Books by Robert F. Jones
Blood Sport
The Diamond Bogo
Copyright © 1977 by Robert F. Jones.
First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-228-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-887-2
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
PART ONE THE LAST SAFARI
PROLOGUE
1 THE HUNTER AT HOME
2 THE WANDERING Y
3 THE GUINEA WORM
4 KRAZY GLUE
5 IT ALWAYS EXCITES
6 BUCKY’S UNDERPANTS
7 CLICKRASP
8 WHITE LEGS
9 KING OF THE DEADWOOD STAGE
10 THE ROPE OF GOD
11 THE ORPHANED COLT
12 NIGHTWATCH
PART TWO THE LAND OF THE TOK
13 NIGHT FRIGHT
14 THE SKULL CAVE
15 OXTAIL SOUP?
16 NO OXTAIL SOUP TONIGHT
17 “THE SIMI, S’IL VOUS PLAIT.”
18 KIDNAPED!
19 PRIAPIC PIPSQUEAK
20 DONN’S SHOOTING LESSON
21 SURE CURE FOR SNAKEBITE
PART THREE THE GRIP OF THE NYIKA
22 THE BOGUS HUNTERS
23 TOKSVILLE
24 THE SPORTING LIFE
25 BUX FUX
26 AVARICE
27 “SAVED BY THE BELT!”
28 ON THE RUN
29 CRUSADER
30 HOME FROM THE HILL
31 OUT OF AFRICA
EPILOGUE
for
BILL WINTER
The best of the last of them
“What is the use of our feeble crying in the awful silences of space? Can our dim intelligence read the secrets of that star-strewn sky? Does any answer come out of it? Never any at all, nothing but echoes and fantastic visions.”
— H. Rider Haggard
PART ONE
THE LAST SAFARI
PROLOGUE
All day the two Samburu ran across a high plateau, loping through the cool fog, looking back now and then to see if the pursuit was gaining. The one with the spear wound in his thigh had weakened, the slash opening and closing with every stride like a toothless mouth. But there was no tongue in the mouth, only wires. His name was Korobo and, from time to time, he snatched the upper branches of a shrub to chew the tender bitter leaves. He did not mind the taste. This was miraa, the khat of the Arabs, a mild narcotic with a slight lifting effect, but now, six hours after the Tok lance had opened his leg, with six hours of thorn underfoot, six hours without meat or water, no narcotic on earth could ease the lion bite of his pain. The khat, however, kept him going.
They should have known the Tok would be there, in that dry, eroded donga on the far end of the known world. They had come upon the remains of a giraffe, the belly hide slashed wide as only the Tok spearheads cut in this country, the charred shinbones split lengthwise by a stone-headed Tok club and the marrow lapped out by harsh Tok tongues. But the wazee, the elders of their tribe, had said for years that the Tok were finished—na kwisha!—wiped out by the cholera and the snail disease, the survivors hounded out of the country by the guns and trucks of the Wazungu. Other young morani of their village had hunted this far west, into the high plateaus of Kansdu, and seen no sign of Tok for a generation. But when they discovered the giraffe kill, the two young men had paused, suddenly sobered by the implication. The Tok were small but strong as baboons, few but fierce as wild dogs, cannier than a wounded buffalo. And crazier than a m’zungu with a belly full of gin.
They had discussed the matter, squatting over the still-warm ashes of the Tok fire, poking at the bones with their thornwood knobkerries, shivering their spears in nervous reflex, the iron laurel-leaf tips still sheathed in their cowhide wrappings, looking out over the empty country ahead—a cold green country, this, high above the Samburu plains and the welcome heat of home. But Machyana had prevailed, he being the older of the two. To Machyana’s way of thinking, it would be cowardly to flee the Tok without even seeing them, two hyenas slinking at the cough of a lion. They would follow out along the Tok sign until they had at least caught a glimpse of them, then run for home and a war party. The Tok were small and slow. They could not run with Samburu morani. But Machyana had reckoned without Korobo’s spear wound….
