The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

by Wilbur Smith

  Leaning out of the hatchway, the officer peered down at the old bull. He appraised the thick curved ivory, and then saw that the beast had bled to death during the waiting hours, and he signalled the pilot lower.

  He placed his lips close to the eldest tribesman’s ear.

  ‘Let not your feet touch the earth, on your life!’ he shouted, and the man nodded jerkily. ‘The tusks first, then the meat.’

  The man nodded again.

  The officer slapped his shoulder and the elder jumped down onto the bull’s belly that was already swelling with fermenting gases. He balanced agilely upon it. The rest of his gang, clutching their axes, followed him down.

  At the officer’s hand signal the helicopter rose and darted like a dragonfly to the next animal that showed good ivory from the lip. This one was still alive, and heaved itself into a sitting position, reaching up with bloody dust-smeared trunk to try and pluck the hovering helicopter from the air.

  Braced in the hatch, the officer sighted down the AK 47 and fired a single shot into the back of the neck where it joined the skull, and the cow collapsed and lay as still as the body of her calf beside her. The officer nodded at the leader of the next gang of butchers.

  Balanced on the gigantic grey heads, careful not to let a foot touch the earth, the axemen chipped the tusks loose from their castles of white bone. It was delicate work, for a careless stroke could drastically diminish the value of the ivory. They had seen the officer in tie-dyed jeans, with a short, well-timed swing of the rifle-butt, break the jaw of a man who merely queried an order. What would he do with one who ruined a tusk? They worked with care. As the tusks were freed, the helicopter winched them up and then carried the gang to the next carcass.

  By nightfall most of the elephant had died of their massive wounds or had been shot to death, but the screams of those who had not yet received the coup de grâce mingled with the hubbub of the gathering jackal and hyena packs to make the night hideous. The axemen worked on by the light of grass torches, and by the first light of dawn all the ivory had been gathered in.

  Now the axemen could turn their attention to butchering and dismembering the carcasses. The rising heat worked more swiftly than they could. The stench of putrefying flesh mingled with the gases from ruptured entrails and drove the skulking scavengers to fresh paroxysms of gluttonous anticipation. The helicopter carried each haunch or shoulder as it was hacked free to the safe ground beyond the minefield. The women cut the meat into strips and festooned it on the smoking racks above the smouldering fires of green wood.

  While he supervised the work, the officer was calculating the spoils. It was a pity they could not save the hides, for each was worth a thousand dollars, but they were too bulky and could not be sufficiently preserved, putrefaction would render them worthless. On the other hand, mild putrefaction would give the meat more zest on the African palate – in the same way that an Englishman enjoys his game high.

  Five hundred tons of wet meat would lose half its weight in the drying process, but the copper mines of neighbouring Zambia with tens of thousands of labourers to feed, were eager markets for proteins. Two dollars a pound for the crudely smoked meat was the price that had already been agreed. That was a million U.S. dollars – and then of course there was the ivory.

  The ivory had been ferried by the helicopter half a mile beyond the sprawling camp to a secluded place in the hills. There it had been laid out in rows, and a selected gang set to work removing the fat white coneshaped nerve mass from the hollow end of each tusk and cleansing the ivory of any blood and muck that might betray it to the sensitive nose of an oriental customs officer.

  There were four hundred tusks. Some of those taken from immature animals weighed only a few pounds, but the old bull’s tusks would go well over eighty pounds apiece. A good average was twenty pounds over the lot. The going price in Hong Kong was a hundred dollars a pound, or a total of eight hundred thousand dollars. The profit on the day’s work would be over one million dollars, in a land where the average annual income of each adult male was less than six hundred dollars.

  Of course, there had been the other small costs of the operation. One of the axemen had over-balanced and tumbled from his perch on an elephant carcass. He had landed flat on his buttocks, directly on top of an anti-personnel mine.

  ‘Son of a demented baboon.’ The officer was still irritated by the man’s stupidity. It had held work up for almost an hour while the body was retrieved and prepared for burial.

