A Time to Die, page 3
Sean reached Claudia and with an arm around her, jerked her to her feet. Her legs were unable to support her, and he had to half carry, half drag her to the Toyota and bundle her into the front seat.
At the same time, Riccardo scrambled into the back seat of the Toyota, and Sean leapt up onto the running board and with his free hand held the rifle like a pistol, pointed out into the darkness, ready for another charge.
‘Go!’ he shouted at Job, and the Matabele driver let out the clutch and they flew down the riverbed, lurching and jolting over the heavy going.
Nobody spoke for almost a minute, until they had climbed out of the riverbed onto the smoother track and then Claudia said in a small strangled voice, ‘If I can’t pee right now, I’m going to burst.’
‘We could always point you at Snarly Sue like a fire extinguisher and wash her away,’ Sean suggested coldly, and in the back seat, Riccardo let out a delighted guffaw. Even though Claudia recognized the nervous relief and tension in her father’s laugh, she resented it bitterly. It aggravated the total humiliation she had suffered.
It was an hour’s drive back to camp and when they arrived, Moses, Claudia’s camp servant, had the shower filled with piping hot water. The shower was a twenty-gallon oil drum suspended in the branches of a mopane tree, a thatched grass screen, open to the stars, and a cement floor.
She stood under the rush of steaming water and as her body turned bright pink, she felt the humiliation and the nausea of the adrenalin over-dose fade away, to be replaced by that buoyant sense of well-being that comes only from having survived extreme danger.
While she soaped herself, working up a rich lather, she listened to Sean. He was fifty yards away at his makeshift gymnasium at the back of his own tent, but his regular hissing breathing carried clearly as he worked with the iron weights. He had not missed a session in the four days she had been in camp, no matter how long and hard the day’s hunting had been.
‘Rambo!’ She smiled contemptuously at his masculine conceit and yet more than once, during the last few days, she had caught herself surreptitiously contemplating his muscled arms, or his flat greyhound belly or even his buttocks, round and hard as a pair of ostrich eggs in his khaki shorts.
Moses carried the lantern ahead of her, escorting her back from the shower in her silk dressing-gown, with a towel tied like a turban around her hair. He had laid out her mess kit for her, khaki slacks and a Gucci tee-shirt, ostrich-skin mosquito boots, exactly what she would have chosen herself. Moses washed her soiled clothes every day, and his ironing was crisp perfection. Her slacks crackled softly as she pulled them on. They added to her sense of well-being.
She took her time drying her hair and brushing it out. She used an artistic trace of make-up and lipstick, and when she looked in the small mirror, she felt even better.
‘Who’s the vain one now?’ she smiled at herself, and went out to where the men were already at the camp-fire, gratified when they stopped talking, and watched her make her entrance. Sean rose from his camp chair to greet her with those silly limey manners that disconcerted her.
‘Sit down!’ She tried to sound brusque. ‘You don’t have to keep jumping up and down.’
Sean smiled easily. ‘Don’t let her see how she is succeeding in getting up your nose,’ he warned himself, and he held the canvas camp chair for her while she sat down with the soles of her mosquito boots to the camp-fire.
‘Get the Donna a peg,’ Sean ordered the mess waiter. ‘You know the way she likes it.’
The waiter brought it to her on a silver tray. It was perfect. A dash of Chivas whisky in a crystal glass, barely enough to colour the Perrier water, and filled right up with ice. The waiter was dressed in a snowy white kanza robe, the hem well below his knee, a scarlet sash over his shoulder to denote that he was the head waiter, and a scarlet pillbox fez on his head. His two assistant waiters stood respectfully in the background, also in scarlet fez and flowing white robes. For Claudia it was mildly embarrassing, there were twenty servants to care for three of them, all so sybaritic and colonial and exploitative. This was 1987, for God’s sake, and the empire was long gone – but the whisky was delicious.
‘I suppose you expect me to thank you for saving my life,’ she said, as she sipped it.
‘Not at all, ducky.’ Sean had learned almost immediately that she hated that form of address. ‘I wouldn’t even expect you to apologize for your crass stupidity. To be quite frank with you, I was worrying more about having to kill the lioness. Now that would have been tragic.’
