by Peter Rimmer
He had arrived in Cape Town and taken the train to Kimberley, recently annexed by the British from the Boers as the place was an underground mountain of diamonds. From Kimberley he had made his way to the new mining camp at Johannesburg, where he had been told the main rains had flooded the rivers and cut the road to the interior. Along with the avalanche of suppliers, he had arrived in Fort Salisbury three weeks earlier when the drifts across the Shushi, the Bubye, Nuanetsi and Lundi had become impassable. Until the moment he put down his knife and fork there had not been a trace of his quarry. The word Brigandshaw, spoken by the big man with a beard down to his chest, rang the bell for Jeremiah that silenced every other thought in his mind.
“You think Oosthuizen has found the Great Elephant?” asked Frederick Selous at the next table.
“Never will. Hunted him for years myself,” said Henry Hartley, the man’s companion.
“They haven’t come in?”
“Camped on the Zambezi I’ll bet. They won’t come through here if they have any sense. Rhodes thinks he owns every elephant south of the Zambezi.”
When Henry Hartley looked up from his place, a short man with a crooked nose was standing at his elbow. The old hunter felt an immediate flash of dislike.
“Do you know the whereabouts of Sebastian Brigandshaw?” asked the stranger.
“What’s it to you?” said Hartley, annoyed at the interruption. He had spoken louder than intended and the conversation in the dining room came to an abrupt halt, the silence broken by the swish and creak of the punkah.
“He’s wanted by the police,” said Shank into the quiet. “In England,” he added. “He’s kidnapped his brother’s wife and son.”
“Has he now? Maybe the brother was a tad careless.”
The gale of laughter made Shank’s right eyelid droop further, and the pulverised cartilage in his twisted nose began to hurt.
“It’s a capital offence,” he said, trying to maintain his authority.
“No, mister whoever you are, never heard of Sebastian Brigandshaw.”
“But I distinctly overheard you mention his name.”
“Then you shouldn’t listen to private conversations,” replied Hartley standing up. Selous, who had been chief scout for the Pioneer Column, also got to his feet. They were the most famous hunters in Africa.
“I’ll report you to the police,” said Shank, standing his ground in his new suit.
The two hunters laughed with the rest of the dining room and sat down again, picking up their knives and forks and leaving Shank standing. Everyone in the room went back to their food except Henry Manderville on the other side of the room.
Shank sat down well pleased with himself. His quarry was camped on the banks of the Zambezi River. The man was still in the country. All he had to do was wait and listen. Jeremiah Shank knew that Oosthuizen was Brigandshaw’s partner. He sat back comfortably in his chair and watched Hartley turn and glare at him. He smiled back. With another five hundred pounds he would buy himself half a dozen of the farms they were talking about and turn himself into a gentleman.
Jeremiah Shank was already in the office of the BSA Company when Gregory Shaw arrived the next morning to register his claim for the farmland he would receive as payment for being a member of the Pioneer Column. Next to Shank was a disgruntled young man who had sold his farm-right for twenty pounds. The man had been interested in quick gold, not the hard work of farming.
“If you don’t occupy the land within twelve months, you will forfeit the title,” said the company man to Shank. “Beacons will be completed next month when you may choose your farm, all of which are within fifteen miles of Salisbury. Now, if you wish to renounce your right to Mr J Shank, sign here,” he said to the disgruntled young man… “Now, good day to you… Mr Shank, twelve months remember.” The BSA Company wanted Englishmen, any Englishmen occupying the land to deter any aggression from Lobengula when he realised Rhodes had taken the land that he valued and not just the minerals that were worthless to the Matabele.
Ten minutes later, having chosen neighbouring farms from a surveyor’s map, Gregory took up their right to six thousand acres north of Fort Salisbury.
“Sir Henry Manderville will sign for his three thousand acres this afternoon.”
“The company store will sell you implements and seed.”
“I’m sure it will.”
Smiling to himself, he left the office to join Henry who was selling the pack horses and prospecting equipment. ‘Whatever it is, wherever it is,’ he said to himself, ‘there’s always a racket.’
At first light the following morning, Henry and Gregory began the ride south that would take them back to England. They had exactly twelve months to complete their business and return.
Even as they rode back close to Matabele territory, there was no sign of Lobengula’s impis. Wisely they travelled with a group of Englishmen going the same way. They were all armed with the new Martini-Henry repeating rifles. Largely the English had conquered the country by force of arms, the Rudd concessions with its prospecting rights merely providing an excuse to pacify the British government and convince the Queen this particular imperialism was legal. The Shona, coming out of their hiding in ever-increasing numbers, had never once been consulted about what was happening to their ancestral home. They were bewildered and hungry and many of them took jobs working for the Englishmen. All the Shona had managed to do was change masters. Instead of losing their lives, they had lost their land to British protection.
Emily knew in her heart that the last seven months would be the best part of her life but their provisions were exhausted, the trail through the bush was dry and it was time to return to the world. For the seven months, they had not even seen the footprint of another man and nothing had disturbed their harmony. Not only had Tatenda learnt to speak good English but Harry, just three years old, was the first Englishman to speak Shona without an accent. He moved from English to Shona as if they were all the same language.
