Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Author:Lucy Ellmann [Lucy Ellmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781913111045
Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Roaming with the cubs by daylight, the lioness found the tracks of a female jogger. They soon came upon the woman, who was leaning up against a tree, panting heavily from running up the hill. The lioness watched her intently, assessing the risk to cubs. They lost interest and started to play, and their cheerful cheeping finally drew the woman’s attention.

Running for her life now, she stumbled through ferns and poison ivy. The lioness followed steadily, and the cubs kept in step. The jogger slithered unadroitly halfway up a tree, tearing her pants and cutting her leg. She gained a low branch, and gripped it tightly, wide-eyed and crying.

The cubs gingerly approached the woman’s backpack, that lay at the foot of the tree, as if they thought it might be alive. They sniffed and prodded it, taking in its unfamiliar scents of cloth and sweat and plastic. Then they started to tear at it, and bat it around between them. One cub stopped to scratch herself.

Their mother had never once taken her eyes off the woman in the tree. At first so still, she now crouched, tensed, and sprang twenty feet in the air, reaching a branch above the one the mewling, bleeding woman clung to. The cubs began to follow and, still unable to leap, they struggled to scratch their way up the trunk. The lioness stared down at the cowering woman, whose vulnerability had a smell. She knew now that this person was neither hunter nor prey. She could afford to leave her be.

The woman, barely breathing, lay there frozen, assuming she would soon be dead for having come between a mother cougar and her cubs. One of the cubs was now tottering on a branch below, getting fretful but still trying to balance. Roused by his distress call, the lioness couldn’t linger. Slowly she ventured down to the woman’s branch, offering a cautious purr. She came so close that for a second their noses touched.

The sweet, sorry smell of the sobbing woman was briefly intriguing. Then the lioness dropped, twisting in a circle mid-air to land on all fours, and swiftly wound her way through the underbrush, the cubs trotting after her. For them, it was all good tree-climbing practice.

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