A Time to Die, page 8
He picked up the .577 and he strode back through the grass to the riverbank. As he trudged through the sandy water-course, his anger at last came upon him, more powerful for being so long delayed.
Claudia was sitting alone in the front of the Toyota as he came up the bank. She looked forlorn and abandoned, but he felt no twinge of pity. She stared aghast at his blood-caked hands.
Sean placed the .577 in the gun-rack without looking at her, and then spilled water from the jerry can over his hands and scrubbed them together, washing off most of the blood. He climbed into the driver’s seat and started the Toyota, swung it in a tight circle and sent it back along the track that followed the river downstream.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?’ Claudia asked at last. She had meant to sound unrepentant and full of bravado, but it came out in a small subdued voice.
‘All right,’ Sean agreed. ‘I’ll tell you. Instead of a quick merciful kill there was total chaos and confusion. The lioness charged us first. We shot her by mistake in the long grass. Not that we would have had much option anyway. She was coming all the way.’ Sean switched on the headlights, for the sun was gone and the forest darkening. ‘Okay, so now the lioness is dead. Her cubs are still unweaned, they are goners, all three of them. They’ll starve to death inside a week.’
‘Oh no!’ Claudia whispered.
‘Then the lion charged after his mate. He caught us all ends up. We weren’t ready for him, and he got Shadrach down, He almost chewed his leg off. The bone is shattered from hip to knee. He may lose the whole leg, I don’t know, perhaps he’ll get lucky and just end up with a permanent limp. Anyway you look at it, he’s not going to be a tracker any more. I’ll find him a job as a skinner or camp servant, but he’s a Matabele warrior and menial work is going to break his heart.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘You are sorry?’ Sean asked. His voice low and furious. ‘Shadrach is my friend and my companion. He has saved my life more times than I can count and I’ve done the same for him. We have fought a war together, we have slept under the same blanket, eaten from the same plate, trekked ten thousand miles together in the heat and the dust and the rain. He is more than a friend. I have two brothers, same mother and father, but Shadrach means more to me than either of them. Now you tell me you’re sorry. Well, thanks a lot, ducky. That’s a great comfort.’
‘You have every right to be angry. I understand!’
‘You understand?’ he asked. ‘You understand nothing. You are an arrogant ignoramus from a different hemisphere. You are a citizen of the land of the quick fix, and you come and try your simplistic naïve solutions here in Africa. You try to save a single animal from his destiny, and you end up by killing a female and sending her three cubs to lingering death and condemning one of the finest men you’ll ever meet to the life of a cripple.’
‘What more can I say?’ she asked. ‘I was wrong.’
‘At this late hour your new-found humility is most touching.’ His low voice lashed her. ‘Sure, you were wrong. Just as you and your people are wrong to try and starve an African nation of thirty million souls into acceptance of another one of your naïve solutions. When the damage you have inflicted is beyond repair, will you again say “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” and walk away and leave my land and my people to bleed and suffer?’
‘What can I do?’
‘We have thirty days of safari remaining,’ he said bitterly. ‘I want you to keep out of my hair for that time. The only reason I don’t cancel the show right now, and send you packing back to your Eskimos and your human rights, is that I just happen to think your father is a pretty fine man. From now on, you are under sufferance. Just one more peep out of you and you are on the next plane back to Anchorage. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Abundantly.’ And there was a trace of spirit in her tone once more. Neither of them spoke again during the rough ride down to the ford and back up the far bank to the glade in which the bait tree stood.
By that time Job and Matatu had a fire going. The glow of the flames guided Sean to where Shadrach lay, and he climbed out of the Toyota and went to him immediately.
‘How is the pain?’ He squatted beside him.
‘It is a little thing,’ Shadrach replied, but Sean saw the lie in the grey tone of his skin and the sunken eyeballs, and he filled a disposable syringe from a glass ampoule of morphine. He waited for the drug to take effect before they lifted Shadrach between them and laid him in the back of the truck.
