by Tony Park
‘The others, they will be here soon,’ Patrice said. He was shorter than either Wise or Caesar, slight of frame, but his thin arms and legs rippled with well-defined muscles. He wore a new khaki shirt with the Isilwane logo – a male lion’s roaring head – embroidered above the left breast pocket, and matching shorts. On his feet were a pair of rubber gumboots which reached almost to his knees.
‘What others?’ Shane asked.
Fletcher explained that Patrice, a native of this part of the country, had organised a work party of ten men to help set up the camp. They should have been waiting for them at the clearing, but Fletcher shrugged and said, ‘Ah, well, Africa is Africa. Some things don’t change from country to country.’
Shane could not abide standing around doing nothing when there was work to be done. As soon as Fletcher had given him a rough idea of the layout of the camp, Shane gave his orders to Wise and Caesar.
The two young men seemed as eager as Shane was to get on with the work, and they manhandled heavy-duty canvas safari tents and bags of poles down from the vehicles’ roof carriers and started unloading the trailers. There was no shade in the clearing and the three men began sweating heavily as soon as they started moving. Shane stripped off his shirt.
Fletcher spread a map of the Virunga Park and its surrounding areas on a fold-out table under the shade of the first trees at the edge of the campsite, and pored over it, with Patrice at his side.
‘What about him?’ Wise asked, gesturing towards Patrice with a thumb.
Shane was as disappointed in the guide’s reluctance to join in the hard work as his men were. However, he did not want to start the venture on a sour note. ‘He has to give the boss the lie of the land. He’ll be earning his money soon enough. Let’s just get on with it.’
‘Can I help?’ Michelle said. ‘I feel like a bit of a waste of oxygen at the moment.’
‘Yeah, sure. Thanks,’ Shane said, wiping his brow with the back of his forearm. ‘Can you divvy the chairs, tables and bedding stuff into separate piles for each tent so the guys can fetch them once we’ve put the tents up.’
She worked and sweated alongside the men, and Shane had to try hard not to stare at her when her shirt rode up as she stood on tiptoe to pull a camp chair down from the roof carrier. He glimpsed a small tattoo above the waistband of her pants. Shane turned away and saw Caesar grinning at him. ‘Back to work,’ he grumbled at the man.
In an hour they had three green canvas walk-in safari tents erected. Finally, the work party organised by Patrice ambled in.
Fletcher went with Patrice to greet them, then assigned them to Shane.
‘These men have no English,’ Patrice said.
‘Fine. You can translate,’ Shane said, hands on hips, as he appraised the men. Their ages, he reckoned, ranged from fifteen to fifty. Generally, he thought them in poor health. Most seemed either undernourished or ill. Still, he had no one else. ‘There are pangas, shovels and picks in the trailer. Tell them I want the central area and pathways between each of the tents cleared of this grass. It’s a snake farm in here at the moment. Also, there are pit latrines to be dug.’ Shane showed Patrice where he wanted the ablutions and the other four tents erected, and told Wise and Caesar, who were adept at erecting the tents by now, to help out.
Patrice spoke to the men in Lingala and they shuffled slowly to the back of the trailer to fetch their tools and stores. Patrice returned to the shade, where Fletcher was now sitting at the table in front of a laptop computer and satellite phone. Shane guessed Reynolds was trying to establish an internet connection. It was important that they get communications up and running, but he seemed to have no need of the guide at the moment.
‘Patrice,’ Shane said, walking over to him, ‘perhaps you can help with the tents.’
‘I am like you, a supervisor,’ he said.
Shane nodded. ‘Then perhaps you would like to get out into the clearing and supervise your men.’
Patrice pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and slowly, deliberately, shook one out and lit it. He squatted on his haunches and sucked in a lungful of smoke.
Shane waited for Reynolds to say something, but he was engrossed in the computer’s screen, softly cursing as he tried to get the connection working. ‘We will have to work as a team out here,’ Shane said.
Patrice exhaled. ‘My job in this team, as you call it, is to guide, not to work like a slave.’
