by Tony Park
After a while she got up to go to the bathroom and he heard the shower running again. Tate wondered what to do and, unable to decide, went back out into the lounge and put the kettle on. When she emerged from her room she had dressed again, in her green shirt and skirt and sandals. Her hair was damp and, although her eyes were still red, she had stopped crying. ‘I'm sorry about all that.’
He waved a hand in the air. ‘No problem. I've made tea. Would you like some?’
‘Um … that's sweet, but I think I might need something a little stronger.’
Bugger it, thought Tate, once more feeling out of his depth. He opened the minibar. ‘No, not stocked. Wait a minute, I'll just pop downstairs.’ And he disappeared quickly out of the room.
*
Natalie was left standing there, hands on hips, wondering what had got into the man. She felt embarrassed at the way she had broken down in front of him. But God, she thought, it was good to be able to let some of this out.
She was grateful that there had been another human being in the room when she'd needed one, and that Tate had dropped his usual automaton impersonation. He'd even called her ‘Nat’, which made her smile now. She looked down at the tea and took a tentative sip. It was too hot and he had used powdered coffee whitener. What she needed was a gin and tonic, but if there was nothing in the minibar, why hadn't he thought to simply call room service?
Natalie walked out onto the balcony and looked out across the lengthening shadows. The dull greens and browns of the Zimbabwean bush were slowly being softened to golden coppery tones as the sun entered the hazy zone of dust and smoke above the horizon. There was still an hour or so of light left and it seemed the rains that had washed out the game census last night had not made it as far as Victoria Falls. The countryside was achingly beautiful and Natalie wished with all her heart that this was her first visit to Africa, that she could simply appreciate the place for its natural wonders. But she couldn't. She was African. She was born of the blood-red dirt that baked below her and she was destined to carry the continent's sorrows in her for all her days.
The doors opened behind her and Tate stood there, grinning like a slightly confused puppy. ‘I've organised you a drink. But you've got to come downstairs.’
She sighed. She felt self-conscious now about her tears and clinginess, and all she really wanted to do was hole up in her room with a drink and watch TV. But she didn't have the heart to turn Tate down. ‘All right, maybe just for one.’
‘OK. Come on.’
Natalie followed him down the stairs back through reception. Outside, two open-topped Land Rovers were filling with the Chinese tourists who had arrived just before them, and an assorted group of Europeans – Germans, she thought, judging by the accents – tricked out in a menagerie of animal-print scarves and designer safari outfits. Natalie groaned inwardly. If he told her they were climbing aboard one of these vehicles she was going to turn on her heel and march straight to the nearest bar.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Tate said.
After the vehicles filled and drove off Tate told Natalie to wait just a little longer. She turned at the sound of the squealing brakes and saw a much older cut-down Land Rover creak around a corner and pull up into the driveway. An African man in oil-spattered overalls got out and slammed the slightly wonky door to close it. ‘I am leaving the engine running in case it stops, sah,’ he said.
‘This is Edson,’ Tate said, introducing the hotel mechanic, who wiped his hand on his grimy clothes before shaking Natalie's. ‘Neil said we could take this old Landy for a spin. Our sundowners are in the cooler box in the back.’
Natalie waved a hand in front of her face to ward off the diesel fumes, then nodded her thanks to Tate who had opened the passenger door for her. Once she was in he slammed it closed after two attempts. They waved goodbye to Edson and Tate headed out into the slanting gold of the afternoon sun.
Natalie closed her eyes for a second and relished the feel of the warmth on her face and the breeze stirred by the movement of the roofless vehicle. The windscreen was folded forward, flat on the bonnet, so she felt as though she was almost floating through the bush. She had no idea if Tate knew where he was going, but she said nothing as he turned down a rutted dirt road flanked by copper-coloured mopane trees.
‘I love this time of day,’ Tate said over the noise of grinding gears. ‘The photographers call it the golden hour, but I expect you know that.’
