And then, lying there stunned under the huge hot body, both of them twitching and Winjah yelling—“Hapana! Hapana! No more bullets!”—he had heard the cycles roar up.
Nordquist appeared over the mountain of the bogo’s shoulder. He had the pistol out. He smiled at Winjah, his eyes tight behind the rimless glasses, and cocked the hammer.
“No,” Winjah said, looking up at Nordquist. “Don’t shoot again. He’s done, finished.”
“The hell you say,” Nordquist answered. “I gotta put the last bullet into him. You’re the guys who made up that rule. Remember the lion? This’n will make that diamond my very own.” He smiled down at the pinned hunter, but avoided the hard blue eyes.
“You’ll kill me if you do,” Winjah said flatly.
“Naw,” said Nordquist. “It won’t even tickle.” He squeezed and the hammer dropped. The Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 magnum banged once, very loud.
The dead buffalo flinched as the heavy bullet tore through its body. Winjah’s eyes widened, then fixed on eternity.
Nordquist holstered the pistol and grabbed the bowie from its sheath on his hip. Straddling the bogo’s nose, he began hacking at the horns around the diamond.
Then Donn raised his rifle. Nordquist’s face ballooned at him through the scope, round and pitted like a photo of some distant moon, eyes bulging under the glasses: strange creatures of another planet, dwelling under domes. Donn—who loved peace and poems, who until a few short days ago had never killed a big-game animal, who had scorned all hunters but had learned to respect at least one—Donn squeezed off.
Nordquist’s head came apart in a whirl of snot and teeth and brains and broken glass. The Diamond Bogo raised his great ruined head and stared at Nordquist. Winjah was staring too, but his eyes were fixed on nothing in particular.
The moment stretched and stretched deep into timelessness. Donn heard the ducklings’ three motors start, heard them grumble out of hearing. He heard a hawk scream high overhead, and heard the raindrops spattering down as a breeze worked the treetops. He saw butterflies alight on the bogo’s wound and drink the blood. Then Lambat and Otiego and Machyana came out of the trees and walked slowly up to the buffalo. He saw them grab its legs and roll it over on its back. Then they knelt behind it, looking at Winjah, and he heard Otiego crying.
He could not bring himself to move.
Two more figures emerged from the wood. Bucky and a Tok. Bucky wore a zebra-striped kilt and carried a recurved Tartar bow in one hand. His hair was bound back with a strip of rawhide, his face grave beneath the grizzled beard. The little man with him carried a sword nearly his own height.
Bucky surveyed the tableau. The shattered body of Red Blanket began the path of carnage, angled and awful. Then Donn, propped up on his elbows, his nose mashed flat again, black with blood, his eyes still wide with shock. Before him, the rifle. Then the mountainous body of the buffalo, quiet save for the tortoiseshell ticks that crawled on its cooling testicles. Then the three Africans standing hopeless, helpless, over the quiet form of Winjah. Beyond lay the body of another man, head smashed and leaking. A ray of sunlight hit the diamond in the buffalo’s forehead and sent a slow moving beam of radiance over the dead hunter’s chest. Bucky watched it sparkle on the bloody hole in Winjah’s starched corduroys. Then the beam moved on.
It was too big for them, Bucky thought. Too big even for him. Too strong, as it always has been, for everyone. Africa.
He walked over to Donn and helped him to his feet, brushing the wet black leaves from his shirt, wiping the blood from his face with a damp bandanna. Then he put his arm around Donn’s shoulders and walked him toward the edge of the thorn thicket, where the light sparkled—bogo bright, he thought.
Clickrasp moved to block his path.
“Where are you going?” he asked in a solemn voice. His eyes shone, dull green behind the lidded eyes.
“I’m taking him home,” Bucky replied. “Donn and Dawn both. Home from the hill.”
Clickrasp’s hands tightened on the haft of the broadsword. For a moment it seemed as if he was about to strike. But then he averted his eyes and held the sword out to Buck, haft first.
“Take this,” he said. “It is my laisser-passer, my gift of freedom to you all.”
