The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

“I don’t know, do you see them?”

  “Who?”

  Then, as the dust began to settle, they heard a single, long, agonized groan echo up from the draw down below. And they saw Bucky and Winjah, waving at them, grinning from the knoll. They ran down.

  “He’s finished,” said Winjah, grinning hugely. “The bull Buck shot, I mean. But did you see the Diamond Bogo? Did you see that great sodding beast? Oh, sweet Jesus, what an animal he is. Biggest bloody buff I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yeah, we saw him,” Donn said. “But I was frozen at the switch. Never got a single picture off.”

  Bucky was pale under his tan, shaking again with the letdown that comes after a concentrated shot.

  “You’re sure the bull I shot at is dead?” he asked.

  “Yes. That groan you heard. When they groan like that, they’re finished. But Christ, if we’d had a clue that the D.B. was there … I even froze at the switch when he came out. I’d been planning to shoot right after Bucky’s shot, but I knew he’d placed it well and held back. So there I lay, with a bullet up the pipe, and when that bloody great creature stood up with that headlight blazing between his eyes, I just gawped at him like a bloody snotnose kid with buck fever. Er, no offense, Bucko me lad, you shot bloody well.” He grabbed Bucky’s hand and pumped it. “Now let’s go collect us our baby bogo.” He grinned again.

  “How did you miss getting trampled by the herd?” Dawn asked as they walked down to the edge of the donga where the dead buffalo had fallen. “It looked to us up there that they charged straight over you.”

  “They split either side of the knoll,” Winjah said. “It was thick and loud in there, I’ll tell you. Rather like an earthquake. But not a one of ’em came within five yards of us. We just lay belly down and prayed.”

  Lambat had run ahead and now signaled to them from the trees at the edge of the donga. He was smiling seraphically. Dead bogo, all right. Pushing in, they saw it at the very lip of the ravine, a thick piglike body hanging head down, one horn tip hooked into the dirt just over the edge. Ticks crawled on the bulging scrotum.

  “Two more jumps and he would have been down there,” said Winjah, pointing into the tangle of vines, thorns, and scrub that choked the donga. “Had you only wounded him, Bwana Buck, we’d have been going down there right now with a knot in our arseholes. Now aren’t you glad you know how to shoot?”

  Bucky nodded, still weak and giddy after the shot. This buffalo, though smaller by far than the Diamond Bogo, was still quite an animal. The boss of the horns looked thick and broad, the points themselves widespread and unmarred by chips or cracks.

  “He’ll go fifty inches,” Winjah observed. “A fine bull, Bwana. I say, would you care for a drop of the old S.W.?” He pulled a silver flask from the patch pocket of his corduroy shorts. “Scottish wine, don’t you know? Thought it might be in order in the event we bagged something extollable, or even tolerably extollable.”

  They walked back up to the ridge while the trackers butchered the buffalo and sipped Scotch while they waited for Red Blanket to arrive with the horses. From time to time the Africans trudged up the hill with slabs of red meat over their shoulders, grinning happily, not minding the load. It was, after all, meat. Otiego carried a buffalo hoof in one hand, while with the other he dipped a chewed twig into the marrow of the ankle bone, slurping the gooey green liquid with glee. Looks just like guacamole, Dawn thought. Then Lambat, with the bogo’s head across his back, arms hooked over the horns, the bull’s glazed eyes staring sadly over the Dorobo’s wiry shoulders. Tongue hanging loose. Flies in the cannon-mouth nostrils. Sad.

  “Well,” said Winjah, “we know the D.B.’s down here along the river, hanging on the edges of this herd. He’s probably not an accepted member of the herd, what with that doodad between his horns, but they tolerate him at a short distance, so he’ll stick with them. That’s just dandy for us. Looks like we won’t have to go up there, after all.” He pointed to the scarp, and the gray smokelike tendrils of fog that blew off its lip, gold-edged with the falling sun. “Dammit, I wonder what’s keeping that bloody Red Blanket? Getting late.”

  Ten minutes later, Red Blanket appeared from the edge of the forest, running, slowly, almost falling. He labored up the hill. His eyes were wild in his bearded face, his ribs thumped in his chest.

  “Tok,” he said, falling to his knees. “Kampi na kwisha. Camp finished. Tok.”

