After the buck and the three does, which squeezed through the narrow opening of the hopo with heart-bursting terror, came a crowd of small beasts; they rushed the opening like immigrants. More cautious, a hyena showed up, and, unlike the other creatures who didn’t know we were there, this creature shot a look up at us on the platform and gave its shallow, batlike snarl. I looked for something to throw at it. But there was nothing with us on the platform to throw and I spat down instead.
“Lion is there — lion, lion!” The king stood, pointing, and about a hundred yards away, I saw a slow stirring in the grass, not the throbbing of the smaller animals but a circular, heavy disturbance which a powerful body made.
“Do you think that would be Gmilo? Hey, hey, hey-is he here? You can take him, King. I know you can.” I had risen on the narrow stand of floor projecting from beneath the grass wall, and I was thrusting and cranking my arm up and down as I spoke.
“Henderson-do not,” he said.
Nevertheless I took a step in his direction, and then he cried out at me; his face was angry. So I squatted down and shut my mouth. My blood was full of fever, as if it flowed open to the glare of the sun.
The king then set foot on the slender pole and took two turns of the cage rope around his arm and began to release the knot against which he had rested his head during our wait. The cage, with its big irregular meshes of vine and the hooflike stone weights, swung from the more rigid part at the bottom. Except for the rocks the thing had almost no substance; it was as near to being air as a Portuguese man-of-war is to being water. The king had thrown off his hat; it would have got in his way; and about his tight-grown hair, which rose barely an eighth of an inch above his scalp, the blue of the atmosphere seemed to condense, as when you light a few sticks in the woods and about these black sticks the blue begins to wrinkle.
The sunlight deformed my face with strain, for I was exposed to it as I hung over the end of the hopo like a gargoyle. The light was hard enough then to leave bruises. And still, in spite of the blasts of the beaters, the cicadas were drilling away, sending up those spirals of theirs. On the cliff side of the hopo the rock was showing its character. It muttered it would let nothing through. All things must wait for it. The small blossoms of the cactus in the ravine, if they were blossoms and not berries, foamed red, and the spines pierced me. Things seemed to speak to me. I inquired in silence about the safety of the king who had a crazy idea that he must capture lions. But I got no reply. This was not the purpose of their speech. They only declared themselves, each according to its law, declaring what it was; nothing at all referred to the king. So I crouched there, sick with heat and dread. My feeling about him had crowded aside everything else within me, which put some pressure on the neighboring organs.
With banging and with horn blasts and whooping and screams, the beaters came on, the ones at the rear leaping up from the grass, which was shoulder high, and blowing depraved notes on those horns of green and russet metal. Shots were fired in the air, maybe with my own scope-sight H and H Magnum. And at the front the spears were stitching and jabbing in disorder.
“Did you see that, Mr. Henderson-a mane?” Dahfu leaned forward on the pole, holding the rope, and the rock weights banged together over his head. I couldn’t bear to see him balanced there on a mere kite stick, with that fringe of stones clattering and wheeling inches above him on the circular contraption. Any one of them might have stunned him.
“King, I can’t stand this. Be careful, for Christ’s sake. This is no machine to horse around with.” It was enough, I told myself, that this noble man had to risk his life on that primitive invention; he didn’t have to make the thing more dangerous than it was. However, there may have been no safe way to do it. And then he did look very practiced as he balanced on the narrow shaft. The rock weights circled with spasmodic power at the king’s pull. This intricate clumsy rig clattered around and around like a merry-go-round, and the netted shadow wheeled on the ground.
For the count of about twenty heartbeats I only partly knew where I was or what was happening. Mainly I kept a fixed watch on the king, ready to hurl myself down if he should fall. Then, at the very doors of consciousness, there was a snarl and I looked down from this straw perch-I was on my knees-into the big, angry, hair-framed face of the lion. It was all wrinkled, contracted; within those wrinkles was the darkness of murder. The lips were drawn away from the gums, and the breath of the animal came over me, hot as oblivion, raw as blood. I started to speak aloud. I said, “Oh my God, whatever You think of me, let me not fall under this butcher shop. Take care of the king. Show him Thy mercy.” And to this, as a rider, the thought added itself that this was all mankind needed, to be conditioned into the image of a ferocious animal like the one below. I then tried to tell myself because of the clearness of those enraged eyes that only visions ever got to be so hyper-actual. But it was no vision. The snarling of this animal was indeed the voice of death. And I thought how I had boasted to my dear Lily how I loved reality. “I love it more than you do,” I had said. But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life. But now I was blasted away from this practice by the throat of the lion. His voice was like a blow at the back of my head.
The barred door had dropped. Small creatures were still escaping through the gaps in streaks of fur, springing and writhing, frantically coiling. The lion rushed under us and threw his weight against these bars. Was he Gmilo? I had been told that Gmilo’s ears had been marked as a cub, before he was released by the Bunam. But of course you had to catch the animal before you could look at his ears. This might well be Gmilo. Behind the barrier the men prodded him with the spears while he fought at the shafts and tried to catch them in his jaws. They were too deft for him. In the front rank forty or fifty spear points feinted and worked toward him, while from the back there flew stones, at which the animal shook his huge face with the yellow corded hair which made his forequarters so huge. His small belly was fringed, and also his forelegs, like a plainsman’s buckskins. Compared with this creature Atti was no bigger than a lynx.
Balancing on the pole in his slippers, Dahfu released one turn of the rope from his upper arm; the net bucked, and the motion and the clacking of the stones caught the lion’s eye. The beaters screamed up at Dahfu, “Yenitu lebah!” Ignoring them, he held fast to the line and turned around the rim of the net, which was now level with his eyes. Stone battered stone as the contraption spun around; the lion rose on his hind legs and threw a blow at these weights. Foremost among the beaters was the white-painted Bunam’s man, who darted in and knocked the animal on the cheek with a spear butt. From top to bottom this fellow was clad in his dirty white, like kid leather, his hair covered with the chalky paste. I now felt the weight of the lion against the posts that held up the platform. They were no thicker than stilts and when he hit them they vibrated. I thought the structure was going to crash, and I clutched the floor, for I expected that I might be carried down like a water tower when a freight train jumps the tracks and crashes it to splinters, with a ton of water gushing in the air. Under Dahfu’s feet the pole swayed, but he rode out the shock with rope and net.
“King, for God’s sake!” I wanted to cry. “What have we got into?”
Again a thick flock of stones flew forward. Some struck the hopo wall but others found the animal and drove him under the circling weights of that cursed net of vines. God curse all vines and creepers! The king began to sway out as he pushed and maneuvered this bell of knots and stones.
I was freed for one moment from my dumbness. My voice returned and I said to him, “King, take it easy. Mind what you’re doing.” Then a globe arose in my throat, about the size of a darning egg.