Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  There were two naked Matabele boys with the herd.

  They were delighted whep Craig spoke to them in their own language. They stuffed the cheap candy that he had brought with him for JOst such a meeting into their cheeks, and chattered without inhibition.

  Yes, there were thirty families living on King's Lynn now, and each family had its herd of goats the finest goats in Matabeleland, they boasted through sticky lips, and under the trees a homed old billy mounted a young nanny with a vigorous humping of his back. "See!" cried the herd boys "they breed with a will. Soon we will have more goats than any of the other families."

  "What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?" Craig asked.

  "Gone! they told him proudly. "Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution." They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.

  Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and jewelled sun birds Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carcasses with relish. Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.

  The herd boys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the overwhelming affection for these people.

  They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.

  He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King's Lynn. The lawns had died from lack of attention, and the goats had been in t -le flower-beds. Even at this distance, Craig could see the main house was deserted. Windows were broken, leaving unsightly gaps like missing teeth, and most of the asbestos sheets had been stolen from the roof and the roof-timbers were forlorn and skeletal against the sky. The roofing sheets had been used to build ramshackle squatters" shacks down near the old cattlepens.

  Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters" encampment. There were half a dozen families living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.

  "I see you, old father." Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.

  "They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man's cattle." The old man spat into the fire. "The only ones with motorcars are the government ministers.

  They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything costs five times more sugar and salt and soap everything." During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.

  "We cannot afford cattle," the old man explained, "so we run goats. Goats!" He spat again into the fire and watched his phlegm sizzle. "GoA! Like dirt-eating Shana." His tribal hatred boiled, ll his spittle.

  Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind's eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like tanned leather and impossibly green Ballantyne eyes, standing before him.

  "Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!" However, the veranda was littered with rubble and bird droppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.

  He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge elephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig's great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s.

  Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King's Lynn. Old grandpa Bawu had touched them each time he passed, so that there had been a polished spot on the yellow ivory. Now there were only the holes in the masonry from which the bolts holding the ivory had been torn. The only family relics he had inherited and still owned were the collection of leather bound family journals, the laboriously handwritten records of his ancestors from the arrival of his great-great-grandfather in Africa over a hundred years before. The tusks would complement the old books. He would search for them, he promised himself. Surely such rare treasures must be traceable.

  He went into the derelict house. The shelving and built-in cupboards and floorboards had been stripped out by the squatters in the valley for firewood, the window, panes used as targets by small black boys with slingshots.

  The books, the portrait photographs from the walls, the carpets and heavy furniture of Rhodesian teak were all gone. The homestead was a shell, but a sturdy shell. With an open palm Craig slapped the walls that great-greatandfather Zouga Ballantyne had built of hand-hewn gr stone and mortar that had had almost a hundred years to cure to adamantine hardness. His palm made a solid ringing tone. It would take only a little imagination and a deal of money to transform the shell into a magnificent home once again.

  Craig left the house and climbed the kopje behind it to the walled family cemetery that lay under the msasa trees beneath the rocky crest.

  There was grass growing up between the headstones. The cemetery had been neglected but not vandalized, as had many of the other monuments left from the colonial era.

  Craig sat on the edge of his grandfather's grave and said, "Hello, Bawu. I'm back," and started as he almost heard the old man's voice full of mock scorn speaking in his mind.

  "Yes, every time you bum your arse you come running back here. What happened this time?"

  "I dried up, Bawu," he answered the accusation aloud and then was silent. He sat for a long time and very slowly he felt the tumult within him begin to subside a little.

  "The place is in a hell of a mess, Bawu," he spoke again, and the little blue, headed lizard on the old man's headstone scuttled away at the sound of his voice. "The tusks are gone from the veranda, and they are running goats on your best grass." Again he was silent, but now he was beginning to calculate and scheme. He sat for nearly an hour, and then stood up.

  "Bawu, how would you like it if I could move the goats off your pasture?" he asked, and walked back down the hill to where he had left the Volkswagen.

  t was a little b4ore five o'clock when he drove back into town. The estate agency and auctioneering floor opposite the Standard Bank was still open for business.