  They sat for a long, loud, awful minute. The clouds worked out over the edge of the scarp, tentacles grappling with the dry wind of the plains. A small rain began to fall. Red Blanket’s gasps slowed, the harshness easing from his chest. Winjah looked up. His face was wet, and Dawn wondered if it was the rain.

  “Bloody ’ell,” the hunter said at last. “No oxtail soup tonight.”

  17

  “THE SIMI, S’IL VOUS PLAIT.”

  Winjah loped the game trails in the waning dusk, Otiego doglike at his heels, both of them running easily and quietly, never talking but communicating all the while: where to place a foot to avoid a thorn, where to skirt the inside of the corner and with it the snake—a puff adder this time—that had coiled back in terror at their swift approach. They had run like this so many times, Winjah thought. Back in the police days, when we went out with just the water bottle on the hip and the old .38 Webley slapping against the thigh, and Otiego with his Turkana spears swinging along right behind. Yes, a good lad, never could learn English, never cared to, but the Turks are so bloody tough, so bloody good. Never heard him bitch once.

  Glad I left Lambat back with the Bwanas and the Fair Dawn Lady, though. Lambat’s Western clever. He’ll understand them. A bit rough just yet, but old Lambat’s a good’un too. Never trust a Dorobo. Too bloody wild. We’ll curb him yet, though. He’ll take care of ’em. I hope I hope I hope I hope …

  But if they’ve killed Joseph, those bastards. Bloody Tok …

  It was Joseph and the question, unanswerable by Red Blanket, that had brought Winjah back this dying day. Two hours of daylight left, but a good moon tonight. With Red Blanket’s report that the camp had been destroyed by the Tok during their absence, Winjah’s first worry had been for the Waziri who had been with him now, he reckoned, for years beyond reckoning. Red Blanket had seen only the flames, and the gnomish figures of the Tok leaping and flashing their spears in the smoke. Horses were crying, yes, but no human voices. A figure on the ground, through the smoke, quiet, bigger than the Tok. Kiparu perhaps. Joseph perhaps.

  Funny, it had been at the end of a run rather like this one that he first met Joseph. Back in the police days. A band of Waziri had made off with some Samburu cattle. Winjah. Otiego, and two other askari went after them. Up in the mountains above the Guaso Nyiro, up in the bamboo, they had lost the sign. They squatted there in the cool green dark of midday, pondering, and then they heard a sound from a short way off. Tink. “A bellbird,” said Otiego. Tink. But wait a minute, Winjah had suddenly thought. There are no bellbirds at this altitude. It was the sound of a jerrican hitting rock. The rustlers were refilling their water jugs from a well. They quickly closed in on the sound and found the cattle and the thieves resting in a glade beside the well. Otiego and the others were for cutting loose right away with their .303s, gun ’em down and have done with it, but Winjah believed in fair play. He stepped out into the open and demanded the rustlers’ surrender. The Waziri answered with their spears.

  So we gunned ’em down, Winjah remembered. Only one left alive after the fusillade. Big man, gut-shot, smiled at me as I came up to him. Asked for his simi so he could kill himself. Don’t worry, he said. It was a fair fight. I would have done the same to you, Bwana, had our positions been reversed. Now, the simi, please. But I didn’t believe in that sort of thing, not back then anyway. We carried him out, using my shirt between two poles as a stretcher. At night. Bloody bogos on the trail ahead of us coming out. Bloody elephants too. But we got him down to Merti, to the police barracks there. Why did you save him, Bwana? Well, that was Joseph.
Bloody good investment it was, too.

  And now these bloody Tok!

  As they entered the camp, sour smoke wafting through the doum palms, Winjah slowed and took the .458 from Otiego, then sent the Turkana to circle out behind the fires. He carried only the two spears, but at close range—fifty yards or less—they were as accurate and deadly as any rifle. Going in once on a wounded leopard, Winjah had seen how deadly. The leopard came out of heavy cover, quite close, and as Winjah shouldered his weapon (a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 buck) he saw Otiego’s arm flash past his ear. After the recoil, after the smoke cleared, the leopard lay dead just twenty feet ahead of them, a spear through his chest. “Good,” Winjah had said. “One spear.” Otiego smiled and shook his head, held up two fingers. And by God yes, there were two spears in the cat, two spears in the time it had taken Winjah to get off one shot. Accurate and deadly and fast.

