by Tony Park
The dogs were still where he had seen them on his drive up from Robins, on the side of the road resting in the shade, near the turn-off to Salt Spring.
She stopped the car and he whispered, ‘Tell me about them.’
Michelle looked at him, pursed her lips and nodded. She understood what this drive was about, at least in part. She scanned the dogs through her binoculars. ‘Three adults, four pups. The alpha male and female are on the far left. The other adult is a female, though subordinate. Both of the bitches are from the same litter, their mother was Rembrandt, the alpha female from the pack I was tracking last week around Robins. The male is from a pack that originated south of Main Camp, near the Kennedy picnic site.
‘Those youngsters are about three months old. They would have just started following the adults on hunts. Until recently they and the alpha female would have been fed by the other two, who would hunt and then regurgitate food for the others at the den. Look at the female.’
Fletcher moved his binoculars. The alpha female had raised her huge rounded ears and was looking intently down the road in the direction they had been travelling. ‘What’s she seen?’
‘Watch the signal she gives the male in a second.’ Michelle checked her watch and made a note of the time on the clipboard on her knees. ‘There, about a hundred metres . . . impala.’
Fletcher followed Michelle’s pointing finger and found the lone ram. The girl had good eyesight, and that was a rare compliment coming from him, though he didn’t voice it. ‘I see it.’
‘They’re up! Have you ever seen a wild dog kill?’ she asked.
He shook his head. He had baited and shot plenty of them in his youth, and knew of their fearsome reputation as hunters and killers, but he had never taken the time to study or follow a pack.
‘Then you, as a hunter, are in for a treat,’ she whispered.
The dogs rose on their long, spindly legs. The alpha female yelped, her cry more a high-pitched twittering than a bark. She moved off down the corrugated dirt road, the pups scampering along behind her. She moved at a slow trot, as though pacing herself. The alpha male and the subordinate female split and took off at a faster pace, through the remains of elephant-shredded mopane trees, their paws raising little clouds of red-brown dust as they ran.
‘They’re the flankers,’ Michelle explained as she put the Landcruiser in gear and slowly followed the mother and her pups.
‘There’s the impala! He’s seen the male. I thought you said these things were good.’ Fletcher saw how the antelope leapt high into the air then sprinted from the right-hand side, across the road, to the left.
Michelle smiled. ‘Can you see the subordinate female?’
He scanned the bush on the left-hand side. ‘No.’
‘And neither can the impala. Watch and learn, big white hunter.’
There was yelping from the alpha male and the alpha female now, and the head dog picked up her pace, the pups finding it harder to keep up on their stubby legs. The adults, however, were made for the chase, with their greyhound-sleek bodies. ‘There!’ Michelle hissed. The impala broke right, running onto the road from the left.
Fletcher saw the subordinate female now, moving in from the same side. The alpha male closed in from the right. The impala had been funnelled between the two dogs.
‘Here she goes,’ Michelle said. The alpha female, who had been conserving her energy, shot forward like a bolt from a crossbow, her legs a blur, the pups left in her dusty wake. The impala skittered left and right, the other two dogs running on either side of it. Confused, it lost distance and momentum by jumping first to the left, and then to the right. It was a fatal mistake.
Michelle put her foot down on the accelerator, keeping a careful eye on the pups, who had moved off the road and were running parallel to the truck. They didn’t seem to mind the vehicle’s presence and, if anything, seemed curious about this newcomer to the hunt.
‘They’ve got it!’ Fletcher cried. He had seen lion and leopard kills, fights to the death between elephants, life and death in all its glory and tragedy, but this was like nothing he had ever witnessed.
The alpha female caught the impala by its tail and dragged it, still hopping, to a halt. The alpha male settled the prey’s front by grasping its snout between his jaws. All three dogs then simply tore the antelope to pieces.
Michelle stopped ten metres away. Any closer and Fletcher reckoned they would have been sprayed. The carcass was unrecognisable, consumed in seconds rather than minutes – a mist of red blood, blue entrails and fawn-coloured hair. The pups caught up and chattered and squealed as they ran around the adults. Two fought over a length of intestine. Beside him, Michelle’s digital Canon clicked away at three frames to the second, recording the whole thing.
