The old man turned back to him slowly.
‘When you are gone.’
‘Jesus!’ Mahoney saw the other crocodiles nosing around the water a distance out. ‘Get into the boat,’ he snapped at Samson. The crocodiles would flush the old boy out, back up to his hut. The boat already had to carry eight, low in the water, without the old boy rocking it.
Mahoney climbed into the boat. It rocked as he pulled the cord to start the engine, and the women jerked and clutched each other. The gunnel dipped under and she took in water. Mahoney scowled at the women.
‘If the boat rocks like that again we will all be food for the crocodiles,’ he snapped. ‘Now be ready for it!’
He pulled the cord again and again and the boat rocked but the engine did not start.
‘Oh no, not wet plugs as well.’
He pulled again and the engine kicked and started.
The old man waded up to the wall of his hut. The water swilled through his doorway.
‘Now, will you come, old man?’
Sixpence stood in the water under the eaves. The goat bleated on its three legs, the water touching its belly.
‘No.’
‘You are a stubborn old fool!’
The old man said nothing. Mahoney put the engine into gear and opened the throttle carefully. He turned the tiller-handle and the boat began to inch through the water heavily. The water came to within two inches of the gunnel.
He turned the boat about and he looked back at Sixpence. The goat was still bleating. The old man raised his hand in a tired salute.
‘I will take these people to a safe place, old man,’ Mahoney shouted. ‘And then I will come back for you.’
The old man said nothing. He just looked at them.
Mahoney opened the throttle and the boat surged sluggishly.
From thirty yards away he looked back at the hut. He saw the old man standing there. The goat was bleating loudly. He saw the crocodile nosing through the water leisurely towards the hut, still a distance away. He saw the nanny goat hobble in the water, its broken leg held up, trying to make its way round the wall of the hut to the doorway. He saw the old man bend and pick up the goat in his arms. It was still bleating. The old man waded through the water round the hut. He ducked his head and carried the goat through the doorway into the dark hut. The old man and the goat disappeared inside the dark hut, and the goat was still bleating loudly.
Mahoney opened the throttle and the boat pushed away into the rain.
The crocodile swam towards the hut and the noise of the bleating. It made a swishing circle outside the hut, then it swam through the doorway of the hut also. And after a few moments the noise of the bleating stopped and there was only a splash in the doorway.
That was the summer. It was to be winter once more before civilisation saw Mahoney again.
Part Two
Chapter Ten
‘Go north young man,’ was the saying, and north they came, the fitters and the turners and bricklayers and carpenters and the miners and the salesmen and the businessmen and the bright young men to become salesmen and businessmen and to be tomorrow’s executives in the Anglo-American Corporation, and the British South Africa Company, and the Roan Antelope Corporation and in the thousand and one corporations that sprang up in the hot flat bushland of Rhodesia, north of the Limpopo. There was a fever in the land, an exciting fever of the opening of the new frontier, of staking your claim and hitting it rich, there was an optimism in the air and the air vibrated with the rattle of pneumatic drills and the crunch of old walls coming down and the new walls going up. Thanks to Federation. Federation of the rich primitive North with the go-ahead South. Partnership of the Black North and the whiter South, wealth shared with know-how, black hand clasped with white across the mighty Zambezi in the new deal handshake on new brotherhood, big white brother shaking hands on the deal with little black brother, big white brother going to be fair with little black brother and teach him the ropes. Progress. A Partnership booming.
And down in the valley, a new link of Partnership was being forged, a link of water, an inland sea.
It is hot in the Zambezi Valley, even in the winter time.
Down in the gorge called Kariba, temple of Nyamayimini, the white man’s mighty wall reared up, looking puny from the heights but very big when you climbed down to it, its top jagged and hugely uneven like a giant’s battlements poking up out of the deep black scarred rock of the great gorge. It was hot, the ground burned underfoot and the bush was crackling brown. The air shimmered and vibrated with the hammer and thump of the drills and the shouts of the men and the grinding of the truck engines and the clank of steel on cement and rock. The great Zambezi river banked up around the wall, then it swilled bewilderedly round, then found its way through the huge tunnel hewn in the huge rock banks to where the giant turbines lay entombed. Then far downstream below the wall the river swilled out into the sunshine again, masticated by the turbines and humiliated. Then it collected its ruffled self and it began to rumble on down the gorge again, to become the mighty magnificent river again.
