Buck didn’t dare to look. He heard a muffled scream from Dawn, then a scuffling sound. Christ, he had to do something. Donn would never forgive him. He’d never forgive himself. He got to his feet, and four Tok emerged from the shadows, spears at the ready. Then, from the darkness by the rock, came a slap, a thump, and a rasping moan. A figure staggered back into the light.
It was Clickrasp, clutching his phallus, which was buckled like plant stem after the hail. Dawn followed after him, cheeks and eyes blazing. “You Priapic Pipsqueak!” she shrilled. “Leave me alone!”
The four spearmen advanced….
20
DONN’S SHOOTING LESSON
“The point of the shoulder,” Winjah whispered. “Right where it bulges there, where the sun shines on it. Lay the top of the vertical post directly on that spot. The horizontal hairs should parallel the backbone, like a butcher’s ink mark on a side of mutton.”
They lay behind a termite hill in the early morning. Some three hundred yards upwind, hock-deep in the fresh green grass, an impala ram watched from the edge of a bachelor band. The impala was a plump young spike, good eating if Donn could down him. The trackers were out seeking the fate of the two surviving packhorses, and Winjah had decided to see if Donn could shoot.
“He’s getting nervous,” Winjah sighed. “Squeeze, squeeze …”
But Donn could not seem to make it happen. He was squeezing, all right, but his own nervousness at a possible miss had frozen his finger, sensitized it so that he could move the trigger only a micromillifraction a minute. The spike ram suddenly snorted and pronked, bouncing off deeper into the plain with his bachelor buddies in close pursuit. Winjah stood up and brushed the termites from his legs.
“You don’t have forever, Bwana,” he said caustically. “It’s all well and good to make sure of a steady trigger squeeze, but at some point or other the sear must break, the pin must fall, the primer must ignite the main charge, the bullet must spin its way out through the rifling of the barrel, exit the muzzle, follow its ballistic trajectory through the atmosphere, and then you will know if you have killed what you’re aiming at. Then and only then. It can’t all happen in your head.”
Donn nodded, mute with embarrassment, and stood up. They started out again, across the plain, after the small impala herd. This was the third time in an hour that Donn had been unable to shoot. He felt sick. When Bucky had shot, hit or miss, Donn had viewed the whole procedure with a disdain that bordered on contempt. Anyone could kill a large animal with a modern telescopically sighted rifle. It was so easy that even to try it was beneath a modern enlightened human being’s dignity. It sullied a man to kill this way. Besides, it was bad for the ecology. All of Donn’t arty friends hated big-game hunters. They were brutes, neofascists, closet leather boys. Donn had seen the deer hunters: fat men, drunk at sunrise, who sat around the woods in Santa Claus suits and waited for the chance to kill something—anything that moved. Oh, bird shooting was all right, and killing the odd trout now and then (but only if taken on a dry fly). Indeed, Terry O’Shane, the far-out doper novelist and Hollywood nonsquare, decried even the killing of fish. He told Donn that he had not killed a fish in five years, though he fished almost daily when he was in residence at Key West, and had once set a world saltwater fly-fishing record for snaffled grunt, or some such flats-dwelling game fish. Yes, killing was too easy.
And now I can’t even get a fucking shot off, Donn cursed to himself. If he couldn’t shoot, couldn’t overcome this impotence of the trigger finger, Winjah would send him back with the ponies to Palmerville and rescue Dawn all by himself. And Donn could just imagine what would happen next. The way Dawn had looked at him as she was being carried off, that gaze of utter loss, total disappointment, complete conviction that he had somehow unconsciously created this dreadful karma for her … Winjah would have her in the sack before they got halfway back to the escarpment. I have to go along, Donn cried to himself. If Bucky can shoot straight, I can shoot a hundred times straighter.
“There’s grease on the scope,” he said suddenly to Winjah. “From Bucky’s thumb! I can tell his thumbprint.” The hunter took the rifle from Donn’s shoulder and studied the lens. He tore a strip of tissue from the wad in his breast pocket and scoured both ends of the sight. He shook his head and handed the rifle back.
“At this rate,” he said, “those impala will be halfway back to White Legs before we drop one. It’ll be a long carry back to camp, Bwana.”
“I’ll do the carrying,” Donn said. “I can handle it. I’m fit.”