Tinus had made the decision for them.
“You, young lady, will need a doctor in three months’ time, and Alison and I need a priest. Break camp. We must move.”
The largest wagon was used to store the ivory from the hunt, stacked high and roped to the bed of the wagon with a canvas pulled tight over the top. The vegetable garden was left to go to seed and feed the buck and at the end of April, the journey back to civilisation began. Not one of them wanted to go.
“Life is made of memories,” explained Tinus as he in-spanned the sixteen oxen into two teams. “At the end of it, you look back and remember the good memories. The rest are forgotten. The mosaic of life. You cannot hold the good moments forever. We never reach eternal happiness in this life and maybe not in the next. What we have found on the banks of this great river is joy for weeks on end. Remember them and thank God, for such weeks are rare. They are the reason for coming into this world. Now, put my chest of books in the wagon, young Seb, and we will go. We can never stand still, more’s the pity… Friends, my speech is over. May God bless our journey. Tatenda, you will ride with me and Harry in the big wagon. Yes, indeed, we must go.”
Tinus led the way slowly across the Zambezi Valley, followed by Seb driving the second wagon and the two saddleless horses on long reins behind. The sky was puffed by small white clouds, motionless below the perfect blue. The sun was white-light on the dust and long grass that brushed against the chests of the lead oxen. A fish eagle’s triple call from the river floated out to them. Ahead, the escarpment was another day’s journey.
Day after day followed as they slowly journeyed through a country empty of people, villages and cattle, the country south of the Zambezi stripped bare by first Mzilikazi and then his son Lobengula. It had taken the Zulu impi fifty years to decimate the tribes of the Shona. All the hunters saw was game; herds of elephant which they left alone; stampedes of buffalo; prides of lions; cheetahs running down the buck: impala, waterbuck, springbok, kudu. Even the great eland was prey
to the predators. Among the buffalo, herds of the gnu. Among the elephant, at respectful distances, prehistoric rhinoceros. In the rivers, crocodile and hippopotamus. High in the sky, eagles and falcons, hawks and buzzards, calling their lonely cries. And always behind them the long line of crushed grass to prove their passage and mark their trail for weeks to come.
The nights were the best for Alison. Camped in the wilderness, with the upward heat of the fire curling sparks high into the heavens, the bulk of her man next to her, Harry asleep, the last of their coffee simmering over a small, secondary fire mingling pungent sweetness with the smell of woodsmoke. Away, close to the smaller wagon, Sebastian and Emily holding hands.
Above them, the great vault of heaven, layer upon layer of crystal stars fixed in their paradise, the wagons the centre of the dome, the Milky Way splashed like cloud among the heavenly stars. And then the moon rising from the wilderness… Stacking the fire and falling asleep in each other’s arms.
By the middle of May, Jeremiah Shank had given up on his second five hundred pounds and was turning his mind to the estate he was going to carve out of the African bush. He had studied the map in the company office that showed the Zambezi River cutting them off from the north, hundreds of miles of one of Africa’s greatest rivers. Somewhere along that river, in territory previously controlled by Lobengula, his quarry had camped for the duration of the rains. The consensus, drawn from prospectors back from their fruitless hunt for gold, elicited after buying round after round of drinks in the new hotel, was that any sane hunter would bring his ivory out on a line that to the west would keep his wagons far away from Gu-Bulawayo, Lobengula’s military kraal, and far east of Fort Salisbury in case Rhodes levied a tax on the ivory. Somewhere there in the middle for weeks, Jeremiah had ridden across this line, climbing kopjes that stuck out of the flat grassland with his telescope looking for the trail of his quarry. All he ever saw were the vast herds of game which he found permanently irritating. To Jeremiah, there was only beauty in gold or pound notes.
His horse was going lame, and he reasoned there was no reason for Brigandshaw to travel at all. Hartley, he heard in the hotel, had spent years in the wilderness without the need of his fellow man. Jeremiah made camp for the last time on his journey. Even before he had made his supper, the hyenas were laugh-whooping at him from the darkness of the bush, and then the first lion roared and sent a shiver down his spine. Owls were calling to each other from the clumps of trees. A leopard coughed and Jeremiah clutched his rifle in fear and loathing. Even as exhaustion made him sleep to the dancing light of his fire, he dreamed of horrors through the night.
The dawn came slowly with the song of birds and the fire was still burning high. Jeremiah was glad to be going. The BSA Company would have placed their beacons to demarcate his farm and he would find some blacks to work for him. There were whites without money who would build him a house and oxen to clear patches of his land that would grow the food for the fools looking for the gold that wasn’t there. He would buy cattle from the company and very soon he would be a man of property. He began to walk his horse the thirty miles back to Fort Salisbury.
Around midday, with the sun a ball of fire above his head, he crossed the trail he had been seeking for four weeks. Even his inexperienced eye showed the trail was less than two days old. The wagons, two of them he read from the tracks, had travelled much closer to the British camp than he had expected and the one wagon drove a rut far deeper than the other. Jeremiah threw his hat in the air and whooped. The only load in the wilderness going south would be ivory, the only hunter not accounted for, Sebastian Brigandshaw. For the first five minutes, he actually ran towards Fort Salisbury. With a wagon that heavy, the police would catch up with them easily.
