The beast was intent on Bazo still, chasing him in a grotesque lumbering charge which covered the ground with uncanny speed. At that moment a low branch caught the half-naked Matabele induna a ringing crack across the shoulder and side of the head.
He was thrown sideways, the monkey-skin cloak flew away, flapping like an overfed black crow, and Bazo slid further until he was hanging upside down, his head almost brushing the ground between his mount’s slashing hooves.
Coming up on the bull’s blood-splattered quarters, Ralph fired into its back, probing for the spine in the mountain of black hide and bulging muscle. He fired with a mechanical action, cranking the loading handle, and the recoil dinned in upon his ears, so he could barely hear the heavy lead bullets slapping into the bull’s body with a sound like a housewife beating a carpet. One of his bullets found the pumping lungs, for there was a sudden torrent of frothy blood blown from both the bull’s nostrils, and the wild charge broke down into a short hampered trot.
Ralph came up alongside it, and it turned the great head and looked at him through eyes that swam with the tears of its death agony. Ralph reached across and almost touched the broad forehead under the beetling horns with the muzzle of the rifle. The bull flung his head back from the brain shot, and it dropped silently onto its knees. It never moved again.
Ralph galloped on and caught the bridle of Bazo’s running horse. He yanked it down to a halt.
‘Only a Matabele rides with his head in the stirrups and his feet in the saddle,’ he gasped, and pulled Bazo upright.
The dark skin was smeared from Bazo’s forehead by the rough bark of the branch, the raw flesh was pale pink and droplets of clear lymph welled up out of it like seed pearls.
‘Henshaw, my little Hawk,’ he replied thickly. ‘You screamed so loudly I thought you were losing your virginity – with a horn, from behind.’
Ralph spluttered with shaky laughter, almost hysterical with the relief from terror and mortal danger. Bazo shook his head to clear it, his eyes came back into focus, and his grin was wicked.
‘Go back to the women, Henshaw, for you cry like a maiden. Give me your gun and I will win your guinea for you.’
‘See if you can keep up,’ Ralph told him, and booted his horse into a run. The reaction from terror came upon him in a kind of atavistic madness, the wild soaring passion of the hunter, and he fell upon the galloping herds in a murderous frenzy.
The bushfire overtook them and put an end to the slaughter at last. Ralph and Bazo were almost caught between the enveloping arms of flame, but they broke through with the manes of their horses frizzled and stinking from the heat and Ralph’s shirt scorched in brown patches. Then from the sanctuary of the back-burn, they watched in awe as the fire swept by on either side. It was a gale of heat that whirled burning branches aloft, and crashed from tree to tree, leaping a gap a hundred feet wide with a deep whooshing roar and bursting the next tree asunder as though it had been hit by a lyddite shell from a howitzer.
The flames sucked the air away so that they gasped for breath, and the heat went deep into their lungs, so they coughed like hemp-smokers. It seared the exposed skin of their faces, seemed to dry the moisture from their eyeballs and dazzle their vision as though they were staring into the fierce orb of the sun itself.
Then the fire was gone, burning away into the west, and they were silent and shaken, awed by the grandeur of its passing and by their own insignificance in the face of such elemental power.
It was the following morning before the earth had cooled sufficiently for the skinners to go out to work. The carcasses of the buffalo were half-roasted, the hair burned away on the upper side, yet untouched on the side where they had lain against the earth. The skinners worked in a landscape like a hellish vision of Hieronymus Bosch, a desolate and blackened earth, grotesquely twisted bare trees, with the hideous shapes of the vultures crouched in the upper branches.
One team of skinners rolled the huge carcasses and made the shallow incisions around the neck, down the limbs and swollen bellies, then the next team hooked on the bullock teams and stripped off the skin in a single slab, while the third team scooped the coarse white rock salt over the wet hides and spread them in the sun.
By the second day, the air was thick with the reek of hundreds of rotting carcasses; and the chorus of cries and howls and croakings of the scavengers was a fitting accompaniment to the scene. Although the dun palls of smoke had cleared, the sky was dark once again with wings, the glossy sable pinions of the crows, the quick sharp stabbing wings of the little kites and the great majestic spread of the vultures.
