by Peter Rimmer
She was alone in the world for the very first time.
Seven miles downriver Will had the campfire going well and the bream he had caught from the river ready to go on the fire. He had cut the stick from a mopani shoot and sharpened the end to a point. The fat bream was in the shallows when he struck with the light fading in the west. He had covered his tracks after turning back, knowing the trackers would look for him after the night had fallen. Now he knew his life on the banks of the river was soon to be over, each moment was precious. Laurie would be home full of talk from the club and Will wished to be alone with his river and the great black night. His loaded rifle lay on the ground next to the fire and the firelight played down to the river. He was more content than at any time in his life. Looking up, he smiled at the great universe, his own insignificance magnified to infinity.
‘It does not matter,’ he told himself. ‘Life is of no consequence, a pulse of thought in the vastness of immeasurable time.’
They could have his concession. They could have his house. But for as long as he lived, they could never take away his memories. For as long as he lived, all the animals would live in his mind and this place would stay the same. Will could see up, his puny eyes taking in so little. He could see within, his simple intelligence understanding so little. But he was content. He knew this peace in his soul, the being that was him, and this had nothing to do with anybody else. The chief, the British, the moral flagellants.
All night Will stayed awake by the fire. With the dawn he was calm, refreshed and free of any fear of the future. He would go on with the odyssey of his life until he died.
The walk back to camp along the river was more beautiful than he ever remembered. The game drinking with the dawn took no notice of Will as if he were part of them. They watched with a wary eye but took no flight. The tall giraffe squatted splay-legged for the high head to reach the water down below. The birds were singing, hundreds of them.
Will, from Langton Matravers in the county of Dorset, was whistling in the African dawn. By the time he reached the base camp the yellow light of the cool dawn had turned to the white light of a hot day. It was going to be really hot he told himself as he walked up the wooden stairs to the high deck of his house. Down below and behind, the great river, oily and powerful, flowed on and on and a fish eagle on the near bank cried its distinctive three calls to the day. Somewhere behind the house he heard the trackers coming back through the other gate and wondered how far they had gone in the wrong direction. Will was smiling. He had spoilt his own spoor perfectly.
Fast asleep on his couch was a young girl with a chiselled face and the look of sheer exhaustion. On the bar was a half-empty brandy bottle.
“Laurie, where the hell are you?” Turning back he looked at the girl on the couch still fast asleep. “Laurie?”
Sixpence came up the wooden stairs two at a time.
“Baas!”
“Fooled you, Sixpence. Wanted a night in the bush on my own. Sorry. Chief says we’re out of here with the new government. Won’t renew my concession or his chieftainship. Where’s Baas Laurie?”
“Good morning, William.”
“Shelley? Shelly Lane? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Come to visit you.”
“Why does nobody ever tell me anything? All right, Shelley, what’s that brother done to you now?”
“Engaged himself to marry someone else.”
“Who? No one told me.”
“Lady Fiona Renwick, second daughter of the Marquis of Bathurst, fifth cousin of the Queen.”
“That figures. You had some breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
“Sixpence, ask Onepenny to make breakfast at the boma. I’m starving.”
“Where did you sleep last night?” asked Shelley.
“I didn’t… Wanted to think. Who’s the girl on the couch?”
“Lindsay Healy. From Australia. Wants to see your photographs.”
“Don’t people ever book? What’s the matter with her?”
“She had a trying night.”
“Morning, Will,” said Laurie, shirtless in his shorts and bare feet.
“First, I’m going to have a shower and then someone can tell me what the hell’s going on around here.”
When Lindsay Healy finally woke on the couch there was an extra man sitting at the bar. The singer and her new boyfriend were drinking out their hangovers. All three people seated at the bar had their backs to the couch. The fear from the night before had gone with the heat of the day. Her bottle of brandy was still on the bar, sitting quietly on its own. From somewhere wafted the rich aroma of fresh coffee. From outside men were talking in a language she had never heard before. A soft breeze washed her face and she could smell the river. Tension drained from her body and for the first time since leaving the Mongu Club she was able to relax. Lindsay half listened to a story about the extra man’s brother, the man she had come to see, but no one turned round to look down at her curled up on the couch and briefly she drifted back into sleep.
When she woke the man she had not seen before was looking down at her. The eyes were soft and warm, almost violet in colour. The feet were clad in crude leather shoes, brown-red from the dust and the long legs were thick at the top, strongly muscled. The shorts were tight around the high thigh and an open shirt revealed a piece of flesh and a belly button. The shirt was stripped of any sleeves. The skin was tanned the colour of mahogany and when she reached the eyes again, the man was smiling and offering her a cup of coffee. The hair on top was white-bleached by the sun.
“Sleep all right? I’m Will Langton. Coffee. Had a taste of Laurie’s driving? You want to camera shoot a safari?”
“Yes and no. I’m Lindsay Healy from Australia.”
“Tell you what. We’ll leave the drinkers at the bar and go down to the river. I made a spot years ago under the acacia tree. Some call them fever trees. When the whites first got to Africa, many died of malaria by camping next to the rivers.”