Job and Matatu had skinned out both lions while they waited, and they loaded the bundle of green salted skins onto the bonnet where it would cool in the night wind.
‘It’s a hell of a lion,’ Sean told Riccardo. ‘You’ve got yourself a magnificent trophy!’
Riccardo shook his head and said, ‘Let’s get Shadrach back to camp.’
Sean drove with care, rolling the truck gently over the rougher spots, trying to protect Shadrach from the worst jolting.
Claudia insisted on sitting in the back with Shadrach, cushioning his head on her lap. Riccardo sat up in front with Sean and he asked quietly, ‘What happens now?’
‘I’ll radio Harare as soon as we get into camp. They will have a private ambulance at the airport to meet him. I’ll be gone a couple of days. I’ll see Shadrach well taken care of and, of course, I’ll have to put in a report to the government game department and try and square it.’
‘I hadn’t gotten around to thinking about that,’ Riccardo said. ‘We killed a lioness with cubs and had a man mauled. What will the government do?’
Sean shrugged in the darkness. ‘There is a better than even chance they’ll pull my licence and take the concession away from me.’
‘Hell. Sean. I didn’t realize. Is there anything I can do?’
‘Not a thing, Capo, but thanks for the offer. You are out of it. It’s between me and the department.’
‘I could take full blame for the lioness, say I shot her.’
‘No good.’ Sean shook his head. ‘No blame on the clients. That’s departmental doctrine. Whatever you do, I am fully responsible.’
‘If they pull your licence . . .’ Riccardo hesitated, and Sean shook his head again.
‘No, Capo, they won’t cancel the safari. That’s also departmental doctrine. Finish the safari. Don’t offend the paying client. Government needs the hard currency you bring. Only after you have left, they’ll bring out the axe for me. You are out of it. I’ll be back in two days, and we’ll hunt that big elephant together. You don’t have to worry.’
‘You make me sound like a selfish bastard. I’m worrying about you and your licence, not about enjoying myself.’
‘We’ll both enjoy ourselves, Capo. After all, if I do lose my licence, it will be the last time that you and I ever hunt together, Capo.’
Claudia could overhear the conversation from where she sat in the back of the truck and she knew why her father did not reply. He knew that it was his last hunt, licence or no licence. Claudia had taken an emotional battering during the last few hours, and thinking about Papa now, she felt the tears well up and scald her eyelids. She fought them back and then it was no longer worth the effort and she wept for all of them, for her father and the lioness and the cubs, for that beautiful male lion, and for Shadrach and his shattered leg.
One of her tears fell on to Shadrach’s upturned face, and he stared up at her in perturbation. She wiped the droplet from his cheek with her thumb and her voice was thick and muffled with grief as she whispered to him, ‘It’s going to be all right, Shadrach.’ Even she realized what a crass and fatuous lie that was.
Sean had a scheduled radio contact with his office in Harare at ten o’clock every evening. The journey home was so slow that they reached camp with only minutes to rig the aerial and connect the radio to the Toyota’s twelve-volt battery before the schedule.
The contact was good; one of the reasons for the late schedule was the better radio reception in the cool of the evening. Reema’s voice with its Gujurati intonation came through clearly. She was a pretty Hindu girl who ran Sean’s Harare office with ruthless efficiency.
‘We have a casevac.’ Sean used the terminology of the bush war for casualty evacuation. ‘I want an ambulance standing by to meet me.’
‘Okay fine, Sean.’
‘Set up a person-to-person telephone call with my brother, Garrick, in Johannesburg for ten a.m. tomorrow.’
‘Will do, Sean.’
‘Make an appointment for me to see the director of the game department tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Director is in New York for the Wildlife Conference, Sean. The deputy director is in charge.’
Sean switched off the hand microphone while he swore bitterly, he had forgotten about the Wildlife Conference. Then he pressed the transmit button again.
‘Okay, Reema my love, get me an appointment with Geoffrey Manguza then.’
