Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  There were forty different varieties of the comb return family of trees, but this was not exclusively comb return forest, as many other varieties were mingled with them, each having a distinctive shape of trunk differing in the color and texture of its bark, some with branches denuded by winter, others with dense foliage of a myriad shades of green and gold and orange and cinnabar. At times the forest enclosed them like a palisade, then only moments later opened onto vistas of far hills and weirdly shaped kopjes, open glades, and vleis from some of which the tall grass had been burned, the tender shoots laying a carpet of green over the black ash. The new growth of grass had attracted herds of antelope into the vleis. They stood out in the open, sable antelopes with long horns curved like scimitars, the proud necks of blood Arabs, upper bodies sooty black as the ash of the vlei, their bellies snowy white.

  There were reedbucks with horns pricked forward inquisitively and tails like white powder puffs, zebras at a distance looking not striped but a uniform gray color, wildebeests with Roman noses and scraggly beards chasing each other in mindless circles like clowns, stirring the black ash in a cloud around themselves.

  When the lion is not hunting, the animals that are his natural prey are amazingly trusting and will stand and stare at him as he slouches past within fifty yards of them. In the same way they seemed to sense that this file of humans was not a threat, and they let them approach closely before moving off at a leisurely trot.

  Claudia's delight buoyed her so much she felt no fatigue even after four hours of hard walking.

  In a gorge between two hills, water had been trapped in a narrow rock pool. It was stagnant and green and bubbled with the gas of rotting vegetation, but the old bull had drunk from it and left a pile of his spongy yellow dung beside it.

  "We'll take ten minutes" rest here," Sean told them. "You can have a drink now." He looked at Claudia. "But try to limit it to two mouthfuls, unless you'd like to try some of that." He indicated the foul pool, and she grimaced.

  He left her sitting beside her father and went to where Matatu stood alone at the head of the pool. "What is it?" he asked. After twenty years, he could read the little man's moods.

  Matatu shook his head and his wrinkles sagged lugubriously.

  "Something is not right here," Matatu told him. "The bull is unhappy. He goes one way and then the other. He travels swiftly, but without purpose. He does not feed, and he walks as though the ground burns his feet."

  "Why is that, Matatu?" " do not know," he admitted. "But I do not like it, Bwana."

  Sean left him and went back to where Claudia sat. "Let's take a look at your feet." He had spotted the slight lImp she had developed in the last hour.

  "Are you serious?" She began to smile, but he took one of her feet in his lap, untied the laces, and pulled off her boot and sock.

  Her feet were long and narrow like her hands, but the skin was delicate and there was a bright pink spot on her heel and another on the hall of her big toe. Sean cleaned the tender spots with cotton wool and surgical spirit. It gave him an intimate, sensuous pleasure to handle those finely formed feet, but he told her severely, "These must have been hurting you. Don't try and be brave-another few miles and you would have had blisters like a bunch of grapes, and we would have had a cripple on our hands."

  He taped the tender spots. "Change socks," he ordered. "And the next time tell me as soon as it hurts." She obeyed him meekly, and they went on.

  A little before noon, the spoor changed direction again and ran due east. "We have gained an hour or two on him," Sean whispered to Riccardo. "But Matatu doesn't like it and neither do I. He's spooky and tense and he's heading straight for the Mozambique border."

  "Do you think he has sensed us?" Riccardo was worried, but Sean shook his head.

  "Impossible. We're still hours behind. At noon they stopped again briefly to eat and rest. When they went on again, they had not gone more than a mile before they entered a grove of morula trees. The ripe yellow fruit lay thickly on the ground beneath them and the old bull had not been able to resist them. He had fed heartily, spending at least three hours in the grove, shaking the trees to bring down more fruit, then at last setting off again eastward as though suddenly remembering a rendezvous.

  "At least we've gained three hours on him," Sean told them, but he was frowning. "We are only ten miles from the Mozambique border. If he crosses, we've lost him. Sean considered running the spoor. In the old days of the bush war, he and Job and Shadrach had never walked in pursuit of the enemy. Running, they had been able to cover sixty or seventy miles in a single day. He glanced back at Claudia; she might surprise him, for she moved like an athlete and despite the incipient blisters there was still a spring and snap in her step. Then he looked back at Riccardo and abandoned the idea. Riccardo was wilting in the ninety-five-degree heat of the valley. Sean tended to forget sometimes that Riccardo was only a year or two short of sixty. He had always been so fit, but now he was showing sips of distress, his eyes sunken in plum-colored hollows and a grayish cast to his skin.

  "Old beggar is looking sick," Sean thought. "I can't push him harder."

  He had let his attention wander, and now he almost ran into Matatu as the tracker stopped suddenly, still hunched over the spoor. "What is it?" he demanded. The little man's agitation was obvious. He was shaking his head and muttering in that obscure Ndorobo dialect that even Sean could not understand.

  "What?"... " Sean broke off as he saw it. "Oh shit!" he blurted. Two separate pairs of human tracks had come in from the side and now overlaid the elephant bull's pad marks. Here the earth was sandy and friable, the tracks clear.

