The Lion That Bit Noah Inside the Ark and Left Him Lame

For twelve months the ark never held still, and neither did Noah. The water had no floor and no shore. The vessel rolled in the black, pitched up some long invisible slope, then dropped, and somewhere below in the dark the animals slid and screamed and were sick. Three stories of cargo groaned around him. The bottom held the refuse, a reeking swamp of dung that had to be raked toward the trap in the hull. The middle held the beasts. The top held the eight humans who were now the only people left in the world.

Click for full size

Every Creature on Its Own Clock

There was no day. There was no night. The sun had been pulled out of its order so that it rose where it should have set, and the only calendar left was hunger. Noah learned the animals the way a jailer learns prisoners, by their demands. Some fed when the light should have been up, some when it should have been down, so he and his sons and their wives split the dark between them and never truly slept, climbing the ladders with armfuls of grain and flesh and leaves, one creature at a time, on each creature's own clock.

The chameleon nearly died on him before he understood it. It ate nothing he offered. Then one watch he sat peeling a pomegranate, half-asleep, and a worm dropped from the fruit, and the small thing struck and swallowed. After that he kneaded bran with water and let it rot until the worms came, and carried the writhing mess up the ladder like a delicacy. In a compartment along the side he found the phoenix lying still, and his heart dropped, because he thought it was dead. "Do you not want food?" he asked it. The bird answered him. "I saw that you were busy," it said, "and I did not want to trouble you." Noah wept over it and blessed it that it would never die.

The Lion in the Middle Story

The lion was different. The lion did not negotiate.

For long stretches a fever burned in it, and while the fever held it needed nothing. When the fever broke the hunger came back enormous, and the great cat would pace its compartment and watch the ladder, and Noah would feel its yellow attention on him from across the middle story. He fed it on its own time. He told himself he always fed it on its own time.

Above all of it, hour upon hour, was the smell. Not the dung, though that was its own punishment. It was the lions, the rank animal reek of the great predators soaked into the timbers and into his clothes and into his skin until he could not remember the smell of a field. His soul went thin inside him. One watch he stood in the dark and lifted his face. "Sovereign of all worlds," he prayed, "bring me forth from this prison, for my soul is faint because of the stench of lions." He did not get an answer. He got another watch, and then another.

The Night He Was Late

It came on a night that was indistinguishable from every other night, which was the whole horror of it. The ark heaved. Noah was below, knee-deep in filth, dragging the refuse toward the hull-trap, his back screaming, when the lion's hour came and went. He was late. Only a little late. He hauled himself up the ladder with the meat, telling the beast in his mind that one missed hour in twelve months of perfect service was nothing.

The lion did not reason that way.

It met him as he came over the lip of the middle story. There was no roar, only weight, a sudden mountain of muscle, and then the teeth. It struck him and bore him down and bit, and Noah went under it screaming with the meat scattered and useless beside him, and his sons came shouting with poles and fire and drove it back into the dark. When they pulled him up he was torn and coughing blood, and one leg would not hold him. The man who had built the box that saved every living thing lay in his own filth in the belly of it, mauled half to death by one of the creatures he had carried up the ladder a thousand times.

What Clung to the Hull

And the work did not stop. Bandaged and broken he still climbed, because the chameleon still wanted its worms and the night-creatures still woke in the false dark and the lion, healing in its corner, still had its hour. There was a hole in the hull besides the refuse-trap, low near the waterline, and through it twice a day Noah passed food to a hand the size of a roof-beam. Og, the giant, who had not been let aboard and could not be drowned, rode the storm clinging to a timber under the gutter of the ark, and had sworn himself and all his seed into servitude in exchange for bread. So the limping man fed the giant on the outside and the lion on the inside, and the months ground on.

The Old Wind and the Opened Door

When the waters at last began to fall, God caused a wind to pass over the earth (Genesis 8:1). The sages asked which wind, and answered with a marvel: no new thing. It was the same breath that had hovered over the face of the waters at the dawn of creation (Genesis 1:2), summoned back to a world that had come undone. At its touch the raging waters remembered their place and grew still, and a scoured earth rose from under the settling sea.

The raven went out, then the dove, and the olive leaf came back bitter in a beak. Then the door opened, and eight people came down into the light, with the animals after them, "after their kinds," because some of what had climbed aboard had died in the dark of that year, and it was their young who walked out. Noah came down last and slowest. Scripture does not say that Noah was left; it says Noah only was left (Genesis 7:23), and Rabbi Huna heard the diminishment inside that small word: a man worn thin, groaning from the depths of his heart. Some tellers made the wound complete at the threshold itself, the lion striking him at the very door, so that the righteous man limped from the ark that saved him straight into the mud of the new world.

"Behold, a righteous one shall be requited on earth" (Proverbs 11:31). The sages read the verse of Noah and did not flinch at what the requital looked like: survival, and a limp, and a cough that stayed. Because the blemish barred him from the altar, his son Shem stood as priest and offered in his place. Philo of Alexandria looked back at the year inside the sealed hull and saw a body: a hard, dense skin like a coat against cold and heat, a door shut fast by divine care so that no water could enter while the vessel tossed. Skin saves. Skin also bleeds.

Noah walked out leaning on his sons, dragging the leg, the smell of lions still in his clothes, into a silence where every quiet mile of new earth was also a grave without a marker. He had kept everything alive, and he carried the wound out of the ark into the world it had purchased.