They fenced lightly, skilfully, and Claudia found herself enjoying it. Every thrust that went through his guard gave her a satisfied glow, better even than a good day in court. She was disappointed when the head waiter announced in sepulchral tones, ‘Chef say dinner she is ready, Mambo,’ and Sean led them into the dining tent that was lit by candles in a many-branched Meissen porcelain candelabra. The cutlery was solid silver, Claudia had furtively checked the hallmarks, and the Waterford crystal wine-glasses sparkled on the tablecloth of Madeira lace-work and a robed waiter stood behind each of their folding canvas safari chairs, ready to serve.
‘What do you fancy tonight, Capo?’ Sean asked.
‘A touch of Wolfgang Amadeus,’ Riccardo suggested, and Sean pressed the ‘play’ button on the tape-deck before going to his seat, and the limpid strains of Mozart’s piano concerto number seventeen shimmered in the candlelight.
The soup was made with green peas and pearl barley and buffalo marrow bones, spiced with a fearsome chili sauce that Sean called Peli Peli Ho Ho.
Claudia had inherited her father’s taste for chili and garlic and red wine, but even she could not face the second course, buffalo tripes in a white sauce. Both men liked their tripes green, which was simply a euphemism for improperly cleaned of the original contents.
‘It’s only chewed grass,’ her father had pointed out, which made her feel squeamish until she turned and caught a whiff of the special dish that chef had prepared for her alone. Beneath a golden pie crust steamed a savoury stew of antelope fillets and kidneys. Chef had shaken his tall white cap when she had suggested the addition of ten cloves of garlic.
‘Cook book say no garlic, Donna.’
‘My book say plenty garlic, it say very loud ten cloves garlic, okay, chefie?’ And the chef had grinned in capitulation. Claudia had almost instantly overwhelmed the entire camp staff with her easy manner and relaxed charm.
The wine was a rich and robust South African Cabernet, every bit as good as her favourite Chianti, and she gave both wine and pie her full attention. The day’s rigours and the sun and fresh air had honed her appetite. Like her papa, she could eat and drink freely without adding an ounce of flesh or fat to her waistline. Only the conversation was a disappointment. As on every other evening the men were talking about rifles and hunting and the killing of wild animals. The gun talk was mostly unintelligible gibberish to her.
Her father said things like ‘The .300 Weatherby can move a 180-grain bullet at 3200 foot per second, that gives you over 4000 foot/lb of muzzle energy and stupendous hydro-static shock.’
And Sean would respond. ‘You Yanks are obsessed with velocity. Roy Weatherby has blown up more bullets on African game than you have eaten spaghetti, Capo. Give me high sectional density, Nosler construction and moderate velocity . . .’
No normally intelligent person could keep that up for hour after hour, she told herself, and yet every night of the safari so far she had gone to bed and left the two of them at the camp-fire still at it over their cognac and cigars.
When they spoke of the animals, however, she could take more interest and even participate, usually to vent her disapproval. They talked mostly of particular individual animals, legendary old males for which Sean had pet names, which annoyed Claudia, just the way it irritated her when he called Papa ‘Capo’, as though he were a mafia don. One such animal he referred to as ‘Frederick the Great’, or simply ‘Fred’. This was the lion they were hunting now, the lion for which they had hung the buffalo carcass.
‘I’ve seen him twice so far this season, one client even had a shot at him. Mind you, he was shaking so much with nerves he missed him by a football field.’
‘Tell me about him,’ Riccardo leaned forward eagerly.
‘Papa, he told you about him last night,’ Claudia reminded him sweetly. ‘And the night before, and the night before that. . . .’
‘Little girls should be seen and not heard,’ Riccardo chuckled. ‘Didn’t I ever teach you anything? Tell me about Fred, again.’
‘He’s got to be well over eleven foot, and not just length. He’s got a head on him like a hippo, and a mane like a black haystack. When he walks, it ripples and tosses like the wind in a msasa tree,’ Sean rhapsodized. ‘Cunning? Sly? Fred knows it all, he’s been shot at at least three times that I know of. Wounded once by a Spanish hunter over in Ian Piercy’s concession three seasons ago, but he recovered. He didn’t get that big by being stupid.’
