The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Page 5

  ‘The place is in a hell of a mess, Bawu,’ he spoke again, and the little blue-headed lizard on the old man’s headstone scuttled away at the sound of his voice. ‘The tusks are gone from the veranda, and they are running goats on your best grass.’

  Again he was silent, but now he was beginning to calculate and scheme. He sat for nearly an hour, and then stood up.

  ‘Bawu, how would you like it if I could move the goats off your pasture?’ he asked, and walked back down the hill to where he had left the Volkswagen.

  It was a little before five o’clock when he drove back into town. The estate agency and auctioneering floor opposite the Standard Bank was still open for business. The sign had even been repainted in scarlet, and as soon as Craig entered, he recognized the burly red-faced auctioneer in khaki shorts and short-sleeved, open-necked shirt.

  ‘So you didn’t take the gap, like the rest of us did, Jock,’ Craig greeted Jock Daniels.

  ‘Taking the gap’ was the derogatory expression for emigrating. Out of 250,000 white Rhodesians, almost 150,000 had taken the gap since the beginning of hostilities, and most of those had left since the war had been lost and the black government of Robert Mugabe had taken control.

  Jock stared at him. ‘Craig!’ he exploded. ‘Craig Mellow!’ He took Craig’s hand in a horny brown paw. ‘No, I stayed, but sometimes it gets hellish lonely. But you’ve done well, by God you have. They say in the papers that you have made a million out of that book. People here could hardly believe it. Old Craig Mellow, they said, fancy Craig Mellow of all people.’

  ‘Is that what they said?’ Craig’s smile stiffened, and he took his hand back.

  ‘Can’t say I liked the book myself.’ Jock shook his head. ‘You made all the blacks look like bloody heroes – but that’s what they like overseas, isn’t it? Black is beautiful – that’s what sells books, hey?’

  ‘Some of my reviewers called me a racist,’ Craig murmured. ‘You can’t keep all the people happy all of the time.’

  Jock wasn’t listening. ‘Another thing, Craig, why did you have to make out that Mr Rhodes was a queer?’

  Cecil Rhodes, the father of the white settlers, had been dead for eighty years, but the old-timers still called him Mr Rhodes.

  ‘I gave the reasons in the book,’ Craig tried to placate him.

  ‘He was a great man, Craig, but nowadays it’s the fashion for you young people to tear down greatness – like mongrels snapping at the heels of a lion.’ Craig could see that Jock was warming to his subject, and he had to divert him.

  ‘How about a drink, Jock?’ he asked, and Jock paused. His rosy cheeks and swollen purple nose were not solely the products of the African sun.

  ‘Now, you’re making sense.’ Jock licked his lips. ‘It’s been a long thirsty day. Just let me lock up the shop.’

  ‘If I fetched a bottle, we could drink it here and talk privately.’

  The last of Jock’s antagonism evaporated. ‘Damn good idea. The bottle store has a few bottles of Dimple Haig left – and get a bucket of ice while you are about it.’

  They sat in Jock’s tiny cubicle of an office and drank the good whisky out of cheap thick tumblers. Jock Daniels’ mood mellowed perceptibly.

  ‘I didn’t leave, Craig, because there was nowhere to go. England? I haven’t been back there since the war. Trade unions and bloody weather – no thanks. South Africa? They are going to go the same way that we did – at least we’ve got it over and done with.’ He poured again from the pinch bottle. ‘If you do go, they let you take two hundred dollars with you. Two hundred dollars to start again when you are sixty-five years old – no bloody thanks.’

  ‘So what’s life like, Jock?’

  ‘You know what they call an optimist here?’ Jock asked. ‘It’s somebody who believes that things can’t get any worse.’ He bellowed with laughter and slapped his bare hairy thigh. ‘No. I’m kidding. It’s not too bad. As long as you don’t expect the old standards, if you keep your mouth shut and stay away from politics, you can still live a good life – probably as good as anywhere in the world.’

  ‘The big farmers and ranchers – how are they doing?’

