Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  At noon, Craig found the shade of an acacia, and slept through the siesta as they all did. Then, refreshed, he worked through the afternoon until the ringing tone of the gong of railway-line suspended from the branch of a jacaranda tree below the homestead sounded the hour and the cry of "Shayile! It has struck!" was flung from gang to gang and they trooped back up the hills.

  Then Craig washed off the sweat and dust in the concrete reservoir behind the cottage, ate a hasty meal and by the time darkness fell, he was sitting at the cheap deal table in the cottage in the hissing white light of the gas lantern with a sheet of paper in front of him and a ballpoint pen in his hand, transported into the other world of his imagination. Some nights he wrote through until long after midnight, and then at four-thirty was out in the dewy not-yet dawn again, feeling alert and vigorous.

  The sun darkened his skin and bleached the cowlick of hair over his eyes, the had physical work toned up his muscles and tougheneciphis stump so he could walk the fences all day without discomfort. There was so little time to spare, that his cooking was perfunctory and the bottle of whisky remained in his bag with the seal unbroken so that he grew lean and hawk-faced.

  Then one evening as he parked the Land-Rover under the jacaranda trees and started up towards the cottage, he was forced to stop. The aroma of roasting beef and potatoes was like running into a brick wall.

  The saliva spurted from under his tongue and he started forward again, suddenly ravenous.

  In the tiny makeshift kitchen a gaunt figure stood over the wood fire. His hair was soft and white as cotton wool, and he looked up accusingly as Craig stood in the doorway.

  "Why did you not send for me?" he demanded in Sindebele. "Nobody else cooks on Kingi Lingi."

  "Joseph!" Craig cried, and embraced him impetuously.

  The old man had been Bawu's cook for thirty years. He could lay a formal banquet for fifty guests, or whip up a hunters" pot on a bush fire. Already there was bread baking in the tin trunk he had improvised as an oven and he had gleaned a bowl of salad from the neglected garden.

  Joseph extricated himself from Craig's embrace, a little ruffled by this breach of etiquette. "Nkosana," Joseph still used the diminutive address, "your clothes were filthy and your bed was unmade," he lectured Craig sternly. "We have worked all day to tidy the mess you have made." Only then did Craig notice the other man in the kitchen.

  Xapa-lola," he laughed delightedly, and the houseboy grinned and bobbed with pleasure. He was at work with the heavy black smoothing-iron filled with glowing coals.

  All Craig's clothes and bed4 men had been washed and were being ironed to crisp perfection. The walls of the cottage had been washed down and the floor polished to a gloss. Even the brass taps on the sink shone like the buttons on a marine's dress uniform.

  "I have made a list of the things we need," Joseph told Craig. "They will do for the time being, but it is unfitting that you should live like this in a hovel. Nkosi Bawu, your grandfather, would have disapproved. "Joseph the cook had a definite sense of style. "Thus, I have sent a message to my senior wife's uncle who is a master thatcher, and told him to bring his eldest son who is a bricklayer, and his nephew, who is a fine carpenter. They will be here tomorrow to begin repairing the damage that these dogs have done to the big house. As for the gardens, I know a man-" and he ticked off on his fingers what he considered necessary to restore King's Lynn to some sort of order. "Thus we will be ready to invite thirty important guests to Christmas dinner, like we used to in the old days. Now Nkosana, go and wash. Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes." With the home paddocks securely fenced and the work on the restoration of the outbuildings and main homestead well in hand, Craig could at last begin the vital step of restocking. He summoned Shadrach and Joseph, and gave King's Lynn into their joint care during his absence. They accepted the responsibility gravely. Then Craig drove to the airport, left the Land-Rover in the car park and boarded the commercial flight southwards.

  For the next three weeks he toured the great cattle stud ranches of Northern Transvaal, the province of South Africa whose climate and conditions most closely resembled those of Matabeleland. The purchases of blood cattle were not transactions that could be hurried. Each was preceded by days of discussion with the seller, and study of the beasts themselves, while Craig enjoyed the traditional hospitality of the Afrikaner country folk. His hosts were men whose ancestors had trekked northwards from the Cape of Good Hope, drawn by their oxen, and had lived all their lives close to their animals. So while Craig purchased their stock, he *rew upon their accumulated wisdom and experience and came from each transaction with his own knowledge and understanding of cattle immensely enriched. All he learned reinforced his desire h to follow Bawu's successful experiments wit cross-breeding the indigenous Afrikaner strain, known for its hardiness and disease- and drou lit-resistance, with the quicker yielding Santa Gertrudis strain. He bought young cows that had been artificially inseminate and were we in ca e pedigree from famous blood-lines, and laboured through the documentation and inspection and inoculation and quarantine and insurance that were necessary before they could be permitted to cross an international border. In the meantime he arranged for road transportation northwards to King's Lynn by contractors who specialized in carrying precious livestock.

  He spent almost two million of his borrowed dollars before flying back to King's Lynn to make the final preparations for the arrival of his cattle. The deliveries of the blood-stock were to be staggered over a period of months, so that each consignment could be properly received and allowed to settle down before the arrival of the next batch.