The Tok came swarming from the donga like soldier ants, dozens of them, their voices deep as drums and their huge heads wobbling as they ran. Their pointed ears shone white in a pearly light and their huge, furry penises—always erect—swayed to their waddling gallop. Spears filled the air, and before the younger Samburu could turn, one was boring straight at his chest. Korobo brought down his club in a vain effort to bat the iron away, but the point hit him on the front of the thigh, its force diminished only a bit by the gesture. He could feel the metal grate on his thighbone. Then they ran.
Fast at first, with the fear pouring through them, the Tok grunting at their heels, but slowing after a while as the blood flowed from Korobo’s leg, then the pain crawling in to replace it. Machyana stayed back, though he could easily have outdistanced the pursuers, and once even dropped behind to skewer the leading Tok with his spear. The spear took the Tok through the throat, but the ugly little creature merely stopped, smiling, then exhaled a stream of blood through his broad twitching lips. He would not even fall. The others whooped and scrambled to catch up.
From time to time, so fast were they moving, they ran unaware on herds of game. Gazelles pronked off in haughty outrage, staring back as they bounced to safety. A flock of helmeted guinea fowl zigzagged with them for a while, one even brushing the wounded man’s foot as it dodged, panic-stricken, unthinking, away from pounding danger. Buffalo moved sullenly aside, wreathed with squawking, feathery haloes of tickbirds. It is good country for buffalo, Korobo thought. He was weakening swiftly now and his mind, protectively, had shifted gears from the imminence of his death to more prosaic matters. Some good dume in that herd, he thought. Good bulls. I must tell Winjah about them when next he comes to Tinga.
And that thought gave him hope.
If Winjah were here …
But the Tok were gaining now. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that there were at least nine of them in the forefront of the pack, with the rest strung out as far as the horizon.
If Bwana Winjah … Yellow-haired Winjah with his bundook. Yes, maybe he has come up since we left the village, maybe he is hunting here even now, with his Wazungu friends, the weak white men, fat, but with guns. It could be.
Machyana dropped back again to urge more speed, but there was none left in the speared man. Machyana gestured behind to the Tok, running steadily with their lumpy, awkward, tireless waddle, their lanc
es and their stiff penises swaying in ugly synchronization, their wide grins…
If Winjah—reaching out through the fog, reaching out half a day’s run to kill with the mere flash of his pale eyes, much less his rifle. Yes. Running, Korobo imagined it: the green truck growling over the next hill, its windscreen flaring through the fog with that beaded gleam of wet glass, then Winjah out of the truck, all corduroy and cool, no bundook even, stopping the Tok with a hoisting of his hand, a flash of his eye …
And then he saw it, actually saw it. The flash of the windscreen, of the eye. There, in that tangle of thorn off to the left. The flash of glass like spear points in the dark. With a yell of jubilation to alert Machyana, the speared man broke into a final sprint, his pain forgotten now, swallowed up in his surge of joy, and bent his course toward the thicket. Behind him he could hear the bone whistles of the Tok exulting—Gone to ground! Gone to ground!
Hah!
And as Korobo neared the thicket, the glass flashed once again, brighter this time, a blue flame out of the black, a blue flame edged in red and green. It must be Winjah, the speared man thought, pounding now toward the spikes of the thicket, it can only be Winjah, only …
It was a buffalo. A great, wide, dark buffalo, broad of back and horn, scabbed and dung-caked of belly—a buffalo unlike any Korobo had seen before. Between the swooping arc of its horns gleamed a huge bright stone, sharp as the sun on wet glass and deep with changing colors. For a long instant the man and the beast stared at one another. The light from the stone picked the man’s eyes. Then the buffalo exploded out of the copse where it had lain throughout the afternoon, black and awful in the instant, and felled Korobo with one quick thump of its boss. Without breaking gallop it turned on the leading Tok, all nine of them, and killed them in as many seconds. The rest of the Tok stopped, turned, and fled the way they had come.
