A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  Despite the pain in his head and the slow drip of blood into his eye from the wound above it, he began the ritual of death he had learned from his dam so many years previously. He gathered the parts of his victims, the squashed trunks and mutilated limbs, and piled them in a heap. He picked their accouterments out of the grass-rifles, hats, water bottles-and added them to the bloody pile. Then he began to strip the trees of leafy branches and to cover it all with a mound of green.

  The bullet wound healed cleanly, but soon there were other scars to add to the little white star it left above his eye. A weighted spear from a deadfall trap opened his thick gray hide from shoulder to knee, and he almost died from the infection that followed. The spread of his ears caught on thorns and hooked twigs, the edges became tattered and eroded. He fought for cows when he joined the breeding herd, and although none of the other bulls could prevail against him, their tusks slashed and cut and marked him.

  Then there were other encounters with men.

  Despite the dire danger associated with it, that first taste of the sweet juice of the sugar cane so long ago had been addictive.

  Tukutela became a compulsive garden raider. Sometimes he would lurk for days in the vicinity of a patch of cultivation, getting up his courage. Then, when there was no moon, in the deepest hours of the night, he would go in, stepping soundlessly as a cat on his big madded feet. Millet, maize, papaya, yams, he loved them all, but sugar cane he could never resist.

  At first he allowed himself to be driven off by the flaming torches, the shouting, and the drums, but then he learned to answer the shouts with his own wild screams and to charge at the guardians of the forbidden gardens.

  On separate occasions over the next ten years, he killed eight human beings in the course of his raids, pulling their bodies to pieces like a glutton dismembering a chicken carcass. He grew reckless in his greed for the sweet cane. Whereas after previous raids he would travel a hundred miles in a single nonstop march to distance himself from retribution, this season he began to return to the same field on consecutive nights.

  The villagers had sent a message to the boma of the colonial district commissioner, begging for assistance. The D.C. had sent one of his ask ari armed with a.404 rifle and the ask ari was waiting for Tukutela. The ask ari was a Policeman and neither a great hunter nor marksman. He hid himself in a pit in the middle of the field, quite happy in his own mind that the elephant would not return to the field that night; for TuIkutela had already made a reputation for himself across his vast range and his habits were known. he was notorious as the garden raider who had killed so many villagers and who never returned to the scene of his crime.

  The ask ari awoke from a deep sleep in the bottom of his pit to find Tukutela blotting out the stars over his head, munching on the standing cane. The ask ari snatched up his.404 and fired a bullet upward into Tukutela's belly. It was not a mortal wound, and Tukutela hunted the ask ari remorselessly, quartering downwind until he picked up the scent and following it to the pit where the man crouched paralyzed with terror. Tukutela put his trunk down into the pit and plucked him out.

  The wound took many weeks to heal. The pain pawed at his guts, and Tukutela's hAtred of man grew upon it.

  Though Tukutela could not understand the reason for it, his contact with man became ever more frequent. His old range was being whittled down; every season there were more tracks and roads cutting through his secret places. Motor vehicles, noisy and stinking, buzzed through the silent places of the veld. The great forests were being hacked down and the earth turned to the plow. Lights burned in the night, and human voices carried to him wherever he wandered. Tukutela's world was shrinking in upon him.

  His tusks were growing all this time, longer and thicker, until in his sixtieth year they were great dark columns.

  He killed another man in 1976, a black man who tried to defend his few wretched acres of millet with a throwing spear, but the head of the spear lodged in Tukutela's neck and formed a chronic source of infection, a constantly suppurating abscess.

  Tukutela had long ago ceased to seek out the breeding herd. The scent of estrus on the wind awakened in him a sweet fleeting nostalgia, but the driving force of the procreative urge had dulled and he pursued his solitary ways through the shrinking forests.

  There were some areas of his old range that remained untouched, and from experience Tukutela came to recognize them and to realize that they formed a sanctuary where he was safe from man's harassment. He did not understand that these were the national parks, where he was protected by law, but he spent more and more of his time in these areas and over the years learned their precise boundaries. In time he became reluctant to venture across them into the dangerous world beyond.

  Even in these sanctuaries he was wary, driven always by his hatred and fear of men to attack them wherever he found them, or to fly from the first acrid taint of them on the breeze. His faith in the safety of the sanctuary was tested when the hunters found him even there. He heard the report of a firearm and felt the sting of the missile, not differentiating between the sound of a rifle and a dart gun, but when he tried to locate and destroy his attackers, a strange lethargy overtook him, a terrible weakness in his thick columnar legs, and he slumped unconscious to the earth. He awoke to the terrifying stench of men all around him, thick and repulsive on the air, even on his own skin where they had touched him. When he lumbered unsteadily to his feet, he found a strange serpentine device suspended around his neck and the chronic abscess on his neck caused by the spear wound was burning with the fires of antiseptics. He tried to wrench off the radio collar, but it defied even his might, and so, in frustration, he devastated the forest around him, smashing down the tall trees and ripping out the bushes.

