He lowered his face to the new prints to get the best look in the final light. Was this the spoor of one more poacher? No, these marks in the dust might be much more than a poacher. Someone in leather shoes, in a truck driven by another . . . Could this be a moneyman? A boss who ran a network? A big fish? A transporter? Elusive, rare, to see this.
Why had this one come out last night? If he was, in fact, a level up from the miserable, disposable poachers, he’d almost never show himself like this. He’d stay in the background, handling the cash through intermediaries, holding his identity secret. What was it about these three poachers, or the horns they brought him, that made him visible last night? Why did he get out of the truck?
Neels folded to his hands and knees in the road. He crawled beside the great shoe prints that had stepped out of the bakkie. Somewhere in the park, a hyena laughed like a madman, rousing the Kruger now that dusk had ended. Neels found a spot in the road where the leather shoes came toe-to-toe with one of the smaller poachers’ sandals.
He sat up on his knees, startled. What had happened here? A disagreement, a fight? An embrace?
Seemingly out of nowhere, a fourth set of tracks appeared in the road, barefoot, small feet.
Neels stood, excited. In the first stains of night, he trailed the bakkie’s tire marks southward on the dirt road. Not far from the border crossing point, the truck had clambered down out of the kopje, the small hills on the Mozambican side of the border. The vehicle had been up there waiting for a signal, for a meeting.
Why? Who was among the poachers to merit this kind of attention? Who wore the smallest of the sandals? Who arrived barefoot?
Neels said to the hills, “Who?”
He pushed off his hat to let it hang behind him, opening his view of the sky. He chose a western star and walked to it with his rifle in hand to keep it quiet. He lay his boots down flat to stop his heels from striking. The bush would know he was here, not the men.
Neels moved quickly, guided not by the game trails or plants; these were just ripples on the veld, seasonal and changing. Elephants would knock down scrub, giraffes and the other big beasts would wear new paths, lightning blasted trees, herds grazed down the grasses. After thirty years, Neels could feel the unchanging parts of Shingwedzi, the rises and plains, watering holes and dry gullies, the river valley, the bones of the place. He knew his sector the way a man understands not a map but a brother. Here, Neels could think like a human or a beast, whichever he chose.
For an hour, he forged southeast toward the streambed where he’d sent Opu. He saw and heard no animals along the way. This was normal soon after the death of something the size of a rhino. The jackals, wild dogs, lions, and hyenas, the night noisemakers of the bush, had gorged their fill over the past day on the carcass. Little hunting was going on. Neels cruised undisturbed through the dark. Anything peering at him did so silently, like the moon rising at his back.
On a flatiron plain dotted with marula trees and dung heaps, Neels stopped for a swallow from his canteen. He spit out the first mouthful, an old soldier’s habit, to wash the dust off his tongue. He was only minutes from the ravine and Opu. The southern constellations shone limpid, the moon hadn’t yet crowded them out. The stars were the stars of his youth. He was sixty-one now, and his knees ached. He was alone, wifeless, drinking too much. Neels drained the canteen, feeling needy and deserving. Time for something else in his life, but what was there? Since she’d left, he’d asked this question over liquor and water, under sun and moonlight, at work and in dreams. No answer he could give himself was honest. No tracks led Neels inward.
A rifle report rang out of the night, from the direction of the streambed. Neels stowed the canteen, clicked off the safety on his R-1, and bent low.
He sped toward the sound, conscious of moving without revealing himself. Who had fired, one of the poachers?
The reply came fast. Another shot, then another scored the dark, this time a different sound, not the same caliber. One more report and Neels had his answer. This was no poacher taking down a beast. This was combat firing. Either the ECP had made contact or Opu had.
Neels dodged through the scrub, staying concealed as he hurried. The earth sloped downward. He’d entered the dry ravine. The ground turned to sandy clay; the undergrowth thinned. Straight ahead, one more gunshot popped. This was the final bang. The echo faded over the veld. Neels ducked beside a thicket of thorny branches. Here, in the center of the streambed, he caught his breath and saw the dust kicked up by a running poacher.