‘How are we going to get him?’ Riccardo demanded.
‘I think the two of you are disgusting,’ Claudia cut in before Sean could reply. ‘After seeing those glorious creatures today, those beautiful little cubs. How can you bring yourself to kill them?’
‘I didn’t see any cubs shot today,’ Riccardo remarked as he nodded to the waiter offering him another helping of tripe. ‘In fact, we went to a great deal of trouble and risk to ensure their survival.’
‘You are devoting forty-five days of your life to the sole purpose of killing lions and elephants!’ Claudia shot back. ‘So don’t get all righteous with me, Riccardo Monterro.’
‘I am always fascinated by the confused thought processes of your average shrieking liberal,’ Sean intervened and Claudia turned on him gleefully, lusting for battle.
‘There is no confusion in my mind. You are here to kill animals.’
‘The same way that a farmer kills animals,’ Sean agreed. ‘To ensure a healthy flourishing herd, and a place for that herd to survive.’
‘You are not a farmer.’
‘Oh yes, I am,’ Sean contradicted. ‘The only difference is that I slaughter them on the range, not in an abattoir, but like any farmer, my chief concern is the survival of my breeding-stock.’
‘They are not domestic animals,’ Claudia contested. ‘Those are beautiful wild animals.’
‘Beautiful? Wild? What the hell has that got to do with it? Like anything else in this modern world, the wild game of Africa has to pay its way if it’s going to survive. Capo, here, is paying tens of thousands of dollars to hunt a lion and an elephant. He is giving those animals a monetary value far above goats and cattle, so that the newly independent government of Zimbabwe is willing to set aside concessions of millions of acres in which the game can persist. I hire one of those concessions, and I have the strongest incentive in the world for protecting it from the grazers and poachers and making certain I have plenty of game to offer my hunters. No, ducky, legal safari hunting is one of the most effective arms of conservation in Africa today.’
‘So you are going to save the animals by shooting them with high-powered rifles?’ Claudia demanded scornfully.
‘High-powered rifles?’ Sean laughed softly. ‘Another emotive liberal parrot cry. Would you prefer us to use low-powered rifles? Won’t that be rather like demanding that the butcher uses only blunt knives to cut throats? You are an intelligent woman, think with your head, not your heart. The individual animal is unimportant. His life span is limited to a few short years. In the case of this lion we are hunting, probably twelve years at the very most. What is beyond price is the continued existence of the species as a whole. Not the individual, but his entire kind. Our lion is an old male at the very end of his useful life span during which he has protected his females and his young and already added his genes to the pool of his race. He will die naturally within the next year or two. Much better that his death produce ten thousand dollars in cash which will be spent on providing a safe place for his cubs to live, than having this wilderness encroached upon by swarming black humanity and their scrawny herds of goats.’
‘My God, listen to you.’ Claudia shook her head sadly. ‘“Swarming black humanity”, those are the words of a racist and a bigot. It’s their land, why can’t they be free to live where they choose?’
‘And that is the logic of woolly-headed liberalism,’ Sean laughed. ‘Make up your mind whose side you are on, the beautiful wild animals or the beautiful wild blacks. You can’t have it both ways; when the two come into competition for living space, the wild animals always come off losers, unless we hunters can pay the bill for them.’
He wasn’t an easy man to argue with, she conceded, and she was relieved when her father cut in and gave her a moment to gather her wits.
‘There can be no doubt on which side my darling daughter stands. After all, Sean, you are talking to a senior member of the commission for the reinstatement of the Inuit people to their traditional lands.’
She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Not Inuit, Papa. People will think you are going soft. Not even Eskimos – your usual description is gooks, isn’t it?’
Riccardo smoothed back the thick waves of silver at his temples. ‘Shall I tell you how my daughter and her commission go about determining how much of Alaska belongs to the Inuits?’ he asked.
