by Wilbur Smith
'It must weigh almost a hundred and fifty pounds,' Garry sail 'But just look at the workmanship." Shasa knew that the ivory workers of Zanzibar were the only from who could do something like this. The entire length of the tusk ha been carved with hunting scenes of exquisite detail and the fine execution.
'It's beautiful." Even Isabella was impressed. 'Who sent it to you' 'There is an envelope --' Shasa pointed to the litter of discarde, wrappings, and Garry picked it out and passed it to him.
The envelope contained a single sheet of notepaper.
In camp on the Tona rive Dear Dad, Kenya.
Happy birthday - I'll be thinking of you on the day. This is my best jumb to date - 146 lbs. before the carving.
Why don't you come hunting with me?
Love, Sean With the note in one hand, Shasa squatted beside the tusk ant stroked the creamy smooth surface. The carvings depicted a herd all elephant, hundreds of them in a single herd. From old bulls and breeding cows to tiny calves, they fled in a long spiral frieze around the ivory shaft, diminishing in elegant perspective towards the point.
The herd was harassed and attacked by hunters along its length, beginning with men in lionskins armed with bows and poisoned arrows, or with broad-bladed elephant spears; towards the end of this primeval cavalcade the hu0ters were on horseback and wielding modern firearms. The path of the herd was strewn with great fallen carcasses, and it was beautiful and real and tragic.
However, it was neither the beauty nor the tragedy that thickened Shasa's voice as he said, 'Will you two leave me alone, please." He did not look around at them, he did not want them to see his face.
For once Isabella did not argue, but took Garry's hand and led him from the room.
'He hasn't forgotten my birthday,' Shasa murmured, as he stroked the ivory. 'Not once since he left." He coughed and stood up abruptly, jerked the handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose loudly and then wiped his eyes.
'And I haven't even written to him, I haven't even replied to one of his letters." He stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket and went to stand at the window, staring out over the lawns where the peacocks strutted. 'The stupid cruel thing is that he has always been my favourite of the three of them. Oh God, I'd give anything to see him again." The rain was icy grey, drifting like smoke over the thick forests of bamboo that cloaked the crests of the Aberdare Mountains.
The four of them moved in single file with the Ndorobo tracker on the point, following the spoor in the forest earth that beneath the litter of 'fallen bamboo leaves was the colour and consistency of molten chocolate.
.Sen Courtney took the second position, covering the tracker and poisedto make any quick decision. He was the youngest of the three white Then but command had quite naturally devolved upon him.
Nobody had contested it.
The third man in the line, Alistair Sparks, was the youngest son of a Kenyan settler family. Although he possessed enormous powers of endurance, was a fine natural shot and a consummate bushman, he was lazy and evasive and needed to be pushed to exercise all his skills to the full.
Raymond Harris was on the drag at number four. He was almost fifty years old, full of malaria and gin, but in his time had been one of the l-gendary white hunters of East Africa. He had taught Sean everyth lg he knew, until the pupil had excelled the master. Now Raymond was content to bring up the rear and let Sean and Matatu, the tracker, get them into position for the kill.
Matatu was naked except for his filthy tattered loincloth and the rain made tiny rivulets down his glossy black hide. He worked the spoor with the same instinct and superhuman sense of sight, smell and hearing, as one of the wild animals of the forest. They had been following these tracks for two days already, stopping only when the light failed completely each night, and taking up the chase again with the first flush of dawn.
The spoor was running sweet and hot. Sean was probably as good a tracker as a white man could be and he judged that they were only four or five hours behind and gaining swiftly. The quarry had angled up the steep slope of this nameless peak, heading to cross the ridge just below the main crest. Sean caught glimpses of the top through the dense vault of bamboo over their heads and the blown streamers of misty rain.
Suddenly Matatu stopped dead, and Sean popped his tongue to warn the others and froze with his thumb on the safety-catch of the big double-barrelled Gibbs.
After a moment Matatu turned abruptly aside, dropping the spoor, and went sliding as swiftly and silently as a dark serpent down the slope, away from the line and direction of the quarry.
