A spine-chilling growl. A slash of razor-sharp claws. A dead weight landing on his shoulders, knocking him to the ground. Amber pinned beneath him, screaming. Claws raking into his back. Snarling jaws ripping apart his go-bag. His vision filling with a blinding fire. Then blackness . . .
Connor parted his eyes. The early glow of dawn was visible on the horizon. Birds sang softly from the trees, and insects hummed in the long grass. The embers of a campfire smoldered gently, sending up a plume of hazy gray smoke. In the middle was a flat rock upon which three plump white sausages sizzled, browning as they cooked.
Lying prone on the ground, Connor felt as if his back was on fire, cooking like those sausages. Then someone pressed a smooth paste into his wounds, soothing the burning sensation. As the pain subsided, Connor sighed and closed his eyes. But the relief was short-lived. All of a sudden he felt a sharp pinch on his shoulder as if he’d been bitten.
Looking for the source of the attack, he saw a young black girl with rounded cheeks and bright eyes kneeling beside him. He also spotted four raw bloody lines across his left shoulder, scored by the claws of the leopard, one gouge particularly deep. The girl applied more red-brown paste to this cut, then held a wriggling driver ant between her fingertips and brought the insect near the wound.
“No!” he croaked, but he was too late to stop her.
The driver ant’s pincers bit either side of his cut, closing the wound. As soon as its jaws had clamped on to his skin, the girl ripped the ant’s body off, leaving the head behind. Too stunned and too weak to protest, Connor watched as she methodically stitched together his injury with live driver ants. Soon he had a neat row of ant heads, like black sequins, across his shoulder.
“Who are you?” he groaned when she’d finished.
“Her name’s Zuzu,” replied Amber on the girl’s behalf. “She’s from a nearby Batwa tribe.”
Connor turned his aching head the other way. Amber was sitting on a rock, picking at the dry white flesh of a baobab fruit and chewing contentedly. “You saved my life yet again,” she said.
“Did I?”
Amber smiled. “Don’t you remember?”
Connor shook his head. For him the whole experience of the leopard attack was a fragmented series of flashing nightmares.
“All I heard was this terrifying roar,” she explained. “I couldn’t see a thing. But you wrapped yourself around me, shielding me from the leopard. You wouldn’t let go, even though the leopard was ripping you to shreds.” Amber shook her head in disbelief at his courageous act. “Now I know what you mean by body cover!”
She winked at him and took a sip from the water bottle stolen from the poacher’s camp.
Connor tried to sit up, but pain flared across his back.
“Is it bad?” he asked, imagining his skin flayed and the flesh stripped to the bone.
Amber glanced at his wounds and grimaced. Then she asked Zuzu, “Est-ce qu’il va s’en sortir?”
The girl replied in French and Amber translated, “Zuzu says they have a saying in their tribe: From every wound there is a scar. And every scar tells a story. A story that says, ‘I survived.’ So I think that means you’ll live.”
Amber held up the tattered remains of his go-bag. “But I’m afraid your backpack isn’t leopard-proof.”
She then showed him his bloodstained shirt. Four claw marks were ripped across one shoulder, but the rest of the fabric was undamaged. “What saved you was your shirt! I’ve no idea how, but it’s a miracle your back wasn’t torn apart.”
“The shirt’s stab-proof,” Connor explained, groaning as Zuzu helped him into a sitting position. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t keep you from being beaten to a pulp. But how on earth did we escape the leopard?”
Amber directed her gaze to Zuzu. “That’s thanks to our new friend here. Zuzu was camped nearby. She heard my screaming and came running. She chased off the leopard with a flaming branch from her fire.”
Zuzu rattled off some more words as she lightly rubbed the oil from a split aloe-vera stem on Connor’s bruises and scrapes, delivering instant relief. Connor looked to Amber for a translation.
“She says we’re extremely lucky to have survived the attack. That particular leopard’s known among her tribe as the Spotted Devil. It’s a man-eater!”
As Amber told him this, there was an incongruous smile on her face.
“What are you looking so happy about?” asked Connor, perplexed by her upbeat mood. “We could have been killed!”
Her smile widened. “Henri’s alive!”