Lionboy by Zizou Corder Read Free Book Online

him even while he’d been talking—was to say that he had his phone on all the time. Of course he had to turn his phone off during lessons—so now they’d know he wasn’t going to Brother Jerome’s, and they could put that together with the sailing and the “really hope I will see you soon” and know he was coming after them.
    Bother. He should have said something about the cats. If Mum and Dad knew the cats were watching out for them, they could maybe send a message . . . Oh, no. Mum and Dad, astonishingly, couldn’t understand when cats talked.
     
    When they were living in Africa, when Charlie was little, Aneba Ashanti used to go frequently into the great forests, looking for plants and mosses and funguses for his research. He would go for several days, deep into the dark areas; he would climb the huge trees with the roots tall enough to build houses between, and he would spend days on end in the canopy of the forest where the monkeys and butterflies live, sleeping in his hammock hundreds of feet above the ground while the elephants rooted below looking for big seeds to eat. Sometimes he would take the little toddler Charlie with him, strapped to his back.
    One hot, humid day, very early in the morning, Aneba was very carefully scraping samples of bark from a lustrous green creeper way up in the canopy, with Charlie sleeping on his back. Because he was concentrating so hard on getting a good clean sample, and trying not to cut himself with his recently sharpened knife, Aneba did not notice a leopardess down below on the forest floor, making her way delicately toward a waterhole nearby. Nor did he notice the strong, pudgy little cub following her. Nor, of course, did he notice the tiny emerald green snake on which the cub trod in the dimness of the undergrowth.
    But he noticed the yowl of pain from the cub as the hot poison sparked into its little body, and the howl of distress from its mother as she realized what had happened. In an instant Aneba swung down from the canopy, his knife in his teeth, and landed not far from the leopards. The snake disappeared: It zipped into the vast green forest and was gone. The leopardess stayed. She stared at Aneba, and for a moment he felt a shot of pure fear. But the animals hereabouts were used to Aneba. They knew he wasn’t a hunter, that he just hung around in the woods picking flowers and leaves and digging roots. So she didn’t immediately pounce on him and kill him. She just stared. And he stared at her.
    The leopard cub’s yowling had started Charlie yowling too.
    The two cubs yowled. The two parents looked at each other.
    Aneba’s heart was torn. He desperately wanted to help the baby leopard, and he had in his backpack the antidote to the snake poison—he took it with him everywhere in case he or the child were bitten. But he would have to get it to the cub swiftly—and how to make the mother let him?
    Her eyes were expressionless. Aneba’s face too was a mask.
    There was only one thing he could do.
    He was very scared to do it.
    Slowly and gently, Aneba unwrapped Charlie from his back and sat him on a flat rock behind him, well away from the leopardess. He didn’t take his eyes off her while he rummaged in the bag and found the syringe containing the antidote. Then, holding the syringe up like a totem, so that she could see it clearly, he asked her: “May I help your child?”
    She stared.
    Charlie, on the rock, yowled a bit more quietly.
    The cub was whimpering.
    Aneba moved away from Charlie, gently toward the cub.
    The leopardess narrowed her eyes. Her ears were perked up, her whiskers twitching. In a swift movement, she dropped her head and moved—away from Aneba, away from her cub, away from Charlie. After ten paces, she stopped, and turned, and sat, staring again at Aneba.
    He fell to his knees beside the cub, and swiftly, surely injected the life-saving medicine into the cub’s fat back leg. As he did so—
    “Baby one!” cried Charlie, who had