by Tony Park
He heard a snort.
Braedan melted into the shadow of a stout leadwood tree. As a precaution he raised the butt of the .303 into his shoulder. He peered through the curtain of crisp, golden-brown leaves and saw movement. It was an ear, rotating like an antenna, searching out the snap of a twig or the swish of fabric against grass that would give away a stalking hunter.
Braedan could hear his own pulse. He licked his lips as he watched the rhino. It was no more than fifty metres from him. He glanced up, looking for branches within reach. He'd have to climb the tree if the rhino saw him and charged. Tiny mopane flies buzzed around his face, seeking the moisture from his eyes and mouth.
The rhino shifted its body so that it was facing him head-on. It lifted its head and sniffed the air. Braedan took a pace backwards and almost jumped as something hard and pointed pressed into his back. Slowly he turned and saw Doctor Nkomo's unsmiling face at the far end of a Brno .458 hunting rifle.
Doctor let go of the stock of the rifle, but held the heavy weapon up with his right hand alone, his finger curled around the trigger. He motioned for Braedan to continue moving backwards.
Braedan was furious. He was angry with himself for not hearing Nkomo sneak up on him, and indignant that the man had the hide and the stupidity to stick the barrel of a loaded rifle in his back. He was ready to give the man a piece of his mind, followed by a klap in the face.
When they had backed up sufficiently for the rhino to lose interest and trot off in the opposite direction, Doctor spoke first. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I could ask you the same question,’ Braedan said. ‘What the fuck do you think you're doing sticking a loaded weapon in my back?’ There was another man, a younger African with his hair in tight dreadlocks, carrying a .303 who stood a pace behind Doctor, his weapon held at the high port, across his chest, ready for action.
Doctor's face remained impassive, despite Braedan's growing anger. ‘You were stalking a rhino, with your rifle up at your shoulder. Why?’
Braedan stuck his jaw forward and narrowed his eyes. ‘What I was doing was checking the security here. Mr Bryant knows all about it.’
‘Then why didn't he tell me?’
‘Because, like me, he probably wanted to test the security here. It was ridiculously easy for me to get onto the ranch.’
Doctor had his rifle lowered now, but still had his finger through the trigger guard. ‘You came in via the dry riverbed. We know that is where the poachers have entered in the past. We are not stupid.’
‘Then why don't you do something about it?’
‘You think we did not?’
Braedan didn't know what Doctor was talking about. Had they, he wondered, been following him all along?
Doctor gestured to the young man behind him. ‘This is Edward. He is one of our new men. His job, and that of another man, is to stay hidden and watch the riverbed from a place in the rocks on the edge of the cutting. He radioed in to tell me an unfamiliar white man had snuck in under the fence. I told him to follow you – although I was fairly certain it was you. But I had to make sure.’
Braedan exhaled. He set his rifle down, butt first in the ground, and reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. He took one out and lit it, and as an afterthought offered the pack to the others. Doctor declined, but Edward smiled, for the first time, and took two. He put one between his lips and filed the other behind his ear. Braedan lit the smoke for him. His heart had slowed to its normal rate, and the tension was draining from the encounter, but Doctor was still not happy.
‘You did well,’ Braedan conceded. ‘But I found this.’ He unhooked the snare wire from his belt and held it up.
Doctor shrugged. ‘I am sure the former head of security was taking money from the war veterans and turning a blind eye to their snaring. Mr Bryant thinks the man became greedy and began working with them to kill rhino. Since he left, my men and I have collected many snares. We must have missed that one.’
‘I saw boot prints on the game trail, near where I found the snare.’ Braedan pointedly looked down at Doctor's veldskoen ankle boots.
‘We patrol on foot here. You will find the footprints of myself and my men everywhere on the ranch.’