She nodded. The breeze was ruffling her skirt and she smoothed it down with her palm. She'd left her knickers drying in the bathroom, and while she hadn't thought twice about walking about the suite naked under her skirt, she now felt quite self-conscious about it. She looked at Tate and he smiled at her. She felt herself blush a little, although he couldn't know why.
Tate changed gears and pumped the squeaky brakes. He pointed out over the open bonnet, then raised a finger to his lips. Natalie swivelled in her seat and saw the sable antelope. It was a magnificent creature, nearly as tall as a horse, jet-black with a white blaze and pale underparts. He raised his snout to sniff the negligible afternoon breeze and tossed his massive curved horns a little.
‘Beautiful,’ she whispered.
‘Rare across much of Africa, yet we still have good populations of them here in Zimbabwe,’ Tate said quietly. ‘It's the way of this crazy, screwed-up place. Some people will tell you there's nothing of value here, but there's always something hiding, surviving somewhere, hoping things will get better eventually.’
The sable bounded away and Natalie felt good just knowing it was out there, alive and well in its natural environment. Tate carried on down the road and took a fork to the right that led them to a small waterhole. He drove around it and parked at the base of a fat old baobab tree. Its spindly branches held an array of nests, and the fleshy bark of its bulbous trunk glowed and shone a pinky-brown in the afternoon light as though it had been polished.
Tate switched off the engine.
‘Are you sure you'll be able to start her again?’
He laughed. ‘We're parked on a bit of a slope. I can roll-start her. I drove one of these things for years when I was younger.’
He looked away into the distance. For now, though, Natalie wanted to keep both of them in the present, away from their terrible past. ‘What about that drink?’
He nodded, returning to the present, and got out and hefted the plastic cooler block out of its purpose-built cradle at the rear of the old Land Rover. He also slid out a folding table, which he set up. Inside the cooler was a plastic bag with a white linen tablecloth, which he snapped out with a flourish and laid on the table. Natalie laughed at his theatrics, and he set out miniatures of gin, a couple of cans of tonic, and a shiny metal tumbler. Tate fixed her drink, complete with ice and pre-sliced lemon, and selected a Lion Lager for himself. He rarely drank alcohol because he couldn't afford it and he didn't like the feeling of losing control, but the sundowners were on the hotel, and he felt he'd earned a beer after what had happened.
‘What shall we drink to?’ she asked, raising her glass.
Tate looked down at the waterhole, about a hundred metres away, where a pair of warthog were staring at them, getting their measure before deciding whether or not to come down to drink. One of the hogs lowered itself into a muddy depression and started wallowing enthusiastically, grinding his belly and genitals into the black ooze at the edge of the waterhole. ‘How about him? He looks as happy as a pig in shit.’
Natalie laughed. It was the first time she'd heard him crack a joke. ‘To pigs in shit.’ They clinked cup and bottle and the stringent, ice-cold drink sliced through the dust and the foul aftertaste of her afternoon nightmare and sent a jolt of pure pleasure down to her core. ‘It's so peaceful here.’
He nodded. ‘I wish life could be like this. Simple. As it was meant to be. But we humans have screwed up the environment so much that even moments like this are only an illusion.’
She agreed with him, but she wanted there to b
e more to Africa, more to this moment. ‘But is it completely hopeless, Tate? If it is, then why do you bother?’
He shrugged, took a sip of beer and appeared to ponder her question. She feared for a moment he might retreat back into his shell, or snap at her with a barb designed to show her how naïve or shallow she was. ‘No, it's not completely hopeless.’
Natalie took another sip of her drink. ‘I'm pleased to hear it.’
‘We white people nearly wiped the rhino off the face of Africa early last century. It wasn't ignorant black poachers or greedy Chinese herbalists who were responsible for almost killing all the rhinos. It was us. We white men killed rhinos because they carried the Rinderpest disease where we wanted to run cattle, and because we wanted the head of a big horny beast to put up on the wall. Stupid, really, when you think about it. Of all the uses for dead animals, trophies seem to make the least sense. But they stopped the slaughter, just in time, down in Natal where there were only about fifty Southern White Rhino left. From those few survivors a species was saved, and today the southern white's numbers are around seventeen thousand. That's a success story.’
