by Tony Park
*
Tate sat on a rock and stared out over the wilderness of acacia-covered hill and valleys, but Natalie noticed his eyes kept coming back to one particular point, a steep-sided peak in the middle distance. He squinted as though he was trying to focus on something.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Natalie asked him.
‘The past.’
She shivered. Dawn and the hour before it were the coldest times in the bush, she remembered from her childhood. She remembered freezing in her nightdress as Emmerson Ngwenya dragged her across thorn-studded ground. She reached out and put a hand on Tate's shoulder, and was encouraged when he didn't move away from her, though he kept staring at the far-off hill.
Chengetai sniffed and huffed in her crate. Natalie saw the animal's frozen breath rising like exhaust from the crate, which had been lowered to the ground in preparation for the release. They were just waiting on the others to join them. Tate had said, in his annoyed voice, that it was partly for sentimental reasons that Paul and Pip wanted to be there, but he'd added that with cranky old Chengetai it would be good to have two dart guns loaded and ready in case she did something crazy.
‘Sometimes it's best to leave the past alone,’ Natalie said. ‘I've discovered that while working on this book.’
He shook his head. ‘No. It never goes away. It's part of who we are. If it doesn't define us, it shapes us. Or rather, our memories of the past shape us.’
She stood beside him and said nothing for a while, just rested her hand on him. She knew she couldn't push him. ‘It's so beautiful here,’ she said at last. ‘I'd forgotten how much I love the bush. I'm a bit envious of you, Tate Quilter-Phipps. I reckon I could live here. You must wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are.’
He pointed straight out, towards the hill he'd been looking at. ‘I nearly died up on that hill. I didn't think I was lucky when Hope left me for Braedan. When I met her at the airport she told me what had happened, and I turned her away. I was about to shoot myself when a rhino trotted up and plucked up the courage to walk past me, to confront its fears and get on with its life.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yes. Wow. You know, I've wondered, these last few days, if it could be the same animal I saw around here at the waterholes. There were very few rhino in this area back in 1979, so that one had to have been a survivor of note already. To think of the terrible things it escaped, and how it adapted. It was up on that hill that I got the radio call telling me that Hope's plane had crashed and I knew right then, Natalie, that I was wrong and that I'd been a total idiot. I had no right to judge Hope – I don't have the right to judge anyone. She was human. She'd come here to apologise to me. She didn't hide anything from me, and I turned her away. And the rest … well, you know the story. I've pretended to hate Braedan ever since then, but it was me I loathed.’
She squeezed his shoulder. ‘But you're human, too, Tate. None of us gets an instruction book for life and love. We all get it wrong sometimes. And sometimes our actions hurt others.’
They were silent a long time and Natalie didn't know whether to stay or to go. Then Tate lifted a hand and rested it on hers. ‘Meeting you, seeing you, has brought it all back.’
‘I'm so sorry, Tate …’
‘No, no. It's a good thing. I needed to let Hope go, and it's time for me to stop living in the past. It's like this business with the rhinos. I don't know if it's right or stupid to release them here, but we have to give them the best chance we can to get on with their lives, to be free and to find their own way.’
Natalie's heart was pounding. He squeezed her hand and she wanted so much to avoid telling him what she knew she must. ‘Tate … there's something I have to tell you.’
He craned his neck to look up at her, into his eyes, and she felt it then, pure and simple. He had opened himself, as much as he could, to her, and it was time for her to do the same. ‘It's about Braedan …’
He kept his hand in hers. ‘You slept with him?’
Natalie swallowed hard and could feel the tears welling, but she didn't want his pity. She was an adult and so was he, and she had done what she did because it was what she needed at the time. She'd missed the intimacy, the touch, the feel of another person, and that's why she'd gone with Braedan on the motorcycle. But being here with Tate she knew that wasn't enough. She wanted more than just sex. Natalie nodded.
For a few long, agonising seconds his face was set in stone, and Natalie held her breath. The corners of his mouth started to crinkle and she was suddenly reminded of Braedan. ‘That's understandable,’ he said.
