On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures Read online

  The Gods First Make Mad was not my first work of fiction—and I had already, fleetingly, had a taste of success. I knew, on some rational level, that I was not without talent. Sometime before embarking on that ill-fated novel, I had made my debut with a piece of writing called “On Flinders’ Face.” In those days, there were more magazines which concentrated on publishing new fiction—magazines like the New Yorker and Argosy, both based in America—and, beyond all my expectations, Argosy had chosen to run one of my earliest attempts at a short story.

  Seeing my work in print for the first time was one of the most uplifting experiences of my life. It wasn’t published under the name “Wilbur Smith”—I was convinced that Smith was a common and unromantic name that would scupper my bid before it had even begun. I’d submitted it under the pseudonym “Steven Lawrence,” after my mother’s maiden name and because I’d just finished reading T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom for the third time. Acceptance lit me up in ways I could not describe. Argosy paid me £70 for the story which was an incredible sum of money at the time, twice my monthly salary, and even more important for someone forced to depend on his parents for hand-outs to get through each month. But what mattered more was the effect it had on my confidence. My story was published alongside S. J. Perelman, Lawrence Durrell and the American science fiction genius Ray Bradbury, and the magazine had featured my hero C. S. Forester, and even printed some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first installments of Tarzan. Argosy also published one of my great literary heroes, Graham Greene.

  I was proud of “On Flinders’ Face” in a way I could never be about The Gods First Make Mad. What I needed to do was recapture that moment, the joy of a successful creation, the essence that had made “On Flinders’ Face” come alive while The Gods First Make Mad had not.

  “On Flinders’ Face” was the tale of a man going mountain-climbing with two friends, one of whom had been cuckolding the other by sleeping with his wife. In the months before writing it, I had myself discovered rock climbing with a group of friends. On the weekends, we would head out into the veld around Salisbury and scale the granite koppies which are so typical of the landscape there. I had had my share of close scrapes on the ranch where I had grown up, but this was a different challenge—and a daunting introduction to a world of terror-infused adrenaline that I had not quite anticipated. The cliff faces of Rhodesia’s heartland were sheer and smooth, offering few handholds, even for a seasoned climber, but I had given myself to them with gusto, displaying a confidence to which I had no real claim. Soon, my confidence got the better of me—I reached too far, committed myself too early, and the granite slipped out of my grasp. One petrified instant later, I was plunging downward, the cliff face rushing into the sky, the whole world a blur of color and churning air. I fell for what seemed like an age but it could only have been seconds, and suddenly I was swinging helplessly from the end of my rope, several hundred feet above the ground.

  As I dangled there, reflecting on how easily lives could end, the plot of “On Flinders’ Face” flowed into my mind. It was a moment of pure inspiration in which story and characters simply materialized in front of my eyes. I knew that, if I survived, I would have to write it down. This was a story and world that I understood. I was living it, every heartbeat of the moment, after all. I knew about the terror and thrill of rock climbing from personal experience. I knew how the hard granite felt beneath a climber’s fingers, how the challenge of pitting yourself against a mountain could come to dominate the mind. And now I had firsthand knowledge of the fear all mountaineers, professional or amateur, will one day come to know: the sensation of free fall, as the mountain betrays you at last.

  I was lucky. My good friend Colin Butler was belaying me; a bull of a man, with the strength of ten, he dragged me single-handedly back to the ledge from which I had just slipped. Later that week, once the shakes had worn off, I sat down in the Salisbury office and, ignoring the pressing demands of income tax assessments, began to write the story in longhand, because I couldn’t type. A young secretary in the office offered to help and even though I didn’t have a cent to pay her, she helped me anyway. Perhaps she could see how desperate I was to capture the moment, to hone my craft.

  Now, faced with the idea of beginning a new novel, I sat down with my copy of Argosy and stared at “On Flinders’ Face.” There was magic in my hands. There was alchemy. And, suddenly, I realized why. I had been writing about what I knew. I had recreated the sensations of being on that mountainside, translated it to the page, captured the real feelings of that dreadful moment. “On Flinders’ Face” had been true.

