by Leon Mare
‘Time is not all I have on my hands,’ he said, pushing her away. ‘Mind we don’t get any on your nice white dress. Give me ten minutes, I just want to run through a quick shower. Don’t go away,’ he said over his shoulder as he entered the house unslinging his armament and chucking it onto a couch. ‘Job,’ he shouted with the same breath, ‘cold Castle in the bathroom chop-chop!’ By the time he reached the shower he was down to his underwear.
He was working the shampoo into a nice lather when the door opened accompanied by a glassy tinkle. ‘Thanks, you old fart. Just put it down anywhere.’ With the invigorating spray stinging his face he was unaware of her getting undressed. When she swept the shower curtain aside she startled him into opening his eyes for a brief moment, imprinting on his brain the image of a naked goddess before the soap stung him into closing them again. He laughed and pulled her under the spray. ‘Come into my parlour, you beautiful thing,’ he said embracing her.
‘My hair,’ she complained half-heartedly.
‘Africa is a rough country, my girl.’
Sundown found them under the big mahogany once more, dressed in light summer apparel, a big leadwood fire roaring in the fire pit. The activities of the afternoon had brought upon them a lethargic sense of well-being, and Linda was lounging in her chair with a feline-like grace, reminiscent of a leopard relaxing in the fork of a tree.
‘Sam, I am in love with you.’ Establishing a fact. Just like that.
He nearly dropped his Castle. He knew the difference between crap and mud, and this was not mud heading his way. Those clouds again! Except for a certain amount of confusion, he had a pretty good idea of how he felt about this himself, but with the typical male reluctance to face up to situations like these, he was disinclined to respond in the way that was most probably expected of him.
He leaned closer and squeezed her knee. ‘Linda, I am crazy about you,’ he said, evading the commitment. ‘You know that. But you also know the position I find myself in. Please don’t say things like that.’
‘Relax, darling, that was not a proposition. I have no intention of backing you into a corner, and I have no intention of jeopardising your relationship with Estelle. So just relax and enjoy. I was just notifying you of the fact that I am in love with you. No strings attached.’ Not yet, she added softly to herself. She knew that she still had a few months grace to make him see the light, and she intended making full use of her formidable arsenal of female cunning combined with the subtle powers of persuasion she had acquired over the years as a top lawyer. She was raised in a house where money was no object, hence the house and the Porsche, so she was used to getting what she wanted once she set her mind on it. And Sam was what she wanted. So Sam was, in her book, what she was going to get. It would just take some work and enough time for him to realise where he was going.
‘Don’t look do dejected, lover, no heavy emotional scenes envisaged. Tell me what you have in stall for us for the weekend. Have the impala started casting their young yet?’
Impala had the uncanny gift of retaining their young until the veld was fit to sustain the lactating ewe. Hence the fact that their gestation period could be stretched at will, up to a point. The first lambs hardly ever appeared before the new grass of summer was at least two inches high.
‘My dear, this year’s lambs are already beginning to think about producing lambs of their own. But I have another surprise for you. I think after we have eaten we will go for a dip in our special reservoir in the moonlight, and then I am going to show you something very few people have ever seen.’
‘Pray tell,’ she said, leaning over and hugging him.
‘Patience, woman. I, too, would like to have the pleasure of giving you a surprise. And please stop breathing so close to me, otherwise we are never going to go anywhere tonight.’
‘Who cares,’ and she slid her tongue between his lips.
‘You are a witch,’ he said, disengaging her slender arm from around his neck. ‘If you promise not to interfere you may accompany me to the kitchen. Tonight you will experience the culinary expertise of a master in the preparation of venison over the open fire.’
‘Oh, you are a master in something else too?’ she inquired innocently as they entered the house holding hands.
Job had prepared a pot of maize porridge and some tomato sheba before being forcibly evicted in the direction of the compound. It had been his intention to stick around, acquiring juicy morsels of information to be expounded upon later around the fires in the compound. The aroma of the sheba consisting of fried onions, green peppers and tomatoes, liberally spiced with curry and garlic reminded Sam that he had not eaten since very early that morning. The whole fillet of a young impala was on the table, covered with a gauze cloth. Job knew that Sam preferred to prepare his meat for a braai personally. To braai, that is, to cook meat over an open fire outdoors, was a favourite pastime in this country, and most men took a certain pride in their own secret recipes and methods. Linda realised that this was a ritual not to be interfered with, and lifted herself onto the edge of a kitchen cupboard, sipping her drink and regarding Sam fondly.
He removed the tough outer fascia of the large muscle with surgical precision and proceeded to cut the fillet crosswise into discs two inches thick. He then pounded the meat down to half-inch thickness with a wooden mallet, laid the steaks out on the table and lightly spread a weird-looking concoction on both sides. Linda could not contain her curiosity. ‘Share the secret of that strange looking marinade?’
