by Chad Oliver
Royce reached into the cage and dragged the body out. The animal lay stiffly on the hard-packed earth. The baboon was not a lovely animal at best, and he looked worse in death. He was somehow an obscene, snouted, four-footed caricature of a human being, and the analogy was not lost on Royce.
“Well, Elijah, what do you make of it?”
Elijah Matheka, the headman, shrugged. His eyes, behind the tinted glasses he always wore, were very wide. “One is dead, one is gone. That is all I know, Mr. Royce.”
“You heard nothing?”
“None of us heard anything. When we got up it was just as you saw it.”
Royce crouched down and fingered the body. There were no puncture wounds that he could see. The skull was intact; there was no fracture. The animal looked as if something had grabbed it and literally pulled it apart. And something—or someone—had forced the cages open.
A man? It would take a man of extraordinary strength, to say nothing of stupidity. Royce would no more have gone after a baboon with his bare hands than he would have wrestled an elephant. No one from outside would have bothered, unless he had been dead drunk. Baboons were worthless except for research. The men on the place had no great love for baboons, and the feeling was reciprocated. They were not above poking a stick at a troublesome animal, or even shaving a patch of his hide when he was out cold so that the bugs could get at him better. But they had never killed a baboon here. It was senseless. If they lost one they had trapped they just had to trap another one, and that was too much like work.
“Mutisya. Any tracks?”
“I did not see any. The ground here is very hard.”
Royce stood up. He felt quite calm, which he recognized as his reaction to trouble. He knew that this incident, whatever its meaning, was only the beginning. There had to be a reason behind it. It could not be written off as just one of those things. He had to find that reason. If troubles were coming, it was bad policy to get the men all stirred up.
He had not forgotten what he had seen and heard the day before. He could think of no connection, but it disturbed him.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes open for awhile. Elijah, please take that baboon and put it in the freezing compartment in the operating room. Don’t forget to switch on the freezer. The police may want to have a look at it. Mutisya, take Kilatya along with you and see if you can find any tracks out along the edges of the bush. Just walk in a big circle, understand? If you don’t find anything, we’ll check the traps as usual later. All clear?”
The two Africans nodded.
Royce turned and started back to the main building. He eyed it with a strange sensation of never having seen it before. It was a long rectangular structure built on piles. The walls were of unpainted boards, slightly golden in the morning sun. The roof was gray thatch. At one end was his bedroom, where Kathy and the children were asleep. Next came the screened breezeway, with the concrete gun safe set against one side. The next room was the kitchen, the biggest room in the building. It was a pleasant place, with its great wood-burning stove and gleaming white refrigerator and freezer. He noted with approval that there was a curl of blue smoke drifting up into the pale sky; Wathome would have the coffee ready soon. After the kitchen came the combined dining room and sitting room: a long plank table with wooden chairs, some uncomfortable leather-covered furniture, a radio, a pocked dart board. Finally, at the far end of the main building, next to the dirt road, there was a guest bedroom.
It was all very familiar, and very odd. Africa was like that, he thought. It was a real place, not just a squiggle on a map. Like any real place, it had its share of monotony, of boredom, of the commonplace. There were times when he had to remind himself of where he was. Hey, I’m in Africa! There were times when he had to look up and out, look far to the westward, where he could sometimes see the snow-capped twin peaks of Kilimanjaro suspended in the clouds.
And there were times when he sensed sharply where he was, and what he was. A stranger in a land that could be suddenly alien. A man surrounded by a world that was not always what it seemed, a world still half understood.
Well, the baboons had settled one thing.
He would have to tell Kathy.
Kathy looked up when he came in. She was still in bed, but the kids were awake. Susan, who was eight, was already dressed. Barbara, who had just turned five, was tugging on her shorts.
“What was that all about?” Kathy asked.
“That’s a good question. Tell you all about it after breakfast, okay?”
“But what happened? Did a baboon bite Elijah or was it the other way around?”
“After breakfast.”
She caught the note of strain in his voice. “Okay. You’re the bwana.”
He gave Susan a pat on her close-cropped hair; they had to keep the kids’ hair short to frustrate the bugs. “You and Barbara run along to the kitchen and ask Wathome to give you your breakfast. Daddy’s going to shave.”
The children ran out happily enough. They got a big charge out of eating with Wathome, and already their Swahili was better than Royce’s. There was a silence in the room after the kids had gone and Royce didn’t break it. He went into the bathroom and took his time about shaving. There wasn’t any hot water yet; the water was heated in a pipe attached to the kitchen stove and it didn’t really warm up until around noon. Royce was in no hurry. He needed time to think. He came out, sat down on the bed, and kissed his wife. Her body was still warm with sleep.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“Just felt like it.”
She looked at him. “There is something wrong, isn’t there?”
“Maybe.” Royce hadn’t gotten married yesterday. There was a right time for discussing problems, and that time was definitely not in the morning before your wife was fully awake. “Let’s get some coffee in us and we’ll hash it out. I’ll go and ride herd on Wathome—I don’t want any of that pineapple and mush for breakfast this morning.”
