The double pannier on the back of the lead mule was the less onerous of the burdens that he had brought with him from the teeming reaches of civilization. He had brought also a load of guilt and remorse, the sorrow of a lost love, and the galling of duty left unperformed. But now, beneath the cliffs of Chaka’s Gate, he felt his burden lightening, and his shoulders gathering strength.
Something indefinable seemed to reach out to him from across the Bubezi River, a feeling of destiny running its appointed course, or more a sense of home-coming. Yes, he thought, with sudden joy, I am coming home at last.
Abruptly Mark was in a hurry. He pulled up Trojan’s reluctant head, with water still pouring from his loose rubbery lips, and kicked him forward into the swirling green eddy of the river, slipping from the saddle to swim beside him when he lost his footing.
As the big soup-plate hooves touched bottom, he threw his leg back across the saddle and rode up the far bank, his breeches clinging to his thighs and his sodden shirt streaming water.
Suddenly, for the first time in a week, and for no good reason, he laughed, a light unstrained burst of laughter that hung about him like a shimmering halo long afterwards.
The sound was so low, and the hooves of Trojan the grey mule were plugging into the soft earth along the river with a rhythmic chuffing sound, so that Mark was not sure of what he had heard.
He reined Trojan to a stop and listened. The silence was so complete that it seemed to hiss like static, and when a wood dove gave its melodious and melancholy whistle a mile along the river, it seemed close enough to touch.
Mark shook his head, and flicked the reins. At the first hoof fall, the sound came again – and this time there was no mistaking it. The hair down the nape of Mark’s neck prickled, and he straightened quickly out of his comfortable saddle slouch. He had heard that sound only once before, but in circumstances that made certain he would never forget it.
It was close, very close, coming from the patch of thick green riverine bush between him and the river, a tangled thicket of wild loquat and hanging lianas, typical cover for the animal that had called.
It was a weird unearthly sound, a fluid sound, almost like liquor poured from the neck of a stone jug – and only one who had heard it before would recognize the distress and warning call of a fully grown leopard.
Mark swung the mule away, and set him lumbering up the rising ground until he reached the spreading shade of a leadwood, where he tethered him and loosened his girth. Then he slipped the Mannlicher out of its scabbard, and quickly checked the loaded magazine; the fat brass cartridges with their copper-jacketed noses were still bright and slick with wax, and he snapped the bolt closed.
He carried the rifle casually in his left hand, for he had no intention at all of using it. Instead he was aware of a pleasurable glow of excitement and anticipation. In the two months of hard riding and walking since his return to Chaka’s Gate, this was the first chance he had been given of sighting a leopard.
There were many leopard along the Bubezi, he had seen their sign almost daily, and heard them sawing and coughing in the night. Always the leopard and the kudu are the last to give way before man and his civilization. Their superior cunning and natural stealth protect them long after the other species have succumbed.
Now he had a chance at a sighting. The patch of riverine bush, though dense, was small, and he longed for a sighting, even if just a flash of yellow in deep shade, something concrete, a firm entry in his logbook, another species to add to the growing list of his head count. He circled out cautiously, his eyes flickering from the thick green wall of bush to soft ground at his feet, checking for spoor as well as for actual sight of the yellow cat.
Just above the steep river bank he stopped abruptly, and stared down before going on to one knee to touch the earth.
They weren’t leopard tracks, but others he had grown to know and recognize. There was no special distinguishing characteristic, no missing toes, no scarring or deformity, but Mark’s trained eye recognized the shape and size, the slight splaying toe-in way the man walked, the length of his stride and a toe-heavy impression, that of a quick alert tread. The distress call of the animal in the thicket made sense now. ‘Pungushe,’ said Mark quietly. ‘The jackal at work again.’ The tracks were doubled, entering the thicket and returning. The inward tracks seemed deeper, less extended, as though the man carried a burden, but the outward tracks were lighter, the man walked freely.
Slowly, Mark edged in towards the thicket, following the man’s prints. Pausing for long minutes to examine the undergrowth carefully every few paces, or squatting down to give himself better vision along the ground under the hanging lianas and branches.
