Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  Sean had two spare cartridges held between the fingers of his left hand. It was the old hunter's trick for the fast reload, and he slid the two cartridges into the empty breeches and snapped the action shut.

  The lion was chewing on Shadrach's lower body. Sean could hear the bone crunch and crackle like dry toast under those dreadful fangs. His nostrils were full of the fetid, gamy smell of the lion, of dust and the reek of blood of man and beast.

  Beyond them he saw that Riccardo had the rifle. He was on his knees, his face ashen with shock, cramming cartridges into the breech of the Rigby.

  "Don't shoot!" Sean yelled again. The lion was directly between them.

  A bullet that hit the animal would come straight on to him.

  It takes a special technique to shoot an attacking animal off a prostrate man without killing them both. It was deadly dangerous to run up to them and shoot down into the animal's body with the man lying under it.

  Sean made no effort to rise to his feet. He rolled like a log, cushioning the rifle, flipping over three times, the maneuver that was second nature from his Scout training. Now he was lying alongside the lion, almost touching him. He thrust the rifle into his lower ribs, aiming upward, and fired. It needed only one of those 750-grain bullets.

  The shot lifted the lion clear of Shadrach's body, tossing it lightly aside. The bullet tore out of his back between the shoulders and went straight on up into the sky.

  Sean dropped the rifle and knelt over Shadrach, taking him in his arms, and looked down on the leg. The fangs had inflicted penetrating stiletto wounds. From hip to knee the black flesh was riddled.

  "Matatu!" Sean snapped. "In the Toyota. The medicine box.

  Get it." And the tracker vanished into the grass.

  Riccardo crawled to Sean's side and looked at the leg. "Sweet Mother Mary," he said softly. "It's the femoral." Bright arterial blood was pumping out of the deepest wound in a jet, and Sean reached into it, thrusting his fingers into the hot flesh.

  He got a grip on the slippery, rubbery, pulsing worm with thumb and forefinger and pinched with all his strength.

  "Hurry, Matatu! Run, you little bugger, run!" he bellowed.

  It was less than three hundred yards to the Toyota, and Matatu ran like a frightened fawn. He was back within minutes. Job was with him carrying the white chest with the red cross on its lid, and he opened it.

  "In the instrument roll," Sean told Job brusquely. "Hemostats."

  Job passed him the stainless steel clamps, and Sean fastened them onto the ruptured artery and taped them against the thigh.

  His hands were wet and bright with blood, but he and Job had done this work fifty times during the bush war, and his movements were swift and confident.

  "Rig up a drip set," he ordered Job. "We'll give him a bag of Ringer's lactate to start with. Rig it."

  As he spoke he was screwing the nozzle onto a tube of Betadyne.

  He slid the nozzle as deeply as it would go into one of the puncture wounds in Shadrach's thigh and squeezed the thick iodine paste into it until it forced itself out of the mouth of the wound like tobacco-yellow toothpaste. Shadrach lay without protest or any sign of pain, watching them as they worked, replying to Job in monosyllables when he spoke to him in Sindebele.

  "Drip set is ready," Job said.

  Without a word Sean took the cannula out of his hands. Shadrach was his man, his responsibility. He would allow no one else to do this, not even Job. He twisted Shadrach's arm, exposing the inside of the elbow, and worked up a vein with a skilled milking motion. He hit it with the needle at the first attempt and nodded to Job to let the plasma flow.

  "Hey, Shadrach!" Sean's grin was remarkably convincing as he laid a blood-smeared palm briefly against the Matabele's cheek. "I think you poisoned that old lion good. He eats your leg and he's dead-poof! Like that!" Shadrach chuckled. It amazed Riccardo to hear it, even though he had fought and worked with tough men before. "Give Shadrach one of your cigars, Capo," Sean suggested, and he began to strap the leg with clean white tape from the medicine chest to stop the residual bleeding.

  Once he had strapped the leg, he went over the rest of Shadrach's body quickly. He smeared Betadyne into all the rents and tears left by the lion's claws.

  "We can't afford to overlook the merest scratch," he grunted.

  "That old lion has been feeding on putrid carcasses. His teeth and mouth are a reeking pit of infection, and there is rotten meat packed in the grooves of his claws. Gangrene kills most of the victims of a mauling."

  Still not satisfied, Sean injected a full ampulet of penicillin into the transfusion bag. That would swamp the body with antibiotic.

  Sean nodded and stood up. It had taken him less than thirty minutes. Studying the bandages and the drip set Job was holding over Shadrach's supine form, Riccardo doubted a trained doctor Could have worked more swiftly or efficiently.

  "I'm going to fetch the Toyota," Sean told them. "But I'll have to bring it around by way of the ford. That will take a little time, and it will be dark by the time I get back." He could have sent Job to fetch the truck, but he wanted to get the girl to himself. "There are spare blankets in the chest. Keep him wrapped and warm." He looked down at Shadrach. "Little scratch like that. I want you back at work pretty damn quick, otherwise I'll dock it off your wages."