‘But can it be done again, with the black rhino?’
Tate shrugged. ‘It's ironic, but war and apartheid saved the black rhino from total annihilation this time around. South Africa was too busy looking inwards, sealing off its borders and being shunned by the rest of the world, to allow wholesale poaching to carry on. At the same time up here in Rhodesia we were far more preoccupied with killing each other than killing our wildlife, so that bought the rhino some breathing space while it was being wiped out in the countries to our north. Greed's the only factor here, and it's hard to find an antidote to that.’
‘So nothing more can be done?’
Tate took another sip of beer and climbed up onto one of the squared-off front fenders of the old Land Rover. Natalie hoisted herself up on the opposite one. The sun-warmed aluminium felt pleasant on her bum, through the thin material of her skirt. ‘We can keep fighting a rearguard action against the poachers, but it's only a matter of time and numbers and the poachers have both on their side. It'll be years before a new, truly democratic Zimbabwean government could get back to the business of properly resourcing the parks and wildlife service, and seriously protecting the country's wildlife. Whoever eventually takes over from Mugabe is going to have to fix the water, the electricity, the economy, the roads … animals are going to have to wait in line, and by that time the rhinos may all be gone. No, I think it's time for some more radical solutions. Farming, for example … If we can't stop people in Vietnam and China buying rhino horn and believing in its powers, then who's to say we aren't better off just accepting the market will always be there and doing something to try and regulate it?’
She was shocked. She'd heard the argument before, but it surprised her coming from someone like Tate, who'd fought the war on poaching all his life. ‘What, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em? Are you saying rhinos should be farmed for their horns?’
He shrugged. ‘All I'm saying is that at the rate they're disappearing – around fifteen a month – they'll all be dead in a few years. But in the same period we could have supplied the same number of horns into Asia without the loss of a single animal if the horns were removed and sold. It would bring foreign currency into the country and, if it was managed properly, it's a renewable resource that simply keeps growing.’
‘But surely that would be seen as an admission of defeat?’ Natalie said.
‘Yes and no.’ Tate set his beer bottle down on the bonnet of the truck and turned to face her. ‘There's a plant in South Africa called the pepper bark tree. Have you heard of it?’
She shook her head.
‘Well, the pepper bark is seriously endangered. There are just a handful of trees left, in only a couple of locations. For years the bark was harvested – poached – by traditional healers who took what they needed to make a tea that was used to treat coughs and colds. It seemed to work. In fact, it worked so well that some smart sangomas started marketing it as a cure for HIV-AIDS. Tuberculosis and respiratory-tract infections are common illnesses for people with AIDS, so some patients may have experienced some relief from using pepper bark.’
‘I understand … but what has this got to do with rhinos?’
He took a sip of beer and set the bottle down again. ‘There was a boom in sales and the poachers started ring-barking trees – stripping the bark off where they once might have taken just a sliver at a time. The trees were in serious threat of dying out altogether, but then some South African national parks people decided to enter the pepper bark market. They started taking cuttings and growing their own trees and selling the plants and the bark direct to the traditional healers. They made money for the national parks, kept the sangomas happy and, for now, saved the trees.’
‘Yes, but you don't believe pepper bark cures AIDS?’
‘Of course not,’ Tate said, ‘no more than I believe rhino horn relieves fever or acts as an aphrodisiac or cures cancer. But if we can hold the line, until those traditional beliefs die out naturally or people are finally convinced they're not true, we might buy ourselves enough time to save a species.’
It was a radical solution to a desperate problem, but she wondered if legalised farming of rhino horn could ever function properly in a state where the government seemed hell-bent on stealing all the natural resources and ruining commercial agriculture. Four female kudu, one with a small fawn, tiptoed nervously past the warthog to the edge of the waterhole. The lead animal looked at Natalie and blinked its big doe eyes and rotated its antenna-like ears, alert for the slightest sign of danger.
