African Dawn

by Tony Park

  Oscar had looked over his shoulder. The intensive protection zone, or IPZ, was an area demarcated around Sinamatella Camp where many of Hwange's rhino had been concentrated so that they could be better monitored and guarded. ‘Yes … and there are many good people here, but in other parts of the park things are not so well organised.’

  ‘Is it a matter of resources? I can speak again to the charities in the UK and Australia.’

  Oscar nodded. ‘But it's not just money. Some of the patrols find that when they are sent to a particular area, a rhino is then shot far away. We have not had contact with poachers for many months.’

  Tate could see Oscar was wary of making an outright accusation, and was obviously nervous about having this discussion. ‘You think someone inside Parks is tipping off the poachers, letting them know where the patrols are?’

  Oscar pursed his lips. ‘I think people are working against us. Important people.’

  ‘Who? Emmerson Ngwenya? It's said he's behind the latest spate of poaching.’

  ‘I did not say that,’ Oscar said. ‘I cannot say that.’

  Tate clapped him on the arm. There was little he could say or do, other than promise to raise the matter with Parks authorities.

  At Masuma the late-afternoon sun glanced off the waters of the dam. A hippo let out a honking laugh. A Nile crocodile motored silently from one side of the dam to the other in search of prey. A trio of old male buffaloes – called dagga boys because of the coating of dried mud or dagga that stuck to their black coats – ambled down to the water's edge through a stand of mopane reduced to toothpick-like sticks by grazing elephants.

  Mrs Bryant sidled up to him, interrupting his reverie. ‘Natalie's grown into a nice girl, hasn't she?’

  Tate looked down at the small woman. He wanted to say something rude but couldn't bring himself to. He nodded.

  ‘Did she tell you her boyfriend left her for a younger woman?’

  ‘No, she didn't, Mrs Bryant.’

  ‘Pip.’ She laid her hand on his arm. ‘Tate, one of the good things about getting old is that you can say what you like, because most of the time people don't pay attention to you.’

  ‘OK,’ he sighed.

  ‘Then be nice to my granddaughter or I won't let you near Paul's rhinos ever again. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Bryant.’

  She patted his arm. ‘Good boy.’

  25

  Fat drops of rain smacked the Toyota's windscreen. Tate peered into the blackness beyond and shook his head. There would be no more counting animals tonight.

  It was what he'd feared when he'd seen the clouds looming the night before, during the briefing and braai. He'd smelled the rain on the stiffening breeze and he, like some of the farmers who'd come to the park for the census, had correctly predicted the rain.

  During the day they'd sat in the small stone hide overlooking Crocodile Pools. The pools had, in fact, been connected into one long body of water that stretched around the bends to their left and right. Tate had been able to keep Natalie's questions to a hushed few, saying that their voices would travel and scare the animals. Now, however, with the rain beating louder on the roof of the cab, there was no need for them to keep their voices down. Nothing could hear them, and they couldn't see a thing through the rain. Lightning struck somewhere nearby, with an explosion that made Natalie jump in her seat.

  ‘Was that close?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled, but was glad she couldn't see. She projected an image of toughness, but like most journalists she was a city person, secretly terrified by nature. Tate had some sympathy, though. He was under no illusions about his own weaknesses. He'd been flown to Australia, years ago, to talk about saving the rhinos. He didn't imagine Sydney was a particularly big city by world standards, but he'd felt a curious sense of fear and disorientation wandering its streets. He hated cities.

  ‘If I wasn't here I imagine you'd be out in the rain, sitting under a tree with a poncho on or something, scanning for rhinos.’

  This time he laughed out loud. ‘Good lord, no. I'd be sitting right here, inside the vehicle. There's no point being uncomfortable for the sake of it, and it's bloody hard to track a rhino at night in the rain.’

  ‘You were fitting GPS transmitters in Tanzania, weren't you?’

