“It depends where he goes,” Nicholas said. “We could spend the night at any one of a number of villages. But, if he heads off to where we were the other day, or farther east, then I don’t know. Not if they’ve got those celebrations on. In that case, we’ll have to leg it home. I can’t think why Amos hasn’t come back.”
“We couldn’t just sleep out in the open?”
“We could. I’d rather not have to.”
They did it all the time in the army, Stan thought. Even nowadays, when war was completely mechanized; if you were deep in the jungle or wandering around out in the field, you made some kind of shelter till the morning. That was another kind of hunting, too.
A picture came to him of Sunday lunch in the summers, long ago, at his mother’s parents’. And from the other side of the family: his father telling him about Uncle George and Cousin Dunstan, who went to Africa to shoot lions. And they had brought back rugs and horned heads and lots of photographs. His room—in that other grandparents’ house—had had zebra-skin rugs on the floor.
Nicholas said, “I think we should turn back, you know. This chap is playing cat and mouse with us. Come back in a day or two with a team of boys and chase him out of the long grass—that’s the way. All right?”
“He won’t be scared. He won’t chase. He didn’t make a sound when the stones were hitting him. I can’t leave it now, anyway.”
“We’ll come back. I think it’s best, Stan.”
“We might never find him again, and then it would always be unfinished.”
Nicholas sighed. He sat silent, looking out and up at the rocks. At last he said, “Some things never finish. And one can’t expect them to. I remember I once travelled through a drought area with my father. People were walking along the road, looking for a place where there was water. Only one road, everything else like burnt toast, as far as the eye could see. They were walking and crawling and dying in front of us. They lay there or pulled themselves forward on hands and knees, over the ones who couldn’t move. Thousands of them. I saw for the first time how quickly people can die, and in what numbers. It doesn’t bear thinking about. We were in a landrover and we had water, food, we were in the pink of health. We were going to live. We moved through the whole of it and came out untouched. There was nothing we could have done. Hundreds of thousands of them. There are some things in life that are irreconcilable. Undigestible. They don’t finish. You simply have to accept them and do what you can about the other things. The droughts are going to go on. The people are going to continue to die until they leave the place. There’s no way of irrigating it, and no money to carry out such a project if if were possible.”
“I just have this feeling that if I don’t get him and see him die, I can’t leave. I’ve got to stay here till I get him.”
“But not today. You’re falling asleep. And you look like Robert. Let’s go.” Nicholas stood up. He held out his hand to Stan, who took it and heaved himself to his feet.
He felt dizzy and his throat was sore. But he wasn’t sick. It’s grief, he thought. It’s only grief and that will go away as soon as I kill the lion.
“Come on,” Nicholas said.
They started back. Stan felt all right now that someone had taken the decision out of his hands.
It was a beautiful day, hot but dry; a wonderful atmosphere that made everything look clean, fresh and sparkling. It was like a nightmare. The rash had ceased to have any effect on him, although he could see it in red lumps on the backs of his hands. It looked bad, but unimportant ailments were often the ones that appeared most dangerous. The really serious conditions usually remained invisible until it was too late.
“You think we’ll get there before nightfall?” he asked.
“Not if we have to walk all the way,” Nicholas said. “I assume they’ll come back for us. Perhaps something’s happened.”
“But we’re in a different place. How would they know?”
“Stan, you’re whacked, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
They passed through an orchard. The road ran through the middle of it. And they saw three elephant moving slowly across their path off in the distance. Then they came to a meadow of tall yellow grasses—another one of those places that looked almost as though it could be a wheatfield from the Middle West. It seemed like a nice place. Stan kept his head turned towards it. He remembered about going out to Indiana that time to give the lecture, and how he didn’t take Millie along because he didn’t want to. His eyes hurt. He kept them fixed on the same place and realized suddenly that he was seeing a man standing in the field and looking back at him. He stopped.
The man was of medium height, with a strong, well-proportioned build. His hair was brown, pushed back from his forehead. His eyes were looking straight into Stan’s, looking straight into them. It was the same face, the same man who was in the photographs from Millie’s wallet. Stan started forward to meet him.
Nicholas yelled, but Stan didn’t hear. And he didn’t slow down until Nicholas’s hand was on his arm, pulling him back.
“Where are you going? What are you doing? Are you mad?” Nicholas shouted at him.
Stan said, “The man out there. He’s the man in the pictures.”
“What man?”
He turned back to the field. There was no one there. “He was right there just a minute ago. He was standing in the middle of the field.”
“You’re seeing things. You’re raving.”
“No. His eyes—he had a very penetrating look. He’s the man in the picture.”
“Wait,” Nicholas told him. They both fell silent, looking at the field. A light breeze ran through the grass.
“Where did you say?”
Stan pointed.
“All right. There’s something there, but not a man. Look, you can see. The grass doesn’t move in quite the same—”
“That’s him!” Stan called out, as they both saw the grasses break into motion and part like the waves of the sea. The lion rushed out to the side. Nicholas fired off two shots quickly, but missed. The lion kept going on into the trees until they couldn’t see him any longer.
