by Wilbur Smith
It fell like a sack at Mark's feet, and tiny droplets of brilliant red blood spattered the scuffed toe cap of Mark's boot, and glittered there like cut rubies.
Mark touched the open staring eye, but the fierce yellow light was fading and there was no blinking reflex of the eyelids with their long beautiful fans of dark lashes. The leopard was dead, and Mark sat down heavily in the leafmould beside the carcass and groped for his cigarette tin.
The hand that held the match shook so violently that the flame fluttered like a moth's wing. He shook out the flame, threw the match away, and then stroked his open palm across the soft thick fur, the amber gold dabbed with the distinctive rosettes of black, as though touched by the five bunched fingertips of an angel's right hand. Pungushe, you bastard! he whispered again. The animal had died for that golden dappled hide, for the few silver shillings that it would bring when sold in the village market, at a country railway halt, or on the side of a dusty road. A death in unspeakable agony and terror to make a rug, or a coat for a lady. Mark stroked the glowing fur again, and felt his own fear give way to anger for the man who had saved his life once, and who he had hunted these two months.
He stood up and went to the steel trap, lying at the end of its chain. The severed leg was still held between the relentless jaws, and Mark squatted to examine it. The trap was the type they call a Slag Yster, a killing iron, and the spikes of the jaws had been carefully filed to bite but not sever. It weighed at least thirty pounds and it would take a thick branch to lever those jaws open, and reset the mechanism.
The steel was dark and sooty where the poacher had scorched it with a torch of dry grass to kill the man-smell on the metal. Lying at the edge of the thicket was the half decomposed carcass of a baboon, the odiferous bait which had been irresistible to the big yellow cat.
Mark reloaded the Mannlicher, and his anger was so intense that he would have shot down the man who had done this thing, if he had come across him in that moment, despite the fact that he owed him his life.
He walked back up the slope and unsaddled Trojan, hobbled him with the leather straps, and hung his saddlebags in the branches of the leadwood out of the way of a questing hyena or badger.
Then he went back and picked up the poacher's spoor at the edge of the thicket. He knew it would be useless to follow on the mule. The poacher would be alerted at a mile range by that big clumsy animal, but he had a chance on foot.
The spoor was fresh and the poacher's camp would be close, he would not stray far from such a valuable asset as his steel trap. Mark had a very good chance.
He would be cagey, of course, sly and cunning, for he would know that it was now forbidden to hunt in the valley. Mark had visited each village, spoken with each tribal headman and drank his beer while he explained to him the new order.
The poacher knew that he was outside the law. Mark had followed his spoor so often, and the precautions Pungushe took, the elaborate ruses to throw any pursuit, made it clear that he was in guilt, but now Mark had a good chance at him.
The spoor crossed the river half a mile down-stream, and then started to zigzag back and forth among the scrub and forest and brush as the poacher visited his trap line.
The leopard trap was clearly the centre of his line, but he was noosing for small game, using light galvanized baling wire, probably purchased for a few shillings at a country general dealer's store. He was also using copper telegraph wire, probably obtained by blatantly scaling a telegraph pole in some lonely place.
He was trapping for jackal, baiting with offal, and he was trapping indiscriminately at salt licks and mud wallows, any place that might attract small game.
Following the trap line diligently, Mark sprang every wire noose and ripped it out. He closed rapidly with his quarry, but it was three hours before he found the poacher's camp.
Itw as under the swollen, bloated reptilian grey branches of a baobab tree. The tree was old and rotten, its huge trunk cleaved by a deep hollow, a cave that the poacher had used to shield his small smokeless cooking fire. The fire was dead now, carefully smothered with sand, but the smell of dead smoke led Mark to it. The ashes were cold.
Tucked away in the deepest recess of the hollow tree were two bundles tied with plaited bark string. One bundle held a greasy grey blanket, a carved wooden head-rest, a small black three-legged pot and a pouch of impala skin which contained two or three pounds of yellow maize and strips of dried meat. The poacher travelled light, and moved fast.
The other bundle contained fifteen jackal skins, sundried and crackling stiff, beautiful furs of silver and black and red, and two leopard skins, a big dark golden torn and a smaller half -grown female.
