Sean sat down between them and was silent for a moment.
"You know, Capo, sometimes for a good friend, someone I can trust, I'm prepared to bend the rules a little." He spoke deliberately, drawing with a twig in the dirt between his feet, not looking at Riccardo.
"I'm listening." Riccardo nodded.
"There may be only one way we will get this lion," Sean said softly. "Jacklight him."
They were silent for a long time, and though Claudia did not know what "jacklight" meant, she realized Sean was suggesting something beyond law or decency, and she knew her father was tempted. She was angry with Sean for putting temptation in her father's way, but she knew better than to intervene. She kept silent and willed her father to refuse to give in to temptation.
Riccardo shook his head. "No, let's do it right."
"We can try." Sean shrugged. "But he has been shot at over a bait and wounded once. It won't be easy."
They were silent again for almost a full minute. Then Sean went on. "The lion is a nocturnal animal. The night is his time. If you truly want this lion, I think you'll have to take him in darkness."
Riccardo sighed, and shook his head. "I want him very badly, but not badly enough to kill him without respect." Sean stood up. "It's your safari, Capo," he agreed quietly. "I just want you to know that there are not many men I'd make that offer to. As a matter of fact, offhand I can't think of anyone else I'd do it for."
"I know," Riccardo said. "Thank you, Sean." Sean walked back to the fig tree to help his men to lower the remains of the carcass so the pride could reach it.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Claudia asked her father, "Jacklight?
What's that?"
"Putting a spotlight on an animal after dark and shooting it in the beam. It's illegal, highly illegal."
"The bastard," she said bitterly.
Riccardo did not react to her denunciation but went on softly, "He was prepared to put his career on the line for me. That's one of the best things anyone has ever done for me."
"I'm proud you refused him, Papa, but he's a bastard."
"You don't understand," he said. "You can't possibly understand."
He stood up and walked away, and immediately she felt a throb of guilt. She did understand. She understood that this was his last lion and that she was spoiling the pleasure of it for him. She was torn between her love for him and her protective instinct for that marvelous animal and her sense of right and justice.
"It should be easy to do the right thing," she thought. "But it so seldom is."
So over the days that followed, they hunted the old lion with ethical tactics, providing fresh bait for him and the lionesses. Riccardo shot the buffalo Sean pointed out to him, another barren cow, and then, two days later, a decrepit bull with horns worn down to stumps and his ribs showing through his bald, mud-caked hide.
Each day Sean moved the bait or repositioned the thatched hide, to find a location the black-maned male would feel sufficiently confident to approach in broad daylight. Evening after evening, they sat in the hide until an hour after darkness had fallen and then drove back to camp dejected and discouraged. When they visited the bait again the following morning, they found that the lion had fed, leaving his mane hairs and his huge pad marks to tantalize them, and had departed again before dawn.
Cursing the beast bitterly, Sean changed tactics. He lowered the remains of the rotten bait on its chain so lionesses and cubs could reach it readily. By this stage, it was mostly dried skin and gnawed bone. Five hundred meters up the river, he hung a fresh carcass at a height only the big lion could reach in a tree that stood alone in a glade of shoulder-high dry winter grass. He hoped that without the harassment of the females and cubs the lion might come earlier to the bait.
To make him feel even more secure, he placed the hide across the dry river-bed in the fork of a teak tree. It was a mac han platform fifteen feet above ground level. From the mac han they had a view across the white sand of the dry river-bed.
Sean did not clear all the grass around the bait tree. He wanted the lion to feel protected by good cover. He merely opened a keyhole in the grass, barely as wide as the body of the lion, through which they could see the carcass.
"If he comes, you'll have to wait until he rears up to feed, Capo," he explained as they went into the mac han an hour after noon to wait out the long drowsy hot afternoon.
Sean allowed Claudia to bring a paperback copy of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa to read. "Just as long as you don't rustle the pages," he warned her.
The lionesses and their cubs came early. They were so conditioned to feeding from a bait by now that they showed not the least trepidation at approaching. First they went to the new bait in the grassy glade and inspected it wistfully. Both lionesses made attempts to feed from it, but it was just out of their reach.
For the last few days, the eyes of the young lioness, Growly Gertie, had been irritated and infected by the river sand Sean had fired into them. Tears ran down her cheeks and her eyelids were swollen and inflamed, but now they were healing and clearing, the swelling was abating, and there were only smears of yellow mucus tears of her eyes.
After a while, they gave up trying to reach the carcass and led their cubs down the riverbank to the old stinking bait.
From the mac han they could hear the pride growling and ripping at the bait five hundred meters downstream, but as the afternoon passed, the sounds of feeding dwindled into silence as the lionesses sated themselves and went to lie up in the shade.
Half an hour before sunset, the small hot breeze that had been blowing all afternoon dropped abruptly and the peculiar hush of African evening descended on the veld. The sparse winter growth of leaves on the trees was still, not a blade of yellow grass stirred in the glade across the river-bed, and the fluffy papyrus reeds below the bank ceased their perpetual nodding and bowing and stood as though listening intently. It was so quiet that Claudia looked up from her book, then closed it softly and sat listening to the absolute silence.
Suddenly a bushbuck barked on the far bank, an alarm call so clear and loud in the hush that Claudia jumped involuntarily.
Immediately she felt Sean's light, firm touch on her hip, a warning, and she heard her father's breathing, quick and deep as though he had just finished a hard rally on the tennis court.
The silence had an ominous weight to it now, as though the world were holding its breath. She heard her father exhale softly, and she glanced sideways at him. His expression was as rapt as that of a communicant kneeling for the Sacrament. God, he was a handsome man, she thought. Except for the silver wings at his temples, he looked so much younger than his years, so tanned and lean and fit. As yet there was no external sign of the treachery of his own body, destroying itself from within.