But Korobo was not dead. The buffalo trotted back to him, sniffed, then lay down with its scarred knees across the speared man’s belly and began to lick his face. The rasp of the buffalo’s tongue peeled the hide away in long raw strips. The buffalo licked and licked until the creature beneath its knees was dead, and the salty flow of tears mixed with blood had run dry. Then it grew bored and moved off after the browsing herd. The sunset light, having burned away the fog, now fired the great prism mounted between the bull’s craggy horns and flashed forth multifaceted beams of red and gold and lightning blue.
Machyana, who had observed all this from a perch in a tall umbrella acacia, climbed down and made off toward the east, toward home, weeping along the way for his dead companion. Or so he told it later.
At first, no one believed him.
1
THE HUNTER AT HOME
Winjah sat on the patio of his farmhouse sipping tea and surveying the morning. Below him spread all of Africa, or so it often seemed to him on mornings like this—the forest-clad mountain slopes swaying in a slow, indecipherable rhythm to the dawn breeze, while farther down the land began to spread into the brindled brightness of the vast game plain, then disappear into a forever of heat haze. Sunlight blazed on the ice fields of Mount Baikie, two thousand feet above him, but the tea groves and pyrethrum fields of his plantation still lay in partial shadow. Already his farmhands were at work. The sound of their singing and the hollow ring of pangas cutting brush rose to his ears. It was good to be home, for however short a time. And the time was short indeed.
A man of middle height and years, with sun-bleached blond hair and sun-wrinkled blue eyes, Winjah was perhaps the best professional hunter still working in this far, game-rich corner of Africa. His full name was William Henry Olliphant Wynton, but the tribesmen of Kansdu had a difficult time with the harder consonants, hence the nickname. He even used it on his business cards: “Winjah: Hunting & Photographic Safaris, P.O. Box 163, Palmerville, Kansdu.” It was simple and direct, like the man himself.
The house, though, was far from simple. Winjah had supervised its construction out of native hardwoods and fieldstone over a four-year period, between safaris. It was a perfect replica of the Lake District cottage in which he had been born, and from which he had fled to war and other killing some twenty years earlier. The last days of the English adventurer, those, and he had lived them to the full. Korea and Malaya first, the blooding, and then Africa—where blood seemed part of the air. The house itself was almost a museum of his adventures, the half-timbered stucco walls covered with Masai spears and Rendile shields, Suk knobkerries and Turkana wrist knives, the beaded leather skirts and redolent snuffboxes of men he had killed and women he had loved. Elsewhere hung the heads of his finer trophies: okapi, mountain nyala, sable antelope, a Rowland Ward’s class scimitar-horned oryx, puku and topi, bongo and dibitag. He’d killed them all—one of each species known to African taxonomy. The eyes of these trophies stared bright and unblinking in the gloom. Each day a servant girl dusted them to keep the glass eyeballs shiny.
Wherever the walls lacked heads or weaponry or tribal art, they were filled with books. Winjah had grown into the world without benefit of higher education, a lack he had rectified by voracious reading. He was particularly proud of his Africana collection: leather-bound volumes, many of them long out of print, dealing with African exploration and big-game hunting, tribal folkways and military history, art and natural history. Here Mungo Park rubbed covers with Alistair Graham, Samuel Baker with James Mellon. Neumann and Baldwin and Frederick Selous (both volumes), Karamoja Bell’s taciturn memoirs, Richard Meinertzhagen, Teddy Roosevelt—Winjah had them all, had read them all. Many of the books bore marginalia in Winjah’s emphatic hand, corrections or amplifications of facts borne out by his own hard experience, or in some cases simple exclamations of delight—“Egad!” “Ah!” “Indeed!”—when an earlier writer had caught the quick bright wings of Africa by just the proper pinion. Whenever he hunted a new region, Winjah brought with him a work by an earlier traveler. But in recent years, as the hunting played out and the trek to the game took him deeper and deeper into the blanks on the map, he found few books to accompany him. In his early years, he had kept a detailed journal, replete with sketches, of his travels and kills. No longer. Too many hunters he knew had been expelled from Kansdu, and other newly independent African nations as well, their property confiscated with no recompense, on the strength of “evidence” culled from their journals and distorted in court by sly though barely literate government prosecutors. Twenty-three hunters had been ousted from Kansdu alone since the tiny country achieved independence three years earlier. Only half a dozen remained. Yes, Winjah thought, the time is short.
