by Wilbur Smith
‘These proceedings are at an end.’ Wallace stood, bowed to the men below him and led his fellow judges to the bar. ‘There’s time for a peg before the train leaves. I’ll have a whisky. What about you chaps?’
As Leon and Bobby headed for the door of the courtroom, which had now reverted to its former role as the officers’ mess, they drew level with the table at which Snell was still seated. He stood up and replaced his cap on his head, forcing them to come to attention and salute. His pale blue eyes bulged from their sockets and his lips were set in an expression that gave him the appearance not so much of a frog but of a venomous toad. After a deliberate pause he returned their salutes. ‘I will have fresh orders for you tomorrow morning, Courtney. Be at my office at eight hundred hours sharp. In the meantime you may carry on,’ he snapped.
‘I doubt very much that you’ve made Froggy your friend for life,’ Bobby muttered, as they went out on to the sunlit parade-ground. ‘He’ll make your life extremely interesting from now onwards. My guess is that his new orders will take you on foot patrol to Lake Natron or some other remote and God-forsaken place. We won’t be seeing much of you for a month or so, but at least you’ll be seeing more of the country.’
His askari thronged around Leon to congratulate him. ‘Jambo, Bwana. Welcome back.’
‘At least you have some friends left,’ Bobby consoled him. ‘May I use the jalopy while you’re sojourning in the outer wilderness?’
Many months later two horsemen rode stirrup to stirrup along the bank of the Athi river. The grooms followed at a distance, leading the spare horses. The riders wore wide-brimmed slouch hats and carried their lances at rest. Before them, the wide green expanse of the Athi plains stretched to the horizon. It was dotted with herds of zebra, ostriches, impala and wildebeest. A pair of giraffe stared down at them with great dark eyes as they rode past at a distance of only a hundred paces.
‘Sir, I can’t stand it much longer,’ Leon told his favourite uncle. ‘I’ll have to put in for a transfer to another regiment.’
‘I doubt any would have you, my boy. You have a large black mark on your service record,’ said Colonel Penrod Ballantyne, commanding officer of the 1st Regiment, The King’s African Rifles. ‘What about India? I might put in a word for you with a few friends who were in South Africa with me.’ Penrod was testing him.
‘Thank you, sir, but I would never dream of leaving Africa,’ Leon replied. ‘When you were weaned on Nile water you can never break the shackles.’
Penrod nodded. It was the reply he had expected. He took a silver case from his top pocket and tapped out a Player’s Gold Leaf. He put it between his lips and offered one to Leon.
‘Thank you, sir, but I don’t indulge.’ Leon read the engraving on the inside of the lid before his uncle closed it. ‘To Twopence, happy 50th birthday from your adoring wife, Saffron.’ Aunt Saffron had a quirky sense of humour. Her nickname for Penrod had originally been Penny but after all their years of marriage she had decided his value had doubled.
‘Well, sir, if no one else will have me I suppose I’ll just have to put in my papers and resign my commission - I’ve already wasted nearly three years wandering in small circles in the wilderness, getting nowhere, at the behest of Major Snell. I can’t take any more.’
Penrod considered this, but before he could decide on a suitable reply a movement further down the riverbank caught his eye. A warthog boar trotted out of a dense clump of riverine scrub. His curved white tusks almost met above his comically hideous face, which was decorated with the black wart-like protuberances that gave him his name. He carried his tufted tail straight as a ruler, pointing up at the sky. ‘Here we go!’ Penrod shouted. ‘Tally ho and away!’ He kicked his heels into his mare’s flanks and she was off.
Leon raced after him, leaning along the neck of his polo pony as he couched his long pig spear. ‘By God, this one’s a huge brute. Look at those tusks! Up and at him, Uncle!’
Penrod’s mare ran lightly, closing swiftly on the quarry, but Leon’s bay gelding pushed up half a length behind her streaming tail. The warthog heard their hoofs thundering, stopped and looked back. He stared at the charging horses with astonishment, then whipped around and darted away across the plain kicking up puffs of dust with each beat of his sharp little hoofs, but he could not outrun the mare.
