by Wilbur Smith
‘Oh, Davey. I am so sorry, because I like it here. It’s peaceful, so quiet. I can just feel my nerves untying themselves.’
‘Don’t be sorry. I’m not. These old huts were built by Gramps back in the twenties – and they weren’t very well built even then.’ David’s voice was full of a new purpose, a determination that she had not heard for so long. ‘It’s a fine excuse to tear the whole lot down, and build again.’
‘A place of our own?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said David delightedly. ‘That’s it. That’s just it!’
They flew into Nelspruit, the nearest large town, the following day. In the week of bustle and planning that followed they forgot their greater problems. With an architect they planned the new homestead with care, taking into consideration all their special requirements – a large airy study for Debra, workshop and office for David, a kitchen laid out to make it safe and easy for a blind cook, rooms without dangerous split levels and with regular easily learned shapes, and finally a nursery section. When David described this addition Debra asked cautiously, ‘You making some plans that I should know about?’
‘You’ll know about it, all right,’ he assured her.
The guest house was to be separate and self-contained and well away from the main homestead, and the small hutment for the servants was a quarter of a mile beyond that, screened by trees and the shoulder of the rocky kopje that rose behind the homestead.
David bribed a building contractor from Nelspruit to postpone all his other work, load his workmen on four heavy trucks and bring them out to Jabulani.
They began on the main house, and while they worked, David was busy resurfacing the airstrip, repairing the water pumps and such other machinery as still had life left in it. However, the Land-Rover and the electricity generator had to be replaced.
Within two months the new homestead was habitable, and they could move. Debra set up her tape recorders beneath the big windows overlooking the shaded front garden, where the afternoon breeze could cool the room and waft in the perfume of the frangipani and poinsettia blooms.
While David was completely absorbed in making Jabulani into a comfortable home, Debra made her own arrangements.
Swiftly she explored and mapped in her mind all her immediate surroundings. Within weeks she could move about the new house with all the confidence of a person with normal sight and she had trained the servants to replace each item of furniture in its exact position. Always Zulu, the Labrador pup, moved like a glossy black shadow beside her. Early on he had decided that Debra needed his constant care, and had made her his life’s work.
Quickly he learned that it was useless staring at her or wagging his tail, to attract her attention he must whine or pant. In other respects she was also slightly feeble-minded, the only way to prevent her doing stupid things like falling down the front steps or tripping over a bucket left in the passage by a careless servant was to bump her with his shoulder, or with his nose.
She had fallen readily into a pattern of work that kept her in her workroom until noon each day, with Zulu curled at her feet.
David set up a large bird bath under the trees outside her window, so the tapes she made had as a background the chatter and warble of half a dozen varieties of wild birds. She had discovered a typist in Nelspruit who could speak Hebrew, and David took the tapes in to her whenever he flew to town for supplies and to collect the mail, and he brought each batch of typing back with him for checking.
They worked together on this task, David reading each batch of writing or correspondence aloud to her and making the alterations she asked for. He made it a habit of reading almost everything, from newspapers to novels, aloud.
‘Who needs braille with you around,’ Debra remarked, but it was more than just the written word she needed to hear from him. It was each facet and dimension of her new surroundings. She had never seen any of the myriad of birds that flocked to drink and bathe below her window, though she soon recognized each individual call and would pick out a stranger immediately.
‘David, there’s a new one, what it is? What does he look like?’
And he must describe not only its plumage, but its mannerisms and its habits. At other times he must describe to her exactly how the new buildings fitted into their surroundings, the antics of Zulu the Labrador, and supply accurate descriptions of the servants, the view from the window of her workroom – and a hundred other aspects of her new life.
In time the building was completed and the strangers left Jabulani, but it was not until the crates from Israel containing their furniture and other possessions from Malik Street arrived that Jabulani started truly to become their home.
The olive-wood table was placed under the window in the workroom.
‘I haven’t been able to work properly, there was something missing—’ and Debra ran her fingers caressingly across the inlaid ivory and ebony top ‘– until now.’
Her books were in shelves on the wall beside the table, and the leather suite in the new lounge looked very well with the animal-skin rugs and woven wool carpets.
David hung the Ella Kadesh painting above the fireplace, Debra determining the precise position for him by sense of touch.
‘Are you sure it shouldn’t be a sixteenth of an inch higher?’ David asked seriously.
‘Let’s have no more lip from you, Morgan, I have to know exactly where it is.’
Then the great brass bedstead was set up in the bedroom, and covered with the ivory-coloured bedspread. Debra bounced up and down on it happily.
‘Now, there is only one thing more that is missing,’ she declared.
‘What’s that?’ he asked with mock anxiety. ‘Is it something important?’
‘Come here.’ She crooked a finger in his general direction. ‘And I’ll show you just how important it is.’
During the months of preparation they had not left the immediate neighbourhood of the homestead, but now quite suddenly the rush and bustle was over.
‘We have eighteen thousand acres and plenty of four-footed neighbours – let’s go check it all out,’ David suggested.
