A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  Riccardo was not even aware of her existence. "It could be Tukutela," he repeated softly, speaking almost to himself, as though he were trying to will it to be so. But Sean shook his head.

  "I've got four good trackers watching the river. Tukutela couldn't cross without them knowing. Besides, it's still too early.

  I wouldn't expect him to leave the valley until the last water holes along the escarpment dry up, another week or ten days at the earliest."

  "He could have slipped through." Riccardo ignored his explanation. "It's just possible it is him down there."

  "We'll go down and take a look, of course." Sean nodded in agreement. Riccardo's passion did not amaze him as it had his daughter. He understood it totally, had seen it in fifty other men like Riccardo-the powerful, aggressive, successful men who made up his clientele, men who did not try to conceal or check their instincts. The hunting imperative was part of every man's soul; some denied or suppressed it, others diverted it into less blatantly violent avenues of expression like wielding clubs on the golf course or racquets on the court, substituting a little white ball for the prey of flesh and blood, but men like Riccardo Monterro gave their passions full rein and would settle for nothing less than the ultimate thrill of the chase and the kill.

  "Shadrach, bring the Bwana's.416 banduki," Sean called. "Job, don't forget the water bottles. Matatu, akwendi, let's go!"

  They went directly down the steep front slope of the kopje, leaping lightly from boulder to boulder, and at the bottom they dropped naturally into their running formation with Matatu leading to pick up the spoor, followed by Job and Sean with their almost supernatural eyesight to sweep the forest ahead, the clients in the middle, and Shadrach at the end to hand Riccardo the Rigby when he needed it. They went swiftly, but it was almost an hour through the forest before Matatu picked up the huge dished spoor in the soft earth and the litter of stripped twigs and branches that the elephant had strewed behind him as he fed. Matatu stopped on it, turning back to roll his eyes, and give shrill piping cries of disgust.

  "It's not Tukutela. It's the old one-tusk bull," Sean told them.

  "The same one whose spoor we saw on the road this morning. He has circled back this way."

  Claudia watched her father's face and saw the intensity of his disappointment. Her heart squeezed for him.

  Nobody spoke on the march back to the Toyota, but when they reached it, Sean said softly, "You knew it wasn't going to be that easy, didn't you, Capo." And they grinned at each other.

  "You're right, of course. The chase is everything. Once you kill, it's only dead meat."

  "Tukutela will come," Sean promised him. "This is his regular beat. He'll be here before the new moon, that's my promise to you, but in the meantime there's the lion. We'll go check bait to see if Frederick the Great is going to oblige us."

  It was only another twenty minutes" driving to the dry river-bed below the hide and the buffalo bait. They left the Toyota parked on the white sand, and Claudia felt a tremor of last night's terror as they climbed the path up the far bank and saw the pad marks of the lioness in the earth behind the hide. Then Sean and his gun bearers were talking excitedly and Matatu was chattering like an agitated guinea fowl.

  "What is it?" Claudia demanded. But nobody answered her and she had to trot to keep up with them as they hurried down the open tunnel through the bush to where the remains of the carcass hung in the wild fig.

  "Somebody tell me what's happening," Claudia begged them, but she stayed well back from the bait. The stench was just too much for her to bear. The men showed no distaste at all as they prodded and peered at the reeking remains, and even Claudia could see the difference from the previous evening.

  Yesterday the carcass had been virtually untouched; now more than half of it had been devoured. Only the head and forequarters remained, and Sean had to stretch up above his head to reach it.

  The bones of spine and ribs had been chewed to splinters and the thick black skin ripped by claw and fang, so that it hung in tatters like a funeral flag.

  While Sean and the gun bearers examined the carcass, Matatu searched the earth around the base of the fig tree, giving excited little yaps like a hound questing for the scent. Sean picked something off the jagged white ribs of the carcass and showed it to Riccardo. Both of them laughed excitedly, passing whatever it was from hand to hand.

  "Won't somebody talk to me, please?" Claudia insisted, so Sean called to her.

  "Come on, then, don't stand so far away."

  Reluctantly, holding her nose theatrically, she approached. Sean held out his right hand to her, palm up. On it lay a single hair, almost as long and black as one from her own head.

  "What is it?"

  Riccardo took the hair from Sean's hand, holding it between thumb and forefinger, and Claudia saw that the back of her farther's arms were goose-bumped with excitement. His dark Italia eyes glowed as he replied, "Mane hair." Then he seized her hand and pulled her across to the base of the fig tree. "Take a look at that. Look what Matatu has found for us."

