by Wilbur Smith
‘We haven’t seen any signs of lions yet,’ Shasa remarked at breakfast one morning. ‘That’s unusual. There are plenty of buffalo about, and the big cats usually keep close to the herds.’
Mention of lions gave the boys delightful cold shivers, and it was as though Shasa’s words had conjured up the beast.
That afternoon, as the jeep bumped and weaved slowly through the long grass avoiding antbear holes and fallen logs, they came out on the edge of a long dry vlei, one of those grassy depressions of the African bush that during the rainy season become shallow lakes and at other times are treacherous swamps where a vehicle can easily bog down, or in the driest months are smooth treeless expanses resembling a well-kept polo ground. Shasa stopped the jeep in the tree line and searched the far side of the vlei, panning his binoculars slowly to pick up any game standing amongst the shadows of the tall grey mopani trees on the far side.
‘Only a couple of bat-eared foxes,’ he remarked, and passed the binoculars to the boys. They laughed at the antics of these quaint little animals, as they hunted grasshoppers in the short green grass in the centre of the vlei.
‘Hey, Dad!’ Sean’s tone changed. ‘There is a big old baboon in the top of that tree.’ He passed the binoculars back to his father.
‘No,’ Shasa said, without lowering the glasses. ‘That’s not a baboon. It’s a human being!’
He spoke in the vernacular to the two Ovambo trackers in the back of the jeep, and there was a quick but heated discussion, everybody taking differing views.
‘All right, let’s go and take a look.’ He drove the jeep out into the open vlei, and before they were halfway across there was no longer any doubt. In the top branches of a high mopani crouched a child, a little black girl dressed only in a loincloth of cheap blue trade cotton.
‘She’s all alone,’ Shasa exclaimed. ‘Out here, fifty miles from the nearest village.’
Shasa sent the jeep roaring across the last few hundred yards then pulled up in a rolling cloud of dust and ran to the base of the mopani. He shouted up at the almost naked child. ‘Come down!’ and gestured to reinforce the command that she would certainly not understand. She neither moved nor raised her head from the branch on which she lay.
Shasa looked around him quickly. At the base of the tree lay a blanket roll which had been ripped open; the threadbare blankets had been shredded and tom. A skin bag had also been ripped and the dry maize meal it contained had poured into the dust, there was a black threelegged pot lying on its side, a crude axe with the blade rough-forged from a piece of scrap mild steel, and the shaft of a spear snapped off at the back of the head, but the point was missing.
A little further off were scattered a few rags on which blood stains had dried black as tar, and some other objects which were covered by a living cloak of big shimmering iridescent flies. As Shasa approached, the flies rose in a buzzing cloud, revealing the pathetic remains on which they had been feasting. There were two pairs of human hands and feet, gnawed off at the wrists and ankles, and then – horribly – the heads. A man and a woman, their necks chewed through and the exposed vertebrae crushed by great fangs. Both heads were intact, although the mouths and nostrils and empty eye-sockets were filled with the white rice pudding of eggs laid by the swarming flies. The grass was flattened over a wide area, crusted with dried blood, and the trodden dust was patterned with the unmistakable pug-marks of a fully grown male lion.
‘The lion always leaves the head and hands and feet,’ his Ovambo tracker said in a matter-of-fact voice, and Shasa nodded and turned to warn the boys to stay in the car. He was too late. They had followed him and were studying the grisly relics with varied expressions – Sean with ghoulish relish, Michael with nauseated horror and Garry with intense clinical interest.
Swiftly Shasa covered the severed heads with the torn blankets. He smelt that they were already in an advanced state of decomposition: they must have lain here many days. Then once again he turned his attention to the child in the branches high above them, calling urgently to her.
‘She is dead,’ said his tracker. ‘These people have been dead four days at least. The little one has been in the tree all that time. She is surely dead.’
Shasa would not accept that. He removed his boots and safari jacket and climbed into the mopani. He went up cautiously, testing each hand-hold and every branch before committing his weight to it. To a height of ten feet above the ground the bark of the tree had been lacerated by claws. When the child was directly above him, almost within reach, Shasa called to her softly in Ovambo and then in Zulu.
