A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

A tracker would expect him to choose this as a breakaway point, wading either upstream or downstream before leaving the river again. They would send scouts along both banks to search for SIP.

  Sean waded downstream, supporting himself on overhanging branches to give them a trail to confirm their suspicions. Then, without leaving the water, he returned to the exact spot where he had entered the stream and on the bank carefully dried his feet and legs, replaced his dry velskoen shoes that he had hung around his neck on their laces, and backtracked on his incoming spoor.

  He retraced his footsteps to the crest of the ridge, walking backward, stepping precisely on his original footprints. At the top of the ridge he employed the same trick Job had. He swung himself into the air from a branch and over handed himself well clear of the spoor before lowering himself to the edge of a rock slab and anti tracking away.

  "Even Matatu wouldn't be able to unravel that," he thought with satisfaction as he struck off back toward the north at a run.

  Two hours later he joined up with Job at the rendezvous, and in the early afternoon they came up with the other party waiting for them five miles north of the point where they had split up.

  "Good to see you, Sean. We were beginning to worry," Riccardo told him as they shook hands. Even Claudia smiled as Sean flopped down beside her and said, "My kingdom for a cup of tea."

  As he sipped at the mug Matatu brought him, he listened attentively to the little tracker. Matatu squatted beside Sean and chattered in his excited falsetto.

  "Matatu went back and kept an eye on the camp we left," Sean translated for Riccardo and Claudia's benefit. "He didn't dare approach too closely, but he saw the gang that was following us arrive This time he counted twelve of them. They searched the area of the camp, then took the bait and followed the false trail Job and I laid for them."

  "So we're clear, then?" Riccardo asked.

  "Looks like it," Sean agreed. "And if we push along we should be able to reach the beginning of the swamps either this evening or early tomorrow."

  "What about Tukutela?" Riccardo asked.

  "Well, we know from his track approximately where he would have reached the swamps. We'll just cast along the edge until we find where he went in, but we've lost a lot of ground on him. We'll have to go hard if we don't want him to get away from us. Do you feel up to it, Capo?"

  "Never better," Riccardo said. "Lead on, man."

  Before they set off again Sean went quickly over their packs.

  They had consumed a great deal of the provisions, and he redistributed the remainder. By giving both Job and himself an extra ten pounds or so, he was able to reduce Riccardo's pack to twenty pounds and Claudia's to a mere ten, just her sleeping bag and personal items.

  They both responded well to their reduced burdens, but again Sean marched beside Riccardo to encourage him and watch over him. Claudia was still going surprisingly well; he needn't have worried about her at all. Under her light pack she was stepping out lithely. He took pleasure in watching her long legs driving and her hard little buttocks oscillating in those tight blue jeans. They reminded him of the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.

  They were on the valley floor now. There were open vleis and baobabs, those trees with bloated trunks, bark like a reptile's skin, and crooked bare branches from which a few late cream-of-tartar pods still hung. It was easy to see why the Zulus said the gods had accidentally planted the baobab upside down with its roots in the air.

  Far ahead of them a slow standing cloud of evaporation marked the position of the swamps, and the alluvial soil was sandy and yielding underfoot.

  "Just think of this, Capo." Sean was trying to divert him. "You are probably one of the last men who will ever hunt a great elephant in the classical tradition of the long chase. This is the way it should be done, man. Not grinding around in a Land-Rover and then leaning out of the window to kill him. This is how Selous and "Karamojo" Bell and Samaki" Salmon hunted their elephant."

  He saw Riccardo's expression light up at the idea of being compared to those grand masters of the chase, men from another age when all elephants had been fair game. "Samaki" Sahnon had hunted and killed four thousand elephants in his lifetime. There had been a different morality in those days. Today a man with a bag of those dimensions would be accounted a villain and a criminal, but in his day "Samaki" Salmon had been respected and honored. He had even hunted with Edward, Prince of Wales, as his client.

  Sean knew that Riccardo had an avid interest in the old-time elephant hunters, so he enlarged on their careers.

  "If you want to do it the way "Karamojo" Bell did it, Capo, you have to walk like this. Bell wore out twenty-four pairs of boots a year and had to replace his porters and gun bearers every few weeks. They just couldn't keep up with him."

  "That was the golden age." Riccardo extended his stride a little as he thought about it. "You and I should have lived then, Sean.

  We were born after our time."

  "A true hunter should kill a great elephant with his legs. He should walk him down. That's the respectful and proper way, and that is what you are doing now, Capo. Enjoy every step you take, for you are treading in old Bell's footprints."

  Unfortunately the effects of Sean's encouragement were not enduring; within an hour Riccardo was flagging again and Sean noticed a new, disconcerting unsteadiness in his gait. He stumbled and would have fallen had not Sean caught his arm.