Kathy slipped out of bed. “Be with you in a minute.”
Royce went into the kitchen, checked to see that Susan and Barbara were messing gleefully with their corn flakes, and told Wathome to fry up some bacon and eggs. He poured himself a cup of black coffee from the big pot on the stove and took it into the dining room.
He finished the coffee before Kathy joined him and had another cup with his breakfast. The eggs were greasy and the bacon was tough and on the rancid side. He said nothing of consequence until Kathy had finished her second cup of coffee.
“Well?” she said.
Royce fired up his pipe and chose his words with some care. He told her exactly what had happened. He neither exaggerated nor minimized it. He told her about his feeling of being watched, the thing he had seen and heard in the sky, and the two baboons, one missing and one dead. “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” he said. “Some of it could just be my imagination. But that baboon is real enough. I’m worried, and that’s real enough.”
“I don’t like you spending so much time out there in the bush,” Kathy said slowly. “If something is really happening, you could just disappear and I’d never know what became of you.”
Royce knocked out his pipe. “I can take care of myself. But I can’t stay here all the time and do my job. That’s the problem. What happens if there’s trouble here while I’m gone?”
“I’m not alone here. The men would take care of me.”
“Maybe. I hope so.”
He studied his wife. Kathy had been a pretty girl when he had married her ten years before, but now, at thirty, she was more than pretty. Not beautiful, if by beauty you meant the blank-faced androids that sleepwalked through the movies or the curious mammals that posed in the boys’ magazines. Kathy had been marked by living. Her body was a bit softened by the two children she had carried. There were tiny wrinkles at the corners of her brown eyes, but the eyes were still alive; the fun had not gone out of them. Kathy flew off the handle sometimes, but ne
ver over big things. Like many women, she was at her best in a crisis.
“Honey, I’m wondering if you shouldn’t maybe take the kids and fly home, just for a few months. Until we find out what the score is.”
Kathy laughed. “For a dead baboon? Leave you here all alone? You’d forget to take your malaria pills. You’d marry a Kamba girl and I’d never see you again. That’s out. If I go, you go.”
“Damn it, this isn’t funny.”
“I didn’t say it was. But if it’s serious enough to send me away then you haven’t got any business being here either. You can’t have it both ways.”
“We’ve got to be practical. I can’t leave. This is one of the most isolated spots on the face of the earth. If there is trouble I might not be able to get you out in time.”
“Has anyone threatened you? Or me? Or the kids?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Then why can’t we just wait and see? We talked this all out before we came here. I’m not going to run home at the first sign of trouble. Isn’t Donaldson coming in with a safari today?”
“Today or tomorrow.”
“He’ll camp right down the road there, won’t he, like he always does? That should give us some protection, if we need it.”
“I’d hate to trust my wife to the tender care of Matt Donaldson. He’s a peculiar guy, Kathy.”
“You’ve got romantic white hunters on the brain, dear. I couldn’t care less about Donaldson as a man—but he knows this country and he knows guns. He’d be a good man to have around if anything happened.”
Royce stood up. He felt vaguely annoyed that Kathy did not share the unease he felt. He could not put the thing into words. Something in the sky, a dead baboon, a missing baboon. It was absurd. And yet …
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll let it ride awhile. But I want you to take the .38 out of the gun safe and put it in the bedroom. If something happens, you take the kids, go in there, and lock the door. If you have to shoot, shoot to kill. Don’t close your damn eyes.”
“What am I supposed to shoot? A baboon? A Mau Mau?”
“Or Frankenstein’s monster. Or a lust-crazed white hunter. Hell, I don’t know. But I’m not kidding, Kathy. You take that .38 and you get it ready.”
“Yes, bwana. I love you when you’re masterful.”
“Good. After I run the trap line, I may stop in and have a talk with Bob Russell. Maybe he has some ideas. I’ll send Elijah into Mitaboni to notify the police. They won’t do anything but maybe they’ll send a man out here to look at that baboon. I’ll be back before dark.”
At that moment, Susan ran in. She jumped up and down in great joy. “Barby just had a BM in her pants,” she announced proudly.
Kathy got up. “Life goes on,” she said.
Royce went to get his rifle out of the gun safe. He supposed that kids had gone on having bowel movements in the middle of Mau Mau raids, or Indian raids for that matter, but it certainly seemed inappropriate.
He forced himself to start thinking about the traps he had to check.
It was a strange world. At a time like this his wife had to change Barby’s pants and he had to go off to hunt baboons.
Still, as Kathy said, life went on.
Royce took Mutisya with him in the Land Rover. Mutisya had found no tracks in his search around the Baboonery. In itself, that was not too peculiar. The land was very hard after the long dry spell and it did not take tracks easily, not even elephant tracks.
They took the back trail, the one that ran along the railroad for a few miles, crossed the Tsavo where the river was low enough, and wound up in Mitaboni. The traps were on the far side of the Tsavo; Royce wanted to work that area before the rains came. Nobody could get into that place during the rainy season.