“He’s turned the tables on us,” Nicholas said. “Come on.”
“You’re going for him after all?”
“Of course. He’s stalking us now. Can’t have a thing like that behind us all the way home in the dark. This is one for the books, Stan.”
They waded out into the field, moving carefully. Stan hated this part. He had always disliked the idea of going blind through tall grass after the large animals, but now he detested it additionally, because of Millie—even though that other field had been much easier to walk through and the grass had been only a few inches above knee-level.
Every smallest sound broke on him with tremendous force. He was afraid that if the lion charged, he would have no response left; his system would simply flood itself and stall. He’d had a car like that once. All machines, every body, could fail.
But the lion ran. Stan and Nicholas both fired and sprinted after it, ready to face it if it turned on them.
It kept going, up a hill, and the next thing they heard was screaming.
Nicholas was in front and a little to the left. Stan could see that the lion had hit a man on the other side of the rise, and that there was another man, standing, who was shooting at them.
They dropped down to the ground fast. Stan aimed at the man’s legs, but the stranger had started to scuttle away towards a jeep parked behind a stand of trees.
“What’s happening?” he asked. “Should I let him have it?”
“If you can bring him down without killing him.”
He fired again. As the man reached the trees, he fell over to the side.
“Got him. Left foot somewhere, maybe the ankle.”
Nicholas said, “Get the jeep.” His voice sounded as if he were out of breath. Stan started to answer and then noticed the blood.
“He hit you?”
“Get th
e car, man. Go on.”
It was too late. As Stan had taken his attention away, the lamed man had picked himself up, hopped over to the protection of the trees, and reached the machine. They heard the engine start.
Stan ran out into the open, down the other side of the hill. The jeep was pulling straight away from him at an angle that made it impossible to get any clear line to the driver. He put some shots into the back tyres.
Nicholas joined him by the side of the second man, who lay curled up on the ground, hands clutching his belly and his face so bleared with blood that it looked as though the skin had been taken off with a knife. Nicholas stooped down on one knee. He inspected the man’s clothes and hands, without touching them, then straightened up. He went back to his knapsack, pulled it over to a rock and sat down.
“Who is it?” Stan whispered. “Do you know him?”
“His name is McBride. It took me a moment or two to recognize him.”
“Why was he shooting at us?”
“I’m not sure that he was. I think the lion barged into him because he was in the way and the other one, Marcus Hart, picked up his rife to shoot. Lion kept going and Hart saw us coming, thought we were after him for whatever he was doing out here. Poaching, perhaps. That was McBride’s game.”
“Is he dead?”
“Not yet. As good as.”
Stan turned to the body as if to try to help. Nicholas told him it was no use: the man was bleeding to death. At most, he could be spared a few more minutes, but the procedures involved might simply serve to wake him to a conscious appreciation of his pain.
Stan said, “Okay. Let’s see the arm.”
“I’ll need help,” Nicholas told him. “Bloody shame we couldn’t get the jeep.”
The bullet had landed as Nicholas was drawing a bead on the running lion and turning. It had entered just above the left elbow, ploughed its way up the arm and come out at the back of the shoulder. There was a lot of blood down his back and from the upper part of the arm, where the wound was open. Stan did his best to clean everything while Nicholas cursed and told him he’d make the kind of doctor Dr Crippen was. Then Stan took a long time doing the bandaging, which wasn’t easy, since the trail of the bullet went around and up over the side. “And you’d better have some of the miracle pills, just in case,” he said. He shook out a few antibiotic capsules and offered his canteen. Nicholas took the medicine and drank.
All this time, Stan realized, he hadn’t thought about Millie. Suddenly she came back: her head inclined, her eyes looking down, her hand on the back of a chair. But he had been unfaithful from the beginning—he had always intended to be. And Crippen was the name of the doctor who was famous for killing his wife.
“We can’t take what’s-his-name with us,” he said. “McBride. We’ll have to come back for the body tomorrow.”
Nicholas laughed. “Come back by all means. You’d be lucky to find so much as a button. Everything that can walk, creep or fly will be making a meal of him soon. Very clean country, Africa. Nothing wasted. You might go through his pockets, take his watch.”
Stan knelt over McBride. There was no sign of movement. He found the watch, two knives, a wallet and some sodden papers. He tried to wipe the blood off with handfuls of grass. The wallet was completely clean and stuffed with banknotes. Nicholas stood up. Stan shouldered the knapsacks.
“I can take mine,” Nicholas said.
“Just carry your rifle.”
“You were right about the man in the field. I thought you were seeing things.”
“It wasn’t this man. At least—he’s hurt so bad, it’s hard to tell what he looked like, but I don’t think so. Wait. I’ve got a picture of him. Two. Millie had them in her wallet.” He brought out the two photographs and held them up.
“That’s who it was.”
“That’s Harry Lewis,” Nicholas said. “You must have been dreaming, after all. He’s dead.”
Stan put the pictures back. They made their way carefully to the road and began the long walk home to camp.
