08 Safari Adventure

by Willard Price

  ‘Now,’ said Tony, ‘come along to the cabin. It’s your turn to get dry - and you must be starved.’

  Chapter 20

  Men live, animals die

  The night was half gone before the boys were dried, fed and bunked in Tony’s cabin.

  Roger was asleep in two minutes. Hal lay awake a little longer, worrying about the trip back - fifteen hours over the stormy lake, then two hours by plane. Impossible to get to Tsavo before dark. Impossible to come down on that tiny landing strip after dark.

  Then he slept and did not wake until roused by the sizzle and smell of bacon and eggs. Tony had some good news for him.

  ‘I’m going to take you back to Mwanza in our launch. It will cut the time from fifteen hours down to seven. The boys can take the raft back later. There’s just one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  “That you give me a lift to Tsavo. I have some matters to discuss with Crosby - about a shipment of four rhinos to Rubondo.’

  The hundred-mile dash to Mwanza by launch was pure joy compared with the painful and dangerous voyage by raft. By mid-afternoon they were aboard the Stork and flying again over the mysterious Serengeti Plain.

  ‘See that deep cut in the plain? Looks like the Grand Canyon. Fly low over it.’

  Hal flew low. He was trying to remember what he had heard about this canyon.

  ‘Is it Olduvai Gorge?’

  Tony turned to him in surprise. ‘So, you know about Dr Leakey. With luck, we may see him and his crew at work.’

  Hal followed the twists and turns of the gorge. Then suddenly, straight below, could be seen a group of men at the bottom of the gorge digging into the rock wall.

  The whirr of the plane made them look up. They waved and Tony waved back. Then they were left behind. It had been only a moment, but a moment Hal would always remember. For that single glance had carried his imagination back two million years.

  Roger, who had never heard of Olduvai, was not impressed.

  ‘What’s so wonderful about that hole in the ground?’ he wanted to know.

  Tony explained. ‘This archaeologist, Dr Leakey, has been digging there for several years. He had found the fossil bones of men who lived two million years ago. Those are the oldest human bones that have ever been discovered anywhere in the world.’

  ‘How can they tell they’re that old?’

  ‘A chemical test. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Carbon 14 test. That’s been used for a long time - the only trouble with it is that it can’t tell the age of anything more than fifty thousand years old. But there’s a new method now, the potassium-argon test. With that they can go back millions of years.’

  ‘And this two-million-year-old man - was he like man today?’

  ‘Apparently he was. Dr Leakey has found the bones of sixteen men. They were all pretty much like ours, but with some differences. Those men were only about four feet tall. Their thumbs and fingers were not as well adapted as ours for picking things up and holding them. Still they could use tools - some of their stone tools were found. The weight of these men was only about half the weight of modern man - five stone five pounds instead of ten stone ten. The weight of the brain was only one pound. Modern man’s brain weight is about three pounds. So, you see, man really has improved a bit during the last two million years.’

  ‘The thing that strikes me as remarkable,’ said Hal, ‘is that we have lasted that long. Think of all the animals that have died out during that time - the mastodon, brontosaurus, diplodocus, dodo, quagga, moa, and hundreds of others. AH gone. And we go merrily along - not only still living, but multiplying to beat the band.’

  ‘Multiplying too fast,’ Tony said. ‘And the faster we multiply, the faster we push the remaining animals off the planet. We, seem to think we own everything. How about our fellow-animals - don’t they have any rights?’

  They passed over one of the greatest of the world’s craters, with one of the strangest of names, Ngorongoro. The volcanic fires had long since died out. The surrounding rim of the crater stood up like a wall two thousand five hundred feet above the crater floor. The floor was a lush green expanse of a hundred and fifty square miles, dotted with woods and meadows and lakes and swarming with animals.

  ‘Lots of life here,’ Roger remarked.

  ‘Yes, but what kind of life? Let’s get down a little closer.’