She didn't know what to say.
‘He's a very handsome man,’ Tate said, his grin spreading across his face.
Natalie burst out laughing, and when the tension had left her body she moved in front of him, blocking his view of the far-off hill, and extended both her hands to him. ‘It's not Braedan I want to spend time with, Tate.’
‘I've got nothing to offer you, Natalie.’
She looked over her shoulder, at the view. ‘You've got this.’
Natalie turned back to him and Tate slowly raised his hands and reached for her. Then they heard the gunfire.
37
‘Tate, we have to go,’ Natalie said, striding from their lookout spot back to the track.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘We have to release these rhinos. If they're poachers down there shooting, these animals will be killed like sitting ducks.’
Natalie stopped and stared at him. ‘I cannot believe this. My family are down the bottom of that hill where the shots are coming from, Tate.’
‘But –’
She shook her head and raised her hand. ‘Christ, I was wrong about you.’ She turned and jogged down the road.
Tate looked at the knot of other drivers who had gathered around them. Chengetai's crate was the only one on the ground, ready to go.
*
The noise of the firing assaulted Chengetai's sensitive ears and she squealed with alarm. If her small brain registered anything about the din, it was to link it with the smells of blood and death at the boma.
Chengetai knew enough to flee. She bolted from her cage as soon as the sliding door was raised. She was confused and disorientated. The trees and smells around her were different and the stony ground was loose under her feet, so unlike the sandveld on which she'd been raised. But the important thing was she was free.
She ran, crashing headlong through thorn bush and flattening small trees. Unused to the steepness of the hills in her new environment, Chengetai's pace slowed when she moved through a valley and tackled the opposing slope. As she huffed and puffed she caught a scent on the wind. It was another rhino. She had lived in close proximity to others of her species all her life – much nearer than if she had grown up in the wild, where she would have only come across others at times of mating and, generally, would have avoided contact with strangers.
But Chengetai was a breeder. Eight times over the years she had given birth to calves, though each of them had been taken away from her to be hand-reared and eventually moved away.
Chengetai stopped, raised her head and sniffed the slight morning breeze. He was close, and coming towards her. As it happened, she was in oestrus and, despite the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, Chengetai knew very well what her big body was made for. She plodded uphill towards him.
*
Tate ran down the track after Natalie. He carried a panga he'd taken from one of the drivers before dismissing the men and telling them again to abandon their vehicles and run off and hide in the bush. They could drive no further in the direction they'd been heading and if they turned around they would walk straight into an ambush.
Chengetai was the only animal Tate had released. The three animals being carried by Braedan, Pip and Paul, and George Bryant were still somewhere down the hill. The remaining five rhinos were still in their crates, at the release spot but still not freed. Tate could hardly bear to look at them as he ran past them. If
the people shooting were poachers then these animals were destined for slaughter.
But the sound of the second volley of gunfire had flicked a switch in his brain. Natalie was foolishly running towards the danger, but she cared more for the safety of her family than herself. For most of his life Tate had been far happier in the company of wildlife than mixing with people. He hadn't suddenly developed a passion for all human kind – just Natalie Bryant. He realised that if Chengetai and the other rhinos on the hilltop survived but something happened to Natalie, then this time he truly would take his life.
Tate slowed his pace down the washed-away track when he heard raised voices in the distance. It sounded like orders being issued in Shona. His command of the language was excellent, but the speakers were far away. He was afraid for Natalie, but not for himself. He felt a raging hatred rise up inside him for the men who would kill defenceless animals and the people who tried to protect them. He gripped the machete tighter in his fist.
He half-ran, half-slid down the steep hill, trying to watch his footfalls and the path ahead and the bush on either side. He detected a blur of movement in the trees to his right, but he was too slow to get into cover himself. Tate stopped, the weapon half-raised in his hand.
‘Don't move.’ Braedan emerged from the cover of the trees and raised Paul Bryant's .303 rifle to his shoulder and took aim at his brother.