Shane didn’t know whether Fletcher was deliberately avoiding entering the confrontation or was simply lost in what he was doing on his computer. ‘Fine,’ Shane said, then turned and walked away.
The sun was a red semicircle over a craggy peak when Michelle lowered herself theatrically into a canvas director’s chair in the centre of the clearing. ‘Oh, my aching back. I haven’t done that much physical work since I lived on my parents’ farm.’
Shane opened the portable camping fridge and pulled out a bottle of Primus beer. The distinctive yellow brand, the beer’s name and a map of the DRC was painted on the bottle, not printed on paper. He deftly ran the blade of a machete along the neck of the bottle and the top sailed off with a pop that sounded as celebratory as the uncorking of a bottle of fine champagne. ‘It’s not very cold – the gas fridges will take a while to cool down.’
‘As long as it’s wet,’ she smiled back at him.
Shane repeated the trick for Wise, Caesar and Fletcher. Patrice sat apart from them, outside the circle that had gathered around a flickering fire in the centre of the clearing, on a rolled tent still stuffed in its waterproof bag. Shane had not pushed the matter of Patrice’s noninvolvement in the work party, but, when he had led Fletcher around the embryonic camp and pointed out where everyone would be sleeping, he indicated the rolled canvas as Patrice’s new home. ‘I wasn’t sure whether he was going to be staying with us in the camp or at his village,’ Shane said. ‘There’s a tent there for him if he wants it.’ The work gang had already been dismissed. Fletcher had tried to suppress a wry grin, but failed. He had obviously picked up on the tension between the two men, but decided to let things run their course.
‘A beer, Patrice?’ Shane called across the newly cropped grass.
‘I do not drink alcohol,’ the African called back in his French-accented English.
‘You’ve done a good job, Shane,’ Fletcher said, raising his beer.
‘Hey!’ Michelle protested.
‘All right, all right. All of you have worked well. To a successful new venture.’
They raised their beers and Patrice vaguely lifted the hand holding his cigarette. ‘I am going to spend the night in my family’s village, monsieur,’ he said to Fletcher, as he stood.
‘The guys will help you with your tent, I’m sure,’ Fletcher said. No one else made a move.
Patrice looked around the circle, then said, ‘It is four kilometres from here. I will be back at dawn.’
‘Try not to make too much noise, as we’ll all be sound asleep after today’s effort.’ Shane raised his hands above his head and let out a lion-like yawn. Wise and Caesar smiled but said nothing. Patrice melted into the gathering gloom.
15
Shane lathered his face from a tin cup full of hot water and looked into a small mirror propped on a jagged section of the derelict cottage’s ruined wall. As he shaved, he noticed the reflection of a movement.
He turned and saw Michelle emerging from the canvas doorway. She caught him looking at her, grimaced, then headed towards him and the campfire.
‘You are so busted,’ he said.
She blushed. ‘Stop it. I’m single and over eighteen. Well over eighteen, in fact.’
‘How’s the old man?’
‘He’s not that old. He’s asleep. Did you hear voices in the night?’ She used a cup to scoop boiling water from the large galvanised metal bucket resting on the slow-burning campfire and dropped in a tea bag.
‘There was a little commotion.’
‘Hey, what was that?’ Michel
le peered through the abandoned building’s doorway. ‘I heard something move in there.’
Shane wiped the remnants of shaving soap from his face with a green sweat rag and led her inside the ruin. Sitting on the floor against the wall were two African men, aged in their twenties. They looked tired and dishevelled in their hand-me-down clothes. One sported a badly swollen left eye. ‘He put up a fight. The other one went down peacefully.’
‘What! You captured them? Who are they?’
‘Wise and Caesar and I didn’t go straight to bed like we told Patrice. I figured that with all this expensive gear lying around, word might have got out amongst the local criminal element. We caught these two sneaking around just before midnight.’
Michelle frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Did Fletcher know about your little ambush plan?
‘Easy on there. We didn’t want to worry you. Besides, you were safe.’
‘Says who?’
