The Protector, page 10
‘Graham had a reputation,’ Thomas said.
Doc looked up from Graham’s face. ‘How so?’
‘A poacher was killed in the Timbavati Game Reserve last month – a colleague of mine was the investigating officer and my brother told me some of the details, although he was on leave at the time it happened. Graham Foster shot the man, who was part of a suspected rhino poaching gang. Security is very good in that reserve and Foster and another man, with a tracker dog, responded to a sighting from a camera trap. They tracked a gang of three poachers and when they cornered them the poacher with the rifle shot at them and wounded the dog. Foster said he fired a warning shot and called to the man to surrender, but the poacher then opened fire on him. Foster shot the poacher in the chest, killing him. The other two poachers then surrendered and were arrested by Foster and his colleague.’
Doc shook her head in quiet awe of the men and women who continued to fight on the conservation front lines. ‘How horrible.’
‘As is procedure out here, a manslaughter docket was opened to investigate the incident. It was decided that Foster had acted in self-defence, but he still had to testify when the two other poachers appeared in court. I heard there was an angry crowd of local people in attendance, relatives of the dead man. My colleague told me he heard more than one of those members of the deceased’s family threaten to kill Graham Foster.’
It was possible this was a payback crime. Perhaps someone had been out driving in the night and had recognised Graham’s bakkie. Doc closed her eyes and tried to picture the scene as it had played out just a short time ago.
‘Are you all right?’ Thomas asked.
‘Just thinking.’
‘Very well.’
She heard Thomas’s footsteps, then his voice as he moved away from her and conversed with one of the crime scene technicians in Xitsonga.
Graham had been drunk, but he was built like a Springboks forward and could hold his liquor better than most – not that his build was an excuse for his drink driving; it wasn’t. He lived his life on the edge, hunting poachers for a living, and from what Doc had seen of him, he was always armed. Stopping on a quiet roadside at night on the edge of a game reserve, with no streetlights or houses or other humans around, was not a wise thing to do at the best of times. Graham, she was sure, would have been aware that he was in a vulnerable situation.
She pictured a car pulling up, before Thandeka Baloyi had arrived, and slowing to investigate why a bakkie was parked on the grass verge of the road.
Graham would have had a light on, she imagined. The driver’s-side door of the vehicle was still open and the interior light of the vehicle still burned. Perhaps that was enough light for him to change the tyre. What would she have done in the same situation?
Doc opened her eyes again and looked at the bakkie. On the ground was the long-armed socket wrench Graham had been using to loosen the wheel nuts. If she had been in his position, she would have at least picked up the wrench and taken that with her if she was going to talk to a stranger who had just pulled up in a car.
Graham, of course, had a gun. He would have been acutely aware, as Thomas had mentioned, that anti-poaching rangers had been targeted in this part of South Africa in the past. A senior ranger had been gunned down outside his home at Acornhoek a couple of years earlier in a high-profile assassination.
Would Graham have drawn his gun? She recalled there was a flap and a clip on the holster, so perhaps he would have at least undone that.
There were so many unknowns, it was hard to work out what might have happened next. Thomas came back to her.
‘Doc, I need to finish up here.’
‘Of course. Were there any spent bullet casings?’
He shook his head. ‘Not that we can find so far, but we’ll check the trees over there,’ he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder towards the bush on the other side of the fence, ‘to see if we can find the slug that killed Mr Foster embedded in a trunk. We might get lucky.’
Talk about a needle in a haystack.
‘Is there anything more you can tell us about Mr Foster,’ Thomas asked, ‘or last night?’
Doc nodded. ‘When he left the party he said he was going to attend to some “work stuff”, and he mentioned his partner – your brother, Oscar Mdluli.’
‘I’ve already left a message for Oscar on his phone, as I know he and Mr Foster were close. I will talk to him.’
A lump rose in Doc’s throat as the stark reality that another man she had known had been killed threatened to overwhelm her. She put her hand over her mouth.
‘I’m sorry, Doc.’
‘It’s OK.’ She sniffed back the tears. They would come later. Thomas nodded to a uniformed constable standing by Graham’s body, and he covered Graham’s face with the blanket again.
‘The work you’re doing out here,’ Thomas asked, ‘is it another sting operation?’
‘No,’ Doc said. ‘I’m just here to supervise a couple of research programs my students are undertaking. I haven’t done any undercover busts since, well, since Jurie. I’ve got no ongoing operations here. Graham was just going to keep an eye out for dangerous game, and poachers, of course, while we were in the bush.’
‘So he wasn’t really part of your anti-poaching pangolin task team.’
Doc shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t, Thomas, and I’m sorry if I gave that impression.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s OK. I’ve seen you speak and I know what you and Jurie and your team achieved. Another pair of eyes on a crime scene shouldn’t bother anyone, unless they have too much of an ego. And it’s late, and I’m tired, and we never have enough resources or money.’
‘I hear you.’
‘I’ll look into his background, what he’s been up to lately in the reserve in addition to the shooting of the poacher,’ Thomas said. ‘Can I count on your help?’
