Part Eight: What He Told His Wife
He got home at seven that evening.
His house was at the edge of the reserve’s staff settlement, a practical, well-maintained house that he and Amara had built incrementally across the years of their marriage — each year a small addition, a repair, an improvement, so that the house at seven years of marriage was substantially different from the house at two years, and the difference was the accumulated material evidence of a life being built.
Amara was in the kitchen. She had the specific quality of someone who has been doing something else all day and has arrived at the kitchen as the natural conclusion of the day, and she had the further specific quality of someone who has been married to a guide for fourteen years and who has, across those years, developed a comprehensive and precise set of readings for what each day has involved.
She looked at him.
He was dry — he had dried during the drive back to the reserve’s main station, and he had changed into the spare clothes he kept there, and there was nothing visually that communicated what the morning had involved. But she looked at him and she read something.
“What happened?” she said.
He sat at the kitchen table. He was not someone who told stories dramatically — he never had been, which was occasionally frustrating to the tourists who wanted the dramatic telling and which was, Amara had always thought, one of the things she most respected about him. He told things the way they were, with the economy of someone who believes the facts are sufficient if accurately reported.
He told her about the cub in the water. He told her about going in. He told her about turning around and finding the pride on both banks. He told her about the six minutes of standing very still. He told her about the mother and the scruff and the cub going with her. He told her about the nose and the tongue and the male’s deliberate turning away.
She listened with the complete attention she had always given to the things he told her.
When he was finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“You could have died,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“Why did you go in?” she said. “You know the protocols. You know the risks.”
He thought about this. He thought about the forty-five seconds of watching the cub in the water, the decreasing intervals between its head going under, the specific quality of watching something live while the window for intervention closes.
“It was a cub,” he said. “It was going to drown.”
“So was the lion cub worth your life?”
He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. His daughter’s drawing of the very friendly lion was on the refrigerator, held there by a magnet shaped like a giraffe. He looked at it.
“I don’t know if any single thing is worth any other single thing,” he said. “But I knew that if I didn’t go in, it would die. And I knew that if I went in, maybe it wouldn’t. And I had to choose between those two things in about five seconds.” He paused. “I chose the one where maybe it lived.”
Amara looked at him for a long moment.
Then she put a plate of food in front of him.
“Eat,” she said.
He ate.