  The men who watched his rage from afar laughed, and one of them said, "Tukutela, the Angry One."

  It took Tukutela many long seasons before he at last succeeded in ripping that hateful collar from around his neck and hurling it into the top branches of a tree.

  Although he recognized the sanctuary of the parks in which he now spent most of his days, Tukutela could not deny his deepest instincts, and at certain seasons of the year he became restless. The wanderlust came on him, the urge to follow once again the long migratory road his dam had first taken him over as an infant. He would be drawn to the boundary of the park by this irresistible longing and he would feed along it for days, gathering his courage until he could no longer contain himself. Then he would set out fearfully and nervously, but with high anticipation for the far-off fastnesses to the east.

  Of these, the vast Zambezi swampland was his favorite. He did not recognize it as his birthplace, he only knew that here the waters seemed cooler and sweeter, the grazing more luxuriant and his sense of peace deeper than any other place in his world. This season as he crossed the Chiwewe River and headed east, the urge to return to that place seemed even greater.

  He was old now, long past his seventieth year, and he was weary.

  His joints ached so he walked with a stiff exaggerated gait. His old wounds pained him, especially the bullet that had driven through his bony skull and lodged beneath the skin above his right eye, It had formed a hard, encysted lump of gristle that he touched occasionally with the tip of his trunk when the pain was bad.

  His craggy old head was weighed down by those huge ivory shafts; each day their burden was less supportable. Alone those tusks were a monument to his former glory. For the old bull was going back rapidly now. The sixth set of molars, the last and largest of his teeth, were all but worn away, and the starvation of age was upon him. Every day he was a little weaker, slowly his food was limited more and more to the softer, more readily masticated grasses and shoots, but he could not take enough of them.

  His huge frame was gaunt and his skin hung in bags at his knees and around his neck. There was a sense of melancholy in him such as he had experienced only seldom in his life, the same feeling that had encompassed him as he waited for his dam to die besid
e the water hole. He did not recognize that feeling as the premonition of his own impending death.

  It seemed to Tukutela that as soon as he crossed out of the park, the pursuit began. He imagined that it was more determined, more persistent than ever before. It seemed to him that the forest was full of the human creatures, following him, waiting for him at each turn, and he could not head directly eastward but must jink and twist to avoid the imaginary and real dangers that beset him.

  However, when the sudden cacophony of gunfire roared out close behind him, Tukutela fled directly eastward at last, instead of doubling back toward the sanctuary of the park. It was a hundred miles and more to where the swamps began and the route was Perilous, but he could not deny the deep instinct that drove him on.

  Ten hours later he stopped to bathe and drink and feed in an isolated marshy place, still a great distance from the true swamps.

  This was one of the way stations on the old migratory road.

  He had not been there for more than a few hours before the aircraft had rushed low overhead, filling the air with its buzzing roar, startling and angering Tukutela. In some vague way he associated this machine with the deadly danger of the hunters. It left the same foul stench on the air as the hunting vehicles he had encountered so often before, and he knew he could rest no longer in this place, the hunters were closing in.

  The great swamps were his refuge, and he fled toward them.

  "He won't stop now until he is into the swamps." Sean Courtney was squatting beside the spoor. "He's thoroughly alarmed, and we can't hope to catch him before he gets into them."

  "How far?" Riccardo asked. Sean stood up and studied him as he replied.

  "Eighty or ninety miles, Capo. Just a stroll." Riccardo wasn't looking well. There were dark sweat patches soaking through his shirt, and he seemed to have aged ten years in the last four days.

  "What will we do if the old bugger keels over on us?" Sean wondered, then thrust that thought aside. "Okay, gang, we'll eat and sleep here.

  Move on again at four."

  He led them to the edge of the marsh, onto firm dry ground.

  Fatigue and heat had dulled their appetites. They needed sleep more than food, and soon they were sprawled out in the shade like dead men.

  Sean woke with the feeling that something was amiss; he sat up quickly, his hand already on the rifle, and swept a glance around to his feet. She was gone.

  He strode out of the perimeter, and whistled for the sentry.

  Pumula came in immediately.

  "The donna," Sean demanded in Sindebele. "Where is she?"

  "That way." Pumula pointed toward the river.

  "You let her go?" Sean demanded.

  "I thought she was going to the bush"-Pumula excused himself-"to relieve herself. I could not stop her."

