I knew where I was going to abandon the Cruiser and the guests—at the baobab tree, a notable attraction this foursome had yet to see. I chose the tree for the same reasons we often picked it for sundowners. The giant trunk provided a sense of protection, privacy if needed, and an intriguingly hollow interior. It stood alone on the plain, with wide-angle views in all directions. Even better for today’s purpose, the guests would have an unimpeded and, I hoped, reassuring sightline to me as I walked to and from the river.
On the way there, I dawdled a time or two to deliver pertinent facts about the world’s largest succulent. The tree loomed like an ancient citadel. I still hadn’t worked out how much to reveal about the hiatus ahead. Did a somewhat routine scouting mission by a certified professional safari guide require an explanation? A guide the four had trusted from the moment they arrived at Motembo? I could make up a story about scouting for dangerous wildlife. But that seemed ridiculous after our intentional, up-close encounter with a coalition of lions. My real purpose, scouting for dangerous humans, implied a far more worrisome threat. Jackson had been correct in cautioning me to say little.
I parked the Cruiser under a mess of crazily forked baobab branches, facing the green scrim that marked the river. The sun at low angle cast a rosy glow westward. Griff got busy snapping photos. Nina and Abby commented on an alien plant that had sprouted from a crease in the tree bark. Todd stretched and rotated his shoulders, peering up at limbs the circumference of oil drums. While the novelty of the location diverted their attention, I clipped the radio to my belt, slid my rifle from the rack beneath the dashboard, and stood.
“Wait here,” I said. Then I stepped down and walked away.
* * *
I took long, purposeful strides to escape as fast as I could. Each footfall detonated a cloud of dust. I stifled a sneeze and regretted not bringing my canteen. Then I saluted myself for having left it behind, a sure sign to the guests that I would return without delay. I could almost feel four pairs of eyes drilling holes into the back of my shirt.
As a matter of course, I scanned the landscape for telling shapes, colors, or movements. The only animals I saw were the usual impalas and a distant herd of zebras. Normally, a walk in the bush would provide a wealth of interesting distractions—things as small as a column of ants or a thistle on a bush. Nothing diverted me now. I hurried past the three termite mounds and the thicket of feverberry bushes. Near the marula grove, a baboon sentry spotted me and sounded a warning. Yak! Yak! Yak!
I skirted the trees. Crossing the last stretch of plane, I said a silent goodbye to the four people waiting in the Cruiser. In a few more strides, I dropped out of sight.
Good Sam’s blind stood a short distance upstream from the trail I descended into the ravine. The water level was low, in a few places little more than a shiny coating on the mud. A mokoro had been grounded and hauled up near Good Sam’s blind. Motembo’s ever-vigilant lookout saw me coming and was already climbing down the ladder.
I hurried toward him. “I didn’t know you had a mokoro.”
“I don’t. It belongs to the hunter who showed up a while ago.”
My heart sank. “A poacher?”
“No. At least not the kind you worry about. He has a shotgun, only good for small game.”
Small-scale poaching was a problem we encountered frequently in the reserve. As long as the hunting was intended for the pot, to feed local families, and the hunters stayed away from our vehicles, we looked the other way. Jackson even encouraged Good Sam and his sons to quietly bag a sustainable supply of game in return for their services to the camp. I felt cautiously optimistic.
“Which way did he go?”
“That way,” Sam said, pointing. “Over the rocks to the other side. I haven’t seen or heard anything from the people Jackson’s worried about.”
My shoulders relaxed as if unscrewed from heavy armor. “Good. We’ll drive south and enter the ravine downstream. If he comes back, he’ll be out of our sight. Thanks, Sam.”
I was turning away when he must have gotten a look at my wrist. “He has on a bracelet like yours.”
“What?”
“The hunter. This many seeds.” He placed thumb and forefinger against his wrist a few inches apart.
“A lucky bean seed bracelet?”
He nodded.
My breath caught in my throat. “What else about him did you notice?”
“He’s tall, with plenty of muscle. Looked straight at me. He has a scar here.” He ran a finger across the bridge of his nose.
