Stalking Ivory

by Suzanne Arruda

  “Del Cameron.”

  “Ah yes. I’ve heard of you. Some hyena trouble down in Tsavo, as I recall. Well, you’re in frontier territory and a bit too close to Abyssinia for your own good.”

  “We’re nearly a hundred miles away,” Beverly said.

  “And that’s a hundred twenty miles too close. Don’t think for a moment that being in the Protectorate is any protection here. We’re far too short staffed to patrol the entire border, and raiders have been making forays both here and to the west more frequently. I just sent part of my patrol back to Isiolo with several captives. The whole bloody thing’s gone wild since Emperor Menelik died several years ago.” He looked past them at the slaughtered elephants, as though he had just now noticed the carcasses. “I heard a shot recently. Is this your doing? Where are your permits?”

  “We didn’t shoot them,” replied Jade. “We’re photographing elephants, not killing them. We stumbled on this.” She pointed to the cow that Avery had shot as a mercy killing. “This cow was left to bleed to death. What you heard was Lord Dunbury putting her down.” Jade handed Smythe the spent cartridge she’d pocketed. “I found this. As you can see, it doesn’t match anything we’re carrying.”

  Smythe nodded and surveyed the carnage. “Poachers.”

  “Murderers, too,” added Jade. “You should see this.” She led the way to the dead man and watched while Smythe examined the body. “One of yours?” she asked.

  Smythe nodded. “Too much of his face is missing to be sure, but judging by the build and height, I think I know who it is. New recruit, very gung ho sort of lad.” He looked up at Avery and directed his questions to him. “You say you found him like this? Did you see anyone else?”

  “We found him kneeling on the ground, shot in the back of the head.” He pointed to the knee marks next to the body. “There was no one else around.”

  “So you moved the body.” Smythe’s tone was accusatory.

  “It seemed disrespectful to the man to leave him in that demeaning, groveling position,” replied Beverly.

  “It looks like an execution,” said Jade, bringing the conversation back to the crime.

  Smythe nodded. “Probably caught the poachers in the act.”

  “So these Abyssinian raiders you spoke of are poaching ivory?” Avery asked.

  “Mostly, at least around here. But slave raiding has increased as well.”

  “And why would that be?” Jade asked, her voice snappish. Smythe had all but dismissed her, which irritated her to no end.

  “Their entire system is feudal, Miss del Cameron. The emperor hands over the government of the various regions to his appointees and demands tribute from them all. But once the old emperor dies, all the governors know they’ll be replaced. So they take everything they can get and head out. That means the new regional lord has to raid and pillage to get enough goods for tribute or until he can manage to capture enough slaves to plant his fields. Others sell the slaves to North Africa, where they fetch a good price. Sometimes it takes years for them to accumulate their own wealth.”

  “And you’re suggesting that we’re in danger of being taken for slaves?” asked Jade.

  “No!” he retorted. “I’m suggesting you might get in their way and be shot.”

  Jade and the Dunburys exchanged glances. “That might explain that stray bullet today,” Beverly suggested.

  “Someone shot at you today?” Smythe asked.

  “If they did, they had bad aim,” Jade replied. “More than likely it was a shot gone wild. Perhaps your man startled them in the act.”

  “Well, chances are it was a warning shot,” Smythe concluded. “You should take the hint and move on farther south.”

  “I’m not moving anywhere unless the elephants move, and as I understand it, they won’t leave until the big rains begin,” replied Jade. “I came here to photograph them and I hit the mother lode. But we’ll keep watch for more than wild animals now.”

  “I should hope that this would prove to you just how dangerous it is for you to remain here, miss,” said Smythe.

  Jade considered the officer for a moment before she added, “Isn’t it dangerous for you to be out here with only one man backing you up?” She nodded to the lone askari standing in the shadows.

  Smythe scowled, planted his feet farther apart, and thrust out his chin. “See here, young woman. I cannot guarantee your protection if you remain. We have a lot of territory to patrol and I’m stretched far too thinly as it is. It takes weeks, months as it were, to canvass it. I left a small contingency under Lieutenant Fitzpatrick near Isiolo, but most of my company is patrolling the Somalian border. As their captain, I need to join them, so my small reconnaissance here must end as soon as I bury this chap.” He looked beyond her to Avery. “Lord Dunbury, I leave it to you to take charge of this matter and get these women out of here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll find the rest of my men and take care of the body.”

