by Wilbur Smith
The leopard fed at intervals during the night, the chain tinkling and bones grating and cracking. Then there were long periods of silence when Shasa feared it had left, before the sounds began again.
Of course, he could easily have turned the powerful spotlight on the tree and lit the leopard for her. It would have probably sat bemused, blinking those huge yellow eyes into the blinding beam. The idea never even occurred to him, and he would have been bitterly disappointed if Elsa had even contemplated such unfair tactics.
Deep down Shasa disliked the technique of baiting for the great cats. He had personally never killed one of them on a bait. Although in Rhodesia it was perfectly legal, Shasa's own sporting ethic could never come to terms with luring them into a prepared position to offer a carefully staged broadside shot to a hidden marksman shooting from a dead rest.
Every lion and leopard he had ever taken, he had tracked down on foot, often in the thickest cover, and the animal had been alert and aware of his presence. In consequence he had experienced a hundred failures and not more than a dozen kills in all those years as a hunter. However, each success had been a peak of the hunting experience, a memory to last his lifetime.
He did not despise Elsa or any of the other clients who took their cats over bait. They were not Africans, as he was, and their time in the bushveld was limited to a few short days. They were paying huge sums of money for the privilege, and much of that money was channelled back into the protection and conservation of the species they hunted. Therefore they were entitled to the best-possibic chance of success. He did not resent them, but it was not his way.
Sitting beside her in the dark hide, he realized suddenly that his own hunting of the cats was over for ever. Like so many old hunters, he had had his surfeit of blood. He loved the hunting game as much, probably more than he ever had, but it was enough. He had killed his last elephant and lion and leopard. The thought made him glad and at the same time sad, a kind of sweet warm melancholy that mingled well with the new emotion he had conceived for the lovely lady who slept on his shoulder. He thought how he would in future take his pleasure in the hunt through her, the way he was doing now. He dreamt happily of travelling with her to the hunting-fields of the world: Russia for the sheep of Marco Polo, Canada for the polar bear, Brazil for the spotted jaguar, and to Tanzania for the great Cape buffalo with a spread of horn over fifty inches wide. These vicarious pleasures sustained him through the long night.
Then a pair of Heughlin's robins chorused a duet from the undergrowth along the river, a melodious entreaty that sounded like "Don't do it! Don't do it!' repeated over an dover, at first softly and then rising to an excited crescendo.
At this certain harbinger of the dawn, Shasa glanced upwards and made out the uppermost branches of the ebony tree against the lightening sky. It would be shooting light in fifteen minutes. The dawn comes on swiftly in Africa.
He touched Elsa's cheek to wake her, and immediately she snuggled against him. He realized that she must have been feigning sleep for some time. She had come awake so secretively that he had not realized it. Since then she had been lying against him there savouring their intimate contact, just as he had been doing.
"Is the leopard still there?' she asked, a breath of a whisper very close to his ear.
"Don't know,' he answered as softly. It was almost two hours since he had last heard it feeding. Perhaps it had left already. 'Be ready,' he warned her.
She straightened mi her chair and leant forward to where the rifle was propped in the forked rest. Although they were no longer touching, he felt very close to her and his arm tingled with the flow of returning blood which her head on his shoulder had impeded.
The light strengthened. Vaguely he could make out the open window through the foliage of the ebony tree. He blinked his eyes and stared into it. The outline of the branch formed out of the gloom. The branch appeared bare, and he felt the swoop of disappointment for her. The leopard was gone.
He turned his head slowly to tell her so, but he never took his eyes off the branch. He checked the words on his lips and stared harder, feeling the tiny ants of excitement crawl along his nerve ends. The outline of the branch was harder, but it was strangely thickened and misshapen.
Now he could just make out the blob of the dangling impala carcass. Most of it had been devoured. It was a ravaged bundle of bared bones and torn skin, but there was Pe something else hanging from the branch, a long snakelike ribbon. He could not decide what it was, until it curled and swung lazily, and then he realized.
"The tail, the leopard's tail.' Like the hidden creature in the puzzle picture, the whole jumped into focus.
The leopard was still draped on the branch, lying flat, its neck outstretched. Its chin was propped against the rough bark. It was sluggish with the weight of meat in its belly, too lazy to move from its perch. Only its long tail swung below.
He felt Elsa stiffen beside him as she also made out the shape of the leopard. He reached across gently to restrain her. The light was still too poor; they must wait it out. As he touched her arm, he felt the tension in her through his fingertips. She seemed to vibrate like the strings of a violin lightly touched with the bow.
The light bloomed. The shape of the leopard hardened. Its hide turned to buttery gold, studded with black rosettes. Its tail swung gently like a metronome set to its slowest beat. It lifted its head slightly and pricked its ears. The light caught its eyes, a flare of yellow, like a distant flash of sheet lightning. It looked towards them and blinked sleepily in regal indolence, so beautiful that Shasa felt his chest squeezed for breath.
