The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

  “Hear, hear!” yelled Bucky, rising also, crunching and gulping in kind.

  Donn rose and ate and swallowed but said nothing. His eyes could not stay away from the two skulls Winjah had brought back from the knob. Charred and grinning, they stared back at him, the hollows of the eye sockets highlighted by the dancing candle flame. The wine had gone bad in his belly, bad with paranoia.

  Dawn took a jerrican into the tent with her that night. Donn took a shotgun.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Dawn asked.

  “In case the Tok come.”

  “But it’s only a double-barrel. Only two shots. What if there’s more than two of them?”

  “When I splatter two of them, the others will run away.”

  “Winjah says they aren’t afraid to die, they keep coming.”

  Donn was silent. He knew what he would do with the two shotgun rounds, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

  “Would you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “On us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  They sat on the edge of the cot, the candle winking in the green dark.

  “I’d want you to,” Dawn said at last. “I’d rather have you do it than them. I’ve been afraid of that sort of thing all my life.”

  “I don’t know if I could,” Donn said.

  “If you love me,” she answered, “you could.”

  Donn blew out the candle and eased into bed beside her.

  15

  OXTAIL SOUP?

  Winjah’s plan was to quarter upstream in search of buffalo sign, hoping at least to get a rough indication of the Diamond Bogo’s whereabouts, or at best to bag him without having to make the climb into Tok country. They might just get lucky. Stranger things had happened in the annals of African hunting.

  “What’s more,” he added to Bucky, “I want to see you shoot at least one bogo before we go up against the real thing. You’ve got three buff on your license. We can pop one down here and have the lads dry some biltong—what you call jerky. Also, I’m getting a mite peckish for a bowl of good oxtail soup, and bogo makes the best I’ve ever tasted.”

  Dawn came back from the shower tent, pale and worried.

  “Something strange is happening,” she said. “There’s toilet paper looped and pulled out all around the loo tent. And no tracks going in or out.”

  They walked over to see. Just as Dawn had reported, the trees around the lavatory tent were festooned with strips of toilet paper. Not a pug mark showed on the carefully raked sand around the tent. Winjah peered into the sky and rubbed his chin.

  “Hmm,” he pondered. “It must be the Pterodactyl of the Ptoilet. Thought I heard something strange last night. The Pterodactyl of the Ptoilet, ptearfully ptearing ptissues.” He smiled. “Actually it was done by weaverbirds. Take a look up there.” High in the acacias, families of weaverbirds were busily mending their nests with sheets of toilet tissue. Mystery solved.

  They set out after breakfast, walking upstream on the margin of palm and underbush that flanked the river, the sun casting intricate webs of light and dancing shadow through the foliage overhead. Brilliantly feathered starlings flapped and scrawed like stiff hinges, flushing ahead of them, and a family of Sykes monkeys—perhaps the very troop raided by the martial eagle the previous evening—scampered in outrage, the males hanging back to hoot and bellow from the swaying treetops. Winjah carried the .458 Remington, Bucky the .375.

  “In cover like this it’s best to carry your own piece,” Winjah said. “These lads are not likely to bolt, but still it’s safer this way. Feel a bit of an ass if a bogo or rhino came out and you reached back for the old thunderstick only to find it up a tree with your faithful bearer. I’ve sent Otiego on ahead to look for that herd whose sign we saw last night near the Skull Cave. But still you never know what’s likely to come crashing out of this riparian bush. Keeps the old testes in tone, what?”

  All morning they walked, cool enough in the bankside shade and bothered only rarely by tsetse flies. But when the flies were there, they knew it. They stung fast and hard, zooming in low to come up on the back of a knee or elbow, then the searing nip like a red-hot nail slammed home by a master carpenter. Dawn nursed a welt on her thigh as large and hard as a golf ball. Sign was plentiful in the damp sand—serval cat, dik-dik, duiker, guinea fowl, elephant, sitatunga. Winjah read short zoology lessons over each set of tracks or scatter of dung. At one point, four lions slunk out of the bush ahead and then sprinted, bellies down, into the tall grass east of the river.

