The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Read online

  ‘Eh – he!’ They showed no rancour at Craig’s purported bag of their brethren.

  ‘Know also that he comes to turn you from goat-keeping women, sitting in the sun scratching your fleas, into proud cattle-men once more, for—’ Shadrach paused for dramatic effect ‘– soon on this grass will graze cows so sleek and beautiful that to look upon them—’

  Craig noted that Shadrach could repeat his own words perfectly, displaying the remarkable memory of the illiterate. When he ended with a high stork-like leap in the air and a clatter of his fighting-sticks, they applauded him wildly, and then looked to Craig expectantly.

  ‘One hell of an act to follow,’ Craig told himself as he stood before them. He spoke quietly, in low, musical Sindebele.

  ‘The cattle will be here soon, and there is much work to be done before they arrive. You know about the wage that the government has decreed for farm-workers. That I will pay, and food rations for each of you and your families.’ This was received without any great show of enthusiasm. ‘And in addition,’ Craig paused, ‘for each year of service completed, you will be given a fine young cow and the right to graze her upon the grass of Kingi Lingi, the right also to put her to my great bulls so that she might bear you beautiful calves—’

  ‘Eh – he!’ they shouted, and stamped with joy, and at last Craig held up both hands.

  ‘There might be some amongst you who will be tempted to lift that which belongs to me, or who will find a shady tree under which to spend the day instead of stringing fencing-wire or herding the cattle.’ He glared at them, so they quailed a little. ‘Now this wise government forbids a man to kick another with his foot – but, be warned, I can kick you without using my own foot.’

  He stooped and in one deft movement plucked off his leg, and stood before them with it in his hand. They gaped in amazement.

  ‘See, this is not my own foot!’ Their expressions began to turn sickly, as though they were in the presence of terrible witchcraft. They began to shuffle nervously and look around for escape.

  ‘So,’ Craig shouted, ‘without breaking the law, I can kick who I wish.’ Making two swift hops, he used the momentum to swing the toe of the boot of his disembodied leg into the backside of the nearest warrior.

  For a moment longer the stunned silence persisted, and then they were overwhelmed by their own sense of the ridiculous. They laughed until their cheeks were streaked with tears. They staggered in circles beating their own heads, they hugged each other, heaving and gasping with laughter. They surrounded the unfortunate whose backside had been the butt of Craig’s joke, and abused him further, prodding him and shrieking with laughter. Shadrach, all princely dignity discarded, collapsed in the dust and wriggled helplessly as wave after wave of mirth overcame him.

  Craig watched them fondly. Already they were his people, his special charges. Certainly, there would be rotters amongst them. He would have to weed them out. Certainly, even the good ones would at times deliberately test his vigilance and his forbearance as was the African way, but in time also they would become a close-knit family and he knew that he would come to love them.

  The fences were the first priority. They had fallen into a state of total disrepair: there were miles of barbed-wire missing, almost certainly stolen. When Craig tried to replace it, he realized why. There was none for sale in Matabeleland. No import permits had been issued that quarter for barbed-wire.

  ‘Welcome to the special joy of farming in black Zimbabwe,’ the manager of the Farmers’ Co-operative Society in Bulawayo told him. ‘Somebody wangled an import permit for a million dollars’ worth of candy and milk chocolate, but there was none for barbed-wire.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Craig was desperate. ‘I’ve got to have fencing. I can’t run stock without it. When will you receive a consignment?’

  ‘That rests with some little clerk in the Department of Commerce in Harare,’ the manager shrugged, and Craig turned sadly back to the Land-Rover, when suddenly an idea came to him.

  ‘May I use your telephone?’ he asked the manager.

  He dialled the private number that Peter Fungabera had given him, and after he had identified himself, a secretary put him straight through.

  ‘Peter, we’ve got a big problem.’

  ‘How can I help you?’

  Craig told him, and Peter murmured to himself as he made notes. ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘At least twelve hundred bales.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘Not at the moment – oh yes, sorry to bother you, Peter, but I’ve been trying to find Sally-Anne. She doesn’t answer the telephone or reply to telegrams.’

