The Diamond Frontier (Simon Fonthill Series)

by John Wilcox

  ‘Ja, that is true. But it’s a bit different around here.’

  ‘Why?’

  De Witt jerked his head backwards. ‘That last burned-out farm we passed. Did you see anything strange about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ach, you people don’t have eyes in your head. There were skeletons out in the bush, four or five of them.’

  ‘Blimey, Fanny.’ Jenkins’s face now wore an expression of extreme disquiet. ‘I saw ’em. They were sheep or cattle, weren’t they?’

  ‘No. They were human remains. BePedi, I should think, who were shot while attacking the farm. The farmers probably didn’t have time to bury them when they left, or . . .’ he gave his mirthless smile again, ‘just didn’t bother. The lions had them.’

  ‘Could have been vultures, surely,’ said Simon.

  ‘Vultures pick quite delicately. These limbs were torn apart and were quite scattered.’

  ‘Hyenas?’

  ‘One or two of the spotted variety round here, but not many. Man, those were lions, I could tell. It’s not generally realised that lions scavenge, too. The trouble is, once they get the taste for human meat, it stays with them, particularly, as you say, if they can’t outrun game. This war with the bePedi has left many bodies - and a lot of wounded men. Back there they ate carrion. But once they have attacked a live human they lose their fear and will do so again.’

  They rode on in silence for a while, and Simon noticed that Jenkins was now looking around him with great care and fingering the stock of his rifle in its saddle holster. The two of them had faced many dangers, and so far two things only had produced fear in the little Welshman: the sea and heights. Now, it was clear, a third had been added to the list.

  After a while Jenkins spoke. ‘Hey, Fanny, I can’t spot any signs of these lions, see. Are you sure you’re right about them?’

  The Boer silently pointed to a sandy patch of soil to their right. The imprint of large pug marks was clearly defined, each showing indentations for the four claw digits and one for the heel of the pad. De Witt drew his rifle and pointed to them but did not dismount. ‘They’re quite fresh,’ he said. ‘He was probably watching us as we approached.’

  ‘Oh bloody ’ell,’ exclaimed Jenkins.

  De Witt gazed about him keenly. ‘Pity we didn’t camp back at that farm,’ he mused, ‘but it was too early.’ He turned to Simon. ‘We are losing the light and it is not safe to ride on. I think we camp here. But make big fire, eh?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Simon

  They had only one tent, a low bivouac just big enough for Simon and Jenkins. De Witt slept in the open. Simon and the Boer foraged for dry wood while Jenkins stood watch with his rifle, and then the three men, all strangely silent, ate their rations by the side of the fire they had kindled. De Witt pulled his sleeping bag close to the fire, his rifle by his side.

  ‘I think we should have a watch system,’ said Simon.

  ‘Not necessary,’ said de Witt. ‘This fire will keep the big cats away.’ He slipped into his sleeping bag. ‘Good night, English.’

  Simon and Jenkins exchanged glances and then shrugged shoulders and crept underneath the flimsy protection of their canvas.

  ‘It don’t seem right, bach sir, old Fanny sleepin’ out there with them lions about,’ said Jenkins, his eyes wide.

  ‘I agree, though this tent isn’t much protection if they do decide to come sniffing around. But look, I’ll lie awake for the first couple of hours or so and then wake you. We can keep watch that way.’

  Simon awoke with a start perhaps some two hours later, cursing that he had dropped off to sleep. The comfort of the sleeping bag and the long hours in the saddle had inevitably prevented him from staying awake. He looked at his watch, which showed just after midnight. He had no idea what had woken him but a glance proved that Jenkins was wide awake also.

  ‘What was it?’ whispered Simon.

