forty-seven
The elephants felt abandoned. It was the first day Davey had left them alone.
They had tried to follow him when he set out this morning with the lions, but he had firmly ordered them back. They had pretended to obey, looking forlorn, plucking leaves in displacement, but as soon as he was out of sight they furtively followed, trying to keep out of sight, which is difficult for three worried elephants to do. Davey ordered them back again, clearly showing his displeasure, and they looked at him as if they had been whipped. Rajah turned around guiltily; Jamba was less accustomed to discipline and stood her ground doggedly, flapping her ears and sighing until Davey had to show anger. She turned with monumental reluctance. After ten yards she stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder. He did not smile. She sighed and lumbered back toward the cabin.
It was another beautiful day. It was like the first day that God made.
That is what Elizabeth thought as she followed Davey, creeping up a little valley below Paw Paw Ridge. The lions padded silently through the undergrowth ahead. Sam trotted behind. She watched for signs of the hunter instinct in the lions, but all they seemed to show was feline caution, alertness bordering on nervousness, bewilderment bordering on distaste. The kings of the jungle were pussyfooting along. They had not been fed since the day before yesterday, but instead of showing any inclination to hunt they had just hung about Davey. Only Kitty had shown any initiative by sneaking into the cabin and stealing the remnants of their roast dinner.
Davey was following the spoor of wild boar. It was fresh. Now the pigs should be resting in the noon sun. The wind was in his favor.
He crept noiselessly up to an outcropping of rock and peered over it.
The boar were about thirty yards away, in a little clearing. Some were lying down, some rooting around, bustling, their curly tails shaking. Davey looked back at the lions.
They were standing around aimlessly. Tommy looked at Davey with stern cat’s eyes, then blinked and looked away. Princess scratched herself. Kitty looked bored. Only Sam seemed to know what was going on.
Elizabeth thought: Can’t you smell them?
Davey shook his ash bag. The ash drifted away from them: they could not smell the wild pigs.
Elizabeth lifted her eyebrows inquiringly. He shook his head: he would wait and see if the wind changed.
Elizabeth crouched on her haunches, willing the cats to act—to peer over the rocks or wander around and sight the pigs by accident. But no. Tommy was just sitting; Princess was grooming herself.
The wind did not change. Davey signaled to Sam to stay, then gave a soft hiss to the lions. He started creeping round the side of the rocks; the lions began to slink after him.
Then a boar squealed.
The lions froze.
They stood, ears pricked, absolutely motionless, staring.
Davey’s heart was hammering, willing them to act. For a full twenty seconds the lions stood, pent; then a boar gave another angry squeal.
Kitty took a hesitant step; then another. And another. She moved noiselessly, head up, eyes intent. Princess took three quick paces after her. Then Kitty dropped her stance, paused, then she started slinking quickly through the undergrowth. Princess watched intently, ears up, motionless: then she too dropped into a crouch, and followed Kitty fast.
Davey crouched, excited, looking around for Tommy.
Tommy’s head was up, ears pricked, every beautiful muscle bulging. Davey willed him; Go, Tommy, go! He took one silent, determined step forward. Then another.
Then he put his ears back, and sat down. He blinked, lifted up his forepaw, uncurled his big, red, rasping tongue, and proceeded to wash his face.
Kitty crept through the undergrowth, head down, muscles quivering. She had smelled the wild pigs. She heard their grunting loud and clear, and she knew by an age-old instinct that she was doing the right thing; she felt the cunning in her heart and guts and in the way she placed her silent paws. The she glimpsed the wild boar.
The nearest was ten paces away, lying on its side, back towards her, grunting in hoggish doze. The others were scattered about the clearing. Kitty stared at them a long murderous moment, then crouched onto her stomach, her legs bunched under her. She felt surge through her the instinctual knowledge of being a lion. For a moment she crouched there, every fiber in her tensing up, up, up, her eyes fixed murderously on the sleeping pig; then she sprang.
She gave a mighty roar as her muscles uncoiled, and the boar woke up and fled.