Above the wall a long split tongue of blue water reached slowly, quietly up into the mauve haze of the great valley. It wound its way round hills and it crept up into ravines and it disappeared into the vast jigsawed depression of Central Africa, and into its thick primitive mauve haze. It was drowning the great valley. The Batonka tribesmen were gone. Their huts and their gardens and their shrines were all buried under the slowly rising water, or standing empty and waiting to be drowned. The Batonka had left the blood of eight tribesmen to drown in the dust that would become the ocean bed, the blood of eight men who had seen fit to fight it out with the authorities who the strange wise black politicians said were tricking them. All gone, a way of life become an ocean bed. Down in the great valley only the wild animals remained, the huge population to whom the authorities could not explain about the flood. And they were going to drown too.
And Kariba, the little shack township which had planted itself on the top of the gorge in the middle of the jungle – the eyes of the world were on Kariba. There were newspapermen from all over the world hitching rides through the jungle to Kariba with their cameras and their notebooks to take pictures of the animals struggling in the water. Newspapermen jostling and competing to get on to the few boats of the few sunburnt men who were trying to rescue some of the animals. ‘Operation Noah,’ the newspapermen called it, but there were very few boats and there were very few men.
Chapter Eleven
Joseph Mahoney was ninety miles away from the wall, where the Zambezi was still river.
He stood on a large grey rock. The river ran deep and wide and swift here. He wore only short trousers and his body was thin and hard and very brown. His hair was long and shaggy and his face was matted with beard. He had a stout fishing rod in his hands, fitted with a good Penn Surfmaster reel, and at the end of the nylon line was a wire trace and a bronze spoon the size of a shoe-horn, fitted with a big hook.
Twenty yards upstream a boat was beached. Higher up on the bank lay three big brown scaly bloated crocodiles, dead and beginning to putrefy in the sun and there were flies crawling into the bullet holes in their big carnivorous heads. Samson Ndhlovu was standing astride one of the beasts and he lifted an axe high above his head and he brought it down on to the ridge of the crocodile’s spine. He hacked the bony shell open, then he hacked down the length of the spine and the stink of the rotting reptile flooded out. Then he took his big hunting knife and he jammed it down between the hide and the flesh and he pulled back hard on the knife and the hide tore away from the flesh. Further from the bank in a big dry clearing the earth was a jigsaw of crocodile skins stretched out and pegged to the ground, raw side uppermost, covered in coarse salt, drying in the sun. Next to the clearing was a small lean-to of brushwood and inside it were stacked bundles of crocodile skins.
Mahoney swung the fishing rod backwards over his head then swiped it forward. The reel sang and
the spoon snaked out high over the river and then it fell into the swift water. He gave it a few seconds to sink a little and then he dipped the tip of his rod down and he began to reel in. The spoon wriggled and flashed through the water until it was back at the foot of the rock. He cast it out again and again a dozen times. Then he got what he was waiting for, the sharp heavy strike on the spoon.
He swiped the rod up and held it and worked on his reel and struck again and reeled and struck again and again. Then the line began to streak sideways across the water against his hold, he gave out line and it streaked tight through the water coming up, up to the surface, up, and the big tiger fish broke the surface.
It jumped high in the air in a splash of silver water, and its long yellow and black striped body flashed in the sun. It shook its head furiously, its big mean head with its snapping jaws agape. This was the dangerous part, the time most tiger fish get away, shaking the spoon out of their great jaws.
The tiger fish dropped back into the water in a fury and dived and Mahoney struck again. The fish streaked across against the strain and it broke surface again twisting and shaking and jerking and snapping in the sunlight, then crashing back into the river. Again and again it jumped and shook and Mahoney struck harder and worked on the reel. After fifteen minutes the fish was thrashing near the foot of the rock, straining and dashing round and sideways and back again frothing and churning and shaking.