“Thanks,” said Lindsay, taking the mug of black coffee.
“It was the mosquitoes, not the tree that killed them, the insects breeding in the stagnant pools left by the floodwaters after the rains. You can tell me what you want at the river. Onepenny will make you some breakfast.”
Shelley Lane had watched the girl’s eyes take in Will Langton. She let a brief, rueful smile play on her face and turned back to her drinking companion. It had probably been a bad idea anyway. The younger brother was the antithesis of Byron.
“I’m going to stay here awhile,” she said.
“Suits me fine.” Laurie was already a little drunk.
“You going to shoot the crocodiles?”
“Been trying to convince Will ever since I got here. Probably get a couple of thousand crocs of the right size. They only use the underbelly for shoes and handbags. Take a few years but the young ones will breed up again. Give the vundu a chance to recover.”
“What’s the vundu?”
“Big barbel. Stable diet of the crocodile. I want five hundred skins for myself but don’t tell Will. My fee for the culling.”
“You really think this is all over?”
“You can be sure, Shelley, my love of the night. Once the rule of British law is removed, they have a bad habit in these parts of fighting each other. For a while one of them comes out on top until he’s taken out, then the whole process starts over. The man fighting from the bush becomes the president with his hands in the national till and the defeated president’s supporters go back into the bush and start a guerrilla war. Tribalism, some of it. Habit mostly. The British gave them peace for a hundred years in exchange for being colonised. The average black man will only find out too late that he never had it so good under the British. Change in world power. Now it’s the Americans fighting the Russians for spheres of influence. The Americans think democracy in Africa will give them control of the minerals and the markets. Everyone wants power and to hell with the people. We a
re not a nice species, Shelley Lane.”
The wooden chairs were deep in the shade with the river down the slope not fifty metres from where they sat. Onepenny had put a large pot of fresh coffee on the table in front of them.
Onepenny was showing a lot of white teeth, the great crocodile hunt overshadowing the politics which he did not understand. There had always been a hereditary chief in the same village under the king. If the chief told the white man to go, he had a reason. They would always be the trackers on the banks of the great river and now they were to hunt the crocodile from the long canoes cut from the big trees. It was good work for a man and Sixpence had said they would keep ten skins each for themselves and they would all be rich.
Will smiled at Onepenny’s retreating back. He had read his mind without a word being spoken. The bloodlust of the hunt was written all over his face.
“I’ll bet they shake out a few skins for themselves,” he said.
“What skins?” said Lindsay. She was enjoying the shade and the river. The coffee had taken away the foul taste of the brandy. With Will she felt safe.
“Crocodile. This will be the biggest hunt in a hundred years. Look, you do what you like with my photographs if you think them good enough. A wildlife book I don’t know. I can’t write a letter.”
“But you can tell me the stories of the animals and I can write them down next to the photographs… You think they will really wipe out the game in Africa?”
“There is a population explosion right across Africa. The old diseases have been contained by the missionaries. You’ll meet Hilary. He says in twenty years’ time there will be twenty million people in the remnants of the Central African Federation. Now, there may be four million. This part of Africa can’t sustain twenty million. Not enough rain. The animals will be the first to go; Hilary says we tinkered with the system. Tried to compete with nature and nature has a built-in way of asserting authority. Otherwise the planet would not be able to sustain life.”
“What are you going to do when you leave here?”
“Drift down south. The whites in Southern Rhodesia will probably fight for what they built. The last gasp of imperialism. I couldn’t live without trees and a river, animals, the bush. To struggle in a big city is against the laws of nature. Stay with us here for a while and you will understand what I mean. Would you like some more coffee?”
“Yes I would… And yes I will. You have quite a place here, Will Langton.”
4
Two months earlier, seven hundred miles to the north-west of Will Langton’s base camp, in the high mountains of Angola, sixty inches of rain had fallen in twelve weeks. Every crevice and stream, gullies that had been dry for years, were running with water; seeping, running, rushing down from the high ground in a long pursuit across the breadth of Central Africa joining spruits with rivers, rivers with rivers, all converging on the Zambezi River which would take their waters on down from the high plateau of Central Africa to the floodplains on the coast of the Indian Ocean and the final sanctuary of the sea. The great rains had fallen and the water and word of them would reach Mongu and Paramount Chief Mwene Kandala III at the end of the African winter, the word in time to beat the drums in his palace at Lealui eleven days and nights before he and his people would evacuate the Zambezi Valley and make for the high ground and his summer palace.
The sky was blue, the clouds pure white in the dry of the Barotse winter, the raptors high in the sky above the great river. Below, the mopani forests were scattered with game, while along a fifty-kilometre stretch of the river the slaughter of the crocodiles had begun, the heavy Brno rifles barking from the first light of the morning until the dusk of night. In parts, the river was dull red and the blood of the crocodiles flowed on down with the flotsam and the occasional carcass that had eluded the skinning knives of Laurie Hall and the trackers.