  ‘Phone me back in ten minutes,’ Peter Fungabera ordered, and when Craig did so, he told him, ‘Sally-Anne is out of the country. Apparently she flew up to Kenya in the Cessna. She is at a place called Kitchwa Tembu on the Masai Mara.’

  ‘Do you know when she will be back?’

  ‘No, but as soon as she re-enters the country again I’ll let you know.’

  Craig was impressed at the reach of Peter Fungabera’s arm, that he could follow a person’s movements even outside Zimbabwe. Obviously, Sally-Anne was on some list for special attention, and the thought struck him that he himself was probably on that very same list.

  Of course, he knew why Sally-Anne was at Kitchwa Tembu. Two years previously Craig had visited that marvellous safari camp on the Mara plains at the invitation of the owners, Geoff and Jorie Kent. This was the season when the vast herds of buffalo around the camp would start dropping their calves and the battles between the protective cows and the lurking packs of predators intent on devouring the newborn calves provided one of the great spectacles of the African veld. Sally-Anne would be there with her Nikon.

  On his way back to King’s Lynn, he stopped at the post office and sent her a telegram through Abercrombie and Kent’s office in Nairobi: ‘Bring me back some tips for Zambezi Waters. Stop. Is the hunt still on. Query. Best Craig.’

  Three days later a convoy of trucks ground up the hills of King’s Lynn and a platoon of Third Brigade troopers offloaded twelve hundred bales of barbed-wire into the roofless tractor sheds.

  ‘Is there an invoice to pay?’ Craig asked the sergeant in charge of the detail. ‘Or any papers to sign?’

  ‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘I know only I was ordered to bring these things – and I have done so.’

  Craig watched the empty trucks roar away down the hill, and there was an indigestible lump in his stomach. He suspected that there would never be an invoice. He knew also that this was Africa, and he did not like to contemplate the consequences of alienating Peter Fungabera.

  For five days he worked with his Matabele fencing gangs, bared to the waist, with heavy leather gloves protecting his hands; he flung his weight on the wirestrainers and sang the work chants with his men – but all that time the lump of conscience was heavy in his belly, and he could not suffer it longer.

  There was still no telephone on the estate, so he drove into Bulawayo. He reached Peter at the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘My dear Craig, you really are making a fuss about nothing. The quarter-master general has not yet invoiced the wire to me. But if it makes you feel better, then send me a cheque and I will see that the business is settled immediately. Oh, Craig, make the cheque payable “Cash”, will you?’

  Over the next few weeks, Craig discovered in himself the capacity to live on much less sleep than he had ever believed possible. He was up each morning at four-thirty and chivvied his Matabele gangs from their huts. They emerged sleepily, still blanketwrapped and shivering at the chill, coughing from the wood-smoke of the watch-fire, and grumbling without any real malice.

  At noon, Craig found the shade of an acacia, and slept through the siesta as they all did. Then, refreshed, he worked through the afternoon until the ringing tone of the gong of railway-line suspended from the branch of a jacaranda tree below the homestead sounded the hour and the cry of ‘Shayile! It has
struck!’ was flung from gang to gang and they trooped back up the hills.

  Then Craig washed off the sweat and dust in the concrete reservoir behind the cottage, ate a hasty meal and by the time darkness fell, he was sitting at the cheap deal table in the cottage in the hissing white light of the gas lantern with a sheet of paper in front of him and a ballpoint pen in his hand, transported into the other world of his imagination. Some nights he wrote through until long after midnight, and then at four-thirty was out in the dewy not-yet dawn again, feeling alert and vigorous.

  The sun darkened his skin and bleached the cowlick of hair over his eyes, the hard physical work toned up his muscles and toughened his stump so he could walk the fences all day without discomfort. There was so little time to spare, that his cooking was perfunctory and the bottle of whisky remained in his bag with the seal unbroken – so that he grew lean and hawk-faced.

  Then one evening as he parked the Land-Rover under the jacaranda trees and started up towards the cottage, he was forced to stop. The aroma of roasting beef and potatoes was like running into a brick wall. The saliva spurted from under his tongue and he started forward again, suddenly ravenous.

