by Nell Brien
“I can produce a story that would satisfy him.”
“She’s no threat. She never has been. But I’ll find a way to put her mind at rest, stop her questions. I’m taking her upcountry—”
“What about the job at hand?”
“Tom can get the men mobilized, and I can be back within hours.”
“Don’t fall in love. We can’t afford the distraction.”
“Fuck you, N’toya,” Campbell said pleasantly. He dropped the phone into the cradle.
Thirty-Three
A pink haze moved in the silvery mist of early morning, undulating in a wave of changing color along the shore.
“Flamingos, about half a million of them,” Campbell called over the sound of the engine. He put the Cessna into a low sweep over the lake. “Lake Nakuru.”
Below them, green, algae-rich water blushed as the birds rose, long legs trailing, necks outstretched, their wings spread into a pink and coral cloak that almost hid the lake from view.
The moment was magical. Cat laid her hand over his, and he smiled at her without speaking, then put the plane into a banking turn to follow the shoreline. Cat turned to watch the birds drop peacefully back into the water as the shadow of the plane passed over them. The lake fell away, the engine of the small plane roared as Campbell climbed to skirt a ridge rising to the west.
Last night she’d protested weakly she couldn’t leave Nairobi before hearing from N’toya. He’d had an answer for everything. Tom would make a few calls, see if he could find someone who knew Stephen. The minute Tom got in touch, they’d come back. She’d wanted to be won over. So much time had already been lost to suspicion and mistrust. For a few encapsulated days she wanted to allow herself to love this man. Without waiting for her to agree, he’d arranged for Morag to remain with the Terrys until Jock came down from the farm.
So she’d stayed the night, slept curled into his body, his arms wrapped around her. This morning they’d laughed a lot, scrambled eggs and burned toast together, then left before Jock arrived.
For most of the journey, Campbell kept the plane low, flying over cultivated fields and small round-roofed villages, open forest and grassland rippling with grazing animals. Brown streams trembled with gold as sunlight caught the silt-laden water. The hours ran together, passing mostly in silence. Occasionally Campbell pointed out a herd of galloping giraffe, or the thin strands of a waterfall tumbling into a ravine. Cat gazed, entranced at the changing scenes, lulled by the drone of the engine, wishing the journey could last forever, the two of them alone in a magic box of space and time, floating, no demands, no pressure, no unanswered questions. No other world outside themselves, now, in this place of blue sky and forest and grassland below the wings.
The engine whined, changed its pattern, the plane banked sharply. Cat sat up, her reverie shattered.
“Here we are. Kitale.” Campbell looked down at the small runway rushing to meet them. “We’re going to drive up to Elgon from here.”
“Elgon! You told me there was nothing worth seeing up there.”
“The situation has changed quite a bit since then.” He threw her a grin. “Hold on, the airstrip’s a bit pitted.”
Cat clutched her seat to steady herself as the plane lurched in and out of deep potholes. They came to rest in front of a Land Rover with extra fuel tanks attached to the rear bumper, parked outside a small shed on the edge of the airstrip.
“The airport crew keeps an eye on it for me. I come up as often as I can.”
“Alone?”
“Until now.”
Cat smiled at him over the top of the vehicle. He stowed their gear, slotted two rifles into the empty rack behind the driver’s seat and nodded to the passenger’s side. “Hop in.”
The Land Rover lurched over rutted red earth, and they turned west, a different route to Mount Elgon from the one they had taken previously. Two hours later they were climbing a series of rough, narrow tracks. The air thinned. Their silence was companionable, easy. Cat found herself unable to stop touching him—a hand on his thigh as he drove, or resting lightly on his shoulder. She wondered whether it was safe to allow herself to feel this way.
“Campbell, could this be that you are breaking your ironclad rule?”
He glanced at her quizzically.
“You know, the famous grade-B movie line about never taking women into the bush.”
