For a time Fallows sat alone with his lion and the others hung respectfully back. Fallows stroked its wet muzzle and stared into its patient, still face. Perhaps he spoke to it. Christian had overheard Fallows saying to Mr. Stockton that after he got his lion, he might give up hunting, that there was nothing left to go after. Stockton had laughed and said, “What about hunting a man?” Fallows had looked at him with those chilly, distant eyes and said, “Hunted them and been hunted by them and have the wounds to prove it.” Peter and Christian had debated, ever since, how many men he’d killed. It delighted Christian to know a no-kidding agent of death.

Some Saan ranch hands materialized out of the night from their own hideaway, and a cheer went up at the sight of the dead lion. One unzipped a canvas cooling bag and dug in the ice for beers. The tail struck the ground again, and Christian imagined he could feel the earth vibrating from the blow. But then Christian had a colorful imagination. Stockton helped Fallows to his feet and handed him an icy Urbock.

Peter pinched his nose. “God. Smells like shit. They ought to groom them before a hunt.”

“That’s the chickens, dumb-ass,” Peter’s father said.

The tail rose and fell with a whap.

“Should he shoot it again?” Christian asked. “Is it suffering?”

“No. That’s one dead cat,” Stockton said. “Never mind the tail. They do that. It’s a mindless postmortem spasm.”

Christian sank down by the lion’s head, sketch pad in hand. He stroked the lion’s vast, trembling mane, tentatively at first, then more firmly. He leaned close to one velvety ear, to whisper to it, before it was all the way gone: to say fare thee well. He was only barely sensible of Peter hunkering down beside him and the two older men talking behind them. For the moment he was alone with the lion in the profound stillness between life and death, a separate and solemn kingdom.

“Will you look at this paw?” Peter asked, drawing Christian back to the now. Peter lifted the lion’s great limp foreleg, spreading the leathery pads with his thumb.

“Hey there,” Fallows said, but Christian wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

“Make a hell of a paperweight, wouldn’t it?” Peter asked, and growled, and waved the paw at Christian in a lazy swipe.

The paw extruded smooth, sharp hooks of yellowing keratin. A tendon in the foreleg went taut. Christian sprang, throwing his shoulder into Peter’s chest. He was fast. The lion was faster. Fallows was faster still. Old, and broken more than once, but fastest of them all.