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The audience leaned forward.
But … no Leo.
He was asleep somewhere in that small portable crate.
“Leo! Vamanos! Ándale! Presto!” The tamer snapped in through the small crate door with his whip, like someone turning meat on a tired spit.
A big fluff of yellow mane rolled over with an irritable mumble.
“Gah!” The pistol was next fired into the deaf old lion’s ear.
There was a most deliciously satisfying roar.
The audience beamed and settled back.
Leo suddenly manifested in the crate door. He blinked into the damned light. And he was—
The oldest lion I have ever seen.
It was a beast come forth from a retirement farm in the Dublin Zoo on a bleak day in December. So wrinkled was his face, it was a smashed window, and his gold was old gold left out in the long rains and beginning to run.
The lion needed glasses, this we could guess from his furious blinking and squinting. Some of his teeth had fallen out in his breakfast gruel only that morning. His ribs could be seen under his mangy pelt which had the look of a welcome mat trampled on by a billion lion-tamers’ feet.
There was no more outrage in him. He was angered out. There was only one thing to do. Fire his pistol into the beast’s left nostril—bang!
“Leo.”
Roar! went the lion. Ah! said the audience. The drummer stirred up a storm on his snare drum.
The lion took a step. The tamer took a step. Suspense!
Then a dreadful thing …
The lion opened his mouth and yawned.
Then an even more dreadful thing …
A small boy, no more than three years old, somehow freed from his mother’s clutch, left the elite table at the edge of the ring and toddled forward across the sawdust toward the monstrous iron cage. Cries filled the tent: No, no! But before anyone could move, the small boy plunged laughing forward and seized the bars.
No! came the gasp.
But worse still, the little boy shook not just two bars, but the entire cage.
With the littlest move of his tiny pink-brown fists, the boy threatened to topple the whole jungle edifice.
No! cried everyone silently, leaning forward, gesticulating at the boy with fingers and eyebrows.
The lion-tamer, with his whip and pistol upraised, sweated, waited.
The lion exhaled through his fangless mouth, eyes shut.
The small boy gave the bars a last rattling shake of terrible Doom.
Just as his father, in one swift run, scooped him up, half hid him under his Sunday coat, and retreated to the nearest formal table.
Bang! The audience exhaled, collapsed in relief, the lion roared, circled round after its own tail, and leaped upon a flake-painted pedestal, there to rear up on its hind feet.
By now, the shaken cage had stopped trembling.
