Love's Golden Spell

by William Maltese

  “But the falls are worth a second visit,” Janet said. “Why don’t I think about it? Some things are better the second time around.” Most things weren’t! Her return to Lionspride proved that.

  “Fantastic!” Craig said. He seemed to want to spend more time with her, and his enthusiasm was flattering.

  At the airport, they bypassed the major terminal buildings. The small private planes were lined up in neat row along one edge of the tarmac.

  Craig’s plane was as crammed with supplies as he had said. Strapping herself in the copilot’s seat, Jane wondered if they would get off the ground.

  “All this stuff isn’t as heavy as it looks,” Craig encouraged her, guessing her thoughts. “I’ve had heavier cargo and there was still no problem.”

  “I wish us luck,” she said. Going belly up in an overloaded airplane wasn’t the way she envisioned leaving Africa.

  “Trust me,” he said, patting her knee in friendly reassurance. Had Christopher done it, she would have reacted differently. Christopher wouldn’t be offering comfort. His intentions would be less chivalrous.

  “So, I trust you,” she said. She was committed to the trip.

  The radio crackled instructions for takeoff, and the plane moved.

  “There, that wasn’t bad, was it?” Craig said a few minutes later. They were airborne. Janet was recovering from an imagined close call with the treetops at the end of the runway. She flew in small aircraft all the time, but she never felt as safe as in the larger jets. Unfortunately, few good camera shots of wildlife were available through the window of an aircraft at thirty thousand feet.

  “Not too bad,” she admitted. Craig was a good pilot, had flown for years apparently. Even if he hadn’t, it was a little late to question his credentials.

  The plane veered tightly toward the south. The resulting sensation reminded her of one of those twirling rides at an amusement park.

  “Great Zimbabwe is that way!” Craig said, pointing straight ahead when the plane leveled. “We have an almost direct line of flight.” Janet was glad.

  “So how did you end up commanding the troops at the reserve?” she asked. The suburbs of Salisbury were beneath them. “Dr. Cunningham said your father was assigned there, too.”

  “Father was,” Craig affirmed. On the radio they heard of an aircraft landing nearby. Craig watched it descending on their left. “But not now, and never in a military capacity. He spent twelve years on the reserve as assistant game warden. I was born on reserve land that has since become some farmer’s cornfield.” He sounded less than pleased.

  “Are your parents still living, then?” Janet asked. Below her, the signs of civilization weren’t disappearing as quickly as they would have done a few years back. The area was now more inhabited and cultivated, a patchwork quilt of farm and grazing land that stretched to the horizon.

  “No, and it’s just as well,” Craig said. “They were extremely fond of the Great Zimbabwe Reserve. They would have been disheartened to see it come to this, even if they were around for the beginning of the land reform that’s shrunk it to its present pitiful size. They were killed during the revolution.”

  She didn’t miss the verb “killed,” but she didn’t press for details. When the new African country of Zimbabwe was arising from the collapse of Rhodesia in 1979, a lot of people, white and black, died—were killed—during the birth of that nation.

  “They were returning to the reserve from Fort Victoria,” he said without her asking. “It was dark. They were ambushed. I heard the gunfire from the house. It didn’t last long.”

  “My husband was killed by guerrillas in Central America,” she said. A bond shared. It was a better reply than stock phrases of sympathy. She knew what it was to lose someone under wartime conditions. It was a grief different from losing a loved one to natural or accidental causes. It was even different from how she had lost her father. What killed Jack Kelley was more subtle than a bullet, although no less lethal. “Bob was a cameraman.”

  “Killed in a mess he volunteered to cover for some newspaper, I should imagine,” Craig said. “My parents were killed in their own backyard.”

  She had been stupid to reach for comparisons. Bob had engineered his own death. He had gone into those jungles with his eyes wide open. Craig’s parents were cut down while driving home from a night on the town. It wasn’t the same thing. “Yes. I suppose you’re right,” she conceded. “However, it didn’t make his death any less final.”

