by Farris, John
The animal that had snatched Jean-Baptiste Chabot from his cot in the floored tent he shared with another member of the climatology team was described by the frightened survivor as a huge hyena. Which he had only glimpsed by moonlight through large rents in the tent's back wall. A striped hyena, he said. That was a dry-country variety usually seen in northern Kenya and Ethiopia; the smaller spotted hyenas were common within a few kilometers of Shungwaya. But mysteriously silent this night. Jean-Baptiste, his head locked in the jaws of the hyena, had not uttered a sound; his tentmate had been alerted by the jangle of an alarm clock prematurely activated when it fell from an overturned table as the hyena exited with its nearly naked prey.
Joseph Nkambe and the Somali house staff boss named Hassan, also an experienced hunter, looked at the long rips in the tough tent fabric. Hassan devoted half a minute to turning his head in all directions and sniffing deeply.
"Hyena? I do not think so," the tall Somalian said. "Felid."
With the aid of a million-candlepower torch, a beam with a throw of half a mile at night, Joseph found on the dusty floor of the tent faint pug marks that measured more than eight inches across.
"Nor was it a lion" Joseph said. "Scarred in some way that gave the impression of stripes."
They looked at each other, perplexed. They carried double-barreled rifles, a number two Jeffery's Express and Joseph's old Evans Double Express with a bead of non-yellowing warthog ivory for a night sight. Their bush jackets were weighted with five-hundred-grain cartridges the size of small cigars.
Outside there was scant blood spoor, but the body of Jean-Baptiste had left a drag track they easily could have followed by the light of the red-tinged full moon.
October. Known as the "month of madness" in many parts of Africa, or the Month of the Blood Moon when winds hot or cold raised the red dust from pan to plain in drought years, carried it howling for a thousand miles.
The track crossed a hippo path to open water and continued upland in moderately heavy cover two hundred yards from the campsite. From the stride of the unknown felid Joseph judged it to be a dozen feet in length.
That was extraordinary, if not impossible.
They paused before entering the wood, listening.
African night is never quiet, and in spite of the wind coursing through the trees Joseph identified sounds from grunts and guttural coughs to cooing and sharp barks. His knees hurt him already. So did an arthritic elbow from carrying a heavy rifle at high port arms.
Hassan, whom Joseph knew to be a brave man, seemed to be trembling in light clothing. Of course it was a chilly hour of the night.
"There is so little blood," Hassan said in a low voice. "And where is This One going? If not to feed, what did it want with the young man who was the friend of the memsaab Eve? I am afraid of this felid."
"It is sensible to be afraid. But we must see for ourselves what it is."
"An enchanted thing," Hassan declared. "Part fisi, part felid. The lover of a witch, for whom the young man is intended as an offering. The stripes described to us may well be the markings of the witch that raised it and gave it power."
"That will be enough mbojo talk," Joseph said, not immune himself to the mention of witches and their enchantments so deep in the night and with a blood moon low across the lake. "I'm surprised at you, Hassan."
"Let us wait now for Bwana Tom. Or the Bwana Game from Hell's Gate. Do you know where Bwana Tom has gone in his helicopter?"
"Sejui. He may not return tonight. This stalk will be our business alone, Hassan."
Joseph led Hassan into the wood, the brilliant torch restoring mistily to life daytime colors of the fringelike mimosa, creeper orchid, and tall green acacias. But moonlight was enough and Hassan preferred it; artificial light distorted senses that were finely tuned to the nuances of the night. Farther into the wood the odors were musty and stale from lack of rain. Hassan sniffed nervously left and right with the nostrils of a horse as they walked. For one mile, and the better part of two, as the terrain changed and the trees thinned, becoming mostly scrub oak growing on the banks of ravines choked with tangled brush.
The track they had been following vanished.
Hassan looked around with his finger on a trigger of the Jeffery's. A hyena clan was in an uproar somewhere, their repertoire of wails and chilling moans borne on the wind. They had been hearing them for a while. Joseph felt something windblown-viscous and stringy-stick to his bare forearm. He turned on the light and saw a dabber of blood. He brushed it off and swept the torch beam through the boughs of the trees around them: high in the tossing canopy a slim body swayed head down, wedged by the waist in the forked wands of a stout limb. The head was soggy and unrecognizable after almost an hour in the jaws of the creature that had carried Jean-Baptiste this far, then climbed nearly straight up the trunk of the tree for twenty feet to secure its prey. A leopard might also cache food in this manner.
