The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

by Wilbur Smith

  Craig charged. It was not a conscious decision. He found himself on his feet, hurling forward, swinging the AK 47 like a club. The Shona saw him, released Sally-Anne and she staggered backwards and fell. The Shona ducked under the swinging rifle, and hit Craig in the ribs with his shoulder as he came off his knees. The rifle flew from Craig’s hands, and he grappled, holding desperately as he fought to regain the breath that had been driven out of him. The Shona, realizing that his rifle was useless in hand-to-hand contact, let it fall, and used both arms.

  Craig knew in that first moment of contact that the Shona was simply too strong for him. He had height and weight and he was trained to the hardness of black anthracite. He whipped a long arm around the back of Craig’s neck, but Craig, instead of resisting, put all his own weight into the direction of the Shona’s pull. It took him by surprise, and they cartwheeled. As he went over, Craig kicked out with the metal leg – but he didn’t connect cleanly.

  The Shona twisted and struck back at him. Craig smothered it and they locked, chest to chest, rolling first one on top, then the other, flattening the coarse scrub, their breathing hissing into each other’s face. The Shona snapped like a wolf at Craig’s face with his square white teeth. If he got a grip, he would bite off Craig’s nose or rip his cheek away. Craig had seen it done before in beerhall brawls.

  Instead of pulling his head back, Craig butted forward with his forehead, and hit him in the mouth. One of the Shona’s incisors snapped off at the gum and his mouth glutted with blood. Craig reared back to butt him again, but the Shona shifted over him and suddenly he had the trench knife out of its scabbard on his belt. Craig grabbed his wrist desperately, only just smothering the stab.

  They rolled and the Shona came out on top, straddling Craig, the knife in his right hand probing with the bright silver point for Craig’s throat and face. Craig got both hands to it, one on the Shona’s wrist, the other into the crook of his elbow, but he couldn’t hold him. The knife point descended slowly towards him, and the Shona kicked his legs and locked one between Craig’s, pinning him like a lover.

  Down came the knife, and behind it, the Shona’s face, swollen with effort, his broken tooth pink with blood, blood running from his chin and dripping into Craig’s upturned face, his eyes mottled with tiny brown veins, bulging from their sockets – and the knife came down.

  Craig put all his strength against him. The knife point checked for a second, then moved down to touch Craig’s skin in the notch where his collar-bones met. It stung like a hypodermic needle as it pierced the skin. With a sense of horror, Craig felt the Shona’s body gathering for the final thrust that would force the silver steel through his larynx – and he knew that he could not prevent it.

  Miraculously, the Shona’s head changed shape, distorting like a rubber Hallowe’en mask, collapsing upon itself, the contents of the skull bursting in a liquid fountain from his temple – and the sound of a shot dinned in on Craig’s eardrums. The strength went out of the Shona’s body and he rolled off and flopped on the ground like a fresh-caught catfish.

  Craig sat up. Sally-Anne was only feet away, kneeling facing him, the Tokarev pistol held double-handed, the barrel still pointing skywards where the recoil had thrown it. She must have placed the muzzle against the Shona’s temple before she fired.

  ‘I killed him,’ she breathed gustily and her eyes were filled with horror.

  ‘Thank God for it!’ Craig gasped, using the collar of his shirt to dry the nick on his throat.

  ‘I’ve never killed anything before,’ Sally-Anne whispered. ‘Not even a rabbit nor a fish – nothing.’

  She dropped the pistol and started to dry-wash her hands, scrubbing one with the other, staring at the Shona’s corpse. Craig crawled to her, and took her in his arms. She was shaking wildly.

  ‘Take me away,’ she pleaded. ‘Please, Craig. I can smell the blood, take me away from here.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ He helped her to her feet, and in a frenzy of haste rolled the groundsheet and buckled the straps of the rucksacks.

  ‘This way.’ Burdened by both packs and the rifle, Craig led her away from the killing ground towards the west.

  They had been going for almost three hours and had stopped for the first sparing drink, before Craig realized his terrible oversight. The water bottles! In his panickly haste, he had forgotten to take the water bottles from the dead Shona.

  He looked back longingly. Even if he left Sally-Anne here and went back alone, it would cost him four hours, and the Third Brigade patrols would surely be coming up. He weighed the water bottle in his hand, a quarter full: barely enough to see out this day, even if they laid up now and waited for nightfall and the cool, not nearly enough if they kept going – and they had to keep going.

  The decision was made for him. The sound of a single-engined aircraft throbbing down from the north. Bitterly he stared up into the pale desert sky, feeling the helplessness of the rabbit below the towering falcon.

  ‘Spotter plane,’ he said, and listened to the beat of the engine. It receded for a while, and then grew stronger again.

  ‘They are flying a grid search.’

  As he spoke, he saw it. It was closer than he had thought, and much lower. He forced Sally-Anne down with a hand on her shoulder, and spread the cape over her, glancing back as he did so. It was coming on swiftly, a low-winged, single-engined monoplane. It altered course slightly, heading directly towards him. He dropped down beside Sally-Anne and crawled under the groundsheet beside her.

