by Wilbur Smith
Two men, wearing rubber-soled shoes. Sean recognized the distinctive pattern of the soles... those ubiquitous Bata tennis shoes, locally manufactured and sold for a few dollars in every street market and general dealer's store.
Even Riccardo picked out the alien human prints. "Who the hell is that?" he demanded. But Sean ignored him and drew aside with Job to watch Matatu.
Matatu scurried back and forth, picking over the spoor like an old hen, and then came back to them. They squatted down, Job on one side of Sean, Matatu on the other-a council of war, from which only Shadrach was missing.
"Two men. One young and tall and thin, he walks on his toes.
The other older, shorter, fatter. Both are carrying packs and banduki. " Sean knew he had deduced all this from the length of stride, the different way the two men heeled and toed under packs, and the unbalancing of a heavy weapon carried in one hand. "They are foreigners. The men of the valley do not wear shoes, and these men came in from the north."
Zambian poachers," Job grunted. "They are after rhino horn, but they stumbled on the elephant and he is too big to let pass.
"Bastards!" said Sean bitterly. In 1970 there had been an estimated twelve thousand black rhinoceros left in Zambia across the Zambezi River. Now there were none, not a single animal left.
A Yemem nobleman would pay fifty thousand dollars for a dagger with a rhinoceros-horn handle, and the poachers organized themselves like military expeditions. There were still a few hundred rhinoceros left on the southern side of the Zambezi Valley, and from the Zambian side the poachers crossed the river in the night, slipping past the game department patrols. Many of the poachers had been bush fighters in the guerrilla war. They were hard men, killers of men as well as of the great animals on which they preyed.
"They will be carrying AKs." Job looked at him. "And there are probably more than two men. They will have out flankers We are outnumbered and outgunned, Sean. What do you want to do?"
"This is my concession," Sean said. "And Tukutela is my elephant."
"Then you might have to fight them for both." Job's noble Matabele features were solemn, but his eyes sparkled; he could not conceal the battle lust in them.
Sean stood up. "Damned right, Job. If we catch them, we are going to fight them. "Then we must hurry." Matatu stood up beside him. "They are two hours ahead of us, and Tukutela must stop soon to feed. They will have him before we get there."
Sean strode across to where Riccardo and Claudia were resting in the shade.
"Poachers!" he told them. "Probably armed with automatic weapons. Two at least, possibly more, all of them ruthless killers."
"We will have They stared at him wordlessly, and Sean went on.
to move fast to prevent them getting to Tukutela before we do. I'll leave you and Claudia to follow with Pumula at your own speed.
Job and Matatu and I are going to run the spoor and try to drive them off before they get to the elephant. You keep the Rigby, Capo, and Job will take the Weatherby."
As he began to turn away, Riccardo caught his arm. "Sean, I want this elephant. More than anything left in my life, I want this elephant."
"I will try and save him for you." Sean nodded. He understood entirely. He felt the same way.
"Thank you." Riccardo let his hand fall to his side, and Sean went to where Job and Matatu were waiting. They had handed over their field packs to Pumula. and carried only their water bottles. Sean glanced at his stainless steel Rolex. Four minutes Since they had picked up the poachers" spoor, four minutes wasted.
"Hot pursuit!" Sean ordered. "And expect ambush!"
Job smiled at him. "Old times," he said. "It makes me feel young again."
Matatu pulled his loincloth up between his legs and tucked the skirt under his belt, then whirled and went away on the spoor at a loping trot. Sean had seen him keep up that pace from sunup to sundown. He went out onto the right flank, and Job, who was left-handed, took his natural side. Sean changed the cartridges in the577 and began to run. Within seconds Riccardo's group was out of sight in the forest behind them, and Sean concentrated all his attention ahead.
It required special skills and vast experience to keep the formation intact in this type of broken country. The flankers had to keep Slightly ahead of the tracker, anticipating the line of the spoor, sweeping the terrain for ambush, covering and protecting Matatu yet keeping fifty paces out on each side, breaking their own trail and still maintaining contact with the opposite flanker, all this while on the run and mostly out of sight of each other, with Matatu setting a furious pace in the center.
When the spoor turned, the man on the outer flank had to wheel on the center, covering twice the distance of his opposite number, and when the spoor crossed open ground, they had to increase the angle on the flank, forming an inverted spearhead formation, always protecting the center, keeping contact with subtle birdcalls the flute of a wood dove, the whistle of a bulbul, the warble of a shrike, the pipe of a black kite--each had meaning, each was a command or a warning.
All this and two other essentials: silence and speed. Job and Sean ran lightly and soundlessly like a pair of kudu bulls, ducking and weaving under branches and through thickets and thorns, quick and vigilant.
