by Tony Park
‘What's that got to do with you?’ Braedan hissed. He shivered at the way Ngwenya lowered his sunglasses to take a better look at Natalie.
‘Anything that happens on this ranch is my business.’
Braedan licked his lips. ‘I know what you want, but you won't get it while I'm head of security here.’
Ngwenya laughed. ‘Head of security? You couldn't protect a kitten, let alone a pair of old white farmers and some rhinos.’ Ngwenya spun on his feet and raised his arms. ‘You cannot protect something that is not yours!’ he said loudly. ‘This land, this farm belongs to the people of Zimbabwe and I am here to liberate it for them!’
The ululating, cheering and dancing began again and a cloud of dust generated by stamping feet began to rise around Braedan. He locked eyes with the politician just before Ngwenya pushed the glasses back up his nose.
‘What do you want?’ Braedan said again.
Ngwenya looked to his sidekick and snapped his fingers. The man walked back to the Toyota, reached in and pulled out an orange plastic folder. He delivered it to the minister, who passed it to Braedan. ‘You can hand this to Paul Bryant after you organise for his trained monkeys to open the gates and escort the police and CIO to the farmhouse.’
The crowd broke into a song, ‘Pamberi ne Chimurenga’ – ‘Forward with the Struggle’ – the words of which Braedan recalled from the war days. Braedan opened the folder and read the first page of a document that was addressed to the government department responsible for redistribution of land. It was headed: ‘PROPOSAL FOR TRANSFERENCE OF OWNERSHIP OF KIABEJANE RANCH TO THE LOCAL COMMUNITY AND REDESIGNATION OF SAID PROPERTY AS COMMUNITY TOURISM AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION CENTRE.’
He scanned the summary of the proposal and realised he had underestimated Emmerson Ngwenya's intelligence and cunning. Paul had had enough friends at the highest levels of the parks and wildlife service to hang on to the ranch during the earlier farm invasions, but the news of the missing horn would not help his case once it came time for the government to consider Ngwenya's proposal to redesignate the ranch as a community project. Brigadier Emmerson Ngwenya, Braedan read in the document, would be chairman of a ‘governing council’ which would oversee the new grassroots conservation and tourism operation, with all profits being returned to the local people.
‘We have a warrant to enter this property, by force if necessary,’ one of the suits said.
Braedan looked up from the folder. He was surrounded and outgunned.
‘Come,’ Braedan said to the politician, as if he was talking to a dog.
29
Tate lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes. They were so sore from scanning the far-off bush and staring through the rippling heat haze that his dirt-encrusted fingers were muddy with tears when he inspected them.
He'd been in the hills above Lake Kariba in the virtually abandoned Charara hunting concession for three weeks, with not the slightest sign of the probably mythical animal he was looking for. A different man might have given up, might have been overwhelmed by the heat and the dust and the flies and the danger, but Tate knew this was where he was meant to be.
It reminded him of the old days, before everything went wrong. He had been at his happiest as a young field ranger, patrolling these very same hills. He'd been at home here, alone and content to live in splendid isolation. And although he was happy here now, he was fast coming to the conclusion that he was on a fool's errand, looking for a ghost. The legendary last black rhino of Makuti was most surely long dead and gone.
Tate pulled out his notebook, opened it to today's date and recorded his observations. 12 pm – nil sighting, nil spoor. He checked his handheld GPS and recorded his current location. He closed the notebook and fastened it with a rubber band. The information was recorded on the GPS as well, but Tate had an inbuilt distrust of gadgets.
He'd quartered the area slowly and methodically, starting from the corner near where he'd left the main Harare to Chirundu road, not far from the old Clouds' End Hotel. He'd had little expectation of finding any sign of a rhino close to the road, but he'd used those first few days to get himself accustomed to being back in the bush on foot again. For too many years he'd been tracking rhinos from helicopters and Land Rovers, using an array of high-tech monitoring gear. Now he was travelling on his own two feet, with only his knowledge of the land, and a plastic-wrapped file of letters, notes and maps collected by an old man with senile dementia, to guide his way.