‘Sounds serious, Sean.’
‘We just invented the word.’
‘What is your ETA? ‘I’ll have to file an emergency flight plan for you.’
The security authority was always so jittery about South African hot pursuit of terrorists into Zimbabwe or preemptive South African raids on terrorist facilities in Harare itself that they usually required flight plans to be filed forty-eight’ hours in advance.
‘Take off here in fifty minutes. ETA Harare 2300 hours. Pilot and two pax,’ Sean told her.
It was half an hour’s drive from the camp to the airstrip. Riccardo and Claudia were in the Toyota when they drove out.
Sean took the back seats out of the Beechcraft and placed a mattress on the floor for Shadrach. By this time, Shadrach was feverish and restive. His temperature was 101 and the glands in his groin, hard and lumpy as walnuts. Sean didn’t want to look under the dressings on the leg, afraid of what he might find, but one of the minor claw wounds on Shadrach’s belly was definitely infected already, weeping watery pus and emitting the first faint odour of putrescence.
Sean administered another dose of penicillin through the canula of the drip set and then he and Job and two of the camp skinners very gently lifted Shadrach into the aircraft and settled him on the mattress.
Shadrach’s wife was a sturdy Matabele woman with an infant strapped to her back with a length of trade cloth: They loaded her considerable baggage and then she clambered up and sat beside Shadrach on the mattress, placed the infant on her lap, opened her blouse and gave the child her milk-engorged breast to suckle. The aircraft’s empty luggage compartments Job filled with sacks of dried game meat, a valuable commodity in Africa. Then Job drove the Toyota to the far end of the runway to give Sean the headlights for take-off.
‘Job will look after you while I am away, Capo. Why don’t you take the shotgun and go for dove and sand grouse down at the pools? Best wing shooting you’ll ever have, better than white winged dove in Mexico,’ Sean suggested.
‘Don’t worry about us. We’ll be just fine.’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can. Tukutela won’t be crossing before the new moon. I’ll be back before then. It’s a promise, Capo.’
Sean held out his hand and as Riccardo took it, he said, ‘You did good work with the lions, Capo, but then you were never short of bottom.’
‘What kind of limey word is that?’ Riccardo asked. “Bottom”?’
‘How about a good Yankee word then? “Cojones”?’
‘That will do,’ Riccardo grinned at him.
Claudia was standing beside her father and now she smiled hesitantly, almost shyly, and took a step forward as if to offer her hand.
She had released her hair from its plait and brushed it out into a dense, dark mane around her head. Her expression was soft and her eyes big and dark and lustrous. In the Toyota headlights her classical Latin features went beyond the merely handsome, and Sean realized for the first time that she was truly beautiful. Despite her beauty and her penitent attitude, he kept his own expression cold and forbidding, nodded at her curtly, ignored the tentative offer to shake his hand, climbed up onto the wing of the Beechcraft and ducked into the cockpit.
Sean had cut the airstrip out of the brush himself and levelled it by dragging a bundle of old truck tyres up and down it behind the Toyota. It was narrow, rough and short, with a gradient falling towards the river. He lined up with the Beechcraft’s tail-plane backed into the bushes, and stood on the brakes facing down the slope. He aimed at the lights of the Toyota at the far end of the strip while he ran up to full power on both engines and then let the brakes off. Just short of the trees at the end of the strip he pulled on the flaps and bounced the Beechcraft into the air. As always he crossed himself blasphemously with mock relief as he cleared the tree-tops and turned on course for Harare.
During the flight, he tried to plan his strategy. The director of the game department was an old friend, and Sean had successfully dealt with him in equally serious circumstances. However the deputy, Geoffrey Manguza, was a horse of literally another colour. The director was one of the few white civil servants still in charge of a department of government. Manguza would succeed him soon, the first black head of the game department.