The man hurtled straight at him, fifty meters off. Neels stood from hiding to put himself in the open, lit by the measly light. He raised the rifle stock against his cheek and swung the sight to the poacher, leading him.
The black man did not see Neels, who, motionless, might have been just a tree in the ravine. The noises of his hard breathing and flapping sandals traveled far ahead of him. In one hand he gripped a rifle. Neels had little trouble following him with his own long barrel. He widened his stance, knowing how this would end.
When the poacher had sprinted within twenty meters, he filled Neels’s gun sight. The man wore dark clothes, a shirt flapped unbuttoned over short pants. He was thin; sweat glistened on him.
“Stop! Drop your weapon!”
The poacher skidded, raising more dust around his ankles. Panicking, he scanned the gray ravine, but with the moon low behind Neels, he did not see the ranger quickly enough. He did not drop his gun.
Neels fired once to put him down, not kill him. The round struck where he’d aimed, in the gut. The poacher staggered backward, arms flung wide, then tripped and landed on his rear, sitting up. Neels, F-1 still to his cheek, took long strides. He glared down the barrel as he approached, both eyes open.
“Take your hand off your weapon. Now.”
The poacher let the gun clatter from his grasp. He reeled in both skinny arms to press palms against his leaking belly. His shrieks were in Bantu, he was Mozambican. In English, Neels told him to shut up. The poacher whimpered.
Neels lowered the F-1. With a toe, he nudged the poacher’s Remington hunting rifle out of reach. A brushy tuft hung from the gun’s long barrel, the tail of an eland, a muti. Neels settled to his knees.
“Who sent you?”
The Mozambican pulled his hands from his stomach. The bullet had taken him just above the belly button, in the bowels. His palms dripped, the waistband of his shorts sagged, sopping with his blood. He wore no underwear. His life pulsed out between his shaking legs into the drinking dust. One sandal had fallen off, and the bottom of his foot was almost white with calluses. He muttered in accented English.
“I’m going to die?”
Neels inched closer, into the smell of copper.
“Who sent you?”
The poacher began to rock, holding his stomach again. Neels poked him in the shoulder.
“Hey. Look at me. A big man, right? He sent you.”
“Ranger, don’t let me die.”
“I won’t. Who sent you? His name.”
The poacher gazed deep into Neels’s face to see if he could trust him. Neels poked him again.
“I won’t let you die. Now tell me who sent you.”
The poacher coughed, and the pain of it wrenched his thin features.
“Juma.”
Neels leaned closer now that he had a name, to let the poacher see in his eyes that he would not find there what he was looking for.
Covering his belly once more, the poacher lay back in the dust. He moaned. Neels stood over him.
“How many have you killed? Jou poes.” (You cunt.)
The poacher shook his head in the dirt, denying, eyes shut.
His blood coursed down the furrows of his ribs, soaking his black shirttail. The moon gleamed in his tears and sweat. Daai bleerie fokken ding (This bloody fucking thing), this poacher, looked shiny dying in the dirt.
Neels rested the muzzle of his F-1 over the Mozambican’s heart. The racing beat throbbed through the gun into his hand
.
“You sneak into my park. Shoot my animals. Hack them to pieces.”
The poacher opened his eyes. He gazed not at Neels but beyond him, to the ageless stars.
Neels spit onto the man’s heaving chest. The gob landed beside the muzzle of the F-1.
“You ruin my life.”
Neels pulled the trigger. Again, somewhere, the mad hyena cackled.
Neels dumped the body off his shoulder. The poacher landed on his back, arms splayed, bloody palms turned up as if to show what Neels had done to him. Old Opu sat beside a corpse of his own, another skinny bastard. Opu looked unhurt, so Neels did not ask how he was. Opu pointed into the dark east.
“One got away.”
Neels handed Opu the poacher’s Remington. The rifle’s ballistics would be compared to bullets pried from rhino carcasses going back two years, searching for matches. The gun itself was most likely stolen, and that record, too, would help the computers at Skukuza create their mosaic of evidence. Opu checked the chamber to see that the gun was unloaded. He fingered the eland-tail muti, then tossed the rifle across the poacher’s bare legs.