But if Paul Bryant wanted to pay him to go off into the wild for a while, then that was fine with Tate. It gave him time to think, and time to be by himself. Annoyingly, he also had plenty of time to replay in his mind, over and over again, the evening he'd spent with Natalie at Victoria Falls. Sometimes he wished he'd taken her to bed, but then memories of Hope would come back to haunt him and he'd feel guilty all over again.
As well as looking for the probably nonexistent rhino, Tate had busied himself looking for signs of other game as he'd walked within earshot of the main road. He'd found the spoor of some small buck – common duiker mostly – plus the occasional small cat. He'd also uncovered snare wire aplenty. As much as it pained him, he left every snare exactly as he found it, and took time to clear his own tracks. He didn't want any of the poachers to know there was a white man on their patch.
Paul's instructions had been succinct.
‘Go out there for me, Tate, and find Makuti, the last black rhino, if he's still alive. I'm too old to go traipsing those hills, but I have to know, before I die, if the story's true.’
‘It's not, Paul. I can tell you that now and save us both the time,’ Tate had replied.
Paul had held up a sun-spotted hand. ‘Always the cantankerous bastard, aren't you? I'm a firm believer that where there's smoke there's fire. I saw stranger things come true in the war, my boy. Here's the file.’ And he had passed over the stained, dog-eared folder.
Not receptive, but curious nonetheless, Tate had opened the folder and skimmed its contents. Despite his convictions he'd felt the frisson of excitement when he'd started reading.
Lomagundi Lakeside
Kariba
September 1997
Dear Paul,
Howzit. You won't believe it, but I spotted your old friend again, during a hunting trip into the hills with a South African client. The hunter had bad eyes and didn't see him, but I did, and he looked in fine form. Makuti sniffed the air a moment, turned his rump to me and trotted off. I wished I'd had a camera, but it was good enough that I was able to get a clear view of him. I've attached a copy of a map showing the location. Look forward to seeing you here again next year.
Cheers,
G.O.F.
Paul had explained that he'd been in regular contact with the old hunter, Gerry O'Flynn, over the years and it was he who was responsible for most of the correspondence and entries in the dossier. Tate knew of O'Flynn, or Flynn as he had been called when he was still alive, and he wished he could put as much credence in the reports as Paul had.
Flynn had given up hunting for much of the seventies, joining the Rhodesian SAS, and he even had some supposedly confirmed sightings of rhino in the Makuti area from the war days. These, Tate conceded, could very well have been true, as there had been a healthy population of black rhino around Lake Kariba in the Zambezi Valley and, by extension, into the mountains on the Zimbabwean side of the Zambezi River after independence and well into the 1980s before they were all either killed or relocated.
But Paul had clearly been paying Flynn to mount occasional searches like the one Tate was undertaking now, and it seemed that for many years Paul had joined Flynn on safari in search of the mythical Makuti, the supposed last black rhino.
Tate unstrapped the blanket from the bottom of his rucksack and laid it in the shade under the tree. He sat down, took off his sweat-dampened broad-brimmed felt hat and scratched his scalp. It had been five or six years since he'd last seen Flynn, propping up the bar at the old Kariba Yacht Club. Flynn had
been an expert on rhinos, and on tracking them, and had still been leading tourists on walking safaris into Matusadona National Park, taking clients to see the virtually tame rhinos that had lived around the main camp at Tashinga. These were the orphan offspring of adults killed by poachers, and as tight as the security had been around these precious survivors, poachers had still managed to get close to them and kill one that had grown to maturity. Word had it that Flynn, who was as addicted by then to the bottle as he was to the money he made off rhino tracking, had inadvertently led the poachers to the adult male on one of his escorted walks. Flynn had been found a short time later at his hovel in Kariba, stabbed to death.