  ‘Don’t know. I’ve just woken up. Some sort of noise, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll just take a look. It’s probably nothing. You stay here.’ Simon crawled out of his sleeping bag, pulled on his boots, picked up his rifle and undid the strings of the tent opening. Poking his head through, he noted the sleeping form of de Witt and the fire guttering dangerously low. The sky was richly patterned with stars and the night was still, unusually still, as though the darkness that surrounded them was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. Simon lay there for a moment, half in and half out of the tent, resting on his elbows, his rifle by his side, listening and looking. The silence slipped around him like a heavy cloak, resting on him oppressively. He felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

  ‘It’s out there.’ De Witt’s whisper was so low it could hardly be heard, but it made Simon start. The Boer’s tone was unemotional and betrayed no fear. ‘It’s somewhere to my right. I can hear it breathing. Don’t want to slip out of my bag in case that prompts it to spring, but I’ve got my rifle. Can you reach to throw a log on the fire? Move slowly. A sudden movement might make it attack. The fire’s the answer, but the damned thing’s nearly out.’

  Slowly, his eyes wide in an attempt to penetrate the darkness, Simon picked up his rifle, cocked it, and then began to crawl on his elbows through the tent opening towards where they had left a small pile of kindling wood near the fire. His feet free, he inched his way nearer to the pile, his belly pressed close to the ground, his eyes desperately trying to focus into the blackness that lay beyond the flickering pool of light cast by the fire. Was it his imagination, or could he smell a strange, musky odour in the velvet stillness? Either way, he knew he was frightened, very frightened.

  When it came, the attack was blindingly quick in its action and frightening in its ferocity. The lion sprang from the edge of the small clearing, exactly where de Witt had indicated, its shape just a blur at first by the light of the fire’s embers. Then Simon had a momentary impression of a huge, fully maned head and staring amber eyes. But if the lion was quick, de Witt was quicker. Still in his sleeping bag, he rolled to one side and fired his rifle into the living mass that landed across his legs and feet. Furious at missing its prey, and half blinded by the flash of the rifle, the lion turned its head and Simon glimpsed the yellow fangs of the beast as they sought the throat of the Afrikaner. On one knee, Simon raised his rifle instinctively and fired into the great head a few paces from him. The bullet penetrated the brain and the beast convulsed for a second and then lay still, half across de Witt.

  ‘Quick,’ gasped the Boer, ‘reload. My gun’s underneath the lion and I can’t get it. These animals come in pairs. There’s another one out there. Behind you, I think. Quickly now.’

  As though on cue, a deep-throated growl came from out of the blackness. In less than a second, it had swollen into a roar of frightening proportions - the most terrifying sound that Simon had ever heard. It came, as de Witt had predicted, from the edge of the bush immediately behind Simon, and from very near. Simon had just half a second to appreciate the beasts’ cleverness in planning their attack from different directions - and at exactly that moment, he realised that he had no more ammunition. His cartridge belt lay, with his Colt revolver, by the side of his bedroll. Both he and de Witt, the latter still trapped underneath the first lion, were defenceless.

  Immediately, Simon plunged for the tent opening. The move undoubtedly saved his life, for the second lion chose exactly that moment to launch itself at the half-erect being so near to it. In mid-air the beast realised that its prey had moved and it twisted round so that it skidded as it hit the ground, paws clawing into the sand to change direction for another attack. As its head swung round, Jenkins’s bullet crashed into the lion’s shoulder, the .45 calibre Boxer slug spreading on impact to smash bone and sinew.

  Even then, however, the animal was not finished. Paws scrabbling, it raised its head to launch another spring, and Simon, hunched in the tent’s opening, caught a glimpse of a snarling, wide-open mouth. Looking straight into the l
ion’s eyes, he saw the malevolence there, framed by the magnificent mane. Man and beast regarded each other for perhaps two seconds - long enough for Simon to realise that he was as good as dead but just time enough for Jenkins to slip another round into the breech and fire again, at point-blank range. The second shot took the lion exactly between the eyes. Slowly - incredibly slowly, it seemed to Simon as he watched - the beast’s head sank to the ground, the terrible eyes still open, glaring defiance.

  A strange silence returned to the clearing, suddenly broken by a crackle from the fire as a last brand settled into the red ashes. Simon realised that his body was trembling as he knelt at the tent opening. Jenkins lay at his side, his rifle poking under the skirt of the tent, his sweat-streaked head resting on one side across the rifle stock and his eyes closed. Eventually the Welshman spoke. ‘I’d rather fight the savage Zulus an’ the Pathans all at the same time than face these wild beasts again, I’ll tell you,’ he whispered.