Mark relit the fire and threw the blanket, the head-rest and the bag upon it, deriving a thin vindictive satisfaction as they smouldered and blackened. He smashed the iron pot with a rock and then he slung the roll of dried skins on his shoulder and started back.
It was almost dark when he got back to the leopard thicket beside the river.
He dropped the heavy bundle of dried skin, which by this time felt like a hundredweight sack of coal on his shoulder and he stared uncomprehendingly at the leopard's carcass.
It swarmed with big green metallic shiny flies. They were laying their eggs on the dead flesh, like bunches of white boiled rice, but what astonished Mark was that the carcass was naked. It had been expertly stripped of its golden fur, and now it was a raw pink, laced with yellow fat and the white tracery of muscle ligaments. The head was bare, the mask stripped away so that dull startled eyes started out of the skull like marbles, and tufts of black hair sprang from the open ear holes, the fangs were exposed in a fixed yellow grin.
Quickly Mark ran to the anchor log. The chain and trap were gone.
It was fully a minute before the next logical step occurred to him. He ran up the slope to the leadwood tree.
Trojan was gone. The hobbling straps had been cut with a razor-sharp blade and laid out neatly under the leadwood tree.
Trojan, unexpectedly relieved of his hobble, had reacted gratefully in a fully predictable manner. He had set off, arrow-straight through the forest, back home to his rude stable, his nightly ration of grain, and the congenial company of his old buddy Spartan.
it was a fifteen-mile walk back to main camp, and it would be dark in fifteen minutes.
The saddle-bags had been taken down from the tree, and the contents meticulously picked over. What Pungushe had rejected, he had folded and stacked neatly on a flat rock. He clearly did not think much of William Shakespeare, his tragedies had been put aside, and he had left Mark his chamois hunting-jacket, a last minute gift from Ruth Courtney.
He had taken the gentleman's sleeping bag, which had once belonged to General Courtney, with its built-in ground sheet and genuine eider filling, twenty-five guineas worth from Harrods of London, good exchange for a threadbare greasy blanket and wooden head-rest.
He had taken the cooking pot, pannikin and cutlery, the salt and flour and bully beef, but had left a single tin of beans.
He had taken the clean shirt and khaki trousers, but had left the spare woollen socks and rubbeT-Soled boots.
Perhaps it was chance that the boots pointed downstream to Mark's camp, or was it mockery? A can of beans and boots to carry Mark home.
Through the red mists of his humiliation and mounting rage, Mark glimpsed suddenly a whimsical sense of humour at work. The man had been watching him. Mark was sure of that now, his selection from the saddle-bags echoed too faithfully what Mark had burned of his.
In his imagination, Mark heard the deep bell of Zulu laughter, and he snatched up the Mannlicher and picked up Pungushe's outgoing spoor.
He followed it for only a hundred yards and then stopped.
Pungushe was heavily laden with trap, wet skin, and booty, but he had hit the Zulu's stride Minza umhlabathi, and he was eating ground to the north at a pace which Mark knew was pointless to try and imitate.
He walked back to the leadwood tr
ee and sank down beside the trunk. His rage turned to acute discomfort at the thought of the fifteen-mile walk home, carrying the saddle-bags, and the roll of dried skins, for honour dictated he did not abandon his meagre spoils.
Suddenly he began to laugh, a helpless, hopeless shaking of his shoulders, and he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and his belly ached. Pungushe, I'll get even for this, he promised weakly, through his laughter.
It rained after midnight, a quick hard downpour, just enough to soak Mark and to bow the grass with clinging drops.
Then a small chill wind came nagging like an old wife, and the wet grass soaked his boots until they squelched and chafed with each step, and his cigarettes had disintegrated into a yellow porridge of mangled tobacco and limp rice paper, and the roll of skin and the saddle and the bags cut into his shoulders, and he did not laugh again that night.
in the pre-dawn, the cliffs of Chaka's Gate were purple and milky smooth, flaming suddenly with the sun's ardent kiss in vivid rose and bronze, but Mark plodded on under his burden, tired beyond any appreciation of beauty, beyond feeling or even caring, until he came out of the forest on to the bank of the Bubezi River and stopped in midstride.