As quickly as it had begun, it was over. ‘My God,’ he said. He was amazed. Not at the dogs’ ferocity, or their success in the hunt – he had heard and read of those many times before. What impressed him – moved him – was that this attractive Canadian girl had come to Africa and showed him, Fletcher Reynolds, professional hunter and bushman, something he had never seen before. He didn’t know how to thank her.
‘Impressed?’ she asked.
‘More than you can imagine.’
She looked at him and smiled and he thought his hard old heart might just melt there and then. She picked up her binoculars and followed the flight of the dogs off into the stunted bush. When they were out of sight she ignored him as she noted the time, the date, the distance travelled during the hunt – she had had the presence of mind to set her odometer when they had first spotted the dogs – and the size and sex of the prey. She edged the Landcruiser forward and noted how much of the impala remained. Not much.
Fletcher watched her work. His heart was still beating from the rush of seeing the kill. She was doing her job. And that only made him desire her more.
‘She is walking faster, sometimes running,’ Charles Ndlovu said, one knee in the dust and ash, his finger gently caressing the three-toed indentation. The tiny ant tracks and the leaves and twigs that filled the mighty creature’s spoor told him they were still at least a day behind Chewore the rhino.
He started to speak again, but the cough wracked his body so much he could not get the words out. Some days were worse than others. This was a bad one.
‘Perhaps she knows she is being followed by the poachers,’ Lovemore said.
That was what Charles had been about to say, but he held his tongue. He didn’t want another run-in with the young man, who was, whether he, Noah and Christopher liked it, the boss. He barely had the strength to speak, let alone argue. He nodded. They had been tracking the rhino, and the poachers who pursued her for days, and the younger men were losing patience.
‘Ah, it will be dead before we catch those Zambians,’ Noah said.
Charles spat. ‘This is our job.’
Christopher sniggered, but it was Lovemore who came to the older man’s defence. ‘Ndlovu is right. Other people may not know or care about the work we are doing, but God knows, and the government knows.’
Charles smiled. So, it seemed Lovemore owed his allegiance to someone higher after all, or perhaps he put the Comrade President and the Almighty on the same plain. It didn’t matter. The boys needed some backbone. ‘We must be ready.’ He wiped the spittle from his lips with the back of his hands. ‘The Zambians are hunting rhino, so they will not be armed with spears. All of you, keep your eyes and ears open. If they see us first, then some of us will die.’
A fire had swept west from Dolilo, burning out what little vegetation remained after the elephants’ annual destructive migration across the park. The wind gathered strength from the hot dry earth and whipped the ash and dust into whirlwinds that danced across the barren hills like ever-moving funeral pyres. They closed their eyes and shielded their weapons as best as they could as the cyclonic hail of dirt and charred leaves and twigs sandblasted their exposed skin.
After nearly a week in the b
ush they bore little resemblance to the smartly turned-out patrol that had paraded for inspection in front of the warden at Sinamatella. Only Charles still wore both his uniform shirt and trousers. In the old days, when the whites ruled the country, a man would have been charged and fined for being out of uniform. Discipline was not everything, but it kept men focused on the job and put paid to the whining and complaining that was going on now. Christopher picked at a scabby cut on his left upper arm, where a thornbush had drawn blood. The wound was caked with ash and grit and might become infected. The boy had taken off his shirt two days earlier and now wore only chest webbing on his bare torso. ‘That wouldn’t have happened if you had kept your uniform on.’
Christopher glared back. ‘If I had left my shirt on, it would have got ripped, old man. And would the parks and wildlife service have given me a new shirt? Ah, no.’
Charles coughed again. There was no point in arguing against the truth.
Ahead he heard the distant tukka-tukka-tukka of a diesel engine. He raised a hand. ‘Listen.’
They all stopped. ‘Where is that?’ Lovemore asked.