  The engine roared louder. The pilot had spotted them. Craig lifted a corner of the groundsheet and looked out.

  ‘Piper Lance,’ said Sally-Anne softly.

  It carried Zimbabwe Air Force roundels, and incongruously the pilot was a white man, but there was a black man in the right-hand seat, and he wore the dreaded burgundy-red beret and silver cap-badge. They both stared down expressionlessly as the Piper made a steep turn, with one wingtip pointed like a knife directly at where Craig lay. The black officer was holding the radio microphone to his lips. The wings of the Piper levelled and she came out of her turn, heading back the way she had come. The throb of the engine receded and was lost in the desert silence.

  Craig pulled Sally-Anne to her feet.

  ‘Can you go on?’

  She nodded, pushing back the sweat-damp wisp of hair from her forehead. Her lips were flaking, and the lower one had cracked through. A drop of blood sat on it like a tiny ruby.

  ‘We must be well inside Botswana, the border road can’t be far ahead. If we can find a Botswana police patrol—’

  The road was single width, two continuous ruts running north and south, jinking now and then to avoid a spring-hare colony or a soft pan. It was patrolled regularly by the Botswana police on anti-poaching and prevention of alleged entry duties.

  Craig and Sally-Anne reached the road in the middle of the afternoon. By this time Craig had discarded the rifle and ammunition, and stripped the pack of all but essentials. He had even considered for a while burying his manuscript for later retrieval. It weighed eight pounds, but Sally-Anne had dissuaded him in a hoarse whisper.

  The water bottle was empty. They had had their last drink, a blood-warm mouthful each, just before noon. Their speed was reduced to little more than a mile an hour. Craig was no longer sweating. He could feel his tongue beginning to swell and his throat closing as the heat sucked the moisture out of him.

  They reached the road. Craig’s gaze was fastened grimly on the heat-smudged horizon ahead, all his being concentrated on lifting one foot and placing it ahead of the other. They crossed the road without seeing it, and kept going on into the desert. They were not the first to walk past the chance of succour and go on to death by thirst and exposure. They staggered onwards for two hours more before Craig stopped.

  ‘We should have reached the road by now,’ he whispered, and checked the compass heading again. ‘The compass must be wrong! North isn’t there.’ He was confused and doubting. ‘Damaged the
bloody thing. We are too far south,’ he decided, and began the first aimless circle of the lost and totally disorientated, the graveyard spiral that precedes death in the desert.

  An hour before sunset Craig stumbled over a dried brown vine growing in the grey soil. It bore only a single green fruit the size of an orange. He knelt and plucked it as reverently as if it had been the Cullinan diamond. Mumbling to himself through cracked and bleeding lips, he split the fruit carefully with the bayonet. It was warm as living flesh from the sun.

  ‘Gemsbok melon,’ he explained to Sally-Anne as she sat and watched him with dull, uncomprehending eyes.

  He used the point of the bayonet to mash the white flesh of the melon, and then held the half shell to Sally-Anne’s mouth. Her throat pumped in the effort of swallowing the clear warm juice, and she closed her eyes in ecstasy as it spread over her swollen tongue.

  Working with extreme care, Craig wrung a quarter of a cupful of liquid from the fruit and fed it to her. His own throat ached and contracted at the smell of the liquid as he made her drink. She seemed to recharge with strength before his eyes, and when the last drop had passed between her lips, she suddenly realized what he had done.

  ‘Your she whispered.

  He took the hard rind and the squeezed-out pith, and sucked on them.

  ‘Sorry.’ She was distraught at her own thoughtlessness, but he shook his head.

  ‘Cool soon. Night.’

  He helped her up, and they stumbled onwards.

  Time telescoped in Craig’s mind. He looked at the sunset and thought it was the dawn.

  ‘Wrong.’ He took the compass and hurled it from him. It did not fly very far. ‘Wrong – wrong way.’ He turned, and led Sally-Anne back.

  Craig’s head filled with shadows and dark shapes, some were faceless and terrifying and he shouted soundlessly at them to drive them away. Some he recognized. Ashe Levy rode past on the back of a huge shaggy hyena, he was brandishing Craig’s new manuscript, and his gold-rimmed spectacles glinted blindly in the sunset.

  ‘Can’t make a paperback sale,’ he gloated. ‘Nobody wants it, baby, you’re finished. One-book man, Craig baby – that’s you.’

  Then Craig realized that it was not his manuscript, but the winelist from the Four Seasons.

  ‘Shall we try the Corton Charlemagne?’ Ashe taunted Craig. ‘Or a magnum of the Widow?’

  ‘Only witch-doctors ride hyena,’ Craig yelled back, no sound issuing from his desiccated throat. ‘Always knew you were—’

  Ashe hooted with malicious laughter, spurred the hyena into a gallop and threw the manuscript in the air. The white pages fluttered to the earth like roosting egrets, and when Craig went down on his knees to gather them, they turned to handfuls of dust and Craig found he could not rise. Sally-Anne was down beside him and as they clung to each other, the night came down upon them.

