The Last Leopard (21 page)

It was a strange kind of heaven, sleeping with a small human, but it was heaven nonetheless.

Now they were connected and would be for all their lives. Whether she turned to look at him or not, he knew that she was aware of him. A smile would play around her lips whenever she was close to him and he sensed that she was proud of her part in bringing him to this place of safety.

Since he’d come to Sawubona, the fear that Khan endured all his life had almost gone. There was no reason to be afraid here. It was a wildlife paradise. Still, he would always be wary. The girl apart, he’d learned the hard way that humans were not to be trusted. The old woman and the Zulu man who ran the game reserve appeared to be good people and on the side of the animals, but he would always be suspicious of outsiders.

Recently, though, he’d spotted one of his own kind—a female leopard with two cubs. In the coming days he planned to make her acquaintance. He was tired of being alone.

Khan stood up, stretched, and prepared to make his way to his hidden sanctuary for his daytime snooze. As he did so, he dislodged a rock. That rock dislodged another rock, which in turn exposed two elephant tusks that had lain undisturbed for more than a thousand years. They tumbled crookedly down the mountain and came to rest with their tips touching, like the head of an arrow.

The leopard saw them land. He paused to sniff them as he moved fluidly down the slope toward his den. They were pointing northeast, beyond the boundary fence of Sawubona, to a place of hot, dry winds, red rippled dunes, and skies like billowing blue canopies.

They were pointing to the land where it all began.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The inspiration for the last leopard of this book comes from a real leopard, also named Khan, who, for the past four years, has resided at Bally Vaughan Bird and Game Sanctuary in Harare, Zimbabwe. Like the fictional Khan and his father Ingwe, he is, at nearly 165 pounds, one of the largest leopards ever recorded. Khan was orphaned when his mum and dad died of Anthrax poisoning, and he is taken care of by Sarah Carter, Dr. Vin, and other dedicated volunteers who battle against near insurmountable odds to keep Khan and the other precious animals at the sanctuary safe and out of the hands of hunters.

Khan is one of the lucky animals in Zimbabwe. In 2005, when I first came up with the idea for
The Last Leopard,
it was as a reaction against reports I kept hearing about the rise of “canned” hunting in Zimbabwe, the wicked and widespread practice of putting lions, leopards, and other dangerous and hard-to-hunt animals in small enclosures so that “hunters” are guaranteed a “kill” or a trophy to hang on their wall. I imagined a worst-case scenario: that the day might dawn when there would only be one last leopard in Zimbabwe. Now, just three years later, the unthinkable is in danger of becoming a reality.

When I set off with my father on a road trip to the Matobo Hills in March 2007 to research this book, I have to admit that I was a little concerned I might have made a mistake deciding to send Martine, Ben, and Gwyn Thomas to such a scary place in
The Last Leopard
. On the drive from Harare to Bulawayo, we were stopped at numerous roadblocks by police brandishing machine guns, demanding to know if we were carrying smuggled diamonds—“I wish!” was my dad’s response—or any other contraband. Like Gwyn Thomas, we struggled to find gas, and the whole of Zimbabwe was stricken by chronic water and electricity shortages.

Entering the Matobo National Park was like entering a totally different country. Martine’s first impressions were my first impressions. I had the same sense she does that I’d reached the end of the world. The silence is awesome. The immense, balancing rocks and granite mountains, streaked with jade lichen and chestnut water stains, are both humbling and breathtaking.

Reviewers of
The White Giraffe
and
Dolphin Song
have described them as magical realism, meaning that they have elements of fantasy and the supernatural in them but also lots of real life and fact. Doubtless the same is true of
The Last Leopard
. But for many people in Africa, and perhaps particularly in the Matobo Hills, cave spirits and the prophesies and healing powers of witch doctors and
sangomas
are not the stuff of fantasy, but part of everyday life—as real as you or I.

For many residents of the Matopos, the cave spirits and guardians of the shrines I’ve described in
The Last Leopard,
including the one about the girl who lived underwater with crocodiles for seven years, are incontrovertible truths, not fiction. And in Zambia, the sending out of baby tortoises with miniature coffins or toy ambulances on their backs as a warning or curse is a favorite method of witch doctors.

What struck me most about the Matobo Hills is that, in spite of the fact that Zimbabwe is in crisis, the gentle, likeable people of this special area seemed almost untouched by the problems in the rest of the country. Life continued much as it did a hundred years before. Peace reigned. Every day, we came across laughing girls, some as young as five, walking four miles through the bush to school as if nothing could be more enjoyable or normal.

Yet even for this remote, lovely region, time is running out. The Matobo Hills has always had one of the highest concentrations of leopards in the world, but illegal hunters have moved in and recently one was caught trying to smuggle leopard skins into America. Cheetahs, lions, and hippos, animals we thought would be around forever, are moving onto the endangered list, and the leopard, one of the world’s most elusive and beautiful creatures, is in danger of being wiped out. Unless we act soon, we’ll wake up to discover that there
is
only one last leopard.