  Flying lower, they could see dozens of lions, elephants, rhinos - but most of the room was taken up by thousands upon thousands of cattle tended by tall, bare Masai herdsmen.

  ‘This is the beginning of the end of this heaven for wild animals,’ Tony said. ‘It used to be reserved for them. But now the Masai have invaded it and their cattle are crowding out the wild life. The Masai have no need for so many cattle - they keep them just to show off. The same thing is happening in the national parks, even in Tsavo. Herds of bony, scrawny, worthless cattle are driving out the wild life.’

  The crater was left behind and Lake Manyara appeared - a curiously pink lake, for on its surface rested millions of pink flamingoes.

  ‘At least the lake is safe from the cattle,’ said Hal.

  ‘Yes, but the flamingoes are having a different kind of problem. This lake has become very salty. The salt hardens on the flamingoes’ legs and makes great heavy balls three or four inches thick so that the birds cannot walk or fly. They starve to death by the tens of thousands.’

  ‘Is anything being done about it?’

  ‘Something fine is being done. See all those African youngsters down there wading among the flamingoes? They have been trained to save the birds by breaking up the ball of salt with a hammer so that the leg is once more clean and free.’

  ‘So African children really do care?’

  ‘Yes. I only wish their parents cared as much.’

  A strong blast of snow-cold air struck the plane as it passed the glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro. Then Hal brought it down skilfully on the Tsavo strip.

  They found Mark Crosby at his desk. The two Englishmen, Tony and Mark, greeted each other heartily.

  ‘Nice to see there’s a bit of England left in Kenya,’ said Tony. ‘I rather expected that by this time I ‘d see an African behind that desk.’

  Crosby laughed. ‘It will happen one of these days. Now that this country has its own government, official jobs like yours and mine will sooner or later be given to Africans.’

  ‘Are you going to wait for it to happen? Or resign now?’

  Til wait. For two reasons. One is that there’s no African yet with enough training to take over my job. The other reason is personal. I ‘d rather take my chances here than face going back to England. What would I do there? I couldn’t get a job. They’d ask me, “What experience have you had?” “Well, I’ve been a game warden in Africa.” What use is that in England?’

  Hal thought that both men looked tired. They faced an uncertain future. They had given their lives to saving the wild life of Africa. Would all they had done go for nothing? It was only natural for an African government to give important posts to Africans. But would Africans care as much about protecting the wild life? For hundreds of years they had been used to killing animals, not protecting them. Would the national parks be split up into farms for the rapidly increasing African population? Was there no way that people and animals could live together in peace? Hal could almost see these thoughts running like a motion picture through the minds of the two Englishmen.

  ‘Well,’ said Tony, ‘we can’t moon around about what may be. We can only do the best we can right now. I understand you have four rhinos ready for Rubondo. I’ll see them through. I’ll need a cage for each animal, and two lorries. I’ll take them by road to Mwanza, and I’ve chartered an old car-ferry for the trip to the island.’

  While the two wardens discussed the transfer of the rhinos, Hal and Roger went to their banda. They found a. note wedged under the door. Hal unfolded it and read it aloud.

  ‘Go home, yanks, this is your first warning, if an
other is needed it will be written in blood -

  yours.’

  Bb

  ‘Somebody playing cops and robbers,’ said Roger contemptuously.

  Hal did not take it so lightly. ‘I have an idea he means it You know who it is, don’t you?’

  Roger studied the signature, Bb.

  ‘I can guess,’ he said. ‘Blackbeard.’

  ‘Right Don’t brush it off. He’s a man who would go to any limit, even murder, to save a business that is bringing him in millions.’

  ‘So you think we should go home?’ said Roger sarcastically.

  ‘No. Not until we get done with Bb. You remember that five-mile trap-line we saw from the plane? We’ll go after it tomorrow morning.’

  ‘But what’s the use? We nab a gang of poachers and send them to court and the judge lets them off.’

  ‘This time we’ll try to nab Blackbeard, not his poachers. But we’ll give them a surprise too - something they won’t like. Perhaps it will make them think twice before they do any more poaching.’