‘Absolutely,’ Doc said. ‘I know every ranger in the Timbavati will want to help you. Graham was . . . well, he had his faults, like all of us, Thomas, but he was one of the good guys. We’ll do anything we can to ensure his killer is brought to justice.’
‘Thank you, Doc. Are you here for long?’
‘Three days, as part of an organised tour that begins tomorrow, and then we leave Hoedspruit for Zimbabwe via the Kruger Park. You’ve got my number – just call me if there is anything I can do.’
‘I will.’ Thomas closed his notebook. ‘What do you think, Doc? Was this a hit on Graham, or was he just unlucky? Could he have been targeted because of his association with you?’
She looked into Thomas’s eyes. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
Doc turned and started back to where Sara was waiting for her, probably champing at the bit to find out what Doc knew. She glanced back over her shoulder at Graham’s lifeless body and the sorrow welled up in her again.
It all seemed so hopeless. Graham, big and strong, fit and young and with his stupid big handgun, was no more. The side of evil had won another round, taken another victim, just like it had taken Jurie. And Doc was left to ask why, to run the theories over and over again in her head, and to watch a species disappear from the face of the earth.
They called people like her, Jurie and Graham heroes on social media, celebrated their meagre triumphs with reels and stories on World Ranger Day and World Pangolin Day, but in the end what did they achieve? Two men had gone to early graves and the slaughter of wildlife continued.
It was all for nothing.
Each step she took felt like there was a dead body tied by a rope to her ankles. Every time she tried to move she saw a white, lifeless hand outstretched, reaching for her, trying to grab hold of her. Jurie, Graham, who would be next? And why, oh why, had she been left alive? Why had she been spared, only to be dragged down by grief?
Sara’s eyes widened when she saw her. ‘Oh, Doc . . .’
Doc clung to her, and wept into Sara’s shoulder.
Chapter 8
Geoff delicately moved a buffalo thorn branch out of his way as he followed the pangolin.
The tiny, wicked thorns on the stem gave the tree its slang name, the ‘wait-a-bit’, as the barbs latched onto clothes, skin and hair with painful ease. He kept his eye on the precious animal as he ducked and weaved.
The pangolin scratched in the dirt with his strong front claws, and then his narrow pink tongue, almost as long as his body and anchored deep inside his body near his pelvis, shot out like a striking snake. The ants he’d uncovered were helpless, and became trapped in the sticky saliva that coated his tongue.
Fed, Geoff tapped into the notes page of his phone as the tongue disappeared as fast as it had appeared. He recorded the time. When the pangolin had licked up a few hundred ants and began to move again, Geoff quickly dropped to one knee, snapped a photo of some of the lucky survivors who had evaded becoming brunch, and made a note of the species of ant. Pangolins were fussy eaters. He’d already recorded this one eating six different types of ants.
Geoff’s thoughts turned to Graham. Geoff, Zola and Sue had been discussing and speculating on their professor’s love life in a bar in Johannesburg one night and Sue had mentioned that Doc had once had a fling with a ranger.
‘That’s the one I told you about,’ Sue had whispered to Geoff when Graham walked into the house party in Hoedspruit. Geoff had been checking his phone at the time and he’d been surprised – shocked, even – to learn that Graham, with whom he’d worked briefly when Geoff was a guide in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve, had been Doc’s lover.
Geoff wondered if Doc would make it into the field today to check on him and his research. He’d woken at the house when his alarm went off at five and been surprised to find Doc and Sara walking in through the front door. He’d learned what had happened to Graham, and how Sara had found out about the shooting.
He had wanted to help, to comfort Doc in some way, as she seemed to be taking the news badly, but Sara had put Doc to bed and told him that probably the best thing he could do was to carry on with his field work.
‘That’s what she would want you to do,’ said Sara, who had a way of taking charge of a situation.
Geoff had packed his gear, gone to his bakkie, and driven out to the Balule Nature Reserve, where he had an access pass that allowed him to come and go as he pleased. The reserve was a large tract of privately-owned bushveld on the western side of the Kruger National Park. The fences between the Balule and other game reserves bordering the Kruger had been taken down years earlier, and now game was free to migrate back and forth.
Geoff followed the pangolin out of the trees and across a dry, sandy stream bed. They emerged over the opposite bank into an open area of golden grass. The reserve was like that, a pleasing mix of bush and savannah, ideal country for all of Africa’s iconic Big Five – lion, leopard, buffalo, elephant and rhino.
A grey go-away bird screeched its eponymous call, a warning to other creatures in the area that a two-legged interloper was moving through. Geoff touched a finger to the brim of his Rogue bush hat in acknowledgement. The pangolin snuffled on, unfussed.
This one had been discovered on a farm outside of Hoedspruit. Mercifully, the young man who’d found the pangolin was not a poacher but a herdsman walking with the farm’s small herd of cattle. He had come across the animal stuck under the electric fence that surrounded the property. Pangolins had a habit of trying to burrow under fences and then getting hung up on their scales. Many were killed when they came into contact with low-strung electric tripwires.
They had named this pangolin, a male, Charlie. It was ironic – well-heeled safari-goers could spend fruitless weeks and thousands of dollars trying to find one of these shy creatures, yet poorly paid workers who spent much of their time outdoors could sometimes trip over them.
