Kalahari by Jessica Khoury Page A

the Land Cruiser. I traced it back until I found where it branched away, leading north. This must have been where Dad found the poachers.
    Or . . . no. This is where the poachers found Dad.
    My skin turned to gooseflesh as a chill ran through me.
They were following him
. I hadn’t been certain of it from his garbled message the night before, but seeing it written so plainly in the sand was like dreaming about a monster only to have it later appear in the flesh. It gave physical form to my worst fears. I realized I’d still been holding out hope that Dad’s message had been a mistake, and that even now he’d be back at the camp wondering where we were. Now I knew it was a lie I’d been clinging to, and that he’d definitely run into trouble.
    “Sarah?”
    I turned to see Sam making his way toward me.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked, his brow furrowing.
    I pointed to the tracks.
    “See these prints?” I circled a small, almost imperceptible line of impressions with my finger. “These are korhaan and sparrow tracks from this morning, when the birds come down from the trees to look for food. Under those are these brown hyena prints, crossing over and under the tire tracks. The hyenas are nocturnal, so that dates the vehicle at late last night, about the time Dad called.”
    Sam looked up at me. “You can tell all that?”
    “Bushmen are the best trackers in the world,” I said. “I learned from them.” I bent low to the sand, squinting at the faint impressions. “There aren’t any tracks between my dad’s truck and the one following him, which means they were close on his tail, but not so close that he’d see them yet. They were following slowly, maybe waiting to see where he was going before . . .” I stopped, shook my head.
    “Before they caught up to him?” Sam asked gently.
    “And when they did . . . Sam, what if those
were
gunshots we heard?”
    “Do you really think they’d try to kill them?”
    “To protect themselves, yes.” Though that was an extreme measure, even for poachers. “Or maybe they only wanted to scare Dad off. The shots could have been to threaten him, nothing more, like an elephant flapping its ears to scare away a predator. It’s just for show.”
    “Makes sense. We’ll find him. Look how far we’ve come already.”
    “Not far enough.”
    Sam said nothing, just studied my face with his green eyes. His hair—the same color as the golden Kalahari grass—was tangled and windblown, shaggy like the mane of a young lion coming into his prime.
    The others grumbled at having to resume our hike so soon after we’d stopped, but I pressed on relentlessly, doubling our pace. With the spoor of two vehicles to guide me, it was easier to track, so I focused on speed. With each step, my dread grew until I felt like I was dragging it behind me. I replayed his leaving in my head as though somewhere in the memory I could find a sign that everything would be all right.
    I noticed another set of prints had picked up the trucks’ tracks and followed them as relentlessly as I was. These prints confused me: They belonged to an adult male lion. He was alone, and his prints were deep and elongated, accompanied by a spray of sand behind each one, which told me he had been running, and had been following the vehicle tracks yesterday. Strange. Male lions are notoriously lazy, and if they aren’t hunting or mating, they’re almost always sleeping in the shade. This one wasn’t pursuing prey—there were no other animal tracks in front of his. Why was he following the vehicles’ tracks, and with such haste? It didn’t make sense.
    I remembered what Dad had said when he’d taken off after the poachers—they were hunting a white lion. Was this the lion? The tracks would make sense if the poachers had been pursuing the animal, but I was certain that the lion had come
after
the trucks, as if
he
were pursuing
them.
It should have been the other way around: Dad following poachers following