He laughed, then braked hard as a troop of baboons broke from the brush ahead of them. A huge male, his upper lip raised to show great yellow incisors, stopped in the middle of the track, forcing the Land Rover to a halt. Campbell shouted at him to move. The baboon snarled back defiantly. Campbell thrust his head and shoulder through the open window and yelled at him, banging the side panel of the door. The baboon held his ground, and Cat started to giggle. Finally the animal turned, taking his time to swagger off, disappearing among the twisted limbs of enormous cedars.
“Cheeky bugger!” Campbell said, voice filled with outrage.
Laughing, Cat grabbed his head, pulled him toward her, planted a kiss on his cheek. “Maybe he didn’t understand Swahili.”
The forest was deep now, the air sweet with resin, giant vines curled around tree trunks and hung from huge branching limbs. They stopped to eat in an open sun-filled glade Campbell said had been created by grazing antelope. Cat spread a blanket and opened the cooler they had brought from Nairobi.
Campbell reached for her, slipping a hand inside her shirt, cupping her breast. “First things first.”
“I can be had for a Tusker,” she said, laughing. He removed his hand to reach for a bottle. Cat dragged the shirt over her head and wriggled out of her pants. “On second thoughts, the hell with it.”
They made love leisurely, afterward spending an hour feeding each other shreds of roast francolin. Juice from cold slices of tomatoes dripped onto their bare skin. They shared a couple of bottles of Tusker, and Cat knew she had never been so happy.
While she enticed bright-eyed vervets with the remains of their lunch, Campbell called Tom on the shortwave. Before leaving that morning, Cat had spoken to Mave and arranged for Doug to relay news of any emergency through Tom in Nairobi, telling Mave she would be out of touch for a few days.
“No news from Los Angeles,” Campbell called.
“Wonderful,” Cat said with relief. Today, construction shacks with their girlie calendars on the walls, bitter coffee and stale cigar smoke seemed a distant echo from another life. One that belonged to some other Cat Stanton.
The afternoon wore on. Gradually the game track disappeared, and they were traveling over open heath. Campbell swung the Land Rover around a stand of rock, maneuvered the vehicle carefully in descent.
“Hold on. It gets easier in a couple of minutes.”
The slope was covered with vegetation, russet where the sun touched, black in the shadow. The decline became more gentle, full of small crevices and ravines. The air was sharp and resinous, like needles of pure oxygen.
He stopped in a tiny box canyon no more than fifteen feet across, sixty at the deepest point. A small spring bubbled out of the earth into a catchment it had hollowed out of rock. The sun was dropping and the air had cooled noticeably. While Campbell unloaded the Land Rover, Cat picked up scattered fragments of wood, trying to remember how he’d built the fire at Maasai Springs. After a few sputtering tries, she gave up.
“I think you’re going to have to give me that lesson in woodcraft,” she called out to him.
“No time for that now, sweetheart. If we’re going to be at the caves before dark, we have to move fast.”
“We’re going to caves? Tonight? It’s going to be freezing. Why don’t we wait until morning?”
“Here.” He tossed her a down jacket. “Morag’s. And get these warmer pants on.”
As she balanced on one leg then the other, changing into the heavy cords he’d brought for her, he caught her around the waist.
“On the other hand, they’ll still be there tomorrow n
ight.”
Cat thrust an elbow into his chest. “No dice, cowboy. You just put a leash on those hormones until we get back. But, I warn you, this better be good.”
“Trust me.” He nuzzled her neck.
“Never trust a man who says trust me,” she said, laughing, “and never eat at a coffee shop called Mom’s. Old American folk saying. Let me go.”
When they left finally, he kept the lights off on the Land Rover. He didn’t need them. Clearly he knew every rut, every stone, every opening in the brush. Fifteen minutes passed. In spite of her cajoling, he refused to give her a clue about the caves—what they were, why they had to go there at night. Fleetingly, Cat thought about the Beretta in the bag at her feet, then, ashamed, dismissed it. Something was tickling the back of her mind—she seemed to have got into the habit of disquiet. But for the next few days—all she would have of him unless a miracle occurred, and she didn’t believe in miracles—she would do as he asked. She would trust him.