  I was determined to do the same again. I had my life to draw on. I had vivid memories of my childhood, living half-feral on my father’s cattle ranch. I would write about my adventures on that ranch. I would write about the people I had known, the black and the white, about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women. I would write about love and being loved, about hate and being hated. I would leave out all the immature philosophy, radical politics and rebellious posturing that had been the backbone of my past work, and only write about the subjects and people I knew.

  At the age of 29 in 1962, I picked up my pen to begin, and an old memory returned. It was a story I had thought of often over many years, one that made me marvel even to this day. It was the memory of the time I had woken in the night and, crawling out of my tent, watched my father shoot three man-eating lions without breaking a sweat.

  I looked down. My pen was already moving over the page. When the Lion Feeds were the words I had written. I had a title. At last, I was on my way to eternal freedom.

  •••

  I was born on January 9, 1933, in what is today Zambia in Central Africa. In those days independence was still thirty-one years away, and Northern Rhodesia, as the country was then known, was a protectorate of the British Empire. The first air I breathed was the air of the Copperbelt, in a tiny maternity ward in Ndola. Eighteen months later I was fighting for my life, after contracting cerebral malaria. The doctors warned my parents that it might be better if I died. They worried that if I came through, I could be brain damaged. I survived of course, and it probably helped me because I think you have to be slightly crazy to try to earn a living from writing.

  My father had been drawn to this remote country as a journeyman metal-sheet worker, having completed his apprenticeship in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and it was here he had made his first fortune. The Kafue River, a tributary of the great Zambezi, had long ago drawn investors to the rich copper deposits along its banks, and for a time a thriving mining industry had existed—but, by the time I was born, the Great Depression had taken its toll, reaching even this remote place in the heart of Africa, and the mines sat stagnant, an underworld museum waiting for a new beginning.

  When the mines were closed, most of the workers had been sent back to England with just enough money to give them a chance of finding their feet when the ship made port. My father, however, was not a man to make that bargain, and stayed on in Rhodesia determined to find a way to survive. He was resourceful, he could see opportunities. I was born the son of a hunter and trader, a man who built and sold what he could.

  Life was hard and my father used his wits and sometimes his rifle to provide for his family. He set up a chain of fourteen stores, simple corrugated tin huts perched precariously on the edges of Rhodesia’s roads, from which local men in his pay would sell whatever wares he could provide. Mostly, it was day-to-day goods—blankets and tools, animal skins and clothes—but sometimes he would disappear deep into the bush, coming back with buffalo hides and butchered meat to sell. My sister, two years younger than me, and I lived like natives as, little by little, he built his empire. By the time the effects of the Depression began to ebb away, my father had decided he did not want to live his life working for somebody else. There was a visceral thrill in pitting yourself against the world, in relying on nobody but you. It was a lesson I would one day learn for myself, though in
a very different sphere to my father.

  When the mines were reopened in the late 1930s, my father was contacted by the authorities running the Copperbelt, and asked to repurpose the dilapidated houses so that the miners could return. Sensing the chance to find some stability for his family, he led us back to the mines—but soon he had decided to break free and, in 1938, we finally moved into a ranch of our own.

  My father’s ranch was 25,000 acres of forest, hills and savannah near the town of Mazabuka, nestled in the banks of the Kafue River, which ran for more than a thousand kilometers, down from the Copperbelt to join the mighty Zambezi. The land had once been a succession of separate farms, each allotted to returning soldiers after the First World War, but my father had painstakingly bought them all—and now everything I could see, from the miombo woodlands in the north, to the lush grasses of the Kafue flood plain, was ours.