All the pigs went squealing and scampering through the forest as fast as their legs would carry them. Kitty landed on the sleeping pig’s spot half a second after it had been vacated. She went after him, bounding high over the undergrowth for twenty yards, then came to a disappointed halt.
Davey closed his eyes and groaned.
‘No, no, no,’ he muttered, ‘you roar afterwards …’ Then he called, ‘Sam!’
Sam came running from behind the rocks. ‘Away,’ Davey ordered.
Sam swerved and went streaking through the undergrowth to herd the wild boar back.
Sixty miles away, on the other side of the Great Smoky Mountains, Stephen Leigh-Forsythe crouched with his chief tracker, Ben Majuju, and examined the spoor to which the two Cherokees had taken them. They had been following it for several hours, with the whole recapture team, plus two jounalists, struggling along behind them.
Forsythe was puzzled. The dung he was examining could be two days old because it had obviously not been rained on, but it must have been dropped shortly after the rains when the earth was soft. Yet there were few footmarks to go with the dung. Quite a lot of scuffs, but with the ground as soft as it must have been, it was surprising that there were no clear footprints. There were other signs, certainly—the odd broken branch, fallen leaves, uprooted grass. But not one clear footprint.
Except human.
Doubtless they were Jordan’s or the Indian’s. But if they had left discernible footprints, why had not the animals?
Mind you, the light was difficult, and the forest floor was mostly in deep shadow, dappled in shifting sunlight, and the undergrowth was thick.
‘What do you think, Ben?’
Ben’s surly eyes flicked over the surrounding undergrowth.
‘It is noon.’
Yes, it was the most difficult time to track because of the angle of the sun.
‘But in the morning this side is in the shadow of the mountain until quite late.’
‘And in the shadows of the trees. And in the afternoon it will be in more shadow,’ Ben said. ‘It is difficult country, when one is in doubt. And we have been going fast.’
Yes, probably too fast. He had been impatient with the Indians. First, they had shown up late at the camp, a good hour after sunrise. Then they had had difficulty recognizing the terrain from the helicopter. Finally they had indicated a place, but it had proved to be a good mile out of the way. It had taken them two hours just to find the first spoor. Gorilla dung. Plus their nests, leaves scraped into crude circles. But no elephant spoor, nor bear, nor Hon. Evidently the animals had already split up. That was to be expected, sooner or later. But there were the odd human footprints, so Jordan was with the gorillas. Forsythe had felt that he should follow the spoor, even though it was two days old, because gorillas do not roam rapidly. They could be quite near. For two hours they had followed a clear trail of broken twigs and depressed undergrowth. Then it had petered out, at a stream. Ben and the other trackers had been unable to pick it up again.
Strange. Gorillas don’t like water. Could they have jumped from rock to rock? It was a possibility. They were trained animals and Jordan was leading them.
Thereafter, Forsythe had ordered the Cherokees to show him the other spoor they had found.
It had taken another hour to reach the elephant dung.
‘Why are there no hoofprints, Ben?’
‘It is possible.’
Ben stood up creakily, his old felt hat flopp
ing over his eyes. He lit his pipe. ‘We follow? Spoor is spoor.’
Forsythe straightened up. His blue eyes seemed pale in this light. He pulled a map out of his pocket.
He didn’t like following spoor that old, but it was the only spoor they had. Where would Jordan be heading from here? Why should he head anywhere? Maybe he was just the other side of the next ridge.
‘We follow. Take your time, now, Ben.’
At a thousand dollars a day, he need not worry if he lost a bit of time following old spoor—but that was beside the point. Stephen Leigh-Forsythe was not only an expert, but an Englishman who gave value for money. Furthermore, the eyes of the world were upon him.
forty-eight
On the western side, where Forsythe was, the sun was still shining, but on the eastern side, the valleys were in deep shadow. For tracking purposes, the light was finished.