They packed a cold lunch and the three of them climbed into the new Land-Rover with Zulu relegated to the back seat. The road led naturally down to the String of Pearls for this was the focal point of all life upon the estate.
They left the Land-Rover amongst the fever trees and went down to the ruins of the thatched summer house on the bank of the main pool.
The water aroused all Zulu’s instincts and he plunged into it, paddling out into the centre with obvious enjoyment. The water was clear as air, but shaded to black in the depths.
David scratched in the muddy bank and turned out a thick pink earthworm. He threw it into the shallows and a dark shape half as long as his arm rushed silently out of the depths and swirled the surface.
‘Wow!’ David laughed. ‘There are still a few fat ones around. We will have to bring down the rods. I used to spend days down here when I was a kid.’
The forest was filled with memories and as they wandered along the edge of the reed banks he reminisced about his childhood, until gradually he fell into silence, and she asked:
‘Is something wrong, David?’ She had grown that sensitive to his moods.
‘There are no animals.’ His tone was puzzled. ‘Birds, yes. But we haven’t seen a single animal, not even a duiker, since we left the homestead.’ He stopped at a place that was clear of reeds, where the bank shelved gently. ‘This used to be a favourite drinking place. It was busy day and night – the herds virtually lining up for a chance to drink.’ He left Debra and went down to the edge, stooping to examine the ground carefully. ‘No spoor even, just a few kudu and a small troop of baboon. There has not been a herd here for months, or possibly years.’
When he came back to her she asked gently, ‘You are upset?’
‘Jabulani without its animals is nothing,’ he muttered. ‘Come on, let’s go and see the rest of it. There is something very odd
here.’
The leisurely outing became a desperate hunt, as David scoured the thickets and the open glades, followed the dried water courses and stopped the Land-Rover to examine the sand beds for signs of life.
‘Not even an impala.’ He was worried and anxious. ‘There used to be thousands of them. I remember herds of them, silky brown and graceful as ballet dancers, under nearly every tree.’
He turned the Land-Rover northwards, following an overgrown track through the trees.
There is grazing here that hasn’t been touched. It’s lush as a cultivated garden.’
A little before noon they reached the dusty, corrugated public road that ran along the north boundary of Jabulani. The fence that followed the edge of the road was ruinous, with sagging and broken wire and many of the uprights snapped off at ground level.
‘Hell, it’s a mess,’ David told her, as he turned through a gap in the wire on to the road, and followed the boundary for two miles until they reached the turn-off to the Jabulani homestead.
Even the signboard hanging above the stone pillars of the gateway, which David’s father had fashioned in bronze and of which he had been so proud, was now dilapidated and hung askew.
‘Well, there’s plenty of work to keep us going,’ said David with a certain relish.
Half a mile beyond the gates the road turned sharply, hedged on each side by tall grass, and standing full in the sandy track was a magnificent kudu bull, ghostly grey and striped with pale chalky lines across the deep powerful body. His head was held high, armed with the long corkscrew black horns, and his huge ears were spread in an intent listening attitude.
For only part of a second he posed like that, then, although the Land-Rover was still two hundred yards off, he exploded into a smoky blur of frantic flight. His great horns laid along his back as he fled through the open bush in a series of long, lithe bounds, disappearing so swiftly it seemed he had been only a fantasy, and David described it to Debra.
‘He took off the very instant he spotted us. I remember when they were so tame around here that we had to chase them out of the vegetable garden with sticks.’
Again he swung off the main track and on to another overgrown path, on which the new growth of saplings was already thick and tall. He drove straight over them in the tough little vehicle.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Debra shouted above the crash and swish of branches.
‘In this country, when you run out of road, you just make your own.’
Four miles farther on, they emerged abruptly on to the fire-break track that marked the eastern boundary of Jabulani, the dividing line between them and the National Park which was larger than the entire land area of the state of Israel, five million acres of virgin wilderness, three hundred and eighty-five kilometres long and eighty wide, home of more than a million wild animals, the most important reservoir of wildlife left in Africa.
David stopped the Land-Rover, cut the engine and jumped down. After a moment of shocked and angry silence he began to swear.
‘What’s made you so happy?’ Debra demanded.
‘Look at that – just look at that!’ David ranted.
‘I wish I could.’
‘Sorry, Debs. It’s a fence. A game fence!’
It stood eight feet high and the uprights were hardwood poles thick as a man’s thigh, while the mesh of the fence was heavy gauge wire. ‘They have fenced us off. The National Park’s people have cut us off. No wonder there are no animals.’
As they drove back to the homestead David explained to her how there had always been an open boundary with the Kruger National Park. It had suited everybody well enough, for Jabulani’s sweet grazing and the perennial water of the pools helped to carry the herds through times of drought and scarcity.
‘It’s becoming very important to you, this business of the wild animals.’ Debra had listened silently, fondling the Labrador’s head, as David spoke.
‘Yes, suddenly it’s important. When they were here, I guess I just took them for granted – but now they are gone it’s suddenly important.’
They drove on for a mile or two without speaking and then David said with determination, ‘I’m going to tell them to pull that fence down. They can’t cut us off like that. I’m going to get hold of the head warden, now, right away.’
