Far Horizon

by Tony Park

  ‘Top secret?’

  ‘Personal.’ Mike took the cigarette from his mouth and blew hard on the stick he had used to light it until he got a flame. He lit the big gas cooker ring sitting on the ground. Then he placed a large kettle of water on the blue flames and stood, staring at the rising sun rather than the reporter behind him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she seemed to mean it. ‘Your friend told me about your girlfriend and . . .’

  ‘Jesus Christ. What else did he tell you? Criminal convictions? Bloody shoe size?’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘It’s just that if I give you, the tour leader, a little colour, if you’ve got an interesting background, it can make my story better and a lot more favourable to your company.’

  ‘So my past is “colour”. Is this blackmail now?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe I just want to know a bit more about the man in whose hands I’m placing my life for the next few weeks. These overland trips can be quite dangerous, from what I’ve heard,’ she said.

  ‘You’d be in more danger driving to work on the M25 than you will be on this trip. I’ll tell you about overlanding, the itinerary, the wildlife we see, African culture, but that’s it. Got it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Are you married?’ he asked her.

  She looked startled by the question, but quickly composed herself. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘How old were you when you first had sex?’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’

  ‘What’s your bra cup size. About a C, I’d say. Am I right?’

  She took a step towards him, hands on her hips, her face reddening. ‘How dare you!’ she hissed.

  Mike held up his hands, palms out, in submission. ‘Sorry. I really am. But how do you like batting off a few personal questions at five in the morning? Look, we’ve got off to a rough start,’ he said, pausing to drag on his cigarette. The nicotine was calming him now. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to give you a good story, but please, leave my personal life out of it. That’s all I’m asking.’

  He thought she wanted to smile. The corners of her mouth started to curl up ever so slightly, but she forced them back into a frown.

  ‘I take your point. But I do expect full cooperation from you. This story can make or break your outfit and I’m sure your boss wouldn’t be very happy if you cocked it up for him.’

  He shook his head and stubbed out the butt of his smoke with his white-water rafter’s sandal. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

  ‘Never.’ She smiled and he had to force himself to turn away.

  Mike left Sarah, and roused the others from their tents and pointed them towards the tea and coffee. The plan was to go for an early-morning game drive and then have a big, greasy cooked brunch when they got back. If he could get them moving in time, they could be out of the gate of Pretoriuskop Camp by five-thirty, when the gates first opened, and back by about eleven.

  ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ asked a bleary-eyed Mel.

  ‘Ah, so that’s what a sunrise looks like,’ said Terry, the Englishman, who looked even bulkier than usual with a sweatshirt and fleece stretched over his stomach. ‘That’ll do me for the next fifty years, thanks. Can I go back to bed now?’

  They rolled out the gate ten minutes behind schedule.

  ‘The idea of an early start is to get out of the rest camp first so we can catch a sighting of the predators – the big cats – when they’re still on the move in the early hours. We might see a leopard slinking across the road or a pride of lions returning from a night’s hunting. The animals in Kruger are used to the sight and sound of cars, but even the most patient will push off once they’re cornered by eight or nine vehicles full of tourists,’ Mike explained as they drove.

  Most of the group had come to Africa to experience the continent’s unique wildlife, so the game drives were an important part of his job. Luck was a big factor in game viewing, but he had also found that good eyesight and a little local knowledge of where animals hid and what they did at different times of the day increased the odds of spotting something interesting.

  The art of leading a successful game drive, Rian had taught him, was to lower the viewers’ expectations and to keep them interested in the bush around them, even when there was apparently nothing to see. A good guide needed to know about birds – there are about five hundred species in southern Africa – trees and other plants and their uses, and insects, as well as the better-known larger mammals.

  ‘If you take a twig from that tree over there, and rub it on a rock, you get a bristly, fibrous end which you can use as a toothbrush. If you burn the wood of that tree, the leadwood,’ he said, pointing to a big specimen on the other side of the road, ‘you can use the fine ash as tooth powder. There are hundreds of other plants with special uses, like the sickle bush, whose leaves ease the pain of toothache when you chew them.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Kylie, the nurse. ‘I’d like to learn more about the medicinal uses of different plants.’

