My father had been with the horses, but when he came running he held me close, crushing me to his chest. It was like being rescued—rescued again, really, because that had happened already.
Bishon Singh had seen me run past him as he tended our horses in the Elkingtons’ stable. When he came up the hill Paddy was already standing on my back, his mouth stretched wide, lips rimmed in black, teeth slick with saliva. He roared again, the sound nearly stopping Bishon Singh and the six or seven grooms that came running up behind him, all of them trying to make their bodies appear larger and their voices boom. Then came Bwana Elkington rolling his huge frame, flicking the long kiboko whip out in front of him like a cresting wave, the tip electrifying the air.
“The lion did not like being disturbed,” Bishon Singh said. “But bwana lashed the whip hard again. He rushed at Paddy and screamed, striking him with the whip over and over, and finally Paddy had had enough. He lunged at his master so quickly there was nothing for Bwana Elkington to do but race to the baobab. He flew up that tree and Paddy roared like Zeus himself. Then he was gone.”
The wound running from my calf muscle to the top of my thigh burned as if I were holding it over flames. I could feel each of the deep, raw claw marks from where Paddy had stood on my back, and the smaller punctures on my neck, under my blood-soaked hair. After the doctor was called, my father went into the other room and talked in sharp whispers to Jim and Mrs. Elkington about what should be done about Paddy. A little while later, a toto came running in from a nearby farm saying that Paddy had killed a neighbour’s horse and dragged it away.
Jim and my father loaded up their rifles, ordering the grooms to ready their hacks while I felt a swirl of emotions. Paddy was on the loose now. Part of me worried he could come back to the farm and attack someone—anyone. Another part of me felt awful for Paddy. He was a lion, and killing was what he’d been made to do.
The doctor gave me laudanum, and then stitched me up with a hooked needle and thick black thread. I lay on my stomach while Bishon Singh held one of my hands, his thin steel bangle rocking up and down his arm, his white turban wrapped around and around, who knew how many times, and the end tucked invisibly somewhere, like the fabled snake that swallows its own tail.
“The whip shouldn’t have been more than a gnat for Paddy,” Bishon Singh told me.
“What do you mean?”
“What is a whip to a lion? He must have been ready to let you go. Or perhaps you weren’t ever meant for him.”
I felt the tug of the needle, a pushing and pulling, as if just that part of my body were caught in a small current. His words were another kind of current. “What am I meant for then?”
“How wonderful that question is, Beru.” He smiled mysteriously. “And as you did not die on this day, you have more time in which to answer it.”
—
I stayed with the Elkingtons for several weeks, while Mrs. Elkington brought me nice food on a bamboo tray—candied ginger, devilled eggs, and chilled juices. She had her kitchen toto busy making me fresh cakes every day, as if that would somehow make up for what Paddy had done—and for the fact of him now, roaring sullenly and sometimes monstrously from a wooden pen behind the main paddock.
They’d finally caught him four days after he escaped and brought him back bound. When Mrs. Elkington told me he was behind bars, it was meant to reassure me, but it also turned my stomach. I had tempted Paddy by running in front of his nose, and now he was suffering for doing something that was natural for him. It was my fault—but there was also the matter, when I lay in my narrow bed at the Elkingtons’, of Paddy’s howling. I clamped my hands over my ears, relieved that he was locked away. Relieved and also sick about it. Safe and also guilty.