  “A lioness and her cubs,” said Winjah. “The little chap bringing up the rear will be a beauty one day. Did you notice the beginnings of the dark mane? I can’t kill them anymore. Glad you don’t have one on your license, Bwana. Lions are easy. Thin-skinned and weak in the lungs. Mean enough when they’re hurt, but not like bogos. Nothing like bogos.”

  Toward noon they came on a spring flowing out from another of the sandstone mounds that rose beside the river. The water was ice-cold and clear. They lunched on cold tommy cutlets and potato salad made from the last of the potatoes, and Tusker beer chilled in the icy spring. Mounds of buffalo dung studded the glade, some of it less than a day old. Squadrons of blue-and-yellow swallow-tailed butterflies clustered on the droppings, disguising them at first. Then a flight would lift off and the brightly colored lump, which might have been some strange, quivering new ore, was revealed as nothing but dung. Buck thought it revelatory—a symbol of Africa.

  “I believe I’ll lambaste the Lepidoptera,” said Winjah, rising from his lunch. He hefted a lump of dried buffalo dung in his hand as if he were a shot-putter and lofted it at the butterflies below. When the lump hit, the butterflies flushed in panic though none had been hit.

  “Wait,” said Donn. “Let me get the camera.” He screwed on a wide-angle lens and shot as Winjah and Bucky lambasted. “Dynamite stuff!” he said. “Just dynamite!” The game ended, though, when Bucky dropped an outsized buffalo flop directly on the headquarters of the Butterfly Air Force, killing two dozen with a single bogo-bomb.

  “Dreadful,” Winjah said. “The Dresden of the Butterfly War. You’re a murderer, Bwana.”

  Perhaps, Bucky thought later as he dozed in the shade, but more accurate with a piece of shit than with a rifle bullet. Still, his shooting was coming back. With the tommy yesterday he’d at least gotten out of the lumberyard of his nightmare. He suddenly realized, half dreaming again now, where that lumberyard actually was, in the real world. It stood on the banks of the Menomonee River near the outskirts of the village of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, where he had grown up. In those days the river and the woods along its banks had been his playground. During the war years, he and his few friends—he never had many, always a bit of a loner—had shot imaginary Jap snipers out of the riverside trees, fought pitched battles with imaginary but no less monstrous Nazi storm troopers, killing with every shot and never receiving anything more painful than a cleanly perforated shoulder wound in return. Buck had been too young for World War II and could hardly bear it. Once, early in the war, his father had come home from work with the “news” that the U.S. Army was accepting enlistments for drummer boys, á la mode de’ Civil War. Buck (then barely eight years old) was ecstatic. He begged his dad’s permission to volunteer—who could tell, perhaps he might be promoted to rifleman, or get caught in an ambush and have to cast his drums aside in favor of a … yes, a machine pistol! A clattering, wasp-snouted Schmeisser he’d take from the corpse of a dead SS sergeant, storm a machine-gun nest all by himself… Then his father had ended the joke. He could see the boy was serious.

  Too young for World War II, too young still for Korea (though he could have enlisted, toward the end there, could have if college hadn’t been “more important”). Then too old for Vietnam. Just as well, perhaps, but Bucky had always missed it, missed the fact of war. For me it’s still a fiction, he thought. Perhaps it always will be.

  But the Menomonee River ha
d been more than a battleground, mocking though it might have been. During the summer it was his Africa, the woods along the banks turned by a squint of the eyelids into the realm of Tantor the elephant and Numa the lion, himself the young Tarzan, lolling on the swaying limb of some giant forest monarch as he waited the stealthy approach on the game trail below of Bara the deer, a quick bit of luncheon meat. He would drop from the limb onto the unsuspecting animal’s back, sink his strong white teeth into its jugular, and plunge his hunting knife— “the blade of his father,” as Burroughs called it—deep into Bara’s heart. Then tear the bloody sweet flesh from its loins to sate his savage appetite. Since his own father never offered him a hunting knife, Buck once saved $1.25 from lawn-mowing jobs and hiked into town to buy his own. When he got home with it, his mother—always fearful of weapons—made him take it back.