  ‘Where are the lions? It’s been nearly an hour already,’ Nigel complained.

  Mike scanned the long dry grass for the flick of an ear or the twitch of a tail. His eyes roved from right to left, an old army trick which he found made it easier to spot movement. Because westerners read from left to right they automatically tend to scan their surroundings in the same direction. Looking from right to left takes more effort and forces the watcher to slow down, to concentrate more. He made himself peer through the dry vegetation and long grass, rather than simply stare at the bush. He scanned the leafy branches of the larger trees in the hope of catching a camouflaged leopard lying up there.

  Old Nelson was well laid out for game viewing. Rian had fitted a large box-like cab on the stripped-down chassis of the ex-military Bedford. He had furnished the cabin with all the comforts he could find and afford. The travellers sat on old airline seats, which Rian had picked up at a South African Airways auction. The seats reclined and still had the little tray tables in their backs. He had the seats re-upholstered in a green, water-resistant rip-stop canvas, which was better suited to the dust and rain that inevitably found its way into the cab. The cab had a flat tin roof, which was also covered in canvas to cut down the sun’s heat, and big open windows on the side. The windows could be closed with roll-down flaps of soft clear plastic, which gave some protection from the rain. On the inside front wall of the cab was a painted map of Africa, showing the various routes the expeditions took. Much of the remaining space on the walls was covered with stickers from various destinations and faded, peeling paper labels from beer bottles from the length and breadth of the continent. There were a couple of bookshelves stacked with dog-eared paperback novels, battered Lonely Planet guides and field guides to the birds and mammals of Africa. A car radio-cassette player was fitted to the front bulkhead, and speakers were mounted in the front and back of the passenger cab.

  The truck was not full on this trip – there were seats for another three passengers – so there was room for the group to spread out in the cab. There was no discussion or vote about it, but Mike noticed no one had invited Sarah to sit next to them. She sat quietly at the far end of the driver’s cab from him, staring out through her window, occasionally snapping a photograph or two.

  Mike was quite comfortable up front, but he knew the passengers in the back would be feeling the cold, with the wind rushing in through the big open windows as they cruised eastwards into the rising sun, up the main tar road from Pretoriuskop.

  ‘There, on the left. Zebra. About five or six of them,’ he called back into the main cab.

  ‘Where?’ asked Mel. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘He’s making it up,’ George said.

  ‘OK, I see them now,’ said Sam. ‘Your eyesight must be very good.’

  ‘It’s just what you’re used to. You’ll find it’ll take you a couple of days to differentiate shapes and movement in the bush,’ Mike said. ‘Al
l your senses come alive in Africa. Not just your sight, but your hearing gets better the longer you spend out here. Soon you’ll be smelling elephants a mile off.’

  They headed for Skukuza, the main camp in the park, which would be their first rest stop that morning. Mike thought briefly of Skukuza the elephant, the grand old man of the Kruger park who had been destroyed, along with so much of Mike’s life, just a year before. He remembered the vultures and the stench of the elephant’s rotting flesh, and the ragged holes where his mighty tusks had been. Mike was sure there was a picture of him in the elephant museum at Letaba Camp, further north in the park, and he wanted to stop by if the chance arose. He had avoided the museum on previous trips, but now felt he was ready to pay his last respects to the animal’s memory and close the book on another little piece of that terrible time. Later that year, he told himself, he would visit Portugal. In December, when the summer rainy season is in full flight in southern Africa, there were no tours booked and Rian expected his drivers to take leave.

