by Wilbur Smith
Ralph had roused the camp before first light, and he supervised the back-burn while the dew on the vlei subdued the flames and made them manageable. The Matabele put fire into the grass on the windward side of the open vlei and let it burn to the forest line on the far side.
Here they beat it out before it could take hold of the trees.
Isazi rolled his wagons out onto the blackened still-hot earth, and formed them into a square with his precious oxen penned in the centre. Then, for the first time, they had a chance to pause and look eastward. The dark smoke cloud of the forest fire blotted out the dawn, and their island of safety seemed suddenly very small in the path of that terrible conflagration. Even the mood of the usually cheerful Matabele was subdued, and they kept glancing uneasily at the boiling smoke line as they honed their skinning knives.
"We will be covered with soot," Cathy complained. "Everything will be filthy." "Amd a little singed, like as not," Ralph laughed, as he and Bazo checked the spare horses and slipped the rifles into their scabbards.
Then he came to Cathy and with an arm about her shoulders, told her, "You and Vicky are to stay in the wagons. Don't leave them, whatever happens. If you get a little warm, splash water on yourselves, but don't leave the wagons."
Then he sniffed the wind, and caught the first whiff of smoke. He winked at Harry, who had Vicky in his arms in a lingering farewell.
"I'll bet my share of the Wankie field against yours." "None of your crazy bets, Ralph Ballantyne," Vicky cut in quickly. "Harry has a wife to support now!" "A guinea, then!" Ralph moderated the wager.
"Done!" agreed Harry.
They shook hands on it and swung up into the saddles. Bazo led up Ralph's spare horse, with a rifle in the scabbard and a bandolier of bright brass cartridges looped to the pommel.
"Keep close, Bazo," Ralph told him, and looked across at Harry.
He had his own Matabele outrider and spare horse close behind him.
"Ready?" Ralph asked, and Harry nodded, and they trotted out of the laager.
The acrid stink of smoke was strong on the wind now, and the horses flared their nostrils nervously and stepped like cats over the hot ash of the back-burn.
"Just look at them!" Harry's voice was awed.
The herds of buffalo had begun moving down-wind ahead of the bushfire. Gradually one herd had merged with another, a hundred becoming five hundred, then a thousand. Then the thousand began multiplying, the westward movement becoming faster, black bodies packing closer, the earth beginning to tremble faintly under the iron-black hooves. Now every few minutes one of the herd bulls, an animal so black and solid that he seemed to be hewn from rock, would stop and turn back, stemming the moving tide of breeding cows. He would lift his mighty horned head with its crenellated bosses and snuffle the east wind into his wet nostrils, blink at the sting of the smoke, turn again and break into a heavy swinging trot, and his cows would be infected by his agitation, while the red calves bawled in bewilderment and pressed to the flanks of their dams.
Now the herds were being compressed against each other.
The huge beasts, the largest of them a ton and a half of flesh and bone, were moving shoulder to shoulder and muzzle to tail across a front almost a mile wide. The leaders came cascading out of the forest onto the edge of the vlei, while the serried ranks reached back into the looming dust and were hidden by the twisted silver trunks of the ms asa trees.
Ralph knotted the scarf up over his nose and mouth, and pulled his hat low over his eyes.
"Harry, my lad, every one that falls this side of the wagons," he made a wide gesture, "is mine. Everything that side is yours." "And a guinea on the bag," Harry agreed. He levered a cartridge into the breech of his Lee Enfield rifle and with one of his wild Indian whoops clapped his heels into his horse's flanks and drove straight at the nearest beasts.
Ralph let him go, and held his own horse down to a trot. Gently he angled in towards the rolling herds, careful not to spook them prematurely, letting them concentrate on the flames behind rather than the hunter ahead. This way he got in really close, and picked out a good bull in the front rank. He leaned into the rifle' and aimed into the barrel of the thick neck, just where the bald scabby hide creased at the front of the shoulder.
The shot was almost drowned by the din of pounding hooves and bawling calves, but the bull dropped his nose to the earth, and somersaulted over it, sliding on his back, kicking convulsively in his death agony, and bellowing as mournfully as a foghorn in a winter gale.
The herds plunged into full gallop.
Steering his mount with his heels and toes, leaving both hands free to load and aim and fire, Ralph pressed in against the wall of dark bodies in gargantuan flight. Sometimes he was so close that the rifle muzzle was merely inches from a monstrous neck or shoulder, and the muzzle flash was quick and bright as a lance as it buried itself in the thick black hide. At each crash of the rifle, another beast went down, for at that range an experienced huntsman could make a butchery of it. He fired until the hammer fell on an empty chamber, and then crammed fresh rounds into the magazine, and fired again as fast as he could pump the loading handle, not lifting the butt from his shoulder nor his eye from the sights.
