The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

  They came on the fresh elephant trail just two hours out of town. Mounds of dung steamed in the afternoon heat. The trail was ten yards wide—ripped, stripped branches, uprooted shrubs, footprints pressed deep in the spongy forest floor, filling slowly with the seepage of groundwater. Clicky stuck a finger into one dung pile and then withdrew it, shaking the digit like a thermometer. “Still hot,” he rasped, in a throaty whisper. “They came down out of the bamboo, probably because of the storm this morning, and now they’re heading to the edge of the forest. Can’t have passed here more than fifteen minutes ago.”

  He flashed signs with his fingers and hands to the other hunters, who immediately spread out and began a slow, still stalk along the fresh trail. “From here on we don’t talk,” Click whispered to Bucky. “I realize you don’t know our hunting sign language yet, but just stay close to me. This means ‘elephant,’ this means ‘stop,’ this means ‘circle’ either ‘right’—like so—or ‘left.’” He demonstrated the various signs. “And this”—he made a forward snapping motion with his index finger—“means ‘shoot.’”

  “And what if we wound him and he comes for us?” Bucky whispered.

  Clickrasp grinned and flashed him a middle fìnger.

  “That means ‘go climb a tree,’” he said.

  A short way up the trail, one of the point men froze, then made the sign for elephant—a drooping of the hand from the nose, fingers bunched downward. Bucky stopped and peered ahead, but could see nothing. He nocked the heavy steel-headed arrow tight on the bowstring. Clickrasp signaled ‘circle right’ and Buck followed him, slow and quiet, pausing every two or three steps for as long as a minute. It seemed an eternity between steps. During one pause, a giant bumblebee swung up from the orchids and buzzed them, circling around Clicky’s head. The Tok remained dead still. The bee landed on his nose. It crawled up his face, into his eyebrows, its legs furrier than the landing site, then back down his nose. Bucky stifled a sympathetic urge to sneeze. The bee probed Clickrasp’s nostrils with its forelegs, then stuck its head in. Buck closed his eyes—he couldn’t watch. When he opened them, the bee had flown off and Click was signaling “follow me.”

  They stopped again, in the midst of what appeared to be a clump of giant rhododendron. Clicky signaled “elephant,” very slowly. Buck stared out through the waxy leaves. Nothing. Just the empty forest, gray, brown, slightly steaming. Then Clickrasp signaled “shoot.”

  The spears appeared out of the surrounding brush like bolts of diamond-tipped lightning. A scream like that of an ocean liner broke directly overhead. Buck looked up and saw the elephant—not five yards ahead—suddenly clear, all of him, raging tall above him. Its tusks flashed golden in the late light. The tiny eyes blew fire at the earth, and the great ears flared wide. He felt his thumb at his cheekbone and heard the bowstring twang. The arrow took the elephant in the throat, buried to the fletching, and then he had another arrow out and nocked. Drawing …

  And Clickrasp was out in front of him, out of the bushes with the broadsword bright, upright, bright as the elephant’s tusks, darting in under the trunk that swung at him like a giant baseball bat, the elephant rearing with the spears dangling—toothpicks from his wrinkled, jungle-gray side. Clickrasp leaped and slammed the sword deep into the elephant’s throat. He hung there for an instant, working the blade, then dropped free and darted between the elephant’s legs. Another ocean liner blast as the sword dug deep into the elephant’s gut. Its head turned and Buck released his second arrow. It disappeared into the elephant’s earhole.

  The beast staggered forward two steps and then teetered. Clickrasp appeared around the elephant’s stern. The bull fell forward to its knees, moaning, the trunk slashing blindly in the foliage. Clickrasp poised, sword held high, his eyes gleaming wildly as he watched. Then he kicked the elephant’s ass. The bull toppled with a slow bubbly sigh. Only then did Clicky turn and grin.

  “Jesus,” said Buck, his throat dry, his ears humming with adrenaline, “you’re some Crusader!”

  Clicky’s grin rearranged itself into his customary, self-deprecating smile and he began to frame a reply. Just then, from close at hand, they heard the roar of a gun. Voices came faint, excited, through the underbrush. In English. Then another shot.

  Clickrasp signaled “stop.” They waited a long silent moment. Clickrasp shook his head with worry.