Hassan stared up at the body, then smacked his lips loudly, an expression of opprobrium.
"You see? This One did not intend to eat." All Somalis have a keen instinct for impending disaster. "Nay, it lured us here and now it has gone."
Joseph already had grasped that they had been deliberately drawn away from the house, where now, except for the Englishman Culver, there were only servants, women, and dogs. Etan Culver was not familiar with guns.
"Listen," Hassan said. "Do you hear the farasi? They have got wind of This One. Mbeya Sana."
They were less than a mile directly overland from the house and grounds of Shungwaya, and the boma constructed of dense blackthorn where the horses were safely stabled away from predators. Only elephants were impervious to thorns like needle-tipped steel spikes that exceeded four inches in length.
Without another word Hassan began to run, striding through brush that was only a minor obstacle for his seven-foot frame, his heavy rifle at arm's length above his head.
Joseph was too old to run. Instead he took a walkie-talkie from a pocket of his bush jacket.
"Yes," Alberta Nkambe said, in a voice so low her father barely understood her. "I see it. I see them. Hyena. A large clan, at least thirty. They're following it. The horses have gone crazy."
Not to mention the dogs surrounding her on the veranda. Two servant boys came running from their quarters to the house, yipping from fear. Bertie motioned them inside. She was looking west to a lugga behind farm buildings and the corral where the hyenas had appeared, rambling along with their strange crippled-looking gaits (although they could outrun horses over short distances) behind the powerful felid, its head in the moonlight three times larger than theirs, but with the same black snout, crooked jaw line, and bad dental armature. An uber hyena, godlike, with the heavy but lissome body of a tiger.
Bertie didn't mention the nude, spectral woman she saw astride the tiger, like a limerick she vaguely remembered, because she felt certain that she was the only one seeing this blank-eyed, evil apparition, long black hair silkily afloat in the argentine light. No need to compound the madness, or the fear Bertie heard in her father's voice. Although by now the goony screams of the approaching hyenas made it hard for her to hear him.
Another Somali servant, wearing only a breechclout, whipped past her into the relative safety of the stone house. The dogs were leaping and snarling, rolling their eyes at Bertie, waiting for a command to attack. Six of them, brawny mixed breeds with emphasis on durability and courage. They all would have been dead in twenty seconds if Bertie let them loose on the hyena clan.
"Go in the house at once," Joseph Nkambe said, unnecessarily. "Arm yourself."
"Yes. But don't you come here. I can take care of it?" Maybe. She was beginning to swallow her heart. Bertie wondered where Hassan was. Probably returning at a dead run, one rifle, sure death for Hassan as well.
She ordered the dogs into the house. They retreated reluctantly. Bertie followed, glancing at the scared faces inside.
"What in God's name?" Etan Culver said. He was in
his pajamas but had a camera with him. Pegeen was holding on to him with both hands, mouth moving soundlessly, appearing to be in a fearful state of near-collapse.
"The thing we saw in your picture show? It's real. And it's here. Brought a pack of hyena along as well."
"I told you, I hate this place!" Pegeen said, slamming a fist into her husband's rib cage. "Get me out of here now, Etan!"
"Go back to your room and bar the door," Bertie said. "Push an armoire against the windows. And don't come out until I call you." The kitchen pavilion seemed to be the best place for the house staff; she sent them there with similar instructions for sealing off possible points of entry. Although Bertie had no intention of letting any marauder close to the house. She tried to close her mind to the din they were making outside. Hyena had a wide range of vocalizations. For now they were tittering and guffawing like elderly ladies telling each other dirty jokes at their bridge club luncheon. Hyena didn't bother her; she'd been listening to them all of her life. It was unlikely they could break in; they were by nature sneaks. Their strength was in their jaws, which could crush the bones of elephants.