Shane smiled. ‘I was pretty sure you’d have someone big and strong and old and rich to protect you through the night.’
She balled a fist and punched him in the arm, eliciting a semi-fake cry of pain. ‘I’m not a goddamned kid, Shane. So don’t you treat me like one. And I’ll be having words with Fletcher.’
Their banter was cut short by the sound of an approaching vehicle. It was a green pick-up truck. In the front were two men in camouflage uniforms. Patrice rode in the rear compartment.
Shane slung his SLR over his shoulder and strode out to meet the vehicle. The older and plumper of the uniformed men eased himself from the truck’s cab. He wore a maroon beret and carried the rank of a colonel on the epaulettes on his shoulders. Shane had studied the military insignia of the Congolese Army as part of his research into the country. The officer’s tailored fatigues were starched and appeared new. His paratrooper’s boots – they looked French to Shane – reached more than halfway up his calves and were polished to a mirror-like sheen. He wore gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses, and chunky rings glittered on several of his stubby fingers.
The other man, who had driven the pick-up, wore the same colour uniform, but that was where the commonality with the senior officer ended. His was faded and patched in several places and his footwear was a pair of scuffed gumboots. His chest webbing looked as though it had been run up on his wife’s sewing machine from a patchwork of different coloured canvas. The wooden stock and butt of his AK 47 were pitted and scratched with age, and even from ten metres away Shane’s trained eye spotted specks of orange rust around the muzzle. The soldier picked his nose with his free hand as he trailed the colonel. Shane had been schooled in the art of assessing an armed force’s expertise, training, leadership, morale and equipment. The way these two men looked and acted told him a lot. Patrice brought up the rear.
‘Francois, mon ami, comment ça va?’ Fletcher called as he pushed open his tent flap and strode out to meet the officer. They shook hands and embraced like old friends.
Fletcher introduced Shane and Michelle to Colonel Francois Gizenga, the local military commander for the region encompassing the concession and the adjoining section of the Virunga National Park. The colonel apologised for not being there to meet them the previous day, as planned, giving as an excuse his command of an operation to mop up some pockets of anti-government resistance.
‘Close to here?’ Shane asked.
‘Oh no,’ Gizenga said, ‘some sixty kilometres to the south-east. You won’t be bothered by them. Believe me, no one will be bothered by them now.’ His broad face lit up with a wide grin.
‘A cognac?’ Fletcher suggested.
Shane thought it a little early, and declined when Fletcher returned from his tent with a bottle and glasses, but the colonel accepted the offer. Michelle also said no and excused herself. ‘We need to talk later,’ she said to Fletcher as she left.
Shane, Fletcher, the colonel, and Patrice, who acknowledged Shane with little more than a cold glare, sat around a fold-out table under the shade of the awning that projected from the roof of Fletcher’s tent. The officer’s driver had returned to the pick-up and squatted in the shade on his haunches, his back resting against the vehicle. Wise and Caesar had relieved Shane on guard duty and were sitting outside the gutted building.
‘So, Fletcher has asked me to brief you, Mr Castle . . .’
‘Shane.’
‘Very well, Shane, on the current situation here in my groupement.’
Shane didn’t know whether the man had called it his district because he was born there or because he thought himself the local ruler. He suspected the latter.
‘You are familiar with this area, Shane?’ Gizenga asked.
‘Never been here before. All I know is what little I’ve picked up from the internet,’ Shane admitted.
‘Very well,’ Gizenga said with a theatrical shrug of resignation, ‘we start from the beginning. The Parc National de Virunga, PNV, as we call it, was created in 1925 during the colonial times and originally named Albert National Park, after the then king of Belgium. The reserve runs north-south along our border with Uganda and Rwanda.’ The colonel traced the elongated green-shaded zone that denoted the protected area on the map in front of them. The park was partly split by a wedge of communal and privately owned lands along the Rutshuru River, and it was in this area, north-east of the town of Rutshuru, on the border with Uganda, that Fletcher’s hunting concession was based.
