The Last Leopard

by Lauren St. John

  Martine jolted herself out of her trance and moved forward. Ben was close behind her. She stopped so suddenly that Ben ran into her. At the witch doctor’s feet was a sticky pool of blood, buzzing with flies.

  “You have come too late,” he said. “The leopard has been shot with the Rat Man’s bullet.” He put a hand close to his heart to demonstrate where the lethal bullet had struck. An odor of alcohol drifted in Martine and Ben’s direction.

  “No!” cried Martine in anguish. “He can’t be dead. He just can’t. I promised him I would save him.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Ben. “It’s too quiet. If the leopard were dead, the hunters would be celebrating. There would be drag marks from where they loaded his body onto their jeep. And the vultures would not be here. They’d be circling the area where he died—possibly even the jeep.”

  The witch doctor waved his arms and the vultures lifted screaming into the air, a sinister cloud of beating, dark wings. They settled in the tops of the peeling plain trees nearby, watching and waiting.

  “I did not say he was dead,” he told Ben a little irritably. “But he is dying. He has run for his life with the hunters behind him. Soon those who want Lobengula’s treasure will be chasing him too.”

  “Can you help us?” Martine begged. “Can you throw the bones and tell us how we might get to him before they do?”

  The witch doctor gave a harsh chuckle. “You shame me in front of my tribe; in front of people who believe that I am the best healer in Zimbabwe. You make me look like a fool, and now you expect me to assist you. You are dreaming, child. Go back to your sangoma friend and ask her. See if she can tell you where the leopard is.”

  “Firstly, I didn’t shame you,” Martine said angrily. “You brought shame on yourself. Before you came, Mercy told us that you were the most talented traditional healer in Zimbabwe. You could have at least stayed sober until after you’d treated her sick child. You made the choice to drink and behave like a fool.

  “As for my friend Grace, if she were here, she would be able to tell me where the leopard is. But she’s a thousand miles away and you’re right here. I don’t know what Griffin bribed you with to make you tell him that the leopard needed to be dead before he could find the treasure, although I can guess. It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. You have a chance to make things right. Are you going to take it?”

  For a moment, the only sound was the eerie cries of the disgruntled vultures. Martine began to take in the enormity of what she’d done.

  She glanced at Ben and he was staring at her in amazement. The witch doctor, who at the beginning of her speech had produced a brown bottle from the depths of his kilt and was in the midst of taking a swig, flung it away from him. It hit a rock and shattered. A clear liquid gushed out.

  “There are many curses I could put on you for saying these things,” he said quietly. “You received my warning this morning, I am sure. But you have spoken the truth in the way that only an outsider could. It is painful for me to hear and it is shameful, but I cannot deny it. This thing, this poison, has a hold over me and I have found no herb, no plant, that can cure me. It is like a python around my neck, strangling me. Men such as Griffin have been feeding that python, bringing me these brown bottles so that I might help them with their wicked quest. I have been too weak to resist.”

  “Is there anyone you would trust to help you?” Ben asked. “Anyone you could talk to?”

  The witch doctor didn’t seem to hear him. He removed his ceremonial pouch, stepped away from the buzzing patch of red, and faced Martine. “You humiliated me in front of my tribe and I will not soon forget it,” he said. “But I will also remember something else. If it were not for you and your sangoma’s muti the baby might have died.”

  “I would never have known Grace’s medicine would help Emelia if you hadn’t said the name of the plant,” Martine said graciously. Her rage had subsided and she felt an urge to comfort him.

  The witch doctor shook his head. “I will throw the bones and tell you what you need to know. It is true that the prophecy says the last resting place of the king of leopards is the hiding place of the king’s treasure, but what you call destiny is written in sand and not in stone. Perhaps there is still time for you to save your friend.”

  He squatted and began chanting to himself, though whether it was in Ndebele or some ancient African language, they couldn’t tell. His rough hands, like the parched skin of an elephant, scattered the bones onto the dry earth. Martine tried her hardest to visualize Khan safe and well and happy, and once again she saw him on a mountainside at Sawubona, golden and whole.