It was time to make the kill. He touched Elsa, a light imperative tap on her upper arm. She settled down behind the telescopic sight of the rifle.
Shasa braced himself for the shot and stared at the leopard, willing the bullet into its heart, hoping to see it topple and tumble lifeless from the high branch.
The seconds drew out, each of them a separate age. The shot did not come.
The leopard rose to its full height, standing easily erect on the narrow branch. It stretched, arching its back deeply, digging its extended claws into the bark.
"Now!' Shasa commanded her silently. 'Shoot it now!" The leopard yawned. Its pink tongue curled out between the gaping fangs. Its thin black lips drew back into a fierce rictus.
"Now!' With telepathic effort Shasa tried to force her to make the shot. He dared not reinforce the command with a word or touch for fear that he disturb her concentration in the very act of firing.
The leopard straightened and flicked its tail over its back. Then, without further warning, it launched itself into flight and dropped from the branch twenty feet to the soft mulched floor of the forest. It was a leap so controlled and graceful that there was no sound as it landed. The undergrowth swallowed it instantly.
They sat for almost a minute in total silence. At last Elsa set the safety-catch with a click and lowered the unfired rifle and turned her head towards him. In the dawn fight, the tears shone like seed pearls on the long curled lashes of her lower lids. 'He was so beautiful,' she whispered.
"I could not kill him, not today, not on this day." He understood instantly. This day was their day, their very first day together as lovers. She had declined to desecrate it.
"I dedicate the leopard to you,' she said.
"You do me too much honour,' he replied, and kissed her. Their embrace was strangely innocent, almost childlike, devoid as yet of sexual passion. It was a thing of the spirit rather than of the body. There would be time for that later, all the time in the world, but not today, not on this blessed day.
Sean had made a miraculous recovery from his malaria and was waiting eagerly at the boma gate to welcome the returning hunters. The reputation of a safari company was built upon the quality of trophies it produced for its clients, especially for its important clients.
As the Toyota pulled up he glanced hopefully into the back and his mouth tightened with disappointment. He spoke first to M
atatu, and the little Ndorobo tracker shook his head gloomily. 'The devil came late and left early." 'I'm sorry, signora.' Sean turned to her, and handed her down from the truck.
"That is hunting,' she murmured, and he had never seen her so philosophical before. Usually she was as angry and as impatient with failure as he was.
"Your shower is ready, hot as you like it. Breakfast will be waiting as soon as you have cleaned up." The rest of the party were full of condolences when Shasa and Elsa appeared in the dining-tent, both of them showered and dressed in freshly laundered and crisply ironed khaki. Shasa was shaved and redolent of aftershave lotion.
"Bad luck, Pater. So sorry, signora,' they chorused, and were puzzled that the couple looked smug and self-satisfied and fell on their breakfast with as much gusto as if there were a world-record leopard in the skinning-shed.
"We can continue our meeting after breakfast,' Garry suggested over coffee.
"And I'll renew the baits this morning.' Sean came in. 'Matatu says the leopard was never alarmed or spooked. We can try again tonight. This time I'll hunt with you, signora. It takes the touch of the master." Instead of accepting the suggestions immediately, Elsa glanced across at Shasa and then lowered her eyes demurely to her coffee-cup.
"Well, actually,' Shasa began, 'to tell the truth, we rather thought, that is, Elsa and 1, rather Signora Pignatelli and 1...' As Shasa floundered for words, all three of his brood stared at him in astonishment. Was this the master of savoir-faire? Was this Mr. Cool himself speaking?
"Your father has promised to show me the Victoria Falls,' Elsa came to his rescue, and Shasa looked relieved and rallied gamely.
"We'll take the Beechcraft,' he agreed briskly. 'Signora Pignatelli has never seen the falls. This seems like a good opportunity."
The other members of the family recovered from their confusion as rapidly as Shasa had. 'That's a lovely idea,' Isabella enthused. 'It's the most awe-inspiring spectacle, signora. You'll adore it." 'It's only an hour's flight,' Garry nodded. 'You could have lunch at the Vic Falls Hotel and be back here for tea." 'And you can still be ready to go into the leopard-hide at four this afternoon,' Sean agreed, and waited expectantly for agreement from his client.
Once again, Elsa glanced at Shasa, and he drew a deep breath. 'Actually, we may stay over at the Vic Falls Hotel for a day or two." Slowly various degrees of comprehension dawned on the three young faces.
"Quite right. You'll need time,' Isabella recovered first. 'You'll want to walk in the rainforest, perhaps take a raft trip down the gorge below the falls." 'Bella is right; you'll need three or four days. So many interesting things to do and see." 'That, Garry old boy, is the understatement of the week,' Sean drawled, and both Garry and Isabella glared at him furiously.
