The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

  Sacri—fiss….

  Just then, from afar, Bucky let out a snore so strange and awful that she lost the reverie. The snore began like the sound of a strangling horse, then elevated itself into the roar of a subway train at three in the morning, broke into a high ululating chortle, the kind of sound you’d expect from a turkey-duck or a madman. Sympathetic magic. She burst into laughter. Bucky was a snore-triloquist, she thought. He propelled his snores across whole veldts, shot them into tents miles away. God, what a talent! If only vaudeville hadn’t died …

  Now she had to pee. Rising from the camp bed, glad that her giggles hadn’t awakened Donn, she walked in her nightie to the front of the tent. Black clouds blew like lady hair across the face of the moon. The fire had died to white-crusted coals, a gentle red in the near distance. She could not find the flashlight, but there seemed to be no hyenas outside, no lions. The moon cast enough light. Walking toward the loo tent, she saw the moonlight on Naibor Keju—for the last time, perhaps, she suddenly realized—and saw, at once, why it was so named. In the night, with the white light on it, a crease up the middle, not obvious during the harder light of day, fell into shadow. The jebel became a Jezebel—long-legged, comely, with a woman’s hips, yes, even the shadowy wedge of a silken-haired pudendum….

  White Legs fell into darkness. A cloud across the moon. Dawn froze where she stood, panic icy between her legs. A sound came from the dark ahead of her, to her right, then was obscured by the rapid thudding of her heart. A splatter of rain hit her face from the cloud high above, rattling on the tent flies, shivering through the thorns.

  Darkness. Water. Mysterious disappearance … A figure emerged, darker than the shadows.

  “Just a momentary blackout, Fair Dawn Lady.”

  The moon leaped from the cloud cover and she saw Winjah standing under a thorn tree just ahead of her. A rifle was cradled in his arm. He smiled, movie-star bright in the moonlight. She wanted to rush into his arms with her relief.

  “I had to visit the ladies’ room, don’t you know?” she said. “Powder my nose.”

  “I’ll keep watch over you, my love,” he answered, hoisting the rifle in a mock-heroic pose. Then he was gone, back into the darkness.

  Later, in the tent, she had crawled in with Donn. He woke, smiled, and made love to her. Then finally she slept.

  But now she marched—they all marched. Down from Naibor Keju, which shrunk in the northeast until it was merely a thumb-tip over the spiked blur of the thornscrub, past the Rope of God, itself blurring and shimmering in mirage as they approached it behind the horses, past the soda lake that once was a sea of blood and milk, and then, through the hard hot afternoon, through real desert. The alkaline soil crunched; dust blew into their mouths. They stopped often for water, until Winjah began to impose discipline.

  “We’ve got plenty of water,” he lectured them, “but you’ll notice that the lads”—he gestured at the Africans—“aren’t drinking a tenth as much as we are. They can live on less of it. So can we. If we don’t show some fortitude right now, we could be in for trouble later. Not through lack of water necessarily, but through lack of respect for the harshness of the country. When I first took Lambat on as a tracker—he was just a skinny Dorobo who had a good nose for game—we were up in the northern frontier of Kenya after beisa oryx. Up in the Chalbi Desert, by contrast with which this piece of dirt”—he kicked the crust—“is a bloody Eden. One afternoon I came out of the tent and saw Lambat splashing water on a rock. Just pouring water down it, then standing back to watch it shine. Flew into a bloody rage, I did. What the bloody hell was he up to? ‘It’s funny, Bwana,’ he told me. ‘Looks pretty on the rock, doesn’t it?’” Winjah sighed and grimaced. “They’ll do that, you know. They never think ahead. Go out into the bush forgetting to fill the petrol tanks. Forget the water. Forget the bloody ammo, even, if you don’t keep close watch on them. And if you all die out there, themselves included, well, it’s bloody Shauri ya mungu. Will of bloody God.”

  Toward evening the weather cooled and the horses began to prance again, smelling water in the low hills ahead. The pace quickened. The Africans began singing and two of them—Lambat and Otiego—ran ahead to set up camp in the green rise that marked the margins of the River Kan. Secretary birds watched from afar, peering studiously down long sharp bills. One had a snake dangling from its beak, a snake that still writhed in pain despite the bird’s ponderous solemnity. Bucky burst out laughing at the sight, and Dawn joined in when she saw it.