After the first hour, Matatu flashed a hand signal down a break in the forest. Sean $mderstood it readily. "Two more," the signal said.
Another pair of poachers had joined the first two, and they also were closing swiftly with the elephant.
They ran for another hour, never slackening for a moment, and Matatu signaled again from the center.
"Very close." An eloquent flash of his pink palm. "Beware.
Danger." Sean whistled like a sand grouse, checking the pace. It was the signal for imminent contact, and they came down to a wary trot.
The trail had led them up the side of a low tableland, along an ancient elephant trail that was well trodden into the iron-hard earth. When they came out on top of the flat plateau, they felt the stir of the evening breeze, cool and blessed out of the east, and Sean held his sweaty face up to it.
The plateau was less than a mile wide. They crossed it quickly and reached the far rim, dropping to their bellies and sliding over the skyline without showing a silhouette against the blue. Then, crouching below the crest and sweeping the ground below them, they saw a shallow valley with another forested tableland beyond.
A river-bed meandered down the center of the valley, its course marked with a narrow ribbon of dark green riverine bush. The rest A of the valley was fairly open: pale winter grass shining in the sunlight, dotted anthills, each the size of a cottage, widely separated umbrella acacia with flat tops and lemon yellow trunks. Sean surveyed it all swiftly.
Out on the left, Job gave the penny-whistle snort of a reedbuck, one of the most urgent alarm calls in their repertoire. He was pointing down into the valley, half left from their front. Sean followed the gesture. For a moment he saw nothing, and then suddenly Tukutela, the Angry One, stepped into view.
He had been hidden from Sean by one of the huge anthills, but now he strode out into the open meadow and Sean gasped aloud.
Even from almost a mile away, Sean realized that he had only poorly remembered the magnificence of this animal.
Tukutela was the dark gray of volcanic rock, tall and gaunt; even at this distance Sean could make out the folds and tucks of his ancient riven hide and the knotted outline of his spine beneath it. His ears, their edges tattered and eroded like a pair of battle ensigns torn with shot and blackened with the smoke of cannon, fanned gently out with each stride.
Tukutela's tusks were also black, stained with age and the sap of the tan trees he had destroyed with them. From his gaping lower lip the tusks flared outward, then curved in again toward each other so the tips almost met nine feet from his lip. They were without taper, solid columns of ivory hanging so low that in the center they drooped below the level of the winter grass. Even that massive frame seemed overburdened by them. There would probably ne
ver be another pair of tusks like that again. This elephant was legend and history.
Sean felt a hot flare of guilt. No matter what the legality of it, the killing of this beast would be a crime against Africa, an affront to the gods of the wilderness and the very soul of man. Yet he knew he would not hesitate to do it, and that knowledge added poignancy to his sense of guilt. To a hunter, the nobler the quarry, the greater the compulsion to take the trophy. Job whistled again, pointing, diverting Sean's attention from the elephant, and only then did Sean see the poachers.
They were already closing in on the bull. He could see all four of them. They had just left the trees at the bottom of the slope and were moving in single file into the grassy meadow. The grass reached to their armpits, and their heads and shoulders bobbed like the cork line of a fishnet in the pale sea of grass. Each of them carried an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
The light swift bullets those weapons fired were not at all suitable for hunting massive-bodied species, but Sean knew the technique. They would get in close and all four would open fire together, blazing hundreds of rounds into the bull, riddling his lungs with copper-jacketed bullets, bringing him down under the sheer weight of automatic firepower.
The line of poachers was swinging out to flank the elephant, not heading directly toward him but keeping well below the wind, so that a fluke of the breeze would not carry their scent to him.
Despite this detour, they were running hard and gaining on him swiftly. The bull was still unaware of their existence, heading with long swaying strides down toward the river-bed, but Sean realized that at this rate they would intercept him and open fire before he could reach it himself.
The government directive from the game department to the concessionaires was in plain language. Unauthorized armed men in a hunting concession, if apprehended in what was clearly a hunting operation, were presumed to be poachers. Four game department rangers and one concessionaire had been murdered by poachers during the past four years, and the directive was that fire could be opened on poachers without warning. The prime minister, Robert Mugabe, made it even plainer. "Shoot to kill" were his exact words. The.577 Nitro EWress was a devastating weapon at close quarters, but over a 1un dred yards the heavy bullet dropped away rapidly. The group of poachers was six hundred yards away across the valley floor. Sean jumped up and, crouching low, slipped across the face of the slope to where Job was lying behind a fallen tree trunk.
He dropped down beside him. "Give me the Weatherby," he ordered, taking the lighter weapon from Job's hands. Job was an excellent shot, but this called for Bisley championship-standard marksmanship.
