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"The Leopard's Prey" In "The Leopard's Prey", Jade has left Morocco and returned to Nairobi. She takes an extra job job wrangling for an animal outfitter and finds herself caught in the lives and loves of colonists, interloppers, and the vestiges of wild Africa. hardcover ($24.95 list) ISBN-10: 0451225864 | ISBN-13: 978-0451225863 |
“There is an African proverb that runs through many tribes. ‘The foolish antelope cuts firewood for the leopard.’ Basically, don’t give your enemies any more help in establishing your demise than they already possess.” - - The Traveler
I’ll be fine.
Jade del Cameron wondered if those famous last words would soon end up gracing her headstone. The plan had seemed like a good one at the time, but it had been daylight then, the sun warm and benevolent. She’d watched the two Americans, Wayne Anderson and Franklin Cutter, enter the blind twenty yards away, and heard the three Kikuyu assistants settle into the tree that grew beside her. Soon after, darkness had swooped down upon the African landscape, a mythical black bird; immense, terrible, and predatory, devouring Jades’s previous cockiness. Her quivering limbs told her this had been one of her less intelligent ideas.
I’m safer in here than in that Model T ambulance with shells pounding around me. But her heart didn’t believe her. It raced until the dull roaring filled her inner ears with a sound akin to a raging river. She took a deep breath and tried to relax by shifting her legs. The right calf immediately cramped, and she flexed her foot to relieve it. The cramp quit, but the left leg started twitching, the muscles fatigued from maintaining one position for over six hours in a two-foot wide by three-foot long and four-foot high enclosure, built for something much smaller than a five-foot, seven-inch woman.
Get a grip on yourself. You’ve sat in blinds for longer than this before. That was from her head. Her stomach responded with, Yeah, but never as leopard bait. She shivered, her sweat-soaked shirt sucking heat from her body. When she had first entered the cage of lashed limbs, its stifling warmth had stolen every breath. Then, as Africa released its captured heat like a nightly sacrifice to Ngai, the Maker, she longed for some of that warmth. And all just to save a bit of Africa from itself.
Perhaps she never really believed that the leopard would turn man-eater just because it had tasted human blood. It sounded like an old wives’ tale. In fact, she doubted the cat would even approach a cage with a human in it. But the settlers wanted the animal eradicated, and the expedition didn’t want to waste any more time trying to capture this pair. She was their last chance. Wild Africa, Jade noted, was disappearing; one animal at a time. She intended to save these two leopards even if it meant shipping them to a new home in Cincinnati or New York.
Take a nap. It’s going to be dawn soon. Hard to nap when her heart was pounding one hundred times a minute. She felt her lungs constrict, as though the walls were closing in on her. She tugged at her shirt collar and gasped. It’s the cage! That was it. Suddenly she needed to get out, to feel air on her face and space around her body. Unfortunately, the release pin was on the outside.
She shoved her slender fingers up through the narrow gap and felt for the toggle. Nothing! Where’s the blasted pin? Jade forced her hand up farther, her knuckles scraping the rough wood, drawing blood. Her fingertips grazed the toggle and, for the first time, she wished she’d cultivated long fingernails. Just a little farther. There! Her index finger had the pin. She started to push it when she heard a tubercular cough.
Leopard! Jade jerked her fingers back inside the cage as something powerful brushed up against it. The soft glow from the gibbous moon, which had previously penetrated her compartment, disappeared as the leopard’s body blocked it. The animal sniffed, short whuffing snorts, as he analyzed her scent. When he exhaled, the hot scent of stale carrion flooded the enclosure. Jade instinctively pressed her back against the opposite side as the leopard snarled, the sound deep and rasping like a heavy saw through hard timber.
The cat pushed his shoulder against the cage, testing it. The lashings creaked under the pressure, and Jade felt subtle movement in the wood along her spine. Her sanctuary shifted a fraction but held. She slid her knife from its sheath and waited for the next jolt.
In this adventure, Jade flies Sam's biplane, a Curtis JN known as a Jennie. See images of a Jennie and video of a flight in a vintage biplane.