Neels leaned down to Opu’s kill to see the story. Two rounds to the chest. This one died fast. No weapon lay near him in the dirt; he’d been unarmed. A flat, empty knapsack hinted that this team of poachers hadn’t found a rhino before they’d stumbled on Opu in the dark.
Opu did the same to Neels’s corpse, reading the death there. One bullet in the gut, one clean in the heart. Opu would have heard Neels’s two shots, the pause between them.
The old man’s white teeth split his black features in a grimace. Both he and Neels had put down men they could have taken alive. Neither poacher had been a threat at the moment he was killed. It remained unsaid between Opu and Neels, and among all the Kruger rangers, chopper pilots, police, prosecutors, sector bosses, intel teams, and office staff, that this was the same bad deal the rhinos got.
Opu jerked a thumb at Neels’s dead poacher.
“What did he tell you?”
“A name. Juma.”
“Juma?” Opu shook his head at the dark veld.
“You know him?”
“No. Did you follow the tracks?”
Squatting beside the dead men in the dust, Neels told the old man what he’d found in the road on the Mozambican side. A bakkie had waited in the dark hills, then rolled down to meet yesterday’s poachers. A big man, Juma, got out of the passenger side, in heeled leather shoes. There’d been an odd closeness with the smallest pair of sandals. And another unexplained set of barefoot tracks had disappeared into the boulders near the crossing, back into the park.
Neels sat cross-legged in the dirt, turned away from Opu and the bodies. He swirled his canteen, forgetting that he’d emptied it. From his backpack he ate a few bites of biltong, offering some to Opu, taking a swig from the old man’s water in return. They couldn’t leave the dead poachers overnight in the bush; animals would strip the bodies to the bone before dawn. They needed to be identified. Tomorrow morning, Neels would call in the choppers to evacuate them all, living and dead.
He put on his hat against the creeping chill. Neels was done with the stars for tonight. The lowered brim narrowed the bush to those bits of the world that would concern him until sunup: the dim ravine where he sat, the rifle across his lap, and Opu. Neels’s shoulder and knees twinged from carrying the poacher. A throb nagged in his head, the withdrawal after so much adrenaline.
Opu pulled a slim dagga cigarette from his shirt pocket. He waggled it at Neels to ask if this was a problem. Neels looked away. The ground flickered orange while Opu lit up. Neels smelled nothing, the smoke blew elsewhere. He spoke over his shoulder.
“You sleep first. Three hours.”
Minutes later, Opu rolled onto his side in the cooling dust, old hands joined under his cheek as his only pillow. Neels peered off into the silent bush, keen with his ears. Scrub and fever trees circled the open ravine in gray shapes that seemed to stare back as the poacher had done, to see if Neels could be relied on. Out in the dark flats, unseen beasts padded wide, careful paths around him, wondering if they might get at the scent of fresh death.
Neels, the protector of Shingwedzi, spoke out the name so the land could hear it, too, and be warned of him.
“Juma.”
The animals kept their distance, and the brim of his hat blocked the moon. Even so, she crossed his mind. It pleased him to wave Juma at her, to feel a new passion grow.
Chapter 4
The blasts barely shook the tunnel. One dangling lightbulb swayed while dust sifted through its glow. The safety people kept Allyn far from the detonation. Even as the mine’s owner, he couldn’t insist on being closer.
Allyn pressed a palm to the cool wall to sense the shuddering stone better, the power of the dynamite in the rocks, the rubble and thrill. Slowly, the rumbles faded under his hand. Long ago, when he’d been the one lighting the fuses, the spots on the back of his small hand were not there. So much time had gone by, and the changes were in him, heavy like collected calendars.
He lowered his hand from the wall. A woman beside him scribbled something competently onto a clipboard; a young engineer walked away over the loose stones of the shaft floor. Three grimy miners stood listlessly around him, assigned to answer questions should Allyn have any. All were taller than him, and the roof of the tunnel ran only centimeters from the tops of their heads. All wore the same white coveralls and hard hats branded with the illustrated head of a leopard, the logo of Allyn’s company, Ingwe. This was the Xhosa word for the big, spotted cat. The eyes of his company’s symbol were drawn wide and alert, lips parted, teeth bared, a predator’s face.
