The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

  He moaned once, and the sharp black horns quivered.

  7

  CLICKRASP

  Clickrasp. The sound, bent by the wind, attenuated over those long thorny hills, their backs broken by the eons, reached the merest hair atop the pointed ears of the listener. The ears peaked.

  Q’lueq …

  He rose from his haunches. His lips widened in a smile. His eyes, aquamarine in color, brightened and crinkled.

  Wide eyes, heavily lashed, an extreme intelligence.

  Grassp’h.

  Clickrasp the Tok had awakened.

  8

  WHITE LEGS

  “The Big Rockcandy Mountain,” said Winjah, halting the G.T. at the top of the ridge. “How do you like it?”

  Below them the country fell away and opened out into a broad savanna, framed on the north and west by the mountains over which they had passed. Jebels rose from the plain, the stubs of older, long-since-eroded mountains, poking through the decomposed lava of the basin like the calcified fingers of a giant. At the base of the tallest jebel lay their camp, convenient to one of the few springs that watered this semiarid land. Herds of zebra, impala, kongoni, and wildebeest circulated through the yellow grass. The western edge of the plain was cut by the River Kan, a fast, strong, mottled python of a stream that drained the slopes of Mount Baikie and spilled, finally, into Lake Tok far to the south. Across the river rose the scarps—three thousand feet high—that protected the Tok Plateau. Seen in this late afternoon light, the plateau itself was a haze of dark green, blotched by clouds and swirling with backlit mists.

  “It’s a grand country,” said Donn. “How long will we stay here?”

  “A week at least,” said Winjah. “Long enough to get toughened up for the Tok Plateau. We’ll have to walk in. No track for the poor G.T.”

  “Who lives here?”

  “There’s a Samburu manyatta tucked away in the northern end of the plain, just below the Tirika Swamp. And up on the plateau, of course, there are the Tok.”

  “The what?” asked Dawn.

  “We’ll get around to them later,” said Winjah. “Right now let’s get down to our lovely little kampi. I’m feeling a bit peckish, and I’m sure the memsahib could use a hot shower and a bit of the old kip.”

  The jebel under which the camp was pitched rose a full thousand feet above the surrounding plain. Its name, in Samburu, was Naibor Keju, which meant “White Legs.” As they drove down toward it, they speculated as to the derivation.

  “It isn’t remotely white,” said Winjah, “more of a dirty gray at best.”

  “And there’s only the one shaft of rock,” added Donn. “Why ‘Legs’?”

  “Maybe if you look at it from another angle,” suggested Dawn.

  “I’d much prefer to study the white legs of the fair Dawn woman,” said Winjah. “Never much for geology, I must say.”

  Dawn blushed and Donn gritted his teeth. He’d read about white hunters and their ways with female clients. Donn was used to men bird-dogging his wife—she was, after all, quite beautiful—but as far as he knew she had never succumbed to their advances. Still, Winjah was more man than any of the others. Rattling along in the Green Turd, rolling his eyes and singing “North to Alaska” in a perfect Johnny Horton drawl, Winjah nonetheless conveyed a sense of murderous, grave purpose—he was a killer and a cocksman, no doubt about it. And who the hell were the Tok?

  The green tents of the camp were pitched in such a way as to look out over the game plain to the River Kan and the Tok Plateau. Africans in freshly starched green uniforms bustled about as the G.T. pulled in, uttering their shy “Jambos” and offering their limp calloused paws in friendly handshakes as Winjah made the introductions. Bucky lurched out of the back of the truck, his nose glowing red with sunburn, and begged for a beer.

  In the mess tent, tea was already laid. Joseph, the majordomo, was a grave and grizzled Waziri who had been in Winjah’s service for nearly a quarter of a century. His demeanor would have befitted a maitre d’ at the Plaza or the George V or the Villa d’Este. He was far kindlier than anyone at Brown’s Hotel. Or so Donn thought: Had he the magical wherewithal to wade through any given week of Joseph’s early manhood, he would have drowned in blood. Dawn excused herself and went to the shower tent.

