And he fought the baboons, but he was more cautious now that the rifle was gone. They came down from the cliffs for the succulent rain-made tubers and berries and he chased them back with firebrands. He gathered food and stored it in the main cave, deep in the sand and high up in the kloof where Smith had found the Bushman bones and ostrich eggshells. In the winter he would live here but it was summer and he filled it with food. It became his storehouse.
The melons he left alone. They grew fat and ripe and did not have to be picked. There would be more than enough for him in the main canyon, for the baboons no longer came here. Once the canyon had been dominated by the animals. Now it was his canyon. Its summer wealth belonged to him.
And then one day the baboons trapped him.
He was hunting lizards along the top of the outside ridge, the smallest one that resembled a thumb from the top of the high peak. It was the shortest spur but there was no way down from it. It fell down in steps that were fissured and split, where rain water hid in shallow pools from the prying sun, where quick lizards waited for heavy flies, where bees found the saxifrage growing and blooming in impossible pockets of black soil.
He was halfway out on it when he heard them barking. He looked back and then climbed to a high slab and let them see him, let the wrench glint in the sun, shouted at them, grimaced. But for the first time they did not retreat; their leader urged them on, bristling at the enemy who was alone now in the sun.
Some of the animals hung back: the old ones who had known the ambush, known the terrible rifle; the females concerned with their young; the half-grown males afraid. But the others advanced down the narrowing spine, barking and chattering and boasting of their strength.
He shouted and advanced, threw stones at them. They backed away but came forward again. There was no time to build a fire, make a firebrand; there was no way down the dizzy cliffs that surrounded him. He began to back away, his mind seizing on a dozen ways of fighting them or escaping and rejecting them all. They had him. They’d trapped him. He would die.
Now they were drifting around him, closing in, forcing him to the edge of the cliff. And there was excitement in them, different from before: the young males boastful, edging closer; the few older males objecting, keeping to the higher places, the safe places, excited too, but cautious. They were going to kill him.
He edged away but the semicircle followed, closing in. A young male was in front of him, shifting and grimacing, gleeful, skipping from rock to rock, boasting to the troop. They’d rush him and it would be over. But he’d kill too; he’d kill one of them, maybe two. There was a cold cramp in his stomach but it wasn’t fear, it was excitement. Not the frenzied excitement of the baboons but something he was above, something he controlled—excitement that was cold and logical and human.
He found his spot, the sun behind him. He waited.
The troop stopped moving. They found places and squatted on the ledges, on the flat black rock, watching him. Then one of them broke away and bounded toward him, sullen and cautious: the new leader. He was the first; the others would break away any moment now and swarm over him.
But the other big males did not move. They sat tense and motionless until the tension became too great; then they exploded in a fit of jabbering. The leader moved back and forth in front of him, twenty feet away, a mastiff with an ape’s body. He charged, but in the last instant, before the spear jabbed him, he recoiled and rolled away. The troop screamed approval. Now he was up circling and O’Brien moved, knowing somehow that the others would not attack from behind. This was a duel, a trial by combat.
He stabbed with the short spear, keeping the weaving animal away, working him around, trying to keep the sun in his eyes. The leader rushed again; he jabbed viciously, hit the baboon’s chest. The leader grabbed and the spear was gone, torn from his grasp almost without effort. Now there was only the wrench. He crouched lower, his hands sweaty on the hot steel. The leader backed away from him fingering his bloody chest. In the rocks around them the silence was total, no muscle moved. The animal looked at his bloody fingers, then seemed to forget the wound as he came closer and circled. There would be no feinting now; there would be a final rush and one of them would die.
They circled like boxers, waiting. The wrench glittered, swayed like a cobra’s head. The leader’s long arms searched the space between them, measuring it. Then the baboon lunged forward, mouth open, yellow fangs ready for the final, terrible bite.
But the wrench was quicker, guided by an instinct that was primitive, brutal, animal-fast. It flashed through the air, blurred, silvery. It smashed against the big head. The baboon stumbled away, forgetting him, reaching weakly for his head. Then he died and sprawled on the black rock.
O’Brien stood, fighting for breath. There was a low moan from the troop. All of them stirred, the hair rising from their necks, fangs bared. Now anything could happen. It was up to him. He stood glaring at them. He picked up the spear and walked toward the baboons as if they didn’t exist, striding toward them with determination and force. A big male moved toward him, fangs bared; the troop waited.
O’Brien didn’t stop. He leaped forward to a raised slab, filled his great lungs with air. Then he screamed: a wild, terrible scream that had never been heard before on the black mountain, a cry of such power and ferocity that it caused the young to whimper and cringe, back away, run. And then the females fled with their babies clinging to them in blind terror. There was a split second when the remaining males stood trembling, uncertain. Then O’Brien charged, waving the glittering wrench and the two-pronged spear. He ran straight at the big warrior in his path and another scream started and the air trembled and shook with it.
The animals fled, terrorized, beaten. O’Brien stood in the sun, chest heaving, muscles rippling beneath taut copper skin bathed in sweat.
He began laughing, and as he walked along, the narrow canyon below caught the sound and brought it back to him, deep and genuine and elemental.
CONTENTS
NightHawk Books
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
The Sands of Kalahari Page 23