On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures Read online

  Praise for the novels of Wilbur Smith

  “Read on, adventure fans.”

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “A rich, compelling look back in time [to] when history and myth intermingled.”

  SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Only a handful of 20th century writers tantalize our senses as well as Smith. A rare author who wields a razor-sharp sword of craftsmanship.”

  TULSA WORLD

  “He paces his tale as swiftly as he can with swordplay aplenty and killing strokes that come like lightning out of a sunny blue sky.”

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Best Historical Novelist—I say Wilbur Smith, with his swashbuckling novels of Africa. The bodices rip and the blood flows. You can get lost in Wilbur Smith and misplace all of August.”

  STEPHEN KING

  “Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he is the master.”

  THE WASHINGTON POST

  “Smith manages to serve up adventure, history and melodrama in one thrilling package that will be eagerly devoured by series fans.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “This well-crafted novel is full of adventure, tension, and intrigue.”

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Life-threatening dangers loom around every turn, leaving the reader breathless . . . An incredibly exciting and satisfying read.”

  CHATTANOOGA FREE PRESS

  “When it comes to writing the adventure novel, Wilbur Smith is the master; a 21st Century H. Rider Haggard.”

  VANITY FAIR

  Also by Wilbur Smith

  The Courtney Series

  When the Lion Feeds

  The Sound of Thunder

  A Sparrow Falls

  The Burning Shore

  Power of the Sword

  Rage

  A Time to Die

  Golden Fox

  Birds of Prey

  Monsoon

  Blue Horizon

  The Triumph of the Sun

  Assegai

  Golden Lion

  War Cry

  The Tiger’s Prey

  The Ballantyne Series

  A Falcon Flies

  Men of Men

  The Angels Weep

  The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

  The Triumph of the Sun

  The Egyptian Series

  River God

  The Seventh Scroll

  Warlock

  The Quest

  Desert God

  Pharaoh

  Hector Cross

  Those in Peril

  Vicious Circle

  Predator

  Standalones

  The Dark of the Sun

  Shout at the Devil

  Gold Mine

  The Diamond Hunters

  The Sunbird

  Eagle in the Sky

  The Eye of the Tiger

  Cry Wolf

  Hungry as the Sea

  Wild Justice

  Elephant Song

  Wilbur Smith is a global phenomenon: a distinguished author with an established readership built up over fifty-five years of writing with sales of over 130 million novels worldwide.

  Born in Central Africa in 1933, Wilbur became a full-time writer in 1964 following the success of When the Lion Feeds. He has since published forty-one global bestsellers, including the Courtney Series, the Ballantyne Series, the Egyptian Series, the Hector Cross Series and many successful standalone novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books have now been translated into twenty-six languages.

  The establishment of the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation in 2015 cemented Wilbur’s passion for empowering writers, promoting literacy and advancing adventure writing as a genre. The foundation’s flagship program is the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

  For all the latest information on Wilbur visit www.wilbursmithbooks.com or facebook.com/WilburSmith.

  ON LEOPARD ROCK

  A Life of Adventures

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Zaffre Publishing

  Zaffre Publishing, an imprint of Bonnier Zaffre Ltd, a Bonnier Publishing company.

  80-81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE

  Copyright © Orion Mintaka (UK) Ltd. 2018

  Charles Pick’s Memoirs: Charles Pick Archive, University of East Anglia

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Zaffre Publishing

  Typeset by Scribe Inc., Philadelphia, PA.

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-49986-124-2

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-49986-128-0

  For information, contact 251 Park Avenue South, Floor 12, New York, New York 10010

  www.bonnierzaffre.com / www.bonnierpublishing.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1. Twilight

  Chapter 2. Lions in the Night

  Chapter 3. This Child’s Life

  Chapter 4. This Boy’s Life

  Chapter 5. This Student’s Life

  Chapter 6. This Underworld Life

  Chapter 7. The Law is an Ass

  Chapter 8. This Seafaring Life

  Chapter 9. This High-Flying Life

  Chapter 10. This Hollywood Life

  Chapter 11. This Hero’s Life

  Chapter 12. This Hunting Life

  Chapter 13. This African Life

  Chapter 14. This Desert Life

  Chapter 15. This American Life

  Chapter 16. This Diving Life

  Chapter 17. This Writing Life

  Appendix. The Monarch of the Ilungu

  Index

  This book is for you, My NisoJon, with my undying token of eternal love.

  Your husband

  Wilbur

  “There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature”

  H. Rider Haggard, She

  1

  TWILIGHT

  Africa is ancient, vast, monumental, a country of death and renewal. We may think man is the dominant species, but on these everlasting plains with the blue sky hazed by a searing sun, the rhythms of life are indifferent to us. Here we are allowed freedom, our spirit its release, but only if in return we offer respect, loyalty and humility.

