The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

  “Clocks were made to imitate the stars

  till we found a time

  to be bound by

  “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

  and tomorrow

  and tomorrow and tomorrow

  and tomorrow and tomorrow

  and tomorrow

  “At the bottom of the Marianas Trench

  there’s a creature that resembles me

  No one has ever seen it

  or ever will.”

  Donn’s voice trailed off into the night. They were sitting under the fly of the mess tent with the stars bright overhead in a sky washed clean by the rain. The fire glowed and flared but gave off little heat. Donn had read them one of his newer poems, in what Bucky considered his “plummy” voice. Dawn sat back uneasily during the reading, humming and twitching her cheek muscles, while Winjah grunted and aha-ed. Bucky—drunk—merely sneered.

  “Tomorrow and tomorrow,” he said. “A creature like you in Mariana’s trench. Yeah, I can see it. Letti whiskey, Joseph! Con leche, if you got it.” He smiled apologetically at Winjah. “My gut’s going sour.”

  “You really oughtn’t to drink so much with the fever on you,” Winjah said. “It blocks the effects of the antibiotic.”

  “Don’t worry,” Buck said. “Joseph tells me that the milk comes from the bag of that zebra mare I shot this afternoon. I’m sure it’ll cure me of what really ails me.”

  “‘The lonely child who drinks the hot fresh milk,’” Donn quoted.

  “Yeah, Buddhism,” Buck said. “I don’t know how you can go for that shit, Young Gavern. Accept the world with all its warts, love it even when it fucks you and breaks your wife’s feet and grows a hump on your daughter’s back and bites your son’s balls off. Don’t eat meat, though. It might be your dead uncle. Sit with your heels in your asshole all day long while the wind blows sleet down your neck. Grin at the avalanche even as it engulfeth thee. Deadpan the muggings and the TEN-DEAD-IN-FIERY-FREEWAY-CRASH. Be like unto the milch cow, making no judgments, taking no action. After all, everything that happens is merely … what’s the word?”

  “Karma,” said Donn solemnly. He paused, searching for further words.

  “Yeah, I met him once,” Bucky interjected. “That runty Karmic IRA man who perfected the motor bombs.” He laughed, bitter and self-pitying. “The Car Mick.”

  “Enough, Bwana,” said Winjah. He stood suddenly and flung his glass of whiskey into the fire. “You’re getting sickeningly drunk—drunk on some kind of disgusting need to feel sorry for yourself. And I won’t have it in my camp!”

  They all looked at him. Winjah enraged was something to see: His normally pleasant face contorted with swollen veins, the fair hair fairly bristling with electric anger, the calm blue eyes spitting something close to death at them. Bucky sobered immediately.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, his own voice lowering to a husky whisper even as Winjah’s had risen in rage. “It’s just—my shooting was so bad, I fucked up so awfully. I hate it that way, hate myself for it. So I take it out on the lot of you.” He hung his head and flipped his own whiskey glass into the fire after Winjah’s. A smell of boiled milk drifted up with the mimosa smoke.

  “No,” said Winjah finally, sitting down again. “The bad shooting is beside the point. I know you can shoot well when you have to. But you were letting yourself get carried away on a wave of self-pity. That just can’t be permitted here. This country we’re going into simply eats up softies.” He looked over his shoulder through the fire glare, toward the west—the Tok Plateau. “The country itself is tough enough, cold and trackless, except for the game trails. It’s steep, even where it’s flat. All dongas and karongas, full of rotten lava that will snap your ankles at the first bad step. Hunks of it as big as a rugger field break out from under you and drop away into God knows what kind of dismal slough. The lions up there all have black manes and eat white hunters for breakfast. Snakes up the arse, some as big as drainpipes. Leopards come into your camp at night and breathe in your face, unless they bite it off first. And we have no vehicles—nothing to get us out if something goes wrong. If one of us gets hurt, all of us must care for him, be slowed by him, suffer with him, because that is the only condition under which I will take you up there. It could be any one of us, of course, but since I am the hunter, the leader, that makes it all the more likely that I will be the one who gets hurt. The leader takes the chances. Must take chances. Do you understand?”

  They nodded. Buck wanted to call Joseph for another whiskey, but decided against it. Dawn felt a chill in her stomach—Winjah had never sounded this serious before. Donn thought further on karma.