‘You bastard,’ Tate said.
‘Look in the mirror, brother.’
*
Natalie was sitting on the ground with her hands tied behind her back with duct tape. Her knee was bleeding through the rip in her trousers from where she had fallen, and her right cheek smarted from the stinging blow of the man's hand. She looked at Emmerson Ngwenya with undisguised hatred.
‘Nice to see you again, by the way,’ he said to her.
Natalie felt foolish and helpless. As she'd run down the hill she'd heard more gunfire, but before she could run off into the bushes, a man had emerged from the side of the track and grabbed her. He'd been armed with an assault rifle and when she'd tried to shrug off his hand he had hit her, knocking her to the ground.
She'd been half-dragged, half-frogmarched to where the other three trucks, driven by her father, grandfather and Braedan, were parked. Blood dripped from the rhino crate on the back of Braedan's vehicle and Natalie had seen the fallen outline of the slain beast. The animals on the other trucks snorted and stamped in alarm.
Natalie had tried to run to her grandmother, who'd been kneeling beside Grandpa Paul, who looked deathly white and was lying on his side. ‘I think he's having another heart attack, or a stroke,’ her grandmother had said. The terror was plain in her face.
Emmerson had bound Natalie while one of his henchmen covered her with his rifle. When he was finished he had pushed her to the ground, between her father and her grandmother, who was checking Grandpa Paul's pulse. Paul looked bewildered and when he saw Natalie he opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.
‘My father needs a doctor, can't you see that?’ George said. Natalie's father also had his hands tied behind his back.
‘Where's Braedan?’ Natalie whispered to her grandmother. Emmerson had not bound the older woman's hands, presumably because he didn't consider her a threat.
‘He disappeared into the bush just as this lot arrived,’ Pip muttered. ‘I think he might be one of them. There are two others, also with guns. Emmerson sent them off into the bush to look for something, or someone, just before you arrived. And that bastard Elias …’
‘Shut up!’ Emmerson strode over to Pip and shoved the end of the barrel of his AK-47 into her temple, hard enough to almost topple her over onto her prone husband. ‘No talking unless I tell you to.’
‘Hah! You're pathetic, Emmerson, you two-faced bastard,’ Pip spat back.
Emmerson raised his free hand.
‘No!’ Natalie yelled.
He looked down at her and grinned.
‘It's no wonder your grandmother is angry and calls me twofaced,’ he said.
Natalie looked up at the back of the truck Braedan had been driving and saw a man climbing up over the top of the rhino crate and down the outside. She hadn't seen him at first. It was Elias, the chief game scout at Kiabejane, and he carried a hacked-off rhino horn, which he took to Emmerson and handed over.
‘Good work.’
Natalie could hardly believe that one of her grandparents' most trusted employees had betrayed them. ‘You … you're the one who darted the rhino on the ranch and –’
‘No,’ Grandma Pip said.
Natalie looked at her.
‘Go on,’ Emmerson said, grinning down at them. ‘Tell them, old lady, who really did poach the rhino horn from the ranch.’
George and Natalie looked at Philippa, who now cradled her husband's head in her lap. His breathing was laboured and his eyes were half-closed. He was still terribly pale, Natalie thought. She watched her grandmother, who closed her eyes for a few moments before beginning to speak, unable to look at any of them.
‘I did it.’
‘What?’ George said. ‘Mom … why … how …’
‘It's all right, George.’ She opened her eyes and looked up at Emmerson. ‘I've been wanting to tell you all since I did it. I was so ashamed. But this … person here came to me with a proposition.’
Emmerson smiled and nodded.
‘He said to me, weeks ago, that if I could supply him with a rhino horn, from a live or dead animal, it didn't matter, he would give me thirty thousand US dollars and he would ensure that the ranch stayed in our names. He told me … swore to me … that would be the end of it. He needed one rhino horn to get some people off his back and Paul and I needed the money. George, Natalie, I'm so sorry …’
Natalie was as astounded as her father.