Now that he knew what he was going to find, the pleasurable glow of excitement had given way to the chill of anger and the cold knowledge of mortal danger.
Something white caught his eye in the gloomy depths of the thicket. He stared at it moments before he saw the white, bleeding pith of a tree trunk, where it had been ripped by the claws of an anguished beast, long raking marks deep through the dark woody bark. His anger slid in his belly like an uncoiling serpent.
He moved sideways and slowly forward, the rifle held ready now, low across his hips, three paces before he stopped again. On the edge of the thicket there was an area of flattened grass and scrub; the soft black leaf-mould earth had been churned and disturbed, something heavy had been dragged back and forth, and there was a fleck of wet red lit by a single beam of falling sunlight that might have been the petal of a wild flower — or a drop of blood.
He heard another sound then, the clink of metal on metal, link on link, steel chain moved stealthily in the dark depths of the thicket and it sighted him. He knew where the animal was lying now, and he moved out sideways, crabbing step after step, slipping the safety-catch of the rifle, and holding it at high port across his chest.
White again, unnatural white, a round blob of it against dark foliage and he froze staring at it. Long seconds passed before he realized that it was the raw wood of a cut log, a short fork-shaped log as thick as a young girl’s waist, so freshly cut that the gum was still bleeding from it in sticky wine-coloured drops. He saw also the twist of stolen fencing wire that held the chain to the log. The log was the anchor, a sliding drag weight which would hold the trapped animal without giving it a solid pull against which to pit itself and tear itself free.
The chain clinked again.
The leopard was within twenty paces of him. He knew exactly where it was but he could not see it, and as he stared, his mind was racing, remembering everything he had heard about the animal, the old man’s stories.
‘You won’t see him until he comes, and even then he will only be a yellow flash of light, like a sunbeam. He won’t warn you with a grunt, not like a lion. He comes absolutely silently, and he won’t chew your arm or grab you in the shoulder. He’ll go for your head. He knows all about two-legged animals, he feeds mostly on baboon, so he knows where your head is. He’ll take the top off your skull quicker than you open your breakfast egg, and for good measure his back legs will be busy on your belly. You’ve seen a cat lie on his back and hook with his back legs when you scratch his belly. He’ll cat you the same way, but he’ll strip your guts out of you just like a chicken, and he’ll do it so quickly that if there are four of you in the hunting-party he’ll kill three of them before the fourth man gets his gun to his shoulder.’
Mark stood absolutely still and waited. He could not see the animal, but he could feel it, could feel its eyes, they stung his skin like the feet of poisonous crawling insects, and he remembered the shiny marble white scar tissue that Sean Courtney had shown him once in one of those mellow moments after the fourth whisky, pulling up his shirt and flexing muscle, so the cicatrice bulged with the gloss of satin.
‘Leopard,’ he had said. ‘Devil cat – the worst bastard in all the bush.’
He felt his feet pulling back slowly, and the dead leaves rustled. He could walk away and
leave it, come back when the vultures told him the animal was dead or too weak to be a danger. Then he imagined the terror and anguish of the animal — and suddenly it was not the animal, but his animal, his charge, his sacred charge, and he stepped forward.
The chain clinked again and the leopard came. It came with a terrible silent rush, and in the blurring streaming charge, only the eyes blazed, they blazed yellow with hatred and fear and agony. The chain flailed out behind it, spinning and snapping, and as Mark brought the rifle up the last six inches to his shoulder he saw the trap hanging on its fore-leg like a sinister grey metallic crab. The heavy steel trap slowed the charge just that fraction.
Time seemed to pass with a dreamlike slowness, each microsecond falling heavily as drops of thick oil, so that he saw that the leopard’s foreleg above the grip of the steel jaws was eaten through. He felt his stomach turn over as he realized that the frenzied animal had gnawed through its own bone and flesh and sinew in its desperate try for freedom. The leg was held by only a thread of bloody ragged skin, and that last thread snapped at the heavy jerk of the steel trap.