  Chapter 21

  Tear gas

  ‘We’ll be turning in early,’ Hal told the warden after reporting the delivery of the colobus to Treetops and the okapi to Rubondo.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Crosby. ‘It was a hard trip. Thanks for doing a good job.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning we want to visit that trap-line we saw from the plane. We’ll make another try to grab Blackbeard.’

  ‘Fine. Sorry I can’t go with you. I certainly wish you the best of luck.’

  After they were in bed they heard a car drive up. Before they got up at dawn they heard a car drive away. They thought nothing of this coming and going until later.

  After a sunrise breakfast the boys and their crew set out in jeeps and Land-Rovers for the trap-line. When they came within a mile of it Hal brought the cars to a halt and gave the men final instructions.

  ‘You will find canisters of tear gas in the supply truck. Each of you take one.’ He went on to explain carefully the plan of attack.

  The cars rumbled on. When they arrived at the trap-line they drew up in front of it just as they had done before. They blew their horns lustily to attract the poachers. But as the poachers began to come out through the gaps in the trap-line, Hal led a dozen of his men round through the woods to come up on the poachers’ camp from the rear.

  If Blackbeard behaved as he had before, he would stay safely behind his men and, when he saw them being defeated, he would try to sneak out the back way. But this time he would find himself trapped.

  On the front line, arrows began to fly. The safari men did not fire back but stayed behind the barricade of cars.

  The poachers grew bolder. Shouting insults at the men who seemed afraid to come out and fight, they came closer. The safari men looked to Roger for a signal.

  When the poachers were within fifty feet Roger threw his canister and at once the air was full of the bombs which burst among the animal-killers upon striking rocks or the hard ground. Within seconds the poachers could hardly be seen amid the clouds of yellow-white tear gas. Choking, suffocating, weeping, they fell over each other in their mad rush to escape. They squirmed on the ground, and buried their faces in the grass. Some staggered back towards the camp. No arrows were flying now.

  At the same moment Hal’s men rushed in from the rear among the grass huts and into the gaps in the trap-line looking for Blackbeard. He was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of his boot-prints. The search was continued for half an hour, but without any results. By this time some of the poachers were able to stand,

  but still could hardly see through their tears. AH the fight had been taken out of them. They waited to be loaded into cars and transported to Mombasa.

  But if they hoped to spend a few days resting in jail, they were disappointed.

  ‘Tell them,’ Hal said to Joro, ‘to go back to their villages and stay there. Tell them if they are caught poaching again something worse will happen to them.’

  All the animals still alive in the snares were set free; some were taken to the hospital, the dead were left to the hyenas and jackals. The wire snares were collected, and all the trophies, some of them very valuable, some very odd.

  Among the odd ones were bracelets made from the hairs of elephants’ tails, and leopards’ whiskers which had been gathered to sell to African witch doctors. When mixed with a drink and swallowed, the sharp, stiff little hairs pierced the walls of the stomach and caused death.

  The grass shacks and the five-mile barricade of thorn bushes were burned to the ground.

  Back at the lodge, Hal told Crosby the unhappy story. Blackbeard had not been caught.

  ‘Never mind,’ the warden said. ‘You destroyed the camp, and you scared the poachers. That’s something. As for Blackbeard, you’ll get him yet. By the way, Judge Singh wishes you luck.’

  ‘Was he here?’

  ‘He drove in last night after you had turned in. He left very early this Morning - said he had important business.’

  ‘Did you tell him where we were going this morning?’

  ‘Of course. He is always interested in these raids. He is very happy about the fine work you are doing.’

  Hal hesitated. ‘Warden, I hate to say this, because I know the judge is a personal friend of yours - but I’ve begun to wonder whether he is really with us or against

  OS.’

  The remark took Crosby by surprise. He stared at Hal.