  “Our own little nightclub,” sighed Winjah as he sipped a steaming mug of Earl Grey tea thick with milk and unrefined sugar. “I call it the M’Bogo a Go Go. Regardez!” For the first time Donn noticed the buffalo skull mounted against the tent pole supporting the far wall of the cubicle. The boss of the horns swept out and downward to either side of a bone-white “part” like some sinister parody of a 1920s hairdo, then curved outward and upward, thinning to black gleaming points. The nose bone and skull were bleached beneath the horns, while the empty eye sockets—big around as cannon holes—glared balefully into the tent. Small spiders, metallic green and bronze, hung in their webs, spun from the craggy ridges of the eye sockets. The spiders were sitting off center in the sockets, and their glint—as Donn’s eyes grew accustomed to the aquatic gloom of the tent’s interior—gave the buffalo a mad, slightly cockeyed look.

  “Kee-ripes!” exclaimed Bucky, blowing the foam from his third mug of Tusker’s. “How big does he go?”

  “Fifty-five inches measured across the outermost curve of the horns,” said Winjah, “by eighteen across the thickest reach of the boss. And he was a young’un.”

  “Where did you take him?”

  “Up there.” Winjah gestured carelessly through the mosquito netting toward the Tok Plateau, over which the late afternoon sky had now begun to boil with rain clouds under the thrust of a reddening sun. “That was fifteen years ago. I believe that I was the last white hunter in there. At least, there have been no safaris to return from the plateau since then.”

  “So we’ll find buff at least this big up there still?” asked Bucky.

  “I should imagine so.”

  “And just who are these Tok?” asked Donn.

  “In the fullness of time, Bwana Donn. In the fullness of time.” Winjah rose and finished his tea. “Right now I must see to the kampi, make sure my loyal lads have met with their harsh but evenhanded Bwana’s every demand—like remembering to bring along the cookstove, etc. After the fair mem is finished with her bathi, just give Joseph a holler and he’ll have the hot-water bucket replenished.”

  While Blackrod showered—Donn had insisted as subtly as possible that perhaps the Big Bucko would enjoy a wash far more than he—Donn walked out behind the camp and studied the jebel called White Legs. Brush-clad for the first third of its height, the ancient rock then bared itself to the waning light—a browning red, like dried blood, veined darkly with crevices filled with small shrubs and rubble. Eagles and a few vultures, drawn by the gerenuk which the boys were butchering just now at the skinner’s tent, turned on the ground wave high overhead. He heard a faint barking from the upper reaches of the jebel and, peering closely, spotted a half dozen scuttling black figures leaping from knob to knob. Baboons. He fetched his Orvis 7x40 binoculars and a copy of Dorst and Dandelot’s Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa from his pack, then focused on the apes. Judging from size and the diagnostic “broken” tails, they were anubis baboons—the largest and most widely distributed of these strong and sociable primates. Up to ninety pounds in weight and nearly four feet long, they were fierce fighters, capable of a highly effective group defense against their most common enemy, the leopard. Or so it said in the book.

  Donn, leaning back against a termite hill, watched them through the glass. This was evidently a “play group” of youngsters, watched over by their mothers. They gamboled and frolicked like kindergartners, squabbling in high-pitched yelping voices, retreating when the going got too rough to the shaggy dugs of their mothers, then venturing forth again to pinch and poke and gnaw on their pals. Donn felt his heart jump as one or another of the young primates came dangerously close to falling—it would be a hundred yards straight d
own, a high price for a misstep. But the baboons always kept their balance, and gradually he grew bored with their cliff-hanging excesses.

  A faint familiar odor now reached his nostrils from the direction of the skinner’s tent. He sniffed. Dope. Well, I’ll be darned! Sauntering down that way, he noted that the smell grew stronger as the voices of the Africans grew jollier and more agitated. Sure enough, when he turned the corner of the tent they were hunkered down around the pile of red meat, toking heartily on a banana-sized joint wrapped in newspaper. Donn sniffed as they looked up at him, then smiled broadly and rolled his eyes in the universal sign of hungry approbation. Otiego, the lean Turkana tracker, grinned back and, pretending he didn’t know what Donn wanted, handed him a slab of gerenuk meat, raw and dripping. When Donn recoiled in mock horror, the lads all laughed. Otiego passed the joint, and Donn, suppressing a faint revulsion at the saliva-slippery business end of the rolled newspaper, took a deep hit.