  Avery bowed slightly in a manner that could mean anything from acquiescence to merely acknowledging his suggestion.

  Jade watched Smythe march down the game trail, his lone askari tailing him. “Most curious, he didn’t really answer my question.”

  “Probably felt it was impertinent,” said Avery. “After all, he is an officer in the African Rifles. I suspect he’s immune from attack. A uniform does frighten many of the locals.”

  “It didn’t help this poor man,” Jade said as she nodded to the slain soldier. “Are they really spread that thinly?”

  “The Rifles went through a reorganization after the war,” said Avery. “I believe there really is only one regiment for the entire northern frontier, but I honestly don’t know how many companies it has. Most of these askaris saw hard service during the war. Officers, too. I’m sure it took a terrible toll on their numbers.”

  As they resumed their trek back to camp in silence, Jade wondered if Avery would insist on removing Beverly from danger. They also knew that Blaney Percival wanted a report on poaching, but the danger hadn’t seemed real to them before. Plus, she had an article for The Traveler to research, and only a month to do it before the rains set in. In any event, Jade didn’t plan to move on, but considering they each had a share in the supplies, she couldn’t very well stay on without the Dunburys or insist that they leave much of the stores behind for her. Then again, Beverly had never run from danger during the war.

  Jade smiled to herself as she recalled some of their escapades during their ambulance-driving stint with the Hackett-Lowther unit. As one of the few women’s units allowed near the front lines, they’d had many close calls driving the wounded during air raids and shellings. No, Beverly hadn’t run from the Germans’ “Big Bertha.” She wouldn’t run from a few armed raiders.

  Jade led the way through the ancient forest along antiquated trails formed by untold generations of elephants. Mount Marsabit was actually a chain of volcanic craters, and their camp lay on the western side of one crater, Gof Sokorte Guda, which housed a beautiful lake. During the dry seasons, the elephants and other wildlife clustered around the large lake and the smaller ones that circled it like ladies-in-waiting surrounding the queen. The entire mountain chain existed as a green jewel amid the blazing deserts.

  Jade took her eyes from the trail for a moment and spared a glance for the massive trees around them as they walked. Some of them sported buttresses; others, like the rarer figs, were stranglers that took hold of a smaller tree and gradually covered it, leaving a hollow core under a latticework of growth. Silver-green moss draped all the trees, and blue butterflies adorned them like living ornaments. Sweet Saint Peter’s little fishes, but it’s beautiful!

  The forest maintained a cathedral-like silence during much of the day, while the elephants lounged in the pools or enjoyed dust baths elsewhere. At night, though, Jade knew it would come alive with the tremendous cracking of branches when the elephants fed. All but four cows and one baby, she thought, and one poor soldier who won’t sit down to evening mess w
ith his comrades. She gritted her teeth, finding it hard to accept so much death and mutilation in this stunning landscape.

  Less than a quarter mile from their base camp, Jade stopped and held up a hand to signal an immediate halt. Then she put one finger to her lips for absolute silence. After turning her head to the side and listening, she pointed to the trail ahead. She mouthed the word “animal” and held out her hand, waist high, to indicate its general size.

  Avery glanced at his wife and pointed to her stomach. Beverly shook her head to say that whatever Jade heard, it wasn’t another stomach growl. Avery shrugged. Neither of them had heard anything, but both trusted Jade’s instincts. They knew leopards were nocturnal and lions rare in this isolated sanctuary, but they raised their rifles in preparation for anything. Jade continued to stare into the brush ahead and listen.

  Light filtering though the treetops teased them with patches of visibility like a game of peekaboo. Jade knew that any predator’s vision in low light would be better than hers. She watched instead for small movements indicating an ear twitch or the quivering of hindquarters, and listened for the slightest brushing of foliage.

  Gradually she filtered out the surrounding noises of their breathing and her heartbeat and concentrated on a very subtle sliding noise, as if something small was being dragged along the forest floor. A soft chirp followed.