Braedan rubbed his jaw. Doctor was surly and arrogant, and clearly still annoyed that Braedan had been installed over his head. Braedan wondered whether Doctor might have taken up where his predecessor had left off, or whether young Edward might be doing a little snaring of his own to fill in the long hours of guard duty. On the other hand, everything Doctor had told him could be the truth and, apart from missing a single snare, he'd been running an efficient security operation since his former boss had been fired.
‘You don't trust us, do you?’ Doctor said.
‘I didn't say that.’
‘So what do we do now?’
Braedan checked his watch. ‘Well, since there don't seem to be any poachers about today and we've just been tracking each other through the bush, I suggest we go back to the house and have a beer.’
For a moment Braedan thought he saw Doctor almost smile.
*
The drive from Bulawayo to Hwange brought back many memories for Tate, most of them good, a few of them heart-wrenching.
The afternoon sun was slanting in through the Hilux's sloping windscreen, so they'd kept the windows wound up and the airconditioner on. Tate preferred using Land Rovers in the bush. Their boxy shape and small straight-up-and-down windows meant the driver was in shade most of the time.
He was thinking about vehicle comparisons partly to keep his mind off Natalie. She was beautiful – even he could see that – but if he looked at her too much or talked to her too much he was worried the dam of emotion inside him might burst. He'd seen the way Braedan leered at her, and as far as Tate was concerned they could have each other. She was writing a book about herself – a self-absorbed, self-indulgent quest if ever there was one – so it would make sense that she spend more time with her saviour, Braedan. He'd given her what he thought she needed for the magazine article she was supposedly writing about the plight of the black rhino. He'd almost felt ashamed of talking of the deaths of the men – good men – killed in the war on poaching. It was almost as though he was sullying their memory by condensing each of their deaths into just a headline for the benefit of her pampered first-world audience.
Charles Moyo – killed in a contact with poachers, 1984, shot in the head by an AK-47 round. Tate had thrown up the first time he'd seen a man's brains spilled in the dust. Matthew Sibanda – stabbed to death, 1989, in a supposed shebeen brawl. Tate later found out that Matthew had overheard two men talking about a rhino horn buy. He'd followed them when they left the village bar, but they had picked up the tail, recognised him as an off-duty ranger and murdered him. Patrick Mangwana – died 2003, screaming in the bush as he bled to death because there was no helicopter to take him to hospital, and no diesel fuel for the one serviceable Land Rover left at Robins Camp. Tate had gripped the slippery, torn end of Patrick's femoral artery in a bid to slow the blood flow, but it had been of no use. He'd been drenched in a good man's blood and had held Patrick's hand as he'd died.
Tate had felt a perverse satisfaction seeing Natalie's face whiten with the telling of these stories. She'd had her own brush with death in the bush war, and her aunt had been murdered, but she needed to know that the fighting had never really ended.
He followed the Bryants off the tar road, near the town of Hwange, home to the once thriving Wankie Colliery and associated power station. Both ventures were in near ruins now. Unemployment meant hunger, and hunger meant more poaching. The road to Sinamatella Camp had seen better days. The Hilux's hard suspension juddered on the corrugated dirt surface. Tate eased off on the accelerator to avoid the Cruiser's dust cloud.
‘It's beautiful countryside,’ Natalie said, breaking the silence.
Tate nodded. She was right. He could tell the rains had been good here as there was a decent amount of wa
ter in the Lukosi River when they crossed it. Tate pointed out a couple of female kudu drinking from a pool of water. They took flight as the four-by-fours passed, curling their short white tails over their rumps as they bounded away in a series of high leaps.
‘They're scared,’ Natalie observed. ‘The poaching must be bad here.’
Tate said nothing. He had neither the time nor the inclination to educate her about the situation in the park. Unlike many whites, Tate wasn't prepared to write off Hwange or any of Zimbabwe's other national parks. Rumours abounded about the extent of poaching, and these half-truths were recorded as gospel in countless email messages of doom and gloom. Conventional wisdom had it that there were no animals left in Hwange, that game had been massacred en masse by government soldiers and that poaching was rife.
