Journey to Freedom (3 page)

She spent the rest of the day moving from one spot to another in the thick woodland, frequently lying down to doze. Startled pheasants and wood pigeons clattered into the air as she disturbed them from the ground. Other smaller birds fluttered from branch to branch, puzzled by Lorna’s intrusion. Inquisitive but anxious, they kept her in view as her soft steps trod through their territories.

As dusk fell Lorna was eager to begin her quest for meat. She retraced her wanderings, guided by the
stream, and eventually reached the edge of the forest. She saw ahead of her the field where the men had nearly caught her, and sniffed the air for human scent. Was it safe to go on? It seemed to be. She padded over the turf, putting the sheep to flight by her approach. Any one of them could have been caught and killed easily, but Lorna didn’t know them as meat so she ignored them and went on her way. She came to the road on the other side of which, further along, were the zoo buildings. Earlier in the day the area had been busy as plans were discussed for the lioness’s recapture, but now all was in total darkness. The road was quiet. Lorna stopped on its verge, trying to detect the slightest hint of a scent of meat. And there was one! She moved in its direction.

A squirrel had been run over and the smell of the carrion had attracted the lioness. She found the carcass and sniffed at it. ‘This isn’t like the usual meat,’ she told herself. She grasped the remains in her jaws and tugged them free from the tarmac. ‘But it definitely is meat.’ Back in the field she devoured all she could, leaving only scraps of fur, but her hunger was far from satisfied. She returned to the road. ‘There must be more of this somewhere,’ she reasoned.

Lorna sought in vain. There were no other casualties to be found. As she prowled along the road the sound of a distant car engine brought her to a halt. She tensed and listened. The growing noise reminded her at once of the Land-Rover giving chase across the field, and she turned tail and loped swiftly back to the fence she had leapt before. She hastily bounded over and ran for the safety of the woods. There were to be no further alarms that night and no further food. But as the hours passed, Lorna’s hunger took precedence over every other sensation, even the feeling of loss at being parted
from Ellen. So her sense of smell was heightened and constantly alert for the faintest taint of meat.

The men who were organised to trap Lorna were counting on her hunger. Her inability to hunt was their trump card. The group was composed of ex-keepers from Lingmere Zoo who were now temporarily in the pay of the interested newspaper. They were advised by a zoologist and they were on a hefty bonus for an early result. Although the area around the old zoo was scantily populated, there was still an urgent necessity to remove the threat that Lorna posed. The forest was made a no-go zone for the public. Police patrolled the perimeter roads. At various pedestrian points of entry, particularly where Lorna had first evaded Joel and the vet, traps were set using strong-smelling raw meat as bait. It was believed that the lioness would be most likely to approach at night.

Lorna hadn’t forgotten the squirrel carcass. The taste of carrion hadn’t left her. The next night she set off in desperation; nothing except water had passed her lips during the day. It wasn’t long before she caught her first whiff of the stale meat. She quickened her pace and headed once more for the sheep pasture.

The trap here was being watched by three men, one of them an armed policeman. They were confident that it was at this spot that they had the best chance of ensnaring her. They talked in whispers and kept as still as they could. There was very little to be heard from the forest rim. An owl hooted and was answered by its mate.

Lorna’s great paws scarcely disturbed the leaf litter. She stopped now and then to check the scent of the meat, drooling copiously. She was so hungry she could think of nothing but finding and gorging on the meat.
But her lion’s instinct still ensured she used caution. As she neared the lure a twig underfoot snapped. She moved on. The waiting men tensed, holding themselves ready, exchanging questioning glances. The heady smell of the rancid meat drew Lorna forward. One step, two steps . . . her head pushed through the undergrowth. She saw the meat, yet hesitated long enough to listen. The men were breathing hard in their excitement, and Lorna caught the sound. She growled low in her throat, contemplating a final mad dash for the food, and then a faint click as the policeman cocked his weapon made her roar angrily. She knew they were waiting for her. Frustration, fury and defeat combined in that roar. She turned, shaking the vegetation and roaring again. The men switched on powerful lamps which flooded the foreground in an arc of piercing brilliance, and Lorna glanced back, frightened by the sudden glare. The policeman raised his gun, but Lorna crashed out of sight, plunging back into the sheltering woodland.