Five years before, when Sean had first taken Matatu into his service, he might have protested and tried to force him to stay with the run of the spoor, but now he followed without argument, and although he was going at his best hunting speed, he just managed to hold the tracker in sight.
Sean was dressed in a cloak of colobus monkey skins and he wore Somali sandals of elephant hide on his feet and a shaggy cap of monkey skin covered his obviously Caucasian hair. His arms, legs and face were blackened with a mixture of rancid hippo fat and soot, and he had not bathed in two weeks. He looked and smelled like the men he was hunting.
There were five Mau Mau in the band that they were pursuing, all of them members of the notorious gang run by the self-styled General Kimathi. Five days previously they had attacked one of the coffee shambas near Nyeri in the foothills of the mountain range. They had disembowelled the white overseer and stuffed his severed genitals into his mouth, and they had chopped off his wife's limbs with the heavy-bladed pangas, beginning at wrist and ankle and working gradually towards the trunk of her body, until they hacked through the great joints in her shoulders and groin.
Sean and his group of scouts had reached the shamba almost twelve hours after the gang had fled. They had left the Land-Rover and taken the spoor on foot.
Matatu took them directly down the slope. The narrow river at the bottom was a tumultuous silver torrent. Sean stripped off his furs and sandals and went into it naked. The cold chilled his bones until they ached and the roaring water swirled over his head but he carried the line across and then brought the others safely over.
Matatu was the last across, carrying Sean's clothing and his rifle, and immediately he was off again, like a wraith of the forest. Sean followed him with the agony of cold shuddering through his body and the sodden furs a heavy burden to add to the rifle and his pack.
A herd of buffalo crashed away through the forest ahead of them, and the bovine stink lingered in their nostrils long after they were gone. Once Sean had a glimpse of a huge antelope, ginger red with vertical white stripes down its heavy body and a head of magnificent spiral horns. It was a bongo. He would have charged one of his rich American clients $1000 for a shot at that rarest and most elusive of all antelopes, but it ghosted away into the bamboo and Matatu led them on without apparent purpose or direction, the spoor three hours cold behind them.
Then Matatu skirted one of the rare forest clearings and stopped again. He glanced back over his naked shoulder and grinned at Sean with the patent adoration of a hunting dog who acknowledges the most important being in its universe.
Sean stepped up beside him and looked down at the spoor. He would never know how Matatu did it. He had tried to make him explain, but the wizened little gnome had merely laughed with embarrassment and hung his head. It was a kind of magic that went beyond the mere art of observation and deduction. What Matatu had just done was to drop the spoor when it was sweet and hot, and go off at an improbable tangent, running blind through trackless bambOo and over wild peaks, to meet the spoor again with the unerringinstinct of a migrating swallow, having cut the corner and gained threhours on the quarry.
Sean squeezed his shoulder and little Ndorobo wriggled his whole body with pleasure.
They were less than an hour behind the gang now, but the rain and the mist were bringing on the night prematurely. Sean signalled Matatu on. Not one of them had spoken a single word all that d
ay.
The men they were chasing were becoming careless. In the beginning they had anti-tracked and covered spoor, doubled and jinked so cunningly that even Matatu had puzzled to unravel the sign and get away on the run of it - but now they were feeling confident and secure.
Ttry had broken off the succulent bamboo shoots to chew as they march d, leaving glaring wounds on the plants, and they had trodden deeply, heeling with fatigue, leaving sign that Matatu could follow like a tarmac road. One of the fugitives had even defecated on the track, not bothering to cover his faeces, and they were still steaming with his body warmth. Matatu grinned at Sean over his shoulder and made the fluttery hand signal which said 'Very close'.
