Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  "Somebody tell me what's happening," Claudia begged them, but she stayed well back from the bait. The stench was just too much for her to bear. The men showed no distaste at all as they prodded and peered at the reeking remains, and even Claudia could see the difference from the previous evening.

  Yesterday the carcass had been virtually untouched; now more than half of it had been devoured. Only the head and forequarters remained, and Sean had to stretch up above his head to reach it.

  The bones of spine and ribs had been chewed to splinters and the thick black skin ripped by claw and fang, so that it hung in tatters like a funeral flag.

  While Sean and the gun bearers examined the carcass, Matatu searched the earth around the base of the fig tree, giving excited little yaps like a hound questing for the scent. Sean picked something off the jagged white ribs of the carcass and showed it to Riccardo. Both of them laughed excitedly, passing whatever it was from hand to hand.

  "Won't somebody talk to me, please?" Claudia insisted, so Sean called to her.

  "Come on, then, don't stand so far away."

  Reluctantly, holding her nose theatrically, she approached. Sean held out his right hand to her, palm up. On it lay a single hair, almost as long and black as one from her own head.

  "What is it?"

  Riccardo took the hair from Sean's hand, holding it between thumb and forefinger, and Claudia saw that the back of her farther's arms were goose-bumped with excitement. His dark Italia eyes glowed as he replied, "Mane hair." Then he seized her hand and pulled her across to the base of the fig tree. "Take a look at that. Look what Matatu has found for us."

  The little tracker was grinning with proprietorial pride as he indicated the churned earth. Five cubs and two lionesses had trampled the soft footing into powder, but one perfect print stood out in the confusion. It was double the size of the other smudged prints, as big as a soup plate, and, looking at it, Claudia felt again the stirring of terror. Whatever animal had left that pad mark must be monstrous.

  "Last night, after the lionesses had seen us off, he came. He waited until the moon had set and he came in the darkest hours of the night," Sean explained. "And he left again before dawn. He ate damned nigh half a buffalo, and then he took off again before first light. I told you he's a cunning old devil."

  "A lion?" Claudia asked.

  "Not just any old lion." Riccardo shook his head. "Frederick the Great has come at last."

  Sean turned away and beckoned his men to come to him. The three of them, Job, Shadrach, and Matatu, squatted around him in a circle and Claudia and Riccardo were forgotten as they planned the hunt, working out their tactics, discussing in detail every aspect, every eventuality. Their concentration was absolute, and it was an hour before Sean stood up and came to where Riccardo and Claudia sat in the shade.

  "The trick is going to be getting him to come in before nightfall," he told them. "We all agree that the only way to do that is to set up a fresh bait for him and build a new hide. The lionesses have rumbled this one, and old Fred is going to be as suspicious as all hell. He's going to lurk out there until well after dark or until we can entice him in somehow."

  Sean sat down between them and was silent for a moment.

  "You know, Capo, sometimes for a good friend, someone I can trust, I'm prepared to bend the rules a little." He spoke deliberately, drawing with a twig in the dirt between his feet, not looking at Riccardo.

  "I'm listening." Riccardo nodded.

  "There may be only one way we will get this lion," Sean said softly. "Jacklight him."

  They were silent for a long time, and though Claudia did not know what "jacklight" meant, she realized Sean was suggesting something beyond law or decency, and she knew her father was tempted. She was angry with Sean for putting temptation in her father's way, but she knew better than to intervene. She kept silent and willed her father to refuse to give in to temptation.

  Riccardo shook his head. "No, let's do it right."

  "We can try." Sean shrugged. "But he has been shot at over a bait and wounded once. It won't be easy."

  They were silent again for almost a full minute. Then Sean went on. "The lion is a nocturnal animal. The night is his time. If you truly want this lion, I think you'll have to take him in darkness."

  Riccardo sighed, and shook his head. "I want him very badly, but not badly enough to kill him without respect." Sean stood up. "It's your safari, Capo," he agreed quietly. "I just want you to know that there are not many men I'd make that offer to. As a matter of fact, offhand I can't think of anyone else I'd do it for."

  "I know," Riccardo said. "Thank you, Sean." Sean walked back to the fig tree to help his men to lower the remains of the carcass so the pride could reach it.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Claudia asked her father, "Jacklight?

  What's that?"

  "Putting a spotlight on an animal after dark and shooting it in the beam. It's illegal, highly illegal."

  "The bastard," she said bitterly.

  Riccardo did not react to her denunciation but went on softly, "He was prepared to put his career on the line for me. That's one of the best things anyone has ever done for me."

  "I'm proud you refused him, Papa, but he's a bastard."

  "You don't understand," he said. "You can't possibly understand."

  He stood up and walked away, and immediately she felt a throb of guilt. She did understand. She understood that this was his last lion and that she was spoiling the pleasure of it for him. She was torn between her love for him and her protective instinct for that marvelous animal and her sense of right and justice.

  "It should be easy to do the right thing," she thought. "But it so seldom is."