‘She’s getting away!’ one man shouted. ‘Come on, we might just catch her.’

‘Not without killing her,’ said the policeman. ‘Should I shoot?’

‘Better not. We’re supposed to take her alive unless we’re in extreme danger.’

‘We can’t follow her, then. Too difficult.’

The ex-keepers cursed their luck. ‘Nearly had her,’ said one. ‘I wonder what alerted her?’

‘Oh ho, she’s clever,’ said the other. ‘I know her of old. She’ll be a match for us.’

‘She won’t be back for the meat,’ the police marksman remarked grimly. ‘The trick failed and she’ll have learnt from it, I’ll bet.’

‘She must be famished, though,’ the keeper pointed out. ‘Hunger will force her to take risks in the end.’

‘Well, she can’t be allowed to roam free for long. People’s lives are at stake. There may have to be a full-scale hunt mounted before she’s much older. And we won’t be keeping our fingers off the trigger then.’

Lorna loped through the forest without pausing to look back, making for the one place where she believed no one would find her: the cave where the stream disappeared. There she had her best hope of hiding herself. She reached the cave mouth and entered, splashing through the stream. The cave was narrow at the stream’s inlet but opened out after a while. Lorna pulled herself on to the dry earth floor and shook her coat. She roared in exasperation, sending echoes through the darkness which startled her. The air was cold and fetid and there was a smell of something which had long rotted. Lorna began to cast about, sniffing over the floor, and found animal remains – shreds of skin and shards of bone too dessicated for even a starving lion to contemplate swallowing. But there were also fresher remnants of a carnivore’s meals. Lorna devoured these gratefully, sparse as they were. She crept further into the cave’s interior, completely absorbed by her quest for food. For the moment all thought of the men who had deceived her was forgotten. She found various discarded chunks of prey: heads, feet, entrails, tails, all in differing stages of decomposition. Some she gulped down, others she rejected. Finally she turned to the stream again to drink.

Where had the food come from? Lorna didn’t know and didn’t care. It was enough for her that it was there. She had some idea that other animals were living in the cave or had lived in it, but she didn’t give that much thought either. She yearned for Ellen’s company.

‘Where are you, sister? Where have you gone?’ Lorna
moaned to herself. ‘I can’t live here on my own. How cruel to separate us! I never trusted men as you did. They frighten me, but I shan’t show it. If they come after me, I’ll defend myself. They are deceivers, all of them!’ She growled angrily and walked to the cave entrance, where she listened hard. There was no evidence that the men were on her trail. The woods sheltered Lorna in a blanket of dark and quiet. She relaxed and lay down near the water’s edge.

During the night a fox caught and killed a rabbit. The rabbit screamed. Lorna heard its cry, lifted her head inquisitively, then lay down again. A short while afterwards the fox, with the rabbit clamped in its jaws, confidently entered the cave. It brought most of its victims there to eat in peace. The cave was the fox’s lair.

Lorna heard the patter of the animal’s claws. She sprang up, and at the same moment the fox detected her smell. It was a strange smell, quite unlike anything the fox had experienced before. The rabbit was dropped. Lorna moved towards it on her silent feet. She smelt blood and a low growl rumbled in her throat. In an instant the two hunters saw each other. The fox tried to snatch up its prey before escaping, but Lorna whipped out a paw and struck the rabbit from its grip, at the same time catching the fox such a blow that it was knocked senseless. Lorna ignored it. The rabbit was meat; the best she had had since escaping from the zoo. She tore at it greedily.