‘Deteema. We are getting close to the dam and picnic site,’ he said. ‘We can rest and refill the water bottles there, if you agree, Lovemore.’
As well as the three main camps, dotted throughout Hwange were picnic sites where visitors could get out and stretch their legs, or camp overnight. The isolated compounds were staffed by an attendant, who kept water pumped to the pans – when there was diesel available – and tanks filled for humans to drink from.
‘It will be good to stop for a while,’ Lovemore said.
Charles wondered if they could really catch the poachers before Chewore crossed into Botswana. He doubted it.
If he were one of the Zambians his plan would be to pursue the rhino into the forest lands on the other side of the border and kill it there, out of Zimbabwean jurisdiction. A rhino’s horns are not big. Once hacked off they could be stuffed in a backpack, and an AK 47 can be broken down into small pieces. The poachers could simply walk to the main tar road between Nata and Kazungula and flag down a passing bus. It was laughably simple.
Charles brushed the grit from the bare metal of the breech block slide that showed through the ejection port of his SLR. He would clean his rifle while the others drank and slept and ate at the picnic site. If they did meet the poachers, he would be ready.
6
It seemed like he had been flying forever. Baghdad to Kuwait on an Arizona Air National Guard C-130; a stopover at the military hospital at Ali Al Salem Air Base to re-dress his wounds and tell him he was fit to travel; Kuwait Airlines to Dubai; Emirates to Johannesburg; and now South African Airways to Zimbabwe.
Joshua Nkomo International Airport, at Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city, was a tin shed. The new terminal, according to a sign, was under construction and passengers were offered an apology for the inconvenience. He’d been in worse points of embarkation and debarkation – at least no one was shooting here.
Inside, Shane Castle baked, along with rich black and white teenagers home for the holidays from private schools in South Africa; African businessmen – or maybe politicians, judging by their girth in this country of otherwise skinny people; women in bright-printed traditional dresses; and whites who had the same drawn faces and grim looks as soldiers reluctantly returning to a war zone after a couple of weeks’ R and R. There were only two tourists that he could pick out, a hardy looking pair of Israelis with dreadlocks and backpacks.
He shuffled his way in the immigration queue, sliding his military backpack and green vinyl dive bag along the concrete floor of the hangar with his booted foot.
‘How long do you stay in Zimbabwe?’ the bored-looking clerk asked as he thumbed, slowly, through every page of Shane’s Australian passport.
‘Few months. After that we’ll see.’ He pointed to the six-month multiple-entry visa when the man eventually reached the page.
‘Issued in Kuwait. And I see you have been in Iraq. What were you doing there?’
‘Surfing.’
The man looked up, squinted, then smiled. ‘Ah, but you are making a joke. There is water, but no surf in the Persian Gulf.’
‘There isn’t?’
‘No.’
‘How’s the water here?’
The clerk raised the stamp and let it hover over the elaborate, hologram-embossed visa. Shane had a theory that the impressiveness of a country’s visas was proportionate to the size of the national debt. ‘We are a land-locked country, facing a severe drought.’
‘Just as well I didn’t bring my board.’
‘I think you know all this already. I see you were born in a place called Salisbury, Rhodesia.’ They were the old names for Harare and Zimbabwe, respectively.
Shane smiled. The man was sharper than he made out. ‘So it says, bru.’
‘I am not your brother and that place does not exist any more, Mister Shane Castle.’
After customs had finished searching his pack and bag, Shane, the last passenger to clear, walked past a flimsy wooden screen and saw a body builder clutching a piece of cardboard with his name on it.
With a grip that would have broken his fingers had he not anticipated it, the white Zimbabwean, Dougal Geddes, led him out of one hangar and across a concrete taxiway to another. ‘I do charters – take all of Fletcher’s clients up to the ranch. He tells me you might be working for him. Are you a hunter?’
‘Kind of,’ Shane said as he hoisted his gear into the back of the Cessna’s cramped cockpit.
It wasn’t nearly as hot as Baghdad in summer, but the haze rising from the runway snatched the moisture from under his arms before it had time to make itself felt. Dougal opened the throttle and raced towards the inviting blue sky.