He sniffed in total disbelief, and was immediately assailed by the demands of his body, the quick flood of saliva from under his tongue and the cramping of his empty belly. it was the most beautiful odour he had ever smelled, bacon frying and eggs in the pan, slowly gelling and firming in the sizzling fat. He knew it was only a figment of his exhaustion, for he had eaten his last bacon six weeks before.
Then his ears played tricks also, he heard the ring of an axe-blade on wood and the faint melody of Zulu voices, and he lifted his head and stared ahead through the forest into his old camp below the wild figs.
There was a cone of pristine white canvas, an officer's bell tent, recently pitched beside his own rudely thatched lean-to shelter. The camp fire had been built up, and Hlubi, the old Zulu cook, was busy with his pans over it, while, beyond the flames, in a collapsible canvas camp chair, sitting comfortably, was the burly figure of General Courtney, watching his breakfast cook with a critical eye.
He looked up and saw Mark, bedraggled and dirty as an urchin at the edge of the camp, and his grin was wide and boyish. Hlubi, he said in Zulu. Another four eggs and a pound of bacon. Sean Courtney's vast energy and enthusiasm were the beacon flames that made the next week one of the memorable interludes in Mark's life. He would always remember him as he was in those days, belly-laughing at Mark's Lair Ur woe and frustration with Pungushe, and then still chuckling, calling to his servants and repeating the story to them, with his own comments and embellishments, until they rocked and reeled with mirth and old fat Hlubi overturned a pan of eggs, his great paunch bouncing like a ball and his cannon-ball of a head, with its hoar-frosting of pure white wool, rolling uncontrollably from side to side.
Mark, half-starved on a diet of bully and beans, gorged himself on the miraculous food that flowed from Hlubi's spade-sized, pink palmed hands. He was amazed at the style in which Sean Courtney braved the hardships of the African bush, from his full sized hip-bath to the portable kerosene-burning ice-box that delivered endless streams of frothing cold beer against the stunning heat of midday. Why travel in steerage, when you can go first class? Sean asked, and winked at Mark as he spread a large-scale map of northern Zululand on the camp table. Now, what have you got to tell me? Their discussions lasted late into each night, with a Petromax hissing in the tree overhead and the jackals yipping and piping along the river, and in the days they rode the ground. Sean Courtney up on Spartan, so clearly enjoying every moment of it, with the vitality of a man half his age, keeping going without a check even in the numbing heat of noon, inspecting the site that Mark had chosen for the main camp, arguing as to where the Bubezi bridge should be built, following the road through the forest where Mark had blazed the trees, exulting at the sight of a big black nyala ram with his heavy mane and ghostly stripes, as it raced away panic-stricken by the approach of man, sitting in his hip-bath under the fig trees, up to his waist in creaming white suds, with a cigar in his mouth and a long glass of beer in his hand, bellowing for Hlubi to top up with boiling water from the big kettle when his bath cooled. Big and scarred and hairy, and Mark realized then what a wide space this man had filled in his life.
As the day drew closer when he must leave again, Sean's mood changed, and in the evenings he brooded over the list of animals that Mark had compiled.Fifty zebra, he read Mark's estimate, and poured the last few inches of whisky from the pinch-bottle into his glass. On the Sabi River in 98 a single herd crossed in front of my wagons. It took forty minutes at the gallop to go by, and the leaders were over the horizon when the tail passed us. There were thirty thousand animals in that one herd."No elephant? he asked, looking up from the list, and when Mark shook his head, he went on softly, We thought it would last for ever. In 9 9 when I rode into Pretoria from the north, I had ten tons of ivory on board. Ten tons, twenty thousand pounds of ivory. No lions there? and again Mark shook his head.I don't think so, General. I've seen no sign of them, nor heard them in the night, but when I was a boy I shot one near here. I was with my grandfather. Yes, Sean nodded. When you were a boy, but, what about your son, Mark? Will he ever see a lion in the wild? Mark did not answer, and Sean grunted, No lions on the Bubezi River, God! What have we done to this land? He stared into the fire. I wonder if it was mere chance that you and I met, Mark. You have opened my eyes and conscience. It was I, and men like me, that did this, He shook that great shaggy head and groped in the sidepocket of his baggy hunting-jacket, and produced a leatherbound pocket-size book, a thick little volume, well-thumbed and shiny with the grease of grubby hands.