  Another man had lost a foot from an over-zealous axe-stroke, and a dozen others had lesser cuts from swinging pangas. One other man had died during the night with an AK 47 bullet through the belly when he objected to what the officer was doing to his junior wife in the bushes beyond the smoking racks – but when the profit was considered, the costs were small indeed. The comrade commissar would be pleased, and with good reason.

  It was the morning of the third day before the team working on the ivory had completed their task to the officer’s satisfaction. Then they were sent down the valley to assist at the smoking racks, leaving the ivory camp deserted. There must be no eyes to discover the identity of the important visitor who would come now to inspect the spoils.

  He arrived in the helicopter. The officer was standing to attention in the clearing beside the long rows of gleaming ivory. The down-draught of the rotors tore at his jacket, and fluttered the legs of his jeans, but he maintained his rigid stance.

  The machine settled to earth and a commanding figure stepped down, a handsome man, straight and strong, with very white square teeth against the dark mahogany of his face, crisp kinky African hair cropped closely to the finely shaped skull. He wore an expensive pearl-grey suit of Italian cut over a white shirt and dark blue tie. His black shoes were hand-made of soft calf

  He held out his hand towards the officer. Immediately the younger man abandoned his respectful pose and ran to him, like a child to its father.

  ‘Comrade Commissar!’

  ‘No! No!’ he chided the officer gently, still smiling. ‘Not Comrade Commissar any longer, but Comrade Minister now. No longer leader of a bunch of unwashed bush fighters, but Minister of State of a sovereign government.’ The minister permitted himself a smile as he surveyed the rows of fresh tusks. ‘And the most successful ivory-poacher of all time – is that not true?’

  Craig Mellow winced as the cab hit another pothole in the surface of Fifth Avenue just outside the entrance of Bergdorf Goodman. Like most New York cabs, its suspension would have better suited a Sherman tank.

  ‘I’ve had a softer ride through the Mbabwe depression in a Land-Rover,’ Craig thought, and had a sudden nostalgic twinge as he remembered that rutted, tortuous track through the bad lands below the Chobe river, that wide green tributary of the great Zambezi.

  That was all so far away and long ago, and he pushed the memory aside and returned to brooding over the sense of slight that he felt at having to ride in a yellow cab to a luncheon meeting with his publisher, and having to pick up the tab for the ride himself. There had been a time when they would have sent a chauffeur-driven limousine for him, and the destination would have been the Four Seasons or La Grenouille, not some pasta joint in the Village. Publishers made these subtle little protests when a writer had not delivered a typescript for three years, and spent more time romancing his stockbroker and ripping it up at Studio 54 than at his typewriter.

  ‘Well, I guess I’ve got it coming.’ Craig pulled a face, reached for a cigarette, and then arrested the movement as he remembered that he had given it up. Instead he pushed the thick dark lock of hair off his forehead and watched the faces of the crowds upon the sidewalk. There had been a time when he found the bustle exciting and stimulating after the silences of the African bush, even the sleazy facades and neon frontings onto the littered streets had been different and intriguing. Now he felt suffocated and claustrophobic, and he longed for a glimpse of open sky, rather than that narrow ribbon that showed between the high tops o
f the buildings.

  The cab braked sharply, interrupting his thoughts, and the driver muttered ‘16th Street’ without looking round.

  Craig pushed a ten-dollar bill through the slot in the armoured Perspex screen that protected the driver from his passengers. ‘Keep it,’ he said, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He saw the restaurant immediately, all cutey ethnic awnings and straw-covered chianti bottles in the window.

  When Craig crossed the sidewalk he moved easily, without trace of a limp, so that nobody watching him would have guessed at his disability. Despite his misgivings, it was cool and clean inside the restaurant and the smell of food was appetizing.

  Ashe Levy stood up from a booth at the back of the room and beckoned to him.

  ‘Craig, baby!’ He put one arm around Craig’s shoulders and patted his cheek paternally. ‘You’re looking good, you old hound dog, you!’

