Primal Scream Read Free

wager who could identify the most obscure poem selected from a thick Oxford anthology. Pop refused to raise an illiterate lout, so when he was in his cups I was forced to run the gantlet of the bards. A wrong answer earned me a boxed ear, so I read and reread that anthology to ward off beating."
    "I wondered why they said you're a walking volume of poetry."
    "Now you know. Child abuse."
    "And the worst?"
    Seated behind the horseshoe desk fashioned from a trio of library tables, Inspector Zinc Chandler leaned back in Chief Superintendent DeClercq's antique office chair and regurgitated Kipling:
     
    "Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
    For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
    But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale—
    The female of the species is more deadly than the male."
     
    Spann chuckled. "There's a poem you couldn't write today."
    "No," agreed Chandler. "Even if it's true." Her chuckle turned to laughter. "You're going from worst to worster."
    "A true story," he said. "I heard it in Africa. Do you recall the legend of Androcles and the lion? He was a runaway Roman slave who hid in a cave. There he took a thorn from the paw of a suffering lion. Later when he faced the same lion in a Roman arena, Androcles survived because the beast refused to harm him.
    "Hwange is the best game reserve in Zimbabwe. It's fifteen thousand square kilometers. The story concerns the warden in charge of a lion area. Months before his wedding, he befriended and mended a lioness with an injured front paw. The first night he and his new wife were in bed in camp, the lioness jumped in through a ventilation hatch in the thatch roof. The warden wrestled the cat off his wife so she could escape, and as she fled, the door shut and trapped her husband inside. When the senior ranger and his cousin responded with guns, they wrenched open the hut door to find the warden dead. The lioness leapt at the senior ranger in front, which forced the cousin behind to shoot her through him. The warden and the lioness died together."
    "Why the attack?" asked Katherine Spann.
    "The lioness was jealous," Chandler replied. "Does that back Kipling's view: The female of the specie s is more deadly than the male?”
    "What about humans? Do you hold that?"
    "You're the female. You tell me."
    "I think we're more deadly because we're naturally superior to you. The human brain evolved as a weapon of survival. No fangs, no claws, no leap, no venom, so our species outthinks predators. But as men have brutalized women since sex began, we evolved another step to match your brute strength. We're quicker to respond to stimuli, more resistant to disease, and able to tap one side of the brain while thinking with the other. You used to call that power 'female intuition.' We outthink you, so we're deadlier."
     
    "And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
    That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male."
     
    "Amen," said Sergeant Spann as Corporal Craven, a parcel in hand, knocked on the door and strode into the office of Chief Superintendent DeClercq, which Inspector Chandler was manning while the chief was on vacation in France.
    "Am I interrupting?"
    "Join the battle, Nick. We're debating who's deadlier. Women or men?" said Spann.
    "Oops. Wrong floor," said Craven, swiveling on his heels to make for the door.
    "No need to flee," said Chandler. "Kipling decided the issue. Our sex is doomed to writhe 'in anguish like the Jesuit with the squaw!'"
    "Thank God that's settled," Craven sighed. "I was losing sleep."
    "This 'God' you mention," Spann inquired. "Is it a He or a She?"
    "Would someone please read me my charter rights so I don't have to reply."
    "A wimp," said Chandler.
    "A wimp," Spann agreed.
    The word Amazon was coined for Sergeant Spann. Six feet tall with a buffed full figure, she looked down on most men. Face to chest with her Playboy breasts was a no-win