But she became bolder, the eternal female taking advantage of her new highly attractive condition, liberties which before would have brought swift and stern disciplinary action.
Desperately the lion tried to restrain her by placing a huge paw on her head, claws carefully retracted, and gulped furiously, trying to eat the entire ox before she could join in, but she wriggled out from under the paw and licked his ear. He growled half-heartedly, flickered the ear. She inched forward and licked his eyes, so he had to close them tightly, furrowing his brow and trying to feed blind, but finally he surrendered to the inevitable and allowed her to force her head into the bloody crater.
Side by side, purring and growling softly, they fed.
There were eighteen of them, gathered on the wide mosquito-screened veranda of the foreman’s cottage under the hissing Petromax lamps. The brandy bottle had been out since sundown, and most of the men were red-faced and bright-eyed as they listened to Dirk Courtney.
‘There will be schools and hospitals within a twenty mile ride of everybody,’ he promised, and the women looked up from their knitting. They knew what it was like to raise a young family out here. ‘This is the beginning only,’ he promised the men. ‘And those of you who were first in will be the first to profit. Once I am in Parliament, you’ll have a strong voice speaking up for you. You’ll see improvement here you couldn’t imagine possible – and quickly.’
‘You’re a rich man, Mr Courtney,’ one of them said. He was a small trader, not directly employed by Ladyburg Sugar, but sufficiently reliant on it to phrase his question with respect. ‘One of the bosses. How come you speak out for the working man?’
‘I’m rich because I worked hard, but I know that without you men, I won’t be rich much longer. We are linked together like a team.’
They nodded and murmured and Dirk went on quickly. ‘One thing I promise you. When I can hire a white man at a decent wage, I won’t push in coolie or nigger labour!’
They cheered him then, and filled their glasses to toast him.
‘Your present Government, the Smuts men, tried that on the gold mines. Two and tuppence a day for black men, and white men out on the street. When the workers protested, they sent the bloody Butcher of Fordsburg, a man who I am ashamed to call my father—’
There was an urgent hammering on the kitchen door, and the foreman excused himself quietly and hurried out. He was back within a minute and whispered to Dirk Courtney. Dirk grinned and nodded, and turned back to his audience.
‘Well, gentlemen, a fine bit of sport in the offing—a lion has killed one of my oxen, down on the new Buli block. The plough boy has just come in to report it. It happened only an hour ago, so we will have an excellent sporting chance at him. May I move closure of this meeting, and we’ll meet here again at,’ he glanced at his watch, ‘at five o’clock tomorrow morning, every man with a horse and rifle!’
Mark and Pungushe slept, each under a single blanket, on the sunbaked earth, with Trojan cropping the scraggy dry yellow grass nearby. There was a cold little breeze out of the east, and they woke in the total dark of not-yet dawn and sat over the fire drinking coffee and smoking silently until Pungushe could take the spoor again.
From the back of Trojan it was still too dark to see the ground, but Pungushe ran confidently ahead, forcing the mule into a reluctant lumbering trot to keep pace.
At the edge of the ploughed land, he had to cast, but he cut the lion spoor on its new track almost immediately. They went off again, with the sunrise outlining the upper branches of the trees, turning them black and spiky against the ruddy gold.
The soft amber rays were without warmth, and threw long distorted shadows of mule and men on the hard red earth.
Mark marvelled once again that the Zulu could run a spoor in this light over such ground, where he could see no mark or sign of the lion’s passing.
There was a single gun shot, so faint that Mark thought he might have imagined it, but Pungushe stopped instantly and signalled him to rein in the mule.
They stood and listened intently, and suddenly there was a distant popping fusillade, ten, eleven rifle-shots and then silence again.
Pungushe turned and looked at Mark expressionlessly. The silence was complete, even the morning bird chorus was stilled by the gunfire for a moment. Then as the silence persisted, a troop of little brown francolin started chirruping again on the edge of the ploughed lands.
‘Go on!’ Mark nodded to Pungushe, trying to keep his face as expressionless, but his voice shook with outrage. They were too late. The last lions south of the Usutu were dead. He felt sick with helpless anger.