‘But Mom,’ George said, ‘I could have sent you money.’
Pip shook her head. ‘I'd never ask you for money, George. The ranch is hopelessly in debt. Our electricity bills are thousands of US dollars a month now and we've got virtually no income. I needed the money to pay our staff.’ She looked at Elias, who had the grace to turn away, not meeting her eyes. ‘I shot the rhino with a dart gun and Elias helped me saw the horn off. Then Elias went behind my back, after I told Emmerson I wouldn't deal with him again. After he double-crossed me …’
Emmerson laughed. ‘Don't try and lecture me about morals, old woman. You broke the law.’
‘Yes, and you used the fact that we couldn't account for the missing rhino horn against us, as an excuse to take over the ranch. I tried to help you, Emmerson, after what happened to you when you were a boy. I tried to make amends, and I broke the law for you and you betrayed us.’
Emmerson spat on the ground. ‘You got my father arrested, you got me thrown into juvenile gaol because your daughter lied. You think you could have made it up to me and my mother by bringing us a basket of eggs now and then? I care nothing for your white guilt. You don't belong in this country and you don't deserve to own our land.’
George looked from Emmerson back to his mother. ‘What does he mean?’
Pip took a deep breath, then shook her head. ‘It's nothing, George. Leave it.’
But Emmerson filled the void. ‘Your sister told me at your wedding that you were sleeping with Thandi. I was shocked, angry. I did nothing to hurt Hope, but when the police came she said nothing, she betrayed me.’
George looked at the man whose life had always been filled with hatred. ‘Then why didn't you say something to the police, tell them that was why you were so angry?’
‘I did,’ Emmerson said. ‘And they called me a stinking lying kaffir and they beat me until I confessed that I had wanted to hurt Hope, to have sex with her.’
George looked at Philippa. ‘Mom …’
She raised a hand. ‘I knew, George. I'm your mother, after all, and it was obvious, the way you two looked at each other … how much time you spent at Patricia's place in the township. I wondered if Hope kn
ew but I chose not to force the issue at the wedding. I felt guilty – yes, Emmerson, white guilt – about what happened to you in prison. It's one of the reasons I agreed to break the law for you.’
‘But Grandma,’ Natalie asked, since it was all coming out, ‘what happened to the money? We thought Tate or Braedan might have stolen the rhino horn and sold it to help their mother.’
Pip sniffed and shook her head, then wiped her eye with a finger. Paul coughed. ‘I couldn't take the money in the end, not for us. I paid the staff the three months' wages they were owed, and I transferred the rest of the money to Sharon's bank account and sent her an email from a phoney address.’ She looked into her husband's face. ‘My darling, do you understand what I'm saying? Can you hear me?’
Paul blinked his eyes twice, and his head moved a fraction in a nod. He reached up, his hand shaking, and took her hand in his and squeezed it.
Her grandmother was crying and her father was staring out blankly over the hills. Natalie turned to look at Emmerson Ngwenya again and saw he was staring at her, smiling. ‘You kidnapped me,’ she said.
His grin broadened. ‘Yes, and I would have taken you across the border into Botswana if my sell-out brother hadn't shot me.’
George snapped his head around. ‘You … you killed Winston?’
Ngwenya laughed. ‘No. That is very funny. You know, the great irony is that he was killed by Braedan Quilter-Phipps, the great hero who rescued the little girl.’
‘The man who found me … the African man who picked me up,’ Natalie said, looking at her father, ‘Braedan shot him.’
George sighed heavily. ‘I picked up the bodies that day. There was a cover-up at the highest levels of the military. It was a mistake of war that Braedan entered an area where a group of Selous Scouts led by Winston Ngwenya was already on the trail of the terrs. When I challenged the official version I was told not to discuss what I'd seen with anyone. I couldn't look Braedan in the eye afterwards and, ultimately, that's why I left the air force and why we moved to Australia. I felt I let Winston down by being too cowardly to stand up for the truth.’ George lowered his head between his knees.