  He looked at her, wondering if she had put away her notebook as a pretence. Was that just a way to get him to open up? He resigned himself to getting this over with. Rhinos could always use publicity and he would give her his standard spiel. ‘Yes, on some of them, but the authorities here don't have the money for that sort of thing. Some of the rhinos here in Hwange are fitted with radio telemetry transmitters.’

  ‘Why do you do what you do?’

  He was taken aback by the sudden change of tack. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There's no money in it, is there?’

  ‘Not that it's any of your business, but, no, I don't get paid very much. Why do I do what I do?’ He thought about Hope's body, lying in the dust by the wreckage of the Viscount. He thought of the rhino that had sniffed the air and trotted by his Land Rover, just as he was about to blow his brains out. He couldn't tell her any of that. He could use the stock phrases about the need to save the rhino so that they would be there for the next generation to see. But that was bullshit.

  ‘Is it because of Hope?’

  ‘I …’

  He swallowed. He didn't know how she could be reading his mind.

  ‘I'm writing a book, Tate, as well as a magazine story. What happened to me – to all of us – in 1979 is part of it. It's not ancient history – it affected us all, and probably still has a bearing on our lives. Braedan was a hero who's now … well, who's now down on his luck. You've dedicated your life to what a lot of people are saying is a hopeless cause. Braedan and I are linked by what happened at the farm, but you're part of the story too. You were Aunty Hope's boyfriend, and as far as I know you've never married or lived with a woman.’

  ‘It's not a story,’ he said, almost to himself.

  ‘Sorry?’

  He snapped his head around and sought her eyes in the dark. ‘I said it's not a bloody story. It's not something you can make up and put in your book.’

  ‘I'm not making it up.’

  ‘No, but you'll sensationalise it, and you'll write it so that people cry, and you'll use it and what happened at the farm as a way to explain your own failings … and it'll be another nostalgic, postcolonial African tragedy.’

  She opened the door, got out and slammed it shut.

  Tate slumped back in his seat and wound down the window. The rain had slowed to a misting drizzle. He folded his arms. He knew he should call her back. If she came across an elephant or a lion she'd scream and run and that would be the end of her.

  After a couple of minutes he reluctantly opened his door. He saw the flaring orange glow of a cigarette, smelled the smoke. He got out, stretching away the cramps of sitting too long. He was damned if he was going to apologise to her. ‘You can't stay out here all night.’

  She turned at the sound of his voice, inhaled deeply, then blew the smoke skywards. ‘Hope flew to Kariba from Salisbury and turned around and flew back the same day. Why does someone do that, Tate?’

  He put a hand on the door.

  ‘Are you getting back inside the car? Are you hiding from me, Tate?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  He sighed, and felt the little strength that remained in him seeping away. ‘Stop trying to understand things you were never meant to know.’

  ‘Like what? Like how Hope died … why she died?’

  He stared at her, and even in the dark she looked so much like Hope, even sounded enough like her, that it hurt.

  He'd bottled it all up for so long. The poison was eating him from the inside out, a little more each year. Time didn't heal a wound like this, it made it worse. The older he got, the more bitter he became and the less likely it was that he would ever find hap
piness, either by himself or with another woman. He should have killed himself that day. He'd tried, unsuccessfully, to justify his meagre excuse for a life by devoting it to saving something innocent. But there were fewer than nine hundred rhinos left in Zimbabwe and at the rate they were being killed they'd all be gone in a year or two, and then there would be no reason left for Tate Quilter-Phipps to stay alive.

  Tate took a deep breath and stared at her. ‘I killed your aunt.’

  She said nothing for a moment. A hyena mocked his confession from the blackness, whooping with derision.

  ‘You didn't know the aircraft was going to be attacked.’

  ‘I rejected her. She came to me to apologise for something she'd done and I wasn't man enough to accept her apology and forgive her. I was a petty, vindictive bastard and she got on that Viscount because of me. If I'd been a better man, a bigger man, she'd be alive today. I killed her, Natalie. Put that in your bloody book.’

  Natalie opened her mouth to reply, but a half-dozen loud popping bangs made both of them turn and look out over the river.