  “I think we should tell them about the Diamond Bogo,” Winjah said to Bucky. “And about the Tok.”

  Bucky nodded agreement, his head still down. Out beyond the campfire, they heard a lion cough. Kind of a hiccup, but deeper. Then they heard teeth and claws working the rotten zebra flesh. They listened for quite a while, as Winjah let the effect sink in.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Diamond Bogo. Buck and I chose not to tell you about him until we were about to go after him. I’d written Buck about it shortly before he asked you along on the safari. Actually, we needed ‘rich’ clients to bring this off, to provide our cover, and that’s why you were chosen. My own European richies would never have worked—too unreliable, too ready to trade adventure for profit. Neither of you”—he stared at Donn and Dawn, eyes hard blue still in the off-light—“would ever do that.

  “Thus, the Adventure of the Diamond Bogo.” His voice was lighter now, a touch flippant but still serious. “It’s a huge Cape buffalo we’re after, perhaps the biggest in Africa. But its horns will never be seen by Rowland Ward’s. A mad Russian named Rokoff, a diamond prospector, has managed to mount a huge diamond—a twelve-million-dollar diamond—between the bogo’s horns. Don’t ask me how, I’m still not sure, though it has something to do with one of your silly American products called Krazy Glue. It’s there at any rate, the stone. And the bogo is mean. He’s killed plenty of hunters already, earlier this year, and then given the rest of them the slip. He’s up on the Tok Plateau; I learned that from Machyana, the Samburu tracker. Machyana saw him kill a few men just last month. We’re going up there after him, and if we can kill him we’ll get the diamond out of here safely, split the profit three ways.” He paused, waiting for objections. None came.

  “I need the money to get out of Africa,” Winjah continued. “My time is just about up. I’ve been here since 1954, when the white man was still not only welcome but necessary to the country. Now he is unwelcome, at any rate. I have no choice but to leave. The hunting is about finished here—not due to any lack of game, but to the understandable desire of Africans to ‘Africanize.’ To these people, the game is an embarrassment. A symptom of their inability to dominate the land. They encourage the expansion of tribes into regions unfit for men, or at least for men in the state of agricultural and cattle-driving ineptitude that now prevails. They will poach the edible game, drive off the inedible, burn out the grasslands, unsettle the landscape, and then die themselves of starvation and plague. A node of numskulls will remain, of course, and from them will grow the New Africa. Ah, but I wax philosophical, like Donny Boy here.”

  Winjah grinned. His humor was intact again. He cleared his throat theatrically—symptom of an impending limerick:

  “There once was a poet named Donny

  “Who thought it would be very fonny …”

  They pondered a bit, then Bucky looked up:

  “To visit Afrique

  “While acting quite chic

  “And crying out: ‘Hey, nonny, nonny!’”

  Nobody laughed. Then Donn asked: “What about the Tok?”

  Bucky laughed.

  “The Tok are a strange people,” said Winjah, “who dominate the plateau we’ll be visiting. They are quite fierce. I’ve talked to various anthropologists about them, and as best anyone can determine t
hey are not quite human. They may be subhuman, but from my experience of them they are superhuman.” He paused to let that sink in.

  “How?” asked Dawn.

  “Tremendous cranial capacity—fully two liters,” said Winjah, turning to smile at her. “We Homo sapiens measure a brain capacity of one and a half liters, fifteen hundred cubic centimeters. The Tok, judging from the few skulls that have been recovered, measure two thousand cc.’s. Maybe a touch more. That, however, is mere science, and I intend to tell you about things far graver.” He looked toward the mess tent. “Joseph,” he yelled, “letti whiskey.”