Davey crouched in the undergrowth, stalking a wild boar. He was tired, but the lions were bored. They had been plodding along after him all day, obediently, and he had tracked down no less than three pigs for them. But apart from Kitty, they had shown very little savvy. They were very hungry, but it seemed they did not associate the interest they had shown in the wild animals with their stomachs; it was the playful killer interest which a house cat displays with a cockroach. Each time the boar had galloped off, suffering no more than a mild heart attack.
Elizabeth was in despair. Tiptoeing around the forest all day, hardly daring to breathe, was exhausting. She was convinced the lions would never learn. What she had been feeling recently seemed unrealistic euphoria. After seeing Kitty fight Sam for that possum a week ago she had though that Davey had been right, that the lions would learn. But how long did the man imagine he had to teach them before Forsythe caught up with him? How long could he keep this up? With the log cabin as a focal point, they were becoming like house cats—wanting to come indoors, hanging around the smell of cooking, three bloody great lions lounging around the porch, squabbling, waiting for a handout. Every time Kitty moved, Princess hissed and moaned. Kitty had taken to stealing: shadowing anybody who was cooking, purring voluminously, nose twitching; nothing edible was safe from her enormous darting paw.
Now Davey trained his rifle on the busily oblivious boar, about to kill it for the lions. He hated what he had to do, and above all he wanted to make a clean kill. The boar wasn’t making it any easier for him, bustling around. For the sixth time, his finger whitened on the trigger. The shot rang out, and he stood up with a sad sigh.
It was about five o’clock when they got back to the log cabin. Davey cut enough off the boar’s carcass for themselves, and suspended the rest of it from a tree for the cats. He was not going to feed them until they were really hungry: he had other plans.
Big Charlie started to roast the boar’s leg with some edible roots he swore were better than potatoes. Elizabeth sat on the porch. She badly wanted a drink; there was still some whisky left, but she was denying herself. She did not want to induce any euphoria. She also wanted to lose weight. She had lost a lot already in the nine days since they crossed the Pigeon—she could feel it; the hard exercise accounted for most of it, plus her lower intake of alcohol, and she wanted to keep up the good work and get her old curvy figure back. But the real reason for not having a drink was that she wanted to have a no-nonsense talk with Davey, try to persuade him to give this whole thing up. She was very worried.
Elizabeth sat, absently watching the gorillas beginning to make their nests. She felt sorry for Champ. He was imitating King Kong, scraping the leaves into a circle about him, but chimpanzees do not build nests like that, as far as she knew; he was simply imitating the gorillas. He did not seem to like the two other chimps. But at least he seemed to have reduced his dependence on Davey and no longer insisted on holding his hand. Elizabeth still felt he was a colorless little creature. Would he ever be a real chimpanzee?
Kitty had been banished from the aromatic cabin by Charlie, and was now watching the gorillas making their nests. Kitty’s stomach was hollow with hunger, and though she had not yet tumbled to the fact that wild boar were made of meat, she knew chimpanzees were, because she had eaten Daisy’s flesh. Gorillas were too big for her; but chimpanzees …
Out of the corner of her eye Elizabeth saw a sudden tawny flash. One moment little Champ was earnestly scraping leaves around himself, and the next a terrible Hon was flying at him through the dusk. Gaping jaws, vicious cat’s eyes and great clawed paws extended, and, as Elizabeth yelled, Champ scrambled. He threw himself aside, screaming, horrified, and raced toward Elizabeth for protection. He flung himself into her arms. Kitty bounded after him with a snarl, and Elizabeth staggered back; Champ threw himself at a tree and bounded up into its branches, and Kitty leaped up the trunk.
Kitty clawed up the tree, ears back, and Champ jumped wildly higher, screaming. Elizabeth yelled at Kitty—then Davey was at her side.
‘She won’t catch him, Dr. Johnson,’ he said calmly.
‘She might. Call her down!’
Champ had clambered out onto the very end of a high branch; there was nowhere else for him to go unless he leaped through thin air to the next tree. Now Kitty was creeping out along the branch at him, head down, leg muscles bulging, paws groping cautiously, eyes fixed on little Champ. Champ crouched on the end of the branch, his black face creased in terror, trying to show his fangs, his eyes rolling as he looked about for escape. Then the branch creaked, Champ screamed, and he had no choice.