The news had barely detonated before I started backing away, in a rush to relay the message. “His name is Skinner. He’s trouble, Sam. I’ll try to let Marks know he’s here.”
Caper bushes grabbed and scraped my shins as I scrambled back up the trail, oblivious to every sensation except the chokehold of alarm. Skinner hadn’t paddled this far to hunt birds or hares. He was connecting with poachers via the river, just as Baba had guessed. I stumbled past the leadwood tree, which was aquiver with chattering monkeys. What if Skinner had come to deliver more poison to his underworld partners, the same men Marks was after? The possibility of a second break-in at Swales unnerved me almost as much as the thought of more poisoned wildlife. I was breathing hard when I emerged from the ravine. Before I could unclip my radio, the receiver buzzed.
“Jackson?” I said.
The radio crackled in my ear. “Bonesy, it’s me. A ranger patched me in.” A strangled, gasping sound came through the static. “Something terrible has happened.”
It took me a moment to recognize the voice. “Baba?” Was he crying?
“We found Zola. She’s alive.”
“What? You found her?”
“By the river.” He took a deep, ragged breath. “A few days ago, Skinner told her about a cartel of poachers—well armed, with a web of paid lookouts. He boasted about his own involvement and tried to recruit her. Later, he overheard her repeating everything over the radio to Marks. He heard her say she loved him. She told me he was wild with rage.” I heard a wrenching sob. “She could barely talk, Bonesy. He beat her. He beat her almost to death. Then he left her, bleeding and unconscious.”
I was unsure whether the next sob came from him or me.
“He told her he was going to kill Marks—find him and kill him. That was early yesterday. She thought he left in a mokoro. He could be there by now.”
“He is here. He was seen leaving the river some time ago. Does Marks know?”
“We couldn’t reach him.”
“I’ll find him, Baba. Tell Zola I’ll find him.”
Exactly whom I was going to find, I hadn’t specified. Was I going to stop Skinner or warn Marks? Either way, every minute mattered. Skinner was hurt and furious and running on rage. And he was dangerously unconcerned about his own safety, judging from the mokoro left in the open and his face-to-face encounter with Sam. I imagined he was half crazy yet also ferociously single-minded in his quest for revenge.
All I knew of Marks’s location was that he had gone out of radio contact, probably because of distance or a barrier such as a hill or a dense growth of trees. Picking up his days-old tracks without additional information would take time and more luck than I could hope for. Worse, Skinner already knew where Marks was. He had traveled here, landed his mokoro, and gone off in the correct direction. I shuddered to think about the network of informants pitted against Marks and the other rangers, a network that included Skinner.
Stopping him from getting to Marks before I did became my all-consuming, fire-in-the-belly objective. I ran, slid, fell, got up, and clambered down the same trail I had followed to the river minutes earlier. Good Sam had gone out of sight, perhaps back inside the blind, but the mokoro sat where I had seen it before. I willed myself to focus, to slow the pistons pounding in my chest so that I could calmly, methodically track down Zola’s attacker.
I tried not to picture Zola lying injured, bleeding, and left to the hyenas or whatever scavenger sniffed her out first. I couldn’t imagine my father’s anguish when he found her—anguish coupled with profound relief that Skinner hadn’t dragged her off, never to be seen again.
Skinner’s waffle-soled boots had stamped clear imprints in the shelf of mud supporting the mokoro. The spacing and depth of the prints fit his stride and weight. I followed the tracks over the same stones he had stepped on, across the river and up the bank on the other side. He had made no effort to conceal his movements. At the top of the ridge, broken branches and trampled, fresh-smelling grass marked the path forward. A buffalo would have done less damage. Either Skinner didn’t think he would be followed, or he didn’t care. Tracking him would be straightforward if I kept my wits about me.
I followed the trail at a fast clip, jogging from one easily visible marker to the next without a pause. Minutes ticked by, maybe an hour, maybe more. Sweat ran like fingers down my back. My determination to move fast almost equaled the stomach-churning dismay I felt with every step that took me farther from the guests I had abandoned at the baobab tree. Leaving them alone in the wild was an unimaginable breach of guide protocol and ethics. I blinked away a hot, furious pool of moisture in my eyes. In addition to his other crimes, Skinner had endangered four tourists and possibly ruined my career.