  “Christ,” said Bucky. “Africa.”

  Up ahead they caught a flash of metal. Winjah stiffened. But it was only Lambat, waving a spear to attract them to the campsite.

  “Kampi,” Winjah said. “We’ll need meat.” He scanned the grass ahead, where a mixed herd of gazelles and hartebeest fed. “Take that tommy ram there, Bucko. The one all the way to the right, with the longest horns.”

  Buck took the 7-mm. magnum and stalked out toward the tommies while the others stood and watched. It’s a test, he thought. To see if that sermon last night straightened me out. Well, I’ll straighten the tommy to show him. Right now, at four hundred yards.

  Buck sat and wrapped the sling around his forearm. Elbows on his knees, he leaned into the butt plate and brought the post up onto the gazelle’s shoulder. At the grainy edge of the sight picture, he saw the black and white tail flirt nervously. The rifle exploded without his being aware of the squeeze. The tommy dropped without a quiver.

  “Asante sana,” said Otiego, coming up with a warm limp handshake. “Before you were Bwana Risasi Ini—Bwana Four Bullets. Now you are Bwana Risasi Moja—Bwana One Bullet.”

  Donn sat on the rocks while the others went over to butcher the gazelle. How can they praise him for something so easy, he wondered. If a slob like Bucky could kill a tommy at four hundred yards with one shot, Donn knew he could kill one at eight hundred. He hadn’t shot a rifle since his cowboy camp days—and that was only a .22 at a hundred yards. But he’d been the best shot in camp. The instructor called him Ol’ Dead Eye. That was one skill Donn knew he would never hone.

  The world had too many marksmen in it already, too many Dead Eyes, young and ol’ alike. What’s more, it wasn’t fashionable to own guns in his set. Oh, maybe a shotgun for the skeet range, or for a pheasant shoot on a private preserve. But certainly not a rifle, and certainly not for big-game hunting. The ranchers—the old-time studs and their slack-jawed sons—carried rifles in the window racks of their pickup trucks. It was crude.

  Bucky walked back, grinning unbearably.

  14

  THE SKULL CAVE

  “I call it EDB,” said Winjah. “Elephant Dung Beach. When I was here last, the lads had literally to shovel the elephant droppings away before we could pitch the tents.”

  No such problem presented itself this time. The reddish hard-packed sand on the banks of the River Kan was stippled only with hummocks of wiry grass and the smooth gray trunks of river-washed trees. While Joseph supervised the household chores, Winjah and the others walked the beach, looking for sign.

  “There,” said Winjah. “Simbas, six of them. One big male for sure.” He pointed the pug marks with the toe of his camel-hide boot. “They’ll be back tonight, you can be sure, when they smell the horses. You’d better take a jerrican into the tent tonight, Fair Dawn Lady, rather than essay any more evening strolls to the loo.”

  Farther downstream, under the bank but still well above the tan swirling waters, they came on a mountain of bones. A buffalo, Winjah said, maybe two or three. Yes, two. Smallish cows. He examined the bones carefully for the scars of man-made weapons but found none. “Must have drowned upstream during a freshet. Et up by crocodiles down here—see the tooth marks?”

  Across the river, a quarter-mile wide at this point, half a dozen of the reptilian diners lay quiet in the water near the reentry of a game trail. Crocodiles, one of them fully fifteen feet long. Their eyes, the tips of their noses, and the ridges of their serrated spines
protruded above the flood. It took Dawn a while to make them out, but when she did she shuddered.

  “Ugly brute, the bloody corkindrill,” said Winjah. “Funny thing about them, though, is that they have a very phlegmatic stomach. Don’t digest things fast at all. One of your Peace Corpsmen got gobbled by a big croc up on the Omo River in Ethiopia awhile back and when they finally shot the culprit two days later the Yank’s legs and arms—about all they found in the stomach—were still fairly fresh. Hair on them and all. Generally they’ll store a body underwater, under a ledge you know, for a few days before polishing it off. Let it get good and high, like an English pheasant. You’ve got a croc on your license, Buck. Want to take that chappie there? He’s a good’un.”

