Krieger handed his daughter his binoculars and pointed toward an outcropping. The male lion lay in the shadow of a boulder. The big cat yawned, exposing impressive canines.

“He’s perfect, Dad,” Blaze said. She took out her iPhone and started a video.

They were hunting Kimber Conservancy, 2,496 square miles of electric-fenced, raw Zimbabwean bush, just over the border from South Africa.

“That’s Cyril,” Pete Zoeller said.

Blaze studied the lion another moment, then turned. “We don’t name wild animals, Mr. Zoeller. Names are for people and pets.”

Krieger smiled—he had taught her that. Zoeller, the senior professional hunter on the Kimber for going on fifty years, smiled, too. He had taught Krieger. “You’re right about that, miss,” Zoeller said.

Blaze handed the field glasses back to her father. “I only have one dart for a lion his size.”

Krieger put the glasses on the seat. “Then don’t miss.”

Zoeller smiled quietly. In more than three decades hunting the Kimber, Krieger had never seen Zoeller other than the way he looked right now: faded safari vest over a massive bare chest, brief shorts, boots, and a necklace bearing a single lion’s tooth. He had been a bush bodybuilder all of his life, lifting tires, fuel drums, cargo chains, even curling the children of his clients, a young Terry Krieger included. “Old Pete” still had silky yellow-white hair that reached to his broad shoulders and a mustache that extended well off his square chin.

From his outfit and what appeared to be recently acquired dentures, one might mistake Zoeller for a has-been circus act. But Krieger knew better. Not so many years ago, Krieger had invited a famous Hollywood actor to Zimbabwe to hunt elephant. The guy’s movies had done a great deal for the defense industry, and Krieger had gotten to know him. Zoeller found them an elephant, but the actor with the veins running down his famous biceps had ignored Zoeller’s whispered advice to wait. He’d fired too soon and too high, and the enraged bull elephant, already in musth, had charged.

Zoeller stepped in front of the actor and was able to get off a shot from his double, but the elephant was in a hormonal fury, too fast for a second shot, and Zoeller had taken the animal’s charge fully in the chest. The impact launched him skyward, his body sailing like a blond rag doll up and over a huge termite mound. Fortunately, the elephant drove its tusk deep into the concrete-like termite mound, where it wedged, offering Krieger time to make an easy kill shot.