Sean jerked the bolt open and checked that there was a cartridge in the chamber. It was a 180-grain Nosier, and Sean tried to drop over hundred yards, the range of six estimate how much the buffet would firing downhill with a light breeze on his left shoulder. He remembered from the ballistic table that the bullet drop at 350 would be six inches, while at 600 yards it would probably be four feet or more.
While he worked it out, he stripped off his shirt, rolled it into a bundle, and placed it on the fallen tree trunk behind which he and Job were crouched.
"Back me with the big banduki. Shoot very high with it," he told Job. He settled behind the tree trunk, resting the fore end of the Weatherby on the pad of the shirt. He screwed the variable telescopic lens to full power and gazed through it.
He picked up the heads of the file of poachers. At this magnification, he could recognize two of the men as Matatu had described them from their spoor. The tall, lean one was leading. He wore a blue denim jacket, traditional guerrilla uniform from the days of the bush war. Behind him came the shorter, heavier man. He had a tiger-striped camouflage cap on his head and wore a plain khaki shirt.
Beyond them Sean could see the elephant. The magnification of the lens foreshortened the range so that the poachers seemed very close to their quarry. Even as he watched them, the leader of the column unslung the automatic rifle from his shoulder and made a gesture with his other hand. Behind him the other three poachers fanned out into a skirmishing line and slipped their rifles off their shoulders, holding them at high port.
Sean snuggled down behind the Weatherby, digging in his heels, regulating his breathing, his forefinger resting lightly on the trigger. He picked out the tall leader in the denim jacket and let the cross hairs of the telescopic sights drift over the man's head.
The image wavered and quivered in the heat. Sean watched the watery lines of mirage, for they were indicators of the strength and direction of the breeze; when they leaned over, the breeze was gusting, but they rose straight upward like smoke in the lulls between gusts.
He drew a long breath, let half of it out, and held the rest. The mirage steadied in a lull, and he took aim a full body length above the poacher's head. The image looked good, but he did not pull the trigger. He squeezed the grip of the rifle with his whole hand as though he were modeling clay. The butt plate slammed back into his shoulder as the barrel jumped high in the typically vicious Weatherby recoil, and he lost sight of the target.
Before he could collect himself, Job exulted, "Shayile! A hit!"
so And when Sean brought the lens back there were only three heads showing above the grass.
All three poachers had turned and were firing their weapons back toward the slope where Sean and Job were hidden, blazing wildly on fully automatic, their AKs beating like the rattle of kettledrums.
Beyond them Sean saw the old bull elephant in full flight. His ears streaming back and his great black tusks lifted high above the grass, he crashed into the narrow ribbon of dark bush and out the other side.
"Run, my beauty," Sean breathed. "If I can't have you, nobody else will." And he turned his full attention back to the band of poachers.
It was immediately obvious that they were a crack unit. Two of them were throwing covering fire at the kopJe, while the third had run to where the leader had gone down in the grass and dragged him to his feet. The blue denim-clad leader had lost his rifle, and he was doubled up and clutching his side.
"Nicked him!" Sean muttered. He fired again. Dust flew above the grass as his bullet fell close beside them. The poachers began to pull out, dragging their leader with them, placing an ant-hill between them and the kopJe. Both Sean and Job were firing deliberately, but the range was increasing every second, and although Sean saw dust fly very close to the scurrying figures, they could not claim another hit before the band disappeared into the grass and scrub and the clatter of automatic fire dwindled into silence.
Sean and Job waited fifteen minutes, peering down into the valley, but they did not get another glimpse of the poachers. Sean stood up. "We'll go and take a look."
"Careful," Job warned. "They could have doubled back to lay an ambush." That was, another old guerrilla trick, and they went down the slope cautiously.
Matatu led them to where the poacher had fallen. It was an area of flattened grass. The man's weapon had disappeared; one of the other poachers must have retrieved it. Matatu picked one of the grass stems and held it out to Sean. The blood on it was almost dry.
However, the bleeding had not been profuse and they found less than a dozen droplets on the grass or balled on the dry earth.
"Flesh wound," Sean grunted. The drift of the breeze must have pushed the bullet off the vital areas of the man's body.
"Who do we follow, Tukutela or the poachers?" Job wanted to know. "The poachers will be halfway back to Lusaka by now." Sean grinned. "Follow the elephant!" he ordered Matatu.
They tracked Tukutela across the river-bed and up the farther side of the valley. After his first panicked rush, the old bull had settled down into that swinging stride that ate up the ground at a prodigious rate, and which he could keep up for days. He was boring away toward the east, toward the Mozambican border, deviating only slightly from his course to take a gap in a line of hills or to climb the easier gradient when there was no pass.
They ran hard o
n his spoor. Not having to take precautions against ambush, they could push themselves to the limit, but the elephant was pulling away from them and the day was wasting.