‘We’ll get to the marinade in a while. This is green pawpaw that has been put through the blender. Nature’s own meat tenderiser, much more effective than anything available in the shops. You just leave it on the meat for ten minutes, rinse it off, and voila! This gives me enough time to refill your glass, get myself another beer and give you a proper kiss.’ With the two glasses in his hands he pushed her knees apart where she was sitting on the high cupboard and kissed her lingeringly. She started giggling as her hand strayed downwards. ‘Oh my, if we want to eat at all tonight you had better pass me some of that meat tenderiser.’ He grinned and touched the tip of her nose with his.
‘I think I may have told you previously that you are a witch. You are juggling with my soul. You have cast a spell over me. I am putty in your hands.’
‘If this is putty,’ she murmured, closing her hand on him, ‘it has been in the sun too long.’
‘Break, break!’ he said, stepping back. ‘Enough, woman, I have work to do.’
‘Let me fix the drinks.’ She jumped to the ground nimbly and took the glasses from him. ‘You get on with the food. I am ravenous.’
He rinsed the steaks thoroughly and dried them on a paper towel. Linda watched attentively as he made a mixture of smooth apricot jam and Worcestershire sauce, coating the meat thickly. Separately he mixed some salt and pepper into a cup of flour, placed the meat on a shallow plate, and they took it all out to the fire.
Linda was fascinated by Sam’s frying pan. It was a ploughshare to the convex side of which was welded three ten-inch legs. From the centre of the concave side was projecting a three-foot long handle, sticking straight up in the air.
He poured some sunflower oil into the pan, and when it had heated up nicely, he dipped the steaks into the flour one by one and laid them in the pan.
Linda brought the plates and the rest of the food out, and gave Sam another beer.
When they eventually sat down to their meal, Linda could not believe what her taste buds were telling her. ‘Sam, this is the tastiest meat I have ever eaten. It is absolutely unreal.’
‘Beef and mutton is something we rarely see around here, and if you eat game regularly you have to start playing around with recipes or else you grow tired of it very soon.’
By the time they had finished, the full moon had risen from behind the foothills of the Lebombo mountains, bathing the bush in its eerie light.
Sam fetched his spotlight with the removable red filter and plugged it in
to the cigarette lighter of the Toyota. He checked the Winchester’s magazine, clipped the rifle into its cradle at the back of the cab, and made sure the batteries in the powerful torch under the seat were in good shape.
‘My goodness, but we are going on some expedition,’ Linda remarked, watching all the preparations.
‘Something you learn very early in this neck of the woods is to make sure your equipment is in good shape before you venture out into the bush, especially at night. When things start to go wrong, they tend to go horribly wrong.’
When they were completely out of sight of the Nwanetzi rest camp Sam stopped and showed her how to operate the spotlight, after removing the red filter from the lens.
‘What is the filter in aid of?’ she asked.
‘We use that when observing carnivores at close range. The 300,000 candle power of the spotlight bothers the sensitive eyes of the night hunters, and the red filter not only weakens the intensity of the light, but it alters the wavelength as well, making the light invisible to them.’
‘Very ingenious. Do you think we will see some lions tonight?’
‘You can bet that magnificent little backside of yours on it. Personal friend of mine by the name of N’gonyama has agreed to trot out his whole family and lay on a little something very special just for you.’
‘N’gonyama?’
‘That’s what the Shangaans call a lion.’
‘Beautiful. Let’s get to them.
‘Swim first?’
‘Lions first, please?’
‘Anything that will make you happy,’ he said, driving off.
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek lightly. ‘You make me happy.’
Before turning onto the fire break they encountered a civet cat and several herds of impala, and a few kilometres along the fire break the spotlight picked up a grey colossus barring their way.
‘White rhino with her calf,’ Sam informed her. ‘Switch off the spot, quick!’ Sam switched off the truck’s lights as well.
Linda apprehensively regarded the massive animal cantering along under the full moon like an overweight ballerina. ‘Aren’t we a bit too close?’ she asked uncomfortably.
‘White rhinos are not aggressive unless they feel threatened. If this were a black rhino it most probably would have stuck its horn into the radiator right up to the exhaust by now. Just don’t shine a bright light into their eyes at night – it confuses them, and they may just try to flee right through you.’
‘How do you tell the difference between a black and white rhino? Surely you can’t distinguish shades of colouring with any certainty in this light.’
‘Contrary to popular belief, the distinction’s got nothing to do with colour. The colour of a rhino depends on the type of mud where he took his last bath. In general the black rhino is slightly smaller that the white, but that’s not a very safe criterion. The black one carries its head higher, and look, this calf is running behind its mother. With the black rhino the calf always runs in front. Nobody knows why. Let’s slow down and see if they’ll turn around.’
They did, and Linda, observing the business end of the cow, felt like getting out in search of a high tree.
‘Her upper lip is square because she is a grazer,’ Sam pointed out. ‘By that I mean she’s a grass eater. The black rhino hat pouted upper lips, being a browser. In other words its diet consists of leaves, and the pouted lip enables it to strip the leaves from the twigs.’
‘Thanks for the very interesting lecture, professor, but how the hell do we get past this lot without ending up looking like kebabs?’
‘Easy,’ Sam said, engaging first gear and driving past the rhinos slowly. The cow tossed her head once and disappeared into the bush, closely followed by the calf.
‘Phew, I think I will have one of your cold beers if you don’t mind.’