Penrod leaned out of the saddle and lined up the point of his spear, aiming at the patch of bald grey skin between the animal’s humped shoulder-blades.
‘Stick him, Twopence!’ In his excitement Leon called the name reserved for exclusive use by his aunt. Penrod showed no sign of having heard. He carried home his charge, the point of his spear arrowing in towards the boar’s withers. But at the last instant the warthog changed direction and doubled back under the mare’s front legs. Even she, bred and trained to follow a bouncing polo ball adroitly, could not counter the manoeuvre and overran the quarry. The spear head glanced off the boar’s tough hide without drawing blood, and Penrod pulled the mare’s head around steeply. She pranced and mouthed the bit, her eyes wild with the excitement of the chase.
‘Come away, my darling! Full tilt and hell for leather!’ Penrod exhorted her, and touched her ribs with blunted rowels. She came around again for the next run, but Leon cut across her line and his pony fastened on the warthog’s hindquarters as though he was attached to it by a leash. Horse and rider stayed with the pig as it twisted, turned and doubled desperately. They went around in a circle, Penrod laughing and shouting advice after them.
‘Stay with him, sir. Watch out for the tusks - he nearly had you there!’ The boar broke back on Leon’s blind side and almost reached the cover of the dense scrub from which he had appeared, but Leon, rising high in his stirrups, switched his spear neatly to his left hand and drove the point between the warthog’s shoulders. The animal took it cleanly through the heart. Leon let the shaft drop back as the gelding passed over the dying beast and the spearhead came free without jarring his wrist. The bright steel and two feet of the shaft behind it shone with the boar’s heart blood. It squealed once and its front legs folded under it. It dropped, slid on its snout, then flopped on to its side, gave three kicks with its back legs and was dead.
‘Oh, well done indeed, sir! A perfect kill!’ Penrod reined in beside his nephew. They were both laughing breathlessly. ‘What was that you called me a minute ago?’
‘I do beg your pardon, Uncle. In the heat of the moment it just slipped out.’
‘Well, slip it back in, you impudent puppy. No wonder Froggy Snell has it in for you. Deep down, I understand and sympathize with him.’
‘It’s been thirsty work. How about a cup of tea, sir?’ Leon changed the subject smoothly.
As soon as Ishmael had seen they had killed, he had parked the tuck wagon in the shade and was already lighting the fire.
‘That is the very least you can do to make amends. Twopence! What is the younger generation coming to?’ Penrod grumbled.
By the time they dismounted the kettle was brewing. ‘Three teaspoons of sugar, Ishmael, and a couple of your ginger snaps,’ Penrod ordered, as he sat in one of the canvas camp chairs in the shade.
‘Your honourable and esteemed lady wife would not like it, Effendi.’
‘My honourable and esteemed lady wife is in Cairo. She will not be partaking,’ Penrod reminded him, and reached for the biscuits as Ishmael placed the plate in front of him. He chewed with pleasure, washed down the crumbs with a swig of tea and smoothed his moustache. ‘So, what do you intend after you’ve resigned your commission, if you won’t go out to India?’
‘It’s Africa for me.’ Leon sipped from his own mug, then said thoughtfully, ‘I thought I might try my hand at elephant hunting.’
‘Elephant hunting?’ Penrod was incredulous. ‘As a profession? As Selous and Bell once did?’
‘Well, it’s always fascinated me, ever since I read the books about their adventures.’
‘Romantic nonsense! You’re thirty years too late. Th
ose old boys had the whole of Africa to themselves. They went where they liked and did as they wanted. This is the modern age. Things have changed. Now there are roads and railways all over the place. No country in Africa is still issuing unrestricted elephant licences that allow the holder to slaughter thousands of the great beasts. All that is over, and a damn good thing too. Anyway, it was a hard, bitter life, dangerous and lonely too, year after year of wandering alone in the wilderness without anyone to talk to in your own language. Put the notion out of your head.’
Leon was crestfallen. He stared into his mug while Penrod fished out and lit another cigarette. ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he admitted at last.