  Two men, wearing rubber-soled shoes. Sean recognized the distinctive pattern of the soles... those ubiquitous Bata tennis shoes, locally manufactured and sold for a few dollars in every street market and general dealer's store.

  Even Riccardo picked out the alien human prints. "Who the hell is that?" he demanded. But Sean ignored him and drew aside with Job to watch Matatu.

  Matatu scurried back and forth, picking over the spoor like an old hen, and then came back to them. They squatted down, Job on one side of Sean, Matatu on the other-a council of war, from which only Shadrach was missing.

  "Two men. One young and tall and thin, he walks on his toes.

  The other older, shorter, fatter. Both are carrying packs and banduki. " Sean knew he had deduced all this from the length of stride, the different way the two men heeled and toed under packs, and the unbalancing of a heavy weapon carried in one hand. "They are foreigners. The men of the valley do not wear shoes, and these men came in from the north."

  Zambian poachers," Job grunted. "They are after rhino horn, but they stumbled on the elephant and he is too big to let pass.

  "Bastards!" said Sean bitterly. In 1970 there had been an estimated twelve thousand black rhinoceros left in Zambia across the Zambezi River. Now there were none, not a single animal left.

  A Yemem nobleman would pay fifty thousand dollars for a dagger with a rhinoceros-horn handle, and the poachers organized themselves like military expeditions. There were still a few hundred rhinoceros left on the southern side of the Zambezi Valley, and from the Zambian side the poachers crossed the river in the night, slipping past the game department patrols. Many of the poachers had been bush fighters in the guerrilla war. They were hard men, killers of men as well as of the great animals on which they preyed.

  "They will be carrying AKs." Job looked at him. "And there are probably more than two men. They will have out flankers We are outnumbered and outgunned, Sean. What do you want to do?"

  "This is my concession," Sean said. "And Tukutela is my elephant."

  "Then you might have to fight them for both." Job's noble Matabele features were solemn, but his eyes sparkled; he could not conceal the battle lust in them.

  Sean stood up. "Damned right, Job. If we catch them, we are going to fight them. "Then we must hurry." Matatu stood up beside him. "They are two hours ahead of us, and Tukutela mus
t stop soon to feed. They will have him before we get there."

  Sean strode across to where Riccardo and Claudia were resting in the shade.

  "Poachers!" he told them. "Probably armed with automatic weapons. Two at least, possibly more, all of them ruthless killers."

  "We will have They stared at him wordlessly, and Sean went on.

  to move fast to prevent them getting to Tukutela before we do. I'll leave you and Claudia to follow with Pumula at your own speed.

  Job and Matatu and I are going to run the spoor and try to drive them off before they get to the elephant. You keep the Rigby, Capo, and Job will take the Weatherby."

  As he began to turn away, Riccardo caught his arm. "Sean, I want this elephant. More than anything left in my life, I want this elephant."

  "I will try and save him for you." Sean nodded. He understood entirely. He felt the same way.

  "Thank you." Riccardo let his hand fall to his side, and Sean went to where Job and Matatu were waiting. They had handed over their field packs to Pumula. and carried only their water bottles. Sean glanced at his stainless steel Rolex. Four minutes Since they had picked up the poachers" spoor, four minutes wasted.

  "Hot pursuit!" Sean ordered. "And expect ambush!"

  Job smiled at him. "Old times," he said. "It makes me feel young again."

  Matatu pulled his loincloth up between his legs and tucked the skirt under his belt, then whirled and went away on the spoor at a loping trot. Sean had seen him keep up that pace from sunup to sundown. He went out onto the right flank, and Job, who was left-handed, took his natural side. Sean changed the cartridges in the577 and began to run. Within seconds Riccardo's group was out of sight in the forest behind them, and Sean concentrated all his attention ahead.

  It required special skills and vast experience to keep the formation intact in this type of broken country. The flankers had to keep Slightly ahead of the tracker, anticipating the line of the spoor, sweeping the terrain for ambush, covering and protecting Matatu yet keeping fifty paces out on each side, breaking their own trail and still maintaining contact with the opposite flanker, all this while on the run and mostly out of sight of each other, with Matatu setting a furious pace in the center.

  When the spoor turned, the man on the outer flank had to wheel on the center, covering twice the distance of his opposite number, and when the spoor crossed open ground, they had to increase the angle on the flank, forming an inverted spearhead formation, always protecting the center, keeping contact with subtle birdcalls the flute of a wood dove, the whistle of a bulbul, the warble of a shrike, the pipe of a black kite--each had meaning, each was a command or a warning.

  All this and two other essentials: silence and speed. Job and Sean ran lightly and soundlessly like a pair of kudu bulls, ducking and weaving under branches and through thickets and thorns, quick and vigilant.

  After the first hour, Matatu flashed a hand signal down a break in the forest. Sean $mderstood it readily. "Two more," the signal said.

  Another pair of poachers had joined the first two, and they also were closing swiftly with the elephant.

  They ran for another hour, never slackening for a moment, and Matatu signaled again from the center.

  "Very close." An eloquent flash of his pink palm. "Beware.