31
OUT OF AFRICA
They walked out swiftly, saying little. No one stopped them. No animals impeded their progress. The broadsword seemed a specific to peace. When Buck had raised it to the Tok women at the Pool where they had found Dawn, the women fell back in silence. Bands of Tok warriors who crossed their path on the march to the scarp detoured at the flash of the blade. Even the game—lions, oryx, buffalo, a lone bull elephant—only stood and watched as they passed.
At the scarp they paused and studied the plain below. Clouds of dust snaked across it—trucks on the move. The occasional slam of a rifle shot or the clatter of automatic weapons echoed up to them. Men in uniform crawled like bugs down there, killing the game. It was always that way when African troops moved into an area.
In the Butterfly Glade where they had lambasted the Lepidoptera, rib cages and backbones picked clean by the ants gleamed in the cool green gloom. A machine-gun emplacement stood on the knoll that housed the Skull Cave; the Africans manning it munched giant spareribs of eland and giraffe. At the Rope of God they found a Volkswagen “Thing” with two impala draped over its hood. The driver, a portly man in lederhosen and a camouflage shirt, was photographing the graffiti on the rock spire. Buck spoke to him in German.
“He says there must be nearly a thousand hunters here already,” Bucky reported as they moved on. “From all over the world—Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Britons, Yugoslavs, Japanese, even a bunch of Brazilians. The Kansduvian Army has sent in a regiment of askari with automatic weapons to protect them from the Tok. They’re all after the Diamond Bogo. I wished him luck.”
At White Legs, they found the trucks and the remainder of the staff waiting and anxious. They wept at the news of Winjah’s death but quickly regained their composure and began striking the camp. Bucky made his farewells.
“You’ll be in good hands all the way back to Palmerville,” he told Donn and Dawn. “By the end of the week, you’ll be back on the Wandering Y, wondering why in hell you ever came here. I’ve got to go back up there.” They all looked up toward the scarp. Rain clouds boiled slowly over the blue mountains. “Clickrasp will need his Crusader’s sword.”
“I understand,” said Donn.
They shook hands. Bucky took Dawn in his arms and kissed her on the cheek. For the first time since she had met him, he didn’t smell bad. Then he walked back down the plain, toward the river and the plateau.
EPILOGUE
Dawn heard the pickup truck crunch ice in the driveway. She went to the window. The sleet, which had been falling since morning, had turned to snow and the beech trees that lined the road up to the house were coated in ice. It was beautiful to look at, the limbs sheathed in clear fire, trees carved of diamonds, but she knew that when the wind sprang up behind the snow, the trees would break and shatter. Donn got down from the truck with the shotgun over his shoulder and Lil, his yellow Labrador, leaping and snapping at the four dead grouse that dangled from his hand. He allowed the dog a sniff and then walked over to the side of the woodshed to hang the birds, heads down, under the protective eave. He’d clean them tonight.
“There’s a package for you,” she said after he had stomped the snow from his boots. “From Africa.”
It was a large flat manila envelope, reinforced with cardboard inside the wrapping, and it bore many stamps. Donn poured himself a cup of coffee and opened it, Dawn hovering over his shoulder. He pulled out a gigantic postcard, two feet by three, with the photograph of a Cape buffalo on the front. A chip of diamond bigger than the one in Dawn’s engagement ring had been glued between the buffalo’s horns. Donn turned the card over.
“Dear Donn and Dawn,” he read. “Ah yes, we remember it well. The S.O.B. And we’ll get
even with its kin in the fullness of time! We all miss you up here in the lonely land of the Tok. I hope this card gets to you sooner rather than later. I’m turning it over to a mercenary who is leaving shortly for French West and he promises to forward it as quickly as he can, but as you damned well know, that could mean months in this slow-moving continent. First off, let me assure you that both Clickrasp and I are alive and well and waging a hell of a war against the outlanders. As I told you before we said good-bye, I’ve always wanted a war of my own and now I’ve got one. It isn’t exactly heaven, but it isn’t hell either. In our case, it’s necessary. If we didn’t fight now, the Tok would be gone in a matter of months and this whole plateau would be one huge diamond mine.
