The Eden Hunter by Skip Horack

stared at him, then left the deer for the shelter of the cane. Buck hair filled the hot air like sparks from a kicked fire. The bloodied deer lurched forward and Kau pardoned the wobbly creature. “Go,” he said in Kesa. “You were lucky today.” The buck gathered itself and then bolted. Kau watched it bound back down the trail. There were other deer close by—keeping still in the cane—and as the wounded buck fled these others spooked as well so that soon Kau could hear deer moving all around him.
    He sat down in the trail. Because his name was Leopard these New World panthers were of great interest to him. He cupped his ears and listened, thinking that maybe, if he waited long enough, he might just hear the big cat scream from somewhere in the canebrake. No scream came, but waiting for some sound from this panther soon made him think of another panther—the black African leopard that had once visited him while he slept.
     
    THE LEOPARD HAD been a female. Small but cunning, she was introduced to the flesh of humans by the carelessness of the Kesa. Before the destruction of his people, before the rape of Janeti, before the births of Abeki and Tufu even, there had been this man-eater.
    But the leopard did not become a man-eater until the arrival of a Kesa child—a blind child, the son of one of the poorest farmers in Opoku. It was the custom of the Kesa to cast out such misfits, and for that reason the condition of the infant was a secret kept close by the mother and father. The child was raised in the hut, and somehow three years passed before an aunt finally spoke out and word reached the chief. Chabo sent for the boy.

    The delay of the parents only made their loss more profound, as the boy was walking and even speaking by the time Chabo’s men came for him. He had a name and a personality, a preference for bananas over plantains, for goat meat over chicken. Even Chabo was stalled, but then he consulted the witch doctors and was compelled to act in accordance with tradition. The boy was pulled from the arms of his mother, then brought deep into the forest and released to wander.
    And wander he did. The child’s whole world had been a small round hut and to be taken from it terrified him. The next day he was walking through the village calling for his mother. Chabo heard his cries and again the boy was seized.
    After two days in the forest the child was found by Kau, hunting. He carried the milk-eyed boy back to Opoku and was scolded by the Kesa villagers. “Do not involve yourself with our affairs,” Chabo told him.
    For a third time the boy was carried off into the forest—though even farther now toward the rising sun, to a distant place separated from the village by an impossible maze of trails. But by now Kau had developed an interest in the unfortunate child. He lingered in Opoku until the Kesa warriors had returned, then backtracked to where the boy had been left to die. When he arrived the child was already gone, stolen by a leopard. He studied the abundant sign:
    The leopard had arrived that same day, perhaps attracted by the cries of the boy. Kau saw that at first she was only curious and had sat in the shadows, watching. She was not hungry—he found where earlier she had killed a nesting chimpanzee—but as time passed she
grew bolder. She crept closer and walked a tight circle around the blind boy—brushing against him, perhaps even teasing him with her tail—and the shock of her presence sent him dancing little nightmare steps that left random dimples in the soft earth. The boy then rolled himself into a ball and the leopard slapped at him, her hooked claws kept hidden, retracted. The cat played until finally the terror-stricken boy collapsed. He lay flat on his stomach, digging his fingers into the dirt as the leopard sniffed him. When death came it came quickly. She touched her fangs to his neck and squeezed her jaws closed.
    Kau thought of the blind and banished child and wondered whether there