The truth was that poaching occurred in Hwange, as it did in every single national park in Africa. During his time as a camp warden Tate had lost men to poachers, and his men had killed poachers. People living near the park – many of them farm invaders who had been unable to maintain the land and keep it productive – took to snaring. The target of these indiscriminate traps was buck, such as impala or kudu, but all too often inquisitive predators – lion, leopard, painted dog and hyena – ended up getting snared. A poacher returning to check his wire nooses would not be game to go near a snarling, writhing leopard and unless parks and wildlife rangers stumbled across the trapped animal it would usually die in extreme pain.
In response, anti-poaching patrols and researchers working in the park devoted countless hours to walking the bush and collecting wire snares. A marvellous interpretive centre devoted to the endangered African painted dog had been built near Main Camp, Hwange's headquarters. The substantial building had been constructed with mud bricks reinforced with snare wire collected by the centre's anti-poaching team.
Snaring was concentrated on the fringes of the park, but Hwange was massive and Tate knew that deep in the park, far from the reach of poachers and all but the hardiest of self-sufficient travellers, there were marvels to be seen. On patrol Tate had encountered herds of thirty or forty sable and roan, antelope considered endangered in other parts of Africa; herds of a thousand or more Cape buffalo; painted dogs, and elephants by the hundreds.
‘I'm looking forward to the count,’ Natalie said, obviously too stubborn to take his hint. ‘I'd like to show the world that there are still some animals up here. It'll be important to lure tourists back to Zimbabwe once things change, don't you think?’
Such sweeping generalisations infuriated him. ‘You're not going to see many animals.’
‘Oh. Is the poaching problem really that bad? I thought –’
He pointed out the window, to where they occasionally had glimpses of the river. ‘Look at the water. That river should be dry at this time of year. They had very good rains here last summer, and that means the game will be spread out all over the park, instead of congregating at the last remaining sources of water. There are animals here for sure, but we won't be seeing many of them.’
‘Oh.’
At last, she was quiet.
*
Natalie wished she had stayed with Braedan. She disliked the fact that he had not told her what he was doing. He was like a commando on some secret mission, sneaking off into the bush with his rifle.
He'd looked good, though, from behind. The shorts were too short to be worn anywhere else in the world except by gay men, but Braedan filled them out to perfection. The muscles in his back and shoulders had rippled like a lion's. She glanced at Tate, who was concentrating on a washed-out stretch of the appalling road they were travelling. She'd be glad when they got to wherever they were going, so she could at least get out and have a conversation with her grandparents.
The road started to climb towards a mesa and when they rounded a bend Natalie saw a green and yellow striped boom gate. Thank God, she thought. Sinamatella rest camp was something approaching civilisation.
A national parks employee in khaki trousers and a shirt bleached to a pale tan stepped out of the shadows of a guard's booth, said something to her grandfather and then raised the boom and waved the Land Cruiser through. The man had a green beret on his head. His eyes, initially bored and listless, brightened as he noticed the driver of the second vehicle.
Tate hit the electric window button and Natalie marvelled at his transformation. ‘Oscar!’
The guard stepped back, beaming, as Tate opened the door. Tate shook the man's hand, first in the normal western manner, and then in the African way. Natalie noticed that both men rested their left hands on their right forearms as they shook. By showing their other hand was empty they were according each other great respect.
‘I am so happy to see you, sah,’ the ranger said.
Tate opened his arms and folded the African man in a hug. ‘You are looking well, my friend,’ he said.
‘And you too, sah.’
Tate bellowed a laugh, and it was so out of character that Natalie stared open-mouthed. ‘You lie, Oscar, but it is a good lie. Your wife and children?’
Oscar nodded vigorously. ‘We have three now, one daughter and two sons.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Ah sah?’
‘Yes?’
Oscar looked down for a moment, as if embarrassed. When he looked up into the taller man's eyes again, Natalie heard him say, in a quiet voice, ‘I have named my youngest son Tate, sah. I hope you do not mind.’