  Tate held up his hand before she could ask what the noise was. ‘Gunfire. AK-47.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  *

  A branch whipped Natalie's face as she stumbled through the bush in Tate's wake.

  He'd ordered her to stay in the vehicle and her immediate reaction had been to refuse. She was a reporter and she'd come to Africa – at least as far as her magazine was concerned – to do a story on rhinos. If what Tate had said was true and those shots were rhino poachers, then this would propel her story from colour piece to hard news. Now, however, with her bare legs beneath her green safari skirt soaked from the wet grass and her arms and cheek scored with scratches from thorn bushes, she wondered if she shouldn't have done as he'd told her. Her heart was beating from fear and the sudden exertion. Tate was tall and it was hard keeping up with his long stride. He seemed to place his feet like a sure-footed animal, whereas it seemed every step Natalie took landed her in another hole, or stubbed her toe into another fallen log.

  The hyena whooped again in the distance and the sound sent a shiver of primal fear down her spine.

  The full moon was glowing white gold through a break in the scudding rain clouds. Natalie looked up and suddenly felt terribly exposed in the light. She hurried to catch up with Tate, and almost bumped into him. He stopped and raised a hand, then moved slowly into the shadow of a tree, Natalie close behind him. When she peeked around his shoulder she saw a dark mound on the ground. On the brisk, cool wind she caught the harsh smell of blood.

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  He turned and glared at her. She said nothing, but stayed close as he moved forward cautiously.

  The rhino lay on its side and Natalie clapped her hand over her mouth at the sight of the horrible wound where its horn had been. Rather than sawing the horn off, the poachers had hacked the skin away from the skull, scalping it. Tate knelt beside the animal and put a hand on its grey flank.

  ‘A female,’ he said. ‘Breeding age. Bastards.’

  Natalie saw the ragged stitch of bullet wounds in the creature's flank, each oozing a trail of coagulating dark blood. ‘How could anyone do this?’

  Tate moved his hand to the rhino's head and fingered a v-shaped notch on the outside edge of the right ear. He leaned across the carcass and lifted the left ear, which had two similar notches on the bottom. The cuts were clean and had obviously been made by humans rather than a predator.

  ‘What do those mean?’

  ‘The ear notches assign a number. The Vs in the outer edges of the ears and a hole punched through the ear all represent a number. There are two notches assigned for the number one, and one each for the numbers three, five, thirty and fifty. A hole in the centre of the right ear is worth a hundred and hole in the left ear is two hundred. By using a combination of these markings you can number a rhino population well into the three hundreds,’ he said without looking up at her. ‘This one has a thirty notch and a ten on her right ear, and these plus the two number one notches on her left ear mean she's rhino number forty-two in the local population.’

  ‘Amazing. But what do we do now?’ Natalie asked.

  Following the poachers on foot, unarmed, was out of the question, although as she jogged after Tate back through the soaking, barbed trees Natalie couldn't help wonder if Braedan might have handled the situation differently. As it was, she was quite happy to go with Tate's plan of heading back to Robins Camp.

  They drove through the night, and although the illuminated dial of the speedometer rarely climbed over fifty kilometres an hour, it felt as though they were doing twice that on the rutted, mud-slicked roads. Several times she reached out to brace her palms on the dashboard as the Toyota's tail slid out on corners and Tate wrestled with the wheel to get the vehicle back under control. A lightning bolt struck a tree not a hundred metres off to their right and Natalie felt her heart lurch as she remembered the crackle of the poachers' rifle fire. To calm herself she forced herself to observe and remember as much detail as she could for the article she'd write about this night, and the chapter she'd devote to it in her book.

  Tate honked the horn as they rolled under the thatched entrance gate at Robins Camp and stopped beside the warden's house, set just outside the perimeter fence. All the lights were out and no one stirred. None of the national parks staff were in the reception office at this late hour. Tate leaned on the horn again and a bleary-eyed man in parks green trousers and a ratty blue anorak stumbled down the last few rickety stairs of the fire-observation tower that rose like a medieval redoubt above the camp restaurant, which had been closed for several years.