  “Your friends,” he said to Bucky, avoiding his eyes. “They have met with the Diamond Bogo.”

  30

  HOME FROM THE HILL

  It was always this way, Winjah thought. The waiting to go in. It was this way in Korea, up on the MLR, on those nights when we went in for prisoners, waiting in the dark behind the cold bags full of dirt with the star shells turning the wire to neon. And later in Malaya, waiting to go into a camp full of Chinese, picking the leeches off your legs from the walk through the swamp, and hearing the Chinese voices up and down out there while you checked the Bren to make sure there was no mud in the muzzle. And then during the Emergency in Kenya, up in the bamboo with the moon shining on the ice at the top of the mountain, and the fires of the Mau Mau dancing up ahead, the men in their long greatcoats and slouch hats hunkered around the fires, talking happily in Kikuyu and eating bush pig, not knowing you were about to do the lot of them.

  But it was different with buffalo, this way, in that the buffalo knew you were coming. Oh how they knew.

  Winjah and Donn and the three trackers were squatting at the edge of the cover into which the Diamond Bogo had fled. It was an irregular lobe of the forest that projected into the grasslands like a mashed thumb. Marula trees and whistling thorn, edged by tall elephant grass and termite mounds. Rainwater ran down the declivity that bisected the lobe, and already the peeper frogs thronged in the small pools that had formed, their incessant chirrup masking any sounds that might come from the cover. The Diamond Bogo’s tracks, splayed and deep, led around the largest of these pools and disappeared into the heart of the thicket. Somewhere in that tangle, a quarter of a mile long by a hundred yards wide, he was waiting for them.

  Winjah checked the five bullets carefully before sliding them down into the magazine, ensuring that none was the least bit bent. A bent bullet meant a jam, and a jam in cover like this meant finished. Then he checked the gaffer tape that he had wrapped around the floor plate, just forward of the trigger guard. The floor plate was the bottom of the magazine, and with a heavy-kicking rifle like the .458, the floor plate had been known to fall off at the jolt of a shot. Rather embarrassing when a buffalo was on top of you. It had happened to an acquaintance of Winjah’s, a hunter named Talbot, down in the Mara a few years back. During the autopsy, the pathologist had extracted Talbot’s testicles from a lodgement just north of his liver.

  There was still time to wait, time to let the Bogo stiffen where he lay, and Winjah found himself thinking a bit morbidly about buffalo accidents. There had been many of them during his time in Africa, tossings and tramplings mostly, but plenty of crushings and punctures and outright dismemberments. Bad animals. They killed more hunters than lions and leopards and elephants put together. And sometimes they did so quite ironically. Winjah remembered an elderly hunter named Bryce-Armytage who had come out to British East during the twenties with, as he liked to recall over a cold Tusker’s at the Long Bar, “naught but five quid in me pocket and a shotgun over me back.” He thrived, as all of them had, during the hunting boom of the fifties, piling up the nicker until he owned his own farm above Nanyuki, on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Finally he invited a younger brother out on safari, free of charge, a birthday safari for a younger brother who had now turned sixty, having worked all his life as a clerk in the Admiralty. It was to have been a jolly good hunt, the Big Five, in the very best blocs Bryce-Armytage could secure. They would start with buffalo, up on the Tana River. Yes, jolly. The brother had wounded the bogo, they had gone in, and the bogo had jumped them of course—the usual story. Bryce-Armytage had fired his .460 Weatherby magnum as the buff ch
arged through, and the animal had fallen. Beyond it, his brother lay dead. In a one-in-a-million shot, the heavy bullet had gone clean through the bogo and taken the birthday boy’s chin off. Back in Nanyuki, Bryce-Armytage burned all his guns, sold the farm, and emigrated to Australia.

  Winjah’s closest call had come one sultry morning out near Kakamega, west of the Rift Valley. Control work for the Game Department. In control work, the locals complained that wild animals were destroying their crops and killing their wives and children, and the Game Department dispatched a hunter to those parts to kill the naughty beasts. The fact that the locals had despoiled the previous tract of land “controlled” by another hunter, ruining it with wasteful agricultural practices and copulating themselves into another near-starvation crisis, was not considered naughty. Now, having moved farther into the bush in their ravenous manner, their needs must be protected. Winjah had caught up with the corn-trampling culprits, a herd of some fifty buffalo. He had killed twenty-seven in the morning’s shoot, cows and calves and herd bulls alike, but when the twenty-eighth had come at him the gun jammed. Overheating. It was a small bull, a young one, with perhaps a three-foot spread of horns. It could kill him with one punch. Now he recalled the terror of that moment, the helplessness, the nightmare sludge of it as the bolt refused to move forward, the bull coming at him head high with those piggy black eyes shining under the scaled bulge of boss, over the sucking caverns of nostril.