‘Bring the gaff.’
Samson came running with the stick with the sharp big hook lashed to the end of it. Mahoney locked his reel and held the rod on high and he crouched down on the rock. He chased the big thrashing fish through the water, poking with the hook, feeling and chasing for a chance to sink it into the fish. He jabbed, but the hook glanced off the twisting fish. He chased again and got the hook under its soft white belly and he jerked the stick and the hook sunk home up into its bowels. He straightened and lifted the stick out of the water with the heavy fish snaking and snapping on the end of it. He walked up the bank and shook it off the hook. It jumped and snapped with its rows of long razor teeth that could bite off a man’s finger. He took a stone and carefully, sharply knocked the fish out with it. Then they crouched down to admire it, as men always do with a handsome tiger fish, and stroked their fingers down the long horizontal black and yellow stripes.
‘Beautiful,’ Samson nodded.
‘Cook it,’ Mahoney said in Sindebele, ‘and smoke the jaws, I want to keep them. I will go ahead with skinning the crocodiles.’
‘Yebo, Nkosi.’
Mahoney went down to the bank and prized and levered and wrenched and slashed the skin off one crocodile. The red stinking flesh of the huge reptile lay naked and dismembered on the bank.
Samson came back.
‘Skoff ready, Nkosi.’
Mahoney straightened up, stinking blood on his hands and arms and chest and legs.
‘The crocodile meat is nicely rotten,’ he said. ‘It may make good bait.’
He went to the water’s edge and rubbed sand and water over himself. Then they went back to the camp where the fire smoked over the big black cooking pots and the big black frying pan. The tiger fish lay in it with only its head and tail chopped off, fried golden black in a batter of mealiemeal and impala fat. In the pot was a mass of thick dry mealiemeal porridge. Mahoney lifted the fish out, chopped it in half with a bush knife and they sat round the fire on rocks. Mahoney ate with a fork and his fingers out of a tin plate, Samson ate with just his fingers. They put pieces of porridge into their mouths, then a piece of fish. They ate in silence. When Mahoney was rolling a cigarette, Samson spoke for the first time.
‘Nkosi?’
‘Hmmm?’
Samson smiled his wide smile on his big black face.
‘Does the Nkosi not thirst for beer again?’
Mahoney did not look at him. ‘Not particularly,’ he said, avoiding the issue.
‘Beer is good for a man,’ Samson said, ‘it makes him strong.’
‘And foolish.’
‘Only if swallowed in excess,’ Samson pointed out.
‘That is the trouble, you swallow in excess. Last time at Kariba you swallowed so much I had to collect you from the police station.’
Samson laughed deep, white teeth wide in black face.
‘It was the fault of those Nyasa men, Nkosi, for trying to fight with me.’
‘For trying to save their womenfolk, you mean,’ Mahoney said, and Samson’s laugh seemed to reverberate across the river.
Then there was silence again. Mahoney fetched a book from his tent and read while he finished his cigarette.
‘I thirst for beer,’ Samson said, as if to himself.
Mahoney did not look up. ‘Well, if you have such a great thirst, why do you not make some beer here? You must know how to make the kaffir beer your womenfolk make.’
Samson nodded thoughtfully.
‘That is a good idea, Nkjosi,’ he said, ‘but alas I have no drum big enough.’
‘Use a paraffin tin. Several paraffin tins.’
‘Alas Nkosi,’ Samson said sadly, ‘we do not have enough sugar.’
‘Use honey, then,’ without looking up, ‘go and smoke out some wild bees.’
‘Beer is unpleasant without sugar, Nkosi, and I am very afraid of bees.’
‘How did we get our honey in those bottles, then?’
‘I think those were very sick bees, Nkosi,’ Samson said and Mahoney snorted to suppress a laugh.
‘What you mean,’ Mahoney said at last, ‘is that you feel it’s time we went to Kariba again and you can go and get blind drunk in the shebeens and squander your pay on Kariba Kate!’