  Ashe cultivated his own eclectic style. His hair was brush-cut and he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His shirt was striped with a contrasting white collar, platinum cufflinks and tie pin, and brown brogues with a pattern of little holes punched in the toe caps. His jacket was cashmere with narrow lapels. His eyes were very pale, and always focused just a little to one side of Craig’s own. Craig knew that he smoked only the very best Tihuana gold.

  ‘Nice place, Ashe. How did you find it?’

  ‘A change from boring old “Seasons”,’ Ashe grinned slyly, pleased that the gesture of disapproval had been noted. ‘Craig, I want you to meet a very talented lady.’

  She had been sitting well back in the gloom at the back of the booth, but now she leaned forward and held out her hand. The spotlamp caught the hand, and so it was the first impression that Craig had of her.

  The hand was narrow with artistic fingers, but though the nails were scrubbed clean, they were clipped short and unpainted, the skin was tanned to gold with prominent aristocratic veins showing bluish beneath it. The bones were fine, but there were callouses at the base of those long straight fingers – a hand that was accustomed to hard work.

  Craig took the hand and felt the strength of it, the softness of the dry cool skin on the back and the rough places on the palm, and he looked into her face.

  She had dark thick eyebrows that stretched in an unbroken curve from the outer corner of one eye to the other. Her eyes, even in the poor light, were green with honey-coloured specks surrounding the pupil. Their gaze was direct and candid.

  ‘Sally-Anne Jay,’ Ashe said. ‘This is Craig Mellow.’

  Her nose was straight but slightly too large, and her mouth too wide to be beautiful. Her thick dark hair was scraped back severely from the broad forehead, her face was as honey-tanned as her hands and there was a fine peppering of freckles across her cheeks.

  ‘I read your book,’ she said. Her voice was level and clear, her accent mid-Atlantic, but only when he heard its timbre did he realize how young she was. ‘I thought it deserved everything that happened to it.’

  ‘Compliment or slap?’ He tried to make it sound light and unconcerned, but he found himself hoping fervently that she was not one of those who attempted to demonstrate their own exalted literary standards by denigrating a popular writer’s work to his face.

  ‘Very good things happened to it,’ she pointed out, and Craig felt absurdly pleased, even though that seemed to be the end of that topic as far as she was concerned. To show his pleasure he squeezed her hand and held it a little longer than was necessary, and she took it back from him and replaced it firmly in her lap.

  So she wasn’t a scalp-hunter, and she wasn’t going to gush. Anyway, he told himself, he was bored with literary groupies trying to storm his bed, and gushers were as bad as knockers – almost.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get Ashe to buy us a drink,’ he suggested, and slipped into the booth facing her across the table.

  Ashe made his usual fuss over the wine list, but they ended up with a ten-dollar Frascati after all.

  ‘Nice smooth fruit.’ Ashe rolled it on his tongue.

  ‘It’s cold and wet,’ Craig agreed, and Ashe smiled again as they both remembered the ’70 Corton Charlemagne they had drunk the last time.

  ‘We are expecting another guest later,’ Ashe told the waiter. ‘We’ll order then.’ And turning to Craig, ‘I wanted an opportunity for Sally-Anne to show you her stuff.’

  ‘Show me,’ Craig invited, immediately defensive once again. The woods were full of them as wanted to ride on his strike – ones with unpublished manuscripts for him to endorse, investment advisers who would look after all those lovely royalties for him, others who would allow him to write their life stories and generously split the profits with him or sell him insurance or a South Sea Island paradise, commission him to write movie scripts for a small advance and an even smaller slice of any profits, all kinds gathering like hyenas to the lion’s kill.

  Sally-Anne lifted a hard-back portfolio from the floor beside her and placed it on the table in front of Craig. While Ashe adjusted the spotlight, Sally-Anne untied the ribbons that secured the folder and sat back.

  Craig opened the cover and went very still. He felt the goose-bumps rise along his forearms, and the hair at the nape of his neck prickle – this was his reaction to greatness, to anything perfectly beautiful. There was a Gauguin in the Metropolitan Museum on Central Park; a Polynesian madonna carrying the Christ child on her shoulder. She had made his hair prickle. There were passages of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and of Lawrence Durrell’s prose that made his hair prickle every time he read them.