  At the last moment, his dog—a Brittany spaniel bitch named Belle—had leaped in and grabbed the bull by the nose. While he swung her, Winjah had cleared the jammed cartridge, slipped in a fresh one, and blasted the bogo to the ground. Yes, old Belle, Winjah thought. Old and gray and full of sleep now, her teeth nearly gone, groaning as she moves to her conclusion. I should put her out of it, but I can’t. She saved my life.

  “I think you’d best sit this one out, Bwana,” he said to Donn as he rose to his feet. “It won’t be nice in there.”

  “I’d like to go in.”

  “You won’t be able to do much,” Winjah continued. “With the scope on that rifle, you won’t be able to sight very quickly up close, and it will be close when it happens.”

  “I’d rather go in.”

  “You’ll just be a distraction to me, Bwana. It’s much better for the hunter to do this alone. Selfish, I suppose, but then he doesn’t have the added worry of what’s happening to the client.”

  “Am I a client?” Donn asked. He looks very grim, Winjah thought. “I’d like to go in there with you, Bwana. Whatever happens.”

  So he’s made his choice, Winjah thought. He can see it now, the difference between client and hunter, between men who kill animals and men who truly hunt them. Of course he’s seen it.

  “Right, then,” Winjah said. “We don’t know for certain that he’s in this bit of cover. If Nordquist didn’t hit him hard, he may well have run right on through and into the forest beyond. But if he’s in there, he will have doubled back outside his trail. He’ll be lying up there, watching his track and waiting for us to pass him. Then he’ll come out and flank us. They come very fast for such a large creature, and they are very rude when they arrive. I’ll have Lambat and Otiego ahead of me, and you just behind me. Then Red Blanket and Machyana bringing up the rear. Our best chance is that one of the lads will spot him before we pass him. Then it’s sit tight, don’t move a bloody eyelash, until I’ve shot. Breathe through your mouth so that there’s no hissing of nostrils to alert him. If you have to fart, do so now or forever hold your peace. If on the other hand he comes out behind us, get to one side—out of my line of fire—before you even raise your rifle. I don’t want to have to shoot through you to hit the bogo. It doesn’t tickle, not with a .458. And finally, if by chance he knocks me down after I’ve shot, don’t shoot in a panic. I’d rather be slightly squashed by a dying buffalo than killed by a well-meant rifle bullet. Understood?”

  Donn nodded.

  They walked down through the wet elephant grass into the scrub thorn at the edge of the darkness. My heart’s pounding, Donn thought, but then he realized that it was the sound of his footfalls. The earth here must be hollow, volcanic, like the skin of a dead, dried bug. But his heart was indeed pounding as well, his mouth dry, as it had been before a race. He tried to shift his mind into that neutral he had found, motor racing, before the green flag fell—the calm that observed the storm. The neutral that took imagination out of gear. If you could keep imagination in neutral during a race, while the other gears howled and whirled and drove you even into death, then the horror of it was very interesting. Even the pit wall at Riverside, coming your way at 160 miles an hour, knowing it would soon tear the car in half, and you with it. Very interesting to be out of control.

  But Donn could not find neutral. Walking past the ponds, with the peepers going silent as they passed and then resuming their screech a moment later, avoiding the wait-a-bit thorns, looking into the cavernous tracks of the bogo still filling with clear rainwater, he felt as he had in childhood, when he first discovered the concept of the moment. This moment is now, it is all that is real, what happened is no longer real, what is yet to happen is unrealized. The world seems to balloon at such moments, to bulge frighteningly into so vast and inexorable a thing that reality itself becomes unreal. That is true fear, Donn thought. The moment. The lie of sequence, with its promise of careful cause leading to benign effect, is much more reassuring.