‘Chin up, my boy.’ Penrod’s tone was kindly now. ‘You want to be a hunter? Well, a few men are making a fine living doing just that. They hire themselves out to guide visitors from overseas on safari. There are rich men from Europe and America, royalty, aristocrats and millionaires, who are willing to pay a fortune for the chance to bag an elephant or two. These days, African big-game hunting is all the rage in high society.’
‘White hunters? Like Tarlton and Cunninghame?’ Leon’s face was bright. ‘What a wonderful life that must be.’ His expression crumpled again. ‘But how would I get started? I have no money, and I won’t ask my father for help. He’d laugh at me anyway. And I don’t know anybody. Why would dukes and princes and business tycoons want to come all the way from Europe to hunt with me?’
‘I could take you to see a man I know. He might be willing to help you.’
‘When can we go?’
‘Tomorrow. His base camp is only a short ride out of Nairobi.’
‘Major Snell has given me orders to take a patrol up to Lake Turkana. I have to scout out a location to build a fort up there.’
‘Turkana!’ Penrod snorted with laughter. ‘Why would we need a fort up there?’
‘It’s his idea of fun. When I submit the reports he asks for, he sends them back to me with mocking comments scrawled in the margins.’
‘I’ll have a word with him, ask him to release you briefly for a special assignment.’
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.’
They rode out through the barracks gates and down the main street of Nairobi. Although it was early morning the wide, unsurfaced road was crowded and bustling like that of a gold-rush boom town. Sir Charles, the governor of the colony, encouraged settlers to come out from the old country by offering land grants of thousands of acres at a nominal fee and they flocked in. The road was almost blocked by their wagons, which were piled high with their scanty possessions and forlorn families as they journeyed on to take up their parcels of land in the wilderness. Hindu, Goanese and Jewish traders and storekeepers followed them. Their mud-brick shops lined the sides of the road, hand-printed boards on the fronts offering everything from champagne and dynamite to picks, shovels and shotgun cartridges.
Penrod and Leon picked their way through the ox wagons and mule teams until Penrod reined in before the Norfolk Hotel to greet a small man, in a solar topee, who was perched like an elf in the back of a buggy drawn by a pair of Burchell’s zebra. ‘Good morning, my lord.’ Penrod saluted him.
The little man adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles on the end of his nose. ‘Ah, Colonel. Good to see you. Where are you headed?’
‘We’re riding out to visit Percy Phillips.’
‘Dear old Percy.’ He nodded. ‘Great friend of mine. I hunted with him the first year I came out from home. We spent six months together, trekking up as far as the Northern Frontier district and on into the Sudan. He guided me to two enormous elephant. Lovely man. Taught me everything I know about hunting big game.’
‘Which is a very great deal. Your feats with that.577 rifle of yours are almost as legendary as his.’
‘Kind of you to say so, even though I detect a touch of hyperbole in that compliment.’ He turned his bright, inquisitive eyes on Leon. ‘And who is this young fellow?’
‘May I present my nephew, Lieutenant Leon Courtney? Leon, this is Lord Delamere.’
‘I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, my lord.’
‘I know who you are.’ His lordship’s eyes twinkled with amusement.
Apparently he did not pretend the same high moral ethics as the rest of the local society. Leon guessed that his next remark would be some reference to Verity O’Hearne, so he added hastily, ‘I am much taken with your carriage horses, my lord.’
‘Caught and trained them with my own fair hands.’ Delamere gave him a last piercing glance, then he turned away. Can understand why young Verity was so taken with him, he thought, and why all the old hens in the coop were cackling with jealous outrage. That young blade is the answer to a maiden’s prayer.
He touched the brim of his helmet with his buggy whip. ‘I wish you a very good day, Colonel. Give my compliments to Percy.’ He whipped up the zebra and drove on.
‘Lord Delamere was once a great shikari, but now he’s become an ardent conservator of wild game,’ Penrod said. ‘He has an estate of more than a hundred thousand acres at Soysambu on the west side of the Rift Valley which he’s turning into a game sanctuary, mortgaging his family estates in England to the very hilt to do so. The finest hunters are all like that. When they tire of killing they become the most devoted protectors of their former quarry.’ They left the town and rode out along the Ngong Hills until they looked down on a sprawling encampment in the forest. Tents, grass huts and rondavels were spread out under the trees in no particular order.