I consoled myself with the thought that Nina, Griff, Abby, and Todd would cope perfectly well in my absence. Unlike me, they had water. They would be safe in the fortress of the Cruiser, buttressed by an almost full tank of gas and a key in the ignition. When they realized something was amiss, they would simply drive back to camp. They probably had gone already.
This line of thought comforted me. With the other guides away, I imagined the Americans arriving in camp to a warm, impromptu welcome by Jaleen, Teaspoon, and Nate, who were no strangers to the unexpected. The staff would provide an early brunch and drive the four to the airstrip in time for their flight. Then someone would go to the river to ask Good Sam where I was. He would tell them I was chasing a bad guy named Skinner. Questions about that could wait. With twelve new guests due in camp that afternoon, no one would have time to worry about me.
At least that’s the story I told myself. The encyclopedia of alternate outcomes, things that could go horribly wrong, I shoved into a small, dark wrinkle of my brain. Thinking about lost guests, injured guests, or even dead guests was a futile, nonproductive, ridiculous exercise. The priority now, the undeniably more urgent life-or-death matter, was preventing Skinner from carrying out his mission. The man was an evil blight, a sociopath who massacred animals, who had beaten my sister nearly to death, and who was at that very moment hell-bent on murder.
My loaded rifle hung from my shoulder. I gripped the strap as I trotted through the grass, aware of the elephant-stopping firepower pressed against my back. The thought of using the rifle to kill a man was so foreign to me that my mind resisted the puzzle of what I was going to do when I found Skinner. How did I expect to rein him in? What was my plan? Could I find my way to the calculating, cold-blooded zone I knew from hunting—the icy calm that enabled me to aim, fire, and kill? The prospect filled me with revulsion even as I vowed to stop Skinner, whatever it took.
I ran, jogged, or walked, depending on the clarity or obscurity of the prints leading me forward. The land was new to me, beyond Motembo’s borders. A few times, I lost the trail and circled to find it again. As the morning drifted into afternoon, my most immediate concern became the sun hanging like a lantern over my head. Searing, nearly vertical rays broiled the top of my hat and produced a dazzle on the crabbed, bleached earth. Skinner’s tracks lost definition in the glare. I slowed my pace to pay closer attention to the powdery topsoil and crispy vegetation. My mouth was gummy with thirst.
The tracks led to the shade of a mahogany tree where Skinner must have stopped for a rest. His prints formed a few tight circles, and I saw a butt-sized dent where he had sat. As much as I welcomed the cool of the shade, I welcomed even more the chance to make up time. Marks and his patrol had covered an impressive stretch of hinterland since his call to Jackson the previous night. I was beginning to worry the chase might not end before dark.
The plain rose up to a rumple of dun-colored hills. Radio contact would be sketchy from there even if I dared chance a call. I didn’t. If Skinner happened to be closing in on Marks, the sound of the radio could lead him directly to his target. In any event, Marks had probably turned off his radio to avoid detection by the poachers he was tracking. As a precaution, I turned mine off too.
I had crested a gentle slope when I registered the first faint whiff of wood smoke. The scent brought me to a halt. I sniffed the impacted air, hoping I was wrong. Fire was a monstrous, terrifying prospect on a day so hot that it seemed a snap of the fingers could ignite a person’s hand. Smoke rose above the western horizon, pale and almost invisible against the exhausted afternoon sky. But there was no mistaking the dusky perfume of burning wood. Either an abandoned campfire had roared back to life, or poachers had set the earth ablaze to flush out animals they wanted to kill. Neither possibility suggested a controlled and harmless burn. Fire on the drought-baked savannah almost always spelled chaos and disaster, an inferno of heat and death that sent every creature running in fear.