  ‘Thanks, 352,’ said Simon. ‘You’re a bloody marvel, you really are.’ He realised that his voice was hoarse and wavering.

  ‘Will somebody get this bloody animal off me,’ growled de Witt. ‘It’s crushing my legs.’

  ‘Sorry, Faan.’ Simon, still trembling, got to his feet, and he and a bootless Jenkins, together using their rifles, were eventually able to lever the lion off the Boer.

  ‘You hurt?’ queried Simon.

  ‘No. Lucky he fell across my legs, mainly with his hind quarters.’ The big man slowly stood erect and immediately slipped another round into his rifle. ‘My pride’s a bit wounded, though. I should have realised that these two weren’t going to let a dying fire stop them from hunting.’ He looked across at Simon and held out his hand. ‘I’m grateful to you, English. You kept your nerve and shot true when you had to. As did 352 here. Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, think nothing of it, boyo,’ said Jenkins, smoothing his moustache. ‘I always shoot lions on a Tuesday.’ He looked out into the surrounding darkness. ‘Any more like this out there then, is there, Fanny?’

  ‘No. Almost certainly not. But let’s build this fire up anyway. It’s my fault for letting it go out. They would never have attacked if it was blazing away.’ They all set to and threw more wood on the still-hot ashes, so that the fire immediately blazed up and illuminated the clearing. De Witt then turned and knelt down by the lion that had nearly killed him, before examining the other. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘They are badly out of condition.’ He pointed with the toe of his boot to where the ribs of the animals were clearly defined. ‘And look here. This one’s got a badly deformed leg, probably broken in a fight and not healed properly, and the other one has this hind leg clearly shorter than the other. They could not have hunted. That’s why they turned to man-slaying. They would have finished off those bePedi skeletons we saw back there. Shame really.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Jenkins. ‘Me ’eart is fair breakin’.’

  The three were now far too wide awake to try for sleep in what was left of the darkness, so they sat drinking tea and whisky around the fire. De Witt explained that the two lions were young males, probably brothers, who would have been expelled by their pride and who had sustained their injuries before they had had time to found families of their own. Forced to live alone on the plain, with no lioness to hunt for them, and unable to run down fleet-footed prey themselves, they had become man-eating outcasts.

  ‘Should we try to bury the carcasses?’ asked Simon.

  ‘No. Vultures and other scavengers will clean their bones pretty damn soon.’

  ‘Good. I don’t want to waste time. Let’s get on before sun-up.’

  They had not reached the Steelport River at the end of the next day, although de Witt said they could not be far from it, when they rode up to a farm which was still inhabited, although it looked more like a fortress. The sun was sinking and a group of men were herding cattle into a large pen enclosed by a thick stone wall. One side of the pen was formed by the farmhouse itself. The windows of the house had been bricked up, with apertures left as rifle slits. The little homestead housed fourteen men, and the leader, a grim, bearded patriarch, was glad to hear that the lions were dead. They had been standing guard each night to protect their cattle against them. He explained that all the women had been sent into Lydenburg while they defended their property against the bePedi, who had been ravaging the surrounding country.

  ‘We fought them off, thanks be to God,’ he said, ‘but they will come again.’ He nodded to Simon. ‘Your General thinks he can defeat them, but no one can. We just farm here as best we can and defend our homes when they attack. Others have gone, but we shall never leave because it is our land, but it is becoming more and more difficult.’

  The visitors enquired after Mendoza’s farm, but the patriarch had not heard of him, although he thought there were several farmers of Portuguese extraction from Mozambique who were trying to scratch a living in the face of the bePedi further up the Steelport Valley. The river itself, he explained, was now only two miles or so away. Simon also asked if there was news of Wolseley’s advance: had he reached Lydenburg yet, or even penetrated further? But the Boers had no information.

  As they rode on the next day, Simon jerked his head back to the farm and asked de Witt, ‘Is it, in fact, their land?’

  The big man looked surprised. ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘But weren’t the bePedi here first?’

