3 ideas
When women are the ones dying, a community can attribute the deaths to an outside beast so that no one has to name the violence women already suffer at home from fathers and husbands. The lion works as a shared alibi. Hunting it restores order without questioning who holds power over women's bodies, so killing the animal leaves the underlying danger in place.
The novel alternates between Mariamar's testimony and Arcanjo's diary, so the same events come to the reader through two limited perspectives. The contrast is not a clean split between a rational outsider and a belief-bound insider, because the hunter's diary also carries his own family trauma and experiences of the supernatural. Reading the two voices together shows each account's gaps and shows where the two narrators share more than their roles suggest.
In Kulumani's belief system, people can become lions, so a lion's attack can also be read as a person's act or a person's wish. When women identify with the lioness, the animal becomes a language for rage and escape that they cannot speak directly. Under that reading, the killings are partly a confession of women's revolt against their confinement.