The police were not interested.
“Mr Shank, you saw a wagon trail in the bush and want me to ride out and arrest the wagon master for kidnapping somebody’s wife in England. Please, Mr Shank. Anyone capable of hunting elephant in the bush for months on end is not, I would think, the kind of person to drag someone else’s wife off to Africa and stick her in an ox wagon at the far extremity of our empire. Having said all that, you did not see this Brigandshaw but a rut in the ground miles from nowhere.”
“But he is the type,” insisted Jeremiah Shank patiently. He had learnt years ago that losing his temper with authority was a worthless extravagance. “The man’s face is on the poster outside and if you capture him, you will have your name in every newspaper in England.” For a moment the look in the policeman’s eyes changed from how do I get rid of this man without losing my temper, to one of personal interest. For a moment the man regarded Jeremiah and then his expression became one of resignation.
“I’m stuck behind this desk. Anyway, Major Johnson would never authorise the expenditure of sending two men down a cold trail without proof that Brigandshaw was at the end of it. Fact is, Mr Shank, the company is tight with money now they find there isn’t any gold.”
“Who owns the ivory on that wagon?” said Jeremiah Shank, seeing his opportunity.
“Well, the company, of course. Anyone hunting for ivory in company territory needs a licence and has to sell any to the company.”
“And if the hunter does not have a licence?”
“The ivory would be confiscated.”
“Thank you, Constable, you have been of extreme help.”
Puzzled, the policeman watched the man abruptly leave the charge office. He thought for a moment the man was being sarcastic and then he wasn’t so sure. Through the open door, he saw the man he had been trying to get rid of for the last half an hour running down Pioneer Street as if a full Matabele impi had swept into Fort Salisbury.
When Jeremiah entered the office of the BSA Company, the same company in which Arthur Brigandshaw had invested all his money, the ex-seaman was out of breath.
“I wish to see the man who issues hunting licences.”
“You may fill in this form… Is there something wrong?”
“There’s a man without a licence not fifteen miles from here with a full wagonload of ivory going south, and if you don’t move very quickly, your company will lose a great deal of money.”
“A full load of ivory? My word, the company will be very angry if that slips through our fingers. Mr Rhodes said every penny counts. How much ivory, do you think?”
“Well over five tonnes.”
“Goodness gracious me… Can you show us where it is?”
“Will there be a reward?” asked Jeremiah, thinking on his feet.
“I rather think so.”
“I’ll need that in writing before we go. But hurry up. Every minute the ivory is getting further away. We’ll need a company policeman to make the arrest.”
“Yes, I rather think we do. Now, what is your name and I will report all of this to my superior?”
Tinus Oosthuizen was in no hurry. It was the middle of May, the best time of the year. There had been no rain for well over a month and the days were cooler, the nights mildly cold. The long elephant grass was brown and beginning to bend, and the tsetse flies no longer attacked them at dusk and dawn. Most of the small rivers were still pooled with water and the game dispersed far and wide across the grasslands of the highveld. The oxen plodded slowly across the veld and had not felt the whip since climbing the escarpment out of the Zambezi Valley.
On the second wagon, Harry sat between his mother and father, Tatenda taking the shade sitting on the tailgate behind. They all watched the face of a giraffe which topped a clump of trees ten yards from the wagon. The animal had stopped chewing at the last leaves on top of the tree and seemed to smile at their passing. Harry looked back, and the animal had begun to chew a leaf stuck in his mouth still watching the wagon. Harry smiled back at the giraffe.
From the back of the almost empty wagon, Tatenda spoke to him in Shona. Someone was coming. Someone was coming down their trail. A cloud of dust was back on their trail. There were horses and men, the first he had seen for so many
months.
“Tatenda says we are being followed,” he told his father.
In front the heavily loaded wagon pushed on into the long grass, moving around a red anthill that rose out of the head-high grass.
“We’ve cut a new trail, Harry.”
Jack Slater, the company man, believed in rules, particularly the rules of the British Empire as without the rules, man would return to primitive anarchy. He was a product, as had been his father and grandfather, of a minor public school in the south of England. He had been sent to the preparatory section of the school as a boy of seven and put in a dormitory with twenty more young boys who had been taken from their parents and given to a housemaster who would teach them how to become English gentlemen, how to comply with the rules. The family had been solicitors for three generations and before that, minor squires. The Slater graves in the church at Tonbridge went back to the time of Cromwell. The family had had something to do with the Great Protector and somehow held onto their land when King Charles the Second was restored to the throne of England. The junior and senior school had so indoctrinated Jack Slater that he believed in his heart that the British Empire was the only source of stability in the world, but any nation or people that were lucky enough to become part of the empire would live in peace, that individuals who complied with the rules would be protected from the vagaries and rapacious nature of his fellow man. Under the flag of England, a man could walk the streets without fear for his life or property. All he had to do was comply with the rules and all would be well for him for the rest of his life.
