did right was to create protected parkland and preserves. Maybe, just maybe, some of the kind of wilderness I grew up in will survive. But there’s nobody to do that here. It’s all too new, too much chaos and too much arguing. Nobody is putting aside parkland and nobody is protecting the way of life that’s been here for thousands of years.”
He took a step closer, his tone urging. “Don’t you see? Those zebra we saw yesterday are part of something bigger, a huge migration that moves over these plains in a vast circle every year. First the wildebeest come, then the zebra, then the small gazelles. There’s a rhythm to it, a rhyme and a reason that makes you believe in a god when nothing else will. And when people stay out of it, the system works just fine. Some of the hooved stock are lost to the lion and the leopard, but most aren’t. Most survive, and so do the cats, and so do the people who live out here. It works, at least it did until the white folks came in and started taking it apart. Now there’s only so much time left until it’s all undone.”
He stopped and drew a deep breath. “The odds are long that the lioness will even conceive. And if she does, most of the cubs probably won’t even make it to adulthood. But if one does, then I will have undone what I have to do when I kill that man-eater. I can bring everything back into balance, and when this place goes to hell, when there’s nothing left on this plain but memories and regrets, it won’t be all my fault. Can you understand that? Will you understand that?”
He was standing so close I could see the gold flecks in the blue of his eyes. I opened my mouth, but he turned. “I shouldn’t have preached. Come on. Let’s see what Tusker rustled up for dinner.”
Tusker’s cook produced a marvel of a meal, and while Ryder went to the porters to discuss what would happen during the next day’s shoot, Tusker and I lounged by the fire with pink gins. The nightjars were calling and the crickets sang as the ripening moon rose. Tusker threw her head back and inhaled deeply.
“Breathe in Africa, child. It’s the most revivifying place I have ever been.”
“Did you grow up here?”
She gave a short, barking laugh. “God, no. I was brought up in England, a proper little debutante, making my curtsey to the Prince of Wales and filling in my dance card. I broke out as soon as I could. Told Balfour I would marry him if he took me right out of England. It was an escape plan, you see.”
“Escape?”
“From all of it, the expectations and the decorum and the polite smiles hiding vicious tongues. I’d had my heart broken, you see. Fell in love with the wrong chap and he crushed me right down to the bedrock. Nothing left but humiliation.”
“And Balfour picked up the pieces?”
“He did. A good fellow, was Balfour. For a poofter.”
She took a long sip of her cocktail and I blinked at her. “He was a homosexual?”
“Oh, as flouncy as they come! But I didn’t care. It meant he would never bother me in the bedroom, and that’s all I wanted. So I married him and he brought me here. We got on quite well together. Poor dear, he always had schemes for making money and none of them ever worked. But we rubbed