She knew nothing, yet, about the strength of the were-beast and its ghostly accomplice, her pale face resonant in Bertie's subconscious mind.
Bertie went quickly into the parlor and opened the twin gun cabinets, looking over the weapons available to her. Everything from a five-shot, seven-millimeter. Rigby to a double-barreled elephant rifle that had a recoil massive enough to dislocate her shoulder. No point in trying to kill the were-beast and its mistress, she guessed. But she wanted to give their hyena entourage something to remember, if they should be tempted to return en masse to Shungwaya another day.
Her choice from the gun cabinets was a Benelli semiautomatic shotgun, which she loaded with five incendiary shells called "Dragon's Breath." Not the best ammunition to use in a dry season; more than hyenas were likely to be ignited from a single round. But they had fought fires before at Shungwaya. The water tanks were full, pumps in good working order.
And she was one woman, one gun. Three weeks past her twenty-first birthday.
She saw Etan Culver's face in a doorway and heard Pegeen sobbing as she walked back toward the veranda.
"A hyena will pull your face off from the eyebrows down. Or castrate you with one bite. But if you still want to take pictures, I can't stop you."
She didn't look to see if Etan had followed her, but she was careful not to let any of the bloodthirsty dogs out.
The were-beast was in the yard now, striding past a big jacaranda laden with pink foam in its blooming season. Hyena in their rump-sprung prowling around the boma serenaded the terrified horses with death threats.
Wouldn't do to fire in that direction, Bertie thought.
Instead she brought the muzzle of the shotgun to bear on the ugly brown head closest to her, observing how the hyena's hard tufted skull did not seem a complete mismatch with the tiger's elegant body. Both animals had powerful necks and shoulders. But it was like admiring the anatomy of a nightmare.
The eyes of the spirit form astride the tiger's body were as empty as holes drilled in wet stone. Her body and teeth both bared, raven hair swirling around lush nakedness. She raised her hands above her head. There was a jingle of shackles, silvery notes in the air as Bertie jacked an incendiary shell into the chamber of the Benelli.
What the hell, she thought. Let's see what you're really made of.
The were-beast was fifty feet from the veranda steps when Bertie fired, and was nearly blinded by the flame and smoke that spouted from the muzzle of the shotgun.
She had only a blurred glimpse of the tiger's long leap, the hyena's contorted, contemptuous mouth. Then it was gone, and she blinked at a narrow blaze on the lawn, like a bolt of lightning fallen horizontally and blackening the grass. She whirled on the veranda, expecting claws nearby, a fatal slash, but she was alone, the faces of dogs raging and demonic behind the beveled glass panes of the doors. They lunged against each other and the doors until one shattered. Then the dogs tumbled past Bertie in a dark torrent and were gone in spite of her screams, streaking over the burning lawn toward the hyena gang.
The were-beast had leaped twenty feet from the ground to a veranda roof and now she heard or sensed it climbing, claws digging into thick papyrus, woven tightly enough to shed a tropical cloudburst. Both roofs, one above the other, were slanted at a sixty-degree pitch from the ridgepole.
She couldn't tell yet if the thing was trying to dig down through the papyrus to get at her, but the roof seemed to bear up okay beneath tremendous weight. Shaking from her adrenaline rush, she swung the muzzle of the Benelli in a tight arc above her head. But the shotgun would be no defense, unless she wanted to bum the house down.
Bertie was backing into the house, eyes on the underside of the larger of the two roofs, when her attention was diverted by the jarring but welcome noise of the Augusta helicopter flying over at fifty feet, barely treetop level. Tom was back; and the searchlight mounted beneath the chopper was focused on the hyenas.
Charging dogs and blinding light; they disappeared in moments, almost magically, finding the cover of the brush-filled lugga. They easily outdistanced the savage dogs if not the helicopter, which continued the chase for half a minute. Then Tom turned toward the concrete pad. The fires on the lawn didn't seem to Bertie to be a big problem. The problem was the were-beast, and for a few very bad moments she had no idea of where it had gone. Her back was to a stone wall next to the shattered veranda door. She was looking, looking, strained to the breaking point, when she heard, above the racket of the landing helicopter, a high-pitched scream. Could've come from one of the houseboys, or Pegeen Culver. The courtyard, she thought, freezing in horror, crying and pissing now like a two-year-old child, couldn't help herself.