‘This is Percy’s base, Tandala Camp.’ ‘Tandala’ was the Swahili name for the greater kudu. ‘He brings his clients up from the coast by railway, and from here he can strike out into the blue on foot, on horseback or by ox wagon.’ They rode on down the hill, but before they reached the main camp they came to the skinning sheds where the hunting trophies were prepared and preserved. There, the upper branches of the trees were filled with roosting vultures and the carnivorous marabou storks. The stench of drying skins and heads was rank and powerful.
They reined in the horses to watch two ancient Ndorobo working on the fresh skull of a bull elephant with their hand axes, chipping away the bone to expose the roots of the tusks. As they watched, one man drew a tusk free of its bony canal. The pair staggered away with it, their skinny legs buckling under the weight. They struggled unsuccessfully to lift the immense ivory shaft into a canvas sling suspended from the hook of a beam scale. Leon slipped out of the saddle and took their burden from them. Effortlessly he reached up and placed it in the sling. Under the weight of the tusk the needle revolved halfway around the scale’s dial.
‘Thanks for your help, young fellow.’
Leon turned. A tall man was standing behind his shoulder. He had the features of a Roman patrician. His short neat beard was silver grey and his bright blue eyes were steady. There could be no question as to who this was. Leon knew that Percy Phillips’s Swahili name was Bwana Samawati, ‘the man with eyes the colour of the sky’.
‘Hello, Percy.’ Penrod confirmed his identity as he rode up and dismounted.
‘Penrod, you look fit.’ They shook hands.
‘So do you, Percy. Hardly a day older than when we last met.’
‘You must be wanting a favour. Is this your nephew?’ Percy did not wait for the reply. ‘What do you think of that tusk, young man?’
‘Magnificent, sir. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘One hundred and twenty-two pounds.’ Percy Phillips read the weight from the scale and smiled. ‘The best piece of ivory I’ve taken in the last many years. Not too many of those around any more.’ He nodded with satisfaction. ‘Much too good for the miserable dago who shot it. Cheek of the man! He complained he’d been given short measure for his miserly five hundred pounds. Didn’t want to pay up at the end of the safari. I had to talk to him very sternly indeed.’ He blew softly on the scarred knuckles of his right fist, then turned back to Penrod. ‘I had my cook bake a batch
of ginger snaps for you. I remember your penchant for them.’ He took Penrod’s arm and, limping slightly, led him towards the large mess tent in the centre of the encampment.
‘How did you hurt your leg, sir?’ Leon asked, as he fell in with them.
Percy laughed. ‘Big old bull buffalo jumped on it, but that was thirty years ago when I was still a greenhorn. Taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten.’
Percy and Penrod settled in the folding chairs under the flap of the mess tent to exchange news of mutual acquaintances and bring each other up to date with goings-on in the colony. Meanwhile, Leon looked around the camp with interest. Despite its apparently haphazard layout it was obviously convenient and comfortable. The ground was swept clean. The huts were all in good repair. On the periphery of the main camp, on the slope of the hill above it, a small whitewashed and thatched bungalow was obviously Percy’s home. There was only one exception to the camp’s order, which caught Leon’s attention.
A Vauxhall truck, of the same vintage as the vehicle he and Bobby owned, was parked behind a hut. It was in a terrible condition: one of the front wheels was missing, the windscreen was cracked and opaque with filth, the bonnet was propped open with a log and the engine had been removed to a crude workbench in the shade of a nearby tree. Somebody had started to strip it down, but seemed to have lost interest and abandoned it. Engine parts were scattered around or piled on the driver’s seat. A flock of chickens had taken over the chassis as their roost and splashes of their white droppings almost obscured the original paintwork.
‘Your uncle tells me you want to be a hunter. Is that right?’
Leon turned back to Percy Phillips when he realized he had been addressed. ‘Yes, sir.’ Percy stroked his silver beard and studied him thoughtfully. Leon did not look away, which Percy liked. Polite and respectful, but sure of himself, he thought. ‘Have you ever shot an elephant?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Lion?’