Mark did not recognize it for a moment, but when he did, he was startled.I did not know you read the Book, he exclaimed, and Sean glanced up at him from under beetling brows.I read it, he said gruffly. The older I get, the more I read it. There is a lot of solace here. But, sir, Mark persisted, you never go to church. This time Sean frowned as though he resented the prying questions. I live my religion, he said. I don't go singing about it on Sunday, and drop it for the rest of the week, like some I know. His tone was final, forbidding further discussion, and he turned his attention to the battered volume.
He had marked his place with a pressed wild flower, and the Bible fell open at the right page.
I found it last night, he told Mark, as he propped the steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose. It seemed like an omen, and I marked it to read to you. Matthew x. He cleared his throat and read slowly: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. When he had finished, he tucked the Bible away in his pocket, and they were both silent, thinking about it and watching the shapes in the ashes of the fire.
Then perhaps he will help us to save the sparrow from its fall, here at Chaka's Gate, said Sean, and he leaned forward to take a burning twig from the fire. He lit a fresh cigar with it and puffed deeply, savouring the taste of wood smoke and tobacco before speaking again. It is just unfortunate that it all comes at a time like this. It will be the end of the next year before we can make an official move to have the proclamation ratified and budget for full development here. Mark was instantly alert, and his voice sharp as he demanded, Next year? I'm afraid so. But why so long? The grim reality of politics, son, Sean growled. We have just received a shattering blow, and all else must wait while we play the game of power. What has happened? Mark asked with real concern now. I haven't read a newspaper in two months. I wish I were that lucky. Sean smiled without humour. There was a by-election in a little place up in the Transvaal. It's a seat that has always been ours, a good safe seat, in the hands of a respected backbencher of great loyalty and little intellect. He had a heart attack in the diningroom of the House, expiring between the soup and the fish.
We went to our safe little constituency to elect a new member, here Sean paused, and his expression we
nt bleak, and we got the trouncing of our lives. A fifteen percent swing to the Hertzog Party. They fought us on our handling of the strike last year, and it was a disaster. I didn't know. I'm sorry. If that swing, fifteen percent, carries for the whole country, then we will be in opposition after the next election.
Everything else is of no significance. General Smuts has decided to go to the country next year in March, and we will be fighting for our existence. Until then, we cannot introduce this type of legislation, or ask for funds. Mark felt cold despair spread out to numb his very fingertips. What happens here? he asked. In the meantime must we stop what I am doing? Do we just leave it? Another year of poaching and hunting, another year without protection or development? Sean shook his head. I've had my people studying the existing proclamation. We have powers there that we can enforce, but no money to do it. You can't do anythingwithout money, said Mark miserably. Ah, so at last a little respect for the power of money Sean shot him a thin smile across the fire, and then went on seriously. I've decided to finance the development and running of the proclaimed area until I get a budget allocation for it.
I'll foot the bill from my own pocket. Perhaps I'll get reimbursed from the budget later, but if I don't, he shrugged, I reckon I owe that much at least. I've had a pretty good run. It won't need much, Mark rushed in eagerly but Sean quieted him irritably. You'll get the same salary as before, and we'll make a start on the main camp. I'm going to give you four men to do the work, he went on, speaking quietly. We'll have to make do without a bridge across the river, and only a wagon track for our first road, but it'll be a start, and let's just hope like hell we win our election. on the last day at breakfast, Sean laid a folder in front of Mark. I talked Caldwell, the man who did the drawings for Jock of the Bushveld, into designing the layout, he smiled, as Mark opened the folder. I wanted you to get the best for your three thousand pounds. in the folder was a mock-up of the full-page Press announcement which would launch the Friends of African Wildlife, .