  The witch doctor looked up from his bones. “The one who reads the sign best will find the leopard first.”

  “Oh,” said Ben.

  That’s not particularly helpful, thought Martine.

  But the witch doctor hadn’t finished. He addressed them both, but his eyes were on Martine. “You are bound together, but you will be torn apart. When that happens, look to the House of Bees.”

  19

  “That’s not a lot to go on, especially if we have to interpret the sign before the hunters do,” said Martine, urging Sirocco forward. She was finding it hard not to panic at the thought of Khan’s life ebbing away. “They have a head start.”

  “It’s not a lot to go on,” agreed Ben. He was leaning down from his saddle, scanning the ground for tracks or spots of blood as they went. “But he did tell us something that could prove vital. He said we’d be torn apart. Now that we know that, maybe we can prevent it.”

  Martine had a flashback to her conversation with Grace before she left Sawubona, the one where she’d said that if the San had only made her destiny clearer in their paintings she could have avoided all the bad stuff.

  “We can try,” she said to Ben, “but I don’t think it really works that way. Grace says that if a person could see their future, they’d ‘only choose the good stuff, the easy stuff.’ They’d never learn from their mistakes and never experience the important things in life because they’re usually the hardest things. But I do think it’s a bit weird that both Grace and the witch doctor talked about us being bound together. What do you think the witch doctor meant when he said ‘Look to the House of Bees’?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said absently. They had reached a stretch of bare rock leading down to a river, a tracker’s biggest challenge. “Maybe we’re meant to look for a beehive, or maybe it’s the name of a local house or even a hill?”

  He got off Mambo. It took several minutes of casting around before a trace of sand in a crevice of the rock revealed a partial boot-print. A little way on he found a smear of blood.

  “They’re right behind him,” he said. “I wish Tendai were here. He has such an amazing eye for this. It’s going to take me years to learn even half of what he knows about tracking.”

  Martine was on tenterhooks. She was worried about what would happen if they didn’t find the leopard, but she was even more afraid of what would happen if they did. When she’d had to rescue Jemmy, she’d done so knowing that he was a gentle, beautiful creature who would never harm her. She and Ben hadn’t thought through the rescue of Khan in any way. If he were wounded he would be lashing out at everyone and everything. He’d be more likely to bite her head off than lie around waiting for her to summon up her gift.

  Ben was at the river’s edge. “Martine, it looks like Khan and the hunters have crossed here. We should probably go on foot.”

  Martine opened her mouth to say that the best thing they could do was race back to Black Eagle and get Sadie and her grandmother to call the police. But that would take hours. No, she and Ben would have to press on and hope for the best.

  “All right,” she said, putting a hand on her survival pouch to check that it was fastened securely. “Let’s give the horses a drink of water and tie them up in the shade.”

  It was easy for Ben to track the men across the river, because their boots had left bits of mud drying on t
he flat rocks on the other side. But where the grass began, there was a problem. There were two faint leopard paw prints heading southwest, one smudged and slightly twisted, but then, inexplicably, they vanished. It was as if Khan had been plucked into the heavens. The hunters had obviously spent a considerable time searching the area for some trace of him, before setting off in the direction that the leopard had last been taking.

  Ben lingered by the riverbank.

  “Let’s go, Ben,” Martine said impatiently. “We’re going to have to run for a while or at least jog if we’re going to overtake the hunters.”

  He stood without moving. “Something’s wrong. The locals believe that after every leopard in Zimbabwe is gone, Khan will survive; that he’ll be the last leopard. They believe it because he’s so cunning. Remember what I told you about Tendai’s theory that people crossing rivers unconsciously walk in the direction they intend to travel, even if they’re trying not to?”

  “That’s people,” Martine said. “Surely a leopard’s not capable of thinking like that?”