‘What a precious thought,’ Sam said and stopped. He got two Castles from the cool box on the back of the pickup and they drove on, Linda scanning the bush avidly with the spotlight.
When they got to the spot where the elephant trail crossed the fire break, Sam got out and engaged the freewheel hubs on the front wheels, ‘We’re now going to do a bit of bundu bashing, and if we do get stuck we can switch to four-wheel drive without having to get out,’ he explained. ‘Another beer?’
‘No thanks. This one will last a while longer.’
He took one for himself and turned off the fire break into the bush. The going was slow and rough, with branches screeching along the body and Sam often having to reverse to look for an opening in the bush.
‘Good grief, where are we going? I must tell you, I’m glad I am with you. If you left me here I would never find my way back in a million years.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It takes a couple of years to stop getting lost in the bush.’
A short distance further and they encountered the first hyena, testing the breeze excitedly with his nose in the air. In the distance the cacophony of feeding animals could be heard faintly. Sam stopped again and clipped the filter onto the light.
‘How did you know where to find the lions?’
‘That’s not a lion, dear, it’s a hyena,’ Sam said mockingly.
She aimed a backhand at him. ‘I may be intimidated by a prehistoric animal with a two foot horn at the business end, but I do know the difference between a lion and a hyena.’
Sam was still telling her about the kill, when the headlights picked up fifteen pairs of eyes, bobbing and weaving about. He drove the Toyota to within a few yards of the carcass, as Linda pulled her arm holding the spotlight into the cab and rolled up her window.
It was her turn to sound condescending. ‘Seems to me your friend has forgotten about the appointment.’ Some fifteen hyenas were bustling and shoving to get at any part of the soft intestines that might still be available. The whole body cavity of the giraffe had been opened by the lions, and a couple of hyenas were more than halfway into the chest cavity, their muffled snarls actually emanating from inside the giraffe.
‘They won’t stay away long. We are about three kilometres from the water, which is where they’ve gone. The lions most probably ate themselves into a stupor this morning, slept at the carcass most of the day, and have now gone for a drink. But sit tight. Watch the scrap when they catch these guys raiding their dinner table. Don’t be fooled by the tales that a hyena is an utter coward. If they outnumber the lions by a comfortable margin and when they are hungry, they are quite capable of chasing lions away from a kill and taking over. But unless this lot gets reinforcements very soon, they are going to be forced into a tactical withdrawal.’
Sam had the spotlight now, and the whole gruesome scene was bathed in the diffused red light of the carnivore filter.
Linda shuddered as she looked at the blood-smeared animals gorging themselves in a frenzied orgy of feeding and fighting. Occasionally one would dislodge a strip of meat too large to be swallowed in one go, and he would back away with it, only to be pounced upon immediately by his companions, vying for part of the spoils and complaining at the tops of their voices.
At times it actually appeared as if two hyenas started swallowing the same piece of meat from either side, tearing it off as their noses touched.
‘Disgusting table manners,’ Linda observed.
‘They always carry on like this, but tonight they’re more in a hurry than usual. They know the lions are due back at any moment, and then it’s going to be a long time before the lions leave the carcass again. Most of the time the lions go to the water in relays, but I suppose N’gonyama reckoned the hyenas wouldn’t make much of a dent in a carcass this size during his absence.’
‘I’ve been told that hyenas are of common gender?’ she wanted to know.
‘Not even an expert can tell the difference between sexes without physically examining the animal, although the females tend to be slightly bigger than the males. But in mammals there’s no such thing as being of common gender. That, thank God, is
limited to some of the lower life forms like earthworms. What causes the confusion is the fact that the sex organs of males and females look exactly alike externally, and at a glance you would classify all hyenas as male. However, judging by the rate at which they multiply they seem to have licked the problem, as it were.’
She was still giggling at the innuendo when all hell suddenly broke loose. With a bloodcurdling roar the big lion was amongst the hyenas, both front feet off the ground and swiping at everything in the vicinity. Close on his heels two lionesses also charged into the mêlée roaring and coughing. Hyenas were making somersaults in their haste to get away from the yellow furies creating havoc in their midst. One of the hyenas experienced some difficulty in backing out of the rib cage, and it appeared as if he (or she?) intended taking along something for the road. A glancing blow by N’gonyama broke its back, and as the hyena was frantically trying to drag itself off by the front legs, a young male bowled it over and killed it instantly, crushing the vertebrae directly behind the skull. This had taken place a short distance away from the rest of the pride, who were all standing around the carcass, panting and snarling. Four hyenas were immediately onto the young lion, and with a startled roar he promptly rejoined the rest.
‘Good lord,’ Linda whispered, awestricken.
‘You said it. When my old friend promises to put in an appearance, he does so with a vengeance. Quite devastating, aren’t they?’
The lions settled down to their feeding, occasionally lifting their heads and snarling at the hyenas, continuously circling and kicking up a tremendous row.
After observing the lions for some time, Sam suggested a swim.
‘If we don’t get moving soon, we will be swimming in the truck. And I don’t think this is the ideal spot to get out to answer the call of mother nature. Let’s move.’