  So his depredations along the Menomonee River were limited, in those years at least, to catching crayfish out of the rocks, using a hunk of liver tied to the end of a string, and boiling them in a coffee can. Some Bara. Or else raiding Victory gardens and munching raw kohlrabi—still a favorite snack after all these years. Later, older and wiser in the ways of mothers, he had actually hunted and trapped along the river, but he kept his knives, his traps, his shotgun, and his hunting bow at a friend’s house. The fantasy was never the same.

  But perhaps now it was retrievable. This country along the River Kan, open and parklike in places, no hotter really than a southern Wisconsin summer, and full of more game, more peril, than anything he could have imagined in even those early, most imaginative years, yes, this country could be the Africa of his boyhood dreams. And with the Tok around, it might finally be his war.

  Bucky slept. His snores shook the woods for miles around. Monkeys scrambled higher in their trees; crocodiles awakened, yawned, and sank into the silence of the deeper waters; the quadrumvirate of lions spooked earlier in the day pricked their ears, the cubs cuddling closer to their mother; even Tantor the elephant, swaying in half-sleep far up the river in a cool, shady glade, flapped his huge ears and opened his red, piglike, but nonetheless intelligent eyes in response to the strange echoing sound.

  And high atop the plateau, Clickrasp the Tok smiled as he peered downward.

  16

  NO OXTAIL SOUP TONIGHT

  “M’bogo mingi sana,” said Otiego. He squatted in the sand of the grotto, sketching a map of the country just ahead, smiling his cynical Turkana grin. Nothing ever surprised Otiego, not even many, many buffaloes. “Thelatini, hamsini.”

  “He says it’s a herd of about thirty, maybe fifty bogos,” Winjah translated. “Lying up along the riverbank about two miles ahead. No big bulls in the main body of the herd, but one big one—kubwa sana—and three askari just beyond them, up on the edge of a draw. Askari, in case you’re wondering, are ‘soldiers,’ the younger bulls, in this case, that stick with an older, superior bull and protect him, warn him of danger, fight his battles while he escapes. Well, what say you? Shall we see what the Good Lord hath provided?”

  “It’ll be tricky getting past the main herd, won’t it?” asked Bucky.

  “Perhaps. But trickier still if we get a shot and the herd decides to panic and run over us on their way out. We’ll have to case it thoroughly.”

  Otiego led the way, staying close to the river, using the low sandstone ridges and intervening bush to mask their approach. Winjah and Buck followed in order, with Dawn in the middle and Donn, Lambat, and Machyana at the rear. Red Blanket had been dispatched back to camp to bring up some horses, in case they killed a bogo. It would help to pack out the meat.

  The grassland beyond the sandstone outcroppings was high, the grass itself sere and noisy underfoot. They moved slowly. A covey of button quail—dark tiny replicas of their bobwhite cousins across the seas—flushed from under Winjah’s foot, buzzing out through the dry grass like a machine-gun burst. Winjah shook his head and mouthed a silent obscenity. They froze, listening for any rumble of hoofs ahead that would indicate the buffalo herd in flight. Nothing. Crouched now, they moved forward even more cautiously. Something huge and thick and mottled slithered away through the grass, far more silent than the button quail. Winjah looked back and grinned. He mouthed the word “python.”

  Bellies down, they eased their way up a sandstone slope. At the top, Winjah took his 4x35 birding glasses from a shirt pocket. Cupping his hands to mask any reflective flash—they were looking now into an afternoon sun, sinking slowly toward the scarp—he studied the near-bank cover. Then he turned and nodded.

  “A big bull all right,” he whispered as he slid back down to them. “Just to the north of the main herd. Lying up next to a dadblasted thicket so I can’t see his head just yet. But he’s big, big. Kubwa sana. Could be our boy. Come on up here, Bucko, and see for yourself.”

  Bucky eased up to the lip of the ridge, the sand grating his kneecaps, and focused the glasses. He could see the herd, a lumpy mass of black shapes with now and then a head swinging up and clear—the shiny black horn tips contrasting sharply with the rough, barklike bosses and the nearly hairless mud-caked bodies. A few calves frisked and flicked their tails at the flies. He swung the glasses and saw the thicket. Then the big bogo came clear. Just his ass-end showing, Bucky thought. But look at the size of him! He hissed approval to Winjah.

  “Big bleeding sod,” whispered Winjah. “Ain’t he? Can you see his head?”

  “No. What’s the range?”