  “The Tok,” he said, smiling fully now, “are very strange indeed. They are short, but immensely strong. They walk erect, the males even more so. If I may be so indelicate in the presence of a lady, the men are always, shall we say, sexually prepared. What’s more, like the Hottentots of southern Africa, and the rare Bushmen, they are steatopygic, which means that they store their body fat in their buttocks, rather than around their middles and thighs and jowls, as we do. When game is available they get immensely tail-heavy, but that development of the derrière doesn’t put them off their stride whilst on the chase. When game is scarce, they grow even fleeter of foot. A wonderful physiological development. Another strange factor of the Tok is that they are white-skinned and green-eyed, to a man (or woman). In ancient times they inhabited most of the country around here, but in the past half century they have been driven ever deeper into the high plateau of Kansdu. The limiting of territory has only intensified their ferocity, and those few of us who have seen them up close and emerged alive can testify that they are far more dangerous, far less easily killed, than, say, the Mau Mau of the past or the Somali shifta of the present day.” He took a whiskey from Joseph, who had padded up in bare feet and black tie, dead quiet, from the mess tent. “Asante sana, Joseph.”

  “Do itashi mashite,” answered the Waziri in Japanese. He winked and eased back into the gloom.

  “Yes,” continued Winjah, “the Tok are tough. They speak the click language, though even a Bushman cannot make hide nor hair of it. And if hide or hair is around, a Bushman will find it. As to their dietary habits, the Tok are primarily meat-eaters, devouring everything from termites to elephants, and like most African hunting peoples they augment the weakness of their weaponry with poisons. Snares, pitfalls full of poisoned bamboo stakes, drop-log traps studded with poisoned spikes, that’s their style.” He paused and smiled grimly. “I save the best for last. Their favorite dish is human brains, cooked if they have the leisure to do so, otherwise scooped raw from a hole chipped in the base of the skull. Interestingly, this is the same technique used by an earlier variety of man. You may recall that the thirty-odd skulls of Sinanthropus, or Peking man, found in China earlier in this century, were all victims of brain-eaters who had holed the skulls at the base. While I was recuperating from my visit to the Tok Plateau some fifteen years ago, I had the opportunity to mention this phenomenon to Derek Weakley, the anthropologist, and he found it fascinating indeed. He was very sorry that I hadn’t brought a few Tok skulls out with me, but of course my condition had precluded the toting of any extra luggage.”

  Darkness, wet, mysterious disappearance, Donn thought. Brain-eating superhumans. A buffalo wearing a diamond as big as the Ritz. Where the fuck am I?

  “Right, then,” snapped Winjah in his best sergeant major’s voice. “It’s tough country, full of tough critters. We must all be at our best if we are to go up there and hope to come out alive. I know you are capable of such a journey, but you yourselves must be certain. Else we can simply turn about right now and hunt our way out on lesser species, through lesser country. Are you game for it?”

  “I sure as hell am,” said Bucky. “It’s what I came here for. I need the money.”

  “Good show, old Buckeroo,” smiled Winjah. “And you, young Bwana Donn? I realize that the plight of the Fair Dawn Lady must give you pause—yes, she gives me paws, too, don’t you know?—but what the hell, we can take care of her. How do you vote?”

  Donn looked at Dawn. Dawn looked at Donn. It was, after all, Adventure.

  “Let me put it this way,” Donn said finally. He stood and cleared his throat, then in his most plummy voice recited:

  “There was a young poet named Donny

  “Who thought it would be rather fonny

  “To stalk a bright bogo

  “And carve his own logo

  “On the place where he found it most brawny.”

  He smiled, bowed stiffly from the waist, and resumed his seat.

  “Which logo?” asked Bucky, smiling warmly once again, the self-pity all gone now, all better.

  “Why, my brand, of course, the brand from my ranch,” said Donn. “The Wondering Why.”

  PART TWO

  THE LAND OF THE TOK

  13

  NIGHT FRIGHT

  The packhorses—six of them—came up from Palmerville during the night, accompanied by a trio of frightened Africans. There had been eight horses when the men set out from town nearly a week earlier, but two had been taken by lions, along with one of the men. The African drovers related this tragedy with much weeping and shivering. They were detribalized Waziri and Samburu who had surrendered the security of their people’s manyattas for the brighter lures of the city. Skinny and scabbed, they wore torn, faded khakis—cast-off bush shirts and shorts—and sandals cut from old truck tires. Two of them carried rusty World War I German Mauser rifles, the split stocks wired with coils of ill-twisted battery cable. They cried like children as they told their tale of woe, hopping about from foot to foot, eyes red and streaming as the trackers listened, deadpan.

  “A huge lioness, kubwa sana, took the first horse just a few miles out of town,” Winjah translated. “In the heat of the day. Just marched up to them bold as brass in the middle of the track, like a woman out shopping for a roast as they tell it.” He fired a quick question at them in Samburu. They babbled and wept some more.