  So over the days that followed, they hunted the old lion with ethical tactics, providing fresh bait for him and the lionesses. Riccardo shot the buffalo Sean pointed out to him, another barren cow, and then, two days later, a decrepit bull with horns worn down to stumps and his ribs showing through his bald, mud-caked hide.

  Each day Sean moved the bait or repositioned the thatched hide, to find a location the black-maned male would feel sufficiently confident to approach in broad daylight. Evening after evening, they sat in the hide until an hour after darkness had fallen and then drove back to camp dejected and discouraged. When they visited the bait again the following morning, they found that the lion had fed, leaving his mane hairs and his huge pad marks to tantalize them, and had departed again before dawn.

  Cursing the beast bitterly, Sean changed tactics. He lowered the remains of the rotten bait on its chain so lionesses and cubs could reach it readily. By this stage, it was mostly dried skin and gnawed bone. Five hundred meters up the river, he hung a fresh carcass at a height only the big lion could reach in a tree that stood alone in a glade of shoulder-high dry winter grass. He hoped that without the harassment of the females and cubs the lion might come earlier to the bait.

  To make him feel even more secure, he placed the hide across the dry river-bed in the fork of a teak tree. It was a mac han platform fifteen feet above ground level. From the mac han they had a view across the white sand of the dry river-bed.

  Sean did not clear all the grass around the bait tree. He wanted the lion to feel protected by good cover. He merely opened a keyhole in the grass, barely as wide as the body of the lion, through which they could see the carcass.

  "If he comes, you'll have to wait until he rears up to feed, Capo," he explained as they went into the mac han an hour after noon to wait out the long drowsy hot afternoon.

  Sean allowed Claudia to bring a paperback copy of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa to read. "Just as long as you don't rustle the pages," he warned her.

  The lionesses and their cubs came early. They were so conditioned to feeding from a bait by now that they showed not the least trepidation at approaching. First they went to the new bait in the grassy glade and inspected it wistfully. Both lionesses made attempts to feed from it, but it was just out of their reach.


  For the last few days, the eyes of the young lioness, Growly Gertie, had been irritated and infected by the river sand Sean had fired into them. Tears ran down her cheeks and her eyelids were swollen and inflamed, but now they were healing and clearing, the swelling was abating, and there were only smears of yellow mucus tears of her eyes.

  After a while, they gave up trying to reach the carcass and led their cubs down the riverbank to the old stinking bait.

  From the mac han they could hear the pride growling and ripping at the bait five hundred meters downstream, but as the afternoon passed, the sounds of feeding dwindled into silence as the lionesses sated themselves and went to lie up in the shade.

  Half an hour before sunset, the small hot breeze that had been blowing all afternoon dropped abruptly and the peculiar hush of African evening descended on the veld. The sparse winter growth of leaves on the trees was still, not a blade of yellow grass stirred in the glade across the river-bed, and the fluffy papyrus reeds below the bank ceased their perpetual nodding and bowing and stood as though listening intently. It was so quiet that Claudia looked up from her book, then closed it softly and sat listening to the absolute silence.

  Suddenly a bushbuck barked on the far bank, an alarm call so clear and loud in the hush that Claudia jumped involuntarily.

  Immediately she felt Sean's light, firm touch on her hip, a warning, and she heard her father's breathing, quick and deep as though he had just finished a hard rally on the tennis court.

  The silence had an ominous weight to it now, as though the world were holding its breath. She heard her father exhale softly, and she glanced sideways at him. His expression was as rapt as that of a communicant kneeling for the Sacrament. God, he was a handsome man, she thought. Except for the silver wings at his temples, he looked so much younger than his years, so tanned and lean and fit. As yet there was no external sign of the treachery of his own body, destroying itself from within.

  His excitement was infectious and she felt her own blood course more swiftly, driven by the quickening of her pulse. She turned her head slowly to follow the direction of her father's gaze. He was looking off to the right out across the river, to where the trees of the forest met the tall pale grass at the edge of the glade.

  The only living creature out there was a gray parrot like bird perched on the top branch of a bush willow. Sean had told her it was a gray laurie, the notorious "go away bird" that plagued the hunter with its raucous warning cry. The bird squawked now.

  "G'way! Gwayf" But as it fluttered on the high branch, it was twisting its neck, craning to peer down into the long grass below the bush willow.

  "Here he comes. The bird can see him," Sean whispered only inches behind her ear. Claudia strained her eyes looking for she knew not what.

  "Watch the grass," Sean guided her, and she saw the movement.

  The tips of the grass trembled and pushed, a stealthy furtive movement that passed slowly down the glade toward the riverbank, and then the grass behind it was still again. It was like the movement of a large trout in a still pool, the creature unseen, just the surface bulging and stirring to mark its passing.

  All movement ceased for long minutes at a time. "He's listening and checking the scent," Sean explained. She had never expected him to show excitement, but his whisper was tight and scratchy.