  ‘They are the elite. The government has come to its senses. They’ve dropped all that crap about nationalizing the land. They’ve come to face the fact that if they are going to feed the black masses, then they need the white farmers. They are becoming quite proud of them: when they get a state visitor – a communist Chinese or a Libyan minister – they give him a tour of white farms to show him how good things are looking.’

  ‘What about the price of land?’

  ‘At the end of the war, when the blacks first took over and were shouting about taking the farms and handing them over to the masses, you couldn’t give the land away.’ Jock gargled with his whisky. ‘Take your family company for instance, Rholands Ranching Company – that includes all three spreads: King’s Lynn, Queen’s Lynn and that big piece of country up in the north bordering the Chizarira Game Reserve – your uncle Douglas sold the whole damned shooting match for quarter of a million dollars. Before the war he could have asked ten million.’

  ‘Quarter of a million.’ Craig was shocked. ‘He gave it away!’

  ‘That included all the stock – prize Afrikander bulls and breeding cows, the lot,’ Jock related with relish. ‘You see, he had to get out. He had been a member of Smith’s cabinet from the beginning and he knew that he would have been a marked man once the black government took over. He sold out to a Swiss-German consortium, and they paid him in Zurich. Old Dougie took his family, and went to Aussie. Of course, he already had a few million outside the country, so he could buy himself a nice little cattle station up in Queensland. It’s us poor buggers with everything we have tied up here that had to stay.’

  ‘Have another drink,’ Craig offered, and then steered Jock back to Rholands Ranching. ‘What did the consortium do with Rholands?’

  ‘Cunning bloody Krauts!’ Jock was slurring a little by now. ‘They took all the stock, bribed somebody in government to give them an export permit and shipped them over the border to South Africa. I hear they sold for almost a million and a half down there. Remember, they were the very top breeding-stock, champions of champions. So they cleared over a million, and then they repatriated their profit in gold shares and made another couple of million.’

  ‘They stripped the ranches and now they have abandoned them?’ Craig asked, and Jock nodded weightily.

  ‘They’re trying to sell the company, of course. I’ve got it on my books – but it would take a pile of capital to restock the ranches and get them going again. Nobody is interested. Who wants to bring money into a country which is tottering on the brink? Answer me that!’

  ‘What is the asking price for the company?’ Craig enquired airily, and Jock Daniels sobered miraculously, and fastened Craig with a beady auctioneer’s eye.

  ‘You wouldn’t be interested?’ And his eye became beadier. ‘Did you really make a million dollars out of that book?’

  ‘What are they asking?’ Craig repeated.

  ‘Two million. That’s why I haven’t found a buyer. Lots of the local boys would love to get their paws on that grazing – but two million. Who the hell has that kind of money in this country—’

  ‘Supposing they could be paid in Zurich, would that make a difference to the price?’ Craig asked.

  ‘Do a Shona’s armpits stink!’

  ‘How much difference?’

  ‘They might take a million – in Zürich.’

  ‘A quarter of a million?’

  ‘No ways, never – not in ten thousand years,’ Jock shook his head emphatically.

  ‘Telephone them. Tell them the ranches are over-run with squatters, and it would cause a political hoo-ha to try and move them now. Tell them they are running goats on the grazing, and in a year’s time it will be a desert. Point out they will be getting their original investment out intact. Tell them the government has threatened to seize all
land owned by absentee landlords. They could lose the lot.’

  ‘All that is true,’ Jock grumped. ‘But a quarter of a million! You are wasting my time.’

  ‘Phone them.’

  ‘Who pays for the call?’

  ‘I do. You can’t lose, Jock.’

  Jock sighed with resignation. ‘All right, I’ll call them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Friday today – no point in calling until Monday.’

  ‘All right, in the meantime can you get me a few cans of gas?’ Craig asked.

  ‘What do you wants gas for?’

  ‘I’m going up to the Chizarira. I haven’t been up there for ten years. If I’m going to buy it, I’d like to look at it again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, Craig. That’s bandit country.’

  ‘The polite term is political dissidents.’

  ‘They are Matabele bandits,’ Jock said heavily, ‘and they’ll either shoot your arse full of more holes than you can use, or they will kidnap you for ransom – or both.’