With the blast done, the always-moving conveyor belt shivered and bounced under the first chunks of rubble. A flurry of vehicles headed off to clear the debris, modern oddities of oversized tires and short profiles designed to operate in the low-slung dimensions of a mine. All the engines were plug-in electric to avoid emissions and ignition sparks; each vehicle trailed a great black cord. The motors were quiet but potent, strong enough to clear tons of fallen rock or scrape raw ore out of earth that had been hidden since creation.
Allyn’s three miners shuffled their boots on the pebbly floor, unaccustomed to standing so near the big boss while idle. They waited on his curiosity, but he had none because he knew their jobs. He’d done them all at one time or another, mining copper in Zambia, gold in Zimbabwe, diamonds here in South Africa. The underground bore no discomfort for Allyn. The immense depths, dark halls, occasional terror, grueling work, he brightened it all in the sunny recollections of his youth. He liked the subterranean chill, the surprising breezes near the ventilation shafts, the blasting and loose rocks; none of it had changed. Allyn had made himself a frequent visitor to his mine for the eleven years since he’d bought the Ingwe operation.
Today was the first time he’d come down in nine months. Labor negotiations had ended yesterday in Jo’burg, the strike was over. He was here to give his support, see the mine up and running, show the men there were no hard feelings though he’d made concessions for their new contract. The shutdown had become costly enough to everyone.
The woman kept her attention on her notes. The overalls made her shapeless, but she seemed trim, judging from her hands and profile. Allyn had not seen her before.
He offered his hand to the three miners around him. He asked their names but did not recall them as the men were saying them. Allyn didn’t introduce himself. He indicated one of the low trucks humming past, burdened with stones.
“I used to be a lasher. You boys know what that is?”
All three appeared young but might not have been. This was a trick of the mines, the dust filled the crevices and wrinkles of the face, smoothing the lines. Allyn had been in coal shafts in America where there had been no one with gray or blond hair, no black men or whites, just dirty miners. The smallest of the three before him, a little taller than Allyn, and wiry, said he did know.
> “A shoveler.”
Allyn popped the man on the upper arm, pleased to find it solid.
“Damn right I was. I started when I was seventeen. We didn’t have those machines to do it for us. Just shovels and these.”
Allyn displayed his hands.
“Did it for a year straight. I got promoted to trammer. Pushed cocopans loaded with rock over the rails. Once we’d pushed twenty cars, a little locomotive took them up to the surface.”
The men nodded, unsure what Allyn wanted from them. When the lull lasted too long and Allyn gazed away, the mine calling him further into memory, the largest of the three asked, “How’d you make miner, then?”
Allyn did not return fully to the moment, a bit of him lingered in the old tunnels.
“Back then, the men were from Mozambique and Nyasaland. Blacks mostly, good blokes. I got promoted before all of them. Not fair, but that’s how it was. I made learner miner. Spent six months training how to blast. We were measured, how many pounds of dynamite we used to get how many tons of ore. Three-man drilling crews. Two-minute fuses.”
The woman lifted her blue eyes from the clipboard, listening now. The middle miner laughed as he spoke.
“I bet you were good, right?”
“That I was, lad. I had the touch. Especially gold.” Allyn raised one arm parallel to the ground. “The reef runs like a river, through granite and greenstone for miles until it hits a spot, some jumble in the rock, some complex structure. Right there it pools.” He made a fist, tapped the knuckles with the other hand. “This is where you look. This is the find. Where the gold bunches up.”
The woman had sidled into their small circle. She smiled, and she was young, perhaps in her late forties. Maybe she was a lawyer. Her tone was level and straight. Like the ore, a shine lurked inside it.
“Mr. Pickston. How did you come up to own your own mines?”
Was she one of his lawyers, or the union’s?
“You know, it does beat the living a poor bastard lasher can make in the bottom of a mine.”
“True. But how did you do it?”
The Devil's Horn Page 6