  “Maybe not. But we already know that Khan is no ordinary leopard. His tracks show him heading southwest as he crosses the river and then when they appear again he’s going due south. What if he doubled back? What if he had the wit to jump onto the rock from the path, which would explain the way his claws seemed to have dug into the ground, and then he waded along the river for a while.”

  Martine was frantic, but she knew that all the rushing in the world wouldn’t help if they misread the sign and ended up in the wrong place. “Okay,” she said. “It’s worth a try.”

  Ten minutes later, Ben gave a triumphant shout. He’d found a series of upturned pebbles on the riverbank, about fifty yards along from where they’d started, their undersides black and moist from the wet clay. “That shows they’ve recently been turned,” he explained to Martine.

  Next he spotted a ball of bloodstained cobwebs that had been wiped from a bush. From then on, they moved very quickly. After leaving the river, the leopard had started to bleed profusely, and tracking him, at least to Ben’s sharp eyes, was simply a matter of following the trail of blood. Ben jogged swiftly through the bush with Martine struggling to keep up. She could only just make out his blue T-shirt and jeans through the trees when she heard him shout, “Martine, I think he’s up here. Isn’t this Rock Rabbit Hill—the one Ngwenya told us about?”

  A hand was clapped over her mouth. There was a faint smell of cologne mingled with tripe. Griffin! He pulled her off the path and into a ditch, making almost no sound.

  On the path ahead, Ben tensed when Martine didn’t answer. He spun around. “Martine? Martine!”

  He guessed immediately that she’d been snatched or worse. He sprinted back down the path and began studying the ground where he’d last seen her. So absorbed was he in his task that he didn’t see the hunters until he almost walked into them.

  “What an unexpected pleasure,” drawled the duty manager from the Lazy J sourly, his bushy blond mustache twitching. He was with one of the guides who’d surrounded Ben and Martine in the forest.

  Ben could still have made a break for it, but he didn’t want to go anywhere until he knew where Martine was or if the hunters themselves had taken her.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” the duty manager demanded in the next breath, answering one of Ben’s questions at least. “I have a score to settle with her.”

  “I think she has a few to settle with you,” Ben replied coolly. “Unfortunately, she’s not here at the moment. She’s at Black Eagle Lodge with her grandmother, and the police are on their way to arrest you for trespassing.”

  The duty manager laughed. “The police here are in the pay of Mr. Ratcliffe. whom you’ve grievously offended. If I were you I wouldn’t count on them to come riding in like knights on white chargers. They know we’re here. Now I’m going to ask you for the last time. Where’s your girlfriend? What were you yelling just now—Mary?”

  “If you’re talking about my friend, her name is Susan,” Ben said. “And like I told you, she’s back at the retreat. I was calling for Mrs. Scott’s dog, Magnus. Maggy, I call him.”

  In the ditch nearby, Martine listened in horror. If Griffin hadn’t been holding her in such a viselike grip, she would have burst from the ditch and confronted the hunters, regardless of the outcome.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” the duty manager told Ben, “and if you continue to lie, you’re going to make me lose my temper.”

  Ben folded his arms. “Well, you’re just going to have to lose it, then. If you think I’m lying, why don’t you try to find Susan yourself? I mean, can you see her anywhere?”

  “No,” admitted the hunter. “But then I don’t see your dog around either.”

  “That’s because he ran away when he saw the leopard,” Ben told him.

  “The leopard!” cried the guide. “Where is the leopard?”

  “The leopard you shot?” Ben said. “You mean you want me to tell you where he’s gone so you can finish him off. I don’t think so. Anyway, they’re expecting me back at Black Eagle. I need to go.”

  The guide lifted his rifle menacingly. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to show us where the leopard is hiding.”

  “And why in the world would I want to do that?” said Ben.

  “Ernest, put down the gun and stop acting like a gangster,” the duty manager ordered gruffly. “Look, kid, you might not be aware of it, but there’s a bounty on the leopard’s head. A thousand dollars dead or alive. It’s yours if you can lead us to him.”

