by Wilbur Smith
She watched Sean with a vicious little curl to her cupidbow lips as he made his pitch. Sean had been working on her just as assiduously as he had on her husband, thus far with as little success.
‘All you’ve got, honey,’ she had told Sean, ‘is a pretty face and a hungry dick. The woods are full of those. Daddy Eddie has got fifty million bucks. It’s no contest, sonny boy.’
The camp table was set under a magnificent wild fig tree on the banks of the Mara River. It was a bright African morning. The plain beyond the river was golden with winter grass, and studded with flat-topped acacia trees. The herds of wildebeest were dark shadows on the gold and a giraffe was feeding from the upper branches of the nearest acacia, his long graceful neck swaying against the brittle blue of the sky, his hide paved with bold rectangles of red brown. From upriver there came the bellowing sardonic laughter of a bull hippo, while from the branches of the fig tree above them the golden weaver birds dangled upside down from their woven basket nests, fluttering and shrilling to entice the drab brown females to move in and take up residence. Legend had it that both Hemingway and Ruark had camped at this very spot and breakfasted beneath this same wild fig.
‘What do you think, Sugar Sticks?’ Ed Liner ran his bony brown fingers down the inside of his wife’s thigh. She wore wide-legged khaki culottes and from where Sean sat he could see a little red-blonde pubic curl peeking out from under the elastic of her panties. ‘Do you think we should give old Sean here a half million bucks to set up our very own safari outfit down in the Zambezi valley of Rhodesia?’
‘You know best, Daddy Eddie.’ She affected a cute little-girl voice, and she batted her long eyelashes at him and turned so that her bosom strained the buttons of her khaki shirt.
‘Just think of it,’ Sean invited. ‘Your very own hunting concession, to do with as you want.’ He watched her carefully as he went on. ‘You could shoot the full quota all yourself if you wanted, as many animals as you wanted.’ Despite her curls and pouting lips, Lana Liner had a vicious a sadistic streak as any man Sean had ever hunted with. While Ed had chosen only to take the lion and elephant that he had paid for, Lana had killed every single animal she was entitled to, and then had killed those her husband had refused.
She was a passable shot, and derived as much pleasure from cutting down one of the dainty little Thompson’s gazelle with her .300 Weatherby magnum as she had when she dropped her black-maned Masai lion with a perfect heart shot. He had seen the sexual radiance in her immediately after each kill, heard her rapid breathing and seen the pulse beat in her throat with excitement, and his philanderer’s instinct had assured him that Lana Liner was vulnerable to him only in those few minutes after she had seen the bullet strike and the blood flash.
‘As much hunting as you want, whenever you want it,’ Sean tempted her, and saw the excitement in her baby blue eyes.
She ran the tip of her tongue over her scarlet lips and said in her breathless little-girl voice, ‘Why don’t you buy it for my birthday, Daddy Eddie.’
‘Goddamm!’ Ed laughed. ‘Why not! OK, son, you’ve got yourself a deal. We’ll call it Lana Safaris. I’ll get my lawyers to draw up the papers soon as we get home to Tucson.’
Sean clapped his hands, and shouted at the kitchen tent. ‘Maramba! Letta champagne hapa. Pacey! Pacey!’ and the camp waiter in his long white kanza and red pill-box fez brought the green bottle on its silver tray, dewed with cold from the refrigerator.
They drank the wine and laughed in the morning sunlight, and shook hands and discussed the new venture until the gunbearer brought the hunting car around with the rifles in the racks and Matatu, the Ndorobo tracker, perched up on the back and grinning like a monkey.
‘I’ve had enough,’ Ed said. ‘Guess I’ll get packed up and ready to meet the charter plane when it comes in this afternoon.’ Then he saw the pout of disappointment on Lana’s red lips. ‘You go off with Sean, Sugar Sticks,’ he told her. ‘Have a good hunt, but don’t be late back. The charter flight is due to arrive at three, and we must get back to Nairobi before dark.’
Sean drove with Lana in the seat beside him. He had cut the sleeves out of his shirt to leave his upper arms bare, and they were sleek and glossy with muscle. Dark chest hair curled out of the V-neck of the shirt, and he wore his shining dark hair in a page-boy almost to his shoulders, but bound up around the forehead with a patterned silk bandana to keep it out of his eyes.