  ‘Ach, yes, I suppose so. There was a king called Thulare who set up his capital in the valley up ahead in about 1800 and his regiments raided all over the place: south to the Vaal, west to the Magaliesberg and north to the Soutpansberg. They built up a thriving trade in ivory, horn, skins and even metal goods but they also fought with the Swazis, who are a bit further east from here. They became traditional foes, but the Zulu impis also raided up here from time to time.’ He gave his grim smile. ‘Man, this has never been a quiet place. Then we, the Boers, trekked up here in the middle of the century and established a community around about Lydenburg.’ He gestured to the low green hills which now billowed up from the plateau. ‘It’s good farming country around here. You can see that—’

  He was interrupted by Jenkins, who reined in and lifted his hand. ‘Listen.’

  Nothing at first, then, in the distance, the faint but unmistakable sound of gunfire, coming from ahead of them and slightly to the left, over the gentle wave of hills.

  ‘Is it the General?’ asked Jenkins.

  ‘I think not.’ Simon shook his head. ‘It’s too far away to be certain, but that doesn’t sound like Martini-Henry firing to me. And there’s no cannon. Could be just a skirmish, though. Let’s find out.’

  They kicked their horses into a canter and rode towards the distant spluttering of musketry, taking care, as they neared its source, not to be silhouetted against the sky. Eventually they reached a copse of stunted trees which gave cover for their horses and allowed them to crawl through the underbrush and look down on a small valley, which cradled a farmhouse and a stretch of the silver Steelport that wound round the building to disappear behind another hill. The farm had a small stone enclosure extending from its walls, rather like the property where the three men had spent the night. Behind the walls a handful of men were maintaining a steady fire on their attackers, who were firing from the vantage points of rocks which climbed the hill. Simon had invested in an old pair of field glasses before he left Kimberley, and he now focused them on the scene below.

  ‘Looks as though they could be bePedi attacking,’ he murmured. He turned to de Witt. ‘Do they look like Zulus - stripped down and with cow tails tied to their calves?’

  ‘Ja. Exactly like that. Here. Let me see.’

  Simon handed him the binoculars.

  ‘Ja. They are bePedi all right. And, of course, they’ve got guns. They’re trying to get the cattle.’

  There were a handful of beasts corralled within the enclosure, but more - although perhaps only forty or so - had already been captured by the a
ttackers, for they were being looked after by a couple of tribesmen higher up the hill, on the edge of another copse of trees.

  Simon took back the binoculars and concentrated on the defenders. There were only six of them, not enough to man all of the walls sufficiently well, and as they watched, they could clearly see the bePedi crawling from rock to rock and getting nearer to the enclosure. It would not be long before they were close enough to rush the defenders and overwhelm them. He could see assegais glittering down below.

  He turned to his companions.

  ‘How many are attacking, would you say?’

  ‘Forty or fifty maybe,’ said Jenkins.

  The Boer nodded in agreement. ‘Man, it’s a hell of a lot for us to take on,’ he said. ‘These blacks are good fighters - as good as the Zulus. Three against fifty in the open are not good odds, particularly as they’ve got rifles.’

  Simon frowned behind the lenses. ‘Yes, but are they good shots? It doesn’t look as though they’ve hit anything yet.’

  ‘Beggin’ your pardon, bach sir, that’s not true.’ Jenkins was pointing to the far corner of the enclosure, where a figure could be seen, obviously tending to another lying on the ground.

  Simon swung the glasses round. ‘You say this is good farming land, Faan?’

  ‘Ja. Of course.’

  ‘Then why isn’t any of the land cultivated around the farm? And why haven’t they got more cattle? There can’t be more than fifty beasts in that herd altogether. It seems very strange.’

  ‘Well, bach sir,’ said Jenkins, wiping his moustache with the back of his hand, ‘strange or not, if we don’t get down there and start a bit of shootin’, like, there isn’t goin’ to be any of them chaps left in the farmyard to ’erd the bleedin’ cattle anyway.’

  ‘He’s right, man,’ grunted the Boer. ‘If we have to go at all, let’s mount and ride down among the Kaffirs now. At least we should be able to scatter them and get behind the wall and add our guns to the others down there.’