‘Hey, little one, can you hear me?’
There was no movement and he saw that her limbs were thin as sticks, and her skin ash-grey with that peculiar dusty look that in the African presages death. Shasa eased himself up the last few feet and reached up to touch her leg. The skin was warm, and he felt an unaccountable rush of relief. He had expected the soft cold touch of death. However, the child was unconscious and her dehydrated body was light as a bird as Shasa gently loosened her grip on the branch and lifted her against his chest. He climbed down slowly, shielding her from any jarring or rough movement and when he reached the ground carried her to the jeep and laid her in the shade.
The first-aid kit contained a comprehensive collection of medical equipment. Long ago, Shasa had been forced to minister to one of his gun-bearers mauled by a wounded buffalo and after that he never hunted without the kit, and he had learned to use all of it.
Swiftly he prepared a drip set and probed for the vein in the child’s arm. The vein had collapsed, her pulse was weak and erratic, and he had to try again in the foot. This time he got the cannula in and administered a full bag of Ringers lactate, and while it was flowing he added 10 ccs of glucose solution to it. Only then did he attempt to make the child take water orally, and her swallowing reflex was still evident. A few drops at a time he got a full cup down her throat, and she showed the first signs of life, whimpering and stirring restlessly.
As he worked, he gave orders to his trackers over his shoulder. ‘Take the spade, bury those people deep. It is strange that the hyena haven’t found them yet, but make sure they don’t do so later.’
One of the trackers held the child on his lap during the rough journey back to camp, protecting her from the jolts and heavy bumps. As soon as they arrived, Shasa strung the aerial of the short-wave radio to the highest tree in the grove, and after an hour of frustration finally made contact, not with the H’ani Mine, but with one of the Courtney Company’s geological exploration units that was a hundred miles closer. Even then the contact was faint and scratchy and intermittent, but with many repetitions he got them to relay a message to the mine. They were to send an aircraft, with the mine doctor, to the landing strip at the police post at Rundu as soon as possible.
By this time, the little girl was conscious and talking to the Ovambo trackers in a weak piping voice that reminded Shasa of the chirping of a nestling sparrow. She was speaking an obscure dialect of one of the river people from Angola in the north, but the Ovambo was married to a woman of her tribe and could translate for Shasa. The story she told was harrowing.
She and her parents had been on a journey to see her grandparents at the river village of Shakawe in the south, a trek on foot of hundreds of miles. Carrying all their worldly possessions, they had taken a short cut through this remote and deserted country when they had become aware that a lion was dogging them, following them through the forest – at first keeping its distance and then closing in.
Her father, an intrepid hunter, had realized the futility of stopping and trying to build some sort of shelter or of taking to the trees where the beast would besiege them. Instead he had tried to keep the lion off by shouting and clapping while he hurried to reach the river and the sanctuary of one of the fishing villages.
The child described the final attack when the animal, its thick ruff of black mane erect, had rushed in at the family, grunting and roaring. Her mother had only ti
me enough to push the girl into the lowest branch of the mopani before the lion was on them. Her father had stood gallantly to meet it, and thrust his long spear into its shoulder, but the spear had snapped and the lion leapt upon him and tore out his bowels with a single swipe of curved yellow claws. Then it had sprung at the mother as she was attempting to climb into the mopani and hooked its claws into her back and dragged her down.
In her small birdlike voice the child described how the lion had eaten the corpses of her parents, down to the heads and feet and hands, while she watched from the upper branches. It had taken two days over the grisly feast, at intervals pausing to lick the spear wound in its shoulder. On the third day it had attempted to reach the child, ripping at the trunk of the mopani and roaring horribly. At last it had given up and wandered away into the forest, limping heavily with the wound. Even then the child had been too terrified to leave her perch and she had clung there until at last she had passed out with exhaustion and grief, exposure and fear.