This time the impala were in a shallow rocky depression beyond the edge of the grass, alert to danger, their ears flicking at every sound. Donn and Winjah lay in the edge of the grass, feeling the hot wind of the desert drying their faces. The herd was easily four hundred yards away.
“Allow about an inch of daylight between the backbone and the horizontal cross hairs,” Winjah warned. “At this range, that should drop the bullet directly into him. This seven-mil magnum shoots very flat to two hundred, and then falls gradually out to five or six. After that it drops like a stone. With the breeze directly in our faces, you don’t have to allow for cross-windage. Just pick your ram and, please, shoot.”
Donn set his elbows in the sandy soil and wound the sling tight on his forearm. He picked a ram to the left of the main herd, another spike, perhaps the same one as before, and laid the sights. The cross hairs leaped and danced. He readjusted the sling, sliding his hand in closer to the trigger guard.
“Your head’s coming up,” Winjah cautioned with a whisper. “Don’t get too far up or they’ll see you.”
The cross hairs continued their dance, finer now but still too funky for accuracy.
“Take a deep breath, hold it a moment, and then let it out very, very easily. When you’re almost down to flat lungs, you’ll steady up. And the shot should go right then.”
Donn inhaled, feeling the blood pound in his temples, and then sighed out. The cross hairs steadied as they fell into line. His squeeze was coming along nicely. As the last of his breath slid away he felt the gun slam. For an instant the recoiling barrel blotted out the target, then fell back.
Nothing was down.
A puff of dust drifted toward them on the wind from just beyond the point where the ram had stood.
The impala herd leaped farther into the desert, rumps wiggling an obscene farewell.
“Let’s give them best, Bwana,” said Winjah, choking back his disgust. “We’re too far out into the desert now. There’s game much closer to camp.”
Donn tried to think of an excuse. An ant crawling across the scope picture. A sneezing fit that he’d had to stifle. A sudden fart in a distant cathedral. Nothing worked. And that should have. It was perfect—sight picture, squeeze, exhalation. Maybe he simply couldn’t shoot.
“Before we head in,” said Winjah, “why don’t you just pop off six or eight more rounds, get better acquainted with the trigger pull. We’ve plenty of ammo, and we’ve spooked all the game out of the immediate vicinity.” He emptied the last few shells out of a box of Remington 7-mm. magnum bullets and walked off two hundred paces, then stuck the box on the branch of a bush. A mound of sand served as the backstop.
Donn shot eight rounds. All but one perforated the target. Winjah scratched his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
As they hiked back toward the river, Lambat came running across the plain toward them, smiling happily. The horses had been recovered. A large simba had been in the vicinity, but it was lying up on an eland kill. Machyana and Red Blanket had taken the horses back to kampi. And there was a band of tommies just over the next rise.
“You’re shooting well now, Bwana,” said Winjah as they bellied up to view the Thomson’s gazelles. “This time you’ll drop him in his tracks, just watch.”
Once again the adjustments, the lineup of the sights, the deep breath, the slow exhalation and squeeze. Once again a miss.
“I can’t do it!” Donn yelled as the
tommies bounced away. “It’s their eyes. Those big wet brown eyes. They’re too beautiful. I just can’t kill such beauty.”
Winjah translated for the astounded Lambat, who could not believe that even a blind man could miss a tommie broadside at 150 yards. Lambat sneered as Winjah spoke. His bloodshot eyes bored into Donn.
“Why don’t you go back to America with your cameras,” he said, “and make pretty pictures?”
“But they’re too beautiful,” Donn snapped back. “You wouldn’t understand that.”
“Beautiful or ugly,” said Lambat, “the heart is the same.”
Donn seethed as they marched back to camp. Where did this bloodthirsty savage get off telling him what was beautiful or ugly? This man couldn’t even write his name until Winjah took him out of the bush; Donn wrote poems. He’d even had some published in The New Yorker. He wished Lambat would run out two hundred yards and then he’d see how soft Donn could be. Yes, then he’d see….
Out of the deep grass ahead, a bushbuck sprinted, from left to right, angling away. Chestnut red with marks like a white harness down its back and rump, it ran with an ugly hunched determination. Equally determined, Donn swung the rifle to his shoulder, felt the recoil of the shot even as he realized the sight picture—on the shoulder, slightly ahead. A dull crack echoed back to them as the bushbuck toppled rump over head and lay still in the grass.