  In the midday sun my wife and I seek shade, and, with my back resting against a tree, I’m as still as I can be to conserve energy. I take a mouthful of water. The grass is sharp and dry, gilded with dust, and I can hear the slow rush of life in the air, in the bushes, in the soil, a mechanical murmur like the stirring of blood with the pulse of my heartbeat. The wilderness is as beautiful as love and as deadly as heartbreak. I turn to my wife, and she looks at me and smiles, but sometimes I think there is pity in her eyes for this driven man, condemned to never-ending wandering, in pursuit of something he cannot define, that will probably always be beyond his grasp. What sort of man has she committed herself to? What is this journey she decided to embark upon?

  A week ago, she sat with me in a crude grass hide, staring through its eye-slit down a narrow tunnel that had been beaten out of the dense bush by the gun bearers, for a bullet traveling at 3000 feet a second could be deflected by even the smallest twig. The tunnel had been paced out to precisely sixty yards so that the rifle could be zeroed in with pinpoint accuracy.

  My rifle was resting in the vee of a branch in front of me and I only had to lift it an inch or two to be ready to aim and fire. The rifle was a .416 Rigby, a tenth anniversary present from my wife.

  Before we had left camp, we had sho
wered using unscented soap so that the big cats would be less likely to pick up our smell; otherwise they could sniff us out downwind for two miles.

  We had baited the site with the carcass of a buffalo cow and the stench was wafting into our hide as we sat below the prevailing wind. The cow I’d selected was well past its breeding prime and one of a herd of several hundred of the muscular black animals. A shot low on the shoulder and through the heart dropped her dead before she hit the ground. The heavy rifle crash had echoed across the plain and sent the herd scattering as blood surged from the wound in the harsh sunlight, the cow’s deep death roar as always inspiring in me an electric shock of exhilaration and regret.

  The trackers had cut up the animal and hoisted her into a tree at a height that would allow a lion stretching on its back legs to feed, but not to take the bait whole. It wasn’t long before the blowflies appeared like shiny round ballbearings to a strong magnet and hastened the putrefaction.

  The smell of death contains its own unique primordial fear, and as we waited for the cats to come alive to the prey, the sun slipped slowly in the sky and lent the bush an apricot glow, allowing the colors to become saturated, heavy with their own beauty. The dusk encouraged the birds to emerge, fighting for their territory and staking their claim with raucous abandon, the parrots swooping like fragments of rainbow. There was a pair of sunbirds, anxious and flighty in their rich-sheen plumage, siphoning nectar from yellow flowers.

  Suddenly there was tension. An animal padded into the hunting area beneath the buffalo carcass. I lifted my gun, gently easing off the safety while I strained to see what was about to feed on the bait. Its golden pelt caught the dying sun, the light illuminating its cream throat, its soft black-tipped ears, and its yellow ever-vigilant eyes stared, the black pupils like the tips of two cold steel daggers as it looked down the tunnel at me sighting behind the barrel of my rifle.

  It was a big cat, sleek and supple and majestic. There is no finer wild animal. It’s at moments like these that I consider the deadly calculations that go through a lion’s brain as it considers the danger or opportunity ahead of it. Man has the upper hand, but not always. A squeeze on the trigger, as Hemingway put it, like the last turn of the key opening a sardine can, and it would be all over. I beaded the lion’s skull. It had no mane; it was a lioness. I would not shoot. She’s too precious as a life-giver and besides there are hefty fines for the hunting of a female, even a prison sentence. Legal safari hunting is well managed, it’s one of the most effective means of conservation in Africa, and I have my own principles from which I never deviate. If you are loyal to the land it will embrace you; if you kill indiscriminately your soul will eventually reside in hell.

  The lioness climbed onto her back legs and began tearing at the buffalo carcass with a savage, violent hunger.

  We were mute spectators, my wife and I, witnessing raw power, something that never failed to send a shiver down my spine.

  We returned for many days, repeating the vigil in the hide, but the big old male lion never showed up. Perhaps he was wise to our tricks, not ready to concede the fight, and would rage until the dying of his day.

  This morning we had seen kudu and reedbuck on the grassy glades that intersected the forest. On the sandy track were spoor of the animals that had crossed in the night. There were elephant droppings, still steaming in the cold air of dawn, a pile knee-high. They came from an old elephant, his teeth at the end of their days, because the dung was full of twigs and leaves that were almost whole. He couldn’t chew his food. In the dust were large round footprints, the size of hubcaps. They were smooth imprints from the pads of his feet which were worn down like car tires stripped of their tread. He was a big old elephant and he was close.

  We climbed the kopje, reaching the summit just as the sun broke out from behind the forest, and all about us the land shimmered with the radiance of daylight, new life unfolding in a blaze of color. The tracker pointed to a far-off clump of forest, perhaps two miles away. There was something gray, impossible to distinguish from a lump of rock, until it moved. We set off down the side of the kopje and onto the golden grass plain. We followed the spoor in the spongy earth, and we could see where the elephant had ripped branches and bark from trees as he fed.