  “No, their rifles would not shoot. Try as they might. Some evil shaman must have put bad dawa on the bullets. Knowing these beggars, the shaman is doubtless nicknamed ‘Rusty.’”

  More weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  “During the night, the simba came back. This time she took one of the boys, a chap named Lomitu. Young chap. Barely a moran. (See how our boys sniggered when they said ‘moran’? As if these city scum could pretend to being moran.) Lomitu had fallen asleep on watch and the lioness took him by the shoulder, carried him off aways and began playing with him. They could hear him crying out to them for help. He said, ‘It hurts.’ (Oh, I can bet it did!)”

  Another quick question. More cries.

  “But what could they do for poor Lomitu? The bundooks were bad, would not shoot. They listened to Lomitu scream until they heard the crunch when the simba bit his head. Then they built up the fire and went back to sleep. Shauri ya mungu, they say. It was the will of God. Bloody cowards.”

  Another question.

  Another snivel.

  “They lost the second horse last night, just up there at the mouth of the pass. They think it was the lioness again, but this time they did not hear her. They heard a whistling. Just a moment…”

  More quick questions, harsher this time, more detailed. The men answered less hysterically now, puzzling, scratching their dusty heads.

  “Yes, it might have been bone whistles. Bloody hell!” Winjah cursed and shook his curly hair, staring up into the mountains. “The bloody Tok use bone whistles to communicate within their hunting parties. Could have been the bloody Tok took the horse.” Now, though, the men were laughing, shaking their heads. “Oh, no,” Winjah mimicked, translating in a silly falsetto, “there are no Tok, no Tok anymore. Na kwisha. They are finished.” He grabbed one of the rifles the drovers had stacked beside the tent and tried to work the bolt. It was frozen with rust. He spoke sharply to the men and their laughter died. “Told them they’d bloody well better look after their bundooks or they
’d be as finished as the Tok. Told them where to find the gun oil. Oh, well, the loss of the horses doesn’t really hurt. I figured we’d lose a couple in the early going, either to flies or predators. But that business of the whistles ain’t so nice. Let’s get packing.”

  By midmorning the horses were laden and they set forth for the land of the Tok, belly bands creaking, horses still fractious and kicking, the blacks in the party loud with a jolly marching song. In addition to the three trackers—Lambat, Otiego, and Machyana—there were Joseph the majordomo, Kiparu the skinner—an elderly, leathery Wakamba with only three teeth left in his head, always smiling—and Red Blanket, the Samburu who had adopted them during the day of the botched eland hunt. Winjah had hired Red Blanket as an apprentice tracker. Red Blanket claimed to speak a bit of Tok. (“There’s no way to tell if he’s lying, since no one in the world can rightfully claim expertise in the Tok tongue,” Winjah said, “but these backcountry Africans are usually truthful. Anyway he’s strong and relatively bright.”) The rest of the staff remained at White Legs, awaiting the safari’s return. Looking back, Dawn saw them standing in tall, lean ranks, neat in their freshly starched green uniforms, waving that limp-wristed African farewell that seemed so poignant, coming as it did from such tough men. The three drovers from Palmerville were busy oiling their rifles and did not even look up. She felt like crying.

  Indeed, back in the tent last night, after the revelations about the Diamond Bogo and the Tok, she had wept. But not loudly enough to awaken Donn, who had written for an hour—a whole hour—in his journal before turning down the gas lamp. Bucky’s snores—hollow and erratic—echoed from the neighboring tent as she lay awake.

  It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t warned her that the safari would be so perilous. Nobody but the stars, and Donn didn’t believe in the stars anymore, if he ever had. She was the one in danger, not Donn or Winjah or Buck. She was the one the Tok would seek out for rape and sacrifice. Dawn had a sudden image of herself, lashed spraddle-legged against some grotesque rack of peeled saplings, her Abercrombie & Fitch safari outfit ripped and soiled, one breast protruding, its pale pink nipple erect in fear, her long blonde hair streaming and flying to the push of a throbbing wind, a wind from the Tok drums as the hairy, toad-headed little creatures advanced on her, their misshapen cocks pulsing to the drumbeat….