  The movement of the grass tips began again, coming on toward the bait tree. Suddenly her father gave a small breathy gasp. At the same moment, Sean warned her again. Perhaps he had meant to touch her hip once more, but his fingers closed on her upper thigh instead.

  His touch was a shock, made more intense by her first sight of the beast. The lion passed through a gap in the grass, which the lionesses had trampled, and she glimpsed the top of his head, the dense bush of his mane, dark and curling, swaying and rippling to his slow imperial stride. For an instant she caught the flash of yellow eyes below the mane.

  She had never seen any creature so menacing and yet so majestic. It was the briefest glimpse before the grass covered him again, but it left her shaken and breathless, and Sean's hand was still on her thigh.

  Suddenly she realized she was sexually aroused. The tension in her lower belly, the hardening thrust of her nipples against the cotton shirt, and the warm flooding of her loins surprised her. She felt an almost irresistible urge to let her thighs relax and fall open under Sean's fingers, even though the folly of it would be monumental. If she had been asked to describe a human being who most offended and angered her, the description would have fitted him perfectly. She knew that if she showed the slightest vulnerability, he would exploit it ruthlessly. "And I don't even like him," she told herself desperately.

  Yet her legs were trembling-he must feel it-and she couldn't move.

  Then he took his hand off her leg, but the way he did it was offensive. He did not simply lift it away, he turned it into a caress, drawing his fingers lingeringly over her thigh and hip, a disconcerting sensation for which she was unprepared. She felt her cheeks and throat turn hot with resentment, but she stared out across the river-bed to that stealthy movement that stopped at last below the bait tree.

  The silence drew out while Claudia tried to bring her emotions under control. "It wasn't him," she told herself. "I wasn't reacting to him. He has nothing for me. It was the tension and excitement of the moment, nothing to do with him. He's not the least bit attractive to me. I like sensitivity and subtlety, and he is obvious and overpowering and brutal."

  Across the river there was an abrupt disturbance in the grass and the sound of a heavy body flopping to earth.

  Behind her she felt Sean shake with soft and silent laughter. For an incredulous moment, she thought he was laughing at her, then he whispered, "He's lain down. Can you believe it, he's taking a rest right under the bait. The cocky son of a bitch."

  Sean was thinking about the girl as much as about the lion. The unconcealed antipathy she bore him he returned in full measure, which made it more amusing to tease and plague her. Of course, the lion hide was always a good place to catch a woman off balance. He had begun many a memorable affair here. While they were in the hide they were psychologically under his control, like children in a classroom. He was the master and they were conditioned to obey his will, and the tension and nervous excitement made them receptive and compliant, the promise of danger and bloodshed heightened their awareness, physical and sexual. It had been fun to find out that this bumptious, spoiled, self-righteous American bitch was no different from any of the others.

  She was probably hating herself and him at this moment for that momentary lapse. He smiled thinly as he sat up close behind her.

  He had judged it with the fine instinct of the gifted philanderer, for it was, of course, a gift. He had read with attention Casanova's memoirs, and there the old rogue had described it precisely. When she is receptive, every woman gives out subtle little signs--breathing, flush of skin, change of pose, tiny body movements, even odor-that very few men can even recognize, let alone interpret. It was a gift only the great lovers possessed. Knowing when to act and how far to push each stage, that was the trick, he told himself.

  From where he sat he could see her right cheek and the long dark lashes of the eye. above, even though she was deliberately keeping her head turned away from him now.

  She had bound her jet hair into a thick braid that hung down between her shoulder blades. So her neck was exposed, an elegant column that supported the small neat head. Her neck and cheek still flushed with angry arousal beneath skin that was already were darkened by the African sun to a color where she could have modeled for an expensive sun cream in one of the glossy women's magazines.

  As he studied her, the flush abated and she regained her composure, but under her thin cotton T-shirt, the nipple on the one pert, almost girlish, breast that he could see was in silhouette. It was still standing out, the size and color of a ripe mulberry, a dark wine color through the thin material. Then it began to shrink and subside; the phenomenon intr
igued him, and he laughed again, soundlessly.

  "You've given yourself a blinding hard-on," he chuckled. "And you can't even stand the little witch." He switched his attention from her back to the unseen cat in the grass across the river.

  It was almost fully dark before they saw the lion again. There was only a fading memory of the sunset on the western horizon, but Sean had positioned the bait and blind so it backlit the scene for them. They heard the grass rustle and stir as the lion stood up, and they leaned forward eagerly. Riccardo lifted the butt stock of the rifle to his shoulder and peered into the long tube of the telescopic sight.

  Abruptly the lion reared out of the grass, a great dark, shapeless mass just visible against the pale sky, and they heard the creak of the chain that held the bait as he swung upon it with all his weight, tearing at the carcass as he began to feed.

  "Can you see your sights?" Sean asked Riccardo. The lion was making so much noise that he raised his voice to an almost conversational pitch, but Riccardo did not reply. He was moving the long barrel of the rifle in slow circles, trying desperately to pick up the cross hairs of the sight against the last fading glimmer of the sunset.