  "We all need a five-minute break and a cup of tea." Sean led him to the shade.

  When Job brought the tea mugs, Riccardo mumbled, "Have you got a couple more aspirins for me?"

  "You all right, Capo?" he asked as he handed him the tablets.

  "Damned headache again, that's all." But he would not meet Sean's eyes.

  Sean looked across at Claudia, who was sitting close beside her father, but she also avoided his gaze. "Do you two know something I don't?" Sean demanded. "You both look guilty as hell." He didn't wait for an answer but stood up and went to join Job at the small fire where he was baking a fresh batch of maize cakes for their evening meal.

  "The aspirin will make you feel better," Claudia told her father softly.

  "Of course. Aspirin's a surefire cure for cancer once it reaches the brain," he agreed. Then, as he saw her agonized expression, he blurted out, "I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that. Self-pity isn't my usual style."

  "Is it bad, Papa?"

  "I can tolerate the headache, but I'm getting a little double vision that worries me," he admitted. "Damn it, I was feeling so well a few days ago. It's all happened so quickly."

  "The exertion," she said, pitying him. "Perhaps that's what has aggravated it. We should turn back."

  "No," he said with utter finality. "Don't even talk about that again."

  She inclined her head in aquiescence.

  "The swamps aren't far ahead. Perhaps we'll have a chance to rest," she said.

  "I don't want to rest," he said. "I realize just how little time I have left. I don't want to waste a moment of it."

  Sean came back to them. "Are you ready to go on?"

  Claudia glanced at her wristwatch. They had rested for less than half an hour. It was too short and she would have protested, but her father pushed himself to his feet.

  "All set," he said, and she could see that even the short break had refreshed him.

  They had been going only a few minutes when Riccardo said, quite cheerfully, "Those hamburgers Job has cooked smell just great. Makes me feel hungry."

  "Those hamburgers are maize cakes," Sean chuckled. "Sorry to disappoint you. "You can't bullshit me." Riccardo chuckled with him. "I can smell the fried onions and beef."

  "Papa." Claudia looked back over her shoulder and frowned sharply, and Riccardo stopped chuckling and looked distraught.

  "There might be hallucinations," Doc Andrews had warned Claudia. "He may begin to see things or imagine various odors. I can't give you an exact progress of the disease, of course, and there may be periods of swift deteriorati
on followed by longer periods of remission. Just remember, Claudia, that his fantasies will be very real to him, and episodes of hallucination can be followed by periods of complete lucidity."

  That evening Sean would not stop to brew tea. "We have to try and make up the ground we've lost," he told them, so they ate the cold maize cakes and biltong-slivers of salted, air-dried venison-on the march.

  "One large hamburger with fried onions and all the trimmings coming up, Capo," Sean teased him. Claudia glared at him, but Riccardo laughed uneasily and munched on the unappetizing fare as he walked.

  They no longer had a spoor to follow, so Sean kept going lOng after night had fallen. The long, tortuous miles fell slowly behind them and the brilliant southern stars burned over their heads. It was almost midnight before they stopped and unrolled their sleeping bags.

  Sean let them sleep until the dawn light was strong enough to make out the way ahead. The landscape had changed. During the night they had entered the region that was held in thrall by the great Zambezi. These were ancient flood plains that were inundated when the river broke its banks during the torrential rainy season.

  They were dry now, although almost devoid of trees; a few long dead mo pane and acacia thorn trees drowned by the floods still held up twisted bare branches to the hazy blue sky, standing out on the empty plains like lonely sentinels.

  As they moved out into the open, the dried mud had cracked in to brick lets beneath their feet, the edges curling up, and the clumps of swamp grass were brown and matted and dead from drought. When the breeze switched fitfully they could smell the swamps still out of view ahead, the odor of mud and rotting vegetation, The mirage shimmered across the plains, so there was no clear horizon; land and sky merged into each other like water. When they looked back the tree line crawled like a long black serpent below the milky sky, undulating and vibrating softly in the mirage, and the dust devils spun upon themselves twisting and swaying like belly dancers.

  Out on the plain Sean felt exposed and vulnerable. There was just the scant chance of a Frelimo patrol plane passing this way to search for Renamo bands, and they were as obvious as fleas on a white sheet. He wanted to hurry but glanced back at Riccardo and knew that they would have to rest again soon.

  Ahead of Sean, Matatu gave a cry that made his nerves jump. Sean knew what it meant and he ran forward, passing Claudia, and stopped beside Matatu.

  "Well, all right!" He clapped Matatu's shoulder and went down on one knee to examine the earth.