  How do you say “Don’t Bogart that joint” in Kiswahili? he wondered. The smoke hit him hard, spreading his already travel-weary head back over the entire route they had followed, and on out to the Tok Plateau. Otiego rolled another and they smoked, giggling.

  “Bhangi,” said the African, his blocky white teeth flashing within those thin purple lips. “Muzuri sana.” Between hits, he wolfed down strips of raw meat, the blood oozing down his chin, onto his scarred and naked chest. Donn looked away, waiting for the bomber to come around again.

  The Tok Plateau now lay dark under the shadow of distant mountains. Strange shapes seemed to move along its lumpy silhouette. Donn felt a chill up his backbone. The rest of the boys had drifted away to the cookfire. Otiego lay back against a peeled thorn log, stoned to the eyeballs. Donn could hear Winjah and Bucky talking over the strains of a Merle Haggard tape in the M’Bogo a Go Go, their voices faint and falsely vivacious, it seemed to him, over the dark mood the bhangi had inspired. Then, suddenly, a piteous scream ricocheted down from the jebel. Whirling around, Donn raised the binoculars and scanned the rock face. Was it Dawn?

  High atop the jebel, bathed in a final plasmic light, a large dark figure held a smaller, squirming one at arm’s length before it. The large figure stood erect. It had pointed ears. Light flashed on polished stone. The scream, rising to urgency, died short. Focusing the glasses with fumbling fingers, Donn zeroed in. He watched in horror as the pointy-eared creature spooned brains from the open skull of the baby baboon, then hurled the limp carcass into the darkness below. Just as the line of dying sunlight rose above the murderer, it caught a wink of bright green eyes, huge eyes that seemed to bulge their way down the lenses of the binoculars and burn deep into Donn’s own. He shook uncontrollably—wracked by dope and weariness and horror—and the scene shivered out of focus. The killer had white legs and a hard-on.

  9

  KING OF THE DEADWOOD STAGE

  For the next five days they hunted out from White Legs, toughening up for the difficult trek to the high plateau across the Kan. The horses and donkeys that would pack the party and its gear into the high country would not be brought up from Palmerville until the last possible moment, to avoid the risk of tsetse fly infection. They saw few of the swift, ugly little cross-winged killers, but those that appeared were vicious. This was the southern reach of their local range, Winjah explained. Up in the Tirika Swamp they were thick as midges. Indeed, the word “Tirika” in the Tok dialect meant “Crap in Your Hand”—whenever a man squatted to defecate the flies zoomed in to bite, and the resultant slaps produced the native name.

  The early morning hours were devoted to bird shooting, over one or another of the springs in the vicinity. Rising in the predawn gloom, awakened by the yammering baboon colony which served as a natural alarm clock, they gulped quick cups of steaming tea in the dew-dank mess tent and then piled into the G.T. for the bouncing, shivering ride to the birds. The best spot was the Maji Moto, a hot spring just twenty minutes from camp. Thick mists cloaked the ground at that early hour. The tufted tops of doum palms reached up from a faintly sulfurous shroud like clenched fists. Walking in one morning through the hot fog, they jumped a rhino cow and her calf on one of the many broad, well-trampled game trails that served as spokes to the Maji Moto’s life-giving hub. Through the distorting mist, the rhinos loomed like saurian holdovers from the Jurassic Age.

  “Faro!” hissed Lambat, who was in the lead, carrying one of the twenty-gauge Beretta over-and-unders. He raised it to his shoulder. They all crouched.

  The mother rhino loomed ahead of them through the mist. They could see her horns casting sideways as her nostrils sucked at the fog. She moaned and chuffed. The baby, a giant piglet, butted at her teats. Whiffs of barn smell reached their noses.

  “Look for the nearest tree,” whispered Winjah. “That popgun will only tickle her the wrong way.”

  “I couldn’t see a tree if it was growing out my nose,” hissed Bucky.

  “Then pray,” said Winjah.

  Donn concentrated on his third eye, hoping perhaps it could penetrate the fog.

  But the rhinos went away, finally, splashing off through the hot water and clattering up a ridge to disappear into the gray miasma, which itself quickly evaporated under the hot hand of the rising sun. Then came the birds—sand grouse and ring-necked doves by the tens of thousands, skimming in low from the surrounding deserts in clusters of as many as a hundred at a time. Some actually landed at the edges of the spring to drink; others merely hovered on backed wings, sipping downward from the air, and filling their neck feathers with water, then flashing away again into the wasteland.