Around each naked carcass, stripped of its hide and with the obscene pink bellies massively swollen with gases, the hyena whooped and chuckled and the little dog-like jackal darted in nervously to snatch up a titbit of offal. The vultures hopped and flapped and squabbled, pecking at each other with steely hooked beaks, forcing their way through the enlarged anus of the cadaver into the belly cavern.
The tall black and white marabou storks, solemn as undertakers, stalked in with their bright greedy eyes set in the naked face-mask. Their crops were naked of feathers also; pink and scalded-looking, they dangled down in front of the throat like the swollen genitalia of some repulsive albino. With their long and powerful bills, they would rip off a strip of flesh on which the greenish iridescent sheen of putrefaction was already blooming. Then they pointed the bill at the sky, gaping and straining with the effort of gobbling the morsel down on top of their already gorged crop.
The stink of rotting, scorched flesh and the smell of the scavengers wafted down on the little circle of wagons, and kept the women from sleep.
‘Ralph, can we leave here tomorrow?’ Cathy whispered.
‘Why?’ he asked sleepily. ‘You like it here, you said so.’
‘Not any more,’ she answered, and then after a while, ‘Ralph, if we go on burning and killing like this, how long will it last?’
He was so startled that he heaved himself on one elbow and peered at her in the candlelight.
‘What on earth are you talking about, girl?’
‘When the animals are all gone, this will no longer be the land I know and love.’
‘Gone?’ He shook his head in sympathy, as though for an idiot child. ‘Gone? By God, Katie, you saw the herds out there. They are countless, limitless. They are as thick as that all the way north to Khartoum. We could hunt like that every day, and not scratch the surface. No, Katie, they will never go.’
‘How many did you kill?’ she asked quietly.
‘Me? Two hundred and fourteen, thirty-two more than your esteemed brother-in-law.’ Ralph lay back comfortably, and pulled her head down onto his chest. ‘And that cost the cocky bastard a guinea of his ill-gotten loot.’
‘Between you, almost four hundred – in a single day’s hunting, Ralph.’ Her voice was so low that he barely heard it, but his own became rough with impatience.
‘Damn it, Katie, I need the skins. They are mine to take if I want them. That’s all there is to it. Now, go to sleep, silly girl.’
If anything, Ralph Ballantyne’s estimate of the buffalo herds was conservative. Probably never had any large mammal been so prolifically massed upon the earth’s face in all of its history. From the great Sud where the infant Nile weaves its way through fathomless swamps of floating papyrus, southwards over the wide savannahs of eastern and central Africa, down to the Zambezi and beyond to the golden glades and forests of Matabeleland, the vast black herds roamed.
They were very seldom hunted by the primitive tribes. They were too swift and fierce and powerful for their bows and spears. The digging of a pitfall large and deep enough to trap such an enormous beast was a labour that few of the tribesmen thought about seriously enough to interrupt their dancing and beer-drinking and cattle-raidings. The Arab travellers into the interior were not interested in such coarse game, rather they were intent on capturing and chaining the tender young black maidens and youths for the markets at Mal
indi and Zanzibar, or in hunting the wrinkled grey elephant for their curved ivory tusks. Very few European travellers, bearing their sophisticated weapons, had yet ventured into these remote lands, and even the huge prides of lion which followed the herds could not check their natural multiplication.
The grasslands were blackened by the huge bovine beasts. Some herds, twenty or thirty thousand strong, were so dense that the animals in the rear literally starved, for the pasturage was destroyed by the forerunners before they could reach it. Weakened by their own vast multitudes, they were ripe for the pestilence that came out of the north.
It came out of Egypt. It was the same plague that Moses’ God Jehovah had inflicted on the Pharaoh of Egypt. It was the Peste bovine, the rinderpest, a virus disease which attacks all the ruminants, but of those the most susceptible are the bovines: buffalo and domestic cattle. The stricken animals are blinded and choked by the discharge from the mucous membranes. Mucus pours in thick ropes from their nostrils and jaws. The discharge is highly infectious and contagious, and it persists on the pasturage over which the animal has passed long after its host has perished.