  He picked up the.577 and strode back through the grass to the riverbank. As he trudged through the sandy watercourse, his anger at last came upon him, more powerful for being so long delayed.

  Claudia was sitting alone in the front seat of the Toyota as he came up the bank. She Invoked forlorn and abandoned, but he felt no twinge of pity. She stared aghast at his blood-caked hands.

  Sean placed the,.57 in the gun rack without looking at her, then spilled water from the jerry can over his hands and scrubbed them together, washing off most of the blood. He climbed into the driver's seat and started the Toyota, swung it in a tight circle, and sent it back along the track that followed the river downstream.

  "Aren't you going to tell me what happened?" Claudia asked at last. She had meant to sound unrepentant and full of bravado, but it came out in a small subdued voice.

  "All right," Sean agreed. "I'll tell you. Instead of a quick, merciful kill there was total chaos and confusion. The lioness charged us first. We shot her by mistake in the long grass. Not that we would have had much option anyway. She was coming all the way." Sean switched on the headlights, for the sun was gone and the forest darkening. "Okay, so now the lioness is dead. Her cubs are still unweaned, so they're goners, all three of them. They'll starve to death inside a week."

  "Oh no!" Claudia whispered.

  "Then the lion charged after his mate. He caught us all ends up.

  We weren't ready for him, and he got Shadrach down. He almost chewed his leg off. The bone is shattered from hip to knee. He may lose the whole leg, I don't know. Perhaps he'll get lucky and just end up with a permanent limp. Any way you look at it, he's not going to be a tracker anymore. I'll find him a job as a skinner or camp servant, but he's a Matabele warrior and menial work is going to break his heart."

  "I'm so sorry."

  "You're sorry?" Sean asked. His voice low and furious. "Shadrach is my friend and my companion. He has saved my life more times than I can count, and I've done the same for him. We have fought a war together, we have slept under the same blanket, eaten from the same Plate, trekked ten thousand miles together in the heat and the dust and the rain. He is more than a friend. I have two brothers, same mother and father, but Shadrach means more to me than either of them. Now you tell me you're sorry. Well, thanks a lot, ducky. That's a great comfort."

  "You have every right to be angry. I understand. "You understand?" he asked. "You understand nothing. You are an arrogant ignoramus from a different hemisphere.

  You are a citizen of the land of the quick fix, and you come and try your simplistic naive solutions here in Africa. You try to save a single animal from his destiny, and you end up by
killing a female, sending her three cubs to lingering death, and condemning one Of the finest men you'll ever meet to the LIFE of a cripple."

  "What more can I sayT" she asked. "I was wrong."

  "At this late hour your newfound humility is most touching."

  His low voice lashed her. "Sure, you were wrong. Just as you and your people are wrong to try and starve an African nation of thirty million souls into acceptance of another one of your naive solutions. When the damage you have inflicted is beyond repair, Will you again say, "I'm sorry, I was wrong" and walk away and leave my land and my people to bleed and suffer?"

  "What can I do?"

  "We have thirty days of safari remaining," he said bitterly. "I want you to keep out of my hair for that time. The only reason I don't cancel the show right now and send you packing back to your Eskimos and your human rights is that I just happen to think your father is a pretty fine man. From now on you are under sufferance. One more peep out of you and you are on the next plane back to Anchorage. Do I make myself clear?"

  "Abundantly." There was a trace of spirit in her tone once more.

  Neither of them spoke again during the rough ride down to the ford and back up the far bank to the glade in which the bait tree stood.

  By that time Job and Matatu had a fire going. The glow of the flames guided Sean to where Shadrach lay, and he climbed out of the Toyota and went to him immediately.

  "How is the pain?" He squatted beside him.

  "It is a little thing," Shadrach replied, but Sean saw the lie in the gray tone of his skin and the sunken eyeballs, and he filled a disposable syringe from a glass ampule of morphine. He waited for the drug to take effect before they lifted Shadrach between them and laid him in the back of the truck.

  Job and Matatu had skinned both lions while they waited, and they loaded the bundle of green salted skins onto the hood, where it would cool in the night wind.

  "It's a hell of a lion," Sean told Riccardo. "You've got yourself a magnificent trophy!"

  Riccardo shook his head and said, "Let's get Shadrach back to camp.

  Sean drove with care, rolling the truck gently over the rougher spots, trying to protect Shadrach from the worst jolting. Claudia insisted on sitting in the back with Shadrach, cushioning his head on her lap. Riccardo sat up in front with Sean. He asked quietly, "What happens now?"

  "I'll radio Harare as soon as we get into camp. They'll have a private ambulance at the airport to meet him. I'll be gone a couple of days. I'll see Shadrach well taken care of and, of course, I'll have to put in a report to the government game department and try and square it."

  "I hadn't gotten around to thinking about that," Riccardo said.

  "We killed a lioness with cubs and had a man mauled. What will the government do?"

  Sean shrugged. "There is a better than even chance they'll pull my license and take the concession away from me."

  "Hell, Sean, I didn't realize. is there anything I can do?"

