by Wilbur Smith
On they went, driving hard all day over rutted tracks, through desert scrub and grassland and then through mopani forest, not yet stopping to hunt, eating the food they had brought with them from the mine, though that night the servants muttered about fresh meat.
On the third day they left the rudimentary road they had been following since dawn. It was nothing more than a double track of tyres that had last been used months before, but now Shasa let it swing away towards the east and they went on northwards, breaking fresh ground, weaving through the open forest until abruptly they came out on the banks of a river, not one of the great African rivers like the Kavango, but one of its tributaries. Still, it was fifty feet wide, but green and deep, a formidable barrier that would have turned back any hunting safari before them that had come this far north.
Two weeks previously Shasa had reconnoitred this entire area from the air, flying the Mosquito low over the tree tops so that he could count the animals in each herd of game, and judge the size of the ivory tusks that each elephant carried. He had marked this branch of the river on his large-scale map, and had navigated the convoy back to this exact spot. He recognized it by the oxbow bend of the banks and the giant makuyu trees on the opposite side, with a fish-eagle nest in the upper branches.
They camped another two days on the southern river bank while every member of the safari, including the three boys and the fat Herero chef, helped to build the bridge. They cut the mopani poles in the forest, thick as a fat woman’s thigh and forty feet long, and dragged them up with the jeep. Shasa kept guard against crocodiles, standing high on the bank with the .375 magnum under his arm while his naked gangs floated the poles out into the centre of the river and set them into the mud of the bottom. Then they lashed the cross-ties to them with ropes of mopani bark that still wept glutinous sap, red as blood.
When at last the bridge was complete, they unloaded the vehicles to lighten them, and one at a time Shasa drove them out on to the rickety structure. It swayed and creaked and rocked under them, but at last he had the jeep and all four trucks on the far bank.
‘Now the safari truly begins,’ he told the boys. They had entered a pocket of country, protected by its remoteness and its natural barriers of forest and river from men’s over exploitation, and from the air Shasa had seen the herds of buffalo thick as domestic cattle and the clouds of white egrets hovering over them.
That night he told the boys stories about the old elephant hunters – ‘Karamojo’ Bell, and Frederick Selous and Sean Courtney their own ancestor, Shasa’s great-uncle and the namesake of his eldest son.
‘They were tough men, all of them, incredible shots and natural athletes. They had to be to survive the hardships and the tropical disease. When he was a young man, Sean Courtney hunted on foot in the tsetse-fly belt of the Zambezi valley where the temperature reaches 115° at noon, and he could run forty miles in a day after the big tuskers. His eye was so sharp he could actually see the flight of his bullet.’ The boys listened with total fascination, pleading with him to continue whenever he paused, until at last he told them, ‘That’s enough. You have to be up early tomorrow. Five o’clock in the morning. We are going to hunt for the first time.’
In the dark they drove slowly along the northern bank of the river in the open jeep, all of them bundled up against the cold for the frost lay thick in the open vleis and crunched under the jeep’s tyres. In the first feeble light of dawn they found where a herd of buffalo had drunk during the night and then gone back into the heavy bush.
They left the jeep on the river bank, and stripped off their padded anoraks. Then Shasa put his two Ovambo trackers to the spoor and they followed the herd on foot. As they moved silently and swiftly through the dense second-growth mopani thickets, Shasa explained it all to the boys, speaking in a whisper and relying on hand signals to point out the different hoof prints of old bull and cow and calf, or to draw their attention to other smaller but equally fascinating animals and birds and insects in the forest around them.
A little before noon they finally came up with the herd. Over a hundred of the huge cow-like beasts, with their trumpet-shaped ears and the drooping horns that gave them such a lugubrious air. Most of them were lying in the mopani shade, ruminating quietly, although one or two of the herd bulls were dozing on their feet. The only movement was the lazy flick of their tails as the stinging flies swarmed over their flanks.
