Level 3

CHAPTER 4 – LION

At one moment our boss went to the front of the boat, and I quickly pushed him to the sea. He tried to swim back to us. I took one of the guns and pointed it at him. I told him to swim back to the coast if he wanted to live.

After he swam away, I turned to the boy and asked him to promise that he would be faithful to me. He did as I asked.

After two years of life as a slave I was finally free. We tried to go as fast as possible. The wind was good. We were far away from the pirate land the next day. But I was still scared of them. I didn’t want to be caught again. I was so scared that I didn’t let the boy stop the boat for five days.

On the sixth day I felt safer. We took the boat close to the land. We saw a little river. I didn’t know where we were. We had to stop somewhere because we needed some fresh water.

We waited until it was completely dark. We wanted to swim to the beach unseen and get water. But as soon as night came, we started hearing horrible noises from the beach. The boy asked me not to go to the beach. We remained on the boat, but we couldn’t sleep. Two hours later some animals came to wash themselves in the water. They made horrible noises.

The boy was extremely scared, and me too. We were even more scared when we heard one of the animals swim to us. The boy asked me to go away. But I didn’t want to go away because we needed fresh water from the river. I took one of the guns and shot at the animal. I didn’t kill it but the animal turned around and it swam back to the beach. When the other animals heard the gun, they went away. We didn’t hear the noises, but we were still scared and we stayed on the boat until the morning.

As soon as it was light again, we ate some bread for breakfast. Then we decided to go to the beach. We took our guns and two big bottles for the water, and we went to the beach. Once we were on the beach, I didn’t want to lose sight of the boat, so the boy went alone a bit further inside the land to get some fresh water. He returned after some time. He was running. I thought that some animal was running after him. But I didn’t see anything dangerous.

He was hurrying to show me he killed an animal that looked like a chicken. We were both very glad because the meat was good and we found fresh water.

I didn’t know where exactly we were. I only knew we went around the coast of Africa. I hoped we met an English ship when we went around the coast. I thought we were in a land where nobody lived. We didn’t see any people on the land. We only heard wild animals.

One morning when we were going to get water, the boy showed me a big lion sleeping in the shade near us. Then the lion woke up. When he saw us, he started to run to us. We didn’t have much time. The boy was so scared he wasn’t able to shoot. I had three guns. The first bullet hit his leg. The second bullet hit its head. He was seriously injured. The third bullet finished the animal.

We couldn’t eat the meat because it wasn’t good. But we wanted the skin. The skin was very big. We put it on top of the boat, and soon it was dry.

WORDS FROM CHAPTER 4