Even if there had been no traps, Royce would have taken this trail. If something had fallen from the sky, it must have been in this general region. The thought crossed his mind that it might have been a space capsule of some sort. He had been told that some of the early astronauts had passed right over the Baboonery. Even the moon shots involved some earth orbits. He had not heard of any new launchings, but he supposed that there were experiments with both manned and unmanned craft that were not announced to the public. Surely, though, if there had been trouble the area would be crawling with people. He hadn’t even seen a search plane.
He kept his eyes open nevertheless.
Unhappily, there was little to see. The land was flat under the great blue sky, flat and red and parched. No Kamba lived here and there were few animals visible. The monotony was broken only by the gray baobabs, looking like Disney trees with their fat trunks and spindly branches, and by the euphorbia plants, which were cactuslike and always reminded Royce of the sort of thing people expected to see in Texas but which would have been more at home in California or Arizona. The sun was hot and the Land Rover kicked up thick clouds of red dust. The dust was half an inch thick on the floor of the Land Rover before they had gone two miles.
They crossed the Tsavo at the ford with only the usual difficulties of slipping wheels and water through the floorboards. Royce had been informed that there were crocodiles in the Tsavo, but apparently they were not as mindlessly aggressive as they were in the movies. He had never seen one. On the far side of the river the vegetation was thicker and the flies and mosquitoes were a nuisance. Royce remembered that he had forgotten to take his daraprim that morning and made a mental note to swallow the pill when he got back. Once a week, and it was all too easy to forget. Malaria had a way of reminding a man if he forgot too often.
It was early afternoon when they reached the clearing where the traps were set. Baboons were all over the place when they arrived, even climbing on the traps themselves. The animals pulled back at the sight of the Land Rover but they did not go far. There were about fifty of them and most of them took to the trees. This had surprised Royce the first time he had seen it; baboons were ground-dwelling monkeys and they liked open country and rocks. The books all said that they weren’t much good in the trees, but evidently the baboons had read the wrong books. They frisked about like so many giant squirrels, and they made a fearful din.
Royce ignored them. He knew from experience that the troop would stay close and holler in an attempt to frighten him away from the trapped animals, but the baboons would not attack. It was strictly a bluff.
He pulled the Land Rover up to the first traps and stopped. He climbed out, leaving the rifle in the vehicle. He took the gadget he always thought of as a prod pole with him. It was not actually a prod, being basically a syringe attached to a wooden pole about four feet long.
There was no need to speak. He and Mutisya had the routine down pat by now.
There were three traps in the first series and two of them held baboons. The third trap was sprung but the animal had gotten away. Royce studied the empty trap with some care. The traps were quite simple. They were just big cages made out of wood and wire with a raised platform in the center. The bait, usually pineapple or maize, was fastened to the platform by a cord. When the baboon climbed up and moved the food, a trigger was released that dropped the door of the cage. That was that, unless the baboon managed to force the wire enough to get out. A large baboon was a powerful animal; there had been escapes before. Royce could not tell whether the empty trap had been opened from within or without. He saw nothing suspicious, but it did seem to him that if someone were swiping baboons this would be the place to come. Why go to the Baboonery where there were people around?
The two caged baboons were alarmed and wary. They were also dangerous. They rushed around the cages in a panic, lunging at the wire and snapping their impressive jaws. They made very rapid coughing noises and thoughtfully dropped sticky dung all over the cage floors.
Royce eliminated one right away; she was a female, and his current orders called for only males within a weight range of thirty to fifty pounds. She would have to be released, but not until they had gotten the baboons they needed.
The other one was okay.
“Friend,” Royce said, “how would you like to visit the United States?”
The baboon did not seem enthusiastic.
Royce approached him with care. A trapped baboon was a formidable animal. They were very large for monkeys, bigger than the smallest ape, the gibbon. They had nasty dispositions when they were crossed, and they were tough. Royce had seen war dogs in action, but he had often thought that they couldn’t hold a candle to a war baboon if there had been such a thing. Unlike most monkeys, the baboon was not flat-faced. Possibly because of his terrestrial habits, he had a tremendous projecting snout. He had powerful jaws liberally supplied with strong white teeth, and he knew how to use them. Once a baboon caught hold of an arm or a leg it was almost impossible to pry his jaws open. There had been accidents at the Baboonery, and Royce had learned to keep his mind on what he was doing.
He filled the syringe on the end of the pole with sernyl. Mutisya went around to the back of the cage and attracted the animal’s attention. Royce made one quick lunge, got the needle in the baboon’s rump, and rammed the elongated plunger home. The baboon shrieked, whirled, and rushed across the cage. Royce stepped back out of range.
There was nothing to do now but wait. Knocking out a freshly trapped baboon was not particularly difficult. It was a nightmare, though, when you had to knock them out a second time at the Baboonery, or if you chanced to catch a baboon that had been stuck before but had escaped. The animals were quick to learn, and they wanted no part of that needle a second time. They would grab at the needle when it came into the cage and they were so fast that they could twist the needle off before you could get it out of range again. Royce had once spent three solid hours trying to stick a baboon in a small cage without success.