Shasa showed the boys how to work in close. Using the breeze and every stick of cover, freezing whenever one of the great homed heads swung in their direction, he took them within thirty feet of the biggest of the bulls. They could smell him, the hot rank bovine reek of him, and they could hear his breathing puffing through his wet drooling muzzle, hear his teeth grinding on his cud, so close they could see the bald patches of age on his shoulders and rump and the balls of dried mud from the wallow that clung in the stiff black hairs of his back and belly.
While they held their breaths in delicious terror and watched in total fascination, Shasa slowly raised the heavy rifle and aimed into the bull’s thick neck, just forward of his massive shoulder.
‘Bang!’ he shouted, and the great bull plunged forward wildly, crashing into the screen of thick mopani, and Shasa gathered his sons and drew them into the shelter of one of the grey tree trunks, keeping his arms around them while on all sides the panicking herd galloped, huge black shapes thundering by, the calves bawling and the old bulls grunting.
The sounds of their flight dwindled away into the forest though the dust of their passage hung misty in the air around them, and Shasa was laughing with the joy of it as he let his arms fall from their shoulders.
‘Why did you do that?’ Sean demanded furiously, turning his face up to his father. ‘You could have shot him easily – why didn’t you kill him?’
‘We didn’t come out here to kill,’ Shasa explained. ‘We came here to hunt.’
‘But—’ Sean’s outrage turned to bewilderment ‘— but what’s the difference?’
‘Ah! That’s what you have to learn. That bull was a big one, but not big enough, and we have all the meat we need, so I let him go. That’s lesson number one. Now, for lesson number two – none of you is going to kill anything until you know all about that animal, understand its habits and life cycle, and learn to respect it and hold it in high esteem. Then and only then.’
In camp that evening he gave them each two books, which he had had bound in leather with their own names on the cover: Roberts’ Mammals of South Africa and his Birds of South Africa.
‘I brought these especially for you, and I want you to study them,’ he ordered. Sean looked appalled, he hated books and studying, but both Garry and Mickey hurried to their tent to begin the task.
Over the days that followed he questioned them on every animal and bird they saw. At first the questions were elementary, but he made them progressively more difficult and soon they could quote the biological names and give him full details of sizes and body weights of males and females, their calls and behaviour patterns, distribution and breeding, down to the smallest detail. Set an example by his younger brothers, even Sean mastered the difficult Latin names.
However, it was ten days before they were allowed to fire a shot and then it was only bird-hunting. Under strict supervision, they were allowed to hunt the fat brown francolin and speckled guinea fowl with their strange waxen yellow helmets in the scrub along the river. Then they had to clean and dress their kill and help the Herero chef to prepare and cook it.
‘It’s the best meal I’ve ever eaten,’ Sean declared, and his brothers agreed with him enthusiastically through full mouths.
The next morning Shasa told them, ‘We need fresh meat for the men.’ In camp there were thirty mouths to feed, all with an enormous appetite for fresh meat. ‘All right, Sean, what is the scientific name for impala?’
‘Aepyceros melampus,’ Sean gabbled eagerly. ‘The Afrikaners call it rooibok and it weighs between 130 and 160 pounds.’
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bsp; ‘That will do,’ Shasa laughed. ‘Go and get your rifle.’
In a patch of whistling thorn near the river, they found a solitary old ram, an outcast from the breeding herd. He had been mauled by a leopard and was limping badly on one foreleg, but he had a fine pair of lyre-shaped horns. Sean stalked the lovely red brown antelope just as Shasa had taught him, using the river bank and the wind to get within easy shot, even with the light rifle. However, when the boy knelt and raised the Winchester to his shoulder, Shasa slipped the safety-catch of his heavy weapon, ready to render the coup de grâce, if it was needed.
The impala dropped instantly, shot through the neck, dead before it heard the shot, and Shasa went to join his son at the kill.
