A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  "You're apologizing to the wrong person. I've still got both my legs."

  She flinched, and her voice trembled. "You're without mercy, aren't you?" Then she lifted her chin. "All right, I guess I deserved that. I've been an idiot. I thought I knew it all, but it turns out I knew very little, and in my ignorance I've done immense damage.

  I know it doesn't help much, but I'm desperately sorry."

  "You and I are from different worlds. We have not a single thought or feeling in common. We could never hope to understand each other, let alone be friends, but I do know what it took for you to say that."

  "A truce, then?" she asked.

  "All right, a truce." He held out his hand and she took it. Her skin was smooth as a rose petal, her hand slim and cool, but her grip was firm as a man's.

  "Goodnight," she said, and she released his hand and turned away.

  He watched her walk back toward her own tent. The moon was two days from full, and her white dress was ethereal and misty.

  Beneath it her body was slim and her limbs long and elegant.

  In that moment he admired her spirit and liked her more than he had done in all the time he had known her.

  Sean slept as lightly as a hunter or a soldier. The natural sounds of the bush did not disturb him, not even the shrieks of the hyena pack around the fortified trophy shed, where the lion skins were curing. But at the light scratch on the canvas of his tent, he was instantly awake and reaching for his flashlight and the.577 propped at the head of his bed. "Who is it?" he asked quietly.

  "It's me, Job."" Sean glanced at his Rolex wristwatch, the luminous hands pointed to three o'clock. "Come in. What is it?"

  "One of the trackers we left on the river has come into camp. He has run twenty miles."

  Sean felt the back of his neck prickle, and he swung both legs out of bed. "Yes?" he said eagerly.

  "At sunset this evening Tukutela crossed the river out of the national park."

  "Is it certain?"

  "It is certain. They saw him close by. It is Tukutela, the Angry One, and he has no collar around his neck."

  "Where is Matatu?" As Sean stood up and reached for his pants, the little Ndorobo piped at the entrance, "I am ready, Bwana. "

  "Good.

  We leave in twenty minutes. Marching packs and water bottles. We'll take Pumula in Shadrach's place. I want to be on Tukutela's spoor before it's light enough to see it."

  Bare-chested, Sean strode across to Riccardo's tent, hearing his even snores as he paused at the flap.

  "Capo!" The snores cut off abruptly. "Are you awake? I've got an elephant for you. Get your arse out of the sack. Tukutela has crossed. We leave in twenty minutes."

  "Hot damni" He could hear Riccardo was still half asleep. He stumbled about in the dark tent. "Where the hell are my pants?

  Hey, Sean, wake Claudia, will you?"

  There was a lantern burning in Claudia's tent. She must have heard the excitement.

  "Are you awake?" Sean asked at the flap. She opened it and stood with the lantern light behind her. Her nightdress reached almost to her ankles, there was lace at her throat and cuffs, but the cloth was so fine that the light struck through it, and her naked body was in silhouette.

  "I heard you telling Papa," she said. "I'll be ready. Will we be walking? Should I wear my hiking boots or moccasins?"

  He was certain that she was putting on this show deliberately, and he felt a prudish outrage that was totally alien to his nature.

  "Today you'll walk further and faster than you ever have in your life before," he told her harshly. Then he thought, "She's showing herself off like a tramp," ignoring the fact that his taste usually ran strongly toward tramps. "Just when I was starting to respect her."

  A reprimand rose to his lips, but he bit it off and tried not to look at the flowing shape of her hips, graceful as the lines of a celadon porcelain vase thrown by a master craftsman of the Tang dynasty.

  He wanted to turn away to show his indifference and his contradictory disapproval, but he was still standing there when she let the tent flap drop.

  "Truce be damned," he muttered furiously as he strode back to his tent. "She's still in the ring throwing punches." But his anger puzzled him. With any other woman, even one half as lovely, he would have been delighted by the exhibition.

  She's got more class than that," he explained to himself. Then he remembered how much he despised and disliked her. "This bimbo is getting you all up a gum tree," he warned himself. Suddenly he burst out laughing. The dreadful gloom of Shadrach's amputation and the imminent loss of his license were dispelled. He was going to hunt one of Africa's legendary beasts, and in some unaccountable manner the presence of this woman added spice to his mood of high anticipation.

  There was frost on the grass in the low vleis they crossed. It sparkled in the headlights, and the game they saw was lethargic with the cold, barely moving out of the road to let the Toyota pass in the night. They reached the ford on the Chiwewe River an hour before dawn.

  The waters were as black and shining as anthracite in the last beams of the moon, and the tall trees along either bank were a silvered host, like two opposing armies of mythical giants.