While she was relating all this, the camp servants were refuelling the jeep and preparing supplies for the journey to Rundu. Shasa left as soon as this was done, taking the boys with him. He would not leave them in the camp while there was a wounded man-eating lion roaming in the vicinity.
They drove through the night, recrossing their jerrybuilt bridge and retracing their tracks until the following morning they intersected the main Rundu road, and that afternoon they finally arrived, dusty and exhausted, at the airstrip. The blue and silver Mosquito that Shasa had left at H’ani Mine was parked in the shade of the trees at the edge of the strip and the company pilot and the doctor were squatting under the wing, waiting patiently.
Shasa gave the child into the doctor’s care, and went quickly through the pile of urgent documents and messages that the pilot had brought with him. He scribbled out orders and replies to these, and a long letter of instruction to David Abrahams. When the Mosquito took off again, the sick girl went with them. She would receive first-rate medical attention at the mine hospital, and Shasa would decide what to do with the little orphan once she was fully recovered.
The return to the safari camp was more leisurely than the outward journey, and over the next few days the excitement of the lion adventure was forgotten in the other absorbing concerns of safari life, not least of which was the business of Garry’s first kill. Bad luck now combined with his lack of coordination and poor marksmanship to cheat him of this experience that he hungered for more than any other, while on the other hand Sean succeeded in providing meat for the camp at every attempt.
‘What we are going to do is practise a little more on the pigeons,’ Shasa decided, after one of Garry’s least successful outings. In the evenings the flocks of fat green pigeons came flighting in to feast on the wild figs in the grove beside the waterhole.
Shasa took the boys down as soon as the sun lost its heat, and placed them in the hides they had built of saplings and dried grass, each hide far enough from the next and carefully sited so that there was no danger of a careless shot causing an accident. This afternoon Shasa put Sean into a hide at the near end of the glade, with Michael, who had once again declined to take an active part in the sport, to keep him company and pick up the fallen birds for him.
Then Shasa and Garry set off together for the far side of the grove. Shasa was leading with Garry following him as the game path twisted between the thick yellow trunks of the figs. Their bark was yellow and scaly as the skin of a giant reptile, and the bunches of figs grew directly on the trunks rather than on the tips of the branches. Beneath the trees the undergrowth was tangled and thick, and the game path was so twisted that they could see only a short distance ahead. The light was poor this late in the afternoon, with the branches meeting overhead.
Shasa came around another turn and the lion was in the game path, walking straight towards him only fifty paces away. In the instant he saw it, Shasa realized that it was the man-eater. It was a huge beast, the biggest he had ever seen in a lifetime of hunting. It stood higher than his waist, and its mane was coal-black, long and shaggy and dense, shading to blue grey down the beast’s flanks and back.
It was an old lion, its flat face criss-crossed with scars. Its mouth was gaping, panting with pain as it limped towards him, and he saw that the spear wound in the shoulder had mortified, the raw flesh crimson as a rose petal and the fur around the wound wet and slicked down where the lion had been licking it. The flies swarmed to the wound, irritating and stinging, and the lion was in a vicious mood, sick with age and pain. It lifted its dark and shaggy head and Shasa looked into the pale yellow eyes and saw the agony and blind rage they contained.
‘Garry!’ he said urgently. ‘Walk backwards! Don’t run, but get out of here,’ and without looking around he swung the sling of the rifle off his shoulder.
The lion dropped into a crouch, its long tail with the black bush of hair at the tip lashed back and forth like a metronome, as it gathered itself for the charge, and its yellow eyes fastened on Shasa, a focus for all its rage.
Shasa knew there would be time for only a single shot, for it would cover the ground between them in a blazing blur of speed. The light was too bad and the range was too far for that single shot to be conclusive, he would let it come in to where there could be no doubt, and the big 300-grain soft-nosed bullet from the Holland and Holland would shatter its skull and blow its brains to a mush.
