Part Seven: The Shore
He made it to the bank and he sat down.
He did not plan to sit down — his legs made the decision, which they made with the authority of legs that have been managing an extraordinary degree of physiological stress for approximately six minutes and that have determined that standing is no longer the priority.
He sat on the riverbank with his boots four feet away and the river moving behind him and the vegetation where the lions had gone very still and he sat there.
The tourists were in the vehicle. They had done what he told them to do — they had stayed in the vehicle, they had not made sudden movements, they had not made loud noises. He became aware of this in the specific way that you become aware of things that are happening around you when your attention returns from a very narrow focus. He could hear the silence of six people who have witnessed something and have not yet processed what they witnessed.
He became aware that his hands were shaking.
This was appropriate. The adrenaline that had been serving a functional purpose for the preceding minutes was now in the process of completing its work, and the shaking was part of that completion. He looked at his hands — at the back of his right hand where the cold nose had touched it, at the inside of his left wrist where the rough tongue had left a faint dampness.
He sat with this for a moment.
Then he stood up.
He walked back to the jeep. He was aware of the way all six passengers were looking at him — with the specific quality of people who have not yet found the appropriate response to what they have seen and who are waiting for him to provide the register in which a response is possible.
He got his boots. He put them on with the practical focus of someone completing a necessary task.
“Is everyone all right?” he said.
A beat of silence. Then the woman who had been photographing — who had, he could see from the position of her camera, been recording throughout, from a distance that was safe but sufficient — said: “Are you all right?”
He thought about this for a moment.
“Yes,” he said.
“The cub—”
“The cub is with its mother,” he said. “It’ll be okay.”
He started the jeep.
They drove for a few minutes in silence, the savanna opening around them in the morning light, the post-rain air still carrying its particular richness. Then the man in the adventure hat said, very quietly, as though he was not sure he should say it at all:
“That was the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.”
Samuel looked at the landscape ahead of them and thought about the cold nose and the rough tongue and the large male’s slow, deliberate turn.
“Yes,” he said. “It was.”