  "Not a thing, Capo, but thanks for the offer. You are out of it.It's between me and the department."

  "I could take full blame for the lioness, say I shot her."

  "No good." Sean shook his head. "No blame on the clients.

  That's departmental doctrine. Whatever you do, I am fully responsible."

  "If they pull your license-" Riccardo hesitated, and Sean shook his head again.

  "No, Capo, they won't cancel the safari. That's also departmental doctrine. Finish the safari. Don't offend the paying client.

  Government needs the hard currency you bring. Only after you have left, they'll bring out the ax for me. You are out of it. I'll be back in two days, and we'll hunt that big elephant together. You don't have to worry."

  "You make me sound like a selfish bastard. I'm worrying about you and your license, not about enjoying myself."

  "We'll both enjoy ourselves, Capo. After all, if I do lose my license, it will be the last time you and I ever hunt together."

  Claudia could overhear the conversation from where she sat in the back of the truck, and she knew why her father did not reply.

  He knew it was his last hunt, license or no license. Claudia had taken an emotional battering during the last few hours, and thinking about Riccardo now, she felt the tears well up and scald her eyelids. She fought them back. Then it was no longer worth the effort and she wept for all of them, for her father and the lioness and the cubs, for that beautiful male lion, and for Shadrach and his shattered leg.

  One of her tears fell onto Shadrach's upturned face, and he stared up at her in perturbation. She wiped the droplet from his cheek with her thumb, and her voice was thick and muffled with grief as she whispered to him, "It's going to be all right, Shadrach." Even she realized what a crass and famous lie that was.

  Sean had a scheduled radio contact with his office in Harare at ten every evening. The journey home was so slow that they reached camp with only minutes to rig the aerial and connect the radio to the Toyota's twelve-volt battery before the scheduled hour.

  The contact was good; one of the reasons for the late schedule was the better radio reception in the cool of the evening. Reema's voice, with its Gujurati intonation, came through dearly. She was a pretty Hindu girl who ran Sean's Harare office with ruthless efficiency.

  "We have a casevac." Sean used the terminology of the bush war for casualty evacuation. "I want an ambulance standing by to meet me."

  "Okay fine, Sean."

  "Set up a person-to-person telephone call with my brother Garrick in Johannesburg for ten A.M. tomorrow."

  "Will do, Sean."

  "Make an appointment for me to see the director of the game department tomorrow afternoon."

  "Director is in New York for the wildlife conference, Sean. The deputy director is in charge."

  Sean switched off the hand microphone while he swore bitterly.

  He had forgotten about the wildlife conference. Then he pressed the "transmit" button again.

  "Okay, Reema my love, get me an appointment with Geoffrey Manguza then."

  "Sounds serious, Sean."

  "We just invented the word."

  "What is your ETA? I'll have to file an emergency flight plan for you." The security authority was always so jittery about South African hot pursuit of terrorists into Zimbabwe or pre-emptive South African raids on terrorist facilities in Harare itself that it usually required flight plans to be filed forty-eight hours in advance.

  "Take off here in fifty minutes. ETA Harare twenty-three hundred hours. Pilot and two par," Sean told her.

  It was half an hour's drive from the camp to the airstrip. Riccardo and Claudia were in the Toyota when they drove out.

  Sean took the back seats out of the Beechcraft and placed a mattress on the floor for Shadrach. By this time Shadrach was feverish and restive. His temperature was 101, and the glands in his groin were as hard and lumpy as walnuts. Afraid of what he might find, Sean didn't want to look under the dressings on the leg, but one of the minor claw wounds on Shadrach's belly was definitely infected already, weeping watery pus and emitting the first faint odor of putrescence.

  Sean administered another dose of penicillin through the cannula of the drip set. Then he, Job, and two of the camp skinners gently lifted Shadrach into the aircraft and settled him on the mattress.

  Shadrach's wife was a sturdy Matabele woman with an infant strapped to her back with a length of trade cloth. They loaded her considerable baggage, and she clambered up and sat beside Shadrach on the mattress, placed the infant on her lap, opened her blouse, and gave the child her milk-engorged breast to suckle. Job filled the aircraft's empty luggage compartments with sacks of dried game meat, a valuable commodity in Africa. Then Job drove the Toyota to the far end of the runway to give Sean the headlights for takeoff.

  "Job will look after you while I'm away, Capo. Why don't you take the shotgun and go for dove and sand grouse down at the pools? Best wing shooting you'll ever have, better than white winged dove in Mexico," Sean s
uggested.

  "Don't worry about us. We'll be just fine."

  "I'll be back as soon as I possibly can. Tukutela won't be crossing before the new moon. I'll be back before then. It's a promise, Capo."

  Sean held out his hand, and as Riccardo took it he said, "You did good work with the lions, Capo, but then you were never short of bottom."

  "What kind of Limey word is that?" Riccardo asked. ""BottOM

  "How about a good Yankee word then? Cojones?"

  "That'll do." Riccardo grinned at him.