‘Can’t pick your accent, man. You from Australia or New Zealand?’ Dougal asked as the angular, colonial grid of Bulawayo slipped under them and wide, empty, golden-brown Africa bared itself to Shane again.
‘I’m from here.’
Once they were over Hwange National Park, Dougal pointed out a herd of six or seven hundred buffalo. ‘Poaching’s getting worse, but the animals here are survivors,’ he said into the microphone attached to his headset.
Shane pressed his face against the Perspex and watched the smokescreen kicked up by thousands of hooves. He remembered their bovine smell from game drives in the family’s old Ford on holidays. Braais at sunset, his first taste of beer. The smell of boerewors cooking and the sizzle of fat on the glowing red coals.
‘That’s the place.’ Dougal pointed ahead and to the right.
Shane saw the long red-dirt airstrip carved from the grey-brown bush; a sprawling thatch-roofed lodge, open-topped hunting vehicles and two glinting town cars. Mud-brick buildings in a fenced compound – the staff area, he guessed – upturned faces and waving children. A Land Rover was parked on the edge of the strip, four white men milling around it. Dougal flew low over the runway, to check for animals, then carried on north, towards Victoria Falls, before executing a wide, lazy turn.
‘Hell, look at that, hey. Might be your first taste of business!’ Dougal’s excitement was plain. He had coaxed from Shane the type of job he had applied for. He banked the aircraft to the left and started a tight circuit.
Shane looked down and saw a flock of vultures rise from a blackened, rotting carcass. ‘Elephant. Looks like an adult – too big to have been taken by lions. Maybe old age?’ The vultures organised themselves into a holding pattern, circling with the aid of a thermal over the hot dry killing zone.
‘I’ll mark the coordinates.’ Dougal punched a button on the GPS mounted on the Cessna’s dashboard.
The little aeroplane bounced a couple of times on the uneven surface then turned at the end of the clearing and taxied back to where the Land Rover waited. Dougal shook Shane’s hand, said goodbye and explained that he would be taking off straightaway, with three hunters who had just finished their safari with Fletcher Reyn
olds.
As Shane hoisted his pack and grabbed his dive bag he caught snippets of the farewells, in loud American accents.
‘Absolutely outstanding, Fletcher. The experience of a lifetime.’
‘Unforgettable. Make sure you email the confirmation to me for our booking for next year. I want my son to see this place.’
Shane saw the tall, rangy owner of the ranch, dressed in a khaki shirt and denim shorts shorter than had been the fashion anywhere else in the world for decades. A scar ran up the hard-calved right leg. ‘Let’s hope it’s safer for you next year, Hal.’
‘Hell no, baby! The danger’s the buzz in this place. Besides, the good thing is that we never felt threatened. You the man!’ More hand pumping and then the Americans smiled and nodded to Shane as they squeezed into Dougal’s aircraft.
Fletcher Reynolds shook his hand but held off speaking until the whine of the revving aeroplane engine had faded away to the other end of the airstrip. ‘Welcome, Shane,’ he said.
Shane passed on the information about the dead elephant and handed his prospective employer a piece of paper from the green hard-backed field notebook he habitually kept in his top pocket. ‘Those are the GPS coordinates.’
Fletcher started the pick-up and handed the scrap back to Shane. ‘That carcass is only three kilometres from here. I’ve known about it since it happened. I heard the shot, in fact. That group who just left were out with me when we came across the two poachers with their ivory. One’s in hospital now with half his leg missing – a .458 will do that to you. ‘
‘Who shot him?’ Shane asked.
‘Me.’
‘And the other poacher?’
‘Dead,’ Fletcher said.
Shane nodded. He had hoped the news might have impressed the older man, but he’d been foolish to think Reynolds wouldn’t have had a good grip on what was going on in his immediate backyard. He wondered, not for the first time, what skills he would be able to bring to anti-poaching operations that the experienced professional hunter did not have himself. The man had already been involved in at least two armed run-ins with poachers in recent times. He knew his business.