The reports since 2004 were in Paul Bryant's hand. They were notes of discussions he'd had with an assortment of people he'd met in and around Kariba and Makuti. There were the two glitter-stone quarry men who still eked out a living digging up the unusual rocks that people who still had money for such things used to tile the edges of their swimming pools. The diggers claimed to have seen a rhino trotting along a distant ridge line as they returned to Kariba from a trip to Chirundu. Paul had recorded that he had paid the men $20,000 Zim dollars – only a few US dollars' worth at times, but no doubt a tantalising reward for the miners. Were they canny men who had heard an old man asking about rhinos and seen a way to make some money, or could their story have been genuine?
Away from the road the poachers' tracks and snares had become fewer and further between, until they had petered out altogether. Tate had returned to his car at the end of each week and, reconnecting the battery, had coaxed it back into life and driven into Kariba for more supplies. On his last trip, three days' earlier, he had carried with him enough kapenta, biltong, noodles and other dried foods to last him a further two weeks on foot in the bush. Water he would find in the streams and pools in the hills. He would be moving deep into the safari area and he wanted to carry on until he was sure, once and for all, that Paul had been wasting their time. But there was no bitterness in his quest. In a way, he wished he could stay out here forever.
Tate opened his pack and pulled out the portable camping stove. He had enough of the small gas canisters to last him three weeks if he was careful with their use and limited himself to boiling water twice a day. He set a tin pannier on the stovetop, filled it with water he'd drawn from a rockpool that morning, and lit the gas. While he waited for the water to boil he heaved himself slowly back to his feet. His right knee protested. As much as he loved this simple, rough life in the bush, he knew full well it was a younger man's calling.
Tate hobbled the first couple of steps until his knee loosened a bit, and stopped at the squat bushwillow tree. He unzipped his shorts and started urinating. He looked at the foliage of the tree and absently noted that some of the branches had been recently grazed. He caressed the snipped-off twigs with his free hand.
As he'd moved further into the bush he'd been pleased to find a little more spoor of more and differing kinds of mammals. There had been the scat and teardrop hoof prints of majestic sable antelope – though he'd yet to see any on his wanderings so far – and the middens of impala rams who had staked out their territories. He'd also seen the big bovine pats of buffalo dung, and patted the oiled stock of his old .358 Brno hunting rifle instinctively as he reminded himself to keep an eye out for any dagga boys who might be snoozing nearby. Elephant had crossed the area often, and though he saw no fresh spoor, it was always nice to know they were still around, moving as silently as grey ghosts. As with the buffalo, he would be content to limit his encounters with the huge mammals to discoveries of their dried dung. He had no wish to get into a dangerous confrontation with any animal, not even a phantom rhino.
‘What's been eating you?’ he asked the bushwillow shrub aloud. It wasn't the first time he'd caught himself talking to no one.
Tate had been checking the trees and bushes he passed on his transepts for signs of browsing and inevitably the stripped and broken branches had been fed on by kudu, which only browsed, or impala, which were both browsers of trees and grazers of grass, depending on the season. He rubbed his thumb against a cleanly cut twig.
His hands were shaking as he zipped his fly and fumbled in his pocket for his reading glasses.
He put on his glasses and leaned in closer to the bush. The stem he'd just touched, and several others around it, had not been stripped of leaves or snapped off, but rather looked as though it had been snipped by a pair of garden secateurs at an angle of precisely forty-five degrees. ‘My God.’ There was only one animal in the African bush that left this telltale sign when browsing.
‘Black rhino.’
*
‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Qantas Club welcomes members and guests travelling to Johannesburg on flight QF 64. Your flight is now ready for boarding.’
George Bryant folded his copy of The Australian and tucked it under his arm. He picked up his blue blazer and snapped out the extendable handle of his wheelie bag. He prided himself on only ever travelling with carry-on luggage, his bags conforming to the gram and the millimetre to cabin-stowage requirements.
He nodded a polite thank you to the woman at reception and walked out and down the escalators to join the throng of people clustered at the boarding gate. His fellow passengers were a mix of Australian backpackers and honeymooners, and South Africans either going home after visiting relatives in Australia, or going back to visit family members unlucky enough, in George's view, to still be stuck there.