The barrel was smoking hot, each shot now recoiling viciously into his shoulder, so that his teeth cracked together in his jaws and the forefinger of his right hand was bleeding, a flap of loose skin torn from the second joint by the trigger guard, so he was seconds slow -on the reload, and then he was firing again. Deafened by gunfire, each shot was a muted popping in his abused eardrums, and the uproar of the galloping, bawling, bellowing herd was dreamlike and far away. His vision was dulled by the head high bank of dust, and, as they tore once more into the forest, by the sombre shadows of the tree-tops that met overhead. He was bleeding from chin and lip and forehead where stones as big as acorns had been thrown into his face by the flying hooves ahead of him. Still he loaded and fired and reloaded. He had long ago lost all count of the bag and the endless herd still pressed close on both flanks of his floundering horse.
Suddenly one bandolier was empty, a hundred rounds fired, he realized with surprise, and Ralph pulled a fresh one from his saddlebag, instinctively ducking under a long branch and straightening up to find an enormous bull galloping half a length ahead of him.
It seemed to Ralph's distorted vision to be the monarch of all buffalo, with a spread of horns wider than a man could reach, heavy as one of the granite boulders of the Matopos, so old that the points were worn blunt and rounded. His rump and back were grey and bald with age, the bush ticks hanging in blue grape like bunches in the deep folds of skin on each side of his huge swinging testicles.
Ralph's horse, almost blown now, could not hold him and the bull was pulling away strongly, his huge quarters bunching and. contracting, cloven hooves driving almost hock-deep into the soft sandy earth under the immense weight of his body. Ralph stood in the stirrups and aimed for the spine at the base of the bull's long tufted tail as it lashed his own sides in the fury of his run.
At the instant that Ralph fired, a branch snatched at his shoulder and the shot flew wide, socking meatily into the round black haunch.
The bull tripped and checked, catching himself before he went down, swinging abruptly aside with blood spurting down his hind legs. Ralph gathered his exhausted horse to follow him, but another thick grey treetrunk sprang out of the dust clouds ahead and forced him to turn hard the other way to avoid it. Rough bark grazed his knee and the bull was lost in the ranks of racing animals and the billowing dust.
"Let him go," Ralph shouted aloud. There was no chance that he could find a single animal again in this multitude. He cranked another cartridge into the scorching breech of his rifle, and shot a sleek red queen through the back of the skull, and an instant later knocked her half grown calf down with a bullet through the shoulder.
The rifle was empty and he began to reload, concentrating all his attention on the task, until suddenly some instinct war
ned him and he glanced up.
The wounded bull had turned back to hunt him.
It came out of the gloom like a black avalanche, goring the laggards out of its way, to cut a path for itself through the racing black river of animals. Its nose was high, the muzzle glistening wetly, and long silver strings of mucus dangled from the flaring nostrils. It came quartering in and the dusty earth exploded in pate puffs under the savagely driving hooves.
"Come boy!" Ralph yelled desperately at his tired gelding, gathering him with knees and reins, turning him away from the bull's charge and at the same time cramming a cartridge into the loading slot of the Winchester.
The bull closed in a crabbing rush, and Ralph swivelled the rifle and fired point-blank into the gigantic head, knowing there would be no time for another shot. The bull's head flinched and a splinter of slaty grey horn tore from the huge round bosses, and then the bull steadied himself, moving with the grace of a gazelle on his huge front legs. His head dropped. Ralph could have reached out and touched the crest of shaggy hide between his shoulders, instead he jerked his near leg from the stirrup and lifted his knee as high as his chin, just as the bull hooked the massive horns at the gelding's flank. At the place where Ralph's knee had been a moment before, the blunt tip of a black horn crashed into the horse's chest.
Ralph heard the ribs crackle and snap like dry sticks, and the air from the gelding's lungs was driven out of his throat in a whistling scream. Horse and rider were lifted high. The gelding was still screaming at the agony of his collapsed chest as Ralph was thrown clear. The rifle spun from his hand and he landed on his hip and shoulder and rolled to his knees. His right leg was numbed by the shock, it pinned him for precious seconds.
The buffalo was braced over the fallen gelding, front legs splayed, armoured head low, blood dribbling and trickling down its massive muscled quarters, and now it hooked at the horse, catching him in the soft of his belly and splitting him open like a cod on a fishwife's block. Soft, wet entrails, slippery as cooked spaghetti, were wrapped around the- blunt point, and as the bull tossed his head, he stripped them out of the gaping belly cavity. The horse kicked once more, and then was still.
Dragging his right leg, Ralph crawled towards the base of a wild teak.
"Bazo!" he screamed. "Bring the rifle! Bring the horse! Bazo!" He could hear the shrill of panic and terror in his own voice, and the bull heard it also. It left the horse, and Ralph heard the splayed hooves thudding into the sandy earth, heard the snort of its breath and smelled the rank bovine reek of the animal. He howled again and dragged himself to his feet, hopping on his good leg. He knew he was not going to reach the mopani and he whirled to face the enraged bull.