When he grinned at her, he was almost impossibly handsome, but there was a vindictive twist to his smile as he said, ‘Ready for a bit of sport, sport?’ And she said, ‘Just as long as I get to do the shooting, sonny boy.’
They followed the track along the river bank, heading back towards the hills. The Land-Rover was stripped and the windshield removed, and Matatu and the gunbearer in the raised back seat scanned the edges of the riverine bush and searched the track for sign of passage during the night.
Alarmed by the engine beat, a bushbuck family came dancing up the bank from the river, heading for the dense cover with the ewe and the lamb leading, followed by the ram, striped and spotted with cream on a dark chocolate ground, his corkscrew horns held high.
‘I want him,’ Lana cried and reached over her shoulder for the Weatherby.
‘Leave him,’ Sean snapped. ‘He won’t go fifteen inches and you’ve got a better trophy already.’
She pouted at him sulkily, and he ignored her as the bushbuck scampered into the bush. Sean hit four-wheel drive and angled the Land-Rover down the bank of one of the Mara’s tributaries, splashed and jolted through water as deep as the hubs and then roared up the far bank.
A small herd of Burchell’s zebra cantered away ahead of them, stiff black manes erect, their vivid stripes shaded to nondescript grey at a distance, uttering their abrupt honking bark. Lana eyed them hungrily, but she had already shot the twenty zebra allowed on both her and Ed’s licences.
The track swung back towards the river and through trees they had a view across the wide plains. The Masai Mara, which meant ‘the great spotted place of the Masai’, and the grassland were blotched with herds of game and clumps of acacia.
‘Bwana,’ Matatu cried, and at the same instant Sean saw the sign. He braked the Land-Rover and with Matatu beside him went to examine the splashes of khaki-green dung and the huge round bovine prints in the soft earth of the track. The dung was loose and wet, and Matatu thrust his forefinger into one of the pats to test for body heat.
‘They drank at the river an hour before dawn,’ he said.
Sean walked back to the Land-Rover and stood close to Lana, almost touching her as he said, ‘Three old bulls. They crossed three hours ago, but they are feeding and we could catch them within an hour. I think they are the same three we saw the day before yesterday.’ They had spotted the dark shapes in the dusk, from the opposite bank of the wide Mara river, but with insufficient daylight left for them to circle upstream to the ford and take up the chase. ‘If they are the same old mud bulls, one of them is a fifty-incher, and there aren’t many of them that size around any more. Do you want to have a go?’
She jumped down from the Land-Rover, and reached for the Weatherby in the gun rack.
‘Not that popgun, Sugar Sticks,’ Sean warned her. ‘Those are big mean old buff out there. Take Ed’s Winchester.’ The .458 threw a bullet more than twice as heavy as the 200-grain Nosler that the Weatherby fired.
‘I shoot better with my own piece than with Ed’s cannon,’ Lana said. ‘And only Ed is allowed to call me Sugar Sticks.’
‘Ed is paying me a thousand dollars a day for the best advice on Harley Street. Take the .458, and is it all right if I call you Treacle Pins, then?’
‘You can go screw, sonny boy,’ Lana said and her baby voice gave the obscenity a strangely lascivious twist.
‘That’s exactly what I had in mind, Treacle Pins, but let’s go kill a buff first.’
She tossed the Weatherby to her gunbearer, and strode away from him with her hard round b
uttocks oscillating in the khaki culottes. ‘Just like the cheeks of a squirrel chewing a nut,’ Sean thought happily, and took the big double-barrelled Gibbs down from the rack.
The spoor was gross, three big bull buffalo weighing over a ton each and scarring the earth with brazen hoofs and grazing as they went. Matatu wanted to run away with it, but Sean checked him. He didn’t want to bring Lana up to the chase shaking and panting with fatigue, so they went out on it at an extended walk, going hard but keeping within the girl’s capabilities.
In the open acacia forest they reached the spot where the bulls had ceased feeding and bunched up, then struck determinedly towards the blue silhouette of distant hills, and Sean explained to Lana in a whisper, ‘This is where they were when the sun rose. As soon as it was light, they headed for the thick stuff. I know where they will lie up, we’ll catch them with another half hour.’
