Part 5
Five dry seasons after Asha first saw Jabari walking in Baraka’s tracks, Neema set two photographs side by side on Asha’s field table.
In the first, a dust-colored cub stared past the camera with burrs in his belly fur. In the second, the adult lion Asha had sedated that morning lay beneath a shade cloth while the team fitted a satellite collar. A full mane now framed his face, but the dark whisker spots above the right side of his lip still formed the same uneven hook.
“Jabari,” Neema said.
Asha enlarged both images before trusting her first reaction. Five years had built a lion around the cub’s face, but the spot pattern had not changed. “Then we know who we’ve collared.”
The operation followed a week of trouble near the western grazing blocks. Three goats had been taken outside a night enclosure, and two males had been seen in the scrub before dawn. No one could prove which lion was responsible, but the danger of retaliation was real. Mawingu strengthened the enclosure, covered the losses through its community livestock fund, and collared one coalition male so herders could be warned when he approached village land.
Camera traps had recorded the intervening years in fragments. Jabari remained with the lionesses for nearly two years, then dispersed with his cousin during Neema’s second year in Colorado. Later images placed the males forty miles west, both carrying scars from recent fights. They returned to Mawingu as a coalition during Neema’s fifth year away.
After the fellowship, Neema spent three field seasons on migration projects in the American West. She and Asha rebuilt contact through photographs from Colorado, weather reports from the Rufiji floodplain, and money Asha sent without ceremony when Neema’s truck transmission failed. At twenty-nine, Neema returned to Mawingu as a movement ecologist with her own contract and field budget. The collar project belonged to her team; Asha’s name appeared on the veterinary permit and nowhere on her daughter’s analyses.
For the next several months, the collar showed Jabari and his cousin patrolling the edge of their range. Rangers intercepted the lions twice near the grazing blocks; both times the males turned back, and no more livestock were lost.
At fifty-seven, Baraka was still walking his old routes, though he had grown slower and favored his scarred left foreleg. His right tusk had worn almost blunt, and the V in his left ear had torn a little deeper. He still dug for damp sand when shallow pools failed and once drove three younger bulls away from a narrow seep with a single lift of his head.
“Competent,” Asha corrected whenever someone called him frail.
Near the end of September, Neema knocked on Asha’s door at 5:42 in the morning and carried the telemetry laptop inside. Jabari’s collar stored its positions and uploaded them in scheduled batches; the evening transmission had failed, and the dawn pass had just delivered the cached data. Fourteen hours of locations lay crowded into one small circle north of the old pump road.
The points clustered around a seasonal ravine choked with silver-leaf and thorn scrub. A lion with a carcass might remain there that long, but the successive fixes showed repeated movement: down the eastern slope, up again, around the northern rim, then back to the same patch of ground.
Neema put Juma on speaker. He was already checking the patrol vehicle.
“Any reports from that sector?” she asked.
“Nothing overnight. No gunshots. No cattle missing.”
“He’s been circling since yesterday afternoon.”
There was a short pause. “A kill?”
“Maybe. Or he’s injured.”
Asha looked at Neema before she looked at the screen. “That ravine floods hard in March.”
“It hasn’t held water in four months.”
“Which means anything washed into it will be buried under loose soil and roots.” Asha straightened. “We go now.”
They took two vehicles: Juma drove the lead truck with three rangers; Asha and Neema followed with the immobilization case, fluids, cutters, and monitoring equipment. The old pump road ended three miles short of the cluster. From there, they followed a track made by elephants and rain, the vehicles pitching through ruts as the sun climbed.
The first sign was not the lion. It was an uprooted leadwood sapling beside a game trail, its trunk splintered where a heavy-gauge cable loop had torn free. From the hole where the sapling had stood, a deep wavering groove crossed the dust toward the ravine, with round elephant tracks on either side.
Juma stopped and crouched beside it. “Buffalo snare,” he said. “An elephant dragged it.”
Neema looked toward the ravine. The handheld VHF receiver in her hand gave a steady pulse.
Jabari appeared on the opposite ridge.
He stood broadside beneath a leadwood tree, close enough for them to see the darker hair along his chest. He did not crouch or fix his gaze on the vehicles. He looked down into the ravine, then back at them.
Hyenas called from somewhere below. Jabari wheeled toward the sound and vanished down the slope.
Juma raised a hand, and the team advanced in the vehicles rather than on foot. The smell reached them first: churned mud, elephant dung, and the iron odor of an open wound.
At the bottom of the ravine, Baraka lay on his left side against a bank of exposed roots, leaving the cable-bound right foreleg uppermost. The snare cable had broken from its original anchor, wrapped twice around that leg, and then wound itself through the leadwood roots as he pulled. Dust coated his flank. His trunk moved weakly across the ground, searching for purchase it could not find.
Three hyenas waited above him. When one started down the bank, Jabari rushed across its path and drove the group back with a short charge. Then he stopped between the fallen elephant and the scavengers…
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