‘He’s going to tell you anyway.’ Claudia leaned across to stroke her father’s hand. ‘It’s one of his party routines. It’s very funny, you’ll love it.’
Riccardo went on as though she had not spoken. ‘They go down Fourth Street, in Anchorage, that’s where all the bars are, and they grab a couple of Eskimos that are still on their feet. They put them in an airplane and fly them down the peninsula, and they say to them: “Now, tell us where your people used to live. Show us your traditional tribal hunting grounds. How about that lake over there, did your people fish there once upon a time?”’ Riccardo changed his voice, he was an excellent mimic. ‘“Sure!!” says the Eskimo in the back seat, squinting out the window, his eyes full of Jack Daniels. “That’s where my gran-pappy fished.”’
He changed voices, imitating Claudia. ‘“And what about those mountains over there, the one which we wicked white folk who stole it away from you call Brooks Range, did your gran-pappy ever hunt there?”’ He changed to his Eskimo intonation. ‘“Sure did, man. He shot a whole mess of bears there. I remember my gran-mommy telling me about it.”’
‘Go on, Papa. You’ve got a marvellous audience tonight. Mr Courtney is enjoying your wit hugely,’ Claudia encouraged him.
‘You know something?’ Riccardo asked, ‘Claudia has never yet had an Eskimo turn down a lake or a mountain she has offered him, isn’t that something else? My little girl has got a perfect score, never a single refusal.’
‘You are just plain lucky, Capo,’ Sean told him. ‘At least they might leave you something, here they took the lot.’
Claudia woke to the clink of crockery outside the flap of her tent and Moses’ polite cough. Nobody had ever brought her tea in bed before. It was a luxury that made her feel marvellously decadent. It was still pitch dark and icy cold in the tent. She could hear the crackle of frost on the canvas as Moses opened the flap. She had never expected it to be so cold in Africa.
She sat up in the camp-bed with a quilt over her shoulders, cupping her hands around the tea mug and watched Moses fussing about the tent. He poured a bucket of hot water into her wash basin and set a clean white towel beside it. He filled the tooth mug with boiled drinking water and squeezed toothpaste onto her brush for her. Then he brought a brazier of burning charcoal and placed it in the centre of the tent.
‘Too cold today, Donna.’
‘And too damned early,’ Claudia agreed sleepily.
‘Did you hear the lions roaring last night, Donna?’
‘I didn’t hear a thing.’ She yawned. They could have had a brass band playing ‘America, the Beautiful’ beside her bed without waking her.
Moses finished laying out her clothes on the spare bed. He had polished her boots until they shone.
‘You want something, Donna, you call me,’ he told her as he backed out of the tent flap.
She shot out of the warm bed and stood over the brazier shivering while she held her panties over the coals to warm them before pulling them on.
The stars were still shining when she left the tent. She paused to look up, still amazed by the jewelled treasure chest of the southern sky. She picked out the great cross with a sense of achievement and then went to the camp-fire where the men were, and held her hands out gratefully to the flames.
‘You haven’t changed since you were little.’ Her father smiled at her. ‘Do you remember how I used to battle to get you out of bed to go to school every morning?’ And a waiter brought her a second cup of tea.
Sean whistled and she heard Job start the Toyota and drive it around to the front gate of the stockade, and they began pulling on their heavy gear. Jerseys and anoraks, caps and woollen scarves.
When they trooped out to the hunting car, they found the rifles in the racks and Job and Shadrach, the two Matabeles, standing in the back with the little Ndorobo tracker between them. The tracker was a childlike figure who came only to Claudia’s armpit, but he had an endearing wrinkled grin and bright mischievous eyes. She had been predisposed to like all the black camp staff, but Matatu was already her favourite. He reminded her of one of the dwarfs from Snow White. The three blacks were bundled up against the cold in army-surplus greatcoats and knitted Balaclava caps, and they answered Claudia’s greeting with white grins in the darkness. All of them had fallen under her spell.
Sean took the wheel and Claudia sat on the front seat between him and her father. She crouched down behind the windscreen and cuddled against Papa for warmth. In the short time she had been on safari, she had come to love this start to the day’s adventure.