The fox wasn’t dead. Lorna finished the rabbit and, only partially satisfied, moved towards the motionless body of its killer. There was blood around the fox’s muzzle. Lorna growled. Could this be another, more satisfying meal? She opened her huge jaws and grasped
the fox around the throat. Seconds later, Lorna had made her first kill and learnt another lesson.

Joel sat in the cabin of the cargo plane and waited for take-off. Loading Ellen had been an upsetting business for him. She was nervous and highly stressed without her sister, and Joel’s familiar figure had only steadied her a little. A further mild dose of sedative had had to be administered. Now, as Joel looked out of the window at the
featureless expanse of the airport, he thought of her in the aircraft hold. Ellen was being taken thousands of miles away from Lorna. How would she cope with all the changes in her life without the reassurance of Lorna by her side? The lionesses had never been parted before. To recapture Lorna alive could be a protracted operation; it would be dangerous and difficult and might result in failure. What then? The people at Kamenza would be unable to release Ellen into the wild on her own; used to captivity, she would have no chance of competing for prey without a partner. The sisters needed each other; otherwise they had no future.

It was a long flight to East Africa. There was plenty of time for Joel to think about all the problems that lay ahead, to say nothing of the major one he had left behind. He sighed deeply and tried to be optimistic. Things might work out with a generous slice of luck.

Ellen’s low, sedated growls were drowned by the noise of the aircraft’s engines. Eventually she fell silent, panting slightly with fright, but after a while she got used to the noise and the regularity of it seemed to increase her drowsiness. She couldn’t believe that her solitude was permanent. She felt that her present suffering was some kind of punishment and that eventually it would end. Then, somehow, she and Lorna would resume their life together.

Ellen dozed, half awake and half dreaming, still under the influence of the tranquilliser. She dreamt of Lorna and herself, playing as youngsters in the enclosure at Lingmere. She couldn’t remember her mother, but Lorna had always been there with her as they grew and matured into the powerful adults they now were. Where was Lorna now? Ellen’s last memory of her sister was her threatening growls as she – Ellen – had been pierced by the human’s shot. Anywhere outside the Lingmere enclosure was beyond Ellen’s imagination, except for other areas of the zoo. She couldn’t picture Lorna anywhere else.

‘Why have they done this?’ Ellen murmured sorrowfully. ‘Why have they left my sister alone and tormented me like this?’ She lay on her side, listening to the aircraft’s drone. Her body vibrated with a sort of low hum, and she drifted into a deep sleep.

As Ellen slept during her long journey to a new land, Lorna lingered in the forest cave, her appetite for the moment satisfied. Her unplanned kill had provided sufficient meat to rid her of the hunger pangs that had been racking her since her escape. Moreover, Lorna had found a haven where she felt comparatively safe. She certainly felt less threatened.

When it began to grow light she left the cave and stood motionless by the stream, listening as always for
human sounds. She had learnt caution. However, nothing could be heard that gave her concern. Numerous birds were at the stream edge, dipping their beaks into the water and throwing back their heads to savour the tiny droplets they took into their throats. Lorna was so still the birds were unaware of her presence, but when she stepped towards them, meaning no harm – she too needed to drink – they took to the air at once in a mass, chirping and screeching their alarm calls. Others who wanted to reach the water perched nearby and scolded the huge interloper. Lorna ignored them and drank her fill. Then she sat on the bank, washing her face with her paws with elaborate thoroughness. Her fur was thickly stained with the fox’s blood.

Some of the bolder birds began to mob Lorna, flapping and buzzing around the mysterious animal, having no way of recognising her vast strength. They screeched at her, trying to dislodge her from the spot. For a while Lorna tolerated the mild irritation, but eventually some strayed too close. With a nonchalant flick of her mighty paw, Lorna brushed them away as if they were no more than flies. The birds crumpled instantly and dropped to the ground where they lay still. Lorna glanced at them without interest, but there was something about their appearance which struck a chord in her memory. The little bloodstained bodies were very like some of the remains she had first found in the cave and eaten eagerly.