  Winjah entered the burned-out camp with his rifle at high port. The tents still smoldered, green canvas charred, orange-edged where the mild breeze brushed the coals to life. He counted the bodies of four horses in the picket yard. A marabou stork already strutted contemptuously on the bloating belly of one. The horses were headless. The stork rattled its bill, then leaned forward, its raw pink air pouch swaying obscenely at the front of its naked throat as it secured a grip on a hunk of windpipe. It tugged, sawing sideways with the heavy beak. A strip tore loose and the bird swallowed, then looked back at Winjah through the heat haze and rattled its bill once more. Leptoptilos crumeniferus, Winjah thought, that’s pretty crummy of you.

  He could see no human bodies in the wreckage. His ammunition box, though, hulked big beneath the ashes of his tent, blankened but apparently not exploded. A bit of good luck, that. The fire must have burned past so quickly that the ammo didn’t cook off. It’ll be a bit touchy, I expect, but it’ll shoot all right. Good. It’ll shoot a few Tok for me. He wrapped a rag of unburned canvas around his hand and dragged the safe clear of the coals to cool. Then he heard Otiego whistle.

  Otiego was standing beside the ashes of the toilet tent. He smiled sardonically and shook his head. The lower half of a human being protruded from the honey hole, legs slashed deep, to the bone, with spear cuts. Shoeless. Splayed feet, thick with callus. Green shorts. Kiparu the skinner. They each grabbed a leg and pulled the body out. It too was headless. A streamer of soiled toilet paper blew from the neck stump.

  “Oh, yes,” said Otiego in Turkana. “Let no one say that the Tok lack a sense of humor.”

  Winjah spun on his heel and shouldered the .458. At the explosion of the big cartridge, the marabou atop the dead horse erupted in a cloud of dirty gray feathers. That’s one pterodactyl that won’t feed at this ptoilet, Winjah said to himself. Otiego laughed and laughed. The Bwana was even funnier than the Tok.

  They pushed Kiparu’s body back into the hole, then covered it over with dirt and rocks. As good a grave as any, far better than the vultures and storks and jackals would do as undertakers. They dragged the ammunition safe back into the thornscrub and buried it, after filling two bandoleers. Then they set out on the trail of the raiders.

  An hour of light left, Winjah thought peering up at the glare above the scarp. Clouds still blew over the lip, but the sunlight behind them was darker now, brassy, and rainbows danced through the ragged edges. The Tok trail was easy to follow—the short, broad, long-toed feet apparently contemptuous of pursuit, sign thick in even the damp and muddy places that a man fearful of followers would instinctively have avoided. Joseph’s tracks were readily distinguishable from the others. A long narrow foot with a deep instep. A Waziri foot. So he’s still alive, but for how long?

  They forded the river well downstream of camp, wading armpit-deep in the brown water, the weapons held high overhead, Winjah waiting resignedly as usual for a bite of the corkindrill which had not come yet, after thousands of crossings, but could come at any moment on rivers like this one. It was a trick of some tribes, in war, to kill a captive and sink his body at the edge of a ford, thus attracting crocodiles which would then wreak havoc among the pursuers. Maybe Joseph was down there right now, belly wide open, stones tied to neck and ankles, baiting up saurians to eat his master. But the bite did not come.

  Yes, Joseph’s tracks resumed in the mud of the far bank and on through the alluvial bush to the edge of the scarp. There, in deep shadow, the trail became harder to follow. Great slabs of rotting lava that had broken off over the eons turned the scarp into a maze. Smaller rocks and rubble clotted the trail. They worked their way upward, slowly, Otiego with his keener eye in the lead, looking for recently turned rocks, faint scrapes of skin against the sides of boulders, the odd impression of a heel in gravel, a toe in the sand. It grew darker. Once, a clattering in the rocks above caused Winjah to throw the rifle to his shoulder, but it was only a klipspringer—a small rock-dwelling antelope—spooking off before them. Then, halfway up the face with the light rapidly fading, they heard yells just ahead of them. They ran, scrambling and kicking, steeply uphill. Screams and the clatter of iron.