Natalie saw Tate's shoulders shake before he hugged Oscar to him again.
*
Natalie joined her grandparents under a high-pitched thatch roof that shaded an open-air restaurant and bar overlooking a huge expanse of wilderness. Tate was still busy wandering around the camp, chatting with the staff, all of whom seemed pleased to see him again.
‘We brought you here when you were a little, little girl,’ Grandma Pip said. Below them was an endless plain of flat-topped acacias and thorn trees, bisected in the foreground by the serpentine meanderings of a river.
Grandma Pip had a battered pair of black binoculars out and had spotted a herd of zebra in the distance. She was giving Natalie directions where to look, but Natalie couldn't see them. The zebra were the size of ants from this distance.
‘It's your city eyes,’ her grandmother said. ‘It's the same whenever we get visitors. Your vision's limited, living in a city. Your eyes can only see a certain distance because of all the buildings and whatnot. It takes time for you to adjust to Africa, where you can see forever.’
Never a truer word spoken, Natalie thought. Out of the corner of her eyes she watched Tate laughing with a waiter in a brightly patterned shirt. They had ordered Cokes, which were taking a long time coming while the waiter and Tate reminisced about old times, but there was no food on offer in the restaurant and a curio shop next door was shut, its shelves empty. They were the only tourists here to take in the magnificent view, but Oscar had pointed out other vehicles in the row of bungalows lining the edge of the drop-off, and some four-by-fours in the campground further along the mesa. These, Oscar explained, were people who had also arrived to take part in the game census.
Natalie lowered the old binoculars and looked across at Tate again. When he smiled he looked more like his brother. Braedan might be down on his luck, but he seemed totally at ease with himself and his world. Tate, however, carried some unseen burden. Seeing him square-shouldered, smiling and laughing, made him look attractive. Very, in fact, though still in an unkempt, scholarly sort of way.
‘Dear?’ Natalie looked around at her grandmother, who had a small smile of her own on her lined but lovely face. ‘See the elephant down there?’
‘Where?’
Natalie looked through the binoculars again and her grandmother laid a hand on her forearm to steer her in the right direction. ‘Oh, I see it now.’
‘They're both very attractive, the twins, don't you think?’
Natalie half-lowered the binoculars. ‘Grandma …’
>
‘Remarkably good shape, I'd say, for their age,’ her grandmother continued. ‘Tate's a good man, don't you think?’
This was too weird for words, Natalie thought. She looked down into her grandmother's blue eyes and saw the girlish sparkle. ‘Actually, I think he's a bit of a cold fish,’ Natalie said softly. An understatement if ever there was one.
Grandma Pip kept her hand on Natalie's arm and gave it a squeeze. ‘He's hurting, that's all. He just needs someone to tell him it's all right.’
‘What's all right?’
‘You know.’
Natalie didn't, but she nodded anyway.
*
Tate was full of admiration for the staff, who had remained motivated and committed to the fight against poaching, but at the same time he was depressed by the obvious lack of resources. Many of the national parks vehicles were dead or barely running, and the field rangers' gear was tatty and worn.
They left Sinamatella Camp for the last leg of their journey, to Robins Camp, in the far northwest of the park, towards the Botswana border. On the way they stopped for a break at Masuma Dam. Tate pulled up beside Paul in the dirt car park on the top of the hill and they got out and walked down some flagstone steps into the welcoming shade of a thatched hide set into the brow of the slope.
The attendant, like the staff at Sinamatella, greeted Tate like a long-lost friend. Tate had lived in the park for years, but he hadn't expected to be so moved by the reaction of the people who had worked under him.
Before they'd left Sinamatella, while the Bryants were still watching game from the restaurant patio, Oscar had taken him aside, looking around him as though he might be overheard. ‘Things are bad for the rhino here,’ he'd told Tate.
‘Yes, I know, Oscar. But the new warden, he's maintaining patrols in the IPZ, yes?’