Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
BETRAYAL Continued from 98 of the pups, a male the make of his father, would gambol to meet the foremost: a normally amicable female that might easily have been assigned the task of sentry, and left behind to guard the litter. Dancing about her, the pup would vigorously lick her lips, pleading for food. It was the accepted signal, and he would not know that she was delirious with fever, unnaturally irritable and confused. More quickly than he could avoid, she would snap at him, ripping his ear. Yelping, he would cower, whimper and tender submission. The other pups would shrink back as well, startled and uncertain. It would typically have been enough. The pups followed the laws of the pack, surrendering to superiority. The yearling female would usually have honored that, for pups, as perpetuation of the pack, were to be protected at all costs. Any indiscretion, and there would be hell to pay with the alpha-female. But the young female was strangely disoriented and angered, beyond the caring. The male pup lay at her mercy, and now the other yearlings were arriving too, watching curiously the unfolding drama – arrested by the same inner-sense of the abnormal that had brought the alpha-male to hesitation before the jackal, they would be cautioned by the foreboding evil. The other pups would withdraw further, wide-eyed, frightened and bewildered, almost to the den. It would happen in a wicked instant. With a crunch of her jaws, the crazed yearling female would crush the male pup's tiny skull. His small body would writhe and jerk, though briefly, then lapse still. A life so fragile that its surrender to death was almost spontaneous. Indifferent, the deranged female would turn aside, grab and kill another pup in the same sinister manner, ripping its stomach open and proceeding to eat it. Driven by the blood smell and drawn by hunger, the other yearlings would S Suddenly the way grew deeper, and darker, and the two men gazed vacantly at each other. Pooled in their eyes was the ancient fear of the unknown. instinctively rush to join the meal. Only to stutter to a halt, hackling, put off by the deviant behavior. Low growls would grow in their throats, they would back away, and, one-byone, lie down. An insensible threat was at fore, a primordial evil. Staring blankly, they would wish no part in the rest of the killings as their demented sibling methodically chased, forced to submission, and destroyed the rest of the litter. Eating portions of three, but only popping the skulls of the rest. The adult females, including the dominant matriarch, would arrive as the last two pups were being slaughtered. Strangely weak and depressed, they would watch indifferently, taking no interest in aiding the young. Apart from the yearlings, they would collapse listlessly, and lay down to their own. The two subordinate, adult males would not make it back to the kopje that night. Straggling in the next morning – dazed, drained and staggering – they did not join the pack, but curled to themselves at a distance. Two days hence, both would be dead, victims of the same horrors that doomed the alpha-male. One after another – in a little less than the next 24 hours – as systematically as the young female had killed each of the pups, an insidious presence would annihilate as terribly the rest of the pack. D ay-by-day between predator and prey, life is won – and life is lost . . . and the means is sometimes so deeply encrypted to fate that even the sharpest senses fail before its ever-present but mysterious warning. Sometimes it cannot be seen, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, or felt. Always, in every night, lies the threat of betrayal. The danger that what seems nearly natural, is not. Even to the razor senses of the alpha-male, there had come only the faintest foreboding of an attendance, though rarely is there even that. Almost always it creeps silently and vilely into the midst of the compelling and endless struggle for survival, unperceived. It had not been the swift fangs of the lion, or the leopard, or the crushing jaws of fisi, the hyena, that had brought the Njombe pack to doom. Mighty as they were, they were not powerful enough or cunning enough for that. T onight . . . somewhere in every night . . . behind all creatures great and small . . . stalks a greater force, hideous and unseen. Ever present. Sinister, and supreme. Tonight – to the jackal, to the hippo, to even the lion, the leopard and the mightiest of elephants . . . to even the humans that hunt them – death will come again. Neither claws, tusks, or wit, nor the skills of the best professional hunters and the awesome deterent of their double rifles, will stop it. It will advance secretly, and horridly, and invincibly. Only afterward . . . when life is cold . . . and only if you look beyond all that is familiar, can you find the chilling, invisible spoor to tell you that the most fearsome predator of all has hunted, the one that lurks beyond our senses. A week later Erick Nanai and Kimacha Mbwana of Tanzania's Kingupira Wildlife Research Centre would find nothing but bones and fetid scuds of hair upon the hot, red sand. Another nail in another coffin in the procession to the vault of extinction. All they could do was retrieve the telemetry collar from the remains of one of the subordinate, adult females. It was the insistent cadence of the transmitter signal that had led them there. They had guessed they would find death. They had not surmised its extent. P O R T I N G C 174 L A S S I C S