  The sign had even been repainted in scarlet, and as soon as Craig entered, he recognized the burly red-faced auctioneer in khaki shorts and short-sleeved, open-necked shirt.

  "So you didn't take the gap, like the rest of us did, Jock," Craig greeted jock Daniels.

  "Taking the gap, was the derogatory expression for All emigrating. Out of 250,000 white Rhodesians, almost 150,000 had taken the gap since the beginning of hostilities, and most of those had left since the war had been lost and the black government of Robert Mugabe had taken control.

  Jock stared at him. "Craig!" he exploded. "Craig Mellow!" He took Craig's hand in a horny brown paw. "No, I stayed, but sometimes it gets hellish lonely. But you've done well, by God you have. They say in the papers that you have made a million out of that book. People here could hardly believe it. Ol
d Craig Mellow, they said, fancy Craig Mellow of all people."

  "Is that what they said?" Craig's smile stiffened, and he took his hand back.

  "Can't say I liked the book myself." Jock shook his head.

  "You made all the blacks look like bloody heroes but that's what they like overseas, isn't it? Black is beautiful that's what sells books, hey?"

  "Some of my reviewers called me a racist," Craig murmured.

  "You can't keep all the people happy all of the time." Jock wasn't listening. "Another thing, Craig, why did you have to make out that Mr. Rhodes was a queer?" Cecil Rhodes, the father of the white settlers, had been dead for eighty years, but the old-timers still called him Mr. Rhodes.

  "I gave the reasons in the book," Craig tried to placate him.

  "He was a great man, Craig, but nowadays it's the fashion for you young people to tear down greatness like mongrels snapping at the heels of a lion." Craig could see that Jock was warming to his subject, and he had to divert him.

  "How about a drink, Jock?" he asked, and Jock paused.

  His rosy cheeks and swollen purple nose were not solely the products of the African sun.

  "Now, you're making sense." Jock licked his lips. "It's been a long thirsty day. just let me lock up the shop."

  "If I fetched a bottle, we could drink it here and talk privately." The last of Jock's antagonism evaporated. "Damn good idea. The bottle store has a few bottles of Dimple Haig left and get a bucket of ice while you are about it." They sat in Jock's tiny cubicle of an office and drank the good whisky out of cheap thick tumblers. Jock Daniels" mood mellowed perceptibly.

  "I didn't leave, Craig, because there was nowhere to go.

  England? I haven't been back there since the war. Trade unions and bloody weather no thanks. South Africa?

  They are going to go the same way that we did at least we've got it over and done with." He poured again from the pinch bottle. "If you do go, they let you take two hundred dollars with you. Two hundred dollars to start again when you are sixty-five years old no bloody thanks."

  "So what's life like, Jock?"

  "You know what they call an optimist here? "Jock asked.

  "It's somebody who believes that things can't get any worse." He bellowed with laughter and slapped his bare hairy thigh. "No. I'm kidding. It's not too bad. As long as you don't expect the old standards, if you keep your mouth shut and stay away from politics, you can still live a good life probably as good as. anywhere in the world."

  "The big farmers andlanchers how are they doing?"

  "They are the elite. The government has come to its senses. They've dropped all that crap about nationalizing the land. They've come to face the fact that if they are going to feed the black masses, then they need the white farmers. They are becoming quite proud of them: when they get a state visitor a communist Chinese or a Libyan minister they give him a tour of white farms; to show him how good things are looking." "What about the price of land?"

  "At the end of the war, when the blacks first took over and were shouting about taking the farms and handing them over to the masses, you couldn't give the land away." jock gargled with his whisky. "Take your family company for instance, Rholands Ranching Company that includes all three spreads: King's Lynn, Queen's Lynn and that big piece of country up in the north bordering the Chizarira Game Reserve your uncle Douglas sold the whole damned shooting match for quarter of a million dollars.

  Before the war he could have asked ten million."

  "Quarter of a million." Craig was shocked. "He gave it I , away.

  "That included all the stock prize Afrikander bulls and breeding cows, the lot," Jock related with relish. "You see, he had to get out.