The lion launched into its charge, keeping low to the earth, snaking in and grunting as it came, gut-shaking bursts of sound through the gaping jaws lined with long yellow fangs. Shasa braced himself and brought up the rifle, but before he could fire, there was the sharp crack of the little Winchester beside him and the lion collapsed in the middle of his charge, going down head first and cartwheeling, flopping over on its back to expose the soft butteryellow fur of its belly, its limbs stretching and relaxing, the long curved talons in its huge paws slowly retracting into the pads, the pink tongue lolling out of its open jaws, and the rage dying out of those pale yellow eyes. From the tiny bullet hole between its eyes a thin serpent of blood crawled down to dribble from its brow into the dirt beneath it.
In astonishment Shasa lowered his rifle and looked round. Beside him stood Garry, his head at the level of Shasa’s lowest rib, the little Winchester still at his shoulder, his face set and deadly pale, and his spectacles glinting in the gloom beneath the trees.
‘You killed it,’ Shasa said stupidly. ‘You stood your ground and killed it.’
Shasa walked forward slowly and stooped over the carcass of the man-eater. He shook his head in amazement, and then looked back at his son. Garry had not yet lowered the rifle, but he was beginning now to tremble with delayed terror. Shasa dipped his finger into the blood that dribbled from the wound in the man-eater’s forehead, then walked back to where Garry stood. He painted the ritual stripes on the boy’s forehead and cheeks.
‘Now you are a man and I’m proud of you,’ he said. Slowly the colour flushed back into Garry’s cheeks and his lips stopped trembling, and then his face began to glow. It was an expression of such pride and unutterable joy that Shasa felt his throat close up and tears sting his eyelids.
Every servant came from the camp to view the man-eater and to hear Shasa describe the details of the hunt. Then, by the light of the lanterns, they carried the carcass back. While the skinners went to work, the men sang of the hunter in Garry’s honour.
Sean was torn between incredulous admiration and deepest envy of his brother, while Michael was fulsome in his praises. Garry refused to wash the dried lion’s blood from his face when at last, well after midnight, Shasa finally ordered them to bed. At breakfast he still wore the crusted stripes of blood on his beaming grubby face and Michael read aloud the heroic poem he had written in Garry’s honour. It began:
With lungs to blast the skies with sound
And breath hot as the blacksmith’s forge
Eyes as yellow as the moon’s full round
And
the lust on human flesh to gorge –
Shasa hid a smile at the laboured rhyming, and at the end applauded as loudly as the end applauded as loudly as the rest of them. After breakfast they all trooped out to watch the skinners dressing out the lion skin, pegging it fur-side down in the shade, scraping away the yellow subcutaneous fat and rubbing in coarse salt and alum.
‘Well, I still think it died of a heart attack.’ Sean could suppress his envy no longer, and Garry rounded on him furiously.
‘We all know what a clever dick you are. But when you shoot your first lion, then you can come and talk to me, smarty pants. All you are good for is a few little old impala!’
It was a long speech, delivered in white heat, and Garry never stumbled nor stuttered once. It was the first time Shasa had seen him stand up to Sean’s casual bullying, and he waited for Sean to assert his authority. For seconds it hung in the balance, he could see Sean weighing it up, deciding whether to tweak the spikes of hair at Garry’s temple or to give him a chestnut down the ribs. He could see also that Garry was ready for it, his fists clenched and his lips set in a pale determined line. Suddenly Sean grinned that charming smile.
‘Only kidding,’ he announced airily, and turned back to admire the tiny bullet-hole in the skull. ‘Wow! Right between the eyes!’ It was a peace offering.
Garry looked bemused and uncertain. It was the first time that he had forced Sean to back down, and he wasn’t able immediately to grasp that he had succeeded.
Shasa stepped up and put his arm around Garry’s shoulders. ‘Do you know what I’m going to do, champ? I’m going to have the head fully mounted for the wall in your room, with eyes and everything,’ he said.
For the first time, Shasa was aware that Garry had developed hard little muscles in his shoulders and upper arms. He had always thought him a runt. Perhaps he had never truly looked at the child before.