  Sean had already started to run down the hippo path into the him.

  Sean was ten paces from the reeds that surrounded the largest and deepest of the pools, when he heard the splash of water ahead.

  "This silly bitch is going to drive me crazy," he told himself as he burst out on the edge of the pool.

  The pool was a hundred yards across, deep and green and still.

  For all its comical appearance, the hippopotamus is the most dangerous animal in Africa. It has probably killed more human beings than all the other dangerous species put together. The old bulls are cantankerous and aggressive, a cow with a new calf will attack without provocation, and a bite from those gaping jaws whose tusks are adapted to shearing coarse river reeds will cut a man in two. The crocodile is a sly and efficient killer. This pool was the ideal haunt of both hippos and crocodiles, and Claudia Monterro was in it up to her waist.

  Her wet clothing, shirt and panties and socks, all freshly washed, were draped over the reeds at the edge, and Claudia was facing away from him, leaning forward and with both hands working up a lather of soap in her hair.

  The skin of her back was lightly tanned and flawless except for the pale line left by the strap of a bikini top across her shoulder blades. Her flanks were lean but elegantly shaped into the waist, and the knuckles of her spine just showed between the ridges of fine athletic muscle on each side of it.

  "What the hell do you think you're doings" Sean snarled. She turned to face him, hands still in her soapy hair, eyes screwed up against the suds.

  "Is this how you get your jollies?" she demanded, making not the slightest effort to cover her bosom. "You pervert, creeping and peeping?"

  "Get your arse out of there before you get it bitten off by a croc." Her jibe had stung him, but even in his anger he saw that her breasts were better than he had guessed. The cold water made the points stick out at him.

  "Stop gawking!" she yelled back at him. "And get lost!" She ducked her head under and then stood erect once again, soap lather streaming down her body, her hair shining and slick as a sheet of black silk over her shoulders.

  "Get out of there, damn you, I'm not going to stand here arguing," he ordered.

  "I'll get out when I'm good and ready."

  Sean plunged straight into the pool and reached her before she could avoid him. He seized her arm, and though it was slippery with soap, he dragged her toward the bank, kicking and lashing at him with her free hand, spitting with fury.

  "You bastard, I hate you! Leave me alone!"

  He controlled her easily with one hand. In the other, he still held his big double-barreled rifle. His khaki shorts ran water and his velskoen boots squelched as he dragged her out. He snatched up her wet shirt and threw it at her.

  "Get dressed!"

  "You've got no right! I'm not going to accept this, you brutal ham-handed... you've hurt my arm." She proffered her upper arm, exhibiting his red finger marks on the skin, holding the wet shirt loosely at her side, shaking and pale with rage.

  Strangely, it was her navel that drew his eyes. It stared accusingly at him from the flat plain of her midriff like a cyclopean eye, a perfect dimple at that moment more erotic than even the dense triangular bush of sodden hair beneath it. He dragged his eyes away. She was so angry she seemed totally oblivious of her nudity.

  He thought she might actually attack him, and he stepped back. As he did so he looked beyond her and saw a tiny arrowhead of ripples slipping silently across the still green surface of the pool toward them. At the apex of the V-shaped ripple were two black lumps; gnarled and no bigger than a pair of large walnuts, they came at surprising speed.

  Sean grabbed her arm, the same arm about whose injuries she was complaining, and jerked her back past him and away from the water's edge so viciously that she sprawled on her hands and knees in the mud.

  He swung up the.577 Express rifle and aimed between the black eye lumps of the approaching crocodile. The eyes were at least nine inches apart, he calculated as he rode the pip of the foresight between them-a big old mugger.

  The thunder of the rifle was stunning in the silence of the reeds and the bullet flicked an ostrich feather of spray from the surface, dead center between the eye protuberances. The crocodile rolled sluggishly onto its back, its tiny brain mangled by the shot.

  Claudia scrambled to her feet and stared over his shoulder as the reptile flashed its butter-yellow saurian belly. Sixteen feet from chin to the tip of its long crested tail, its jaws clicked as its nerves spasmed from the brain shot. The fangs, as long and thick as a human forefinger, overlapped the grinning scaly lips. It sank slowly back into the pool, the creamy belly fading into the green depths.

  Claudia's fury had evaporated. She was staring into the pool, shivering uncontrollably, shaking her wet hair.

  "oh God, I didn't realize... how horrible." She swayed toward him, shattered and vulnerable. "I didn't know." Her body was cold from the pool, long and sleek and wet as she pressed against him.

  "What is it?" Riccardo Monterro shouted from the edge of the reed bed.

  "Sean, are you all right? What happened? Where's Claudia?"