  The little tracker was grinning with proprietorial pride as he indicated the churned earth. Five cubs and two lionesses had trampled the soft footing into powder, but one perfect print stood out in the confusion. It was double the size of the other smudged prints, as big as a soup plate, and, looking at it, Claudia felt again the stirring of terror. Whatever animal had left that pad mark must be monstrous.

  "Last night, after the lionesses had seen us off, he came. He waited until the moon had set and he came in the darkest hours of the night," Sean explained. "And he left again before dawn. He ate damned nigh half a buffalo, and then he took off again before first light. I told you he's a cunning old devil."

  "A lion?" Claudia asked.

  "Not just any old lion." Riccardo shook his head. "Frederick the Great has come at last."

  Sean turned away and beckoned his men to come to him. The three of them, Job, Shadrach, and Matatu, squatted around him in a circle and Claudia and Riccardo were forgotten as they planned the hunt, working out their tactics, discussing in detail every aspect, every eventuality. Their concentration was absolute, and it was an hour before Sean stood up and came to where Riccardo and Claudia sat in the shade.

  "The trick is going to be getting him to come in before nightfall," he told them. "We all agree that the only way to do that is to set up a fresh bait for him and build a new hide. The lionesses have rumbled this one, and old Fred is going to be as suspicious as all hell. He's going to lurk out there until well after dark or until we can entice him in somehow."

  Sean sat down between them and was silent for a moment.

  "You know, Capo, sometimes for a good friend, someone I can trust, I'm prepared to bend the rules a little." He spoke deliberately, drawing with a twig in the dirt between his feet, not looking at Riccardo.

  "I'm listening." Riccardo nodded.

  "There may be only one way we will get this lion," Sean said softly. "Jacklight him."

  They were silent for a long time, and though Claudia did not know what "jacklight" meant, she realized Sean was suggesting something beyond law or decency, and she knew her father was tempted. She was angry with Sean for putting temptation in her father's way, but she knew better than to intervene. She kept silent and willed her father to refuse to give in to temptation.

  Riccardo shook his head. "No, let's do it right."

  "We can try." Sean shrugged. "But he has been shot at over a bait and wounded once. It won't be easy."

  They were silent again for almost a full minute. Then Sean went on. "The lion is a nocturnal animal. The night is his time. If you truly want this lion, I think you'll have to take him in darkness."

  Riccardo sighed, and shook his head. "I want him very badly, but not badly enough to kill him without respect." Sean stood up. "It's your safari, Capo," he agreed quietly. "I just want you to know that there are not many men I'd make that offer to. As a matter of fact, offhand I can't think of anyone else I'd do it
for."

  "I know," Riccardo said. "Thank you, Sean." Sean walked back to the fig tree to help his men to lower the remains of the carcass so the pride could reach it.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Claudia asked her father, "Jacklight?

  What's that?"

  "Putting a spotlight on an animal after dark and shooting it in the beam. It's illegal, highly illegal."

  "The bastard," she said bitterly.

  Riccardo did not react to her denunciation but went on softly, "He was prepared to put his career on the line for me. That's one of the best things anyone has ever done for me."

  "I'm proud you refused him, Papa, but he's a bastard."

  "You don't understand," he said. "You can't possibly understand."

  He stood up and walked away, and immediately she felt a throb of guilt. She did understand. She understood that this was his last lion and that she was spoiling the pleasure of it for him. She was torn between her love for him and her protective instinct for that marvelous animal and her sense of right and justice.

  "It should be easy to do the right thing," she thought. "But it so seldom is."

  So over the days that followed, they hunted the old lion with ethical tactics, providing fresh bait for him and the lionesses. Riccardo shot the buffalo Sean pointed out to him, another barren cow, and then, two days later, a decrepit bull with horns worn down to stumps and his ribs showing through his bald, mud-caked hide.

  Each day Sean moved the bait or repositioned the thatched hide, to find a location the black-maned male would feel sufficiently confident to approach in broad daylight. Evening after evening, they sat in the hide until an hour after darkness had fallen and then drove back to camp dejected and discouraged. When they visited the bait again the following morning, they found that the lion had fed, leaving his mane hairs and his huge pad marks to tantalize them, and had departed again before dawn.

  Cursing the beast bitterly, Sean changed tactics. He lowered the remains of the rotten bait on its chain so lionesses and cubs could reach it readily. By this stage, it was mostly dried skin and gnawed bone. Five hundred meters up the river, he hung a fresh carcass at a height only the big lion could reach in a tree that stood alone in a glade of shoulder-high dry winter grass. He hoped that without the harassment of the females and cubs the lion might come earlier to the bait.