  The faintest trace of a smile twitched Jade’s lips just before she whistled one sharp answering chirp. Immediately a sleek spotted cat bounded out of the woods and slapped at Jade’s legs.

  “Biscuit, what the thundering blazes are you doing here?”

  The slender cheetah butted his head against Jade’s thigh and chirped again. Avery and Bev lowered their rifles and released audible sighs of relief. “I might have shot him,” muttered Avery.

  Jade stroked the exotic cat’s head and back. Biscuit responded by flopping onto the ground and rolling on his back like a giant domestic tabby. Jade chuckled and obliged the cat by rubbing his muscular tummy.

  “We weren’t in any real danger, Avery, darling,” Beverly said. “Jade’s knee didn’t hurt.”

  Jade glanced up at her friend. “My shrapnel wound only hurts when it’s going to rain, Bev.”

  “And when something is trying to kill one of us. At least that’s what you told me back in Tsavo.”

  “That’s impossible, and you know it,” muttered Jade. She stifled her irritation and picked up the broken lead dangling from Biscuit’s collar. “Hmmm. That explains how he got away from Jelani. He snapped his tether.”

  “Don’t be angry with the lad,” Beverly pleaded. “He’s just a boy.”

  “I’m not angry with Jelani, but if I ever see Harry Hascombe again, I’m going to thrash him.” After being shot at and finding both a murdered askari and an elephant left to bleed to death, or die at the hands of scavengers, Jade definitely wanted to hit something, and Harry, her last season’s safari leader, seemed as good a target as any. Last June he had connived to trick her into passing on her dead fiancé’s legacy to an impostor, Roger Forster. Hascombe claimed he didn’t know the man had been a drug smuggler and a murderer, but it didn’t lessen his guilt in Jade’s eyes. She didn’t care to be lied to for any reason. Biscuit had been one of Hascombe’s pets.

  Avery, who until then had stayed out of the conversation, raised one eyebrow as an inquiry.

  “Hascombe could have trained the animal better,” Jade answered, “and he shouldn’t have abandoned the cat.”

  “He didn’t exactly abandon it, darling,” Beverly said. “He turned it over to Madeline and Neville to keep for him. After all, with his man Ruta deceased, who would be able to watch him?”

  “Quite right,” echoed Avery. “And after Hascombe decided to give up ranching and turn full-time hunter and safari leader, he couldn’t very well drag the poor beast around with him.”

  Jade arched her thick black brows and fixed her intense green eyes on Avery. He stammered and shifted his feet before replying, “Sorry, I didn’t quite mean that you are dragging Biscuit around. I meant—oh, bloody hell, I have no idea what I meant. Stop staring at me! You know I hate it when you do that. It gives me goose bumps.”

  Jade only smiled a Mona Lisa smirk. “Harry Hascombe is a lying, thieving, low-down, conniving snake in the grass.” After her dealings with him on her last safari in Tsavo, she couldn’t find one iota of respect for the man.

  “He’s not that bad a sort,” protested Beverly. “And he tried to do right by Biscuit. He couldn’t very well turn him loose. The poor creature would have wandered to some unsuspecting human and then been shot.”

  When Jade transferred her hypnotic, predatory stare to Beverly, the pretty blond Englishwoman stuck out her chin in defiance and retorted, “Anyway, who would have thought that Biscuit would take such a liking to you, Jade? He ran away from Neville and Maddy twice before they finally decided you should keep him.”

  Jade stroked the big cat and took hold of his broken tether. “Don’t forget Jelani. Biscuit seems to love Jelani.”

  As if the Kikuyu boy heard his name, twelve-year-old Jelani came running towards them, breathing heavily. “Ah, Miss Jade,” he said as he fought to catch his breath. “He found you. I’m sorry. I—”

  Jade raised her hand to cut him off in midapology. “Jelani, I’m not upset that Biscuit got loose. But I am unhappy that you chose to go trailing after him alone. You could have been hurt. You don’t know this forest.” She thought of Captain Smythe’s warnings and wondered if she should perhaps heed them for the boy’s sake. “I’m surprised Chiumbo didn’t stop you.”