Around them the forest closed in, and acacia gave way to the dense claustrophobic thorn and green jess. Visibility ahead dropped to a hundred and then fifty feet, and they had to crouch beneath the interlacing branches. The heat built up, and the dappled light was deceptive, filling the forest with strange shapes and menacing shadow. The stink of the buffalo seemed to steam around them in the heat, a rank gamy smell, and they found the flattened beds and smeared yellow dung where the bulls had lain down for the first time, and then stood up and moved on.
Ahead of them Matatu made the open-handed sign for ‘Very close’, and Sean opened the breech of the Gibbs and changed the big brass .577 Kynoch cartridges for two others from his bullet pouch. He kept the original pair between the fingers of his left hand, ready for an instant reload. He could fire those four cartridges in half the time it would take even the most skilled rifleman to fire four from a magazine rifle. It was so silent and still in the jess that they could hear each other breathe, and the blood pounding in their own ears.
Suddenly there was a clatter, and they all froze. Sean recognized the sound. Somewhere just ahead of them a buffalo had shaken his great black head to drive away the plaguing flies, and one of his curved horns had struck a branch. Sean sank on to his knees signalling Lana to come up beside him, and together they crawled forward.
Suddenly and unexpectedly they came to a hole in the jess, a tiny clearing twenty paces across, and the earth was trodden like a cattle kraal and littered with pancakes of old black dung.
They lay on the edge of the clearing and peered across into the tangled vegetation on the far side. The sunlight into the clearing dazzled them, and the shadow beyond it was confused and obscure.
Then the bull shook his head again, and Sean saw them. They were lying in a bunch, a mountainous mass of blackness in the shadows, and their heads overlapped so that the heavy bosses and curls of horn formed an inextricable puzzle. Though they were less than thirty paces away, it was impossible to separate one animal from the others, or one set of horns from the bunch.
Slowly Sean turned his head and laid his lips against Lana’s ear. ‘I am going to get them up,’ he whispered. ‘Be ready to take the shot as I call it.’
She was sweating and trembling. He could smell her fear and excitement, and it excited him also. He felt his loins thicken and stiffen, and for a moment he savoured the sensation, pressing his hips against the earth as though he had her body under him. Then deliberately he knocked the brass cartridges in his left hand against the steel barrels of the Gibbs. The sharp metallic sound was shocking in the silence.
Across the clearing the three bulls lumbered to their feet, and faced the sound. Their heads were lifted, drooling wet muzzles held high and the bosses of rough horn, black as ironstone, joined above their vicious piggy little eyes, the tips curving down and up again to the wide points, and their ears flared like trumpets.
‘The middle one,’ Sean said softly. ‘Rake him through the chest.’
He stiffened in anticipation of her shot, and then glanced sideways. The barrel of the Weatherby was describing small erratic circles as Lana tried to hold her aim, and it flashed upon Sean that she had forgotten to change the power of her variable telescopic sight. She was looking at a bull buffalo from thirty paces through a lens of ten multiplications. It was like looking at a battleship through a microscope: all she was seeing was a black shapeless mass.
‘Don’t shoot!’ he whispered urgently but the Weatherby erupted in a long blazing muzzle-flash across the clearing, and the big bull lurched and tossed his head, grunting to the strike of shot. Sean saw the dried mud puff from his scabby black skin, low down in the joint of his right shoulder, and as the bull spun away into the jess, Sean swung the Gibbs on him to take the back-up shot. But one of the other buffalo turned across the wounded animal, screening him for the instant that it took for him to crash away into the jess, and Sean lifted the Gibbs without firing.
They lay side by side and listened to the thunderous rush of bodies dwindle into the jess.
‘I couldn’t see clearly,’ Lana said in her childish piping treble.
‘You had the scope on full power, you silly bitch.’
‘But I hit him!’
‘Yes, Treacle Breeches, you hit him – more’s the pity. You broke his right front leg.’ Sean stood up and whistled for Matatu. In a few quick words of Swahili he explained the predicament, and the little Ndorobo looked at Lana reproachfully.
‘Stay here with your gunbearer,’ Sean ordered Lana. ‘We’ll go and finish the business.’