The leopard was free, mad with pain and fear, as it launched itself at Mark’s head.
The muzzle of the Mannlicher almost touched the broad flat forehead; he was so close that he could see the long white whiskers bristling from the puckered snarling lips like grass stalks stiff with the morning frost, and the yellow fangs behind wet black lips, the furry pink tongue arched across the open throat, and the eyes. The terrible hating yellow eyes.
Mark fired and the bullet clubbed the skull open, the yellow eyes blinked tightly at the jarring shock, and the head was wrenched backwards, twisted on the snakelike neck, while the lithe body lost its grace and lightness and turned heavy and shapeless in mid-air.
It fell like a sack at Mark’s feet, and tiny droplets of brilliant red blood spattered the scuffed toe cap of Mark’s boot, and glittered there like cut rubies.
Mark touched the open staring eye, but the fierce yellow light was fading and there was no blinking reflex of the eyelids with their long beautiful fans of dark lashes. The leopard was dead, and Mark sat down heavily in the leaf-mould beside the carcass and groped for his cigarette tin. The hand that held the match shook so violently that the flame fluttered like a moth’s wing. He shook out the flame, threw the match away, and then stroked his open palm across the soft thick fur, the amber gold dabbed with the distinctive rosettes of black, as though touched by the five bunched fingertips of an angel’s right hand.
‘Pungushe — you bastard!’ he whispered again. The animal had died for that golden dappled hide, for the few silver shillings that it would bring when sold in the village market, at a country railway halt, or on the side of a dusty road. A death in unspeakable agony and terror to make a rug, or a coat for a lady. Mark stroked the glowing fur again, and felt his own fear give way to anger for the man who had saved his life once, and who he had hunted these two months.
He stood up and went to the steel trap, lying at the end of its chain. The severed leg was still held between the relentless jaws, and Mark squatted to examine it. The trap was the type they call a ‘Slag Yster’, a killing iron, and the spikes of the jaws had been carefully filed to bite but not sever. It weighed at least thirty pounds and it would take a thick branch to lever those jaws open, and reset the mechanism.
The steel was dark and sooty where the poacher had scorched it with a torch of dry grass to kill the man-smell on the metal. Lying at the edge of the thicket was the half decomposed carcass of a baboon, the odoriferous bait which had been irresistible to the big yellow cat.
Mark reloaded the Mannlicher, and his anger was so intense that he would have shot down the man who had done this thing, if he had come across him in that moment, despite the fact that he owed him his life.
He walked back up the slope and unsaddled Trojan, hobbled him with the leather straps, and hung his saddle-bags in the branches of the leadwood out of the way of a questing hyena or badger.
Then he went back and picked up the poacher’s spoor at the edge of the thicket. He knew it would be useless to follow on the mule. The poacher would be alerted at a mile range by that big clumsy animal, but he had a chance on foot.
The spoor was fresh and the poacher’s camp would be close, he would not stray far from such a valuable asset as his steel trap. Mark had a very good chance.
He would be cagey, of course, sly and cunning, for he would know that it was now forbidden to hunt in the valley. Mark had visited each village, spoken with each tribal headman and drank his beer while he explained to him the new order.
The poacher knew that he was outside the law. Mark had followed his spoor so often, and the precautions Pungushe took, the elaborate ruses to throw any pursuit, made it clear that he was in guilt, but now Mark had a good chance at him.
The spoor crossed the river half a mile downstream, and then started to zig-zag back and forth among the scrub and forest and brush as the poacher visited his trap line.
The leopard trap was clearly the centre of his line, but he was noosing for small game, using light galvanized baling wire, probably purchased for a few shillings at a country general dealer’s store. He was also using copper telegraph wire, probably obtained by blatantly scaling a telegraph pole in some lonely place.
He was trapping for jackal, baiting with offal, and he was trapping indiscriminately at salt licks and mud wallows, any place that might attract small game.
Following the trap line diligently, Mark sprang every wire noose and ripped it out. He closed rapidly with his quarry, but it was three hours before he found the poacher’s camp.
