In the eastern foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, deep in the thorned plains of obsidian, a slow and heavy storm was approaching. It was April, the early cusp of the wet season in the Tsavo region of Kenya. In the dry season, the Masai had migrated west in order for their animals to feed and survive in wetter climes near Lake Victoria, as they have done every year. Returning home, they would have ample free time to train new moran, warriors, performing the rites necessary for young men to prove themselves worthy of that title. The ritual was called Olamaiyo, where a strong and brave few would be sent out into the flatlands alone, tasked with returning to the village with evidence of a lion slain and their own vitality intact. The lions of Tsavo are unique in Africa for a genetic polymorphism which causes the males to be born without manes. This is either proof of an indomitable will to adapt, or a divine blessing from God. The combination of thick, twisted terrain and equator-adjacency, would render the inexistant fur nothing but a hindrance, full of inescapable heat and forever tangled grass. At this time, the Tsavo lions still outnumbered humans by a magnitude of a hundred or more. They were not considered a direct threat to the Masailand people, but to their precious livestock which the moran defended with their lives. A precious balance was struck between the two forces, one of mutual understanding that loss is prerequisite to life. The lions killed livestock and the humans killed lions and all was well. While the Masai had gone away, however, a newer danger had arrived in Tsavo. This danger had no ritual predictability, and did not participate in the Masai’s tradition of honorable one-on-one combat. This danger came in numbers, with rifles, iron, and most importantly of all, fear. They did not fear the clime or place, treacherous as it was. They did not fear the unknown, which they willingly dived into again and again. They did not fear the Masai moran, for man is simply man the entire globe over. They feared only the lions, because in times of duress the lions did not play by God’s rules. Two such lions had not been the proof of moranist manhood yet, though not for lack of trying. This particular pair inspired a greater fear than any other.

I.

Nadab laid quiet with his maneless head between his front paws, the brush of his tail gently whisking the dirt behind him as it swayed back and forth. By his side was his brother, Abihu, and Nadab took care to watch over him as he slept. Only the last whisper of the sun’s fire sat on the horizon, and the pair were safe in a thick brush not far from where their mother had once given birth to them. Abihu slept soundly, a hollow whistle escaping his great maw upon every breath where a tooth had snapped in half, leaving a small gap. Nadab would sleep soon, but the convoys had been coming later and later each night, in ever increasing number. The asymmetrical escalation had begun so long ago that it was impossible to tell who had provoked who first, and known unknowns were the only certainty in warfare. With only oil lamps to see and a limited number of rifles between them, the humans’ hunting expeditions had been more fruitful in killing morale than killing lions. This only pressured them into fighting harder and injuring themselves further, spinning an unlimited deathdrive flywheel of fear. Still, it was good for Nadab to be alert. Neither of the two lions were in good shape to defend themselves after months of dry season hunting, without any livestock for easy picking. He laid there on his oversized paw pads until his eyelids could hardly shoulder the weight of watchfulness any longer. In a few slow blinks’ time, the sun had disappeared entirely. Nadab rose and paced wearily in a circle around his brother once, twice, another two times around his own tail, and finally laid to rest. Abihu’s anxious lullaby of whistled breathing kept him strangely calm as he dozed off.