  Now, leaning against the tree for a brief rest, cross-legged with the Rigby across my lap, I considered the elephant. A bull of this size could have tusks that weigh up to a hundred pounds each. Like humans who are either left- or right-handed, an elephant will have a dominant tusk, which means that one tusk might be shorter than the other, or even broken. In my grandfather’s day, the prize of ivory was always the quest, and the nobler the animal, the greater the desire to capture the trophy. But I also knew that the chase is everything; once you kill, it’s only dead meat. The hunting impulse is part of every man’s soul; some supress it, some disguise it in behavior that appears strange and unknowable, some start wars. I choose to constantly move forward, never looking back, and hunting is what I have always done. And writing: I put my heart and soul into every book I write.

  •••

  I was eight years old when my father, Herbert Smith, gave me my first rifle, a .22 Remington. I shot my first animal shortly afterward and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face. I was a new hunter, the blood the mark of emerging manhood. I refused to bathe for days afterward.

  The rifle had 122 notches carved on it, one for every animal that had been hunted with it. “It’s yours now, Wilbur,” my father said, “but there’s a code that goes with it. A system of honor. You fire safely. You shoot clean. You only kill that which you’re going to eat.”

  The Remington had belonged to my father and before that to my grandfather, Courtney James Smith. Grandpa Courtney had been a transport rider during the Witwatersrand gold rush in the late 1880s, and before that he had led a Maxim gun team in the Zulu War, decimating the enemy with 600 rounds a minute. He was a tough guy, full of burly opinions and apocryphal, self-aggrandizing stories.

  Hunting was in his blood. I had sat at my grandfather’s knee listening to stories of his great elephant hunts, which provided sport and meat to sustain his family. “You don’t hunt an elephant with a gun, you kill him with your feet,” he said. He would walk the elephant down, there were no four-wheel drive vehicles in the 1900s. He always hunted the old bull cleanly, before the animal even knew it was being stalked.

  In those days, the big game hunter was revered. My grandfather’s heroes were men like Karamojo Bell, a Scottish adventurer who plied his trade in East Africa and was famous for being one of the most successful ivory hunters of all time, and for perfecting the difficult diagonal shot from behind the elephant, known as the Bell shot, which produced an instant kill. There was also Frederick Selous, explorer, hunter and conservationist whose real-life exploits inspired H. Rider Haggard’s fictional character Allan Quatermain. Between 1874 and 1876 Selous shot seventy-eight elephants with a short-barreled musket that fired a quarter-pound bullet. He was an Indiana Jones character, a Victorian gentleman with a wild, untamable streak.

  That age is gone, just as my father and grandfather have passed away. The spirit of the times has changed and we have different heroes now, media icons, celebrities, perhaps not so real as the gods of the past.

  I rest, I dream, my grandfather is alive in my imagination. I hear his voice:

  “The sun’s heat was lessening from its midday intensity so we resumed our pursuit. The lead tracker’s eye could see the disturbance in the grass, the small scuffs on rocks where the elephant’s pads had scraped off the lichen. In a ravine between two hills there was water that was brackish and foul-smelling, but the bull had drunk, leaving behind a pile of his yellow dung. Further on he had eaten the fruit from a cluster of marula trees; as legend has it, the fruit that drives elephants mad with intoxication if the fruit has been left to ferment on the ground.

  “Wilbur, a bull elephant needs to eat over a ton of vegetation every day and will have to stop mov
ing to feed. This is when it’s at its most vulnerable. Its eyesight is poor and with eyes positioned toward the back of the skull, its forward vision is compromised and its massive ears can impede vision behind him. His hearing is acute and he can sense movement with uncanny precision.

  “There was a grumble like a loud purr that echoed across the still plains, the sound of an elephant at ease, feeding contentedly. We pushed forward into the bush and suddenly there was an explosion of twigs breaking, branches being stripped from trees and there he was, his enormous ears gently flapping, and I could see his eye, gray with age and weeping as if he was sentient of his decline and the end of his life. There was sadness in that moment, a melancholy that seemed to rush in like the tide, demolishing all resolve before it.

  “His huge tusks were a heavy burden, each day they would be less supportable. His joints would ache with every step and, if he was in his seventieth year, his sixth set of molars would be worn away and slow starvation would be his fate as soft grasses and fruit, his only manageable diet, would not sustain him. His skin sagged with wrinkles like deep fissures. And yet he was defiant, unbending, purposeful.

  “A brain shot would kill the bull instantly. I lifted my rifle, trusting experience and instinct. I took a deep breath but I could not still my heart.

  “The old bull elephant in my sights, no more than twenty yards away, was coming to the end of its life, but it still stood proud amongst the trees, feeding on the grass of its homeland, the ragged curves of its bulk an assertion of its massive presence, of nature’s mysterious will. Not so many years ago I would have already pulled the trigger of my rifle in an unthinking instant, but now, in my own twilight years I felt an affinity for its life, its struggling, stoic soul that would never give up the chase.

  “I had to decide quickly or the bull would sense my presence and charge.

  “As the day began its final descent into the half-light of evening, there was a stillness and silence as if the birds themselves had paused before a moment of departure and I lowered my rifle, stepping backward, taking care to leave with only the slightest disturbance.”