Sean eased open the action of the double-barrelled Gibbs, without allowing the sidelock to click. He slid the brass-cased cartridges out of the breeches, and replaced them with two Others from the leather ammunition pouch beneath his monkey-skin cape. The .577 cartridges were thicker than a man's thumb and the clumsy, blunt-nosed bullet heads were jacleted in copper and capped with soft blue lead so they could mushroom through living tissue, tearing open a wide channel and inficting terrible damage. This little ritual of changing his cartridges was one of Sean's superstitions - he always did it just before he closed with dangerous game. He closed the rifle as gently and silently as he had opened it and glanced back at the two men behind him.
The whites of Alistair's eyes gleamed in his blackened face. He carried the Bren gun. Sean had not been able to wean him from it.
Despite its unwieldy long barrel and great weight, Alistair loved the automatic weapon. 'When I'm after Mickey Mouse I like to be able to turn the air blue with lead,' he explained with that lazy grin.
'Nobody is going to get a chance to stuff my knockers down my throat, matey!" At the rear Ray Harris gave Sean the thumbs-up signal, but the sweat and rain had cut pale runnels through the soot and fat on his face, and even through the camouflage Sean could see how haggard he was with fear and fatigue. 'The old man is getting past it,' Sean thought dispassionately. 'Have to put him out to grass soon." Ray carried the Stirling sub-machine-gun. Sean suspected it was because he could no longer manage the weight of a more substantial weapon. 'In the bamboo it's point blank." Ray excused his choice, and Sean had not bothered to argue or to point out that the tiny 9 men bullets would be deflected by the frailest twig, and smothered in the dense vegetation of the Aberdares - while the big .600 grain slug from his own Gibbs would plough straight through branch and stem and still blow the guts out of the Mickey Mouse on the other side, while the stubby 20-inch barrels were perfect for close work in the bamboo, and he could swing them without risking hooking up in the brush.
Sean clicked his tongue softly and Matatu went away on the spoor in that soft-footed, ungainly lope which he could keep up day and night without tiring. They crossed another heavily bambooed ridge and in the valley beyond Matatu stopped again. It was so dark by now that Sean had to move up beside him, and go down on one knee to examine the sign.
It took him almost a minute to make sense of it, even after Matatu had pointed out the other set of tracks coming in from the right.
Sean gestured Ray to move up and laid his lips to his ear. 'They have joined another party of Mickey Mice - probably from the base camp.
Eight of them, three women, so we have thirteen in a bunch now. A lovely lucky number." But as he spoke the light was going, and the rain started-again, spilling softly out of the purple-black sky. Within five hundred yards Matatu stopped for the last time and Sean could just make out the pale palm of his right hand as he made the wash-out signal. Night had blanketed the spoor.
The white men each found a treetrunk to prop themselves against, spreading out in a defensive circle facing outwards. Sean took Matatu under the monkey-skin cloak with him as though he were a tired gun dog.
The little man's skinny body was as cold and wet as a trout taken from a mountain stream and he smelled of herbs and leaf mould and wild things. They ate the hard salted dry buffalo meat and cold maize cakes from their belt pouches and slept fitfully in each other's warmth while the raindrops pattered down on the fur over their heads.
Matatu touched Sean's cheek and he was instantly awake in the utter darkness, slipping the safety-catch of the Gibbs that lay across his lap. He sat rigid, listening and alert.
Beside him Matatu snuffled the air and after a moment Sean did the same. 'Woodsmoke?" he whispered, and both of them came to their feet. In the darkness, Sean moved to where Alistair and Ray were lying and got them up. They went forward in the night, holding the belt of the man ahead to keep in contact. The whiffs of smoke were intermittent but stronger.
It took..almost two hours for Matatu to locate the Mau Mau encampmefitprecisely, using his sense of smell and hearing, and at the end the fnt glow of a patch of camp-fire coals. Although the bamboo dripp{d all around, they could hear them - a soft cough, a strangled snore, the gabble of a woman in a nightmare - and Sean and Matatu moved them into position.
It took another hour; but in the utter darkness before the true dawn, Alistair was lying up the slope, forty feet from the dying camp fire. Raymond was amongst the rocks on the bank of the stream on the far side, and Sean lay with Matatu in the dense scrub beside the path that led into the camp.