  “Of course it didn’t!” Craig said apologetically. How did we get on the depressing subject of death anyway? There’s no point in dredging up the past.” He wouldn’t approve of her reasons for returning to Lionspride, then. He wouldn’t approve of her years of living with bitterness. It was the present that counted. That’s what he was saying. Why should anyone screw up her present by dwelling on things over which she had no control? “A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that bloody hell left blacks and whites its victims,” he said. “We’re all sleeping more soundly now.”

  Not as soundly as they might. There were those who said Zimbabwe wasn’t entering the twentieth-first century rapidly enough. There were whites and blacks who argued constantly that the other had too much power. Interparty politics still resulted in murders on night-darkened streets. It was all very complicated, and Janet didn’t pretend to understand it. Her job in Africa was to save animals. As difficult as that was, it was invariably less complicated than saving people.

  “So you’re familiar with the Great Zimbabwe Reserve,” Janet said. The plane dipped slightly and returned to a steady flight line. Her stomach adjusted less quickly. “And that’s why you were assigned there to settle the poaching problem?”

  “Right. And for reasons already discussed, my knowledge of the area hasn’t been of much use,” Craig said. The only animals below them were domestic. Wildlife didn’t stick around when cattle, dogs and people moved in. They migrated with the same swiftness they had exhibited in fleeing from the Van Hoon Afrikaner Minerals site sixteen year before. They ran until there was no place to go. Then someone either came to their rescue, or they died. Such was the predicament of the elephants in what remained of the Great Zimbabwe Reserve.

  Craig cared what happened to the elephants. Christopher would lift a hand only when the elephants were dead, their cold-blooded killers peddling the ill-gotten ivory. Then his hand would be lifted to pass out the cash and pull in more tusks for his macabre collection. How could she love such a man? She didn’t! She loved the boy the man once was.

  “You have no idea who’s leaking information?” she asked. It was an unnecessary question. His look told her that he didn’t know. If he did, the leak would be plugged. Right? He would have accolades instead of criticisms of incompetence. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “That was silly.”

  “At least you recognize it as such,” Craig said grudgingly. “My superiors haven’t your insight. Next they’ll accuse me of consorting with the enemy.”

  “I do doubt that,” Janet consoled him. His grandfather had been one of the original supporters of the Great Zimbabwe Reserve. His father had been an assistant game warden there for twelve years. Generations of the Sylo family had been devoted to saving animals. Had Christopher been on the scene, she would have pointed a suspicious finger in his direction. And yet, even if Christopher’s purchase of ivory was contributing to the problem, he wouldn’t involve himself in something illegal like poaching, she was sure. Even the seizure of the land once scheduled for the Lackland Animal Preserve had been above board. Her anger and hurt painted him blacker than he was. He had warned her about doing at.

  “Hell, I’m beginning to wonder if I am somehow responsible,” Craig said. “There’s seemingly no other explanation for their knowing my every move except them somehow having hot-wired my brain.”

  “I don’t see any protruding electrodes,” Janet said, hoping to inject a lighter vein into the conversation. “So I think you can discard that possibility.�
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  “They’re too often in the right place at the right time to rely on just luck,” he said, not taking her cue. “There’s a spy in my camp, and I have every intention of flushing him out.”

  “He’ll make a slip,” Janet said encouragingly. “He can’t be so damned clever forever.”

  “He doesn’t have to be clever forever,” Craig reminded her, “but only until the last elephant on the reserve is dead.”

  If Craig didn’t find the leak, she realized, it could damage his military record. Things like this were important to a career man’s chances for promotion.

  Janet looked out the window. There were finally a few sections of untilled land below. So close to civilization, they offered sanctuary for squirrels, groundhogs and birds—nothing bigger.