Not far from where Nadab and Abihu slept flowed the Tsavo River. Water came gently from up on the mountains in the west until merging with the Athi River on the east and eventually out into the Indian Ocean. The Tsavo was, at its widest, only about as far across as one might have to raise their voice and they could carry on a perfectly intelligible conversation. It was shallow enough that the Masai and the lions and the mongooses and the rhinoceros could cross with ease, and never thought about it as anything other than a drinking source. Regardless, a bridge was being constructed. On the river bank, tall manmade fences of twisted thorns and branches called boma sprouted up as far as the eye could see in either direction. At some point, this traditional boma method of keeping livestock safe broke its own contamination. Its efficacy at protecting humans made it spread and duplicate so widely that it became a new part of the natural landscape. Boma were simple to construct, bundles of heavy vegetation would be tied together and dug into the ground at regular intervals so that the weight of a hippopotamus could not knock it down and the high leap of a lion could not hurdle over it. If they tried and failed, they would be so thoroughly tangled and covered in scratches from the thorn that they would learn not to try again. This wall of boma on the banks caused the cool waters of the Tsavo to teem with algae and weeds from disuse.
As Nadab and Abihu laid in the grass, the Kenyan grasslands too slept without peace. Hunger pangs crept through the tired bellies of the crocodiles and the zebra and the lions alike. Grasshoppers whirred in every direction, clip-clip-clipping their wings as they snapped and vibrated together in a process known as crepitation. This is extremely common in the daytime, as the soundmaking creates enough friction to regulate their cold-blooded bodies and attract mates. At night, they make noise only in profound peril as a warning to their peers of predators hunting nearby. As the environment and the climate shifted, so too did the natural clocks and processes of all animals, but not everything changes at the same pace. As the river changed, so did the algae, and the insects that fed on it, and the birds that ate the insects that ate the algae, and the mammals all that ate the birds and the insects and drank the algae water too. As the river changed, so did all the little wet grasses that the mice ate, so the soil was less nutrient rich, so the millet didn’t grow, so the sorghum didn’t grow, so the trees were suddenly dry, so the giraffes didn’t come, so the lions didn’t come, so the Masai didn’t come, and so, the grasshoppers whirred in every direction on this night in greater number than the lands had ever heard. A gentle wind brushed the grass this way and that, and nothing stirred.
Overnight, long lines of railroad tracks had appeared and disturbed the firmament, confusing the natural paths where Nadab and Abihu had once chased down their first giraffe together. Ecology is a fragile balance, where even a fractioning pride might cause a river to flood or an ant colony to collapse in turn. The rising tide of humans across the landscape seemed the domino which would finally fell this great house of cards for good. They came bearing machetes, for clearing their own paths through the flatlands more like the bird flies than any being of the earth. The fields of grass and the layers of rock and soil beneath, that once dictated a way from one watering hole to the next, where hardsoil grasses died earlier than others and bacteria fed on the decaying leaf, meant nothing. It only made the boma spread worse, the necessary branches and bindings were cut easily in the forming of unnatural trails. Rubber boots, recently invented and from a grove of trees just a few days travel northwest, negated any ill effect on movement. The machetes too came from somewhere nearby, a hole where humans alone bled for iron and copper. It was as if God himself had granted them his own power and vision to create the world in seven days.

