LionWorld by WILLIAM E JUSTIN

Big-E White’s Last Lion Head

Big-E sure looked intense. He didn’t see Maxim coming up the lawn toward his training area at the
back of the property. He was all involved in his footwork exercises. Stepping forward, backwards, cross-
stepping, whirling about—doing all the moves taught to him as a child by his martial arts instructor.
The basic routine. As he approached he saw Big-E suddenly surge toward the dummy head stand, smack
the target with his baton, take a quick back step—then lunge at it with a snapping sweep of his opposite
arm. He could tell right off that Big-E wasn’t working out with a standard 12” blade. He had sliced at the
target with something a bit larger. That was odd—just like Big-E not
noticing him walking up on him was odd. He sure looked intense;
withdrawn into himself.
Maxim Le
Muffett
On the target stand, the dummy head had flipped backwards when
struck with the large blade. The face of it now pointed skyward. Big-E
White, the number one Lion Fighter had failed yet again to cut it clean off.
And this time with a 16” blade he personally sharpened with a file for an
hour before he began his workout. He sighed. Then he looked up and
saw The Man walking up the lawn. That really startled him and again he
sighed. Lion-Fighters were never to lose awareness of the field—
attention had to sit gently on that edge between their own subtle nervous
system and the 360 degrees of outer phenomena around them.
His brother-in-law Maxim Le Muffett had come up the lawn a full fifty
yards without him seeing. He’d catch shit for that!
Even on a crowded street it wasn’t like one could miss Maxim. He
was 6’8” with a shiny titanium prosthetic leg peeking strategically out a
wide slit cut into the slacks he wore. The edges of the slit were hemmed
and fixed in a way that allowed elegant exposure of seven two-caret
jewels encrusted in the leg. The diamond, opal, amethyst, ruby, emerald
and blue and black sapphires were positively shimmering in the midday
sunlight as he moved. A blind man could’ve spotted him coming. Big-E
had sunken halfway into a trance as he worked out. Now Maxim came
upon him with a big smile mixed slightly with a puzzled look.
“My Oafie”. Maxim greeted his brother-in-law. The two men grabbed
each others’ right hands with their own and locked onto each others biceps
with their left hands. That was the way the fraternity of Lion Fighters had
greeted each other for fifty years. They’d go eyeball to eyeball and try
and make the other flinch or grimace a bit by squeezing his arm.
“So you come in early?” Big-E said, hoping to delay the inquiry that
Maxim would soon put forth.
“Yeah, flew into L.A. early and drove up. Got here and Coco say, “you better go out and see what’s up
with Big-E. He’s been acting funny lately. So I come walking up and see you all sunk into your little
world out here. What’s going on?”
It wasn’t hard for Big-E to have predicted that. He’d seen the puzzled look on her face lately and had
been brushing off her own inquiries into his sudden change of behavior. Nothing was up, he told Maxim.
He was just into a deep training mode getting ready for next season. Coco always dispatched her one of
four brothers to get information about what he was thinking.
Maxim began very slowly. He had to be real smooth with Big-E White. Big-E had an ego even bigger
then he had had when he was at the top of the sport—back before the Lion got his leg. His sister Coco was
becoming very concerned. Women who hooked up with Lion-Fighters became very sensitive to even small
changes in their men. With four brothers, Coco knew men better then most.
In his slow and easy baritone, Maxim poured out the right words. “Oafie, you always in a training
mode. That why you Big-E White and everybody else is just a punk. But Coco say you gone a little over
the edge”.
Big-E had his cover story prepared well. “Listen Oafie, it ain’t nothing. I’m just working extra hard
‘cause next season gonna be my last. I’m hanging up the bat & blade. But see, I only got the knock-out
record by ten and I gotta pad my lead over Lanai. He’s got maybe three more years and I don’t want to
make it easy for him to take my crown.”
“Wait…wait…!” Maxim raised his hand. He was at a loss of words following that gush of revelation.
He quickly gathered it in and sorted the underlying meaning. Then he decided he would test Big-E.
“Oafie, you gonna quit? Why you wanna quit so young fo? You only thirty-five?.
Big-E just shrugged. Then he smiled and added, “I’m doing it for you oafy! You already to old to be in
there with Lions”. He knew his own retirement would bring about the end of Maxim’s career. Fact is,
everybody knew that the only reason why Maxim had gone the last two seasons was to be there with Big-E
and his brothers as they continued Big-E
White to dominate the sport.
“I’m just a spearman. I can do that for ten more years.”
Big-E let out an involuntary spasm of laughter hearing Maxim’s little
description of himself as “just a spearman”. That was like hearing the great
Latin American golfer Tigre Nikola refer to himself as “a pretty good club
pro”. Maxim Le Muffett had killed more lion in fair competition then any
man ever had. He had reached the all-time top ten in lion head knockouts in
his first 7 years. He was in the top twenty all-time for slit lion throats. All
before the age of 26; before he met his match out on a plain up in Canada.
On that day—which fans of the sport called “the Saddest Day In Lion-
Fighting History”—Maxim had squared off on flat ground against the
Canadian Tall now thought of as “The Greatest Lion of All-Time”. With the
usual world-wide audience watching the intensely gripping and highly
competitive battle on pay-per-view TV, the lion had ducked out of a hard
pinwheel upper-cut swing of Maxim’s bat. With the Lion-Fighter off balance,
the giant cat had pounced and knocked Maxim down and would have pinned
an ordinary competitor for a throat kill.
But the agile, powerful young Lion-Fighter slit its throat first. With the
last of its adrenalin surging, the beast was able to lock its paws into Maxim’s
right leg. Its nails sunk hard into the flesh before two spearmen arrived and
pierced its chest from different directions and sapped its remaining strength.
Under normal circumstances, both Lion and Lion-Fighter would have
simply bled to death together in a heap on that Canadian plain. And that
would’ve been “all fair” since each had willfully engaged the other. But
world-class professional Lion-Fighters like Maxim Le Muffett have medi-vac
helicopters on standby. Maxim was taken to doctors, who saved his life but
had to amputate the leg. The Greatest Lion of All-Time had its heart cut out
by Maxim’s crew—a tradition—and it was auctioned off to a group of A Class
Japanese businessmen for $75,000 dollars.
In the year following his defeat, Maxim began to drink and live out on the
fringe in Northern California. He stumbled around drunk on his plastic
prosthetic leg and mixed into the seedy world inhabited by old, partly eaten Lion-Fighters and the tourists
who bought them drinks and have their pictures taken with the men. Some of them would get together with
the young newbie’s trying to break into the sport and form into crews. They’d go out and fight with packs
of “fringe lion”—the smaller breed that populated the rural outskirts of the