‘Did I not tell you that I had led my impi over these hills, chasing the same hairless baboon upon whom you now shower gifts?’
‘You did not tell me,’ Ralph replied, and Bazo moved on hastily from that subject. He was not proud of his campaign against Wankie, the only one during all the years that he had been induna of the ‘Moles’ which had not ended in complete success. He still recalled the old king’s recriminations – would that he could ever forget them.
‘Henshaw, if you had spoken to me, we would not have had to waste our time and demean ourselves by parleying with this son of thirty fathers, this unsavoury jackal-casting, this—’
Ralph cut short Bazo’s opinion of their host, by standing up and seizing Bazo’s shoulders. ‘Bazo, can you lead us there? Is that what you mean? Can you take us to the stones that burn?’
Bazo inclined his head, in assent. ‘And it will not cost you a wagon, either,’ he replied.
They rode into a red and smoky dawn through the open glades in the forest. Ahead of them the buffalo herds opened to give them passage and closed behind them as they passed. The huge black beasts held their wet muzzles high, the massive slaty bosses of horn giving them a ponderous dignity, and they stared in stolid astonishment as the horsemen passed within a few hundred paces, and then returned unalarmed to graze. The riders barely glanced at them, their attention was fastened instead on Bazo’s broad bullet-scarred back as he led them at an easy trot towards the low line of flat-topped hills that rose out of the forest ahead.
On the first slope they tethered the horses, and climbed, while above them the furry little brown klipspringer, swift as chamois, flew sure-footed up the cliffs and from the summit an old dog baboon barked his challenge down at them. Though they ran at the slope, they could not keep up with Bazo, and he was waiting for them halfway up on a ledge above which the cliff rose sheer to the summit. He made no dramatic announcement, but merely pointed with his chin. Ralph and Harry stared, unable to speak, their chests heaving and their shirts plastered to their backs with sweat from the climb.
There was a horizontal seam, twenty foot thick, sandwiched in the cliff face. It ran along the cliff as far as they could see in each direction, black as the darkest night and yet glittering with a strange greenish iridescence in the slanted rays of the early sun.
‘This was the only thing we lacked in this land,’ Ralph said quietly. ‘The stones that burn, black gold – now we have it all.’
Harry Mellow went forward and laid his hand upon it reverently, as though he were a worshipper touching the relic of a saint in some holy place.
‘I have never seen coal of this quality in a seam so deep, not even in the Kentucky hills.’
Suddenly he snatched his hat off his head and with a wild Indian whoop threw it far out down the slope.
‘We are rich!’ he shouted. ‘Rich! Rich! Rich!’
‘Better than working for Mr Rhodes?’ Ralph asked, and Harry grabbed his shoulders and the two of them spun together in a yelling, stomping dance of jubilation on the narrow ledge, while Bazo leaned against the seam of black coal and watched them unsmilingly.
It took them two weeks to survey and peg their claims, covering all the ground beneath which the seams of coal might be buried. Harry shot the lines with his theodolite, and Bazo and Ralph worked behind him with a gang of axemen driving in the pegs and marking the corners with cairns of loose stones.
While they worked, they discovered a dozen other places in the hills where the deep rich seams of glittering coal were exposed at the surface.
‘Coal for a thousand years,’ Harry predicted. ‘Coal for the railways and the blast furnaces, coal to power a new nation.’
On the fifteenth day the two of them traipsed back to camp at the head of their bone-weary gang of Matabele. Victoria, deprived of her new husband for two weeks, was as palely forlorn as a young widow in mourning, but by breakfast the following day she had regained her fine high colour and the sparkle in her eyes as she hovered over Harry, replenishing his coffee cup and heaping his plate with slices of smoked warthog and piles of rich yellow scrambled ostrich egg.
Sitting at the head of the breakfast table set under the giant msasa trees, Ralph called to Cathy:
‘Break out a bottle of champagne, Katie my sweeting, we have something to celebrate,’ and he saluted them with a brimming mug. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a toast to the gold of the Harkness Mine and the coal of the Wankie field, and to the riches of both!’
They laughed and clinked their mugs and drank the toast.
‘Let’s stay here for ever,’ said Vicky. ‘I’m so happy. I don’t want it to end.’