II.

Abihu swirled his tongue around his broken tooth, assessing the pain of an infection which had taken root months prior. It felt worse than yesterday, it always did. Abihu pawed guiltily at his brother’s tail, until Nadab awoke only a few short hours after relieving his duty at watch. Abihu knew he had slept more than double his brother, but it was time to hunt. The pair looked at each other, and out to the fields, and back to each other, sat to wave their paws at a small bird in the nearby thatch for a moment, and arose again to begin their patrol. It was at this time of night, a few hours before sunrise, when the hunt was the easiest. Tired kudu would be just awakened, beginning their own usual routes except a little confused and a little slower than usual in this newly illusionary landscape. The lesser kudu of eastern Africa are a docile sort, only about as large as a common white-tailed deer, with the most beautiful antelope antlers spiraling up more like coral than tree branch. Today, there were three feeding in the tall grass together not far from Nadab and Abihu as they walked along a natural path. Abihu noticed first as they rounded a corner into a clearing, and paused suddenly. His tail flicked left and right, and Nadab kept on a few paces further before realizing the sound of his paws on dirt turned from eight to four. A branch snapped near the kudu family and Nadab finally found them in his line of sight. He looked back at Abihu, and then forward to the kudu. A pathway was clear, to move slowly along the field’s edge, then under the plentiful moonshade of an Umbrella Thorn acacia tree, where they would finally be close enough to sprint towards the kudu with minimal effort. Tall and bare at its trunk until suddenly billowing out in a wide disc of leaves at its top, the brothers had slept and played here beneath this specific tree many times before.
Nadab took the lead and lowered his maneless head to the ground in a stalking pose, weaving stealthily along the grass as his father had taught them many years ago. Abihu took a slower route and circled wide around the field until he was nearly opposite Nadab, creating a pincer trap like snapping beetle mandibles. Slowly, they stalked in closer and closer. Each lion licked their own teeth in anticipation. A meal had not come in nearly three days, and this one was easy. Nadab reached the edge of the shade, and the kudu were none the wiser. Closer now, Nadab could see the white striated lines on their grey and fawn fur, the deep black of their eyes imposing wisdom onto the plains themselves. The daybreaking sky was hot and humid, a clear expanse of the same dark bluish-green shade in paintings of icy ocean wavecaps. Nadab paused and shifted his weight back like an Olympic runner on his starting block. His limbs were weary but fueled with adrenaline and pride. All of the energy building into this moment suddenly condensed and pressurized itself until it exploded, and before the kudu could turn their heads he was already barreling at high speed in their direction. Only five full galloping bounds later, a distant rifle shot rang across the open dawn sky. The kudu spooked, and went from feeding to sprinting in an instant. The echoing snap-pow of flintlock gunpowder was an unfamiliar sound for such a morning with nary a cloud in the sky. Lagging only a few seconds behind to react to the noise, Abihu took the ready as the meat fled away from the shot and near his direction. The simple, easy hunt had been foiled. Catching a kudu already in motion would take a lot more effort than a surprised and resting one. Fire flowed through Abihu, well rested but weak from the infection his entire body was working to fight. Two front legs hit the ground and trampled tall grass into new paths, two hind legs quickly replacing the pressure on the floor beneath him. Like this, he carved the earth towards the kudu as they sprinted away, breathing uglily on the plains beneath. The sound of four paws was now a calamity of twenty or more and all the grunting and sweat and the ringing of ears. Abihu held focus on the smallest and slowest member of the family as they each scattered off in their own vector lines of panic. As he stole more and more ground on the precious kudu, the world became quieter and more and more narrow. Finally within striking distance, Abihu leapt with all the vim and vigor in his spirit and trapped one leg of the runt beneath his mass.
Squirming and crying undertow, Abihu quickly obeyed his instincts and reached for the victim’s neck with his yellowed and dehydrated mouth. Nadab’s quickening paw could be heard hustling towards him, and pride swelled in the lion. After so many months of patheticism and needfulness, this was his. It felt good not to rely on his brother, to work as a team again, it felt good to contribute. Before it had even happened, the lion imagined in full vividness the emotion on Nadab’s face seeing his successful hunt. He saw in visions Nadab lit by the sun on the east and the mighty Mount Kilimanjaro looming on the west, framing his golden face behind him like their kind and gentle ancestors watching over. He bit, hard, on the little thing. Abihu scarcely remembered this sensation of an enormous canine pushing into firm dry skin, feeling it pull down before tooth finally pierced through and the skin popped back taut and wet. Blood and flesh felt better than cool water. In the next instant, agony traded places for victory. Abihu’s gums were stung by a-thousand-and-one angry wasps, the pain oozing out from his mouth and through every little vein in his nervous system like honey flowing hot and fast. He froze stone cold and the kudu, in all of its final prayers and pleas, disappeared. It left only a trail of leaking blood behind. Nadab growled low with all the guttural defeat his tired body had to offer as he dashed right on past his brother in pursuit of the pack. The kudu ran north in the direction of the Tsavo River, looking for safety.
Any advantage gained by the lions had been lost at this point, and the tender little kudu limbs glided further and further out from Nadab. He looked out onto the horizon and saw not their usual river watering hole, but the bridge worksite boma. Unstaffed at this hour, it provided a haven for the fastest of the prey as Nadab watched one find a narrow gap to squeeze through the thorny barrier. The littlest wounded one was slowing, losing too much blood too fast to carry on too much further, but the gap was wide and the headstart long and it, too, narrowly escaped becoming food. The bleeding kudu wriggled its way through the fence just moments before Nadab caught up. The lion pawed at the fence and tried incessantly to dig into the ground below the thorn, covering his pallid fur with deep cuts and scratches. He clawed and clawed at the dirt long past the point at which it was apparent no good could come. None but hope fueled each tired swipe until slowly, slowly, the pace lessened and finally Nadab was left standing there quiet. Suddenly, soundlessly, Abihu had appeared right beside him, unbeknownst to his brother enraptured in fury. There was nothing for either of them to do. All of their energy had been expended in the fruitless hunt, and they would need to rest again. Neither lion looked at the other, but they both let themselves fall to the ground right there in the newly risen shade of the boma. A bird in the thorn tweeted out a mocking little song. It was morning.

III.