  In the tiny makeshift kitchen a gaunt figure stood over the wood fire. His hair was soft and white as cotton wool, and he looked up accusingly as Craig stood in the doorway.

  ‘Why did you not send for me?’ he demanded in Sindebele. ‘Nobody else cooks on Kingi Lingi.’

  ‘Joseph!’ Craig cried, and embraced him impetuously. The old man had been Bawu’s cook for thirty years. He could lay a formal banquet for fifty guests, or whip up a hunters’ pot on a bush fire. Already there was bread baking in the tin trunk he had improvised as an oven and he had gleaned a bowl of salad from the neglected garden.

  Joseph extricated himself from Craig’s embrace, a little ruffled by this breach of etiquette. ‘Nkosana,’ Joseph still used the diminutive address, ‘your clothes were filthy and your bed was unmade,’ he lectured Craig sternly. ‘We have worked all day to tidy the mess you have made.’

  Only then did Craig notice the other man in the kitchen.

  ‘Kapa-lala,’ he laughed delightedly, and the houseboy grinned and bobbed with pleasure. He was at work with the heavy black smoothing-iron filled with glowing coals. All Craig’s clothes and bed-linen had been washed and were being ironed to crisp perfection. The walls of the cottage had been washed down and the floor polished to a gloss. Even the brass taps on the sink shone like the buttons on a marine’s dress uniform.

  ‘I have made a list of the things we need,’ Joseph told Craig. ‘They will do for the time being, but it is unfitting that you should live like this in a hovel. Nkosi Bawu, your grandfather, would have disapproved.’ Joseph the cook had a definite sense of style. ‘Thus, I have sent a message to my senior wife’s uncle who is a master thatcher, and told him to bring his eldest son who is a bricklayer, and his nephew, who is a fine carpenter. They will be here tomorrow to begin repairing the damage that these dogs have done to the big house. As for the gardens, I know a man—’ and he ticked off on his fingers what he considered necessary to restore King’s Lynn to some sort of order. ‘Thus we will be ready to invite thirty important guests to Christmas dinner, like we used to in the old days. Now Nkosana, go and wash. Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes.’

  With the home paddocks securely fenced and the work on the restoration of the outbuildings and main homestead well in hand, Craig could at last begin the vital step of restocking. He summoned Shadrach and Joseph, and gave King’s Lynn into their joint care during his absence. They accepted the responsibility gravely. Then Craig drove to the airport, left the Land-Rover in the car park and boarded the commercial flight southwards.

  For the next three weeks he toured the great cattle stud ranches of Northern Transvaal, the province of South Africa whose climate and conditions most closely resembled those of Matabeleland. The purchases of blood cattle were not transactions that could be hurried. Each was preceded by days of discussion with the seller, and study of the beasts themselves, while Craig enjoyed the traditional hospitality of the Afrikaner country folk. His hosts were men whose ancestors had trekked northwards from the Cape of Good Hope, drawn by their oxen, and had lived all their lives close to their animals. So while Craig purchased their stock, he drew upon their accumulated wisdom and experience and came from each transaction with his own knowledge and understanding of cattle immensely enriched. All he learned reinforced his desire to follow Bawu’s successful experiments with cross-breeding the indigenous Afrikaner strain, known for its hardiness and disease- and drought-resistance, with the quicker yielding Santa Gertrudis strain.

  He bought young cows that had been artificially inseminated and were well in calf. He bought bulls of fine pedigree from famous blood-lines, and laboured through the documentation and inspection and inoculation and quarantine and insurance that were necessary before they could be permitted to cross an international border. In the meantime he arranged for road transportation northwards to King’s Lynn by contractors who specialized in carrying precious livestock.

  He spent almost two million of his borrowed dollars before flying back to King’s Lynn to make the final preparations for the arrival of his cattle. The deliveries of the blood-stock were to be staggered over a period of months, so that each consignment could be properly received and allowed to settle down before the arrival of the next batch.