Laurie Hall was in his element and making money for the first time in his life. The crocodile skins, worth one hundred pounds each, were only the beginning. Laurie Hall was going back to London as Shelley Lane’s manager. What he knew about the music business was less important than the passion they felt in bed. Shelley needed a man’s security and Laurie needed a job. The killings of Africa could sweep right down to Cape Town for all he cared. He was going home with his share of the spoils from the colonies and what happened to them after he left was none of his business. Out of sight would be out of mind forever. He had even begun to limit his drinking. A man needed a clear head to make money. Opportunities never came twice. Once in a lifetime. In Laurie’s head, the clichés flew thick, fast and jumbled.
Downriver fifty miles from the blazing guns and the stinking carcasses bereft of their underbellies, Will Langton was camped in a small grove of ilala palms, thin and tall, and feather-topped, leaning at angles to the sky. The island in the river was three hundred metres long and half as wide, thick with bush foliage watered by the constant flow of the river. There were small antelope on the island, hidden deep in the foliage, and the big water-fed trees were the home of crows and a multitude of birds rich in crimsons and yellows, every one of them unknown to Lindsay Healy. Despite the fact that she had still not been able to seduce Will Langton and despite the privacy of their island, she was happier than any other time she could remember in her life. Kevin Smith, his wife and his children, were as far away as the moon. She had removed tomorrow from her mind.
Will was sick with foreboding, knowing they were slaughtering the game for money, money that would be spent and gone with the animals.
The island had always been his sanctuary since the day Hannes Potgieter had showed him the safe campsite away from the crocodiles and hippo, deep in the trees, the smooth glade made by the intrusion of the ilala palms, the seeds deposited by some distant elephant when the river was low and the animals migrated south.
“They don’t grow,” he told Lindsay, “unless the small coconut, the size of a cricket ball, first passes through the belly of an elephant. Many seeds are like that, spread by the birds. Do you like my hideaway, the heart of the biggest hideaway in the world? There are hundreds of thousands more species of game in Barotseland than people. Why it is so special. Here we are just another animal.”
“Are you lonely, Will?”
“Not now. Only sometimes. Yes. Without Hannes. A man needs conversation.”
“Will the canoe be all right?”
“It always has been. They cut them out of tree trunks. Took me a while to paddle without turning turtle. First, we gather wood for the night’s big fire… You’re not frightened?”
“Not really. Maybe. Not exactly Sydney. Hard roads and concrete buildings. Some of my ancestors lived in the bush. We call it the outback. Maybe this calls to some part of me.”
The plucked carcasses of two Egyptian geese hung by their necks from a low branch of the jackalberry tree next to strips of drying meat cut from an impala ram. Will’s .22 Hornet rifle stood against the trunk of the tree next to a pile of dry wood that would burn through the night. From the curved trunk of an ilala palm that had grown sideways before being able to rise up to the sky, Will had tied the top cord of a mosquito net. There was only one net as Lindsay had deliberately put the second back in the house before it reached the Land Rover that took them downriver to the hidden dugout canoe, the Goliath heron chasing her for her trouble. The first cry of a beast in the night would be Lindsay’s signal to grab fast and hold onto Will. Shelley and Laurie had left them alone at the base camp with candlelight, a good bottle of wine and the African night. She had taken his hand at the bar, stroked his richly tanned arm, pushed her bare knee against his bare thigh, leant forward to prove her lack of a bra and searched his violet eyes but nothing had worked. The door to her solitary bedroom stayed shut all night.
“Bloody certain I put two nets in the car. Have to use the one as outside the wood smoke, the mozzies bite like bastards. There’s enough room.”
“Good,” said Lindsay.
“I’ll do the impala’s sad
dle over the secondary fire when we have some coals. Feed the cooking fire from the main fire. Before the light goes, I want to show you the sunset reflected in the river. There’s a game path through the trees to a sandbank.”
Will picked up the bolt-action Hornet without thinking, the precaution automatic, and together they walked through the trees for thirty metres before coming out onto the river. The sky was crimson in the west, silhouetting the trees along the west bank of the river, sluggish and slow, waiting for new water, months in the coming. Flotsam passed on either side of their small island and the distant bark of the Brnos had been silent for half an hour. As they broke cover onto the sandbank, a cloud of small birds whirred away into the crimson sunset and an eleven-foot crocodile ran off on short legs for the water, slithering beneath the reflected glow of the clouds, red from the sinking sun.
“What were they?” said Lindsay, shivering as the reptile sank into the black, oily water. Will put a protective arm around her shoulder.
“Quail,” he said. “Harlequin quail. They drink in the morning and evening. The crocodile won’t come back.” Bringing the rifle to his shoulder, he fired into the water a few metres from the sandbank, worked the bolt and fired again. The high whine of the .22 pierced the silent last of the day. “Impact on the water sends shock waves under the water. We could swim if we wanted to.”
“No thanks,” said Lindsay.
“You’re shivering.”
“That crocodile was big.”
“Yes. He was… They’ll come back if they don’t get shot up again. The vundu will multiply. That’s a big barbel. Main source of food for the crocs. One animal’s problem is another one’s pleasure.”
“How long will they shoot?” She snuggled against him and the shivers began to contain themselves.
