Sitting behind the wheel of the Jeep, Makena, her assistant, said, “You want to move closer?”
“No, this is fine.”
In fact, it was more than fine. Their Jeep was on a slight rise, and they had a better-than-average view. With any luck, she would record the entire attack pattern. She turned on the video camera, mounted on a tripod five feet above her head, and dictated rapidly into the tape recorder.
“F1 south, F2 and F5 flanking, twenty yards. F3 center. F6 circling wide east. Can’t see F7. F8 circling north. F1 straight through. Disrupting. Herd moving, stamping. There’s F7. Straight through. F8 angling through from the north. Coming out, circling again.”
This was classic hyena behavior. The lead animals ran through the herd, while others circled it, then came in from the sides. The buffalo couldn’t keep track of their attackers. She listened to the herd bellowing, even as the group panicked, broke its tight clustered formation. The big animals moved apart, turning, looking. Harding couldn’t see the calves; they were below the grass. But she could hear their plaintive cries.
Now the hyenas came back. The buffalo stamped their feet, lowered their big heads menacingly. The grass rippled as the hyenas circled, yelping and barking, the sounds more staccato. She caught a brief glimpse of female F8, her jaws already red. But Harding hadn’t seen the actual attack.
The buffalo herd moved a short distance to the east, where it regrouped. One female buffalo now stood apart from the herd. She bellowed continuously at the hyenas. They must have taken her calf.
Harding felt frustrated. It had happened so swiftly—too swiftly—which could only mean that the hyenas had been lucky, or the calf was injured. Or perhaps very young, even newborn; a few of the buffalo were still calving. She would have to review the videotape, to try and reconstruct what had happened. The perils of studying fast-moving nocturnal animals, she thought.
But there was no question they had taken an animal. All the hyenas were clustered around a single area of grass; they yelped and jumped. She saw F3, and then F5, their muzzles bloody. Now the pups came up, squealing to get at the kill. The adults immediately made room for them, helped them to eat. Sometimes they pulled away flesh from the carcass, and held it so the young ones could eat.
Their behavior was familiar to Sarah Harding, who had become in recent years the foremost expert on hyenas in the world. When she first reported her findings, she was greeted with disbelief and even outrage from colleagues, who disputed her results in very personal terms. She was attacked for being a woman, for being attractive, for having “an overbearing feminist perspective.” The university reminded her she was on tenure track. Colleagues shook their heads. But Harding had persisted, and slowly, over time, as more data accumulated, her view of hyenas had come to be accepted.
Still, hyenas would never be appealing creatures, she thought, watching them feed. They were ungainly, heads too big and bodies sloping, coats ragged and mottled, gait awkward, vocalizations too reminiscent of an unpleasant laugh. In an increasingly urban world of concrete skyscrapers, wild animals were romanticized, classified as noble or ignoble, heroes or villains. And in this media-driven world, hyenas were simply not photogenic enough to be admirable. Long since cast as the laughing villains of the African plain, they were hardly thought worth a systematic study until Harding had begun her own research.
What she had discovered cast hyenas in a very different light. Brave hunters and attentive parents, they lived in a remarkably complex social structure—and a matriarchy as well. As for their notorious yelping vocalizations, they actually represented an extremely sophisticated form of communication.
She heard a roar, and through her night-vision goggles saw the first of the lions approaching the kill. It was a large female, circling closer. The hyenas barked and snapped at the lioness, guiding their own pups off into the grass. Within a few moments, other lions appeared, and settled down to feed on the hyenas’ kill.
Now, lions, she thought. There was a truly nasty animal. Although called the king of beasts, lions in truth were actually vile and—
The phone rang.
“Makena,” she said.
The phone rang again. Who could be calling her now?
She frowned. Through the goggles, she saw the lionesses look up, heads turning in the night.
Makena was fumbling beneath the dashboard, looking for the phone. It rang three more times before he found it.
She heard him say, “Jambo, mzee. Yes, Dr. Harding is here.” He handed the phone up to her. “It’s Dr. Thorne.”
Reluctantly, she removed her night goggles, and took the phone. She knew Thorne well; he had designed most of the equipment in her Jeep. “Doc, this better be important.”
“It is,” Thorne said. “I’m calling about Richard.”
“What about him?” She caught his concern, but didn’t understand why. Lately, Levine had been a pain in the neck, telephoning her almost daily from California, picking her brains about field work with animals. He had lots of questions about hides, and blinds, data protocols, record-keeping, it went on and on. . . .
“Did he ever tell you what he intended to study?” Thorne asked.
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“Nothing at all?”
“No,” Harding said. “He was very secretive. But I gathered he’d located an animal population that he could use to make some point about biological systems. You know how obsessive he is. Why?”
“Well, he’s missing, Sarah. Malcolm and I think he’s in some kind of trouble. We’ve located him on an island in Costa Rica, and we’re going to get him now.”
“Now?” she said.
“Tonight. We’re flying to San José in a few hours. Ian’s going with me. We want you to come, too.”
“Doc,” she said. “Even if I took a flight out of Seronera tomorrow morning to Nairobi, it’d take me almost a day to get there. And that’s if I got lucky. I mean—”
“You decide,” Thorne said, interrupting. “I’ll give you the details, and you decide what you want to do.”
He gave her the information, and she wrote it on the notepad strapped to her wrist. Then Thorne rang off.
She stood staring out at the African night, feeling the cool breeze on her face. Off in the darkness, she heard the growl of the lions at the kill. Her work was here. Her life was here.
Makena said, “Dr. Harding? What do we do?”
“Go back,” she said. “I have to pack.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m leaving.”
Message
Thorne drove to the airport, the lights of San Francisco disappearing behind them. Malcolm sat in the
passenger seat. He looked back at the Explorer driving behind them and said, “Does Eddie know what this is all about?”
“Yes,” Thorne said. “But I’m not sure he believes it.”
“And the kids don’t know?”
“No,” Thorne said.
There was a beeping alongside him. Thorne pulled out his little black Envoy, a radio pager. A light was flashing. He flipped up the screen, and handed it to Malcolm. “Read it for me.”
“It’s from Arby,” Malcolm said. “Says, ‘Have a good trip. If you want us, call. We’ll be standing by if you need our help.’ And he gives his phone number.”
Thorne laughed. “You got to love those kids. They never give up.” Then he frowned, as a thought occurred to him. “What’s the time on that message?”
“Four minutes ago,” Malcolm said. “Came in via netcom.”
“Okay. Just checking.”
They turned right, toward the airport. They saw the lights in the distance. Malcolm stared forward gloomily. “It’s very unwise for us to be rushing off like this. It’s not the right way to go about it.”
Thorne said, “We should be all right. As long as we have the right island.”
“We do,” Malcolm said.
“How do you know?”
“The most important clue was something I didn’t want the kids to know about. A few days ago, Levine saw the carcass of one of the animals.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. He had a chance to look at it, before the officials burned it. And he discovered that it was tagged. He cut the tag off and sent it to me.”
“Tagged? You mean like—”
“Yes. Like a biological specimen. The tag was old, and it showed pitting from sulfuric acid.”
“Must be volcanic,” Thorne said.
“Exactly.”
“And you say it was an old tag?”
“Several years,” Malcolm said. “But the most interesting finding was the way the animal died. Levine concluded the animal had been injured while it was still alive—a deep slashing cut in the leg that went right down to the bone.”