  At the age of twenty-eight, in 1961, I stood outside the traditional thatched Rhodesian farmhouse my father had built, a polished red veranda running all the way around its white-washed walls, and watched him approach. I had always thought of my father as the master of all he surveyed, a semimythical figure hewn out of the wilderness and bending the world to his own shape. He was not a huge man, but sun-burnished and fair, with forearms grown immense by his years of working with sheet metal and ventilation pipes, and a head that had been bald since his early twenties. His eyes were piercing blue, his nose misaligned from the time it was broken in a boxing match—and, as he veered off to talk to his foreman, I took my chance. This was time for some secret reading.

  My father didn’t hate books. In a lot of ways, he too was a bookish man—and, late at night, he could often be found under the lantern light of the ranch house, poring through his mechanical books and manuals, absorbing all the factual, technical knowledge he could find. My father did not distrust books; it was stories he was highly suspicious of. He was convinced stories could infect a young mind. Stories were flights of fancy, ways of escape, imaginative confections that took you away from the real world of taming and conquering the wild, laying roads and raising empires out of the dust. To my father, stories represented a distraction from the proper business of life, they were unmanly. He had no love for them and would have preferred it if I had none either.

  In my early teens, while back at the ranch for long summer vacations, when I was sure he wasn’t looking, I scrambled around the side of the ranch house and crossed the scrub land. There, by a koppie of brown stone—on which sat the vast water tank that fed into the ranch house—I made my way down to the outhouse. Inside lay the long-drop latrine. Once I had made certain the bolt was dropped, I unearthed my secret cache from the hiding place I had burrowed out many months before. Here were the prized possessions of my young life: Biggles in the Baltic, The Black Peril, Just William—and, my current favorite, King Solomon’s Mines. Certain that I would not be discovered for a while, I settled down in my hiding place to read. I used to spend so long in the outhouse latrine reading books that my father was convinced I had a stomach problem and ordered my mother to force me to swallow copious doses of castor oil. It was a small price to pay.

  At other times my father would send me to collect wood for heating and cooking and I’d head off with the tractor and trailer and a gang of workers. Before we set off I’d sneak a book down the front of my shirt. As our men worked up a sweat chopping wood, I’d be perched on the tractor, reading my book out in the open with this big sun hat on. My father never caught me because I could hear his car coming. And when the car did come tearing down the road spitting dust, I’d leap off the tractor, shove the book back up my shirt and pretend to make myself useful. The men didn’t mind; I was too small to wield an ax and they made sure to keep my secret. Sometimes they’d point to their head and make a small circle with their index finger to indicate that I was a smart, brainy fellow because I read books, but more likely they thought I was a bit crazy.

  It was my mother who had introduced me to the magic of the written word. Her love of reading touched me deeply. She was ten years younger than my father, and she had met and fallen in love with him on the Copperbelt, at one of the dances to which the locals from many miles around would descend every month. If my father was my god, my mother was my guardian angel. She shielded me from my father’s rage, until it cooled. She ignited my interest in the wonders of nature, trees, plants, species of flower and their exotic classifications. Together they made me who I am. Her name was Elfreda, and she balanced my father in a way that made them perfectly matched. Where my father was headstrong and single-minded, my mother was gentle and artistic. With dark hair and almond eyes, she was English by birth but embraced the wilds of Africa without breaking her stride. When she wasn’t sitting at her easel with her watercolors, painting this dramatic landscape, she was cantering across the veld on horseback, equally at home under the endless African sky as she had ever been in an English city or town.

  For as long as I could remember, my mother had led me into the fantastic worlds lying inside the pages of her books. After a long day following my father around the ranch, bedtime would bring adventures of its own. I would curl up in bed and listen to my mother reading from books just like the ones I now had hidden in the long-drop latrine. One room in the ranch house was dominated by her library, with shelves of books lining every wall. I could never understand why this was not an object of awe to my father. There may have been a real life out there offering its own unique experiences, but in my mother’s library there were hundreds of other worlds as well, all of them waiting to be explored. The hour before I went to sleep was the greatest pleasure I could remember. As I lay in my bed, letting her words wash over me and staring at the book in her hands, every night I would think, “She’s not making it up! It’s all coming from those pages. That book . . .” Those were the first moments I knew books would always play a central part in my life.