  ‘That is a very strange thing to say about a man who has always been one of the chief supporters of the anti-poaching campaign. Of course he’s a personal friend of mine. You remember, he saved my life. He’s also a friend of the wild life. He never fails to speak up against poaching.’

  ‘Does he just talk? Or does he really do something?’

  ‘He really does something.’

  Crosby opened a drawer of his desk and took out a cheque. He laid it before Hal. ‘The judge gave me this last night. I will send it on to the treasurer of the Wildlife Society.’

  The cheque was for two hundred pounds. It was made out to the African Wildlife Society and it was signed Sindar Singh.

  ‘You see,’ Crosby said, ‘he does more than talk. In this country a judge’s salary is very small. Two hundred pounds represents a real sacrifice for him. Now, do you doubt his sincerity?’

  Tin sorry,’ said Hal. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong.’

  ‘I am sure you are,’ Crosby said with a touch of severity.

  Hal returned to his banda. He told Roger about the conversation and the cheque.

  ‘He certainly caught me flat-footed,’ Hal confessed. ‘Perhaps we’ve been mistaken all along.’

  Roger was not ready to give in. ‘I Still think he’s a crook.’

  ‘Then how do you explain that cheque?’

  ‘Simple enough. If he’s really mixed up in this racket he isn’t living on a judge’s salary. He’s making millions on the side. To him, two hundred pounds is nothing. It’s just to pull the wool over the warden’s eyes and make the society think he’s on their side. I still think he’s Blackbeard’s buddy.’

  ‘You think so and I think so, but we can never convince the warden. We’d better give up trying. If we keep on, we’ll only get him down on us. First we must get some real evidence.’

  ‘I guess we can’t prove anything yet,’ Roger admitted. ‘But we’re sure getting some evidence. There was that funny business about the Aco. If you hadn’t stopped Singh, the warden would be dead now. And those silly sentences in court. And that warning signed Bb. How do you suppose it got here? I’ll bet a plugged nickel Judge Singh brought it from Blackbeard.’

  Hal nodded. ‘Could be,’ he said, ‘And today we didn’t find Blackbeard at the poachers’ camp. Why not? Perhaps he’d been warned. The warden told the judge last night what we were planning to do. The judge left very early this morning. Perhaps he stopped at the poachers’ hangout and tipped off Blackbeard.’ Hal brushed his hand wearily across his forehead. ‘B
ut these are all perhapses. We’ve got to get some real proof.’

  ‘Well, we won’t get it sitting round here. Let’s go.’

  Chapter 22

  Massacre

  Twice they had spotted camps from the air. It was worth trying again.

  In the Stork they flew over hill and valley, scanning the ground through binocular&i^^

  They looked for another trap-line. A trap-line would be a dead give-away. It was a sure sign of poachers, and easy to see.

  But there was no trap-line. No camp of grass huts. No spearmen or bowmen searching for animals. Mile after mile, no sign of human life.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve scared them off,’ Roger said.

  ‘No such luck. Perhaps they’re just hiding in the woods.’

  ‘Swing over to that waterhole.’

  It was solid with animals - elephants, rhinos, zebras, everything under the sun. But no poachers.

  Suddenly the waterhole blew up in a mighty fountain of spray and smoke that reminded them of Old Faithful. The explosion made the plane bounce and stagger. Small animals and torn-off parts of large ones were shot into the sky. What had a moment ago been a source of cool refreshment for hundreds of creatures was now their grave.

  ‘Dynamite,’ Hal exclaimed.

  Out of the woods poured the poachers, spearing animals that were still alive, chopping off tails, horns, heads, anything that would bring a price.

  Suddenly they saw the plane, and ran for cover. Hal circled and flew back at full speed to the lodge.

  There he lost no time in mobilizing his men and their vehicles but, hurry as they might, it was nearly an hour before they could get through to the dynamited waterhole.

  They were too late. The poachers had taken all they wanted and made good their escape.

  The mangled corpses of animals filled the waterhole. If they were allowed to remain there they would rot and poison the water.