He stopped under a large boulder, discernible to Cat by that time only as a denser black against the night sky. Darkness had fallen with the suddenness of a curtain closing.
“We’ll walk from here.” Campbell pulled the rifle from the rack behind his seat. “Not far. Stay close.”
Deliberately, she dropped her bag, and the Beretta it contained, onto the floor of the Land Rover. “Don’t worry. That’s me breathing down your neck.”
A three-quarter moon was rising. Every shadow seemed threatening, dancing in the breeze rustling through the brush. There was no path, but Campbell moved silently, without hesitation, and she followed closely, noticing that her breath was becoming heavier. They were climbing steadily.
An indefinable noise drifted through the night—a strange, soft gurgle. Mouth dry, Cat grabbed the back of Campbell’s jacket. He stopped, put an arm around her, motioned silence. Twenty feet away, an enormous boulder moved. Cat thought her heartbeat would be heard in Nairobi. The moon broke from the cover of trees, flooding silver light over a game track slightly below where they stood on a brush-covered cascade of rock. The track was as clear of vegetation as if it had just been weeded by a giant hand. On the other side of the track, the shadow moved again.
“Elephants,” Campbell said softly against her ear. “Mountain elephants.”
The great shape was pewter in the moonlight, trunk raised, testing the air. Another elephant appeared. The two stood together as if conferring, trunks weaving from side to side. Satisfied, they moved ponderously over the rim of the path and started to climb.
Cat caught her breath. Behind them, elephants of all sizes appeared on the ridge and swung into single file. Their feet made no sound.
Over a hundred, she thought. And babies.
“We’re looking at the last of them,” Campbell said. “Only a few years ago there were ten million. At last count there are about five hundred thousand. Only half that number will be protected.”
“What about the rest?”
He shook his head. “They take their chances.”
The elephants paced to the speed of the smallest calf. The smack of their ears against their heads as they walked was clearly audible, as well as the strange sound she had heard earlier.
“What’s that gurgling noise?”
“Their stomachs rumbling.” He laughed softly at her delight. “Come on.”
In spite of the cold air, she was damp from effort and excitement, her lungs laboring. Campbell stopped on a stone ledge above the track. Across a small ravine was the black entrance to a series of caves. The open ground in front was filled with great moving beasts, dappled with silver moonlight. Cat hardly breathed, riveted by the gray shapes, the strange mixture of sound—stomachs rumbling, rock ground beneath huge feet, grunts of welcome, tiny squeals. The smell of dust and dung and moisture, the green scent of crushed vegetation. It was a scene from the morning of the world.
“How many do you think are there?”
“Three or four hundred. A number of family groups. You don’t find single herds that size now. Once there were herds of five thousand and more.”
Trunks were raised in greeting, ears and eyes explored gently. Every adult seemed aware of the fragility of the babies and young calves. Above them, black shapes against the moon, bats and flying foxes fluttered from the dark mouths of the caves.
“These are the elephant caves of Kitum.” Campbell’s breath stirred the hair just above her ear, and she shivered. “Dug out by countless generations of tuskers bringing down rock to get at the mineral salts. Watch. When the matriarch gives the signal, the whole group will sort themselves out. They communicate by sound, even over long distances, a sort of rumbling below our hearing.”
The herds were separating, one group starting the trudge back into the bush, another climbing into the caves. The rest continued to mingle.
Campbell pointed. Cat dragged her eyes away from the elephants to see a leopard springing fluidly from rock to rock, slipping into the cave. Below, a few jackals followed. She looked closer. The rocks leading to the cave were alive with moving shapes.
“The tuskers bring down the minerals, the rest benefit,” Campbell said.
“Can you get inside?”
“Well, it’s best to be in position before the trek begins at night. I’d hate to find myself arguing with a female that size. I know when I’m outmatched.”
“Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“It’s far too dangerous.” He touched her cheek. “You’re freezing. We should go back, get a fire going, warm you up.”
She was shaking, but it was not with cold. “Not yet. It’s wonderful, this place.”
He pulled her back against his chest, wrapped his arms around her to give her his warmth. “I’m glad you’re here, sweetheart,” he said against her ear.
Not even Tom came up here with him, Cat thought. But he’d wanted to share this with her, something of his world for her to take back to her own. She leaned against him. Automatically, she found herself studying the terrain, checking the site, the slope of the land. Guitterrez would sell his soul for a site like this, she thought.
Any architect would.
Thirty-Four
“There it is,” Campbell said. “Erukenya. It’s Maa for Misty Mountain. The ancestral home.” He put the plane into a sliding turn. “Let’s give them a buzz.”
The low, rambling house was shaded by trees and set in a sea of green lawn. Behind it, the jagged sun-touched peaks of Mount Kenya were wreathed in boas of feather-gray mist.
Two days on Elgon had flashed by in a dream of sex and sun and laughter. Now, below the wings of the Cessna, scarlet canna lilies and yellow hibiscus bent in the slipstream, and purple bougainvillea lifted like a cloud of confetti.
“That’s some farmhouse,” Cat said. If Father Gaston had been right about the Campbells having been wiped out by rinderpest, their financial recovery was impressive.
A tennis court was tucked away behind a stand of trees, the ruffled water of a swimming pool sparkled aquamarine in the sun. Horses galloped around white-fenced paddocks, spooked by the circling plane. In the distance was a small cluster of outbuildings, then a village of round thatched houses. Great squares of irrigated green faded into undulating yellow grassland.
It was beautiful. It was real. And being here meant sharing him with Jock and Morag and the ghost of Fiona. To please him, this morning she’d hidden her reluctance to leave Mount Elgon and return to the world of questions and doubts.
Already the thought of losing him was more than she could bear.
In a few days from now, what they’d had together would degenerate into juggling an eleven-hour time difference, patched-in, static-filled conversations, she in Los Angeles, Campbell in the bush somewhere, their exchanges becoming more and more stilted until finally they’d both be grateful to let them fade into memory.
And who knew what he was, really? Her fears were already pressing in again. Cat looked down at the ground racing below, remembering the
raid on the poachers carried out so professionally. The sound of bullets striking rock, the deadly fountains of dust thrown up around him. The savagery he’d shown.
Yet the thought of leaving him was a cold, dense pain in the center of her being.
Campbell flew to the end of the small airstrip, checked the windsock and put the plane into a slow descent. A herd of zebra wheeled, kicking their heels like circus ponies, tossing their heads in the cloud of red dust that arose as the Cessna touched down. Cat reached for the gold and enamel Cartier powder compact that Paul Neville had given her when they’d first become lovers and peered into the mirror.
“Don’t tell me you’re nervous,” Campbell said.
Cat snapped closed the lid of the compact and slipped it back into her bag, hearing it click against the Beretta. “Nah.” She held up one trouser-clad leg, inspected a scabbed knee through a gaping L-shaped tear. “What’s to be nervous? I’ve spent the last two days with twigs in my hair, wrestling naked with you on bare ground—”
“Not entirely bare,” he protested. “I remember a bit of grass here and there—”
“Bare ground,” she said firmly. “I am about to meet your father for the first time, unexpectedly, I might add, and renew acquaintance with a rebellious daughter. But I’m on top of it, Campbell. Never fear. I am on top of it.”
“Well, N’kosi will get the pants patched up. The twigs, though…” He shook his head doubtfully. “I think you’re on your own with that.”
She laughed, pushed her hair back with both hands. Campbell taxied toward a small corrugated hangar at the end of the strip, scattering a dozen marabou storks who strutted regally off the tarmac just ahead of them, feathers ruffling in the passing breeze, too dignified to hurry.
Inside the dark building, he parked next to another small plane, jumped out and went around the front of the aircraft to swing Cat down before she could open the door herself.