Kalahari by Jessica Khoury Page B

lion. Instead, it was lion following poachers following Dad.
No matter how I looked at it, the order of prints just didn’t seem to add up to any reasonable explanation.
    Reluctantly, I stopped just as the sun began to drop in the sky. It hung above us as if tempting us onward, a prize that would always be out of reach.
    But as the others sat down and groaned in relief, I called for them to get up again. My eyes had fixed on the ground, and my pulse sped from what I saw written in the sand.
    “You’re a machine,” complained Joey. “How are you not dead from exhaustion?”
    “
Look
,” I said, pointing at the ground.
    They all stared at me blankly. Frustrated, I knelt and pressed my hand to the tracks.
    “My dad finally realized they were following him. Right here, do you see it? He accelerated and so did they.” I stood up and jogged ahead, eyes scanning the sand. “He began swerving, probably trying to go head-on with them, but they stuck close to his tail.”
    I wove in and out of the brush, my eyes reading the prints as easily as if they’d been words on paper. “Look at this! He tried reversing into them, but they swerved around and—” I froze, my eyes fastened on a
Terminalia
tree. Woodenly, I put out a hand and touched the trunk, rubbing my thumb over a jagged scar in the bark.
    “This is where they shot at him,” I whispered. The bullet hole was too neat to have been from my dad’s gun. This looked like the mark of something deadlier, something intended to kill people, not animals—maybe an assault rifle or a pistol. I remembered the popping sounds that had come over the radio to drown out Dad’s voice—gunfire after all, and not static as I’d hoped. This must have been where Dad called me.
    “But they missed,” said Sam. “Right?”
    “I don’t see any blood,” I said, my voice shaking.
    “Let’s keep going,” he said.
    The lion’s tracks were everywhere too. It seemed confused by the tangle of car tracks and had padded this way and that.
    “So weird,” I muttered. “It’s tracking them like a bloodhound.”
    I grabbed my flashlight, though I wouldn’t need it for another hour or two, and set off after the tracks, telling the others to wait and keep an eye out. The possibility of us finding the poachers instead of finding Dad was becoming a growing problem. If they’d caught up to Dad—I didn’t want to consider it, but I knew for our own sakes I had to—where would they go next? Would they suspect us to be out here, or would they think Dad and Theo were alone? If they suspected Dad had radioed someone, would they go so far as to search for us? The thought made me feel sick. But I couldn’t imagine them wasting more time out here, so far from the rhino and elephant herds they no doubt were hunting. They could be a hundred miles away by now, across any of four different national borders, if they weren’t still hunting Dad and Theo. No, the greatest danger to us now was the bush itself, and that at least was a danger I felt somewhat qualified to handle.
    Sam caught up to me, panting, and wordlessly stayed by my side as I zigzagged through the bush, my eyes pinned to the ground.
    “I figured two pairs of eyes were better than one,” he said genially.
    He was right. He saw it before I did and grabbed my arm, stopping me in my mad rush, and said my name so softly I almost didn’t hear it at all.
    “There,” he said, nodding ahead.
    He was right. There was the Land Cruiser, sitting silently in the grass, silhouetted against the scarlet sky.
    My heart nearly exploded with conflicting relief and dread. I broke into a sprint, kicking up clouds of sand.
    “Dad!” I yelled, my voice hoarse. “Theo!”
    When I reached the Cruiser I vaulted inside, noting the bullet holes ripped into the metal panels. The canvas roof was bundled in the back, and the cab was empty. The keys were still in the ignition; the engine had been left on but must have stalled at some point. The front