  He had been a member of Smith's cabinet from the beginning and he knew that he would have been a marked man once the black government took over. He sold out to a Swiss-German consortium, and they paid him in Zurich. Old Dougie took his family, and went to Aussie. Of course, he already had a few million outside the country, so he could buy himself a nice little cattle station up in Queensland. It's us poor buggers with every.

  thing we have tied up here that had to stay."

  "Have another drink," Craig offered, and then steered Jock back to Rholands Ranching.

  "What did the consortium do with Rholands?"

  "Cunning bloody Krauts!" Jock was slurring a little by now. "They took all the stock, bribed somebody in government to give them an export permit and shipped them over the border to South Africa. I hear they sold for almost a million and a half down there. Remember, they were the very top breeding-stock, champions of champions. So they cleared over a million, and then they repatriated their profit in gold shares and made another couple of million."

  "They stripped the ranches and now they have abandoned them?" Craig asked, and Jock nodded weightily.

  "They're trying to sell the company, of course. I've got it on my books but it would take a pile of capital to restock the ranches and get them going again. Nobody is interested. Who wants to bring money into a country which is tottering on the brink? Answer me thad"

  "What is the asking price for the company?" Craig enquired airily, and Jock Daniels sobered miraculously, and fastened Craig with a beady auctioneer's eye.

  "You wouldn't be interested?" And his eye became beadier. "Did you really make a million dollars out of that book?"

  "What are they asking?" Craig repeated.

  "Two million. That's why I haven't found a buyer. Lots of the local boys would love to get their paws on that grazing but two million. Who the hell has that kind of money in this country-" "Supposing they could be paid in Zurich, would that make a difference to the price?" Craig asked.

  "Do a Shana's armpits stink! "How much difference?"

  "They might take a million in Zdrich."

  "A quarter of a million?"

  "No ways, never not in ten thousand years," jock shook his head emphatically.

  "Telephone them. Tell them the ranches are over-run with squatters, and it would cause a political boo, ha to try and move them now. Tell them they are running goats on the grazing, and in a* ear's time it will be a desert. Point "y out they will be "getting their original investment out intact. Tell them the government has threatened to seize all land owned by absentee landlords. They could lose the lot."

  "All that is true," jock grumped. "But a quarter of a million! You are wasting my time."

  "Phone them."

  "Who pays for the call?"

  "I do. You can't lose, Jock." Jock sighed with resignation. "All right, I'll call them."

  "When?"

  "Friday today no point in calling until Monday."

  "All right, in the meantime can you get me a few cans of gas? "Craig asked.

  "What do you wants gas for?"

  "I'm going up to the Chizarira. I haven't been up there for ten years. If I'm going to buy it, I'd like to look at it again."

  "I wouldn't do that, Craig. That's bandit country." IThe polite term is political dissidents."

  "They are Matabele bandits," Jock said heavily, land they'll either shoot your arse full of more holes than you can use, or they will kidnap you for ransom or both."

  "You get me some gas and I'll take the chance. I'll be back early next week to hear what your pals in Zurich have to say about the offer." t was marvelous country, still wild and untouched no fences, no cultivated lands, no buildings protected from the influx of cattle and peasant farmers by the tsetse-fly belt which ran up from the Zambezi valley into the forests along the escarpment.

  On the one side it was bounded by the Chizarira Game Reserve and on the other by the Mzolo Forest Reserve, both of which areas were vast reservoirs of wildlife. During the depression of the 1930s, old Bawu had chosen the country with care and paid sixpence an acre for it. One hundred thousand acres for two thousand five hundred rids. "Of course, it will never be cattle country," he told pou Craig once, as they camped under the wild fig trees beside a deep green pool of the Chizarira river and wa
tched the sand-grouse come slanting down on quick wings across the Ac setting sun to land on the sugar-white sandbank beneath the far bank. "The grazing is sour, and the tsetse will kill anything you try to rear here but for that reason it will always be an unspoiled piece of old Africa." The old man had used it as a shooting lodge and a retreat. He had never strung barbed, wire nor built even a shack on the ground, preferring to sleep on the bare earth under the spreading branches of the wild fig.