  The weather would be cold in Portugal, but he wouldn’t be looking for the sun or a beach holiday. He would find Isabella’s grave, maybe even look for her parents. He knew that he had to make his peace with her ghost once and for all, or she would never leave his dreams. There was another way to put her memory to rest, but he could not see how that could ever happen. Flowers on a grave were one thing, but every now and then he still fantasised about what he would say to the man who killed her, just before he sent him to hell.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever go home?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Sorry?’ Mike had been lost in his thoughts.

  ‘Will you ever leave Africa, and go home? Off the record, if you like.’

  ‘Off the record?’ Mike had paid enough attention to media training from army public relations officers over the years to know that phrase meant absolutely nothing. ‘I don’t know where home is.’

  ‘Australia. Big, empty country, lots of beer and kangaroos.’

  ‘You know about my background. People sometimes say the army’s a home, but it’s not. It’s just a job. A job that feeds you and clothes you, but it’s not a home. I’ve lived all over Australia, all over a lot of the world. Here’s as good a place as any.’

  ‘Wherever I lay my hat? That sort of thing?’ she asked.

  ‘Wherever I park my truck. Yeah. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’d like to buy a place over here, if I could get the money together. Maybe a small game farm. Do you want some more info on the company, or on our itinerary in Zimbabwe and Zambia?’ he added, trying to change the subject.

  ‘No. Are you running away from something?’

  He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on the road ahead. The last thing he wanted was to lose his cool and run into an impala. ‘Look, I lost a girlfriend, a mate and a job in Africa. I’ve seen famine, I’ve seen massacres, I’ve seen little kids dissected by landmines here, but I’m still in Africa. Wouldn’t you say I’m a textbook case of confronting one’s fears rather than running from them?’

  Sarah’s cheeks reddened. ‘Sorry. Put that way, I see your point.’

  ‘Forget it. But let’s just keep this about the trip, OK?’

  Mike turned the truck to the right, following a sign to the Transport Dam. The small earthen-walled dam was a watering point for the horse-drawn transport wagons that used to take people and goods from South Africa across to Mozambique in the old days.

  ‘This is a pretty spot,’ he said to Sarah as they trundled along the corrugated dirt side road. ‘It’s got water all year round and good birdlife.’

  When they arrived at the dam, a couple of kilometres down the road, an African fish eagle, with its distinctive snowy-white head atop a dark body, was keeping watch on the water’s surface. The bird whined a mournful melodic call. A moment later it was joined by another. Mike pointed them out to the crew in the back of the truck, who dutifully raised an assortment of binoculars and cameras, large and small.

  ‘Fish eagles mate for life,’ he said as he stared at the beautiful big birds through his binoculars.

  ‘Unusual,’ said Sarah.

  ‘You didn’t answer me this morning,’ he said.

  ‘Which of your inane questions was that? The one about the bra size?’

  He lowered his binoculars and noticed that she was smiling.

  ‘The one about marriage. Are you?’

  ‘Married to my job, yes,’ she said.

  ‘And you reckon I’m one for clichés,’ he replied, shaking his head.

  ‘Touché. But it’s tough to get on in journalism and I certainly don’t want to stay at Outdoor Adventurer for the term of my natural life.’

  She made the title sound about as interesting as Modern Shopfitting, or Plasterer’s Monthly. Mike had met people on his travels who would have given their right arm to be sent around the world to write about adventure holidays.

  ‘Marriage would tie me down, kill off my career before it’s really had a chance to start,’ she said.

  ‘Rather be exposing corruption and bringing down governments?’

  ‘It’d beat driving a tour bus full of teenage hippies,’ she replied. Sarah raised her binoculars to the birds again and Mike resumed his sweep of the dam shore. He sensed they would never fully recover from the bad start they had got off to, and that it was going to be a very, very long four weeks.

  There was nothing else to see at the dam, except for a pair of yellow-billed hornbills that hopped comically on the ground around the truck, hoping that crumbs or other rubbish would fall like manna from heaven.