  When he woke it was morning, and he could not rouse Sally-Anne. Her breathing snored and sawed through her nose and open mouth.

  On his knees he dug the hole for a solar still. Though the soil was soft and friable, it went slowly. Laboriously, still on his knees, he gathered an armful of the scattered desert vegetation. It seemed there was no moisture in the woody growth when he chopped it finely with the bayonet, and laid it in the bottom of his hole.

  He cut the top off the empty aluminium water bottle, and placed the cup this formed in the centre of the hole. It required enormous concentration to perform even these simple tasks. He spread the plastic groundsheet over the hole, and anchored the edges with heaped earth. In the centre of the sheet he gently laid a single round of ammunition, so that it was directly above the aluminium cup.

  Then he crawled back to Sally-Anne and sat over her so that his shadow kept the sun off her face.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘We’ll find the road soon. We must be close—’

  He did not realize that no sound came from his throat, and that she would not have been able to hear him even if it had.

  ‘That little turd Ashe is a liar. I’ll finish the book, you’ll see. I’ll pay off what I owe. We’ll get a movie deal – I’ll buy King’s Lynn. It will be all right. Don’t worry, my darling.’

  He waited out the baking heat of the morning, containing his impatience, and at noon by his wrist-watch he opened the still. The sun beating down on the plastic sheet had raised the temperature in the covered hole close to the boiling point. Evaporation from the chopped plants had condensed on the under-side of the plastic sheet and run down it towards the sag of the bullet. From there it had dripped into the aluminium cup.

  He had collected half a pint. He took it up between both hands, shaking so violently that he almost spilled it. He took a small sip and held it in his mouth. It was hot, but it tasted like honey and he had to use all his self-control to prevent himself swallowing.

  He leaned forward and placed his mouth over Sally-Anne’s blackened and bleeding lips. Gently he injected the liquid between them.

  ‘Drink, my sweet, drink it up.’ He found he was giggling stupidly as he watched her swallow painfully.

  A few drops at a time he passed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily. He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it trickle down his throat. It went to his head like strong drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black lips, his face swollen and sun-baked purple red, the abrasions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping scab, and his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.

  He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, ‘All right – find help – soon. Don’t worry – my love—’

  But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another. Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade – but tomorrow they would die.

  At sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each other’s arms.

  Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and cocked his head to listen, not sure whether he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the sky.

  Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it. The distinctive beat of a four-cylinder Land-Rover engine. The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly, like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.

  He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swinging and tilting as the vehicle covered the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. ‘I never did trust the son-of-a-bitch.’

  Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights. In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. ‘Puck,’ he thought. ‘Fairies. I never believed in fairies. Don’t say that – when you do, one dies. Don’t want to kill fairies. I believe in them.’ His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.

  Suddenly he recognized that the little half-naked yellow mannikin was a Bushman, one of the pygmy desert race. A Bushman tracker, the Third Brigade were using a Bushman tracker to hunt them down. Only a Bushman could have run on their spoor all night, tracking by the headlights of the Land-Rover.

  The headlights flashed over them, like a stage spotlight, and Craig lifted his hand to shade his eyes. The light was so bright that it hurt. He had the bayonet in his other hand behind his back.

  I’ll get one of them, he told himself. I’ll take one of them.

  The Land-Rover stopped only a few paces away. The little Bushman tracker was standing near them, clicking and clucking in his strange birdlike lan
guage. Craig heard the door of the Land-Rover open behind the blinding lights, and a man came towards them. Craig recognized him instantly. General Peter Fungabera – he seemed as tall as a giant in the back lighting of the headlights as he strode towards where Craig huddled on the desert floor.

  Thank you, God, Craig prayed, thank you for sending him to me before I died, and he gripped the bayonet. In the throat, he told himself, as he stoops over me. He marshalled all his remaining strength, and General Peter Fungabera stooped towards him. Now! Craig made the effort. Drive the point into his throat! But nothing happened. His limbs would not respond. He was finished. There was nothing left.

  ‘I have to inform you that you are under arrest for illegal entry into the Republic of Botswana, sir,’ said General Fungabera – but he had changed his voice. He was using a deep, gentle, caring voice, in heavily accented English.

  He won’t fool me, Craig thought, the tricky bastard, and he saw that Peter Fungabera was wearing the uniform of a sergeant of Botswana police.

  ‘You are lucky.’ He went down on one knee. ‘We found where you were crossing the road.’ He was holding a felt-covered water bottle to Craig’s mouth. ‘We have been following you, since three o‘clock yesterday.’

  Cool, sweet water gushed into Craig’s mouth and ran down his chin. He let the bayonet drop and grabbed for the bottle with both hands. He wanted to gulp it all down at once, he wanted to drown in it. It was so marvellous that his eyes flooded with tears.

  Through the tears he saw the Botswana police crest on the open door of the Land-Rover.

  ‘Who?’ he stared at Peter Fungabera, but he had never seen this face before. It was a broad, flat-nosed face, puckered now with worry and concern, like that of a friendly bulldog.