Geoff heard a crack like a gunshot and stopped. He looked around and listened. There it was again, not a rifle, but the sound of splintering wood – a branch being broken. Elephant.
He dropped to one knee, picked up a handful of dusty, dry dirt and stood again. He let the tiny grains fall through his fist, showing him the direction the wind was travelling, then tilted his face and sniffed the air. They were upwind, to the east. Geoff peered through the trees lining the watercourse he had just crossed. For huge animals, elephants were extremely difficult to detect. They padded about the bush, literally, on feet lined with a spongy sole.
Geoff heard another branch being severed and this time the noise was definitely louder. To his right he saw movement, the flap of a grey sail-like ear through the foliage of a leadwood tree. The elephants were coming his way.
As a qualified field guide he’d had training in how to approach dangerous game, though he was not as experienced as the trails guides who led walking safaris, armed with rifles. By rights, he should have cancelled his walk in the bush with Charlie the pangolin after he learned that Graham was not going to be with him and no substitute had yet been arranged.
Geoff was now wondering if Sara was wrong and he should have stayed at the wildlife college, as a sign of respect over Graham’s death.
‘Geoff is on the spectrum, ever so slightly,’ Geoff’s mother was fond of saying to her friends. It annoyed Geoff, because he didn’t feel different from any of the other kids in school, although he had struggled with some subjects and he knew that he often misread what other people were thinking or how they felt. He did know about true love, though.
Reading and English comprehension had been difficult for him, although he’d done well at mathematics and anything that required him to commit rules or formulae or facts to memory. That skill had made him a good safari guide. He could impress his former clients with information about different animals’ eating habits, gestation periods and average sizes and weights.
The pangolin had moved to the far side of a termite mound and Geoff crouched down. By getting lower, he could better track the movement of the approaching elephant herd, because he could now see their legs moving below the curtain of leaves. They were still heading his way.
The elephants’ smell was getting stronger and Geoff heard the low rumbling noise from their bellies as they communicated with each other. The herd broke from the cover of the trees, led by the matriarch, a tall female with fine, long, thin ivory, and her latest calf trotting in her way. The baby was less than a year old – it could still fit under its mother’s belly – and it waved its trunk about, still not entirely sure what the appendage was for.
After the leader came four younger females, two with calves of their own. Knowing the structure of a typical herd, Geoff assumed these others were all females too, the daughters or even granddaughters of the haughty old lady in the lead, who paused and raised her trunk to sniff the air for possible danger.
Geoff looked to Charlie. If Geoff wasn’t busy watching over the pangolin he would have retreated to a respectable distance, out of the path of the oncoming pachyderms. Only the most foolish of guides went out of their way to bring on a confrontation with elephants, taunting them to get a rise out of them, to make them flare their ears, raise their trunks and trumpet, so that a tourist might record a bit of action on their phone. Not Geoff.
He had his nine-millimetre pistol in a pancake holster on his belt, but this was a token nod towards personal protection in the bush. The rounds in his magazine would bounce off an elephant’s head or the armoured boss between an angry buffalo’s horns. He was beginning to regret coming out into the field without an escort now.
Geoff watched as the matriarch lowered her trunk then swung her enormous head from side to side. The rest of her family had halted behind her, moving into a loose semicircle with their calves behind them. The big mother set off, making straight for the anthill behind which Geoff crouched.
‘Shit. Charlie, you’re on your own.’
The pangolin was a wild creature; it would get out of the elephants’ way if it needed to, and Geoff could always turn on his radio tracker again and find it without too much difficulty. He rose to a half-crouch and started backing away.
Just then, he heard a growl.
Geoff almost couldn’t believe it, but if there was one thing that he had learned in his brief time as a safari guide, it was to expect the unexpected. He turned to face where the noise had come from, further downwind from where he and the elephants were and, about fifty metres away, he saw a lioness stand up in the long golden grass.
Like the female elephant, the lioness also sniffed the air and turned her face to the elephant herd. Geoff froze, then lowered himself again. He was away from the relative shelter and cover of the termite mound, but was now stuck between several tonnes of irascible grandmotherly concern and Africa’s apex predator.
The lioness growled again and, to Geoff’s horror, a fully grown male lion, with an impressive russet and black mane, stood up from where it had been laying in the grass next to his mate. The male walked around behind the female and he, too, eyed off the elephants. The matriarch had stopped and was sniffing the air again, her trunk up.
Ordinarily, Geoff would have been thrilled to witness this kind of wildlife interaction – but right now, he was terrified. He knelt down in the grass. The two sets of animals were, for the time being, fixated on each other rather than him.
The male lion blinked twice, then started to walk, but he was stopped by his mate, who shot out a big paw and slapped him in his shaggy face. He stopped and the lioness turned to present herself. Clearly, they were a mating pair, which was why they appeared to be on their own, and she was unfazed by the looming presence of the elephants.
The lioness lowered her rump and the big male mounted her. In true lion fashion, the coupling was brief and violent. The lioness snarled and the male bit down on the back of her neck as he vigorously entered her.