“Pongo!” exulted Lambat, leaping high on his toes and clapping his hands like a kid at a parade. “Muzuri sana! Very good, Bwana Donn. Very good shot!” He grabbed Donn’s right hand in the two of his and smiled ecstatically into his face. “Now you are like us. Now you are a killer!”
They paced it off: 250 yards. The bullet had broken the bushbuck’s neck. Donn gutted it himself, still grim-faced but warm inside, almost enjoying the hot blood on his arms, the strong smell of blood and raw meat. Then he wiped his hands and forearms in the grass.
“Can I come with you?” he asked Winjah.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” the hunter replied.
Back in camp, Otiego had rigged the buffalo hide on poles to form awnings. A slow fire burned under a greenwood rack draped with long strips of buffalo meat. The biltong was drying nicely. Over a separate fire bubbled a pot salvaged from the burned-out camp, and the smell of oxtail soup filled the still midday air. After they had eaten, Donn took his notebook and walked down to the riverbank shade for a lie-down. He took the 7-mm. rifle with him.
Birds hopped and chattered in the cool brush. The river hissed through its slippery channels, roiling over rocks in some places but for the most part strong and quiet, opaque. A pied crow, one of dozens drawn to the camp by the drying meat, croaked overhead in a doum palm. The afternoon shadow was just beginning its slow crawl up the escarpment. Donn pulled a fountain pen from his breast pocket and opened the notebook:
There will be no going back
No feeding that longing for a former self
No returning
to patterns or nature or loves
Spiraling outward in a web of my own
Shadow on the mountain
and a noon bird singing like a rusty swing.
21
SURE CURE FOR SNAKEBITE
“Oh my, look at this!” chirped Dawn.
Bucky sat up and instantly wished he hadn’t. His head felt as if it had been used for practice by the New York Cosmos. The effects of the narcotic weed given him by Clickrasp had worn off, and the club-blow of yesterday came back in spades. He and Dawn lay under a leopard-skin blanket, with cushions of grass-stuffed hides under their heads as pillows. At Dawn’s feet lay a basket, woven of reeds, full of jungle fruits and flowers. Another strip of leopard skin was tied around the basket in a neat, ornamental bow, and attached to it fluttered a square of parchment. Dawn untied the bow and read the note, penned neatly in something that looked like red ink.
“‘Darling Dawn,’” she read aloud, “‘My humblest apologies for my rude behavior of the evening just past. Those horse brains must have gone to my head, hah hah. I hope this poor offering of the fruits of my land may in some small way compensate for the inexcusable conduct of Your Devoted Servant, Clicky. P.S. The red ones are best!” She chuckled to herself and rubbed the cutting edge of her right hand. “Maybe I shouldn’t have given him such a sharp karate chop,” she mused to Bucky. “I hope I didn’t, well, ruin him!”
Bucky groaned and staggered to his feet. In the jungle beyond the rocky bowl in which they had camped, early morning monkeys chattered. A dull-red ball of sun climbed through the triple-canopied forest to the east, mocking the ache in his head. Two Tok approached with steaming bowls in their hands. They bowed to Bucky and Dawn, placed the bowls at their feet, bowed again, and withdrew. Down below, Buck could see other Tok busying themselves around a cookfire. The smell of cooking horse heads rose to his nostrils, to be obscured a moment later by the odor of—could it be? Tea!
He picked up the bowl of hot dark liquid and sniffed. Then sipped. Yes, tea sweetened by wild honey. And flavored, subtly, with another, darker taste. Sure. More of that magical herb that had cleared up his headache yesterday. He gulped the boiling liquid and in moments felt the sick ache slide away from him.
“Well, whatever you did to dear Clicky,” he told Dawn, “you ought to try more of it today. He’s turned into a most gracious host.”
They broke their fasts on the fruit, which proved sweet and slightly citric though it resembled nothing that Buck had ever seen or tasted in his experience as a globe-girdling journalist. Must be peculiar to the region, he thought. A large red seed-filled globe the size of an indoor softball vaguely resembled pomegranate but contained far more meat, of a far more delicate flavor, than any he’d ever tasted. Another, purple as an eggplant, and half again the size, smacked of a cross between Concord grape and cantaloupe. The tea-bearing Tok appeared once again to refill their bowls—beautifully engraved and painted ceramics that bore on their sides delicate, slightly abstracted depictions of oryx and impala, jolly crocodiles and glowering buffalo. When they had finished both the tea and their morning ablutions, the two Tok reappeared once more, collected the utensils, and gestured toward the main body of their captors. “We march,” said one of the Tok, and then giggled at his linguistic temerity.