A regular man, about normal height and usual weight, woke up in the worksite. He had secretly gotten very drunk whilst heaving sacks of gravel and wheelbarrows to and fro in the day prior. At some point he had tripped and fallen behind a large gravel mound and hit his head, he was assumed dead or missing by the officer in charge at headcount. The human hierarchy is strangely precarious, not all dead humans are treated the same. No great honor or glory is bestowed upon the dead drunkard, if it is his own drunkenness which kills him. The squealing of the beasts and the roaring of the lion gradually pulled the dead man out of his deep concussive sleep, and he found himself just as fuzzy and drained sober as he had before drunk. For all the theosis and intelligence of humans, they are very feeble creatures. He knew the rising sun meant that the rest of the work crew and officers would be arriving soon, so he mustered the energy to sit upright in the dirt and dust himself off. He felt the back of his head for blood, and untied and tied his boots again. The man passed his little self-wellness check and rose to his feet, still dazed and blistered with headache all the same. He checked his surroundings and stumbled to the Tsavo to splash his face with cool mountain water.
About as far away as one could throw an apple sat Nadab and Abihu, performing the same morning ritual for a second time that day on the other side of the boma. This diagnostics check is the one thing that all forms of life have in common, that it is good to live and bad to die. Occasionally a test is needed to see which one is closer, so that we can plan and act accordingly. Sometimes, it's not so clear. Abihu’s tooth was still in tremendous pain from crunching down into the kudu runt, and the little bit of blood and fur left over in his mouth tasted more like hunger than food. Each passing day, the energy for the hunt corroded away without reward, each day it became harder to pounce and chase. They knew that the boma was a dangerous place to be at this time of day, that soon men with rifles would march across the grass and appear at the edge of the trailheads nearby. The pair stood up and looked at each other, looked at the trailhead, and pawed a bit at a little bird who was nested in the thorny fence. One of the claws in the whole tangled mess clawed the bird’s wing a little too hard, and it fell out of the branches. It flew pitifully away on the strength of one wing, and all three of them knew it would not make it to see the next day. Accidents happen in play. The two lions watched the bird until it was out of sight, noticed how the sun had fully risen off the horizon, and began to step out back into the tall grasses of home.
Everything was still on the plains this day. The grasshoppers were loud against the backdrop of quietude, the wind pushed with all the might of a mouse. So, when the creaking hinge of the boma door opened and our regular, normal man stepped out and vomited into the grass, it was all the world could hear. Nadab and Abihu whipped their heads back to the worksite and lowered themselves, tawny grey-yellow fur hiding in the wild millet. If a hunter came, they were too weak to retreat in good time. This man did not appear to have a rifle, he in fact appeared half dead himself. His face was covered in wet soot and his uniform in several states of disarray, lurched over and folded at the waist facing the earth. Abihu laid in the grass to watch in safety, and Nadab stood. Nadab felt hunger more strongly than defeat and the world became black to him. Every thought poured out of his ears and he simply obeyed the nothing inside of him. He approached the man slowly while he was distracted. Without much fuss or complication, Nadab had placed himself in leaping distance of the poor fellow. The nothing man looked up from the pool of his insides and made eye contact with the lion, and found a mirror.
In a moment, Nadab was returning to Abihu with a paltry amount of gore stuck to his teeth. A sickly corpse dragged from his jaw along the dirt. Nadab dropped the body in front of his brother and the both of them sat there a long while without action. They looked at each other, and then at the ground, they were tired. An hour or two passed by. Nadab began clawing at the body, shredding the canvas uniform and picking apart meat from bone. Humans don’t have much meat compared to bone. Abihu ate what he could, the little satiation felt a pittance compared to the shattered ego and death of pride in his stomach.
Nearby, as the sun shone straight down into the earth, as all of the fire and might in the sky was home, a group of men noticed something upon arriving at the trailhead. A rather conspicuous trail of blood, a rubber boot, a pile of vomit sat inert on the hard soil where lava once flowed. It was not the first, or the second or third time they had seen something like this. It took only a moment for whispers of “the lions” to spread like a ghost story through the ranks of workers. The lead officer held his hand in a fist above his shoulder, and all the men stopped marching at once. He knelt and slung his rifle from his back to his front, and looked through the iron sights. The rifle was hot and heavy in his hands, the wooden grip stained black with oil and blood. It was more familiar to the officer than any woman he had ever loved and left back home an ocean away. The stinging of sun-soaked metal felt like love on his cheek as he pressed his face against the rifle butt to steady himself in preparation for fire. The officer felt the gun as one of his own limbs, he slowly scanned the fields with the iron barrel like a radio receiver.
Nadab and Abihu were tired, and they lay there daydreaming of the past. Nadab remembered how this place used to feel, when the zebra and the giraffe roamed predictably through the fields. He remembered Abihu as a cub, golden and brilliant. Abihu thought of his tooth so intensely that he did not notice, or at least react, to the many flies now resting on his face. He breathed deeply in, so that the air in his tooth whistled loud, and he did not breathe out again. Fire tore through the air and the sound of thunder broke out in the cloudless sky. And again. Starving was one thing, but killing a man was another, and God showed no mercy.

The End.