Chapter 33 #2
Without knowing it again I was standing set and ready to jab at any wolf that was out there with the boar spear.
But there were no eyes. No teeth. No animal head smiling at me at all.
There was only grass. And then it moved, and I realised it wasn’t grass it was fur again, belly fur.
Again without knowing I was doing it, I jabbed the spear into the book at my feet – which was now well alight – and lifted it slowly: my eyes travelled upwards, tracking the light it threw, higher than my eyeline, higher than my head, more than two and a half metres into the air, above the top of the door to the window nailed in place above it.
And there – for an instant that stretched into an unbearable for ever – were the eyes I’d somehow always known were out there, staring down at me, killer’s eyes, yellow eyes with dark pupils contracted down into pure predator’s pinpricks, locked on mine.
I have never felt smaller or more fragile and powerless than in that instant: the eyes and the face they sat in were designed for one thing only: To make you feel like helpless prey.
Murderous eyes, flat and emotionless because they didn’t need to be anything else.
If any of the scores of rabbits or squirrels or even deer that I’d killed, the fish even, if they’d looked into my eyes they’ve no doubt have seen the same unshakable confidence in the moment before I let loose the arrow or bashed their heads to put them out of their misery: In those moments, for them I had been the super-predator, the unstoppable killer.
And now the table was turned. Standing there, looking up into those pinpricks I was the inferior, I was pure prey, powerless and about to lose control of my bladder.
Because this terror that the night had spawned was unthinkable.
The island that we lived on sat in the north seas, and wolves were the biggest danger.
But this was bigger than the biggest wolf.
This was the king of all predators.
This was, impossibly, a lion.
And, in this place, as unlikely as a unicorn.
And in any place, deadlier.
And then, as if it knew what I was thinking and had decided to prove it was no impossible fantasy, and that I was not having a bad dream, it stretched open a huge fang-filled mouth and roared at the flaming remnants of First Aid and Safety for Dummies that I had jabbed at it from my side of the glass on an impulse that came from believing wild animals were scared of fire.
This one didn’t sound scared, he sounded angry, terrifyingly so, the roar alone almost enough to turn my guts to water and freeze me in place with terror again as it stepped back and lowered itself onto all fours before batting a huge paw the size of my head in the direction of the flames, as if in irritation.
The claws glinted like knives, and then they multiplied into a hundred shards of flame-lit glass as the door shattered and what unfroze me and snapped me out of the fear was the blurred sight of Digger, leaping out into the dark punching through the falling glass, snarling into the attack.
It was a stupid thing to do of course, she was maybe one quarter of the other animal’s size. But the lion was the one that had slashed her, so she had a score to settle, and more than that she had her people to protect. Her pack.
That fear-filled instant out of time was the moment I really learned something about family, because I found myself following her with nothing except a long boar spear with a burning book stuck on the end, and by the light of the flames now being tossed and winnowed by the night’s wind, I saw the lion pause, crouched at bay for a moment, about to attack but stopped for the instant, as if trying to figure out why this snarling dog that was a fraction of its size had the confidence to stand up to it and even threaten to attack it.
The lion looked right and left, like it suddenly thought that maybe Digger was a decoy to distract it from an attack on one of its flanks, and again I don’t know why or how I did it – but as it looked away for that instant – I lunged forwards shouting at the top of my voice, jabbing the spear towards its face, so that when it turned back it saw fire coming right at its eyes, and maybe because it had no more encountered a human than I had met a lion, it flinched in surprise and then froze again, just for a fraction of a second, trying to figure out how to cope with the unexpectedly animated fire stick.
And then I yelled again, not words just noise as loud as I could, and the impossible nightmare did the unbelievable thing: the lion snarled and hesitated for another fraction of a second and then it twisted in its own length, and sprang away, out of the light and off into the darkness.
I stood there suddenly paralysed by the delayed fear and the unreliable sense of relief that flooded through my body.
Digger stood in front of me, slightly to one side, still wound tight and ready to spring into the darkness and give chase.
She looked at me and I looked at her and just as I was about to tell her not to chance it, it happened.
Compared to waking up and finding a lion at your door it was a small enough thing, but it was in the end much more devastating.
The book fell off the spear tip and landed on the ground.
Into the fat that had spilled from the bucket that I must have kicked over as I ran through the door to face the lion.
I must have knocked it over before it sprang away into the darkness.
That’s when First Aid and Safety for Dummies nearly killed us, though it’s possible, likely even, that it’s also when it saved us again.
Given how disoriented the lion had been by the quite small amount of fire I had waved in its face it is possible that the wildfire that followed freaked it out so hugely that it fled the area and went hunting for food somewhere much less alarming and combustible.
The burning book fell into the fat collected for torches and the flames immediately found just enough wind to catch and spread through the dry grass into the thicket before I could stop it, though I burned my bare feet trying to stamp it out before it got out of control.
And then it was too late and the wind kicked up and fanned the flames and the whole Tanglewood ignited, turning the darkness into flickering gold and light as flames leaped into the sky, within minutes roaring their way down the whole overgrown length of the airstrip.
To start with the only good thing was that it was a crosswind that blew the fire away from us at a shallow angle.
That was bad enough as I saw fire taking hold of the bunkers on the other side.
The library bunker took easily and eventually belched fire out of its back door as if it was a giant rocket stove.
The burning books sucked more and more oxygen inside to burn and vent out through the back door which was acting as a chimney.
I remember the heat of the fire shocking me as it danced wildly out of control, but then the wind shifted, or maybe it was the fire’s own intensity that shifted it, the wind vortex sucking it this way and that – and what had seemed safe about the home bunker suddenly got dangerous.
The horse started screaming. The babies began to cry.
And the goats went batshit, all feeding off each other’s panic and the wild dance of shadows and fire illuminating the Bunker’s walls and ceiling from outside the wall of windows.
I had enough sense to yank Digger inside and take a last fast moment to put my boots on.
And while I was hunched over them at the end of the bed I told Cat I didn’t know what to do.
Just stay calm, she said.
The wall of windows won’t keep the fire out, I said. The frames are wood. They’re already burning. And the door’s smashed anyway…
You have time, Cat said.
If we go out the back door, where do we go? I said. Cat. I don’t know what’s safe in the dark. The lion could be waiting…
No lions here, she said.
I know, I said. Except there are. I don’t know what to do…
Three squeezes of my hand.
Save the babies.