  “Bit over two hundred. We’ll have to move in closer if we’re to take a shot, but I’d rather not shoot until we see the head. Could be sticky if we go down in there and the herd comes out over us. We’ll wait a bit.”

  He slid back down the slope to tell the others. Buck kept his eyes on the big bull. He could see it swing its head now and then, but he couldn’t see the horn tips. Then he saw them—far wider off the head than he’d been looking. They were enormous. Fifty inches easy, he thought. Maybe fifty-five. Oh, Christ, it could be the Diamond Bogo, couldn’t it? He could feel his scrotum tighten.

  Winjah was beside him again and Buck passed the glasses.

  “Christ, yes,” Winjah sighed. “A good head, Bwana. Even if he’s not the D.B., let’s bloody take him.” He turned and smiled, his eyes alight. After all these years, Bucky thought, after all the animals he’d killed. God, once it’s in you it never goes away. He could feel Winjah’s joy pinging through to him, pervasive, like some psychic electromotive force.

  Lambat led the way this time, very slowly, very low in the grass. He carried a puffball in his left hand, squeezing it every now and then and watching the cloud of greenish spores filter on the wind, seeing to it that the wind didn’t back around on them and carry their scent to the herd, and especially not to the big bogo. In his right hand, two spears. One foot at a time. One foot at a time.

  Finally they reached the low scrub-grown knoll, rested a minute, then eased to the crest. Looking back, Bucky could just make out Donn and Dawn on the sandstone ridge they had left. Their yellow hair clashed with the reddish stone. But they kept their heads still. He could see that Donn had the Nikon up beside him, the long lens covered with his hand. Good boy, he thought.

  “Okay,” Winjah breathed. “He’s still looking away from us, but you’ve a nice angle on his left shoulder blade. Take a peek.”

  The bull seemed to be right at the base of the knoll. Huge and black with scabs of dried mud flaking on a whalelike back. Through the scope, Bucky could actually see flies moving through the sparse black hair. His heart was hammering now, shaking the scope so that the cross hairs danced across the bull’s shoulders. Seventy-five yards. No farther. He was shaking clear down to his bowels.

  “Easy, Bwana, very easy,” came Winjah’s whisper, faint as the hint of a breeze. “I’m backing you with the four-five-eight. Don’t take the shot unless you’re sure you can make it. We’ve loads of time, now, loads of time.”

  Buck could see the muzzle of Winjah’s .458 Remington poke out beside him,
out of the corner of his eye. The hunter’s words had calmed him. The shakes were gone. The hairs lay steady now on the buffalo’s shoulder. Bucky eased the safety forward and began the trigger pull, slow, steady, slow, slow …

  Up on the sandstone slope, Donn sighted the Nikon. He too was breathless, steady. Dawn’s mouth was open. She could see Winjah and Bucky below, and just the dark shadow of a shape were the bogo lay, its head up now, starting to swing back to look at the hunters. Bucky’s buns were clenching and relaxing, like a fat man chewing tobacco. Bruxism of the butt, she thought, giggling to herself….

  At the explosion, the big bogo leaped to his feet—erupted to his feet, it seemed, so quick was the upward, forward movement—and dove into the thicket. The askari bulls lying nearby sprang up and stared for one wild-eyed instant, then bolted after their leader. The herd, some hundred yards away, arose almost as one animal and charged—directly toward the low knoll where Winjah and Bucky lay.

  And then, in a single blinding instant, they saw it—they all saw it. From a patch of thin brush to the far side of the thicket, perhaps fifty yards farther on, an enormous black mountain of an animal ascended. It came to its feet in one powerful, steady movement, its horns seeming to span half the horizon, its shoulders basalt boulders, its head a squared, thick black wedge as big as a truck. Between its horns flashed a prism of blinding light—purple, white, red, gold. The Diamond Bogo turned as the dust from the stampeding herd of lesser buffaloes obscured him, obscured the whole scene.

  “My God!” Dawn said, “they’re trampled!”

  “Did you see him?” Donn asked. “Did you see him?”

  “My God, yes, how could you miss him?”

  “Miss him, did he miss him?”

  “Who?”

  “Bucky.”

  “Where? Oh, is Winjah all right?”