Samson smiled sadly and deferentially. ‘Ah! but it is a long time since we went to Kariba, Nkosi.’
‘Three months,’ Mahoney said.
‘Three months, Nkosi?’ Samson said mournfully. ‘That is indeed a long time. And we already have a full load of skins and we are running short of petrol. And sugar,’ he added.
‘Ndhlovu,’ Mahoney said firmly, ‘we have a space in the boat for many more skins. And we have enough petrol to last another four weeks. We are not going to Kariba for at least one month. If you wish to leave me you go with the first other boat we see.’
He knew Samson would not leave him. Had he thought he would, he would have gone to Kariba. Samson looked hurt.
‘Ah! I would not leave the Nkosi,’ he said and Mahoney grunted and went back to his book.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re making too much money out of the Nkosi.’
He put his book aside and threw his cigarette into the fire ashes. He got up off the ground.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘let us skin those crocodiles and bait up the hooks.’
Chapter Twelve
In the late afternoon they put out into the big river. The sun shone low down the valley, the tall river reeds were green golden and the African mahogany cast longer shadows and the distant sides of the wild escarpment were gold-tipped but turning blue. It was quiet, jungle quiet, with only the slide of the river and now the throb of the outboard motor. Both men wore only blood-spattered short trousers, but both had shirts stashed away for the winter evening’s cool. Samson crouched on his haunches in the bows facing for’ard, his thick arms outstretched holding the prow, his black woolly head turning slowly from left to right, scanning the riverbanks, the sun shining black on his strong back. Mahoney sat at the machine, his left hand on the tiller, the air blowing his thick long hair off his hairy face, a cigarette in his mouth. He was also watching the riverbanks. They chugged down the river slowly, looking for a chance shot. A mile below the camp they saw eight buffalo near the water. There was an old bull and five cows, and their horns curled thick and heavy on their heads and their manes were long and shaggy and there were two half-grown calves with them. They were drinking at the water’s edge, the calves in the middle and cows and the bull on the flanks, watching. They looked up as the boat came round the bend and they snorted and turned a
nd stampeded back into the thick bush, the calves galloping beside their mothers and bucking and kicking up into the air with their hindlegs. Another mile, and the river widened out into the lake, twelve miles wide.
The lake disappeared round a twist in the valley twenty miles away. It was studded with islands, hills and ridges that the water was slowly climbing. Tree tops poked through the water in patches, the branches bare and dying, and at the shallow edges of the rising lake the water was creeping through the jungle. An angry high-pitched scream came from the south.
‘Listen!’
It came again, a wailing squeal from great lungs.
‘Elephant.’
‘Look.’
Simultaneously they saw it through the water-logged tree trunks, a big heavy movement of the trees, then a hulking grey body, a mile away. Mahoney veered the boat to the shoreline and opened the throttle. Then he slowed down and manoeuvred the boat through the acres of tree trunks.
The old bull elephant was standing on the edge of the lake, the water covering his great feet and he was milling up and down. He lifted his head and looked shortsightedly up and down the waterline and he lifted his trunk and sniffed the air. He plodded out of the water and bulldozed through the trees for thirty yards and then he plodded experimentally back into the water and sniffed and peered again. Then he flapped his ears bad-temperedly and filled his lungs and let go another anguished trumpet.
‘Poor old bastard.’
‘He is looking for his wives,’ Samson said sympathetically. ‘He has been away for the winter and now he wishes to return to them and he finds water where there was none before.’
‘So spring has come,’ Mahoney said. ‘Poor old chap, he will never find them again.’
Samson shook his head.
‘No, he will have to stay on this side for ever, now.’ They watched the elephant wander distractedly down the lake shore, knocking over trees and bushes in his confusion and irritation and trumpeting his frustration and calling his wives. But no answering trumpet came back. Mahoney turned the boat round and threaded back through the trees to the open water. He opened the throttle and sped down-river on the fringe of the trees. ‘Look.’
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