Years passed in the slow, patient rhythm of the forest. Kivuli was no longer the scrawny outcast who had been cuffed away beneath a dying sun on a granite kopje. Time, hunger, and relentless necessity had forged him into a 150-pound engine of muscle and obsidian fur. His shoulders rolled like boulders beneath the black coat; his forelegs were thick with corded sinew; his hindquarters carried the explosive power of a coiled spring. Scars mapped his hide like a personal historY