The course of the disease is rapid and irreversible. The mucous discharges are swiftly followed by profuse diarrhoea and dysentery, with the beasts straining to evacuate even after their bowels are purged of all but bloody slime. Then when at last the animal goes down and no longer has the strength to rise, the convulsions twist the horned head back and around, until the nose touches the flank. That is the position in which they die.
The rinderpest passed with the speed of a gale wind across the continent, so that in places where the concentrations of buffalo were heaviest, a herd of ten thousand great horned animals was wiped out between the dawn and the sunset of a single day. The carcasses lay so thickly on the denuded savannah that they were touching each other like shoals of poisoned sardine washed up on a beach. Over this carnage hung the characteristic fetid odour of the disease with which soon mingled the stench of putrefaction, for even the teeming flocks of vultures and packs of gluttonous hyena could not devour one thousandth part of this awful windfall.
This gale of disease and death blew southwards, swallowing up the blundering, bellowing herds – southwards until at last it reached the Zambezi. Even that wide stretch of swirling green water could not check the pestilence. It was carried to the far bank in the bulging crops of the vultures and carrion storks, and was scattered upon the pasture in the faeces that they voided in flight.
The dreadful gale began again, southwards it moved, ever southwards.
Isazi, the little Zulu driver, was always the first awake in the laager. It gave him satisfaction to be alert and aware when others half his age still slept.
He left his mat and he went to the watch-fire. It was nothing but a pile of fluffy white ash, but Isazi moved the blackened tips of the logs together, crushed a few dry leaves of the ilala palm between them and leaned close to blow upon it. The ash flew away, and a coal glowed sullenly before the palm leaf popped into a cheery little flame. The logs took and Isazi warmed his palms for a moment, and then left the circle of wagons and wandered down to where the oxen were penned.
Isazi loved his bullocks as some men love their children or their dogs. He knew each by name. He knew their separate natures, their strengths and their weaknesses. He knew which of them would try to turn out of the span when the going got tough or the footing soft, and he knew those with great hearts and special intelligence. Of course, he had his favourites, like the huge red wheeler he had christened Dark Moon for his huge soft eyes, an ox who had held a loaded eighteen-footer against the flood of the Shashi when the mud bank was crumbling under his hooves, or Dutchman, the black and white dappled lead ox that he had trained to come like a dog to his whistle and lead the others to their place in the span.
Isazi chuckled lovingly, as he opened the thorn bush gate of the temporary kraal and whistled for Dutchman. In the pre-dawn gloom, a beast coughed, and the sound had a peculiarly harrowing quality that struck a chill into Isazi’s guts. A healthy bullock did not cough that way.
He stood in the opening of the kraal, hesitating to go in, then he smelled something that he had never smelled before. Faint though the whiff of it was, it made his gorge rise. It smelled like a beggar’s breath or a leper’s sores. He had to force himself to go forward against the smell and his own dread.
‘Dutchman,’ he called. ‘Where are you, my beauty?’
There was the explosive spluttering sound of a beast racked by dysentery, and Isazi ran towards it. Even in the bad light he recognized the bulky dappled shape. The bullock was lying down.
Isazi ran to it. ‘Up,’ he called. ‘Vusa, thandwa! Get up, my darling.’ For a beast only lies down when it has given up hope.
The bullock heaved convulsively, but did not come to its feet. Isazi dropped to his knees, and placed his arm around its neck. The neck was twisted back at an awkward unnatural angle. The velvety muzzle pressed into the beast’s flank. The muscles under the sleek skin were convulsed as rigidly as cast iron.
Isazi ran his hands down the beast’s neck, feeling the fierce heat of fever. He touched the cheek, and it was slick and wet. Isazi lifted his hand to his own nose. It was coated with a thick slime and the little Zulu gagged at the smell of it. He scrambled to his feet, and backed away fearfully until he reached the gate. Then he whirled and ran to the wagons.
‘Henshaw,’ he yelled wildly. ‘Come quickly, little Hawk.’