‘I’m going with you.’ Lana shook her head.
‘This is what I’m paid for,’ Sean told her. ‘Cleaning up the mess. Stay here and let me do my job.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s my buff. I’ll finish it.’
‘I haven’t got time to argue,’ Sean said bitterly. ‘Come on then, but do as you are told.’ And he waved Matatu forward to pick up the blood spoor.
There were bone splinters and hair where the bull had stood.
‘You smashed the big bone,’ Sean told her. ‘It’s a racing certainty that the bullet broke up. At that range it was probably still going 3,500 feet per second when it hit – even a Nosler bullet can’t stand that.’
The bull was bleeding profusely. Bright blood had sprayed the jess as he blundered through, and blood had formed a dark gelatinous puddle where he stood for the first time to listen for his pursuers. The other two bulls had deserted him and Sean grunted with satisfaction. That would prevent confusion, shooting at the wrong animal in the mix-up.
Lana kept close beside him. She had removed the scope from the Weatherby and left it with the gunbearer, and now she carried the rifle at high port across her chest.
Abruptly they stepped into another narrow clearing, and Matatu squeaked and bolted back between Sean and the girl as the bull broke from the far side of the clearing and came down on them in a bizarre crabbing sideways gait. His nose was up, and the long mournful droop of his horns gave him a funereal menace. His broken leg flapped loosely, hampering his gait, so he rocked and plunged, and bright blood was forced in a spurting stream from the wound by the movement.
‘Shoot!’ said Sean. ‘Aim at his nose!’ But without looking at her he sensed her terror, and her first movement as she turned to run.
‘Come on, you yellow bitch. Stand and shoot it out,’ he snarled at her. ‘This is what you wanted – now do it.’
The Weatherby whiplashed, and flame and thunder tore across the clearing. The buffalo flinched at the shot, and black flinty chips flew from the boss of his horns.
‘High!’ Sean called. ‘Shoot him on the nose.’ And she shot again, and hit the horn a second time and the bull kept coming.
‘Shoot!’ Sean called, watching the great armoured head over the express sights of the Gibbs. ‘Come on, bitch, kill him!’
‘I can’t,’ she screamed. ‘He’s too close!’ The bull filled all their existence, a mountain of black hide and muscle and lethal horn, so close that at last he dropped his head to toss and gore them, to rip and trample and crush them under the anv
il of his crenellated boss.
As the massive horns went down, Sean shot him through the brain and the bull rolled forward over his own head. Sean pulled Lana out from under the flying hoofs as the bull somersaulted. She had dropped the rifle and now she clung to him helplessly, shaking, her red mouth slack and smeared with terror.
‘Matatu!’ Sean called quietly, holding her to his chest, and the little Ndorobo reappeared at his side like a genie. ‘Take the gunbearer with you,’ Sean ordered. ‘Go back to the Land-Rover and bring it back here, but do not hurry.’
Matatu grinned lewdly and ducked his head. He had an enormous respect for his Bwana’s virility and he knew what Sean was going to do. He only wondered that it had taken so long for the Bwana to straighten this pale albino creature’s back for her. He disappeared into the jess like a black shadow and Sean turned the girl’s face up to his own and thrust his tongue deeply into the wet red wound of her mouth.
She moaned and clung to him, and with his free hand he unbuckled her belt and jerked down the culottes. They fell in a tangle around her ankles and she kicked them away. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of her panties and tore them off her, then he pushed her down on top of the hot and bleeding carcass of the buffalo. She fell with her legs sprawled open and the muscles of the dead animal were still twitching and contracting from the brain shot, and the sweet coppery smell of blood mingled with the rank wild stink of game and dust.
Sean stood over her and tore open the front of his breeches and she looked up at him with the terror still clouding her eyes.
‘Oh you bastard,’ she sobbed. ‘You filthy rotten bastard.’
Sean dropped on his knees between her long loose limbs and cupped his hands under her hard little buttocks. As he lifted her lower body he saw that her fluffy blonde mount was already as sodden as the fur of a drowned kitten.
They drove back to camp with the body of the dead bull crammed into the back of the Land-Rover, the great homed head dangling over the side, and Matatu and the gunbearer perched upon it, singing the hunter’s song.