The dead calm offered some hope. Without a wisp of breeze to fan the flames, fire would take its time advancing up and down the hills. This was the only good news in the entire ghastly nightmare. I had no choice but to press forward, toward the burn. A whiff of smoke wasn’t stopping Skinner. His prints had gotten farther apart, heavier at the toe. He was running.
I matched his pace, step for step, gasping for breath in the suffocating atmosphere. He was closing in on Marks, I was sure—rushing to exact revenge before fire scattered the patrol and forced him to retreat. Caution slowed my feet whenever the tracks led over a rise or around a bend. My rifle had a greater range than Skinner’s shotgun, but surprise was an advantage I did not want to lose.
The sun had crossed its zenith when I summited a slope ribbed in granite. In quick succession three things happened. A furl of desiccating wind blasted me in the face. A herd of frightened impalas raced by, pronking and wheezing. And a gunshot rang out, followed by two more in quick succession. The shots had come from somewhere ahead of me, beyond the next stack of hills.
In a panic, I ran, slipped, fell, got up, and ran again toward the sound, toward the fire, toward Skinner, Marks, and the animal slaughterers Marks was determined to stop. It sickened me to hope that the shots I had heard were from poachers killing animals fleeing the fire and not from Skinner’s gun. A Noah’s Ark of easy targets was headed in the opposite direction. Rodents, birds, and creatures large and small rushed past me, caught up in the climate of fear. In their haste, they seemed oblivious to the human swimming upstream. A springbok nearly charged into me before darting to the side. I could only hope no buffalos would thunder my way. A wrenching thought snaked into my head: if ivory poachers had started the fire, I needn’t worry about oncoming elephants.
Smoke stung my eyes and throat. I coughed and squinted into the haze. Flames had crowned a hill a kilometer or two away. A sounder of warthogs raced down the slope. Then, at last, I spotted what I had come for. In a copse of old-growth hardwood between the fire and me, I saw movement. Not animals, but a man.
I crouched low and moved closer. Unshouldering my rifle, I crept in for a better look. I blinked, taking in the scene before me. The man wasn’t Skinner. He was a ranger I recognized from the village. And there was another ranger with him. The men stood next to a third person sprawled on the ground. I straightened up and ran. The fallen man was Marks.
Shock and disbelief distorted the rangers’ faces. They recognized me right away and stepped to the side. I knelt next to Marks’s lifeless body while they told me what had happened. The assassin had surprised them, they said—a man with a shot
gun. He yelled, “Your precious Zola is dead. I killed her.” Then he fired once at close range and ran.
The rangers said they fired back. They might have wounded him. They gave chase, but not for long because the wind came up, and they feared the flames would engulf them all. So they had rushed back to claim Marks’s body before making a run for safety.
One of the men handed me a canteen. I drank my fill and handed it back, speechless, numb with grief and defeat. My tears fell on Marks’s bloody shirt. Ash drifted through the acrid air and landed on his ruined face. The fire was closing in, but I almost didn’t care. The metallic scent of blood rose up as I helped the men wrap the corpse in a tarp, which we then roped to a pole. The men hoisted the pole to their shoulders, one man on each end. Marks’s body swayed heavily between them.
“Our Jeep isn’t far, over those hills,” one of them said, pointing. A hot gust of wind pushed at the knotted tarp. “Follow us.”
“No. I’m going after him.”
They stared at me with raised eyebrows but didn’t try to change my mind. The one who had offered water gave me his canteen and a few sticks of biltong. The other clenched my fist in his. He held my eyes in a look so solemn that I knew he thought he might be the last person to see me alive. A hundred meters away, a tree exploded like a flare. Pockets of flame dotted the landscape. A bushbuck raced past, its singed coat trailing smoke. The rangers were turning to leave when I remembered to tell them the most important thing.
“His name is Skinner. The killer’s name is Skinner.”
* * *
Skinner had taken a route perpendicular to the path of the fire, like a swimmer trying to escape a riptide by swimming parallel to shore. Not a bad strategy if he went fast enough and the direction of the wind could be trusted. The sky to the west was flushed an angry orange. The air to the north looked brighter, a sun-washed backdrop to the smoky haze.
The Story of Bones Page 25