  ‘You get me some gas and I’ll take the chance. I’ll be back early next week to hear what your pals in Zurich have to say about the offer.’

  It was marvellous country, still wild and untouched – no fences, no cultivated lands, no buildings – protected from the influx of cattle and peasant farmers by the tsetse-fly belt which ran up from the Zambezi valley into the forests along the escarpment.

  On the one side it was bounded by the Chizarira Game Reserve and on the other by the Mzolo Forest Reserve, both of which areas were vast reservoirs of wildlife. During the depression of the 1930s, old Bawu had chosen the country with care and paid sixpence an acre for it. One hundred thousand acres for two thousand five hundred pounds. ‘Of course, it will never be cattle country,’ he told Craig once, as they camped under the wild fig trees beside a deep green pool of the Chizarira river and watched the sand-grouse come slanting down on quick wings across the setting sun to land on the sugar-white sandbank beneath the far bank. ‘The grazing is sour, and the tsetse will kill anything you try to rear here – but for that reason it will always be an unspoiled piece of old Africa.’

  The old man had used it as a shooting lodge and a retreat. He had never strung barbed-wire nor built even a shack on the ground, preferring to sleep on the bare earth under the spreading branches of the wild fig.

  Very selectively Bawu had hunted here – elephant and lion and rhinoceros and buffalo – only the dangerous game, but he had jealously protected them from other rifles, even his own sons and grandsons had been denied hunting rights.

  ‘It’s my own little private paradise,’ he told Craig, ‘and I’m selfish enough to keep it like that.’

  Craig doubted that the track through to the pools had been used since he and the old man had last been here together ten years before. It was totally overgrown, elephant had pushed mopani trees down like primitive road-blocks, and heavy rains had washed it out.

  ‘Eat your heart out, Mr Avis,’ said Craig, and put the sturdy little Volkswagen to it.

  However, the front-wheel drive vehicle was light enough and nippy enough to negotiate even the most unfriendly dry river-beds, although Craig had to corduroy the sandy bottoms with branches to give it purchase in the fine sand. He lost the track half a dozen times, and only found it after laboriously casting ahead on foot.

  He hit one ant-bear hole and had to jack up the front end to get out, and half the time he was finding ways around the elephant road-blocks. In the end he had to leave the Volkswagen and cover the last few miles on foot. He reached the pools in the last glimmering of daylight.

  He curled up in the single blanket that he had filched from the motel, and slept through without dreaming or stirring, to wake in the ruddy magic of an African dawn. He ate cold baked beans out of the can and brewed coffee, then he left his pack and blanket under the wild figs and went down along the bank of the river.

  On foot he could cover only a tiny portion of the wide wedge of wild country that spread over a hundred thousand acres, but the Chizarira river was the heart and artery of it. What he found here would allow him to judge what changes there had been since his last visit.

  Almost immediately he realized that there were still plenty of the more common varieties of wildlife in the forest: the big, spooky, spiral-horned kudu went bounding away, flicking their fluffy white tails, and graceful little impala drifted like roseate smoke amongst the trees. Then he found signs of the rarer animals. First, the fresh pugmarks of a leopard in the clay at the water’s edge where the cat had drunk during the night, and then, the elongated teardrop-shaped spoor and grapelike droppings of the magnificent sable antelope.

  For his lunch he ate slices of dried sausage which he cut with his clasp-knife and sucked lumps of tart white cream of tartar from the pods of the baobab tree. When he moved on he came to an extensive stand of dense wild ebony bush, and followed one of the narrow twisting game trails into it. He had gone only a hundred paces when he came on a small clearing in the midst of the thicket of interwoven branches, and he experienced a surge of elation.

  The clearing stank like a cattle-pen, but even ranker and gamier. He recognized it as an animal midden, a dunghill to which an animal returns habitually to defecate. From the character of the faeces, composed of digested twigs and bark, and from the fact that these had been churned and scattered, Craig knew immediately that it was a midden of the black rhinoceros, one of Africa’s rarest and most endangered species.