Tate slid down off the fender, took Natalie's cup and fixed her another drink from the cooler box. She was tired, despite her troubled nap, and the drink was going to her head. She asked him some more about the places he'd been and he told her of his travels around Africa and some near-death scrapes while capturing and monitoring rhinos.
He leaned against her side of the truck while they talked, the distance between them closing all the time. She could sense him relax as he finished a second then a third beer as the evening shadows edged across the waterhole. It was funny, she thought, how it had taken the danger of the aerial pursuit and his near suicidal flying to bring about this change in Tate. She found him a curious mix of inconsistencies. He'd proved he could be fearless in defence of rhinos, but he was also willing to discuss the possibility of decriminalising the rhino-horn trade.
‘We should be getting back,’ Tate said as the sun disappeared behind the mopane trees and the bare red earth fringing the water turned a dark purple. She wished they could have lingered a little longer. Tate held out a hand. She didn't need any assistance getting off her fender seat, but let him take her hand anyway, and help her down. He held it just a fraction longer than he needed to, and she smiled at him. He blushed, which was cute, then opened and closed her door for her and walked around to his side of the Land Rover.
‘Tate!’ she hissed. He followed her outstretched finger and saw the elephant emerge from the trees off to the left, not thirty metres from them. The old bull shook his head, sending out a halo of dark crimson dust against the sunset. He looked at them through a long-lashed eye. ‘Hurry,’ she said.
Tate held a finger to his lips and eased his way into the driver's seat then quietly closed his door. The elephant had been heading to the waterhole, but his interest was clearly aroused now that he had spotted the Land Rover. His massive skull seemed to rock with each step he took towards them. Natalie slid closer to Tate across the middle seat of the Land Rover and reached a hand out onto his thigh to steady herself. She felt him wince slightly as she gripped him, but she kept her eyes on the elephant.
‘It's fine,’ Tate whispered. ‘Stay very still.’
The elephant seemed to fill her entire field of vision as he raised his trunk against the pink and gold sky. Natalie flinched as she heard a low rumbling growl from the animal's throat. The elephant
reached out its trunk until it was protruding over the row of seats behind her. She didn't dare move as it snaked around behind her neck. The elephant shifted a little to the left and sniffed her.
The tip of its trunk looked like a couple of fingers and she heard a gurgling noise as the two nostrils drew in her scent. Natalie nearly screamed when the wet end of the trunk brushed her shoulder. She had never in all her life been this close to one of these huge creatures. She was terrified, but awed at the same time.
Tate held up a palm and the elephant dutifully sniffed him as well. Then, seemingly satisfied that all was right and that the humans and their vehicle posed no threat to him, the bull sauntered off to the waterhole.
*
‘Sheesh, you could have washed it before you brought it back, bru,’ Neil said when Tate pulled up outside the entrance to the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge.
‘You might want to do something about the brakes,’ Tate said, climbing down, ‘And the tyres … and the starter motor … and the clutch … and …’
‘All right, all right!’ Neil held up his hands and laughed. ‘I get the picture.’ He leaned close to Tate as he reached in to retrieve the now empty cooler box. ‘It's all sorted, my China. I've organised a candlelit dinner on your balcony with the lady.’
Tate watched Natalie walk into the hotel and hoped she hadn't heard. ‘It's not like that, Neil. Can't we just have dinner with all the other guests?’
Neil shook his head. ‘Well if it's not like that, man, it should be. She's hot. Besides, the table's already set and there's a waitress up there waiting to take your orders. If I was sharing a suite with a babe like that I'd be ordering room service for a week.’
Tate set off after Natalie, wondering how he'd explain his friend's misplaced generosity. The doors to the suite were ajar and she stood there in the middle of the lounge, arms folded, looking out at the table set with glittering candles in a silver candelabra.