  What in the fuck am I babbling about? I should be looking for the bogo. He peered ahead, searching the maze of dark and tangle for a blacker patch—a fragment of buffalo hidden to right or left, dead quiet, waiting. They were moving quite slowly, a step followed by a ten-beat pause, sometimes longer. Their heads turned like the turrets of tanks in ultra-slow motion. The eyes of the Africans were slits, their lips compressed, and Donn suddenly realized that it was to minimize the bright flash of eye and tooth that might alert the buffalo. The air was heavy, unmoving, not a breath of breeze, and Donn could smell the miasma of sweat and rancid fat that Lambat, just ten yards ahead of him, left collapsing in his wake. Butterflies flickered ahead, in the gloom, disturbing his concentration. They were skippers, mainly, the shade-loving Ypthima and Precis, with a few of the poorly represented Lycaenidae thrown in for good measure. And what the hell am I lepidopterizing for? He almost laughed at a sudden image of Vladimir Nabokov dancing into the thicket, butterfly net at full tilt, pale legs squirting from the dim mouths of his mountaineering shorts. Pnin on the prowl, uttering elegant puns in impeccably translated Russian.

  Otiego’s long hand pointed earthward, the grass stem indicating a bead of blood on the wet black leaves. A scarlet pearl, bright blood, arterial. It was the first blood they had seen on their way in. A neck shot, Winjah thought. Could be superficial. Could be he’s gone out the back door. Could be he’s halfway across the Sudan by now. Yes, could be, but you know damned well he isn’t. That bullet just enraged him, like a banderillero’s sticks in the neck of a fighting bull. He’s bloody in here and he’s bloody vexed. Winjah felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. He could feel the buffalo’s eyes on him, it seemed. His own eyes cast back and forth, to right and left, probing, stabbing at the dark spiked tangle, checking each still shadow again, and yet again. He felt the cold lump swelling in his stomach and willed it to shrink, but it wouldn’t. He surrounded it with rage, hoping the heat might neutralize it, but it was too cold. The rage went warm, then lukewarm, then became part of the fear.

  All right, then if it’s to be ice, let it fill me. Let it freeze the nerves to numbness. Then let him come and I will kill him stone-cold dead.

  And then the Diamond Bogo came, black and awful in the instant. He came from behind them, out of a patch of thorn that seemed scarcely large enough to hide a house cat. He came in one great silent rush, moving the heavy air before him like a bow wave. He came with a shivering of the very earth. He came like a truckload of death. Spinning, Donn saw Red Blanket rise through the air, mouth wide with h
air and brown teeth, his back snapped at right angles, ribs popping through the shiny skin of his crushed chest. And the Diamond Bogo kept coming, under the arc of Red Blanket’s orbit, his head up, nostrils like stovepipes, the tiny eyes brighter even than the stone that led his charge. Donn was still bringing the .375 up when the boss struck him. He saw the horn tip flash past his face, polished ebony, and then the bogo’s knee took him in the stomach and he too was airborne, his nose filled with the taste of blood and cattle. As he flew, he saw the Diamond Bogo move on Winjah.

  Winjah stood waiting, legs braced, until Donn was thrown clear. The .458 was up and out, the blue eye hard and wide back of the iron buckhorn. The ice filled him now: An icicle of death sprang from his eye down the sighting plane. The bogo’s head filled the world. He could see the veins around the eyeballs, the moss on the rough boss, the light winking blood and black from the facets of the stone. The sear snapped—a blossom of flame. The five-hundred grain solid-cased bullet moved out at 2,130 feet per second. In precisely 1/426 of a second, it crossed the five feet that separated muzzle and buffalo. When it got there, it delivered a punch that measured 5,040 foot-pounds of momentum. It delivered this punch directly up the right nostril of the Diamond Bogo. The bullet, tearing through mucous membrane and cartilage, burst into the Diamond Bogo’s brain cavity and ran a circle of lightning around the banked wall of the Diamond Bogo’s skull, smashing brain matter into dead pulp. And the Diamond Bogo kept coming.

  Dead, totally dead by any means measurable to magic or science, the Diamond Bogo smashed into Winjah—a full ton of black moving death. Winjah felt his right thighbone crack, heard the pop like a pistol shot, as he moved on the boss of the horns, the diamond digging into his ribs, smelling the barn as it fell on him. The breath went out of them both with a great roaring whoosh.