  Unlike its cousin the white rhinoceros, who is a grazer on grassland and a lethargic and placid animal, the black rhinoceros is a browser on the lower branches of the thick bush which it frequents. By nature it is a cantankerous, inquisitive, stupid and nervously irritable animal. It will charge anything that annoys it, including men, horses, lorries and even locomotives.

  Before the war, one notorious beast had lived on the escarpment of the Zambezi valley where both road and railway began the plunge down towards the Victoria Falls. It had piled up a score of eighteen lorries and buses, catching them on a steep section of road where they were reduced to a walking pace, and taking them head-on so that its horn crunched through the radiator in a burst of steam. Then, perfectly satisfied, it would trot back into the thick bush with squeals of triumph.

  Puffed up with success, it finally over-reached itself when it took on the Victoria Falls express, lumbering down the tracks like a medieval knight in the jousting lists. The locomotive was doing twenty miles per hour and the rhinoceros weighed two tons and was making about the same speed in the opposite direction, so the meeting was monumental. The express came to a grinding halt with wheels spinning helplessly, but the rhinoceros had reached the end of his career as a wrecker of radiators.

  The latest deposit of dung on the midden had been within the preceding twelve hours, Craig estimated with delight, and the spoor indicated a family group of bull and cow with calf at heel. Smiling, Craig recalled the old Matabele myth which accounted for the rhino’s habit of scattering its dung, and for its fear of the porcupine – the only animal in all the bush from which it would fly in snorting panic.

  The Matabele related that once upon a time the rhino had borrowed a quill from the porcupine to sew up a tear caused by a thorn in his thick hide. The rhino promised to return the quill at their next meeting. After repairing the rent with bark twine, the rhino placed the quill between his lips while he admired his handiwork, and inadvertently swallowed it. Now he is still searching for the quill, and assiduously avoiding the porcupine’s recriminations.

  The total world-wide population of the black rhinoceros probably did not exceed a few thousand individuals, and to have them still surviving here delighted Craig and made his tentative plans for the area much more viable.

  Still grinning, he followed the freshest tracks away from the midden, hoping for a sighting, and had gone only half a mile when just beyond the wall of grey impenetrable bush that flanked the narrow trail, there was a sudden hissing, churring
outcry of alarm calls and a cloud of brown ox-peckers rose above the scrub. These noisy birds lived in a symbiotic relationship with the larger African game animals, feeding exclusively on the ticks and bloodsucking flies that infested them, and in return acting as wary sentinels to warn of danger.

  Swiftly following the alarm, there was a deafening chuffing and snorting like that of a steam engine: with a crash, the bush parted and Craig got his longed-for sighting as an enormous grey beast burst out onto the path not thirty paces ahead of him and, still uttering blasts of affronted indignation, peered short-sightedly over its long polished double horns for something to charge.

  Aware that the beast’s weak eyes could not distinguish a motionless man at more than fifteen paces, and that the light breeze was blowing directly into his face, Craig stood frozen but poised to hurl himself to one side if the charge came his way. The rhino was switching his grey bulk from side to side with startling agility, the din of his ire unabated, and in Craig’s fevered imagination his horn seemed to grow longer and sharper every second. Stealthily he reached for the clasp-knife in his pocket. The beast sensed the movement and trotted a half dozen paces closer, so that Craig was on the periphery of his effective vision and in serious danger at last.

  Using a short underhanded flick, he tossed the knife high over the beast’s head into the ebony thicket behind it, and there was a loud clatter as it struck a branch.

  Instantly the rhino spun around and launched its huge grey body in a full and furious charge at the sound. The bush opened as though before a centurion tank, and the clattering, crashing charge dwindled swiftly as the rhinoceros kept going up the side of the hill and over the crest in search of an adversary. Craig sat down heavily in the middle of the path, and doubled over with breathless laughter in which were echoes of mild hysteria.

  Within the next few hours, Craig had found three of the pans of stinking, stagnant water that these strange beasts prefer to the clean running water of the river, and he had decided where to site the hides from which his tourists could view them at close range. Of course, he would furnish salt-licks beside the waterholes to make them even more attractive to the beasts, and bring them in to be photographed and gawked at.