It was under the swollen, bloated reptilian grey branches of a baobab tree. The tree was old and rotten, its huge trunk cleaved by a deep hollow, a cave that the poacher had used to shield his small smokeless cooking fire. The fire was dead now, carefully smothered with sand – but the smell of dead smoke led Mark to it. The ashes were cold.
Tucked away in the deepest recess of the hollow tree were two bundles tied with plaited bark string. One bundle held a greasy grey blanket, a carved wooden head-rest, a small black three-legged pot and a pouch of impala skin which contained two or three pounds of yellow maize and strips of dried meat. The poacher travelled light, and moved fast.
The other bundle contained fifteen jackal skins, sundried and crackling stiff, beautiful furs of silver and black and red, and two leopard skins, a big dark golden tom and a smaller half-grown female.
Mark relit the fire and threw the blanket, the head-rest and the bag upon it, deriving a thin vindictive satisfaction as they smouldered and blackened. He smashed the iron pot with a rock and then he slung the roll of dried skins on his shoulder and started back.
It was almost dark when he got back to the leopard thicket beside the river.
He dropped the heavy bundle of dried skin, which by this time felt like a hundredweight sack of coal on his shoulder, and he stared uncomprehendingly at the leopard’s carcass.
It swarmed with big green metallic shiny flies. They were laying their eggs on the dead flesh, like bunches of white boiled rice, but what astonished Mark was that the carcass was naked. It had been expertly stripped of its golden fur, and now it was a raw pink, laced with yellow fat and the white tracery of muscle ligaments. The head was bare, the mask stripped away so that dull startled eyes started out of the skull like marbles, and tufts of black hair sprang from the open ear holes, the fangs were exposed in a fixed yellow grin.
Quickly Mark ran to the anchor log. The chain and trap were gone.
It was fully a minute before the next logical step occurred to him. He ran up the slope to the leadwood tree. Trojan was gone. The hobbling straps had been cut with a razor-sharp blade and laid out neatly under the leadwood tree.
Trojan, unexpectedly relieved of his hobble, had reacted gratefully in a fully predictable manner. He had set off, arrow-straight through the forest, back home to his rude stable, his nightly ration of grain, and the co
ngenial company of his old buddy Spartan.
It was a fifteen-mile walk back to main camp, and it would be dark in fifteen minutes.
The saddle-bags had been taken down from the tree, and the contents meticulously picked over. What Pungushe had rejected, he had folded and stacked neatly on a flat rock. He clearly did not think much of William Shakespeare, his tragedies had been put aside, and he had left Mark his chamois hunting-jacket, a last minute gift from Ruth Courtney.
He had taken the gentleman’s sleeping bag, which had once belonged to General Courtney, with its built-in ground sheet and genuine eider filling, twenty-five guineas’ worth from Harrods of London, good exchange for a threadbare greasy blanket and wooden head-rest.
He had taken the cooking pot, pannikin and cutlery, the salt and flour and bully beef, but had left a single tin of beans.
He had taken the clean shirt and khaki trousers, but had left the spare woollen socks and rubber-soled boots. Perhaps it was chance that the boots pointed down-stream to Mark’s camp – or was it mockery? A can of beans and boots to carry Mark home.
Through the red mists of his humiliation and mounting rage, Mark glimpsed suddenly a whimsical sense of humour at work. The man had been watching him. Mark was sure of that now, his selection from the saddle-bags echoed too faithfully what Mark had burned of his.
In his imagination, Mark heard the deep bell of Zulu laughter, and he snatched up the Mannlicher and picked up Pungushe’s outgoing spoor.
He followed it for only a hundred yards and then stopped. Pungushe was heavily laden with trap, wet skin, and booty, but he had hit the Zulu’s stride ‘Minza umhlabathi ,’ and he was eating ground to the north at a pace which Mark knew was pointless to try and imitate.
He walked back to the leadwood tree and sank down beside the trunk. His rage turned to acute discomfort at the thought of the fifteen-mile walk home, carrying the saddle-bags, and the roll of dried skins, for honour dictated he did not abandon his meagre spoils.