  “Naw,” said Buck. “Then we’d have the hide to drag along with us uphill and through the bogo country. On the way back.” If and when, he added to himself.

  “As you wish.”

  Knobs of reddish wind-worn rock rose along the riverbank, studded irregularly like the fang-stumps of some long-extinct saurian. Below one of these—the tallest in the immediate vicinity—they found what Winjah said was day-old buffalo sign. The twin-toed, cattlelike hoofprints had pulped the hardening mud and a barnyard reek still sweetened the air. Donn was back in his cowboy days, riding a Chisholm Trail of the nose down into his boyhood. He had spent three fine tough summers riding with the wranglers of the Bar None Ranch in northern Arizona, up in the rimrock country above Prescott. What was it they said? “Cowboying is what you do when you cain’t do nothing else.” But it was hard work—the sort that requires close study of seemingly casual techniques, cinching belly bands just so to prevent a fatal fall from a slipped saddle, learning the precise angle at which to approach a red-eyed range Hereford without causing it to bolt once more, even the best technique for boiling coffee when the wind is blowing flat and full of dirt. It wasn’t like hunting, where the rifle did all the work and you just sat there on your ass and pointed it. And cowboying was productive, not murderous. You were doing things for people, putting meat on the table, not heads on the wall.

  “Let’s scamper up on this rock pile and see what we can see,” Winjah suggested. “Just be careful where you put your hands. Snakes and scorpions, you know, but they’ll get out of our way if we make enough noise.” He sang “Rule, Britannia” as he climbed, belting it out manfully in a music hall baritone.

  From the top of the knob, the view was vast. The River Kan wound away to the north, beige and brawny where it could be glimpsed through the stands of doum palm that marked the watercourse. Snow and ice flashed from the peak of Mount Baikie to the northwest, while a roseate light filled the lowlands along the river and the game plain stretching back toward White Legs. Across the Kan, the three-thousand-foot lava-lipped scarp that guarded the Tok Plateau stood black in the backlight. Winjah and Bucky leaned their rifles against a rock while Donn pulled a bhangi bomber from the flap pocket of his khaki shirt.

  “Anybody care to join me in some Upcountry Tumbaco?”

  “Sure,” said Bucky. “Dis is de place, sho nuff.”

  While Bucky and Donn smoked, Winjah prowled around the boulder-strewn top of the knob. From time to time they could hear him, chortling over this find, exclaiming in a Colonel Blimpish “Egad!” over that. The rock was warm and smooth and the cannabinols powerful. Buck felt the tensions of the earlier bad-shooting days ease out of him entirely now, unknot themselves and slide away through his nostrils, like the sweet tendrils of bhangi smoke, floating out over the strong-backed river into a vague benign distance. It was good to smoke grass now and then, though he still preferred the madness of hooch for a real high. Booze tapped the anger in a man’s gut; pot brought out the pussy in him. But when you were really wound down tight so that the springs squeaked, a healthy gurgle of grass was doubtless the best medicine.

  From upstream a great dark winged figure appeared high above them. As the light caught it, the white breast, pocked sparsely with brown dots, flared to their eyes. As it neared, it peered down at them and barked—a short, half-swallowed, gulping bark.

  “You ought to add that to your snore-triloquism routine, Buck,” laughed Dawn.

  Donn took the J. G. Williams Field Guide from his camera bag.

  “It’s a martial eagle,” Donn said. “Polemaetus bellicosus. The largest eagle in Africa, except for the crowned hawk eagle, which is only a touch bigger. Hey, wait! Look at that!”

  Downstream, a group of small dark figures—monkeys or baboons, it was too dark to tell—trooped along through the close-grown hardwoods. The martial eagle stooped and barked again while the primates scattered, yelping and scuttling in terror. The huge wings flashed black against the lesser blackness, braking, and a scream rose with the soaring bird. A monkey, clear now as the eagle again caught the light, squirmed in the trailing claws.

  The eagle flapped off into the shadow of the scarp, pinions hissing even after it had disappeared in the high dark. The thin screams of the captured monkey continued, echoing back and forth now out of the darkness, then ceased abruptly.

  “Egad!” came Winjah’s voice from the far side of the knob. “Ahah!”

  Then a long pause.

  “Oh, shit.” A deep and dying fall. “You better come around here, boys and girls.”