*
They moved forward in silence. Nicholas wondered if they would be able to make camp that evening. He began to doubt it. And now he had blood on him; there would be more than one predator after that. They’d come from miles off. Stan was temporarily off his head, but he could still shoot straight. It might be all right after all. Not a soul on the road—it was extraordinary. One would think the country had been evacuated. Perhaps they really were all at some enormous ceremony. Wonderful day for it.
They walked through a shady patch of tree-covered ground and he felt uplifted by the beauty of the place.
Stan said, “I’ve figured it out, now. He’s the lion. He found out some way of doing it. He could change back and forth. They got him in town, but unless we get him when he’s a lion, he’s still alive.”
They came out into full sunlight again and Nicholas stumbled. At last the penny had dropped and Stan knew about Millie and Harry, but couldn’t come to terms with it. This was his version. In the position they were in, it was dangerous to hold such an idea. It would be a danger even if this lion hadn’t been a rogue and unpredictable. There was a point where you could ruin your life yourself, though no one else would be able to do it to you. There were people who give up just at the time when they might win. They throw it away.
“Stan, I may need your help,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. It’s like Dracula. Maybe we even need a silver bullet to kill him.”
“Listen to me. I want you to give me one of the photographs of Harry.”
Stan took out his wallet and handed over the picture that showed just the face of the man.
“Now, listen to me. A great many peculiar things have been going on. And no one about the place. If I can’t keep walking, if we have to go our separate ways, then—you may run into strangers. I don’t know what’s happening, but if they threaten you and you can’t make them understand anything, just hold up the picture. All right? This was his district. It should do the trick.”
“Do you feel bad?”
“I’m looking ahead. You never know.”
Shortly afterwards they heard shots coming from far away and followed by a short series of sounds that might have been explosions.
“Doesn’t sound too good,” Stan said. “What do you suppose that could be?”
“We’ll find out soon enough. We’re walking straight into it.”
“Do you think we’re going to make it?”
“You ask some bloody stupid questions, Stan. I don’t know, and that’s the truth.”
“Yes, of course. And it hurts too, doesn’t it? That was the one I wasn’t going to ask. Let’s talk about something.”
“Perhaps later. I think we ought to save our energy.”
“They say soldiers in the jungle get all kinds of problems from not being allowed to talk. It’s supposed to be psychologically debilitating to march in total silence, not even being able to sing. They say it makes all the work twice as hard.”
“It can be even harder, having to listen.”
Two hours later they found the remains of Marcus Hart in his jeep, which had been set on fire and still reeked of burning metal and rubber and flesh. It looked as if he had been trying to change a tyre, had been surprised by someone, or by several people, and had then taken shelter inside.
“They have guns?” Stan asked.
“A couple of old muskets.”
“This guy Lewis could have been arming his boys.”
“Not here, Stan. We muddle along without revolutions. We even got through Independence without one.”
“There’s nothing like one or two ideals for toppling governments.”
“Of course, now they have Hart’s rifle. There’s that.”
The sun was lower. They kept walking. Stan went off into a daze, seeming to dream while he was moving. He saw disconnected parts and scenes of past times again, images of people he knew. He thou
ght he heard voices talking to him, and singing in a chorus.
“Stan,” Nicholas said.
“What?”
“This is as far as I can go.” He sat down at the side of the road on a flat stone. “Leave me one of the haversacks. And you go on. Send back a car. You have enough ammunition?”
“I’ll stay with you.”
“If you like. But if you get a move on now, you could make camp before it’s too dark to see, and come back. Remember the photograph if there’s trouble. Put it in your breast pocket, where you can get at it easily.”
“You take the wallet we found on McBride. It’s full of money.”
“We’ll turn it in.”
“I don’t see why. Pay off your mortgage.”
“Honest as the day is long. I know what that is—it’s the blood money they were going to pay the men in town for killing Harry. I wouldn’t touch it.”
“Okay. But you take charge of it.”
They divided up the contents of the packs until Stan was satisfied. Then he said, “Just in case—”
“Hurry, Stan. When the light goes, you know what it’s like.”
Stan said that if they never met again, what last wish did Nicholas have, because he himself had none. Nicholas said that neither did he, and hurry up. They shook hands. Stan turned twice and waved.
*
They picked Nicholas up the next morning. He had lost consciousness shortly after Stan was out of sight and had lain shivering on the stone, sometimes coming out of his coma and then being pulled back into dreams. He had woken to the realization that the light was almost gone, had risen to his feet, staggered over to a clump of trees he was still able to mark out against the night sky and, after many attempts, had managed to climb up and wedge himself and his rifle into a nook, where he had once more passed out. The dawn had roused him and brought him down to the road, to begin walking again. And so the rescue team came upon him.
They also recovered the burned-out jeep, with what was left of Hart inside it. And Amos—he was the first to set foot in camp—had turned up late in the evening the day before; he had had to walk back after the landrover broke down on his way to rejoin the others. They never saw McBride, although as Nicholas had predicted, there was a button near the place where he’d been lying. And they never found Stan.
Binstead's Safari Page 19