‘We are in what was once known as the Domaine de Chasses de Rutshuru – a hunting reserve, or a safari area, as you would call it.’ With his finger, Gizenga drew a box around much of the white area on the map between the green of the PNV to the west, and another identically coloured area on the border. ‘Over there,’ he added, pointing past Fletcher to the east, ‘a few kilometres away is the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, home to about half of the remaining mountain gorillas – about three hundred and twenty creatures in all.’
‘Impenetrable?’ Shane asked.
‘Oui. It is named for a good reason. Here we are quite high, and this limits the size of the trees. Instead of rainforest with a high canopy and little undergrowth, we have smaller trees in thickly forested areas with a very thick tangle of vines, bamboo and bushes below.’
Shane nodded. He knew they were on the border of the Ugandan park, and had read a little about it, but wanted to know more about the side of the imaginary line where he and his men would be operating. ‘You say this was once a hunting concession. When was it last used?’
Gizenga shrugged. ‘Perhaps twenty years ago, maybe more, when Mobuto Sese Seko was in charge. Since his fall, and following the civil wars, this land has been taken over by refugees and others. The animals have mostly gone, replaced by small farms and people, with the exception of the more rugged areas, such as where we now sit.’
‘It’s called the Sarambwe Forest,’ Fletcher interjected.
Shane leaned closer to study the map. ‘No civilisation between us and the Ugandan border.’
Fletcher shook his head. ‘Not unless you can call a couple of refugee villages civilisation.’
If Gizenga was offended by Fletcher’s comment, he ignored it. He explained a little more of the park’s history, including its name change under Mobuto Sese Seko’s government, and the increasing interest in efforts to save the endangered mountain gorillas, which were mainly located in the Mikeno sector of the Virunga park, about forty-five kilometres south of their camp.
‘Occasionally troops of gorillas have also crossed into our country in this area, from the Bwindi Impenetrable Park. If the forest on this side remains intact, and we keep poachers and militia out of here, perhaps one day tourists will come to the Sarambwe Forest to view wildlife.’
‘To a hunting concession?’ Shane asked. ‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Our government believes that hunters will return before the backpackers,’ Gizenga said. ‘My men have been deployed to this area in force, with three aims. The first is to clear out the
Rwandan Interahamwe – the Hutu militia who have lived in this part of our country for too long. The second aim is to make this concession safe for Fletcher and his clients to hunt, and the third is to stop local poachers and refugees coming here, killing wildlife for bush meat and cutting down trees for firewood.’
Fletcher leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s something you don’t see every day in Africa, Shane. Forward thinking. The Congolese hope their own people – and the militiamen – will move out and stay away if there are soldiers and hunters operating legally in the bush. Even though we’re hunting, we’re doing more for conservation – by stopping the locals and foreigners from massacring the wildlife – than any other greenie in the country.’
It was an odd concept, introducing hunting to protect animals, but Shane knew that several of Africa’s great national parks had begun life as hunting preserves, so perhaps it was just history repeating itself. The problem of Rwandan and other rebels hiding out in the DRC’s eastern forests gelled with what he had read online, although Gizenga had left out any mention of illegal hunting by the Congolese Army.
Gizenga continued. ‘Inside the Virunga Park there are anti-poaching patrols funded by international aid organisations, conservation groups and the UN. They, along with our soldiers, have done a good job increasing security and making the park safe for the return of tourists, but it is areas such as here, where you are operating, close to population areas, where there is still a problem. In past years small armies of rebel forces have swept through the park and beyond its borders, attacking and killing rangers and local villagers alike. The fighting has died down a little, although refugees have settled around existing villages and there is still a problem with robbery and subsistence poaching in and around the park.’ Fletcher interrupted and told the colonel of the previous night’s events.
Gizenga nodded. ‘Crime is still a problem in these communities. The poaching, though, it is mostly for bush meat now. Sometimes they light fires to drive the game from the jungle into nets. As well as the antelope and hogs, they will catch monkeys and smoke the meat. Sometimes they will kill chimps and gorillas.’