  Sean parked the Toyota well off the track and left one of the skinners to guard it. They fell naturally into established hunting formation, clients in the center. Purnula took up Shadrach's old position at the end. A muscular taciturn man with a thick woolly bush of a black beard, he carried Riccardo's Rigby on its sling.

  All the men, including Riccardo, were carrying field packs and even Claudia carried her own water bottles. Job had Riccardo's second rifle, the Weatherby, over his shoulder, and as always Sean lugged the577 Nitro Express. Once the hunt had begun he never let it out of his hands. They moved out, heading upstream, and within a mile they had warmed up and were pushing harder. Sean noticed that Claudia moved well on those long legs of hers and was keeping up without difficulty. She gave him a saucy grin as she noticed his appraisal.

  The dawn light was hardening when the tracker who had come in with the news of Tukutela's crossing exclaimed and pointed ahead. It was light enough to make out a fresh blaze on the trunk of a pod mahogany tree guarding a low place on the riverbank.

  "There!" said the tracker. "I marked the spoor."

  At a glance, Sean saW that this was a natural crossing for large animals. Troops of hippo had pioneered a pathway through the reed beds and dowp the ten-foot riverbank. Herds of buffalo and elephant passing over it had consolidated it and improved the gradient.

  The African veld is crisscrossed with a network of game trails, and a dozen or so of these came in through the forest, like the spokes of a wheel, to concentrate on this river crossing. Everyone in the party quickened pace at the tracker's exclamation, but Matatu reached the main pathway ahead of them and darted down it, turning his head to use the light of dawn most effectively, dabbing lightly at the earth with the tip of the peeled wild willow wand he carried.

  He had not gone five paces before he straightened and looked back at Sean, his features wreathed in wrinkles of happiness and excitement.

  "It is him!" he chirped. "These are the feet of the father of all elephants. It is Tukutela! It is the Angry One!"

  Sean looked down at the great dished spoor in the fine dust of the game path and felt as though a spring tide had begun to flow in his life. His excitement was replaced by a sense of destiny, an almost religious gravity. "Matatu," he said, "take the spoor!"

  Formally he announced the start of the hunt.

  The spoor was as clear as a highway, following the game trail directly into the forest away from the river.

  The old bull was striding out briskly as though he knew the crossing was the danger point. Perhaps that was why he had chosen to cross at sunset, so that darkness would cover him until he was clear.

  For five miles he had gone without a check and then suddenly had turned aside from the game trail into a thicket of rambling thorn that had come into blos
som and new shoot. He had moved back and forth, feeding on the blooms and succulent shoots, and his spoor was confused, the thicket trampled and torn.

  Matatu and Job went into the Thorn thicket to unravel it while the rest of the party hung back to let them work unhindered.

  "I'm thirsty!" Claudia exclaimed as she unhooked one of the water bottles from her belt.

  "No!" Sean stopped her. "If you drink on your first thirst, you'll want to drink all day, and we've only just begun."

  She hesitated a moment, considering defying him, but then she hooked the bottle back on her belt. "You are a hard taskmaster," she said.

  On the far side of the thicket, Matatu whistled softly.

  "He has worked the spoor out," Sean told them, leading them through the thorn. "How much have gained?" he asked Matatu. They had started almost ten hours behind the bull, but -every time he had paused to feed, they had cut that lead.

  "He did not feed long." Matatu shrugged. "And now he is going hard again."

  The bull had turned off the game trail and was following a stony ridge, almost as if he were deliberately obscuring his own spoor.

  He left no indications obvious enough for the average human eye to follow, but Matatu went after him with complete authority.

  "Are you sure he's still on it?" Riccardo asked anxiously.

  "Capo, you've hunted with Matatu too often to ask that question," Sean told him.

  "But what can he see?" Claudia wanted to know. "It's just rocks and gravel."

  "The elephant's pads leave a scuff on the rock. They bruise the lichen, leave smears of dust. There's fine grass growing between the stones. He has disturbed it, bending the stems in the direction of his passing. The disturbed grass catches the light differently."

  "Could you follow it?" Claudia wanted to know. Sean shook his head. "No, I'm not a magician." They had been speaking in barely audible whispers, but Sean said, "That's enough chatter, let's keep it down to a bellow from now on."

  So they went on in silence, and the forest about them was a perpetually changing show.

  There were forty different varieties of the comb return family of trees, but this was not exclusively comb return forest, as many other varieties were mingled with them, each having a distinctive shape of trunk differing in the color and texture of its bark, some with branches denuded by winter, others with dense foliage of a myriad shades of green and gold and orange and cinnabar. At times the forest enclosed them like a palisade, then only moments later opened onto vistas of far hills and weirdly shaped kopjes, open glades, and vleis from some of which the tall grass had been burned, the tender shoots laying a carpet of green over the black ash. The new growth of grass had attracted herds of antelope into the vleis. They stood out in the open, sable antelopes with long horns curved like scimitars, the proud necks of blood Arabs, upper bodies sooty black as the ash of the vlei, their bellies snowy white.