George took out his iPhone. He thought briefly about sending Susannah an SMS, but there was no point. He switched his phone off instead. She'd been polite, when saying goodbye, but he knew she was looking forward to having the house to herself while he was away.
Any pretence of tenderness or affection had disappeared from their communications, verbal and typed, years ago. These days, George and Susannah, while still married on paper, were no more than flatmates. They didn't have a bad life, he supposed. They had a lovely house in Pymble, on Sydney's upper north shore, which was big enough for them to lead their separate lives without annoying each other unnecessarily. Two cars, separate bedrooms, separate home offices. It was all very civilised.
To split up would be too much of a hassle. They would have to sell the house, and then they'd both have to buy new places. With the property market stagnant at best, it wasn't a good time to sell.
He didn't want to think about that. George had joined a blue chip insurance company soon after they'd migrated to Australia in 1980. Susannah had urged him to try to join the Royal Australian Air Force. He'd been reluctant, but Susannah was a domineering woman who usually got her way, so he'd gone for an interview with defence recruiting and duly suffered the humiliation of rejection. He'd been a squadron leader in the Rhodesian Air Force and had flown in wartime operations for ten years, yet he'd been told by a flight sergeant that he would have to join the Australian Defence Force as an officer candidate or a recruit and complete his basic training and flight training all over again. ‘You'll have to go through a selection board and, to be honest, mate,’ the flight sergeant had said with a patronising familiarity that had irked George, ‘you blokes are a bit on the nose after the way you've stuffed up your own country.’
George had stormed out and told Susannah that he'd be happy if he never flew or even saw a helicopter again as long as he lived. What George hated most was that his years of war service had all been for nothing. All the fighting, all the dying, all the bloodshed had counted for nought when Robert Mugabe, the Commonwealth's great black hope, had been sworn in as the President of the new Zimbabwe.
‘Heading home?’ a man in the queue asked him in a South African accent, as they waited for the flight attendants to sort out an issue with a bent boarding card.
‘No, to Zimbabwe,’ George said.
‘You're not from there?’
‘A long time ago, but Australia's my home now.’ George's reply was automatic, as it had been for decades, but as he'd packed for this trip he'd
wondered what it might be like to make a clean break, to leave Susannah and Australia for good. His life wasn't bad, but it was like living in an emotional coma. Zimbabwe was a mess, but perhaps it could bounce back, once Mugabe died. He'd taken his family away from Rhodesia to escape the killings, but ever since then he'd been slowly dying inside.
‘Ja,’ the stranger nodded, ‘those people ruined your bloody country, now they're doing their best to screw up mine. There's no bloody hope at all. Me, I'm going back to Jo'burg to try and get my daughter to come back to Australia with me. She thinks everything's going to work itself out in South Africa, but I keep telling her she's crazy, man.’
George just nodded. He didn't want to continue the conversation.
‘She called me a when-we in an email the other day,’ the man continued. ‘Isn't that what they called you Rhodesians who left? Now they're using it on us South Africans, hey? Well, I don't mind being called that because when we ruled our country it was bloody paradise, hey?’
George simply nodded again. He had been one, as well – a when-we. The fact was that life expectancy, education standards and every other indicator of civilised society – roads, water, healthcare, electricity, economic performance – had all plummeted under black rule in Zimbabwe, just as they had in South Africa. From what George had read, the new Government of National Unity had achieved nothing of note, so even the beatings and torture that members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change had suffered had all been for nothing.
George got most of his information about Zimbabwe from the internet. He regularly read online newsletters and newspapers that painted a grim picture of life there. More than once he'd come across the name Thandi Ngwenya. Although he sometimes felt slightly guilty doing it, he'd googled Thandi several times and had kept up to date with her rise through the political ranks.
The man ahead of George said goodbye as he entered the aircraft and turned right towards economy. George was grateful. He'd feared the man might be flying business class and, worse, that he might end up sitting next to him. As much as he agreed with everything the South African had said during their brief exchange, he hated such conversations.