  Ben grinned. “In that case, follow me.”

  20

  Griffin waited until the only sound was the cooing of a lone dove before taking his hand from Martine’s mouth and pushing her none too gently out of the ditch. He’d taken off his white shirt and hat and was wearing his soiled black waistcoat and trousers. His face, neck, and bare arms were covered in swollen ant bites. He looked like the victim of some ghastly disease.

  “You are lucky to have such a good friend,” he said. “Loyal friends who will stand by you no matter what, those are hard to come by these days.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe if you’d gone to law school like your father says you wanted to, instead of hanging about with lowlifes looking for gold and diamonds that don’t belong to you, you might have met those kinds of friends,” Martine responded coldly.

  “Papa remembered my dream?” Griffin said. A wistful expression flickered across his face, but then he shook himself and scowled. “You are too young to know anything about life. It is not always easy.”

  He gave her a shove. “I was very prepared to be nice to you and your friend, but you tricked me and caused me to be attacked by the Enemy of Lions. Have you felt their bites? It is like being pierced by needles made red-hot in fire. So now you have two choices. You are going to help me, or you are going to pay. The leopard has been shot and the witch doctor says it is dying. Perhaps it is dead already. You will use your gift to locate Khan. Before the sun sets, the prophecy will be fulfilled. In the last resting place of the king of leopards I will find the king’s treasure.”

  “The witch doctor told you that?” Martine felt a sense of disappointment. She’d really believed that he might change.

  “No,” replied Griffin. “I tried to give the stubborn old drunk some wine in payment for a prediction, but he smashed it against a rock and became very abusive. He said that the leopard was dying and I was wasting my time. Luckily I found your footprints down by the river and followed you here.”

  He jerked her arm. “Come, let’s go. Let’s find the leopard.”

  Martine took a couple of steps along the path taken by Ben and the hunters, but Griffin wrenched her back so brutally that she winced in pain.

  “No more tricks,” he shouted. “I heard your friend telling you that the leopard is on Rock Rabbit Hill. Start walking.”

  The climb to the top of the fortress of rocks was agony for Martine. She was tired, hungry,
and thirsty, and with every arduous step she expected to come across the bloody body of Khan and to have to deal with Griffin tossing it aside to scrabble for the king’s treasure.

  She tried to think of an escape plan, but her brain was like mush. She didn’t even have the energy to sneak a hand into her survival kit—not that there was anything in it that could help her at this moment. And besides, Griffin was right on her heels. The witch doctor’s words kept running through her head. “You are bound together, but you will be torn apart. When that happens, look to the House of Bees.”

  What House of Bees? thought Martine.

  A police siren wailed in the distance. It was so unexpected that Griffin, in mid-stride between two rocks, lost his footing and slipped.

  Martine seized the opportunity to make a run for it. Somehow she had to get to the top of the hill and signal the distant police car. It was her only hope. Up she went, forcing one exhausted leg in front of the other. Griffin came scrambling after her. Martine felt like she sometimes did in dreams, when she was being pursued by an unknown assailant and her legs refused to work.

  In seconds, Griffin would grab her, and this time there would be no Khan, Ben, or Ngwenya to save her. The sweat ran into her eyes, stinging them and blurring her vision. Through a red haze, she saw a swollen dark mass suspended from a tree. Black specks circled it.

  The House of Bees! But how on earth was it going to save her? If she did anything to anger the bees, in the hope that they’d come to her aid by stinging Griffin, she’d probably be stung herself. But in the absence of any other option, it was a chance she’d have to take. She’d just have to grin and bear it.

  Griffin grabbed at her ankle and missed. Martine scooped a rock as she dodged him and threw it with all her might. The rock hit the bees’ nest square on. It vibrated crazily, the black cloud of bees vibrating with it, before a great chunk of it plunged to earth.