As they shook hands, Shasa recognized in Sean the deep atavistic passion of the hunter. In some contemporary men that urge had cooled or been suppressed – in others it still burned brightly. Shasa and his eldest son were of that ilk, and now Shasa stopped and dipped his forefinger in the bright warm blood that trickled from the tiny wound in the ram’s neck and then he traced his finger across Sean’s forehead and down each cheek.
‘Now you are blooded,’ he said, and he wondered when that ceremony had first been performed, when the first man had painted his son’s face with the blood of his first kill, and he knew instinctively that it had been back before recorded time, back when they still dressed in skins and lived in caves.
‘Now you are a hunter,’ he said, and his heart warmed to his son’s proud and solemn expression. This was not a moment for laughter and chatter, it was something deep and significant, something beyond mere words. Sean had sensed that and Shasa was proud of him.
The following day they drew lots and it was Michael’s turn to kill. Again Shasa wanted a solitary impala ram, so as not to alarm the breeding herd, but an animal with a good pair of horns as a trophy for the boy. It took them almost all that day of hunting before they found the right one.
Shasa and his two brothers watched from a distance as Michael made his stalk. It was a more difficult situation than Sean had been presented with, open grassland and a few scattered flat-top acacia thorns, but Michael made a stealthy approach on hands and knees, until he reached a low ant heap from which to make his shot.
Michael rose slowly and lifted the light rifle. The ram was still unaware, grazing head down thirty paces off, broadside on and offering the perfect shot for either spine or heart. Shasa was ready with the Holland and Holland to back him, should he wound the impala. Michael held his aim, and the seconds drew out. The ram raised its head and looked around warily, but Michael was absolutely still, the rifle to his shoulder, and the ram looked past him, not seeing him. Then it moved away unhurriedly, stopping once to crop a few mouthfuls. It disappeared into a clump of taller grass and without having fired, Michael slowly lowered his rifle.
Sean jumped to his feet, ready to rush out and challenge his brother, but Shasa restrained him with a hand on his shoulder. ‘You and Garry go and wait for us back at the jeep,’ he said.
Shasa walked out to where Michael was sitting on the ant heap with the unfired Winchester held across his lap. He sat down beside Michael and lit a cigarette. Neither of them said anything for almost ten minutes and then Michael whispered, ‘He looked straight at me — and he had the most beautiful eyes.’
Shasa dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it out under his heel. They were silent again, and then Michael blurted, ‘Do I really have to kill something, Dad? Please don’t make me.’
‘No, Mickey,’ Shasa put his arm around his shoulders. ‘You don’t have to kill anything. And in a different sort of way, I’m just as proud of you as I am of Sean.’
Then it was Garrick’s turn. Again it was a solitary ram with a beautiful head of wide-curved horns and the stalk was through scattered bush and waisthigh grass.
His spectacles glinting determinedly, Garry began his stalk under Shasa’s patient supervision. However, he was still a long way out of range of the ram when there was a squawk and Garry disappeared into the earth. Only a small cloud of dust marked the spot where he had been. The impala raced away into the forest, and Shasa and the two boys ran out to where Garry had last been seen. They were guided by muffled cries of distress, and a disturbance in the grass. Only Garry’s legs were still above ground, kicking helplessly in the air. Shasa seized them and heaved Garry out of the deep round hole in which he was wedged from the waist.
It was the entrance to an antbear burrow. Intent on his stalk, Garry had tripped over his own bootlace and tumbled headlong into the hole. The lenses of his spectacles were thick with dust and he had skinned his cheek and torn his bushjacket. These injuries were insignificant when compared to the damage to his pride. In the next three days Garry made as many attempts to stalk. All of these were detected by his intended victim long before he was within gunshot. Each time as he watched the antelope dash away, Garry’s dejection was more abject and Sean’s derision more raucous.