“As you’ve probably read in the newspapers, we’ve gotten support from a number of nations, mainly Israel, and next month we’re planning to send a delegation to the U.N. Clickrasp will head it, and I’m sure he’ll make a hit with the media, if he gets a decent tailor. Of course, General Opolopo Bompah, the dictator of Kansdu, is furious. But as the Tok say, his time is not long. Click says he’ll call you from New York when he gets there. I know he’s eager to see you—particularly his lost love, the Fair Dawn Lady. Funny thing. The other day he was musing about his unrequited romance and he ended up blaming it on the stars. ‘My chart for that month predicted danger from water, darkness, and mysterious disappearance,’ he told me. You two must go to the same astrologer.
“I also discovered a few more things about Clickrasp that we didn’t know when you left. For years he’d been selling Tok diamonds outside the country under the pseudonym of one Nikolas Rokoff, and it was he who had planted the stone in the Diamond Bogo’s horns. It was a carefully planned lure, thrown out into the big world in order to draw hunters into his realm. He knew that the first ones in would be the boldest and best, if they survived the buffalo. And those were the ones he wanted for his master plan to save the land of the Tok. Very clever, these superhumans.
“Clickrasp also used the money from the diamond sales to stock his library and to purchase the weapons for the war, which began arriving over the mountains shortly after the two of you departed. When the first wave of invaders hit the River Kan, we repulsed them quite bloodily. Then Opolopo Bompah sent in more troops, but they couldn’t take the scarp. So far we’ve had fairly light casualties—only fifty-odd dead and wounded in the five months of fighting. We took quite a pounding from the air, right at the beginning, but since the Israelis came in to build the airstrip and man the interceptors, it’s been virtual peacetime up here against the mountains. The major loss in town was the Moor’s Head Inn, my favorite watering hole, but we’re rebuilding it. At least the ale remained largely intact. And the paintings.
“Along the way, though, we’ve taken some painful personal losses. I’m sorry to report that Lambat is dead, killed by mortar fire in a fight near the Skull Cave. Machyana was seriously wounded leading a reconnaissance-in-force in the area of the Rope of God. He was taken prisoner and we haven’t heard from or of him since. Knowing Opolopo’s tendencies, I fear the worst. Otiego, though, is doing very well. He’s taken a hareem of Tok wives and they keep him out of trouble when he’s back here on his infrequent leaves. He often reminisces, when I see him, about the Bhangi Bwana and smiles nostalgically in memory of the highs.
“Well, I see I’m running out of space on this gigantic postcard, which an Israeli intelligence aide printed up for me from one of the film rolls you left behind. Oh—the fate of the ducklings, as you called them. Apparently they fled on the ATCs until they ran out of gas, then wandered on foot through the Nyika. Tok hunters, following up the sound of gunfire, found two of them dying of gunshot wounds, apparently after a fight over the water left in a canteen. The Tok ended their suffering quite swiftly. The third boy made it to the Pool of the Bleeding Ladies, but the Tok women who were there at the time said he couldn’t bring himself to drink the water. He shot himself instead. That night, the Tok dined on cervelles des canetons à l’orange.
“I buried Winjah beside the grave of Mungo Park. It seemed appropriate—the First Great African Explorer and the Last Great White Hunter. The skull and horns of the Diamond Bogo, with the stone still gleaming at the boss, serves as headstone for them both.
“So that is that. Take care and, as Robert Frost said of his apple orchard, keep cold. Love, Bucky.”
Written in a tiny, almost indecipherable scrawl was a postscript:
“P.S. Ticklette had triplets, wouldn’t you know! And I got me another Guinea worm,”
Donn sat back and tasted his coffee. It had grown cold. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe we could have stayed…” His voice trailed off. Outside, the wind worked on the ice-sheathed trees.
Any moment now they would hear the pistol shot of breaking branches.
The Diamond Bogo Page 20