  ‘Where is the warden?’ Tate yelled over the noise of the engine. The man pointed in the direction of the staff village, behind the tower. Tate quickly briefed the duty ranger on what had happened then sent mud spinning as he floored the accelerator and bounced down the track towards the cluster of asbestos-roofed cottages where the rangers and domestic staff lived. The rain had stopped and Natalie heard African music coming from one house. Two men stood outside, dressed in shorts and T-shirts and holding brown bottles of beer. A battered green national parks Land Rover Defender was parked next to the mostly barren, rock-rimmed garden in front of the dwelling.

  ‘Where's the warden?’ Tate barked.

  One of the men nodded towards the interior of the building.

  Natalie followed Tate out of the vehicle and caught up with him as the warden, a surprisingly young man in a still-starched khaki shirt, emerged. He looked less the worse for wear than the two rangers who leaned against the outside wall of the house. Tate told him, rapid fire, what had happened. ‘We must go, now!’

  The warden nodded. He spoke to the other two men in Ndebele and they set their beer bottles down and strode off. One of the men began calling at the top of his voice and lights went on in two other houses.

  Tate paced up and down while he waited for the national parks men to get themselves organised. Natalie turned at the sound of another vehicle's engine and a white Land Rover, preceded by the sweep of its headlights, pulled up beside them. Two men got out and Natalie recognised, but couldn't remember the name of, the coordinator who was overseeing the game census. There was another man, with his right arm in a plaster cast, who was introduced to her as Nicholas Duncan, a researcher from New Zealand doing his PhD on black rhinos.

  Tate filled them in on the rhino's death and Nicholas asked if there were notches on its ears.

  ‘Yes. It's number was forty-two.’

  Nicholas shook his head. ‘Bastards. That's Chizzi. I thought she might be pregnant – she's been seen with a male on and off lately.’

  ‘I was on the team that relocated rhino from Chizarira National Park to here years ago. Your Chizzi was probably one of them or a descendant,’ Tate said, his words heavy with the remembrance. ‘One step forward, two steps back.’

  Natalie wondered what it must be like to live in a place as
remote as Hwange, spending your days in the bush following rhinos. ‘What did you do to your arm, Nicholas?’

  He smiled. ‘Stupid, really. I was up in the microlight, doing a test flight. It's brand new and we're going to fit a radio tracking antenna to it. A couple of days ago I landed – safely I might add – and had started to walk back to camp from the airstrip when I was charged by a dagga boy. The buffalo was in the trees on the edge of the runway. He knocked me down and tossed me with his horns. I was lucky that my arm was the only thing he broke before one of the rangers came running and shot him. I feel terrible that people back home and in Australia have paid for the aircraft and I can't use it for another month.’

  The warden rounded up his four rangers, who were all now dressed in green field uniforms and carrying a mix of AK-47s and FN self-loading rifles. Tate spread a map of the park on the bonnet of his vehicle and pointed out where the poaching attack had occurred. ‘You can follow me, if you like.’

  The warden nodded, ordered his men to climb into the back of his Land Rover and got in. There was a painful groaning noise from the starter motor when he turned the key.

  ‘Sheesh,’ Tate fumed. Natalie saw his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The Land Rover continued to refuse to start. Tate got out and slammed the door of his vehicle. ‘Give him a push start,’ he yelled at the rangers. They climbed out and, with Tate helping, pushed the Land Rover. The warden let out the clutch and the vehicle lurched, belched a cloud of diesel smoke and the engine started. Tate was getting into the Toyota when the Land Rover's engine died.

  Three times more they tried starting it, but the Land Rover refused to be coaxed into life. Tate went to the driver's door and stood with his hands on his hips. ‘Get into my vehicle. I'll drive.’

  The warden shook his head. ‘Ah, that is not possible. It is against regulations. What if we have to drive off-road to chase the poachers? You cannot be involved in the pursuit. You no longer work for parks and wildlife.’

  Tate stood there glaring at the man. ‘Bloody hell, they're getting away while we speak.’