by Tony Park
‘The girl, Mia,’ Sannie prompted gently. ‘We need to find her.’
‘I know!’
Sannie gave her some space. Right now this distressed young safari guide was probably their best chance of tracking down Laura. ‘Mia, please.’
She sniffed and wiped her eyes again. ‘Sorry. I know we have to find Laura, but I just don’t know where she is.’
‘The tracks from the scene?’
Mia closed her eyes, concentrating. ‘There were signs of a scuffle, and her jacket was on the ground at the termite mound.’
‘We found that.’
‘I left it there. I thought that if the dog team arrived they could use it to pick up her scent.’
‘Good thinking,’ Sannie said, encouraged that Mia had calmed somewhat. She waited for her to carry on, eyes still closed.
‘There was blood. I thought it was Laura’s. Two sets of footprints leading away from the termite mound. Bongani had picked up tracks of men dragging an impala – they’d tried to make it look like a leopard with a kill.’
Excellent tracking, Sannie thought to herself. ‘Poaching?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, but what? They took an impala and went to a lot of trouble to cover up their tracks. It doesn’t make sense, unless they took Laura because she was a witness to what they were doing, or they . . . they know the value of a child. One could have had the impala over his shoulder and the other carried Laura the same way, but if they’d decided to take the girl, why bother with the impala? I don’t know.’
Sannie tried to remain patient. She made a note in her book.
Mia looked up, her face pale with shock. ‘I heard hyenas. They didn’t . . .’
‘No,’ Sannie said quickly. ‘That was not Laura. The hyenas were feeding on an impala.’
Mia put a hand to her head. ‘I need to think, to go take a look again.’
‘OK, if you’re up to it,’ Sannie said.
Sannie helped Mia to her feet and the pair of them caught up with Sean who, like Graham and Oscar, had been casting along the watercourse, desperately looking for spoor.
‘Nothing,’ Sean said to them when they reached him. The helicopter buzzed over them, working a search grid between where they were and the fence line.
‘Mia wants to see where the hyenas were,’ Sannie said.
‘Sure,’ Sean said, without questioning why. Sannie could tell they were all desperate for a lead of some kind.
When they got to the scene there was little left of the impala. It seemed that after Sean’s initial shots had scared the hyenas away they had returned to finish the job. Mia knelt and touched some blood on the grass, then stood and followed the trail back in the general direction from which they had all come, though not, Sannie noticed, along the tracks of the poacher they had been tracking.
Mia stopped and peered ahead through the bush.
‘Do not shoot me,’ a male voice called.
‘Bongani, it’s me,’ Mia replied.
The two trackers met on the trail.
‘The helicopter came,’ Bongani said, ‘for Phillip and the dog.’
‘Yes,’ Sean confirmed for Sannie’s benefit. ‘Mike picked them up and dropped them just outside the reserve, where they met up with an inbound ambulance. The paramedics said Phillip and Askari would be fine on the drive and Mike wanted to get back to the search here.’
‘Makes sense,’ Sannie said, thinking out loud, and remembering how the pilot had touched down, briefly.
Mia handed her R1 rifle to Sean. ‘This is Phillip’s.’
He took it. ‘Don’t you want to keep it for now?’
She shook her head and wiped her hand on her shirt front, as if the weapon had contaminated her.
‘I have been following the hyenas’ trail,’ Bongani said.
‘Me, as well,’ Mia said, ‘from the other end.’
‘The hyenas caught the impala here?’ Sean asked.
‘No,’ Bongani said. ‘This impala was already dead when the hyenas found it. There is no sign of a chase or the violence of a kill. I think this was the impala the two poachers were carrying back at the termite mound.’
‘Not Laura?’ Mia asked.
Bongani shook his head. ‘After you killed one man, the other carried the impala. But his tracks end where we all lost his trail.’
Sean pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand, the LM5 rifle still in his right. ‘So where is the girl?’
Bongani looked to Mia, and Sannie saw something in the older man’s eyes.