  Silhouetted on a shelf not fifty yards away, Winjah saw a tall figure swinging a spear at many shorter ones. A figure in evening dress. Joseph had his back to the wall, the spear darting and parrying as the Tok screamed and howled at his ankles. Running, Winjah snapped a shot at the outermost Tok and saw the figure smash backward into the dark. Good shooting on the run! He worked the bolt but missed the next shot. The Tok were aware of him now. He saw Otiego’s spear arm cock and unleash. A grunt from above. Spears and knobkerries now rattled all around them as they climbed. Winjah slammed another round home and fired from the hip—distraction was as important as hits. The roar of the .458 echoed off the rotten lava, starting small avalanches all along the face of the scarp. The Tok backed off, broke, and fled uphill. One of them—the last—stopped in a gap between the boulders and cocked his spear arm. Winjah raised the rifle. Otiego raised his last spear.

  The Tok threw.

  Winjah shot.

  Otiego uncoiled.

  Joseph grunted.

  The Tok died instantly, head shredded by the heavy soft-pointed bullet, chest skewered by the laurel-leaf spearhead, but Joseph was not so fortunate. He stood pinned against the crumbling lava by the Tok spear. Blood slid slowly over the ruffled white dress shirt. The spear had taken him through the chest. Winjah pushed the haft through the wound as gently as he could manage, then lay the Waziri down on the rocky shelf. He took off his own shirt, wadded it under the dying man’s head. He unknotted the neat black tie. Joseph smiled up at him, a crooked smile.

  “Ah, Bwana,” he said in Waziri. “I think we have been here before. A long time ago. But this time I mean it: the simi, s’il vous plait.”

  From far below, far unstream, came the faint pop of a rifle. Then another and another. Winjah caught the wink of gunfire, single shots, back in the direction of the buffalo kill. Oh, Christ! he thought. They suckered me. Suckered me. Joseph, too, heard the sound. Still smiling, he offered his empty hand. Winjah pulled the hunting knife from its sheath and passed it to the Waziri. He stood and looked down the hill. Otiego had collected his spears and was trotting toward him, alert and eager as a gundog after the flush. When Winjah turned back, Joseph was dead. Winjah kissed him before he resheathed the knife.

  They headed back down the scarp.

  18

  KIDNAPED!

  “Gone,” said Donn. “Both of them.” He rubbed a lump on the side of his head, bitterness just now beginning to enliven the stunned tone of his voice. “Bucky tried to stand them off for a while, dropped three or four of them, but they were all around us, dancing through the weeds, hopping and ducking and flipping those damned spears at us. These guys weren’t much help.” He gestured contemptuously over his shoulder at Lambat, Machyana, and Red Blanket, who sat heads down just at the edge of the firelight. “They threw their spears and ran with the rest of the guns back into those rocks up there. Where we watched you shoot the buffalo.”

&nb
sp; Winjah chewed on a piece of broiled bogo. It wasn’t much, but it was meat, and they’d need it. He wished Donn would eat, but with the clout on the head he’d received from one of the Tok knobkerries he was understandably short of appetite. That and the loss of his wife.

  “What happened then? It’s important for me to know precisely, so we can figure out if they merely wanted prisoners, or if …” Winjah let the last part of the sentence trail off into the dark. “Or if the bodies are lying out there in the night without their heads,” he almost said.

  “When Buck started to reload, they rushed him,” Donn continued. “We should have had two rifles, dammit. Then we could have spelled each other while we reloaded. Shit, I’ve thought of all the possibilities. All of them.” He wiped his eyes. “The main one is, we shouldn’t have been here.”

  “Karma,” said Winjah, after a suitable pause. Donn pulled himself together again.

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, Buck saw they were about to take him and he threw the rifle and the box of ammo over to me. I was lying up, with Dawn next to me, under that acacia back there. One of the Tok clobbered him with a knotted hunk of stick, what you call a rungu, and I managed to get off a couple of shots. I don’t know if I hit any of them, but it seemed to keep them down. The next thing I knew, I was out cold. One of them must have snuck around behind me and hit me with a club. When I came to, they were gone. Bucky and Dawn. Both of them.”

  “But the Tok left the rifle?”

  “Yes. Damned if I know why. They seemed pretty primitive”—he laughed bitterly—“so maybe they don’t know what it is.”

  “Well, that’s a plus, anyway,” Winjah said. Businesslike. That’s the tone, he thought. “Our ammunition is intact. When they burned the kampi, they failed to destroy my ammo safe. We’ve plenty of rounds, and the rifles, and we’ve got the lads here. We’ll follow them on out and rescue Dawn and Bucky, that’s what we’ll do. What say, young Gavern?”