  The first to arrive were four young bulls, just ready to take up their stud duties. Craig had paid fifteen thousand dollars for each of them. Peter Fungabera was determined to make an important occasion out of their arrival. He persuaded two of his brother ministers to attend the welcoming ceremony, though neither the prime minister nor the minister of tourism, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, was available on that day.

  Craig hired a marquee tent, while Joseph happily and importantly prepared one of his legendary al fresco banquets. Craig was still smarting from having paid out two million dollars, so he went cheap on the champagne, ordering the imitation from the Cape of Good Hope rather than the genuine article.

  The ministerial party arrived in a fleet of black Mercedes, accompanied by their heavily armed bodyguards, all sporting aviator-type sunglasses. Their ladies were dressed in full-length safari prints, of the wildest and most improbable colours. The cheap sweet champagne went down as though a plug had been pulled out of a bath, and they were all soon twittering and giggling like a flock of glossy starlings. The minister of education’s senior wife unbuttoned her blouse, produced a succulent black bosom, and gave the infant on her hip an early lunch while herself taking on copious quantities of champagne. ‘Refuelling in flight,’ one of Craig’s white neighbours, who had been an RAF bomber-pilot, remarked with a grin.

  Peter Fungabera was the last to arrive, wearing full dress, and driven by a young aide, a captain in the Third Brigade whom Craig had noticed on several other occasions. This time Peter introduced him.

  ‘Captain Timon Nbebi.’

  He was so thin as to appear almost frail. His eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles were too vulnerable for a soldier, and his grip was quick and nervous. Craig would have liked to have spoken to him, but, by this time the transporter carrying the bulls was already grinding up the hills.

  It arrived in a cloud of fine red dust before the enclosure of split poles that Craig had built to receive the bulls. The gangplank was lowered, but before the tailgate was raised Peter Fungabera climbed up onto the dais and addressed the assembly.

  ‘Mr Craig Mellow is a man who could have chosen any country in the world to live in and, as an internationally bestselling writer, would have been welcomed there. He chose to return to Zimbabwe, and in doing so has declared to all the world that here is a land where men of any colour, of any tribe – black or white, Mashona or Matabele – are free to live and work, unafraid and unmolested, safe in the rule of just laws.’

  After the political commercial, Peter Fungabera allowed himself a little joke. ‘We wil
l now welcome to our midst these other new immigrants, in the sure knowledge that they will be the fathers of many fine sons and daughters, and contribute to the prosperity of our own Zimbabwe.’

  Peter Fungabera led the applause as Craig raised the gate and the first new immigrant emerged to stand blinking in the sunlight. He was an enormous beast, over a ton of bulging muscles under the glistening red-brown hide. He had just endured sixteen hours penned up in a noisy, lurching machine. The tranquillizers he had been given had worn off, leaving him with a drug hangover and a bitter grudge against the entire world. Now he looked down on the clapping throng, on the swirling colours of the women’s national costumes, and he found at last a focus for his irritation and frustration. He let out a long ferocious bellow, and, dragging his handlers behind him, he launched himself like an avalanche down the gangplank.

  The handlers released their hold on the restrainers, and the split-pole barrier exploded before his charge, as did the ministerial party. They scattered like sardines at the rush of a hungry barracuda. High officials overtook their wives, in a race for the sanctuary of the jacaranda trees; infants strapped on the women’s backs howled as loudly as their dams.

  The bull went into one side of the luncheon marquee, still at a dead run, gathering up the guy ropes on his massive shoulders, so the tent came down in graceful billows of canvas, trapping beneath it a horde of panic-stricken revellers. He emerged from the further side of the collapsing marquee just as one of the younger ministerial wives sprinted, shrilling with terror, across his path. He hooked at her with one long forward-raked horn, and the point caught in the fluttering hem of her dress. The bull jerked his head up and the brightly coloured material unwrapped from the girl’s body like the string from a child’s top. She spun into an involuntary pirouette, caught her balance, and then, stark naked, went bounding up the hill with long legs flashing and abundant breasts bouncing elastically.