It was so close that he could see the wet trail of tears from the corners of its pink-shot piggy little eyes running down the shaggy black cheeks, and the spongy tongue, splotched pink and grey, lolling from its jaws as it bellowed at him. The head went down to hook him and split him, as it had the horse, but at that instant another voice bellowed in Sindebele. "Haul Thou uglier than death!" The bull checked, and pivoted on his stubby forelegs. "Come, thou witches' curse Bazo was taking the bull off him, he galloped in out of the rolling dust, dragging the spare horse on its lead rein, and he angled in now across the bull's front, taunting it with his voice and flapping his monkey4in cloak in its face. The bull accepted the lure of the Cloak, put his nose down, and went after it. The horse that Bazo rode was still fresh, and it skittered out of the arc of the great swinging head, and the bull's polished horn glinted at the top of its lunge.
"Henshaw," Bazo yelled, "take the spare horse." And he dropped the lead rein, sending the free horse down on Ralph, still at full gallop.
Ralph crouched in its path, and the grey mare saw him and swerved at the last moment, but Ralph leaped for the saddle, and got a hold on the pommel. For a dozen strides he hopped beside the mare, his feet skimming the ground as she carried him away. Then he gathered himself and swung his weight up across her back. His buttocks thumped onto the saddle, and he did not waste time groping for the stirrups. He yanked the spare rifle from the scabbard under his knee, and kicked the mare around after the great black bull.
The beast was intent on Bazo still, chasing him in a grotesque lumbering charge which covered the ground with uncanny speed. At that moment a low branch caught the half-naked Matabele and una a ringing crack across the shoulder and side of the head.
He was thrown sideways, the monkey-skin cloak flew away, flapping like an overfed black crow, and Bazo slid further until he was hanging upside down, his head almost brushing the ground between his mount's slashing hooves.
Coming up on the bull's blood-splattered quarters, Ralph fired into its back, probing for the spine in the mountain of black hide and bulging muscle. He fired with a mechanical action, cranking the loading handle, and the recoil dinned in upon his ears, so he could barely hear the heavy lead bullets slapping into the bull's body with a sound like a housewife beating a carpet. One of his bullets found the pumping lungs, for there was a sudden torrent of frothy blood blown from both the bull's nostrils, and the wild charge broke down into a short hampered trot.
Ralph came up alongside it, and it turned the great head and looked at him through eyes that swam with the tears of its death agony.
Ralph reached across and almost touched the broad forehead under the beetling horns with the muzzle of the rifle. The bull flung his head back from the brain shot, and it dropped silently onto its knees. It never moved again. Ralph galloped on and caught the bridle of Bazo's running horse.
He yanked it down to a halt.
"Only a Matabele rides with his head in the stirrups and his feet in the saddle," he gasped, and pulled Bazo upright. The dark skin was smeared from Bazo's forehead by the rough bark of the branch, the raw flesh was pale pink and droplets of clear lymph welled up out of it like seed pearls.
"Henshaw, my little Hawk," he replied thickly. "You screamed so loudly I thought you were losing your virginity with a horn, from behind." Ralph spluttered with shaky laughter, almost hysterical with the relief from terror and mortal danger. Bazo shook his head to clear it, his eyes came back into focus, and his grin was wicked.
"Go back to the women, Henshaw, for you cry like a maiden. Give me your gun and I will win your guinea for you. "See if you can keep up, "Ralph told him, and booted his horse into a run. The reaction from terror came upon him in a kind of atavistic madness, the wild soaring passion of the hunter, and he fell upon the galloping herds in a murderous frenzy.
The bushfire overtook them and put an end to the slaughter at last. Ralph and Bazo were almost caught between the enveloping arms of flame, but they broke through with the manes of their horses frizzled and stinking from the heat and Ralph's shirt scorched in brown patches.
Then from the sanctuary of the back-burn, they watched in awe as the fire swept by on either side. It was a gale of heat that whirled burning branches aloft, and crashed from tree to tree, leaping a gap a hundred feet wide with a deep whooshing roar and bursting the next tree asunder as though it had been hit by a lyddite shell from a howitzer.
The flames sucked the air away so that they gasped for breath, and the heat went deep into their lungs, so they coughed like hemp-smokers.
It seared the exposed skin of their faces, seemed to dry the moisture from their eyeballs and dazzle their vision as though they were staring into the fierce orb of the sun itself.
Then the fire was gone, burning away into the west, and they were silent and shaken, awed by the grandeur of its passing and by their own insignificance in the face of such elemental power.
It was the following morning before the earth had cooled sufficiently for the skinners to go out to work. The carcasses of the buffalo were half-roasted, the hair burned away on the upper side, yet untouched on the side where they had lain against the earth. The skinners worked in a landscape like a hellish vision of Hieronymus Bosch, a desolate and blackened earth, grotesquely twisted bare trees, with the hi
deous shapes of the vultures crouched in the upper branches.
One team of skinners rolled the huge carcasses and made the shallow incisions around the neck, down the limbs and swollen bellies, then the next team hooked on the bullock teams and stripped off the skin in a single slab, while the third team scooped the coarse white rock salt over the wet hides and spread them in the sun.