Sean had the barrel of the Gibbs across his left forearm and his right hand on the pistol grip with the safety-catch under his thumb.
He had spr ,d the fur cloak over both himself and Matatu, but neither of teen even drowsed. They were keyed up to the finest pitch.
Sean could feel the little Ndorobo trembling with eagerness where their bodies touched. He was like a bird dog with the scent of the grouse in his nostrils.
The dawn came stealthily. First Sean realized that he could see his own hand on the rifle in front of his face, and then the short thick barrels appeared before his eyes. He looked beyond them and made out a tendril of smoke from the fire rising out of the Stygian forest towards the lighter pitch of darkness that was the sky through the canopy of bamboo.
The light came on more swiftly, and he saw that there were two crude shelters, one on each side of the fire, low lean-tos not more than waist high, and he thought he saw a movement in one of them, perhaps a recumbent figure rolling over and pulling up a skin blanket over his head, Again somebody coughed, a thick phlegmy sound. The camp was waking. Sean glanced up the slope and then down into the stream bed. He could see the soft sheen of the water-polished boulders - but nothing of the other two hunters.
The light hardened. Sean closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. He could see sharply the support of the roof of the nearest shelter, and dimly beyond it a human shape wrapped in a fur blanket.
'Shooting light in two minutes,' he thought. The others would know it also. All three of them had waited like this in countless dawns beside the rotting carcass of pig or antelope for the leopard to come to the bait. They could judge that magical moment when the sights were crisp enough to make the sure killing shot. This dawn they would wait for Sean before they came in with the Bren and the Stirling.
Again Sean closed his eyes and when he opened them again the figure in the nearest shelter was sitting up and looking towards him.
For a gut-swooping instant he thought he had been spotted and he almost fired. Then he checked himself as the head turned away from him.
Abruptly the figure threw the fur blanket aside and stood up, crouching under the low roof of the shelter.
Sean saw it was a woman, one of the Mau Mau camp followers, but for Sean just as cruel and depraved as any of her menfolk. She stepped out into the open beside the dead fire wearing only a short kilt of some pale material. Her breasts were high and pointed and her skin smooth and glossy as newly mined anthracite in the soft dawn light.
She came directly towards where Sean lay, and though her gait was still clumsy and unsteady with sleep, he saw that she was young and comely. A few more paces and she would stumble over him, but then she stopped agai
n and yawned and her teeth were very white, gleaming in the soft grey light.
She lifted her kilt around her waist and squatted facing Sean, spreading her knees and bowing her head slightly to watch herself as she began to urinate. Her water splashed noisily and the sharp ammoniacal tang of it made Sean's nostrils flare.
She was so close that he did not have to lift the Gibbs to his shoulder.
He shot her in the stomach. The heavy rifle bounded in his grip and the bullet picked the girl up and while she was in the air it broke her in half, blowing a hole through her spine into which her own head would have fitted, and she folded up, loose and floppy as a suit of discarded clothing as she fell back onto the muddy forest floor.
Sean fired the second barrel as one of the other Mau Mau bolted out of the nearest shelter. The Gibbs made a sound like the slamming of a great steel door, and the man was hurled back into the shelter with half his chest torn away.
Sean had two more cartridges held between the fingers of his left hand, and as he opened the breech of the Gibbs the spent brass cases pinged away over his shoulder and he slid the fresh cartridges into the empty breeches and closed the rifle again in the same movement.
The Bren and the Stirling were firing now. Their muzzle flashes were bright and pretty as fairy lights in the gloom, twinkling and sparkling, and the bullets wentfrip!frip!frip! amongst the leaves and sang shrilly as they ricocheted into the forest.
Sean shot again and the Gibbs canhoned down another naked figure, knocking him flat against the soft earth as though he had been run down by a locomotive. And again he shot, but this one was a snap shot and the Mau Mau jinked just as the Gibbs thundered.
The bullet hit him in the shoulder joint and blew his right arm off so it hungby a taller of torn flesh and flapped against his side as he spun around. Raymond's Stirling buzzed and cut him down.