  "What is it?" Riccardo sounded alarmed, but Sean lifted his head and grinned at him.

  "It's him. Tukutela. We've cut his spoor again just where Matatu predicted we would." And he touched the marks of the huge pads whose weight had crushed the brick lets of dried mud to talcum powder. The spoor was so clear that the difference between the bull's rounded front feet and the more oval hind feet was immediately apparent, and the forward edges of each footprint were nicked by his toenails.

  "Still heading straight for the swamps." Sean stood and shaded his eyes against the glare as he followed the direction of the spoor.

  Not far ahead another line of trees was drawn like a pencil along the horizon where a narrow curved finger of higher ground reached out across the plains.

  "In a way we are fortunate," Sean remarked. "A few years ago there were so many herds of buffalo and game on these flats that Tukutela's spoor would have been wiped out in a few hours by their hooves. Now, since the Frelimo government converted them all to army rations, Tukutela is the only living thing for miles around."

  "How far behind him are we?"

  "We've made up a bit of ground." Sean lowered his hand from his eyes and turned to him. "But not enough, and if the uglies catch us out here in the open.... Luckily Tukutela's spoor is headed straight for the line of trees ahead. They will give us some cover."

  He gestured to Matatu to take the spoor once again.

  Now the expanse of the wide plain was dimpled with old anthills, mounds of clay thrown up by colonies of termites, some of them the size of a large cottage. Tukutela's spoor meandered between them. However, the line of growth was by now so close that they could make out individual trees. The finger of high ground formed a natural causeway from the edge of the forest across the wide plains to the beginning of the true swamps. There were ivory nut palms, bottle-stemmed palms, and low palms with their fan-shaped leaves, mixed with wild fig. On the highest ridge of the long causeway grew a few massive baobab, with trunks of elephantine gray bark.

  With relief Sean followed the spoor of the old bull off the plain and into the trees of the isthmus. Here the elephant had stopped to dig out the juicy roots of an Bala palm and drop a pile of spongy yellow dung.

  "The elephant rested here," Matatu explained, lowering his voice to a whisper. "He is an old man now and he tires easily. Here he stood to sleep, see how he shuffled his feet in the dust, and when he awoke he dusted his body. See where he scooped it up with his trunk and threw it over his back."

  "How long did he stay here?" Sean asked. Matatu leaned his head to one side as he considered the question.

  "He rested here until late yesterday afternoon when the sun was there."

  Matatu pointed ten degrees above the western horizon.

  "But when he went on he went more slowly. He feels safer now that he is close to the swamps. We have gained on him."

  Sean exaggerated Matatu's estimate as he passed it on to Riccardo and Claudia. He wanted to encourage them. "We are making really good gains on him now." He put on a cheerful, confident air. "We might even catch up with him before he gets into the deep swamps, if we don't waste any time."

  The spoor headed down the isthmus and the old bull had fed quietly as he moved along it, keeping up on top of the low ridge where the bush was thickest. Directly ahead of them stood another gigantic baobab tree. Its bark was gray and folded and riven as the old bull's hide.

  For the moment Sean had left Riccardo's side and moved up to his original position behind Matatu. He wanted to caution the tracker not to set too fast a pace, but before he could speak he heard a strange, guttural cry behind him and he whirled around.

  Riccardo's face was swollen and congested with blood. His eyes blazed and seemed to start from their sockets. Sean thought he was suffering from some kind of seizure, but he was pointing ahead, his hand, shaking with violent emotion.

  "There he is," he croaked, in a thick unnatural voice. "For God's sake, can't you see him?"

  Sean whirled and followed the direction of his outstretched arm.

  "What is it, man?"

  He was looking ahead, and he did not see Riccardo turn to Pumula and snatch the Rigby rifle off his shoulder, but he heard the metallic clash of the bolt as Riccardo chambered a cartridge.

  "Capo, what the hell are you doing?" He reached out to restrain him, but Riccardo shoved him backward. Sean was in unprepared and off balance, and he staggered and almost fell.

  Riccardo ran forward to the head of the line, stopped, and threw up the rifle.

  "Capo, don't do it." Sean was sprinting to catch him, but the Rigby crashed out and the barrel jumped high, driving Riccardo back a pace with the heavy recoil.

  "Have you gone crazy?" Sean could not reach him before he had fired again, and the heavy bullet tore a flurry of white wet bark from the trunk of the baobab. The echoes of the shot rolled across the plains.

  "Capo." Sean reached him and seized the rifle, forcing the muzzle up toward the sky just as Riccardo fired the Rigby for the third time.

  Sean wrested the weapon out of his grip.

  "In the name of all that's holy, man, what on earth do you think you're doing?"