‘We’ll stay a little longer,’ Ralph agreed, with his arm about Cathy’s waist. ‘I told Doctor Jim we were coming up here to hunt buffalo. If we don’t bring a few wagon-loads of hides back with us, the little doctor is going to start wondering.’
The evening wind came softly out of the east. Ralph knew that at this season it would hold steadily during the night, and increase with the warmth of the sun.
He sent out two teams of his Matabele, each team armed with a package of Swan Vestas and leading a span of trek oxen. They moved out eastwards and by dawn they had reached the bank of the Gwaai river. Here they felled two big dried-out thorn trees and hooked the trek chains onto the trunks.
When they put fire into the branches, the dried wood burned like a torch and the oxen panicked. The drivers ran beside each span, keeping them galloping in opposite directions, heading across the wind, dragging the blazing trees behind them and spreading a trail of sparks and flaring twigs through the tall dry grass. Within an hour, there was a forest fire burning across a front of many miles, with the wind behind it roaring down towards the long open vlei where Ralph’s wagons were outspanned. The smoke billowed heaven-high, a vast dun pall.
Ralph had roused the camp before first light, and he supervised the back-burn while the dew on the vlei subdued the flames and made them manageable. The Matabele put fire into the grass on the windward side of the open vlei and let it burn to the forest line on the far side. Here they beat it out before it could take hold of the trees.
Isazi rolled his wagons out onto the blackened still-hot earth, and formed them into a square with his precious oxen penned in the centre. Then, for the first time, they had a chance to pause and look eastward. The dark smoke cloud of the forest fire blotted out the dawn, and their island of safety seemed suddenly very small in the path of that terrible conflagration. Even the mood of the usually cheerful Matabele was subdued, and they kept glancing uneasily at the boiling smoke line as they honed their skinning knives.
‘We will be covered with soot,’ Cathy complained. ‘Everything will be filthy.’
‘And a little singed, like as not,’ Ralph laughed, as he and Bazo checked the spare horses and slipped the rifles into their scabbards.
Then he came to Cathy and with an arm about her shoulders, told her, ‘You and Vicky are to stay in the wagons. Don’t leave them, whatever happens. If you get a little warm, splash water on yourselves, but don’t leave the wagons.’
Then he sniffed the wind, and caught the first whiff of smoke. He winked at Harry, who had Vicky in his arms in a lingering farewell.
‘I’ll bet my share of the Wankie field against yours.’
‘None of your crazy bets, Ralph Ballantyne,’ Vicky cut in quickly. ‘Harry has a wife to support now!’
‘A guinea, then!’ Ralph moderated the wager.
‘Done!’ agreed Harry.
They shook hands on it and swung up into the saddles.
Bazo led up Ralph’s spare horse, with a rifle in the scabbard and a bandolier of bright brass cartridges looped to the pommel.
‘Keep close, Bazo,’ Ralph told him, and looked across at Harry. He had his own Matabele outrider and spare horse close behind him.
‘Ready?’ Ralph asked, and Harry nodded, and they trotted out of the laager.
The acrid stink of smoke was strong on
the wind now, and the horses flared their nostrils nervously and stepped like cats over the hot ash of the back-burn.
‘Just look at them!’ Harry’s voice was awed.
The herds of buffalo had begun moving down-wind ahead of the bush-fire. Gradually one herd had merged with another, a hundred becoming five hundred, then a thousand. Then the thousand began multiplying, the westward movement becoming faster, black bodies packing closer, the earth beginning to tremble faintly under the iron-black hooves. Now every few minutes one of the herd bulls, an animal so black and solid that he seemed to be hewn from rock, would stop and turn back, stemming the moving tide of breeding cows. He would lift his mighty horned head with its crenellated bosses and snuffle the east wind into his wet nostrils, blink at the sting of the smoke, turn again and break into a heavy swinging trot; and his cows would be infected by his agitation, while the red calves bawled in bewilderment and pressed to the flanks of their dams.
Now the herds were being compressed against each other. The huge beasts, the largest of them a ton and a half of flesh and bone, were moving shoulder to shoulder and muzzle to tail across a front almost a mile wide. The leaders came cascading out of the forest onto the edge of the vlei, while the serried ranks reached back into the looming dust and were hidden by the twisted silver trunks of the msasa trees.