  Jelani hung his head, and Jade felt a twinge of guilt for chastising the young Kikuyu. “I’m sorry, Jelani. I should know that any young warrior who could face down a witch’s hyena like you did would not be afraid to follow Biscuit or bother to wait for the headman’s permission.”

  The lad’s black eyes glowed at Jade’s reference to his encounter the previous June with a man-eating hyena that had raided his village. Never mind that Jade had already shot the beast before Jelani stuck his knife in it. Jade handed the broken lead to the boy. He took it, squared his narrow shoulders, and scolded the big cat at length in a mixture of Swahili, English, and Kikuyu. Biscuit stood by his side, his tongue lolling. When Jelani finished his diatribe, the cheetah rubbed his head against Jelani’s waist and licked his hand as if making a tacit apology for being so much trouble.

  “Let’s get back,” Jade said. “It will be dark soon and I don’t care to get eaten or shot at—again.”

  “And I’m hungry,” Beverly repeated.

  THEY DINED IN MIDAFTERNOON ON roasted bustard that had been smothered in a clay coating and baked under hot coals in a pit. When the fire-hardened clay was cracked aside, the resulting turkey-sized bird nearly fell off the bones, after having spent the day steaming in its own juices. Whole potatoes baked among the coals completed the meal. Jade couldn’t remember when she’d enjoyed a bird more. She poured a second cup of her beloved coffee and sipped it. Pure nectar! Beverly, she noted, had decided on tea again. Jade grimaced. To her, drinking tea was only a little better than swallowing warm ditch water after the fall leaves had stewed in it for a month.

  Jelani ate with Jade and the Dunburys at the trio’s insistence. Since the few remaining porters were predominately Wakamba and not interested in conversing with a Kikuyu lad, Jelani didn’t mind sacrificing the men’s tales for Jade’s company. Jade had her own reasons for keeping the boy close. She wanted him to become more than someone’s servant or porter, a man forced to eke out a living just to pay the colony’s hut tax. Her hope was for him to become a leader of his own people, one who could hold his own against the Protectorate’s bureaucracy. Even the tribe’s mundu-mugo, or spiritual healer, approved her decision. After supper, she motioned for Jelani to move closer to her kerosene lantern and handed him a children’s book of Aesop’s fables.

  “Time for a reading lesson, Jelani. Did you practice today?”

&
nbsp; “Yes, Miss Jade, but some of the words are strange to me. I tried to sound them out as you and Miss Beverly taught me, but…” He shrugged to indicate his uncertainty over his success and his general feeling of perturbation over the English language’s irregularities.

  “Read to us and we shall see.” She smiled her encouragement.

  Jelani opened the book to one of the fables and began. “‘The Crow and the Water Pitcher.’ There once was a crow who was half-dead from thirst when he saw a pitcher with some water inside. ‘Ah,’ said the crow, ‘now I shall have water and live,’ but when the crow tried to put his head into the pitcher, it would not fit, and the water was too far down for him to reach. ‘What shall I do?’ he said. ‘If I do not get a drink, I shall die.’ The crow began to…” Jelani paused and pointed to the next word. “Dee-spair?” he asked.

  “That’s very close. It is ‘despair,’” Jade said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means giving up all hope,” answered Lord Dunbury. “Something you should never do.”

  Jelani nodded. “Now the story makes sense. If the crow gives up, he will die.”

  “And did he?” Beverly asked.

  Jelani shook his head and turned back to the book. “Then the crow saw some little rocks. He picked one up and dropped it into the pitcher. He took another and another. He dropped many rocks into the pitcher. The water rose higher and higher till he could reach it with his beak. Then he could take a drink and save his life.”

  Jelani looked up and grinned at Jade. “He was a smart bird.”

  “Very,” Jade agreed. “And what is the moral of this fable?”

  Jelani recited the final line of the tale. “Little by little does the job.”

  “A good lesson,” agreed Avery, “but I should think it could also be ‘Never give up’ or, perhaps, ‘Use your brain when you’re in trouble.’”

  Jelani closed the book carefully and hugged it to his chest. “I like this book. Some of the animals are very wise and others are funny. I found another story about a wolf that chewed off its own foot to escape from a trap. Do you want to hear that one, too?”