The Eden Hunter. Skip Horack

consulted the witch doctors and was compelled to act in accordance with tradition. The boy was pulled from the arms of his mother, then brought deep into the forest and released to wander.

      And wander he did. The child’s whole world had been a small round hut and to be taken from it terrified him. The next day he was walking through the village calling for his mother. Chabo heard his cries and again the boy was seized.

      After two days in the forest the child was found by Kau, hunting. He carried the milk-eyed boy back to Opoku and was scolded by the Kesa villagers. “Do not involve yourself with our affairs,” Chabo told him.

      For a third time the boy was carried off into the forest—though even farther now toward the rising sun, to a distant place separated from the village by an impossible maze of trails. But by now Kau had developed an interest in the unfortunate child. He lingered in Opoku until the Kesa warriors had returned, then backtracked to where the boy had been left to die. When he arrived the child was already gone, stolen by a leopard. He studied the abundant sign:

      The leopard had arrived that same day, perhaps attracted by the cries of the boy. Kau saw that at first she was only curious and had sat in the shadows, watching. She was not hungry—he found where earlier she had killed a nesting chimpanzee—but as time passed she grew bolder. She crept closer and walked a tight circle around the blind boy—brushing against him, perhaps even teasing him with her tail—and the shock of her presence sent him dancing little nightmare steps that left random dimples in the soft earth. The boy then rolled himself into a ball and the leopard slapped at him, her hooked claws kept hidden, retracted. The cat played until finally the terror-stricken boy collapsed. He lay flat on his stomach, digging his fingers into the dirt as the leopard sniffed him. When death came it came quickly. She touched her fangs to his neck and squeezed her jaws closed.

      Kau thought of the blind and banished child and wondered whether there was a moment before that killing bite when he believed he might be spared, that maybe he had met a friend in the forest, that maybe he would be adopted by that leopard and raised by her, go on to live as a wild boy.

      At that time in his life Kau was still cursed with the curiosity and courage and foolishness of a young man, and so he began to track the leopard. In a sun-dappled clearing he spotted the stiff arm of the buried boy pushing up from kicked leaves. He tensed and looked around, and then he saw the cat asleep within the plank buttresses of a giant fig tree. She was an all-black, a coloration that was almost unknown among the leopards of the forest. He sat and watched the dark sleeping cat for all the afternoon, then slipped off in silence as night began to fall.

      SHE WAS THE only black panther he would ever see—though in the Mississippi Territory the white pioneers and settlers would speak of them often. Black panthers killed hogs. Black panthers stalked travelers on the federal road. Black panthers screamed like dying women in the night. But not so long ago an Alibamu mystic had assured him that the white men were all wrong, that no such creature really existed in these forests. There were indeed panthers but not black panthers.

      He had come upon the old Indian sitting alone on a stump in a field behind Yellowhammer and had stopped and visited with him for a while. Though Kau knew much of his language, the Alibamu spoke good English and so eventually they settled upon that tongue. Somehow their talk turned to black panthers, the Alibamu insisting that white men saw them for the same reason people sought to name the shapes of clouds and the clusterings of stars—a beast akin to that shadowy form lived in their imaginations and their fears. “But that does not make black panthers real,” said the Alibamu. “No Indian will ever claim to have seen one, at least not before the invaders came.”

      Kau told the Alibamu that black panthers were in fact in Africa—that he had killed one himself, a man-eater.

      The Alibamu stared at him. “Is that the truth?”

      “It is.”

      “Maybe you say that because you have lived a long time with the whites, are owned by them even.”

      “No, that black cat done come first.”

      The Alibamu rose up and began to shake a loop of clicking snake rattles. When he finished he climbed atop the stump and looked down at Kau. “You should be very careful,” he warned.

      “Why you sayin that?”

      “Because you must come from a place where the dreams in their heads live,” explained the Alibamu. “Be careful that in the end you do not become just another one of their wicked creations.”

      THE OTA MEN were gathered around a fire, listening as Kau told of what he had seen. When they at last retired, the leopard entered the camp and looked into the leaf hut of the sleeping storyteller. She brought her face almost to rest against his own and watched him—watched him like he had watched her and then stole off, returning to the forest.

      In the morning Kau saw her pugmarks in the dust and thanked that same sheltering forest for protecting him. The elders pointed at where the cat had stood over him and laughed at his luck. Only a visit, they told him, from his namesake.

      AGAIN HE TRACKED the leopard, and before long he saw where she had ignored the fresh spoor of a crippled bongo to instead return and begin feeding on the remains of the child. Something had changed within her, and that night in the Ota camp Kau shared this news with the others. The leopard was headed in the direction of Opoku. A man-eater was now hunting.

      EVERY FEW DAYS thereafter the leopard visited upon the Kesa, waiting all night at the edge of the burnt-back forest, in the thick borderland where their cassava fields pushed up against the beginnings of the tree line. At sunrise the farmers would leave their huts with the fatalism common among those reigned over by others, and once they had worked themselves far enough into the fields the leopard would attack, hauling off a half-dead catch as the more fortunate of the Kesa raced for the village.

      At night goats were left staked throughout the forest, broken legged and bleating, their hides soaked with poisons. All these the leopard ignored.

      Chabo began to station the best of his warriors in the fields with the farmers, and these men kept guard but without effect—as they could never know the exact place or moment or victim of the next attack. When the black cat appeared they were always unprepared, and the closest they came to killing the man-eater was an errant spear thrown into the chest of a mauled farmer.

      Five more men were taken before Chabo asked for help from the Ota. He called upon the Ota even though he knew of their relationship with leopards. Like all people the band lived by certain codes, and among their beliefs were prohibitions against the killing of particular animals. Generations of Ota had shared the forest with leopards, and though on occasion there would be incidents between the two forest-dwellers, for the most part they existed together in peace. That leopards allowed the Ota to live in their midst was a gift from the forest, and so to kill a leopard would be an insult to that blessing. Chabo asked and the Ota refused. In their minds this problem belonged to the Kesa alone.

      More villagers died. The Kesa witch doctors conferred and blame was placed on the young Ota man who called himself Leopard—the one who had first returned the blind child to Opoku. The black cat was his sister. He had somehow brought this killer, and therefore it fell upon him to destroy her. Chabo declared that the Kesa would not suffer this alone. The Ota were not welcome in the village so long as the man-eater lived.

      AMONG THE OTA were some who had begun to adopt the customs and superstitions of the Kesa. These younger men spoke out in support of Chabo, arguing that the black cat was a mistake of the forest same as the blind child had been a mistake of the village—an unintended creature. The Ota were hunters; the forest was their home. It was their duty to kill this man-eater and restore the balance of things.

      In the end there was a compromise between the young men and their elders. Kau alone would help the Kesa. If the leopard must be hunted then it should be done by the one she herself had chosen to visit. Perhaps in this way there might come forgiveness from both the leopard and the forest.

      THOUGH HE HAD feigned reluctance for the sake of the elders, in truth Kau was eager to test his skills against the animal