  There were reedbucks with horns pricked forward inquisitively and tails like white powder puffs, zebras at a distance looking not striped but a uniform gray color, wildebeests with Roman noses and scraggly beards chasing each other in mindless circles like clowns, stirring the black ash in a cloud around themselves.

  When the lion is not hunting, the animals that are his natural prey are amazingly trusting and will stand and stare at him as he slouches past within fifty yards of them. In the same way they seemed to sense that this file of humans was not a threat, and they let them approach closely before moving off at a leisurely trot.

  Claudia's delight buoyed her so much she felt no fatigue even after four hours of hard walking.

  In a gorge between two hills, water had been trapped in a narrow rock pool. It was stagnant and green and bubbled with the gas of rotting vegetation, but the old bull had drunk from it and left a pile of his spongy yellow dung beside it.

  "We'll take ten minutes" rest here," Sean told them. "You can have a drink now." He looked at Claudia. "But try to limit it to two mouthfuls, unless you'd like to try some of that." He indicated the foul pool, and she grimaced.

  He left her sitting beside her father and went to where Matatu stood alone at the head of the pool. "What is it?" he asked. After twenty years, he could read the little man's moods.

  Matatu shook his head and his wrinkles sagged lugubriously.

  "Something is not right here," Matatu told him. "The bull is unhappy. He goes one way and then the other. He travels swiftly, but without purpose. He does not feed, and he walks as though the ground burns his feet."

  "Why is that, Matatu?" " do not know," he admitted. "But I do not like it, Bwana."

  Sean left him and went back to where Claudia sat. "Let's take a look at your feet." He had spotted the slight lImp she had developed in the last hour.

  "Are you serious?" She began to smile, but he took one of her feet in his lap, untied the laces, and pulled off her boot and sock.

  Her feet were long and narrow like her hands, but the skin was delicate and there was a bright pink spot on her heel and another on the hall of her big toe. Sean cleaned the tender spots with cotton wool and surgical spirit. It gave him an intimate, sensuous pleasure to handle those finely formed feet, but he told her severely, "These must have been hurting you. Don't try and be brave-another few miles and you would have had blisters like a bunch of grapes, and we would have had a cripple on our hands."

  He taped the tender spots. "Change socks," he ordered. "And the next time tell me as soon as it hurts." She obeyed him meekly, and they went on.

  A little before noon, the spoor changed direction again and ran due east. "We have gained an hour or two on him," Sean whispered to Riccardo. "But Matatu doesn't like it and neither do I. He's spooky and tense and he's heading straight for the Mozambique border."

  "Do you think he has sensed us?" Riccardo was worried, but Sean shook his head.

  "Impossible. We're still hours behind. At noon they stopped again briefly to eat and rest. When they went on again, they had not gone more than a mile before they entered a grove of morula trees. The ripe yellow fruit lay thickly on the ground beneath them and the old bull had not been able to resist them. He had fed heartily, spending at least three hours in the grove, shaking the trees to bring down more fruit, then at last setting off again eastward as though suddenly remembering a rendezvous.

  "At least we've gained three hours on him," Sean told them, but he was frowning. "We are only ten miles from the Mozambique border. If he crosses, we've lost him. Sean considered running the spoor. In the old days of the bush war, he and Job and Shadrach had never walked in pursuit of the enemy. Running, they had been able to cover sixty or seventy miles in a single day. He glanced back at Claudia; she might surprise him, for she moved like an athlete and despite the incipient blisters there was still a spring and snap in her step. Then he looked back at Riccardo and abandoned the idea. Riccardo was wilting in the ninety-five-degree heat of the valley. Sean tended to forget sometimes that Riccardo was only a year or two short of sixty. He had always been so fit, but now he was showing sips of distress, his eyes sunken in plum-colored hollows and a grayish cast to his skin.

  "Old beggar is looking sick," Sean thought. "I can't push him harder."

  He had let his attention wander, and now he almost ran into Matatu as the tracker stopped suddenly, still hunched over the spoor. "What is it?" he demanded. The little man's agitation was obvious. He was shaking his head and muttering in that obscure Ndorobo dialect that even Sean could not understand.

  "What?"... " Sean broke off as he saw it. "Oh shit!" he blurted. Two separate pairs of human tracks had come in from the side and now overlaid the elephant bull's pad marks. Here the earth was sandy and friable, the tracks clear.