Ralph knotted the scarf up over his nose and mouth, and pulled his hat low over his eyes.
‘Harry, my lad, every one that falls this side of the wagons,’ he made a wide gesture, ‘is mine. Everything that side is yours.’
‘And a guinea on the bag,’ Harry agreed. He levered a cartridge into the breech of his Lee Enfield rifle and with one of his wild Indian whoops clapped his heels into his horse’s flanks and drove straight at the nearest beasts.
Ralph let him go, and held his own horse down to a trot. Gently he angled in towards the rolling herds, careful not to spook them prematurely, letting them concentrate on the flames behind rather than the hunter ahead. This way he got in really close, and picked out a good bull in the front rank. He leaned into the rifle, and aimed into the barrel of the thick neck, just where the bald scabby hide creased at the front of the shoulder.
The shot was almost drowned by the din of pounding hooves and bawling calves, but the bull dropped his nose to the earth, and somersaulted over it, sliding on his back, kicking convulsively in his death agony, and bellowing as mournfully as a foghorn in a winter gale. The herds plunged into full gallop.
Steering his mount with his heels and toes, leaving both hands free to load and aim and fire, Ralph pressed in against the wall of dark bodies in gargantuan flight. Sometimes he was so close that the rifle muzzle was merely inches from a monstrous neck or shoulder, and the muzzle flash was quick and bright as a lance as it buried itself in the thick black hide. At each crash of the rifle, another beast went down, for at that range an experienced huntsman could make a butchery of it. He fired until the hammer fell on an empty chamber, and then crammed fresh rounds into the magazine, and fired again as fast as he could pump the loading handle, not lifting the butt from his shoulder nor his eye from the sights.
The barrel was smoking hot, each shot now recoiling viciously into his shoulder, so that his teeth cracked together in his jaws and the forefinger of his right hand was bleeding, a flap of loose skin torn from the second joint by the trigger guard, so he was seconds slow on the reload, and then he was firing again. Deafened by gunfire, each shot was a muted popping in his abused eardrums, and the uproar of the galloping, bawling, bellowing herd was dreamlike and far away. His vision was dulled by the head-high bank of dust, and, as they tore once more into the forest, by the sombre shadows of the tree-tops that met overhead. He was bleeding from chin and lip and forehead where stones as big as acorns had been thrown into his face by the flying hooves ahead of him. Still he loaded and fired and reloaded. He had long ago lost all count of the bag and the endless herd still pressed close on both flanks of his floundering horse.
Suddenly one bandolier was empty, a hundred rounds fired, he realized with surprise, and Ralph pulled a fresh one from his saddlebag, instinctively ducking under a long branch and straightening up to find an enormous bull galloping half a length ahead of him.
It seemed to Ralph’s distorted vision to be the monarch of all buffalo, with a spread of horns wider than a man could reach, heavy as one of the granite boulders of the Matopos, so old that the points were worn blunt and rounded. His rump and back were grey and bald with age, the bush ticks hanging in blue grapelike bunches in the deep folds of skin on each side of his huge swinging testicles.
Ralph’s horse, almost blown now, could not hold him and the bull was pulling away strongly, his huge quarters bunching and contracting, cloven hooves driving almost hock-deep into the soft sandy earth under the immense weight of his body. Ralph stood in the stirrups and aimed for the spine at the base of the bull’s long tufted tail as it lashed his own sides in the fury of his run.
At the instant that Ralph fired, a branch snatched at his shoulder and the shot flew wide, socking meatily into the round black haunch. The bull tripped and checked, catching himself before he went down, swinging abruptly aside with blood spurting down his hind legs. Ralph gathered his exhausted horse to follow him, but another thick grey tree-trunk sprang out of the dust clouds ahead and forced him to turn hard the other way to avoid it. Rough bark grazed his knee and the bull was lost in the ranks of racing animals and the billowing dust.
‘Let him go,’ Ralph shouted aloud. There was no chance that he could find a single animal again in this multitude. He cranked another cartridge into the scorching breech of his rifle, and shot a sleek red queen through the back of the skull, and an instant later knocked her half-grown calf down with a bullet through the shoulder.