‘What do you think, Bongani?’ Sannie asked.
He turned and stared at her for a few moments, not saying anything.
‘Bongani?’ Mia prompted.
‘There was grass, tied like string across the trail, where the poachers were waiting for us by the termite mound,’ Bongani said, looking at Mia again.
Mia, Sannie saw, swallowed, and gave a small nod.
‘What is that?’ Sannie asked them. Time was ticking away and they had wasted much of it, so it seemed, on a false trail.
‘A trip-wire?’ Sean ventured.
Sannie knew that Sean, who had worked for a while as an explosive detection dog handler in Afghanistan, was an expert in IEDs, improvised explosive devices, which had also been set by poachers to catch rangers in South Africa.
Mia shook her head. ‘No, grass woven into string and placed like this signifies something else. Evil.’
‘Umuthi?’ Sannie asked.
Bongani looked at her. ‘Those two men were never carrying Laura. They made her disappear.’
Chapter 14
Mia looked from Bongani to the police captain and she could see that the woman was struggling to control herself. Captain van Rensburg had closed her eyes for a moment, one hand balled into a fist as she holstered her pistol.
‘Captain . . .’ Mia began.
Sannie opened her eyes and held up a hand. ‘I respect your beliefs, Bongani, but a child is missing and I need more than evil spirits as a reason why we have not found her. Maybe the poachers disturbed Laura when she was behind the termite mound, and she ran off into the bush. Come, we must look again, start at the beginning.’
Sean got on his radio and called Mike in the chopper. Mia heard Mike report that he had found nothing. ‘Mike,’ Sean said, ‘fly to my place. Get Benny. Tell Christine to give you my pack with Benny’s tracking collar and other gear.’
‘Roger, Sean.’
Mia could appreciate the seriousness of Sean’s request. Benny was Sean’s personal dog, retired from work after being shot by a poacher and attacked by a leopard that had climbed over the fence and into his kennel. Benny, a Belgian Malinois like Askari, was a legend in the reserve for his tracking ability, but Sean had sworn his best friend would never have to be put in danger again.
‘Bongani,’ Sannie said, ‘tell me what you really think happened to the girl.’
Bongani handed Mia’s rifle back to her, then started walking the way they had all come, and beckoned the rest of them to follow. Mia caught up with him and also checked the ground.
‘Here is where they were shooting at us, and Phillip and Askari,’ Bongani said, raising his hands to pantomime a rifle firing.
Mia saw the spent cartridges on the ground and pointed them out for Sean and Sannie.
‘Did they have Laura here, at this point?’ Sannie asked.
Mia cast about, then stopped and pointed at the ground. ‘See this indentation here, this is where I thought they had laid Laura down.’
Bongani squatted and took a closer look. He ran his fingers through the grass and picked up some short strands of hair. He held them up. ‘From the impala.’
Mia felt terrible, seeing the evidence of her mistake. A poor tracker, she reminded herself, set out with a suspicion and then looked for proof of what she thought.
&nbs
p; ‘Where’s my daughter?’
They all looked up to see Sue Barker storming ahead of Julianne.
‘She’s walking all over the tracks,’ Mia said softly.
‘Mrs Barker, Sue,’ Sannie said. ‘I asked you to stay with the vehicle.’
Elizabeth arrived at the clearing and Samantha, stumbling and almost falling over a tree root, came up behind her. ‘We were too scared to stay in the vehicle by ourselves,’ Samantha said.
Sannie bit her tongue.
‘Sorry, Captain,’ Julianne said, ‘but I’m sure you understand Sue’s concern.’
‘Completely,’ Sannie said, maintaining her composure, ‘but, ladies, this whole area is a crime scene and the more people who walk over it, the more valuable evidence is destroyed.’
‘Where’s my daughter?’ Sue said again, as if Sannie had said nothing.
‘We’re trying to find her tracks,’ Mia said.