  The first to arrive were four young bulls, just ready to take up their stud duties. Craig had paid fifteen thousand dollars for each of them. Peter Fungabera was determined to make an important occasion out of their arrival. He persuaded two of his brother ministers to attend the welcoming ceremony, though neither the prime minister nor the minister of tourism, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, was available on that day.

  Craig hired a marquee tent, while Joseph happily and importantly prepared one of his legendary al fresco banquets. Craig was still smarting from having paid out two million dollars, so he went cheap on the champagne, ordering the imitation from the Cape of Good Hope rather than the genuine article.

  The ministerial party arrived in a fleet of black Mercedes, accompanied by their heavily armed bodyguards, all sporting aviator, type sunglasses. Their ladies were dressed in full-length safari prints, of the wildest and most improbable colours. The cheap sweet champagne went down as though a plug had been pulled out of a bath, and they were all soon twittering and giggling likea flock of glossy starlings. The minister of education's senior wife unbuttoned her blouse, produced a succulent black bosom, and gave the infant on her hip an early lunch while herself taking on copious quantities of champagne. "Refuelling in flight," one of Craig's white neighbours, who had been an R.A.F bomber-pilot, remarked with a grin.

  Peter Fungabera was the last to arrive, wearing full dress, and driven by a young aide, a captain in the Third Brigade whom Craig had noticed on several other occasions. This time Peter introduced him.

  "Captain Timon Nbebi." He was so thin as to appear almost frail. His eyes behind the steel, rimmed spectacles were too vulnerable for a soldier, and his grip was quick and nervous. Craig would have liked to have spoken to him, but, by this time the transporter carrying the bulls was already grinding up the hills.

  It arrived in a cloud of fine red dust before the enclosure of split poles that Craig had built to receive the bulls. The gangplank was lowered, but before the tailgate was raised Peter Fungabera climbed up onto the dais and addressed the assembly.

  "Mr. Craig Mellow is a man who could have chosen any country in the world to live in and, as an internationally best selling writer, would have been welcomed there. He chose to return to Zimbabwe, and in doing so has declared to all the world that here is a land where men of any colour, of any tribe black Or white, Mashona or Matabele are fr
ee to live and wotk, unafraid and unmolested, safe in the rule of just laws After the political commercial, Peter Fungabera allowed himself a little joke. "We will now welcome to our midst these other new immigrants, in the sure knowledge that they will be the fathers of many fine sons and daughters, and contribute to the prosperity of our own Zimbabwe Peter Fungabera led the applause as Craig raised the gate and the first new immigrant emerged to stand blinking in the sunlight. He was an enormous beast, over a ton Of bulging muscles under the glistening red-brown hide. He had just endured sixteen hours penned up in a noisy, lurching machine. The tranquillizers he had been given had worn off, leaving him with a drug hangover and a bitter grudge against the entire world. Now he looked down on the clapping throng, on the swirling colours of the women's national costumes, and he found at last a focus for his irritation and frustration. He let out a long ferocious bellow, and, dragging his handlers behind him, he launched himself like an avalanche down the gangplank.

  The handlers released their hold on the restrainers, and the split-pole barrier exploded before his charge, as did the ministerial party. They scattered like sardines at the rush Of a hungry barracuda.

  High officials overtook their wives, in a race for the sanctuary of the jacaranda trees; infants strapped on the women's backs howled as loudly as their dams.

  The bull went into one side of the luncheon marquee, still at a dead run, gathering up the guy ropes on his massive shoulders, so the tent came down in graceful billows of canvas, trapping beneath it a horde of panic, stricken revellers. He emerged from the further side of the collapsing marquee just as one of the younger ministerial wives sprinted, shrilling with terror, across his path. He hooked at her with one long forward-raked horn, and the point caught mi the fluttering hem of her dress. The bull jerked his head up and the brightly coloured. material unwrapped from the girl's body like the string from a child's top. She spun into an involuntary pirouette, caught her balance, and then, stark naked, went bounding up the hill with long legs flashing and abundant breasts bouncing elastically.

  "Two to one, the filly to win by a tit," howled the R.A.F

  LIM

  bomber-pilot ecstatically. He had also fuelled up on the cheap champagne.

  The gaudy dress had wrapped itself around the bull's head. It served to goad him beyond mere anger into the deadly passion of the corrida bull facing the matador's cape. He swung his great armed head from side to side, the dress swirling rakishly likea battle ensign in a high wind, and exposing one of his wicked little eyes which lighted on the honourable minister of education, the least fleet, footed of the runners, who was making heavy weather of the slope.

  The minister was carrying the burden of flesh that behaves a man of such importance. His belly wobbled mountainously beneath his waistcoat. His face was grey as last night's ashes, and he screamed in a girlish falsetto of terror and exhaustion, "Shoot it! Shoot the devilP His bodyguards ignored the instruction. They were leading him by fifty paces and rapidly widening the gap.