  The opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; those incredible jeté leaps of Rudolph Nureyev, and the way Nicklaus and Borg struck the ball on their good days – those things had made him prickle, and now this girl was doing it to him also.

  It was a photograph. The finish was egg-shell grain so every detail was crisp. The colours clear and perfectly true.

  It was a photograph of an elephant, an old bull. He faced the camera in the characteristic attitude of alarm, with his ears spread like dark flags. Somehow he portrayed the whole vastness and timelessness of a continent, and yet he was at bay, and one sensed that all his great strength was unavailing, that he was confused by things that were beyond his experience and the trace memories of his ancestors, that he was about to be overwhelmed by change – like Africa itself.

  With him in the photograph was shown the land, the rich red earth riven by wind, baked by sun, ruined by drought. Craig could almost taste the dust on his tongue. Then, over it all, the limitless sky, containing the promise of succour, the silver cumulo-nimbus piled like a snow-clad mountain range, bruised with purple and royal blue, pierced by a single beam of light from a hidden sun that fell on the old bull like a benediction.

  She had captured the meaning and the mystery of his native land in the one hundredth of a second that it took the lens shutter to open and close again, while he had laboured for long agonizing months and not come anywhere near it, and secretly recognizing his failure was afraid to try again. He took a sip of the insipid wine that had been offered to him as a rebuke for this crisis of confidence in his own ability, and now the wine had a quinine aftertaste that he had not noticed before.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked the girl, without looking at her.

  ‘Denver, Colorado,’ she said. ‘But my father has been with the Embassy in London for years. I did most of my schooling in England.’ That accounted for the accent. ‘I went to Africa when I was eighteen, and fell in love with it,’ she completed her life story simply.

  It took a physical effort for Craig to touch the photograph and gently turn it face down. Beneath it was another of a young woman seated on a black lava rock beside a desert waterhole. She wore the distinctive leather bunnyears headdress of the Ovahimba tribe. Her child stood beside her and nursed from her naked breast. The woman’s skin was polished with fat and ochre. Her eyes were those from a fresco in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and she was beautiful.

  ‘Denver, Colorado, forsooth!
’ Craig thought and was surprised at his own bitterness, at the depths of his sudden resentment. How dare a damned foreign girl-child encapsulate so unerringly the complex spirit of a people in this portrait of a young woman. He had lived all his life with them and yet never seen an African so clearly as at this moment in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village.

  He turned the photograph with a suppressed violence. Beneath it was a view into the trumpet-shaped throat of the magnificent maroon and gold bloom of kigelia Africana, Craig’s favourite wild flower. In the lustrous depths of the flower nestled a tiny beetle like a precious emerald, shiny iridescent green. It was a perfect arrangement of shape and colour, and he found he hated her for it.

  There were many others. One of a grinning lout of a militia man with an AK 47 rifle on his shoulder and a necklace of cured human ears around his neck, a caricature of savagery and arrogance; another of a wrinkled witch-doctor hung with horns and beads and skulls and all the grisly accoutrements of his trade, his patient stretched out on the bare, dusty earth before him in the process of being crudely cupped, her blood making shiny dark serpents across her dark skin. The patient was a woman in her prime with patterns of tattoos on her breasts and cheeks and forehead. Her teeth were filed to points like those of a shark, a relic of the days of cannibalism, and her eyes, like those of a suffering animal, seemed filled with all the stoicism and patience of Africa.

  Then there was another contrasting photograph of African children in a school-room of poles and rude thatch. They shared a single reader between three of them, but all their hands were raised eagerly to the young black teacher’s questions and all their faces lit by the burning desire for knowledge – it was all there, a complete record of hope and despair, of abject poverty and great riches, of savagery and tenderness, of unrelenting elements and bursting fruitfulness, of pain and gentle humour. Craig could not bring himself to look at her again and he turned the stiff glossy sheets slowly, savouring each image and delaying the moment when he must face her.