  “The problem at the Great Zimbabwe Reserve has always been its fertile land,” Craig said, following her gaze. “You don’t allocate such land to four-legged animals when people are starving. If you do, they don’t hold it for long. A field of corn feeds more people far longer than does a dead gazelle. If there are people finally realizing how valuable animals are for the tourist trade, they were a long time in seeing that, probably because there was so much wildlife at one time that few people imagined there ever would be a shortage.”

  The reserve boundary, when it appeared, was a visible line where fences stopped and complete wilderness took over. Animals sought sanctuary in that wilderness, although there were no guarantees of safety even there. Why maintain small reserves when there was giant Wankie a few hundred miles to the northeast? Not to mention Matopos National Park or Victoria Falls National Park. So much of a poor nation’s valuable land turned over to animals!

  Janet didn’t think it was too much. There were, however, too many people like Christopher. Christopher saw a herd of animals on land, and he didn’t question that the land was more important. Even though the Great Zimbabwe Reserve had been whittled down for farms and not for mineral development as had happened on the Lackland Preserve, Christopher’s indifference indicated where his sympathy lay. Show him how a herd of wildebeest could fatten his pockets, and he would save it fast enough.

  His fine talk about putting down his gun for a camera was worthless. The proof came with the Great Zimbabwe Reserve shrinking to nothing while he was in his counting house, counting out his money, and his diamonds and his precious gold. He had the power and the influence to champion wildlife preservation successfully. If he only would!

  “Lake Kyle.” Craig announced. They were approaching the man-made body of water resulting from the back-up of the Mtilikwe River behind the sixty-meter-high Kyle Dam. The lake and the dam were part of a vast water-storage system designed for the same agricultural network that had doomed the Great Zimbabwe Reserve to its present depletion. “Ninety square kilometers of water,” Craig informed her, and then pointed to the right. “Fort Victoria is that way.” Fort Victoria was the first town established by pioneers after their struggle up from the low country. In the 1890s, during the rebellion of the warlike Matabele tribe, the town had been an important stronghold for the white settlers. There had been plenty of animals back then.

  Janet surveyed the shoreline. Somewhere among those trees were the elephants she had come to save—how many she didn’t know. Part of the project in which she was involved required a counting before transfer. Estimates were well over a hundred, but there were fewer elephants now than a week or two before. Poachers had seen to that.

  “Giraffes at eight o’clock!” Craig said. He banked the plane to give her a better look. There were three, their tall necks extending fragile heads into the treetops. Mobile lips gently plucked the tender leaves. The gold-and-black high-rises paused, instinctively aware that they were being watched but unsure from which direction. The noise of the plane gave no clue until the aircraft passed between them and the sun. Startled by the eclipse, they set off in a surprisingly graceful gait.

  Janet was moved by the tragic beauty of these confined animals who had once roamed far and wide. Christopher would condemn her feelings as mere sentimentalism.

  Craig turned the plane back toward the south. The terrain was hillier than that around Salisbury. Large ridges of stone bulged to form rich, flat-bottomed valleys between them. Slopes and depressions were verdant with velvety foliage. Here and there, variegated gray-granite domes alleviated the monotony of green. Centuries of weathering had peeled Zimbabwe granite as if it were a multi-skinned orange. The resulting scree slid to the base of the outcrops. But there were fewer loose stones than there might have been. Most had been picked up centuries ago and used for building the city of Great Zimbabwe.

  The ruins that remained of that city had been legally protected as early as 1893, when the British Africa Company began to fear the destructive nature of early settlers scrounging for the legendary wealth of the region. Made a part of the Great Zimbabwe Reserve in 1900, they were proclaimed a national monument in 1937.

  Two thousand people had once lived in Great Zimbabwe. It was once, according to one school of thought, the capital of biblical Ophir, famous in King Solomon’s time. Other historians believed it was the capital of Havilah, where the gold of Ophir originated in the second and first millenniums B.C.

  A later theory, based on the radiocarbon dating technique, put the city’s heyday in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. The theory postulated that a small African village had grown into a mini-nation as a result of old trade, and then was abandoned when the violated environment was depleted not only of gold but of the resources necessary to sustain its inhabitants.

