Carl And The Leopard | Story Quest
The dead hyena at Carl’s feet was a sorry thing. The old creature had been skulking only half a mile from the camp when they had met; and when Carl had put him in the sights of his rifle he had looked to be a good specimen. But as Carl bent to a knee to inspect the bullet wound piercing its scrawny neck, the stench of rotten disease filled his nostrils. The infected skin beneath the animal’s coarse fur, bore sores rich in putrid pus. The hum of flies had already begun to fill the air as they commenced their orgy upon the corpse.
Useless, Carl thought to himself, Bloody useless.
It was a shame really. In the few weeks since he had arrived in the desert plains of Somaliland - in the June of 1896 - and observed striped hyena in the wild, he had had a mind to sculpt a diorama of a group of these fierce scavengers for the museum. It would be the perfect opportunity to display these creatures in a replica of their natural habitat and demonstrate his newly developed taxidermy technique: a hollow mannequin made of wire and clay on which to mount the animal’s skin.
With a heavy sigh he got to his feet, slinging his rifle over one shoulder, and turned to see Saleban, a young pony boy, leading his mule through the brush. Despite their best hopes of a smaller hunting party improving their chances of success, it had been a long and frustrating day of chasing their prey under the relentless sun. Still, they pressed on. After a short while they happened upon a warthog whom, with a single clean shot, became a fine addition to their scientific collection. Leaving the specimen where it lay, Carl marked the spot and continued the search for their primary target of the day: an ostrich.
Carl hated the man who had originally told the myth of the stupidity of ostriches. For two whole days he had been constantly outwitted by the ridiculous creatures. Not one, not one of them had stuck its head into the ground and offered it’s big black and white plumed posterior for him to put a bullet into. The closest he had come that afternoon was when a magnificent cock ostrich had burst into a clearing at full speed. Carl got off one shot, the bullet striking the ground between the birds frantically flailing legs, before he disappeared behind a dense green bush. Instead of emerging from the other side, as Carl had hoped he would, he had stopped short and turned at a sharp right angle, running straight away, keeping the bush between itself and his enemy. By the time Carl had closed the distance between himself and the bird’s cover, the clever feathered bastard was nowhere to be seen.
Frustrated, Carl and Saleban made their way back to camp to drop off the mule and pick up the necessary tools to decapitate the head of the warthog he had shot earlier that afternoon. The two of them found the spot of the swine’s assassination with no difficulty, but there was nothing to be seen of the wild pig. Two vultures sat hunched on the branch of a nearby tree, their cruel faces and sharp beaks mocking. In the distance, Carl spotted a hyena travelling up the slope of a ridge, out of rifle range, the pig’s head held firmly between its jaws.
With no ostrich, no warthog and the sun setting behind them, Carl returned to the place where he had killed the diseased hyena; hoping to settle the score of the stolen head with another one of their kin who might be scavenging the carcass. But the dead hyena was gone; he had been dragged away, leaving a trail of blood in the sand under the fading light of dusk.
As he studied the trail, Carl heard a faint rustle come from his right side and saw a glimpse of a shadowy form going behind a bush. Then, he did a very stupid thing. Without thought, Carl whirled to the side and in one fluid motion, he raised his gun, bracing the butt of the bolt-action rifle between his shoulder and clavicle and pulled the trigger, firing blindly into the bush. The almighty crack of the gun echoed across the savannah and was greeted with the sound of a vicious snarl in reply. Carl knew that sound and in that moment he knew he would die. That snarl belonged to a leopard.
A leopard is a vindictive creature. No matter how many chances it will have to escape, its determination is fixed on the fight until it is either dead or it has ripped its opponent to shreds. Feeling the sweat running down his back, Carl caught Saleban’s frightened eyes and motioned to retreat towards a nearby stream bed. Their only hope was that the big cat was so badly wounded it could not pursue them; if they were really lucky there might even be the chance of finding its body in the morning. But as they backed about twenty yards away from the bush, the beast emerged intent on finishing what Carl had started.
Unable to see the sights of his rifle in the dim light of the evening, Carl fired again in quick succession. The first two shots went wide, but the third struck true. For a moment the leopard stopped, before unleashing a furious battle cry charging toward them.
He pulled the trigger again. Click. The magazine was empty.
“Run boy!” Carl screamed at Saleban, the paralysis of fear lasting only a moment before he broke into a sprint, working the bolt of his rifle, and slamming a round into the chamber. He wheeled around to face the leopard flying towards him midair.
If you have ever owned a cat, you’ll be familiar with the sight of them sprawled out, exposing their underside, seemingly granting you permission to give them a belly rub. But suddenly you find your hand clutched between teeth and fore-paws, while its back legs furiously scratch and flay the skin from your arm. A leopard kills her prey in the same manner. Gripping with her fore-paws, she sinks her teeth into the throat of her victim and uses her hind claws to dig out the intestines.
However, luckily for Carl, this leopard missed her aim and only caught his right arm in her mouth; sending the rifle flying but leaving her hind legs where they could not reach his stomach. With his left hand, Carl gripped the cat’s throat, trying to wrench his right arm free. As he tightened his fist around her neck and her hold loosened enough to pull away his arm, she would catch him again between her teeth. Teeth covered in the viscera of the diseased hyena.
Little by little he drew the full length of his arm through her mouth. Blood was pouring from the trail of puncture wounds left behind, and the sounds of tense muscles being crushed between the cat’s jaws mixed with the snarling grunts of both man and beast. The pain Carl felt was both exquisite and distant, numbed by the adrenaline in his veins.
The pair of them collapsed to the ground and Carl pinned the leopard beneath him with his knees on her lungs. It was a struggle to keep her twisting body and frantic clawing from doing anything more than ripping his shirt, but his arm was almost free and for a moment he had the advantage.
“Saleban!” He roared, “A knife! Bring me a knife!”
But the boy was smart enough to stay away from a conflict with the vicious predator. Now unable to free his right hand, he shoved his fist down her throat so hard that she could not close her mouth. With his left hand still squeezing her neck in a strangle hold, he surged down with his knees and, to his great surprise, felt a rib crack. He pounded his knees into her again and again and felt her weakening. Feeling the last of his strength draining from his body, it became a question of which one of them would give up first. Little by little, her struggling ceased. His strength has outlasted hers.
Hearing that the leopard was defeated, Saleban emerged from the brush with his knife in his hand. He passed it to Carl who then made certain that the animal was dead.
For next 20 years Carl Akeley continued his passions of scientific expedition and museological taxidermy. You can still find his work in the American Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Field Museum. But later in life he would become occupied by a different kind of shooting; inventing the Akeley Motion Picture Camera, the first film camera to be used in the field, and capturing the first footage of gorillas in the wild. In 1925, he would convince the King of Belgium to establish Africa’s first national park.
But later that evening, as he sat in camp with antiseptic being pumped into his innumerable bite wounds — there were so many he thought that an injection in one must surely drive the liquid out of another — he turned to look at the body of the animal he had killed with his bare hands. He saw the bullet wound in her right hind foot where he had first shot her by firing blindly into the bush. This broken foot is what had thrown off her aim when she had lunged for his throat and instead got his arm. If she had found his neck instead, there was no doubt in his mind that he would be dead.
Luck saved my life today, not brute strength. Carl thought, Man is not the ruler of these lands, this is their kingdom. The kingdom of animals. And we must preserve it against the domination of man, for surely that is not a fight we can win.