In the cool clean air, not yet sullied by the smoke of the bush fires of the late winter season, the spray cloud of the Victoria Falls was visible at sixty miles distance. It rose two thousand feet into the sky, a silver mountain as brilliant as an alp of snow.
Shasa shed altitude as they approached. Ahead of them the great Zambezi glinted in the sun, broad and tranquil, studded by its islands on which the forests of graceful ivory nut palms stood giraffe-necked.
Then the main gorge opened beneath them and they peered down in wonder as they watched the great river, well over a mile wide, tumble over the sheer edge of the chasm, and fall three hundred and fifty feet in a welter of foaming waters and blown spray. Along the brink of the chasm, black castles of rock split the flow of the river. Over it all towered the immense spray-cloud which was shot through with rainbows of astonishing colour.
Below the falls the entire flood of the river, a staggering thirty-eight thousand cubic feet a second, was trapped between vertical cliffs of rock and charged, raging at this restraint, into the narrow throat of the gorge.
Shasa banked the aircraft into a tight right-hand turn, pointing one wing into the abyss, so that Elsa could gaze down with her view unobstructed.
With each circuit he allowed the Beechcraft to drop lower until they were in danger of being engulfed by the splendid chaos of rock and water. The silver leaping spray blew over the canopy, blinding them for an instant before they burst once more into the sunlight and the rainbows garlanded the sky around them.
Shasa landed at the small private airfield of Sprayview on the outskirts of the village, and taxied to the hard stand. He switched off the engines, and turned to Elsa. The wonder of it was still in her eyes, and her expression was solemn with an almost religious awe.
"Now you have worshipped in the cathedral of Africa,' Shasa told her softly. 'The one place that truly embodies all of the grandeur and mystery and savagery of this continent."
They were fortunate enough to find the Livingstone Suite at the hotel vacant.
The building was in the style and dimensions of a bygone era. The walls were thick and the rooms immense, but cool and comfortable.
The suite was decorated with prints of the drawings that the old explorer Thomas Baines had made of the falls only a few years after David Livingstone first discovered them. From the windows of their sitting-room they looked across the gorge and the railway bridge that spanned it. The steelwork of the arched bridge seemed delicate as lace, and the entire structure was light and graceful as the wing of an eagle in flight.
They left the suite and wandered down the pathway to the brink of the gorge and walked hand in hand through the rainforest, where the spray fell in an eternal soaking rain and the vegetation was green and luxuriant. The rock trembled beneath their feet, and the air was filled with the thunder of the falling waters. The spray soaked their clothing and their hair, and ran down their faces, and they laughed together with the joy of it.
They followed the rim of the gorge downstream, out of the spray-cloud. The bright sunshine dried their hair and clothing almost as swiftly as the spray had drenched them. They found a rocky perch on the very edge and sat side-by side, dangling their legs over the terrifying chasm while the mad waters churned into green whirlpools far below.
"Look!' Shasa cried, and pointed upwards as a small bird of prey stooped out of the sun and fell on whistling knife-blade wings into the flock of black swifts that swirled along the cliff face below them.
"A Taita falcon,' Shasa exulted. 'One of the rarest birds in Africa." The falcon struck one of the -swifts in flight, killing it instantly in a burst of feathers. Then, binding to its prey, it fell into the void and disappeared from their view in the gloom far below.
That evening they dined on steaks of crocodile-tail that tasted like lobster, but when they went up to the suite they were suddenly both shy and nervous. Shasa drank a Cognac in the sitting-room. When finally he went through into the bedroom, Elsa was already propped up on the pillows. Her hair was down on the shoulders of her lace nightdress, and it was thick and black and glossy.
Shasa was overcome by a sense of panic. He was no longer young and there had been one or two occasions recently with other women which had shaken his confidence.
She smiled and lifted her arms to him in invitation. He need not have worried. She managed him as no other we ever had. In the morning, when they awoke in each other's arms, the sun was streaming in through the high windows.
She sighed and smiled with a slow and languorous contentment and said: "My man.' And kissed him.
Their illicit honeymoon drew out from one day to the next. They did things together, silly little things for which for many years Shasa had had neither the time nor the inclination.
They slept late each morning and then spent the rest of it loafing in their swimming-costurnes beside the pool. They read for hours in companionable silence, stretched out in the sunlight. At intervals, they anointed each other with sun-tan oil, making it a fine excuse to touch and examine each other in leisurely detail.
Elsa was lean and smooth and tanned. The condition and tone of her muscle and skin were the rewards for endless hours of aerobics and callisthenics and beauty care. She was obviously pro
ud of her body. Shasa came to share that pride as he compared her to the other semi-naked bodies sunning themselves under the msasa trees on the green lawns.