Then she saw the were-beast on the south lawn where pool mist drifted, heading away from the house with great loping strides. Momentarily bold in the moonlight, a beautiful monster but without the spirit-rider Bertie had seen a minute ago.
The were-beast covered fifty yards in less than three seconds, reaching the bungalow where Eden lived.
Bertie jumped at the crunch of broken glass in the doorway and threw down on Etan Culver. He jumped too, a good three feet away from the muzzle of the Benelli.
"No, no! It's me!" He fumbled with his movie camera, but the were-beast had vanished again, in tree-darkness near the bungalow.
"Get any pictures?" Bertie asked breathlessly.
"Are you insane?" Etan looked at Bertie's shotgun. "You bloody might have shot it!"
"Give me a break. Did you see how fast it moves? Who screamed?"
"Pegeen."
"Well, is she okay, damn it?"
"Oh, uh, I think so. She saw, thinks it was, a spectre, she said."
"Forget about the ghost. Anyway, it wasn't." Bertie was still on edge, feeling soggy and ill-tempered. Tom Sherard was coming toward them, a fire extinguisher from the chopper in his hands. He doused clumps of fire as he limped heavily across the rough farmyard. She wondered fleetingly what he had done with his lion's-head walking stick.
"Bertie!"
She wiped her eyes, which were still leaking. "We're okay! It's down by the bungalow!"
"What is?"
"You didn't see it?"
"All I saw were hyena about to massacre our dogs."
Four of the dogs had turned back and were catching up to Tom. Two missing. Hyena were whooping it up from cover, and no matter how often Bertie had heard them, still their eerie voices raised gooseflesh.
"Oh, man," Bertie said as Tom came up the steps to the veranda. "You have a treat in store. Better get us a couple of rifles, Tom. Fifties. It's the size of a Land Cruiser, I am not kidding."
"What are you talking about?" He looked in irritation at Bertie's shotgun. "What did you load that with?"
"Incendiaries." She shrugged. "It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I missed?'
He noticed the wet spot on
her trousers, smelled it probably, but didn't embarrass her by commenting. He couldn't remember having seen her scared, by anything.
"It's our phantom tiger-hyena thing," Etan volunteered. "Only in the too, too solid flesh, from what little I saw of it." He looked regretfully at his expensive camera. "I'm afraid I didn't get a good shot myself."
Bertie nodded, teeth fastened to her under lip. Looking a bit windy, as the old safari hands put it. Tom took the shotgun from her and gently guided her inside.
"Sit down. Stay here."
"But—I feel safer with you, Tom! You haven't seen it. You don't know how fast it comes at you."
"Faster than a charging lion?"
"I—I don't know!"
"Survived a few of those. So I can cope, you see. Now you've done enough, let me take it from here."
Bertie's best dog, Fernando, came into the house on three legs, left hindquarters laid open to the bone by a hyena's near-miss. Fernando's tongue lolled, he was hurting, but he looked pleased with himself. He spread himself slowly at Bertie's feet and began to lick tattered flesh, eyes half closed.
"I'd better go find Pegeen," Etan muttered. "Left her beneath our bed." To Tom he said, "I don't suppose—"
"Absolutely not. One of us is all I can look after."
Tom went to the parlor and was back in thirty seconds with the .470 Holland and Holland double rifle his father had ordered for him when he was a year old.
Hassan came in from the veranda with his own rifle, not very out of breath after running a five-minute mile through bush.
"Where's Joseph?" Tom asked.
"He will soon be coming."
"Good," Tom said. "Well, shall we take a crack at this mysterious critter, Hassan?"
"If you say we must, Bwana Tom."
Five minutes past four in the morning. The moon was down, the brilliant litter on all the pathways to Eternity flashing forth in the black sky.
It would have been useful, Tom thought, to know what they were stalking. Lion, leopard, Cape buffalo; all dangerous game he had hunted, known their spoor, their cunning, and their power. A tiger combined with a hyena was not only an abomination, unearthly; it could possess a supernatural intelligence beyond his calculation.