Sue fixed her with a stare. ‘You. You shouldn’t have let her go off by herself, behind that bloody termite mound.’
The words cut Mia to the core.
‘And now I find out you knew there were armed poachers all around us and yet you took us out on a drive, put us in harm’s way.’ Sue turned to Julianne. ‘I’d call my lawyer if I wasn’t so worried about Laura.’
Mia looked to Julianne, who put a hand on Sue’s arm.
‘Sue,’ Julianne said softly, ‘we assessed the risk and decided it was safe to carry on. We had no idea there were more poachers close to us and Mia was actually taking us away from danger, or so she thought.’
Sue bellowed to the sky: ‘Where is my daughter!’
Julianne tried to hug her, but the woman shook her off and came to Mia, who stood, hands on hips, ready to fend her off or to take what was coming.
Sue jabbed a finger at Mia’s chest. ‘You’ll never work in this business again if you don’t find her. It’s all your fault.’
‘We will find Laura,’ Bongani said. His deep voice and deliberate delivery seemed to calm the situation.
Sue wiped fresh tears from her eyes. ‘My daughter can’t have just bloody vanished into thin air.’
‘The magic these poachers are using is very strong,’ he said.
Mia looked skywards.
‘What did you just say?’ Sue asked slowly.
‘We need help, from a sangoma, but we will find your daughter,’ Bongani said.
Sue looked from him to Mia, and then to Captain van Rensburg. ‘What. The. Absolute. Fuck.’ Her face became flushed with rage. ‘Are you telling me that black magic is responsible for the disappearance of my daughter?’
‘We do not call it that,’ Bongani said. ‘If you will allow me –’
‘Get this madman away from me and do your bloody jobs!’
Mia felt for the woman. It was impossible for her to begin to understand what was going through Bongani’s mind, and hers, if she admitted the truth to herself. There seemed something other-worldly about their run of bad luck at tracking lately. Who was she, Mia asked herself, to mock Bongani when she had been chewing on his magical potion as she stalked the poacher, looking for any advantage she could get over her prey?
Sannie intercepted Sue and Mia thought that was just in time, as she feared the woman was about to launch herself at Bongani. Mia went to her friend and took him gently by the arm. ‘Come, let’s go check the trail again.’
Bongani nodded and let her lead him away. ‘I am sorry,’ he said to Sue over his shoulder.
‘You should both be ashamed of yourselves,’ Sue said to their backs. ‘You call yourselves trackers? You can’t find your own two feet and now my baby is gone!’
Julianne again tried to fold Sue into a hug and this time the other woman did not resist; her body heaved with sobs. Mia and Bongani took their cue to move off.
‘Jesus, Bongani . . .’
‘Do not blaspheme, please, Mia.’
‘Sorry.’ She had to remind herself that Bongani’s deep traditional beliefs did not detract from his devout following of Christianity. ‘But that woman can’t understand the way you think.’
He looked up from the ground to her. ‘The way we think. You feel it as well, don’t deny it, Mia.’
‘We’re definitely dealing with something we don’t understand, something illogical. That’s for sure.’
They walked on, side by side, studying the tracks for something they had missed, although by now so many humans, and a dog, had covered the tracks of the two men that they were almost indistinguishable.
Almost. Here and there Bongani or she picked up a footprint or a partial track left by the two men. Mia stopped and examined an impression of half of a bare foot.
Bongani reached over to a thorny branch and took a pinch of impala hair from it. ‘So where is the girl?’
‘That is the question.’ Mia stood and brushed dirt from her hands. She had the .375 rifle slung over her shoulder.
Bongani sighed. ‘We all did the wrong thing – you, me, the police, Sean and his men. We assumed that the men we were tracking were carrying Laura but all the while they were running off with an impala.’
Mia caught up to him. ‘Go on.’
‘So, we were looking for proof that we would find the girl, but the old man fooled us, with his muthi, which caused us to become confused.’
