Death Warrant
A Trilogy of True Animal Terror is headed your way. In the first installment, our hero is on the verge of death—and that’s even before he has to hunt a leopard in the dark. “Death Warrant”—a 10-minute listen.
For Llewelyn Powys, the journey to Africa started with tuberculosis. He picked it up in his travels; he found out it was more than flu when he coughed blood into his handkerchief. That made him think of what the poet John Keats had said: “I know the color of that blood; that blood is arterial blood; it is my death warrant.”
This happened at the turn of the twentieth century, when there was no cure. Powys went to a sanatorium where the social life was lively and the corpses were carried out after dark. “I see blood; I taste blood; I breathe blood,” he wrote in his diary one night. “Will daylight never come?” Eventually, his doctor told him Africa might suit. The air might help his lungs.
Off he went, to manage a stock farm in British East Africa. There he found “moles as large as water rats” and nettles that stung like wasps. It was, he said, a “country of midnight murmurs.” He wondered what sort of animal might have given a particular death-scream he heard one night; and, in a theological mood, he wondered at the ugliness of the bearded cedars, at the very convolutions of the cascades.
Africa took his faith while it restored his health. It was the suffering he minded, and not merely his own. His pet tabby cat lay in pain after an accident; he bludgeoned it, then found himself contemplating how little there was to separate its death from anyone else’s. Much later, when the ranch hands killed a leopard in a trap, that thought recurred to him. This bigger cat seemed to look at him with one eye; the bullet had gone through the other. While they carried it home, he kept making them pause so he could stuff stones into the hole at the back of its head. He wanted to keep the crimson and cream of its brain from oozing out.
“I had no idea I should come to fear death as I do,” he wrote. “It is as though I had been asleep or hypnotized all this time, and had only now waked.”
One morning, a farm hand told him they’d lost a calf to another leopard. He had never seen this leopard, but he had heard it in the night, its scraping bark echoing from the trees.
That sound was always followed by one even more impressive: silence. The country of midnight murmurs was united in its fear of the big cat.
It had flattened itself, in the uncanny way leopards have, and slipped between cedar logs to invade a shed. Its movements were easy to follow in the muddy ground. The tracks were nearly four inches across; the four toes showed no claws, but their size kept the danger present in his mind—that, and the glistening drops of blood along the trail. They saw no drag marks—the leopard clearly had the power to hold the calf-carcass aloft as it strode. He and the farmhands tracked until the prints vanished in tangled grass. It’s a wild moment, to go from knowing the predator is in front of you to not knowing where it is at all.
Soon a herdsman came to say he’d found the carcass, partly eaten. It lay at the foot of a cliff near the lake. Powys knew his evening plans had changed. There would be no poetry, only sitting with a gun until the predator showed up to finish the meat.
Late in the afternoon, Powys scrambled among the cliff’s jutting boulders in search of a safe spot. It behooves the hunter of a leopard not to leave his back unprotected. The ledge he selected lay forty yards above the lake. The killed calf lay below him mostly intact, its unzipped belly swarming with golden bottle flies like rings on probing fingers, its eyes in a sultry half-close and swarming with blacker gnats. Powys licked a little wedge of paper to glue it to the sight of his rifle. He wanted it visible in the dark.
The sun sank and turned liquid against mountains worn like the nubs of molars. Powys listened to the stillness. It was curious how the dying light seemed to suck the sound out of the world as well. Soon, however, a new sound came from the water below, like a rushing of air. Next, the water sounded its troubling. Something scraped like a rusty gate. Another rush of air, like a locomotive venting steam. In fact, the entire lake seemed to come to life, like a heated pot beginning to bubble. Powys braced his back against the cliff and cradled his rifle. Then one of those ventings modulated itself into a hog grunt. It was only then Powys realized he was hearing hippopotamuses rising from the depths, moving for the shore. And sure enough, the surface, orange with sunset, went wild with ripples. Heads wider than human torsos rose. They chatted and chafed at the wait.
The sun fell behind those molar-mountains, swallowed at last. Powys watched the hippos, shadowy now, slipping through the frothy water and the rushes to feed in the grass beyond. Night was far louder than sunset; birds and frogs and insects beyond his power to sort sounded off. Powys waited. A cold stink rose from the lake. Soon it settled in his bones.
The moon was up when the leopard came. It announced itself with a tubercular bark.
The stony face of the cliff shivered. A silence followed the announcement, as usual, but it didn’t last long. Suddenly the cliff was alive with screams, with figures climbing higher or thrusting themselves into crevices.
Baboons!
Powys had hardly been aware of them before. Now he felt kin to them, all the primates on the cliff trembling to the bone. Except, thought Powys, his fellow primates had to spend every night outdoors with the leopard. He himself could sleep inside tomorrow, if he managed to live through this night.
The leopard kept no secrets. It barked again and again to tell the citizens of the night just where it was. It was coming back to its kill. Powys figured it would come along a game trail he’d noticed, which would bring it out from between two boulders just at the base of the cliff. He should be able to see it then, because the moonlight lay over the lake like a sheet of ice and over the shore where it had left the carcass. Powys brought his rifle up. The leopard fell silent, however. The entire landscape was silent now. Powys wondered whether the baboons were watching those boulders, as he was.
He didn’t see the leopard arrive. It was simply there, moving like a snake through an open space. Its body was too long, too low. The worst part was its silence. Its paws must have touched the earth, and yet the earth returned no sound.
It approached the carcass carefully, avoiding the mess its own mutilations had made. It put its face to the wound. Even now, its movements were dainty—as if it were kissing the flesh instead of whittling it by the pound.
The wedge of paper was perfectly visible on his rifle. Powys pulled the trigger.
The leopard was gone.
He hadn’t seen it sprint away; it had simply ceased to exist. He must have missed; it must have moved faster than he could see. And now the ledge where he sat was where he must continue to sit. Moving about in the dark was suicide. If he had missed, the leopard was out there somewhere, and it knew where he was. If he had wounded it, his position was far worse. There was nothing to do but keep his back against the cliff and his rifle in his hands and his eyes open.
And yet, without meaning to, Powys fell asleep. He woke to a huge sun swimming on the horizon. His bones ached. The cold had settled deeply into him. He stood. The light slanted in discrete rays upon the basalt of the cliff. Flamingoes stood in the shallows, picking at the mud and shaking their heads on snaky necks. There in the golden light lay the calf; already the gleaming flies had returned to it. And there, with its dainty nose nearly touching the calf, lay the leopard. Its coat and the stillness of death had camouflaged it in the night. Morning showed that coat just as you have seen it in pictures: sloppy cocoa kisses on gold.