  To make him feel even more secure, he placed the hide across the dry river-bed in the fork of a teak tree. It was a mac han platform fifteen feet above ground level. From the mac han they had a view across the white sand of the dry river-bed.

  Sean did not clear all the grass around the bait tree. He wanted the lion to feel protected by good cover. He merely opened a keyhole in the grass, barely as wide as the body of the lion, through which they could see the carcass.

  "If he comes, you'll have to wait until he rears up to feed, Capo," he explained as they went into the mac han an hour after noon to wait out the long drowsy hot afternoon.

  Sean allowed Claudia to bring a paperback copy of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa to read. "Just as long as you don't rustle the pages," he warned her.

  The lionesses and their cubs came early. They were so conditioned to feeding from a bait by now that they showed not the least trepidation at approaching. First they went to the new bait in the grassy glade and inspected it wistfully. Both lionesses made attempts to feed from it, but it was just out of their reach.

  For the last few days, the eyes of the young lioness, Growly Gertie, had been irritated and infected by the river sand Sean had fired into them. Tears ran down her cheeks and her eyelids were swollen and inflamed, but now they were healing and clearing, the swelling was abating, and there were only smears of yellow mucus tears of her eyes.

  After a while, they gave up trying to reach the carcass and led their cubs down the riverbank to the old stinking bait.

  From the mac han they could hear the pride growling and ripping at the bait five hundred meters downstream, but as the afternoon passed, the sounds of feeding dwindled into silence as the lionesses sated themselves and went to lie up in the shade.

  Half an hour before sunset, the small hot breeze that had been blowing all afternoon dropped abruptly and the peculiar hush of African evening descended on the veld. The sparse winter growth of leaves on the trees was still, not a blade of yellow grass stirred in the glade across the river-bed, and the fluffy papyrus reeds below the bank ceased their perpetual nodding and bowing and stood as though listening intently. It was so quiet that Claudia looked up from her book, then closed it softly and sat listening to the absolute silence.

  Suddenly a bushbuck barked on the far bank, an alarm call so clear and loud in the hush that Claudia jumped involuntarily.

  Immediately she felt Sean's light, firm touch on her hip, a warning, and she heard her father's breathing, quick and deep as though he had just finished a hard rally on the tennis court.

  The silence had an ominous weight to it now, as though the world were holding its breath. She heard her father exhale softly, and she glanced sideways at him. His expression was as rapt as that of a communicant kneeling for the Sacrament. God, he was a handsome man, she thought. Except for the silver wings at his temples, he looked so much younger than his years, so tanned and lean and fit. As yet there was no external sign of the treachery of his own body, destroying itself from within.

  His excitement was infectious and she felt her own blood course more swiftly, driven by the quickening of her pulse. She turned her head slowly to follow the direction of her father's gaze. He was looking off to the right out across the river, to where the trees of the forest met the tall pale grass at the edge of the glade.

  The only living creature out there was a gray parrot like bird perched on the top branch of a bush willow. Sean had told her it was a gray laurie, the notorious "go away bird" that plagued the hunter with its raucous warning cry. The bird squawked now.

  "G'way! Gwayf" But as it fluttered on the high branch, it was twisting its neck, craning to peer down into the long grass below the bush willow.

  "Here he comes. The bird can see him," Sean whispered only inches behind her ear. Claudia strained her eyes looking for she knew not what.

  "Watch the grass," Sean guided her, and she saw the movement.

  The tips of the grass trembled and pushed, a stealthy furtive movement that passed slowly down the glade toward the riverbank, and then the grass behind it was still again. It was like the movement of a large trout in a still pool, the creature unseen, just the surface bulging and stirring to mark its passing.

  All movement ceased for long minutes at a time. "He's listening and checking the scent," Sean explained. She had never expected him to show excitement, but his whisper was tight and scratchy.

  The movement of the grass tips began again, coming on toward the bait tree. Suddenly her father gave a small breathy gasp. At the same moment, Sean warned her again. Perhaps he had meant to touch her hip once more, but his fingers closed on her upper thigh instead.

  His touch was a shock, made more intense by her first sight of the beast. The lion passed through a gap in the grass, which the lionesses had trampled, and she glimpsed the top of his head, the dense bush of his mane, dark and curling, swaying and rippling to his slow imperial stride. For an instant she caught the flash of yellow eyes below the mane.

  She had never seen any creature so menacing and yet so majestic. It was the briefest glimpse before the grass covered him again, but it left her shaken and breathless, and Sean's hand was still on her thigh.