  Craig watched helplessly from his grandstand position on the transporter, as the bull lowered his head and drove up the slope after the Aeeing minister. Dust spurted from under his hooves, and he bellowed again. The blast of sound, only inches from the ministerial backside, seemed physically to lift and propel the honourable minister the last few paces, and he turned out to be a much better climber than sprinter. Fk'went up the trunk of the first jacaranda likea squirrel and hung precariously in the lower branches with the bull directly beneath him.

  The bull bellowed again in murderous frustration, glaring up at the cowering figure, tore at the earth with his front hooves, and gored the air with full-blooded swings of his vicious, white-tipped horns.

  "Do something!" shrieked the minister. "Make it go away!" His bodyguards looked back over their shoulders and, seeing the impasse, regained their courage. They halted, unslung their weapons and began cautiously closing in on the bull and his victim.

  "No! Craig yelled over the rattle of loading automatic weapons. "Don't shood" He was certain that his insurance did not cover "death by deliberate rifle-fire', and, quite apart from the fifteen thousand dollars, a volley would sweep the area behind the bull, which included the marquee and its occupants, a scattering of fleeing women and children and Craig himself.

  One of the uniformed bodyguards raised his rifle and took aim. His recent exertions and terror did nothing for the steadiness of his hand. The muzzle of his weapon described widening circles in the air.

  "No! Craig bellowed again and flung himself face down on the floor of d-te trailer. At that moment a tall, skinny figure stepped between the wavering rifle-muzzle and the great bull.

  "Shadrach!" whispered Craig thankfully, as the old man imperiously pushed up the rifle-barrel and then turned to face the bull.

  "I see you, Nkunzi Kakhulu! Great bull!" he greeted him courteously.

  The bull swung its head to the sound of his voice, and very clearly he saw Shadrach also. He snorted and nodded threateningly.

  "Haul Prince of cattle! How beautiful you are! Shadrach advanced a pace towards those vicious pike-sharp horns.

  The bull pawed at the earth and then made a warning rush at him. Shadrach stood him down and the bull stopped.

  "How noble your head! he crooned. "Your eyes are like dark moons!" The bull hooked his horns towards him, but the swing was less vicious and Shadrach answered with another step forward. The shrieks of terrorstruck women and children died away. Even the most fainthearted stopped running, and looked back at the old man and the red beast.

  "Your horns are sharp as the stabbing assegai of great Mzilikazi." Shadrach kept moving forward and the bull blinked uncertainly and squinted at him with red, rimmed eyes.

  "How glorious are your testicles," Shadrach murmured soothingly, 'like huge round boulders of granite. Ten thousand cows will feel their weight and majesty." The bull backed up a pace and gave another halfhearted toss of his head.

  "Your breath is hot as the north wind, my peerless king of bulls." Shadrach stretched out his hand slowly, and they watched in breathless silence.

  "My darling," Shadrach touched the glossy, wet, chocolate-coloured muzzle and the bull jerked away nervously, and' then came back cautiously to snuffle at Shadrach's fingers. "My sweet darling, father of great bulls-" gently Shadrach slipped his forefinger into the heavy bronze nose, ring and held the bull's head. He stooped and placed his mouth over the gaping, pink-lined nostrils and blew his own breath loudly into them. The bull shuddered, and Craig could clearly see the bunched muscle in his shoulders relaxing. Shadrach straightened and, with his finger still through the nose-ring, walked away and placidly the bull waddled after him with his dewlap swinging. A weak little cheer of relief and disbelief went up from his audienc and subsided as Shadrach cast a withering contemptuous eye around him.

  "Nkosi!"he called to Craig. "Get these chattering Mashona monkeys off our land. They are upsetting my darling," he ordered, and Craig hoped fervently that none of his highly placed guests understood Sindebele.

  Crai marvelled once again at the almost mystical bond that existed between the Nguni peoples and their cattle.

  From that age, long obscured by the mists of time, when the first herds had been driven out of Egypt to begin the centuries-long migrations southwards, the destinies of black man and beast had been inexorably linked. This hump-backed strain of cattle had originated in India, their genus has indic us distinct from the European has taurus, but over the ages had become as African as the tribes that cherished and shared their lives with them. It was strange, Craig pondered, that the cattle, herding tribes see me always to have been the most dominant and warlike: people such as the Masai and Bechuana and Zulu had always lorded it over the mere tillers of the earth. Perhaps it was their constant need to search for grazing, to defend it against others and to protect their herds from predators, both human and animal, that made them so bellicose.

  Watching Shadrach lead the huge bull away, there was no mis
taking that lordly arrogance now, master and beast were noble in their alliance. Not so the minister of education, still clinging, catlike, to his perch in the jacaranda. Craig went to add his entreaties to those of his bodyguards, who were encouraging him to descend to earth once more.

  Peter Fungabera was the last of the official party to leave. He accompanied Craig on a tour of the homestead, sniffing appreciatively the sweet odour of the golden thatching grass that already covered half the roof area.