“They’re charming people,” said Dawn as they resumed the march, this time without the hobbles of yesterday.
“If you treat them with a firm hand,” laughed Buck. “I thought we were finished for sure when you socked old Clicky on the pecker that way. All I could see was you with your eyes blazing, him with his manhood in his hands, and those four spearpoints moving in on us. Clickrasp clicked them away from us in the nick of time—no pun intended.”
“I wonder what they have in mind for us?” Dawn said.
They marched all day through the rain forest, the going fast and easy on the leafmold, spongy floor. A green underwater light filled the woods, and the only sounds apart from their footfalls was the hollow natter of birds and apes in the triple canopy high overhead. The boles of the trees, some of them ten feet through by Bucky’s guess, were gray beneath their hoary black veins of liana and elephant ivy. From time to time Buck caught glimpses—mere flashes—of the sun through the foliage above, and judging by the time and the unwavering line of their travel, estimated that they were heading almost due north, with just a bit of westering thrown in now and then. It would be important to know the route well if they were to make a successful escape. He figured they were paralleling the flow of the River Kan, well west of it perhaps, but thus avoiding the impenetrable swamps and the scarp itself. Ahead must lie Mount Baikie, though it wasn’t visible through the heavy forest cover.
Clickrasp stayed at the front of the column, never looking back at them. Occasionally, though, he would call a halt, order a couple of younger Tok up a particular tree to pluck fruit from its distant limbs, and then send the gleaning by runner back to Bucky and Dawn, who were marching in the middle of the troop. Eager to please
, Buck did his best with the fruit, but eventually he felt a desperate need to crap. When he tried to pull out of the column, the Tok behind him growled fiercely and prodded him with his spear. Buck mimed the need to defecate, but the man didn’t understand.
“All right, you bastard,” Buck said. “You asked for it.” He dropped his shorts and squatted in the middle of the trail. The Tok recoiled in horror, then covered his eyes with shame and embarrassment. He ran clicking and clattering to the head of the parade with his news. I wonder what they have for bowels, Bucky thought as he plucked some dry leaves from the ground. Garbage grinders, no doubt.
They marched on through the afternoon, with no rest, but both of the captives felt strong. The rain forest was cool and the pace quite easy, thanks to the shorter legs of the Tok. Bucky studied the wildlife, rarer here of course than in the game plains or the river edges, but all the more fascinating for its rarity. Gigantic butterflies flapped batlike through the lower canopy, sipping on the flowers—red, orange, mauve, yellow, blue—that seemed perennial in those leafy heights. Orchids, some of them as big as cook pots, bloomed from creases in the tree trunks. Gaudy parrots clacked and climbed the trees, using their hooked, heavy bills as levers. Flying squirrels coasted through the bottom branches, or glided down across their path to alight on the bole of some forest monarch, then scramble chittering to the top and another flight. Once the column halted and Clickrasp dispatched three spearsmen into a bamboo thicket ahead and to the right of their line of march. The hunters advanced in a crouch, spears cocked and quivering slightly in their throwing hands. As they neared the copse, a large giraffelike animal burst out the other side and fled untouched into the green gloom. A giraffe with a wry neck, thought Bucky. It must have been an okapi. Striped haunches and forelegs with a purplish-red back. By God, the rarest of African game animals! Where’s my rifle?
He enjoyed watching the Tok move. They were well-knit little men, few of them much taller than four and a half feet, he reckoned, though with their relatively heavy bone and musculature they probably weighed about 120 or 130 pounds. Their skin was not exactly white, as Winjah had said, but more of a lustrous tan, with a touch of gold in it, like some Southeast Asians or perhaps the Central American Indians. Apart from the grotesquerie of their genitalia, which reminded him of medieval jesters who sometimes wore fake phalluses as part of their costume, they were a handsome people. The big eyes helped a lot, as did the excellent dentition. There was nothing really “primitive” about their features, nothing on the order of those ghastly museum re-creations of Java man or Sinanthropus or Homo neanderthalensis—flat noses, brutal eyebrows, slack jaws, unseemly slouches—yet Buck, who had studied anthropology in college, suspected they derived from an earlier species of the genus Homo. Perhaps they were living survivors of such a species. Yes, he thought, it’s apt. Homo erectus.
The Diamond Bogo Page 12