He finished his tea and walked behind the house to the storeroom, where his safari team was loading the trucks. They would take off this morning and set up camp at the edge of the Tok Plateau, so that by the time Winjah arrived with the clients a few days hence the camp would be shipshape and ready for action. The lads smiled as Winjah came up—he was a good bwana, considerate, patient, and he paid well. Winjah checked the tanks of the Bedford lorries for petrol. Frequently the Africans would load in perfect order, rotate the tires impeccably, polish the windscreens to a high gloss, and then put water in the petrol tanks. Or vice versa. But today everything was in its proper place and Winjah praised the men in a loud enough voice that their women could hear. At the last moment, though, he checked the ammunition safe, a battered green steel box lashed deep under tenting in the back of the lead lorry. It was empty save for spider webs. Winjah turned bleakly, his shoulders slumping with exasperation. The men giggled nervously. Then Lambat, the head tracker, sprinted for the house and the ammo stores.
For twenty years it had been like that. Winjah cursed to himself as he walked away. You tried to teach them, and they learned, but they never coordinated the bits, never caught the spark that made the engine run. Africa.
Well, this would be the last time out, the last safari. If it worked. Since the young Samburu, Machyana, had come to him three weeks earlier with the tale of the huge buffalo with the bri
ght stone in its forehead, Winjah had reached his decision. Time was short, the government was moving in on all Europeans who remained in the country. General Opolopo Bompah, the former sergeant of infantry who now served as Kansdu’s President, had made it all quite clear. He wanted the hunting rights for himself, the ivory and the rhino horn and the hides. To hell with hunting for sport, or for tourist dollars. The quick money was there, on the hoof, and Opolopo would take it.
Winjah had exercised extreme caution in organizing this safari, to prevent Opolopo from learning about the buffalo with the stone in its head. Pondering the list of his earlier clients, looking for one he could trust on this dangerous and important mission, he had settled finally on Bucky Blackrod, an American journalist with whom Winjah had hunted a few years earlier. Blackrod was a good shot, brave enough, and his journalistic credentials would cover the real intention of the safari: Who would bring a scrivener along on so precarious an expedition? Winjah had outlined the plan to Blackrod in a letter which other clients had taken out of the country for him after their safari had ended. They would go into the high country of the Tok Plateau and secure the valuable “trophy,” then exit across the border into the Sudan. Blackrod would procure Sudanese visas. With the proper amount of baksheesh, it should be no trouble to smuggle the stone out to Amsterdam, where it would be sold and the profits divided. Winjah left it to Blackrod to bring along at least two other clients, reliable but rich if possible. If one were a woman, that would be even better for deceptive purposes.
Winjah strolled back to the patio, whistling “North to Alaska,” the Johnny Horton song. It stuck in his mind. That’s where he would go, once the affair of the Diamond Bogo was completed. North to Alaska. He’d always wanted to try his hand at gold prospecting, kill a moose or two, catch salmon from the front porch. Yes, North to Alaska.
But once he had poured himself another cup of tea and sat back on the overstuffed ottoman, he felt a chill creep down his back. The books glowered at him from the shelves, the trophies glared. Even the spears and knives winked, it seemed, in a forbidding manner. On the posts of teak that supported the patio roof—the roof he himself had raised on one of his rare visits home, during the rainy season—the bleached skulls of Cape buffalo stared empty-eyed under their great, sweeping black horns. Buffalo he had shot on this very property, some of them, as he hacked it from the wilderness. On his forehead he wore the scar, pale and shiny, cut by one of those horns when the bull rose up, long after it should have been dead, and hooked him. This was his land.
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