The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 7

"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." IThe polite term is political dissidents."

"They are Matabele bandits," Jock said heavily, land they'll either shoot your a.r.s.e 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." t was marvelous 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 rids. "Of course, it will never be cattle country," he told pou 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 Ac 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 st.u.r.dy 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 nick half a dozen times, and only found it after laboriotaly casting ahead on foot.

He hit one antlbear 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 limmering 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-homed 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 pug marks 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 grape like 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 likea 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 gra.s.sland and a lethargic and placid animal, the black AA

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 headon 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 likea 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.-mi ling Craig recalled the old Matabele myth whisk 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 a.s.siduously avoiding the porcupine's recriminations.

The total world-wide population of the black rhinoceros 4 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-p.e.c.k.e.rs rose above the scrub. These noisy birds lived in a symbiotic relations.h.i.+p 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 shortsightedly 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, cras.h.i.+ng 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 salt4icks beside the waterholes to make them even more attractive to the beasts, and bring them in to be photographed and gawked at.

Sitting on a log, beside one of the waterholes, he reviewed the factors that favoured his plans. It was under an hour's flight from here to the Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, that already attracted thousands of tourists each month. It would be only a short detour to his camp here, so that added little to the tourists" original airfare. He had. an animal that very few other reserves or camps could offer, together with most of the other varieties of gawe, concentrated in a relatively small area. He had undeveloped reservations on both boundaries to ensure a permanent source of interesting animal life.

What he had in mind was a champagne and caviar type of camp, on the lines of those private estates bordering the Kruger National Park in South Africa. He would put up small camps, sufficiently isolated from each other so as to give the occupants the illusion of having the wilderness to themselves. He would provide charismatic and knowledgeable guides to take his tourists by Land, Rover and on foot close to rare and potentially dangerous animals and make an adventure of it, and luxurious surroundings when they returned to camp in the evening air-conditioning and fine food and wines, pretty young hostesses to pamper them, wildlife movies and lectures by experts to instruct and entertain them. And he would charge them outrageously for it all, aiming at the very upper level of the tourist trade.

It was after sunset when Craig limped back into his rudimentary camp under the wild figs, his face and arms reddened by the sun, tsetse-fly bites itching and swollen on the back of his neck, and the stump of his leg tender and aching from the unaccustomed exertions. He was too tired to eat. He unstrapped his leg, drank a single whisky from the plastic mug, rolled into his blanket and was almost immediately asleep. He woke for a few minutes during the night, and while he urinated he listened with sleepy pleasure to die distant roaring of a pride of hunting lions, and then returned to his blanket.

He was awakened by the whistling cries of the green pigeons feasting on the wild figs above his head, and found he was ravenously hungry and happy as he could not remember being for years.

After he had eaten, he hopped down to the water's edge, carrying a rolled copy of the Farmers" Weekly magazine, the African farmers" bible. Then, seated in the shallows with the coa.r.s.e-sugar sand pleasantly rough under his naked backside and the cool green waters soothing his still aching stump, he studied the prices of stock offered for sale in the magazine and did mental arithmetic with the figures.

His ambitious plans were swiftly moderated when he realized what it would cost to restock King's Lynn and Queen's Lynn with thoroughbred blood stock The consortium had sold the original stud for a million and a half, and prices had gone up since then.

He would have to begin with good bulls, and grade cows slowly build up his blood lines. Still, that would cost plenty, the ranches would have to be re-equipped, and the development of the tourist camp here on the Chizarira river was going to cost another bundle. Then he would have to move the squatter families and their goats off his grazing the only way to do that was to offer them financial compensation. Old grandfather Bawu had always told him, "Work out what you think it will cost, then double it. That way you will come close." Craig threw the magazine up onto the bank, and lay back with only his head above water while he did his sums.

On the credit side, he had lived frugally aboard the yacht, unlikea lot of other suddenly successful authors.

The book had been on the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic for almost a year, main choice of three major book-clubs, translations into a number of foreign languages, including Hindi, Reader's Digest condensed books, the T! series, paperback contracts even though at the end, the taxman had got in amongst his earnings.

Then again he had been lucky with what was left to him after these depredations. He had speculated in gold and silver, had made three good coups on the stock exchange, and finally h! transferred most of his winnings into Swiss francs at the right time. Added to that, he could sell the yacht. A-month earlier he had been offered a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for Bawu, but he would hate to part with it.

Apart from that, he could try hitting Ashe Levy for a substantial advance on the undelivered novel and hock his soul in the process.

He reached the bottom line of his calculations and decided that if he pulled out all the stops, and used up all his lines of credit, he might be able to raise a million and a half, which would leave him short of at least as much again.

"Henry Pickering, my very favourite banker, are you ever in for a surprise!" He grinned recklessly as he thought of how he was planning to break the first and cardinal rule of the prudent investor and put it all in one basket. "Dear Henry, you have been selected by our computer to be the lucky lender of one and a half big Ms to a one-legged dried-up sometime scribbler." That was the best he could come up with at the moment, and it wasn't really worth worrying seriously until he had an answer from Jock Daniels" consortium. He switched to more mundane considerations.

He ducked down and sucked a mouthful of the sweet clear water. The Chizarira was a lesser tributary of the great Zambezi, so he was drinking Zambezi waters again, as he had told Henry Pickering he must. "Chizarira" was a h.e.l.l of a mouthful for a tourist to p.r.o.nounce, let alone rem em her. He needed a name under which to sell his little African paradise.