Chapter 7
Sheena staggered through the tall grass, dizzy and confused. Had she
killed all of them? She tried to remember what happened at the house. Three or
four had gone down, but which was it? If three, then one was still alive. But
maybe she had gotten them all.
She suddenly realized that her left foot hurt. The pain was intense, and
when she looked down she saw the bloody crease where a bullet had slashed across
the top of her instep. How far could she get with this injury? And even if she
hadn't been wounded, how far could she get in this alien environment? This
wasn't her beloved jungle, with its chimps and bonobos, its snakes and okapis,
its brightly colored birds. She was on the savanna, a mostly treeless domain
filled with predators and scavengers she had rarely or never encountered in the
forest: lions, cheetahs, hyenas and jackals. She had defeated large predators in
battle, one-on-one, but that was in the jungle, where tactical retreat was just
a vine or a tree limb away.
Here she was naked and vulnerable, and predators traveled in packs.
As if it had eavesdropped on her thoughts, a lion roared in the
distance. Another, much closer to her, answered with what sounded like a cough.
She turned slowly, scanning the horizon. There was a copse of trees
perhaps two miles to the northeast, but that was in the direction of the lions.
To the southeast, about a mile away, was a rocky outcropping. Its steep sides
would be difficult for a lion to scale and impossible for hyenas or jackals. She
started off in that direction, wincing each time she put weight on her left
foot.
Halfway to the rocks, a herd of giraffes crossed her path. Despite her
pain and danger, she couldn't help smiling at their rocking gait.
They passed within a dozen yards and seemed uninterested in her.
But as the dust they had kicked up settled, she turned and saw, not a
hundred yards to her left, a pack of hyenas. They were moving toward her but
seemed in no hurry.
Maybe they hadn't seen her. If she got down and crawled on her hands and
knees, she would be hidden by the grass. But her pace would be so slow that they
might stumble upon her before she reached the rocks.
Better to make a run for it.
She took off as fast as the pain in her foot would permit. A few seconds
later, she heard a raucous outcry as the hyenas detected her and gave chase.
She knew she should keep running and not look back. But she couldn't
resist. The two fastest beasts were well ahead of the rest of the pack and only
fifty yards behind her. She tried to run faster, slipped, fell and scrambled
back onto her feet. The ground was rocky here. Only a few more yards and she
would be at the sheer stone face. She was already searching for hand-holds in
the cliff when a hyena hit her from behind and knocked her face down. Its
momentum carried it head-first into a boulder, and it howled in pain.
The second hyena was on her in an instant, its powerful jaws closing on
her upraised forearm. Sheena screamed, and with her other hand plunged her knife
into the hyena's neck. It relaxed its grip on her arm and collapsed on top of
her.
Sheena struggled to her feet and backed up to the cliff face. The other
hyenas had caught up and now arranged themselves in a semicircle. The largest, a
150-pound female, addressed her: "It is useless to fight us. There is no escape.
Accept your death. Accept your death in peace."
The others took up the chant: "Accept your death. Accept your death in
peace."
They were right, she thought. Resistance was futile. She was exhausted
and hurt. They would tear her to pieces. Better to allow one terrible bite from
those jaws - then blackness.
Slowly, she sank to her knees. "I am ready," she whispered.
She closed her eyes and tilted back her head to expose her throat to the
leader of the pack. The beast moved forward, its jaws agape.
Something told her to open her eyes. She looked up. A few feet above
her, the root of some long-lost tree protruded from a crack in the stone.
"Wait," she cried. The startled hyena stopped and even took a step
backward.
Sheena leapt with all the strength that was left in her. She grabbed
the root and pulled up her dangling feet a fraction of a second before the
furious hyena bitch snapped at them.
Now, with the beasts panting and grunting below, she searched for a way
up the rock face. She found a ledge above the tree root and used it to pull
herself up. Now she could use the root as a foot-hold. Slowly, painfully, she
made her way up the side of the cliff. She was trembling with exhaustion and
covered with sweat when she reached the top.
She lay for several minutes and looked at the angry and confused hyenas,
only twenty feet below her. Then she turned to examine the high ground on which
she found herself. With horror, she realized that the stone cliff she had
climbed was only one face of the plateau. Further to the southeast, it sloped
gently back to the grassland.
All the hyenas had to do was work their way around the outcropping until
the cliff disappeared. Then they could walk right up - and enjoy the feast they
had barely missed.
A wave of dizziness and despair brought her to her knees. She was weak
and sick.
A shadow crossed the ground near her. She looked up, into the blinding
sun. Was something up there? She couldn't tell.
Then she felt a sharp bump on the back of her head and realized she had
fallen backward. Two dark shapes glided across the sky above her, then another
and another. She closed her eyes and used the little strength she had left to
turn onto her side and curl up in a fetal position.
The vultures landed with small, clumsy hops - nothing like their grace
while airborne. Soon there were seven of them. One waddled over to Sheena,
lunged at her behind and came away with her leopard-skin thong. Another sank its
beak into her shoulder and jerked her onto her back. Now her face, breasts and
belly were exposed and defenseless.
The others greedily closed in.
# # #
The first rifle shot only sheared off the tail feathers of one of the
birds, but the sound startled all of them. The next shot took the head off the
vulture that had bitten Sheena's shoulder, and the third ripped through the
breast of another.
Suddenly, the survivors lost their appetites and scrambled to get
airborne.
The shooter walked slowly to Sheena, cursing and sweating. It was Louie.
"I don't know why I go to so much trouble to save your sorry ass," he
said irritably. "You tried to fuckin' kill me."
Sheena gave no response.
"Aw, shit," said Louie. "You mean I'm going to have to carry you all the
way back to the truck?"
Carry her, he did. And after they were back in the Explorer, he drove
until he found a little clinic in a village by a lake. It was run by a bunch of
white do-gooders from Europe, and they wanted to know who Sheena and Louie were,
how she had been hurt, and where they were headed.
"She's my sister," Louie said, unconvincingly. "We was hunting, and we
had an accident."
"Does your sister usually hunt in the nude?" asked a slim doctor with a
reddish beard and a Scandinavian accent.
"All the time," said Louie. "Actually, she loves runnin' round naked.
Sort of a religion with her."
They gave her a shot of penicillin and bandaged her foot, her shoulder
and her forearm. Two days later, when she was strong enough to travel, a young
woman of the village gave her a long, multicolored cloth to wrap around her.
"So you've gone native," Louie said, with a grin, as they drove away.
"Where are you taking me?" Sheena asked. She sounded tired and beaten.
"To America, sweetheart. I'm going to make you a fuckin' star - at
least in my little corner of Carolina."
