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watching me. He’d smelled me first—possibly before I’d left the veranda. Maybe he’d only been curious about my girl-smell, or maybe he’d started hunting me then. It didn’t really matter, because he had already overpowered me.
    Paddy’s jaw closed on my thigh above the knee. I felt his dagger teeth and his wet tongue. The strangely cool feel of his mouth. My head swam as I smelled my own blood, and then he released me to bellow. It was everything I’d heard from the veranda and more—a vibrating black cave of noise that swallowed the earth and sky and swallowed me, too.
    I closed my eyes and tried to scream, but only released a puff of air. I felt Paddy’s mouth again and knew I had no chance at all. He would eat me here or drag me off to a glade or valley only he knew of, a place from which I’d never return. The last thought I remember having was
This is how it feels, then.
This is what it means to be eaten by a lion.

W hen I came back to myself, Bishon Singh was carrying me in his arms, his face bent over mine. I didn’t want to ask about Paddy and where he’d gone, or to know how hurt I was. Blood dripped from a long gash along my leg onto Bishon Singh’s white cotton tunic.
    My father had been with the horses, but when he came running he held me close, crushing me to his chest. It was like being rescued—rescued again, really, because that had happened already.
    Bishon Singh had seen me run past him as he tended our horses in the Elkingtons’ stable. When he came up the hill Paddy was already standing on my back, his mouth stretched wide, lips rimmed in black, teeth slick with saliva. He roared again, the sound nearly stopping Bishon Singh and the six or seven grooms that came running up behind him, all of them trying to make their bodies appear larger and their voices boom. Then came Bwana Elkington rolling his huge frame, flicking the long
kiboko
whip out in front of him like a cresting wave, the tip electrifying the air.
    “The lion did not like being disturbed,” Bishon Singh said. “But bwana lashed the whip hard again. He rushed at Paddy and screamed, striking him with the whip over and over, and finally Paddy had had enough. He lunged at his master so quickly there was nothing for Bwana Elkington to do but race to the baobab. He flew up that tree and Paddy roared like Zeus himself. Then he was gone.”
    The wound running from my calf muscle to the top of my thigh burned as if I were holding it over flames. I could feel each of the deep, raw claw marks from where Paddy had stood on my back, and the smaller punctures on my neck, under my blood-soaked hair. After the doctor was called, my father went into the other room and talked in sharp whispers to Jim and Mrs. Elkington about what should be done about Paddy. A little while later, a
toto
came running in from a nearby farm saying that Paddy had killed a neighbour’s horse and dragged it away.
    Jim and my father loaded up their rifles, ordering the grooms to ready their hacks while I felt a swirl of emotions. Paddy was on the loose now. Part of me worried he could come back to the farm and attack someone—anyone. Another part of me felt awful for Paddy. He was a lion, and killing was what he’d been
made
to do.
    The doctor gave me laudanum, and then stitched me up with a hooked needle and thick black thread. I lay on my stomach while Bishon Singh held one of my hands, his thin steel bangle rocking up and down his arm, his white turban wrapped around and around, who knew how many times, and the end tucked invisibly somewhere, like the fabled snake that swallows its own tail.
    “The whip shouldn’t have been more than a gnat for Paddy,” Bishon Singh told me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “What is a whip to a lion? He must have been ready to let you go. Or perhaps you weren’t ever meant for him.”
    I felt the tug of the needle, a pushing and pulling, as if just that part of my body were caught in a small current. His words were another