  Danger." Sean whistled like a sand grouse, checking the pace. It was the signal for imminent contact, and they came down to a wary trot.

  The trail had led them up the side of a low tableland, along an ancient elephant trail that was well trodden into the iron-hard earth. When they came out on top of the flat plateau, they felt the stir of the evening breeze, cool and blessed out of the east, and Sean held his sweaty face up to it.

  The plateau was less than a mile wide. They crossed it quickly and reached the far rim, dropping to their bellies and sliding over the skyline without showing a silhouette against the blue. Then, crouching below the crest and sweeping the ground below them, they saw a shallow valley with another forested tableland beyond.

  A river-bed meandered down the center of the valley, its course marked with a narrow ribbon of dark green riverine bush. The rest A of the valley was fairly open: pale winter grass shining in the sunlight, dotted anthills, each the size of a cottage, widely separated umbrella acacia with flat tops and lemon yellow trunks. Sean surveyed it all swiftly.

  Out on the left, Job gave the penny-whistle snort of a reedbuck, one of the most urgent alarm calls in their repertoire. He was pointing down into the valley, half left from their front. Sean followed the gesture. For a moment he saw nothing, and then suddenly Tukutela, the Angry One, stepped into view.

  He had been hidden from Sean by one of the huge anthills, but now he strode out into the open meadow and Sean gasped aloud.

  Even from almost a mile away, Sean realized that he had only poorly remembered the magnificence of this animal.

  Tukutela was the dark gray of volcanic rock, tall and gaunt; even at this distance Sean could make out the folds and tucks of his ancient riven hide and the knotted outline of his spine beneath it. His ears, their edges tattered and eroded like a pair of battle ensigns torn with shot and blackened with the smoke of cannon, fanned gently out with each stride.

  Tukutela's tusks were also black, stained with age and the sap of the tan trees he had destroyed with them. From his gaping lower lip the tusks flared outward, then curved in again toward each other so the tips almost met nine feet from his lip. They were without taper, solid columns of ivory hanging so low that in the center they drooped below the level of the winter grass. Even that massive frame seemed overburdened by them. There would probably never be another pair of tusks like that again. This elephant was legend and history.

  Sean felt a hot flare of guilt. No matter what the legality of it, the killing of this beast would be a crime against Africa, an affront to the gods of the wilderness and the very soul of man. Yet he knew he would not hesitate to do it, and that knowledge added poignancy to his sense of guilt. To a hunter, the nobler the quarry, the greater the compulsion to take the trophy. Job whistled again, pointing, diverting Sean's attention from the elephant, and only then did Sean see the poachers.

  They were already closing in on the bull. He could see all four of them. They had just left the trees at the bottom of the slope and were moving in single file into the grassy meadow. The grass reached to their armpits, and their heads and shoulders bobbed like the cork line of a fishnet in the pale sea of grass. Each of them carried an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

  The light swift bullets those weapons fired were not at all suitable for hunting massive-bodied species, but Sean knew the technique. They would get in close and all four would open fire together, blazing hundreds of rounds into the bull, riddling his lungs with copper-jacketed bullets, bringing him down under the sheer weight of automatic firepower.

  The line of poachers was swinging out to flank the elephant, not heading directly toward him but keeping well below the wind, so that a fluke of the breeze would not carry their scent to him.

  Despite this detour, they were running hard and gaining on him swiftly. The bull was still unaware of their existence, heading with long swaying strides down toward the river-bed, but Sean realized that at this rate they would intercept him and open fire before he could reach it himself.

  The government directive from the game department to the concessionaires was in plain language. Unauthorized armed men in a hunting concession, if apprehended in what was clearly a hunting operation, were presumed to be poachers. Four game department rangers and one concessionaire had been murdered by poachers during the past four years, and the directive was that fire could be opened on poachers without warning. The prime minister, Robert Mugabe, made it even plainer. "Shoot to kill" were his exact words. The.577 Nitro EWress was a devastating weapon at close quarters, but over a 1un dred yards the heavy bullet dropped away rapidly. The group of poachers was six hundred yards away across the valley floor. Sean jumped up and, crouching low, s
lipped across the face of the slope to where Job was lying behind a fallen tree trunk.

  He dropped down beside him. "Give me the Weatherby," he ordered, taking the lighter weapon from Job's hands. Job was an excellent shot, but this called for Bisley championship-standard marksmanship.

  Sean jerked the bolt open and checked that there was a cartridge in the chamber. It was a 180-grain Nosier, and Sean tried to drop over hundred yards, the range of six estimate how much the buffet would firing downhill with a light breeze on his left shoulder. He remembered from the ballistic table that the bullet drop at 350 would be six inches, while at 600 yards it would probably be four feet or more.

  While he worked it out, he stripped off his shirt, rolled it into a bundle, and placed it on the fallen tree trunk behind which he and Job were crouched.

  "Back me with the big banduki. Shoot very high with it," he told Job. He settled behind the tree trunk, resting the fore end of the Weatherby on the pad of the shirt. He screwed the variable telescopic lens to full power and gazed through it.