  ‘Make sure you don’t feed the birds, or any of the animals we see in the park. They get dependent on humans and eventually become a pest. Some of the bigger ones, like baboons and hyenas, eventually get too bold and have to be shot by rangers,’ Mike said. He started the engine and glanced in the wing mirror. Nigel was crumbling potato chips and sprinkling them from the window. The hornbills were jostling and pecking each other to get to the crumbs and squawking with delight. Mike shook his head and despaired at the confrontation that he knew had to come.

  They drove back up the dirt road to where it met the main tar road. ‘How’s the left?’ he asked Sarah.

  She stuck her head out the window, and screamed, ‘My God!’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, leaning over.

  ‘Lions. Two of them,’ she said breathlessly. ‘They’re – they’re . . .’

  ‘Screwing!’ Linda called delightedly from the back.

  Mike felt the truck lurch as all the passengers in the rear compartment shifted to one side and craned out for a better view. The click and whirr of instamatic cameras sounded as soon as their initial surprise had worn off. He cut the engine so as not to disturb the big cats any more than necessary.

  They were in the middle of the road. The big black-maned male chomped down on the rippling muscles on the back of the lioness’s neck to steady her, then entered her repeatedly and furiously. After about a minute he sat back on his haunches then flopped lazily onto one side, temporarily exhausted. The lioness, restless and unsatisfied, stood and flicked her tail disdainfully in his face. She turned her big head to give the humans an equally contemptuous glance.

  ‘They’ll be doing that about every ten minutes for a twenty-four-hour session,’ Mike said, keeping an eye on his passengers now. A couple were leaning a little too far out the windows to get better shots. The last thing he needed was for a backpacker to wind up as part of a feline ménage à trois.

  ‘Sounds like my kind of man,’ Jane Muir said from the seat behind Mike.

  ‘Do they mate for life?’ Kylie asked.

  ‘No. There’ll be a couple of males with a pride. The males take over a pride when they reach their prime, and kick the existing males out. Then, once they get too old, at between twelve and fifteen, they get kicked out themselves by a couple of new guys. The female initiates sexual contact and the male only stays close for the twenty-four hours or so that they’re mati
ng.’

  ‘Now that’s my kind of man,’ said Julie, not to be outdone by her mother.

  There was a chorus of laughter from the back and both lions looked up sharply. It wasn’t the noise that had disturbed their post-coital relaxation, though, it was the sight of movement. Mike looked back again to see that Terry, one of the English boys, was now standing on a windowsill. All Mike could see were Terry’s pudgy white legs in the window. He was hanging onto the roof, and his head and shoulders were sticking out above the top of the rear cab. Mike realised that the lions, while used to the uniform silhouettes of vehicles and even large trucks, had noticed the movement of Terry’s head and pointing arm. They fixed cold yellow eyes on the unfamiliar form.

  ‘Get inside, Terry,’ Mike called.

  He started the truck’s engine again, then turned back to look inside the cab. Nigel was reaching theatrically for one of Terry’s legs. Mel giggled as Nigel grabbed hard on the Englishman’s right calf. Terry yelped and kicked his leg out in a reflex motion.

  ‘Stop!’ Mike knew what was going to happen next and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  Terry lost his grip on the smooth roof of the cab and pitched forward, out of the truck. His arms windmilled as he fell and landed heavily on his side.

  Linda screamed.

  ‘Get him in, get him in!’ Sam yelled.

  Mike rammed the gearstick into reverse and heaved down as hard as he could on the steering wheel, spinning it to the left. He let the clutch out savagely and the Bedford leapt back violently. There were wild screams from the back as the passengers slammed into each other when the truck started to move.

  Mike managed to get the vehicle between Terry and the lions, but the animals were not going to be so easily fooled.

  ‘They’re coming around the front now!’ Sarah yelled from the passenger’s seat.

  The maned lion growled, deep and menacing, showing yellowed fangs each as long as an adult’s finger.

  Mike knew what that meant. ‘He’s going to charge!’ he shouted. He climbed into the back of the cab, knocking Nigel aside as he elbowed his way to a window. ‘Terry, here! Give me your hand.’