He flew through the air, caught a branch of the neighbouring tree and clawed up into it while Kitty clung to her breaking branch. She tried desperately to turn around, but lost her footing. In a flash of legs and tail, Kitty was hanging Upside down, yowling.
Davey was grinning. Elizabeth fumed, ‘You and your Laws of Nature!’
Kitty was trying to get one hind paw onto the branch again, but the other hind leg lost its grip, and then she was hanging by her forepaws, moaning. Then the branch broke, and down she came. Her yowl was cut off as she thudded to the ground, the branch crashing on top of her, and Kitty disappeared in a pile of leaves. The pile of greenery erupted, and she burst out, fleeing into the forest as if pursued by demons.
Elizabeth snapped, ‘You’d have stopped her if it was Sam she was chasing!’
‘Sam isn’t going to return to the wild, Dr. Johnson.’
He walked over to the tree where the boar’s carcass hung. He lowered it to the ground, and hefted it up onto his shoulder. He whistled for the lions.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded.
‘I’m taking them to a place I know.’
A stream tumbled down the steep valley below Paw Paw Ridge. An old mineshaft, hewn into a cliff , abutted the stream. The excavated rocks had been thrown into the stream, so they formed a steep jumbled bank and a broad rubble terrace outside the mouth of the mine. Bushes and creepers had grown over the rocky platform, and the mine’s mouth was almost entirely obscured.
But the most important feature of this valley was that the stream ran right down its middle: it was possible to climb up the stream, from rock to rock, right to the mouth itself without leaving any signs for a tracker, nor scent for a dog to follow.
Davey toiled up the stream, the boar across his shoulders, the lions following. He walked into the mouth of the mine, and slung down the carcass. The lions fell upon it.
‘Why are you feeding them here?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘I was going to bring them here tomorrow anyway. It’s a good den for them. I don’t want them to settle down at the cabin, or they’ll get territorial about it. By the time they’re finished feeding we’ll be over a mile away. They won’t be able to follow our scent because we’ll follow the stream.’
‘But they’ll try to follow and get lost.’
‘The whole forest is their home now, Dr. Johnson. They won’t be lost for long.’
‘But they can’t hunt yet.’
‘I thought you were complaining about Kitty hunt
ing a little while ago?’ He smiled. ‘I’ll come back the day after tomorrow and take them hunting again.’
‘But what if you can’t find them?’
‘I don’t think they’ll be lost, Dr. Johnson. They’ll hang around here: the last place they saw me and got fed. Anyway, I’ll find them, don’t worry.’
She looked back at the lions crouched around the carcass, snarling and feeding. And dear Sultan anxiously hovering, awaiting a break in the ranks.
It seemed awful to sneak away and leave them. Knowing that when they were finished they were going to start looking for their keeper. Afraid. How far would they look? …
Twenty minutes later they reached the bottom of the stream.
‘Don’t worry about them, Dr. Johnson.’
‘Of course I’m worried.’
‘They’ve got to start looking after themselves.’
He suddenly looked formal, and a little embarrassed. He said, ‘Dr. Johnson, I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done. But … we’re here now.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘If you want to quit now, okay. No hard feelings.’
She stared at him. ‘Why should I quit now?’
‘To get back to your job. And this is a pretty rugged life for a woman.’
‘This is my job. I’m still a salaried employee of the zoo, you know. I’m just on temporary assignment.’
‘But all this is going to be upsetting for you.’
‘Oh! Because I’m upset about abandoning tamed lions in the wilderness, I’m being a nuisance, am I? And because I made a fuss about Kitty trying to murder Champ? Well, of course I’m upset—any sane person would be. And so should you be, laws of Nature or not. Tell me,’ she demanded, ‘would you have stopped Kitty if she got close to killing Champ?’
Fear No Evil Page 28