  As soon as I was able, I started to read books myself, starting with Biggles and Just William, and no longer was it a pleasure reserved for night times alone. Soon I was lost in the worlds of C. S. Forester, with his exquisite Horatio Hornblower tales of adventure on the high seas, or John Buchan and his thrillers set in the wild places of the distant north. My mother struck up a friendship with a public librarian in Bulawayo, almost eight hundred miles to the south, and every month a package of new adventures would arrive on the freighter trains that were then spreading across the continent. From that moment onward I always had a well-thumbed novel in my pocket. I could dive into books where I found gripping tales of death and danger, the heroism and savagery of this continent we called home. I loved the romance of Africa, the mysticism of its lost tribe and the sorceress, She Who Must Be Obeyed. H. Rider Haggard, one of my favorite authors at the time, showed me that Africa was a vast repository of stories—and, better yet, that I was close to those stories. Hidden in the long-drop latrine, I got to thinking that Haggard’s hero, Allan Quatermain, was in some way a reflection of my father and his own African adventures. Quatermain was English-born, the same as my father—and, like my father, he too was a professional game hunter and trader. Haggard’s love for Africa and its people was so deep he too learned the languages of the natives and supported their affairs. It was from these men that I learned to look at Africa as a continent filled with heroes and heroines, a place of infinite adventure.

  I was reading about the jungles of Africa’s dark heart, journeying in my imagination with Quatermain, when I heard my father bellowing my name from the back of the ranch. Fumbling to hide the books, I emerged from the outhouse in time to see him descending from the veranda.

  He looked at me with the same scrutinizing expression I can still remember, even though he has been gone from this world for over thirty years. It was a look that said: What were you doing in there, boy? He wanted me to be like him, and in many ways, I was. I just had another facet to my personality, a love for imaginative invention that maybe he thought was some kind of affliction. My fat
her was not an unimaginative man; he simply never had time to indulge in solitary abstract pursuits. There was constant physical work to be done.

  “Wood,” my father said, and I nodded. It was time for my chores to begin.

  Once, when I was hurling firewood into the tractor’s trailer, the book I’d hidden up my shirt bounced out into the dust. As luck would have it my father had joined us to keep an eye on the workmen as they cut down the bush. I hastily rammed the book back up into my shirt and continued as if nothing had happened. I heard the crunch of footsteps as my father came up behind me and put his big hand on my shoulder. I turned around. I don’t know if it was the sun glancing off his face, but I’m sure I saw the briefest of winks in his eye. Nothing more was said.

  •••

  I was so proud when I held my grandfather’s rifle for the first time. My father handed it to me without a word, and of course I knew what it meant to him and to me. I had marveled at this rifle on many occasions, known its long and storied history. The old Remington was cared for and in perfect condition, and I ran my fingers along the notches and tried to breathe in the hunts, each one a story in my mind which I loved to hear again and again.

  The sportsman’s code that my father taught me was an order that brought decency to killing, an unspoken line across which a true hunter never stepped. Hunting, for my father and grandfather, had never been an indiscriminate practice, done for joy. Hunting was a way of life, a skill by which you provided for your people or helped the natural world retain its balance. Those were lessons to which I would stay true throughout my life, but in that moment, I could think of nothing but the legendary rifle in my hands.

  The fact that my father had trusted me with this rifle was a privilege and an honor. We did not see my grandfather often, only when we took long journeys south to his home in Natal. He lived alone in a twenty-acre plot outside town, surrounded by the guns, spears and fishing rods of his life, a pack of dogs his only company. If my father was a god to me, then Grandpa Courtney was a god to my father. To me he was Methuselah, an ancient man from a different age. With his dazzling blue eyes and a pair of magnificent mustaches lightened by tobacco juice, he could hit a spittoon at five paces without spilling a drop. He appeared like some vision from the storybooks I loved—and was himself a fountain of stories. I used his name for the hero of my first novel When the Lion Feeds but in truth he inspired both Sean Courtney, and Sean’s father, Waite.