  Winjah stood crouched in the low mouth of a cave on the shadowed side of the rock. In either hand were what looked like round dark-red boulders. On closer examination, they proved to be skulls. Human skulls.

  “It’s a Tok eating-cave,” the hunter said, unsmiling. “At first I thought maybe it was a leopard’s lair, full of baboon skulls. But these are definitely human heads. There are paintings on the wall in there, and signs of a fire. Stick paintings by the Samburu, I thought. But they’re too well done. Take a look.”

  They crawled one at a time through the narrow opening, nostrils flinching to the faint, moldy smell of old ash and rotting bones that met them as the cave widened. Winjah flicked on his belt flashlight. The beam followed around the wall: figures in the round, bulb-headed, white, outlined in orange ocher that still shone thick and wet against the dry dull sandstone. Scenes of a feast, the smaller, white figures hacking the long dark-brown bodies of their victims, holding dark heads aloft, ugly tools cracking the backs of severed skulls, a fire full of blackened lumps. The diners were all green-eyed in the wavering light. The diners all had enormous penises, writhing with smaller, wormlike ocherous projections.

  “And then there’s that,” Winjah said, his voice hollow in the darkness. The flashlight beam flicked into the far corner. A pile of moldering skulls stared out at them, fire-blackened except for the few white teeth that still hung from the jaws. “God knows how long they’ve been eating here. The skulls at the bottom of the heap are nearly decomposed. In a climate dry as this, they might have been here for a century, for centuries. Fortunately, the ones near the top are pretty well gone, too, so it looks like the Tok haven’t been here for a while. Maybe five or ten years. Let’s get the hell back out into the air.”

  On the way back to camp, Winjah let Donn and Dawn move out ahead and then dropped back with Bucky.

  “Really?” Buck asked. “Five or ten years?”

  “I didn’t want to get their wind up,” Winjah answered. “Much more recently. Only a few months at best. But D. and D. are getting a bit spooky. Not that I’m precisely a tower of unconcern myself.”

  “But we could handle them if they come, couldn’t we? With all our firepower?”

  “You haven’t seen them yet, Bucko me boy. I have. They’re tough little sods, and far more persistent than any Africans I’ve dealt with. It’s like I said yesterday. The Tok are superhuman—not in physical strength, no. You or I or any of the blacks could handle a Tok, one on one, without too much trouble. But they have an uncanny sense of teamwork. They’re like bloody safari ants—always coming at you. They don’t seem to mind dying.”

  “Well, Donn and Dawn can handle the fear part all right,” Bucky said after a
pause. “They wouldn’t have come along if they couldn’t.”

  “They haven’t seen that yet,” Winjah said, gesturing over his shoulder to the high plateau.

  The dinner of broiled tommy tenderloin was excellent, as was the Margaux served with it. The last of the fresh peas and potatoes rounded out the main course. Then Joseph, resplendent as usual in his tuxedo and black tie, shoes spit-polished to a gleam that matched his cheekbones, brought forth a huge round cheddar cheese. The candles guttered under the fly of the mess tent. Moths the size of game birds fluttered against the propane lamps. Beyond the netting, the fire flared as Kibaru threw on another log of driftwood.

  “We’ll make ourselves a Warrior,” said Winjah as the cheese arrived. “Joseph, bring me a bottle of port.” Winjah had been solemn all through the meal, but now his spirits revived. With his knife, he scooped a deep dimple in the top of the cheddar, mashed the scooped portion, and poured a hearty dollop of port wine into it. “The Warrior,” he proclaimed, stabbing the point of the hunting knife deep into the top of the cheese. “As the wine soaks in, it flavors the cheese, turns it red as the enemy’s blood. It will hearten us on our outward trek, sustain us on our triumphant journey home. The Warrior grows better and better as the campaign progresses. Now then”—he spread a dollop of the wine-softened cheddar on a tinned cracker—“eat hearty, lads and lassie. Gain strength from blood as does The Warrior!”

  Rising, Winjah crunched the tidbit in his strong white teeth, then chased the cheese with a glass of port.

  “The Diamond Bogo!” he cried, the mock-theatricality of his voice barely masking a deeper, harsher tone. He gulped the rest of the wine.