He and Sean had fought on opposite sides during the bush war, and Manguza had been an astute guerrilla leader and political commissar. The rumour was that he did not like the safari concession owners, most of whom were white. The concept of private exploitation of State assets offended his Marxist principles, and he had shot too many white men during the war to have any great deal of liking or respect for them.
It was going to be a difficult meeting, Sean sighed.
Reema was waiting for him as he taxied in. As a modern Indian woman, she had abandoned the sari in favour of a neat slacks suit. She was not so modern, however, that she wished to choose her own husband. Her father and her uncles were working on that at the moment, and had already come up with a likely candidate in Canada. A professor of Oriental religions at Toronto University. Sean hated them for it. Reema was an ornament to Courtney Safaris, and he knew that he would never be able to replace her.
She had the ambulance waiting on the tarmac beside the light aircraft hangars. Regularly, Reema bribed the guards on the main gate with dried game meat from the concession. In Africa, meat or the promise of meat opens all gates.
They followed the ambulance to the hospital in the Kombi. While Sean sat in the passenger seat glancing through the most urgent mail she had brought for his attention, Reema recited a list of the important developments during his absence.
‘Carter, the surgeon from Atlanta, cancelled . . .’ That was a twenty-one-day safari, and Sean glanced up sharply, but Reema soothed him. ‘I phoned the German soap manufacturer in Munich, Herr Buchner, the one we turned down in December. He jumped at it. So we are full, back to back, for the rest of the season.’
‘How about my brother?’ Sean interrupted. He didn’t tell her that it was touch and go that there was going to be an end to the season.
‘Your brother is expecting your call and as at six o’clock this morning the telephone was still working.’ In Zimbabwe that was something that couldn’t be taken for granted.
At the hospital, there were at least fifty seriously ill patients awaiting admission ahead of them. The long benches were full of huddled, miserable humanity and the stretchers were blocking the aisles and doorways. The admission clerks were in no great hurry and waved Shadrach’s stretcher to a far corner.
‘Leave it to me,’ said Reema, and she took the senior admissions clerk by the elbow and led him aside with an angelic smile, talking to him sweetly.
Five minutes later, Shadrach’s admission papers were processed and he was being examined by an East German doctor.
‘How much did that cost?’ Sean asked.
‘Cheap,’ Reema answered. ‘A bag of dried meat.’
Sean had picked up sufficient of the German language from his safari clients to be able to discuss Shadrach’s case with the doctor. The man was reassuring. Sean said goodbye to Shadrach.
‘Reema has your money. She will come to see you each day. If you need anything tell her.’
‘I will be with you in spirit when you hunt Tukutela,’ Shadrach said softly, and Sean had to clear his throat before he could answer.
‘We will hunt many more elephant together, old friend.’ And he walked away quickly.
The next morning when at last he got through to Johannesburg, the telephone line was crackling with static.
‘Mr Garrick Courtney is in a board meeting,’ the girl on the switchboard at Centaine House, the Courtney Group headquarters, told him. ‘But he gave orders to put your call through directly.’
In his mind’s eye, Sean saw once again the boardroom, panelled in figured walnut, the huge Pierneef canvases framed by the elaborate panels, and his brother, Garry, sitting at the head of the long table, beneath the crystal chandelier that his grandmother had imported from Murano in Italy, in the chairman’s high-backed throne.
‘Sean!’ Garry’s voice cut through the static, bold and assured. How he had changed from the puny little runt who used to pee his bed.
The job could have been Sean’s if he had wanted it and had been prepared to work for it. Sean was the eldest son, but he did not want the job. Still he always experienced a twinge of resentment when he thought of Garry’s Rolls and Lear jet and holiday home in the south of France.
‘Hello Garry. How’s it going?’
‘All well here,’ Garry told him. ‘What’s the problem?’ It was typical of their relationship that any contact meant there was a problem to solve.
‘I might need to put a bit of honey with the cheese,’ Sean told him diplomatically. It was their private code for money to Switzerland, and Garry would understand that Sean would be bribing somebody for something. It happened often enough.