Mia did not truly think she had been fooled by umuthi, but Bongani was right – they had all been labouring under the misapprehension that the two men who had been carrying the buck had also taken the girl.
‘You said “the old man”. How do you know he’s behind this? Didn’t you say it was his tracks that were leading away in the other direction from where we saw the leopard?’
‘They were his tracks,’ Bongani said. ‘But he is also behind this.’
‘How do you know?’ Mia asked.
‘His muthi is strong.’
‘What makes you think that?’
Bongani stopped and straightened his back, looking to where they had just been. ‘Ask yourself this. Why would those two men bother carrying an impala? It was not worth their lives and they knew we would be coming after them.’
Mia had been thinking the same thought. ‘They were a decoy.’
‘Yes. For the old man, so that he could get away, or go kill another rhino, or –’
‘Take the girl.’
Bongani nodded. ‘There have been two girls who have gone missing in the village.’
‘You think Laura might have been taken for the same reason as the other two?’
Bongani shrugged. ‘I cannot say, but it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. I think when we find Laura, we might find the other girls too.’
‘We?’
‘It is our duty,’ he said. ‘And Laura was our responsibility. The old man put umuthi on the trail.’
‘The grass rope, strung across the game trail?’
He nodded again. ‘I didn’t tell you, but it was the same when we were chasing him, in the rain. He used the same magic. It is powerful. It confused me then, just as it did this afternoon. It is getting dark.’
Mia looked at the red sky. Soon the light would be gone. There was still no sign of the crime scene investigation team that Captain van Rensburg had summoned. Mia called Sean on her radio and asked for an update.
‘Negative, Mia,’ Sean said. ‘Graham and Oscar have been sweeping up and down the spruit, and there are no more tracks on either side. Maybe you should come take another look. I’ve got no idea how this guy disappeared or where the girl is.’
Mia looked to the sky. This confounded reason. ‘Thanks, Sean. We’re going back to the termite mound, to start over again.’
‘Roger.’
Mia retraced her steps, trying to keep the images of the man she had shot from flashing back across the TV screen of her mind. It was
difficult. The more she tried to forget him, the more he barged his way back in. She stopped in the clearing and screwed her eyes shut for a moment. When she opened them, Bongani was staring at her.
‘You will need to do something about him, or he will haunt you forever,’ Bongani said.
Mia nodded. ‘Yes, but first we have to find this girl.’
They went to the termite mound and started casting about.
‘There was a struggle, here, by the base of the mound, but it looks like they tried to cover up their tracks as well,’ Mia said.
‘Like they wanted to confuse us,’ Bongani said.
‘They’ve done a good job of that. We need to reconnect the dots, Bongani, to work out what happened here, and fast.’
The light was fading as they circled the mound again and tracked back to the dirt road. The tyre marks, footprints and other signs told the story of the group stopping for sundowners, of Mia scouting about for danger, and of Laura walking away from them and behind the mound.
Mia walked in ever wider circles, first concentrating on finding Laura’s tracks which, when they could be seen, were distinct by the small size of her feet and the clear imprint of her hiking boots, which Mia guessed had been bought for her safari holiday and possibly never used elsewhere.
‘You can see here, where Laura came in from the road.’
Bongani came to her and checked. ‘Yes, I noticed that.’
‘And I can’t find any exit trail from her, so I don’t think she ran off in panic, or was lured away.’
‘Agreed,’ Bongani said. ‘And there’s no sign she was taken by a leopard or any other animal predator.’
‘But all the tracks around here have been brushed away, by a human.’ Mia looked around and saw a broken branch lying on the ground a few metres away. She walked to it and picked it up. ‘Here’s the broom they used.’
Bongani took the branch from her and inspected it. ‘Cut with a sharp panga.’
Mia grimaced and dropped to one knee. Carefully, she ran her hand through the top layer of dirt and sand. ‘At least there’s no blood mixed in with this. So, where did she go?’
‘Laura disappeared into thin air.’
Mia sighed. ‘That is not possible.’