  “The males soak their throat feathers to give drink to the nestlings,” Winjah explained.

  The shooting was fast and chaotic at first. Standing under widely separated thorn trees, which served as partial blinds, Donn and Bucky flailed frantically at the sky with their charges of No. 8 shot, hitting only perhaps one bird in every five shots. Neither of them had shot at flighted birds in quite these numbers before. Growing up on ruffed grouse and woodcock, pheasant and mourning dove, they were used to singles and doubles, jumped up and away from them, or else passing swift and solitary in the cold American air. Here the very abundance of birds served as a defense. That and the heat, the exotic circumstances. Finally the futile pounding of the gun butts taught a lesson: Concentrate on one bird at a time, swing with him and through him, slap the trigger, then pick another target. Soon the sand grouse were puffing and breaking to the patterns, corkscrewing down or spilling tip over tail to thud on the sodden earth, all awry-eyed and dead.

  “Behind you, Bwana!” yelled Winjah.

  Bucky wheeled and saw a pair of sand grouse skimming in low over the filigree of spikes, mounted the gun as he tracked and hit the trigger. Nothing. The safety was on. He cleared it, still tracking, and folded the first bird with the gun nearly overhead, then kept following the second, bending backward, backward—pow! The bird crumpled and fell. Bucky too—flat on his back.

  “The classic high passing shot!” whooped Winjah. “The Classic Safety On At First High Passing Fall On Your Arse Double! Oh, Bwana, I love it!”

  Prowling the White Legs country, Donn and Bucky took turns riding shotgun on the Deadwood Stage. That’s what they called the G.T. when they came on guinea fowl or francolin or yellow-necked spur fowl and the man up behind the cab of the truck got to shoot them on the run. These were frantic chases, particularly after the guineas which scuttled like scatbacks, weaving slate black through the bush, leading the truck through kidney-squashing leaps and slides around the ubiquitous ant bear and warthog holes, down rock-filled nullahs and over sand washes that bogged the tires and slammed the gunner gut-first onto the hot metal of the roof. At first Donn would not shoot until the birds flushed from their run, an event that occurred only rarely since the truck usually fell far behind after the first ten minutes. It was his sense of sportsmanship. But then he realized that the chase itself was sporting, that his chances—from a bucking truck bed at thirty miles
an hour—of hitting a bird that dodged and cut behind rocks and brush were slimmer than if it flew. Once he accepted that fact, he felt the quick-draw instincts return, the ability to align gun and target in a blurred microsecond that suddenly came to focus, so quickly that the image was gone before it reached his consciousness, but not before he had hit the trigger and the bird had tumbled dead to the shot. After that, Donn was Top Gun of the Deadwood Stage.

  At night, though, he wasn’t so certain. Sitting around the campfire over whiskey and port, with the jackals yipping in the dark beyond the yellow tongues and the smell of stale blood drifting up from the skinner’s tent, he felt quite small in this vastness. The adrenaline had retreated to its cave in the bottom of his stomach. Dim shapes moved in his mind, memories of baboon death on the cliff face. He had not mentioned the incident to Winjah and the others, not even to Dawn. Just another hallucination, like so many he had experienced in his drug years. But at night, waking for a pee, walking to the door of the tent, he had seen things out there—things that bore no resemblance to the creatures of the day. Probably just hyenas like those that ripped each night at the carcass of the zebra Blackrod had killed the first day, a pin-striped Grévy’s stallion blasted flat in its nobility by the heavy .375 solid at three hundred yards. Winjah had hung the skinned carcass to draw lions, and a few had appeared, but mainly hyenas that squalled and farted and drowned out Bucky’s snoring—a welcome thing. Probably just hyenas that couldn’t get to the meat. But still …

  He walked out and peed into the starlight. When he came back to the tent, Dawn was awake.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, sliding into the wide cot beside her. “Just hyenas working that zebra carcass. I wish Winjah would cut it down and then maybe we could get some sleep.”

  “It scared me at first,” she said, “hearing them snarl and rip out there. But now it doesn’t bother me anymore.”