  All that remained were scattered ruins through one valley and more ruins atop one hill. The former was dominated by the Great Enclosure, the latter by a warren of stone walls and rock passageways. It was the Great Enclosure that first captured Janet’s attention as they flew over. It was an oval wall, 253 meters in circumference, as high as nine and a half meters in many places, and more than five and a half meter thick at its base—a stupendous achievement of dry-stone construction, encircling what was once supposedly a royal residence. The tall red milkwood trees, clustered mainly inside the eastern curve, hadn’t rooted until after the place had been abandoned, several hundred years before. They now extended a canopy of leafy branches that concealed a solid stone tower. The tower had a base diameter of almost six meters, tapering in its eleven-meter height to a summit only two meters across.

  “The military accommodations,” Craig informed her as he buzzed over the tents pitched among the trees outside the Great Enclosure. “Yours are a little less rustic. We’ve booked you into the tourist hotel—over there.” The Zimbabwe Ruins Hotel was a cluster of one-story buildings within a fifteen-minute walk of the Great Enclosure. Janet, who was expecting far less, was pleased by what she saw from the air. “Once more around the block,” Craig said, “and then I’ll set us down.” Janet didn’t see an airstrip. Craig pointed to a stretch of dirt road. “We’ll land there!” he prophesied confidently.

  “Which you’ve done plenty of times without accident,” Janet said, not enthused. Landing too close to the trees could lose them a wing. The plane was overloaded with cargo and therefore wasn’t as maneuverable, no matter what Craig said. She glanced toward the horizon, because she didn’t want to increase her fears by a further examination of the pitiful runway.

  “We’ll be down before you know it,” Craig assured her, preparing her and the plane for touchdown.

  Janet, though, was suddenly no longer concerned about landing. She had spotted the lazy vortex silhouetted against the bright blue of the African sky. “Vultures!” she exclaimed.

  “Damn!” Craig replied. His thoughts were the same as hers. He immediately aborted the landing and headed for the whirlpool of birds.

  “It could be an injured animal,” Janet said without conviction.

  “Quite a few scavengers for one wounded animal,” Craig observed.

  Janet prepared herself mentally for what was coming. She had seen death in th
e wild before. She had filmed in Mexico and South America before coming to Africa. Death was part of the natural order.

  Not death like this, however!

  “Oh, my God!” she cried, sick to her stomach. Nothing could prepare her for the six slaughtered elephants around a blood-dyed waterhole, a seventh partially submerged in the water. The seven mounds pulsed, not because they were alive, but because they were covered by birds. As the plane swooped closer, some birds took wing. Others scattered along the ground, too glutted by the frenzy of feeding to get their bloated bodies in the air. “Poachers did this?” Janet asked, knowing the answer. Her first sighting of the Great Zimbabwe elephants was a grisly one.

  “I’ll wager not one of those elephants has its tusks any longer,” Craig said, making another approach. More birds scattered. Those too heavy to fly were grotesquely comical as they flapped their wings and wobbled in futile attempts to get airborne. “There’s no place to land here,” Craig said. “I’ll come in by Land Rover.”

  “I want to come with you,” Janet said. It was a lie. She had seen enough. Still, it was important that she expose herself to the full horror of a closer inspection. If she hoped to portray graphically to her viewers the extent of the tragedy, she must immerse herself in it. Tomorrow she would bring the camera crew to this spot, too. Even a jaded viewing public couldn’t remain unmoved by this. If they did, there was no hope for the animals.

  “It was predictable,” Craig said. She must have misheard him. If it was predictable, he would have taken steps to prevent it. Even if he had been in Salisbury at the time, there was open communication between him and the camp. “They knew, don’t you see?” he continued. Janet didn’t see anything but the sickening sight below her. “They knew exactly where to strike most effectively. My patrols were concentrating on the north and northeast sections. The poachers struck exactly where there was the least chance of detection.”