‘Next time we will do it together,’ Shasa consoled him, and the following day he coached Garry quietly through the stalk, carrying the rifle for him, pointing out the obstacles over which Garry would have tripped, and leading him the last ten yards by the hand until they were in a good position for the shot. Then he handed him the loaded rifle.
‘In the neck,’ he whispered. ‘You can’t miss.’
The ram had the best trophy horns they had seen yet, and he was twenty-five yards away. Garry lifted the rifle and peered through spectacles that were misted with the heat of excitement and his hands began to shake uncontrollably.
Watching Garry’s face screwed up with tension, and seeing the erratic circles that the rifle barrel was describing, Shasa recognized the classic symptoms of ‘buck fever’ and reached out to prevent Garry firing. He was too late, and the ram jumped at the sharp crack of the shot, and then looked around with a puzzled expression. Neither Shasa nor the animal, and least of all Garry, knew where the bullet had gone.
‘Garry!’ Shasa tried to prevent him, but he fired again as wildly, and a puff of dust flicked from the earth halfway between them and the ram.
The impala went up into the air in a fluid and graceful leap, a flash of silken cinnamon-coloured skin and a glint of sweeping horns and then it was bounding away on those long delicate legs, so lightly it seemed not to touch the earth.
They walked back to the jeep in silence, Garry trailing a few paces behind his father, and his father, and his elder brother greeted him with a peal of merry laughter.
‘Next time throw your specs at him, Garry.’
‘I think you need a little more practice before you have another go at it,’ Shasa told him tactfully. ‘But don’t worry. Buck fever is something that can attack anyone – even the oldest and most experienced.’
They moved camp, going deeper into the little Eden they had discovered. Now every day they came across elephant droppings, knee-high piles of fibrous yellow lumps the size of tennis balls, full of chewed bark and twigs and the stones of wild fruit in which the baboons and red-cheeked francolin delved delightedly for titbits.
Shasa showed the boys how to thrust a finger into the pile of dung to test for body heat and judge its freshness, and how to read the huge round pad-marks in the dust. To differentiate between bull and cow, between front and rear foot, to tell the direction of travel and to estimate the age of the animal. ‘The tread is worn off the feet of the old ones – smooth as an old car tyre.’
Then, at last, they picked up the spoor of a huge old bull elephant, with smooth pad-marks the size of garbagebin lids, and they left the jeep and followed him on foot for two days, sleeping on the spoor, eating the hard rations they carried. In the late afternoon of the second day, they caught up with the bull. He was in almost impenetrable jess bush through which they crept on hands and knees, and they were almost within touching distance when they made out the loom of the colossal grey body through the interlaced branches. Eleven foot high at the shoulder, he was grey as a storm clo
ud, and his belly rumbled like distant thunder. One at a time Shasa took the boys up closer to have a good look at him, and then they retreated out of the jess bush and left the outcast to his eternal wanderings.
‘Why didn’t you shoot him, Dad?’ Garry stuttered. ‘After following all that way?’
‘Didn’t you see? One tusk was broken off at the tip, and despite his bulk the other tusk was pretty small.’
They limped back over the miles on feet that were covered in blisters, and it took two rest days in camp for the boys to recover from a march that had been beyond their strength.
Often during the nights they were awakened and lay in their narrow camp beds, thrilling to the shrieking cries of the hyena scavenging the garbage dump beside the lean-to kitchen. They were accompanied by the soprano yelping bark of the little dog-like jackals. The boys learned to recognize all these and the other sounds of the night — the birds such as the night jar and the dikkop, the smaller mammals, the night ape, the genet and the civet, and the insects and reptiles that squealed and hummed and croaked in the reeds of the waterhole.
They bathed infrequently. In matters of hygiene Shasa was more easy-going than their mother and a thousand times more so than their grandmother, and they ate the delicious concoctions that the Herero chef dreamed up for them with plenty of sugar and condensed milk. School was far away and they were as happy as they had ever been with their father’s complete and undivided attention and his wonderful stories and instruction.