‘Flame lilies,’ Ralph Ballantyne growled. His face was congested with black angry blood, as he strode through the kraal. The lily was a lovely flower of crimson edged with gold that grew on a bright green bush that tempted any grazing animal that did not know them.
‘Where are the herdboys? Bring those bloody mujiba here.’ He stopped beside the twisted carcass of Dark Moon, a trained wheeler like this was worth £50. It was not the only dead ox, eight others were down and as many more were sickening.
Isazi and the other drivers dragged in the herders. They were terrified children, the eldest on the verge of puberty, the youngest ten years old, their immature groins covered only by a scrap of mutsha cloth, their little round buttocks naked.
‘Don’t you know what a flame lily is?’ Ralph shouted at them. ‘It’s your job to watch for poison plants and keep the oxen off them. I’m going to thrash the skin off your black backsides to teach you.’
‘We saw no lilies,’ the eldest boy declared stoutly, and Ralph rounded on him.
‘You cocky little bastard.’
In Ralph’s hand was a sjambok of hippo hide. It was almost five foot long, thicker than a man’s thumb at the butt and tapering to whip cord at the tip. It had been cured to the lovely amber colour of a meerschaum pipe.
‘I’ll teach you to look to the oxen, instead of sleeping under the nearest tree.’
Ralph swung the lash around the back of the child’s legs. It hissed like a puff-adder, and the boy screamed at the cut of it. Ralph seized his wrist, and held him up for a dozen more strokes across the legs and buttocks. Then he let him go and grabbed the next mujiba. The child danced to the tune of the sjambok, howling at each cut.
‘All right.’ Ralph was satisfied at last. ‘Get the healthy animals into the span.’
There were only sufficient oxen left to make up three teams. Ralph was forced to abandon half of the wagons, with their loads of salted buffalo hides, and they trekked on southwards as the sun came up over the horizon.
Within an hour another ox had fallen in the traces, with its nose twisted back against its side. They cut it loose and left it lying beside the track. Half a mile further two more bullocks went down. Then they began dropping so regularly that by noon Ralph was forced to abandon two more wagons, and the last one rolled on with a depleted span dragging it. Long ago Ralph’s rage had given way to bewilderment. It was clear that this was no ordinary case of veld poisoning. None of his drivers had seen anything to equal it, and there was not even a precedent in the wh
ole vast body of African folklore.
‘It is a tagathi,’ Isazi gave his opinion. He had seemed to shrink with grief for his beloved bullocks, so now he was a mournful little black gnome of a man. ‘This is a terrible witchcraft.’
‘By God, Harry,’ Ralph led his new brother-in-law out of earshot of the women. ‘We’ll be lucky to get even the one wagon home. There are a few bad river drifts to cross yet. We had better ride ahead and try to pick an easier crossing on the Lupane river.’
The river was only a few miles ahead, they could already make out the dark green of the forest along its course. Ralph and Harry rode side by side, both of them worried and anxious.
‘Five wagons lying out here,’ Ralph muttered moodily. ‘At three hundred pounds each, to say nothing of the cattle I’ve lost—’ He broke off and sat up very straight in the saddle.
They had come out onto another open glade beside the river, and Ralph was staring across it at the three huge dappled giraffe. With the stilt legs of herons and the long graceful necks of swans, they were the strangest looking of all Africa’s mammals. Their huge eyes were soft and sorrowful, their heads, strangely ugly-beautiful, were topped not by true horns but by outgrowths of bone covered with skin and hair. Their gait had the same deliberate slow motion of a chameleon, and yet a big bull would weigh a ton and stand eighteen feet tall. They were mute, no extremity of pain or passion could induce a whisper of sound from their swanlike throats. Their heart was large as a drum to pump as high as that head, and the arteries of the neck were fitted with valves to prevent the brain exploding under the pressure when the giraffe stooped, splay-legged, to drink.
These three animals were moving in single file across the vlei. The old stink-bull leading them was almost black with age, the cow that followed was splotched with reddish fawn, and the half-grown calf was a lovely soft beige.