David remembered Conrad Berg from his childhood when he had been the warden in charge of the southern portion of the park, but not yet the chief. There was a body of legend about the man that had been built up over the years, and two of these stories showed clearly the type of man he was.
Caught out in a lonely area of the reserve after dark with a broken-down truck, he was walking home when he was attacked by a full-grown male lion. In the struggle he had been terribly mauled, half the flesh torn from his back and the bone of his shoulder and arm bitten through. Yet he had managed to kill the animal with a small sheath knife, stabbing it repeatedly in the throat until he hit the jugular. He had then stood up and walked five miles through the night with the hyena pack following him expectantly, waiting for him to drop.
On another occasion one of the estate owners bounding the park had poached one of Berg’s lions, shooting it down half a mile inside the boundary. The poacher was a man high in government, wielding massive influence, and he had laughed at Conrad Berg.
‘What are you going to do about it, my friend? Don’t you like your job?’
Doggedly, ignoring the pressure from above, Berg had collected his evidence and issued a summons. The pressure had become less subtle as the court date approached, but he had never wavered. The important personage finally stood in the dock, and was convicted. He was sentenced to a thousand pounds fine or six months at hard labour.
Afterwards he had shaken Berg’s hand and said to him, ‘Thank you for a lesson in courage,’ and perhaps this was one of the reasons Berg was now chief warden.
He stood beside his game fence where he had arranged over the telephone to meet David. He was a big man, broad and tall and beefy, with thick heavily muscled arms still scarred from the lion attack, and a red sunburned face.
He wore the suntans and slouch hat of the Park’s service, with the green cloth badges on his epaulettes.
Behind him was parked his brown Chevy truck with the Park Board’s emblem on the door, and two of his black game rangers seated in the back. One of them was holding a heavy rifle.
Berg stood with his clenched fists on his hips, his hat pushed back and a forbidding expression on his face. He so epitomized the truculent male animal guarding his territory that David muttered to Debra, ‘Here comes trouble.’
He parked close beside the fence and he and Debra climbed down and went to the wire.
‘Mr Berg. I am David Morgan. I remember you from when my father owned Jabulani. I’d like you to meet my wife.’
Berg’s expression wavered. Naturally he had heard all the rumours about the new owner of Jabulani; it was a lonely isolated area and it was his job to know about these things. Yet he was unprepared for this dreadfully mutilated young man, and his blind but beautiful wife.
With an awkward gallantry Berg doffed his hat, then realized she would not see the gesture. He murmured a greeting and when David thrust his hand through the fence he shook it cautiously.
Debra and David were working as a team and they turned their combined charm upon Berg, who was a simple and direct man. Slowly his defences softened as they chatted. He admired Zulu, he also kept Labradors and it served as a talking-point while Debra unpacked a Thermos of coffee and David filled mugs for all of them.
‘Isn’t that Sam?’ David pointed to the game ranger in the truck who held Berg’s rifle.
‘Ja.’ Berg was guarded.
‘He used to work on Jabulani.’
‘He came to me of his own accord,’ Berg explained, turning aside any implied rebuke.
‘He wouldn’t remember me, of course, not the way I look now. But he was a fine ranger, and the place certainly went to the bad wit
hout him to look after it,’ David admitted before he went into a frontal assault. ‘The other thing which has ruined us is this fence of yours.’ David kicked one of the uprights.
‘You don’t say?’ Berg swished the grounds of his coffee around the mug and flicked it out.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘For good reason.’
‘My father had a gentleman’s agreement with the Board, the boundary was open at all times. We have got water and grazing that you need.’
‘With all respects to the late Mr Morgan,’ Conrad Berg spoke heavily, ‘I was never in favour of the open boundary.’
‘Why not?’
‘Your daddy was a sportsman.’ He spat the word out, as though it were a mouthful of rotten meat. ‘When my lions got to know him and learned to stay this side of the line – then he used to bring down a couple of donkeys and parade them along the boundary – to tempt them out.’
David opened his mouth to protest, and then closed it slowly. He felt the seamed scars of his face mottling and staining with a flush of shame. It was true, he remembered the donkeys and the soft wet lion skins being pegged out to dry behind the homestead.
‘He never poached,’ David defended him. ‘He had an owner’s licence and they were all shot on our land.’
‘No, he never poached,’ Berg admitted. ‘He was too damned clever for that. He knew I would have put a rocket up him that would have made him the first man on the moon.’
‘So that’s why you put up the fence.’
‘No.’
‘Why then?’
‘Because for fourteen years Jabulani has been under the care of an absentee landlord who didn’t give a good damn what happened to it. Old Sam here—’ he motioned at the game ranger in the truck ‘– did his best, but still it became a poachers’ paradise. As fast as the grazing and water you boast of pulled my game out of the Park, so they were cut down by every sportsman with an itchy trigger finger. When Sam tried to do something about it, he got badly beaten up, and when that didn’t stop him somebody put fire into his hut at night. They burned two of his kids to death—’