The rifle was empty and he began to reload, concentrating all his attention on the task, until suddenly some instinct warned him and he glanced up.
The wounded bull had turned back to hunt him.
It came out of the gloom like a black avalanche, goring the laggards out of its way, to cut a path for itself through the racing black river of animals. Its nose was high, the muzzle glistening wetly, and long silver strings of mucus dangled from the flaring nostrils. It came quartering in and the dusty earth exploded in pale puffs under the savagely driving hooves.
‘Come boy!’ Ralph yelled desperately at his tired gelding, gathering him with knees and reins, turning him away from the bull’s charge and at the same time cramming a cartridge into the loading slot of the Winchester.
The bull closed in a crabbing rush, and Ralph swivelled the rifle and fired point-blank into the gigantic head, knowing there would be no time for another shot. The bull’s head flinched and a splinter of slaty grey horn tore from the huge round bosses, and then the bull steadied himself, moving with the grace of a gazelle on his huge front legs. His head dropped. Ralph could have reached out and touched the crest of shaggy hide between his shoulders, instead he jerked his near leg from the stirrup and lifted his knee as high as his chin, just as the bull hooked the massive horns at the gelding’s flank. At the place where Ralph’s knee had been a moment before, the blunt tip of a black horn crashed into the horse’s chest.
Ralph heard the ribs crackle and snap like dry sticks, and the air from the gelding’s lungs was driven out of his throat in a whistling scream. Horse and rider were lifted high. The gelding was still screaming at the agony of his collapsed chest as Ralph was thrown clear. The rifle spun from his hand and he landed on his hip and shoulder and rolled to his knees. His right leg was numbed by the shock, it pinned him for precious seconds.
The buffalo was braced over the fallen gelding, front legs splayed, armoured head low, blood dribbling and trickling down its massive muscled quarters, and now it hooked at the horse, catching him in the soft of his belly and splitting him open like a cod on a fishwife’s block. Soft, wet entrails, slippery as cooked spaghetti, were wrapped around the blunt point, and as the bull tossed
his head, he stripped them out of the gaping belly cavity. The horse kicked once more, and then was still.
Dragging his right leg, Ralph crawled towards the base of a wild teak.
‘Bazo!’ he screamed. ‘Bring the rifle! Bring the horse! Bazo!’
He could hear the shrill of panic and terror in his own voice, and the bull heard it also. It left the horse, and Ralph heard the splayed hooves thudding into the sandy earth, heard the snort of its breath and smelled the rank bovine reek of the animal. He howled again and dragged himself to his feet, hopping on his good leg. He knew he was not going to reach the mopani and he whirled to face the enraged bull.
It was so close that he could see the wet trail of tears from the corners of its pink-shot piggy little eyes running down the shaggy black cheeks, and the spongy tongue, splotched pink and grey, lolling from its jaws as it bellowed at him. The head went down to hook him and split him, as it had the horse, but at that instant another voice bellowed in Sindebele:
‘Hau! Thou uglier than death!’ The bull checked, and pivoted on his stubby forelegs. ‘Come, thou witches’ curse!’
Bazo was taking the bull off him, he galloped in out of the rolling dust, dragging the spare horse on its lead rein, and he angled in now across the bull’s front, taunting it with his voice and flapping his monkey-skin cloak in its face. The bull accepted the lure of the cloak, put his nose down, and went after it. The horse that Bazo rode was still fresh, and it skittered out of the arc of the great swinging head, and the bull’s polished horn glinted at the top of its lunge.
‘Henshaw,’ Bazo yelled, ‘take the spare horse.’ And he dropped the lead rein, sending the free horse down on Ralph, still at full gallop.
Ralph crouched in its path, and the grey mare saw him and swerved at the last moment, but Ralph leaped for the saddle, and got a hold on the pommel. For a dozen strides he hopped beside the mare, his feet skimming the ground as she carried him away. Then he gathered himself and swung his weight up across her back. His buttocks thumped onto the saddle, and he did not waste time groping for the stirrups. He yanked the spare rifle from the scabbard under his knee, and kicked the mare around after the great black bull.