They did not notice Mark until he was right up to them. They were too excited, too intent on their work.
There were eight white men, all heavily armed and dressed in rough hunting clothes, with two Zulu grooms holding the horses.
In a trampled opening among the mimosa trees lay the half-eaten carcass of a red and white ox. However, this was not what was engaging their attention. They were grouped in a tight circle beyond the ox, and their voices were raucous, raised in rough jest and cheerful oath.
Mark dismounted and handed the reins to Pungushe. He walked slowly towards the group, dreading what he would find, but he stopped again as one of the men looked up and saw him. He recognized Mark instantly.
‘Ah, warden!’ Dirk Courtney laughed, tossing that splendid head of glossy curls. ‘We are doing your job for you.’ The laughter was sly and spiteful, the malice so apparent that Mark knew he was thinking of the bribe that Mark had accepted and then turned against him.
‘Here is one that you can cross off your report,’ Dirk chuckled again, and gestured for his men to stand aside. The circle opened and Mark stepped into the opening. The men around him were still red-faced and garrulous, and he could smell the stale liquor on them.
‘Gentlemen, may I present the newly appointed warden of Chaka’s Gate proclaimed area.’ Dirk stood opposite him, across the circle, with one hand thrust carelessly into the pocket of his chamois-leather jacket, a hand-made double barrelled .450 elephant rifle by Gibbs of London tucked into the crook of his elbow.
The lion lay on its side with all four legs extended. He was an old, scarred tom, so lean and rangy that each rib showed clearly through the short tan hair. There were four bullet-holes in the body; the one behind the shoulder would have raked both lungs, but another heavy bullet had shattered the skull. The mouth hung open slackly and a little blood-stained saliva still oozed out on to the lolling pink tongue.
‘Congratulations, gentlemen,’ Mark nodded, and only Dirk Courtney caught the irony in his voice.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The sooner we clear this area and make it safe for settlement – the better for all.’
There was a hearty chorus of agreement and one of them produced a brown bottle from his back pocket, and passed it from hand to hand, each in turn pointing its base briefly heavenwards, then exclaiming appreciatively and smacking their lips.
‘What about the lioness?’ Mark asked quietly, refusing his turn at the bottle.
‘Don’t worry about her,’ one of them assured him. ‘She’s down already. I hit her clean in the shoulder. We are just giving her a chance to stiffen up, before we go after her to finish her off.’ And he drew his sheath knife and began to skin out the carcass of the lion, while his comrades passed loud comment and advice.
Mark walked back to Pungushe who squatted patiently at Trojan’s head.
‘The lioness is wounded, but has run.’
‘I have seen the spoor,’ Pungushe nodded, and pointed it out with his eyes, not moving his head.
‘How bad is she hit?’
‘I do not know yet. I must see how she settles to run before judging.’
‘Take the spoor,’ said Mark. ‘Let us go quietly, without alerting these mighty hunters.’
They drifted away from the clearing, leading the mule casually, Mark following a dozen paces behind the Zulu.
Five
hundred yards further on, Pungushe stopped and spoke quietly.
‘She is hit in the right shoulder or leg, but I do not think the bone has gone, for she touches with every second pace. She goes well on three legs, and ant first there was a little blood, but it dries quickly.’
‘Perhaps she bleeds inside?’ Mark asked.
‘If that is so, we will find her within a short while — dead,’ Pungushe shrugged.
‘All right.’ Mark swung up into the saddle. ‘Let us go swiftly, that we may outrun these others, none of them will be able to follow across such hard ground.’
He was too late.
‘Anders!’ Dirk Courtney shouted, riding up at the head of his band. ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’
‘My job,’ Mark answered. ‘I’m following a wounded beast.’
‘We are coming with you.’
Mark glanced at Pungushe, and a silent accord flashed between them, then he turned back to the group.
‘You all realize the danger involved? These animals have probably been hunted before, and my tracker thinks the lioness is only lightly hit.’
There was a little sobering and hesitation, but all eight of them rode on after Pungushe. He went hard, loping away, minza umhlabathi, stretching the horses into an easy canter and after the first hour Dirk Courtney swore bad-temperedly.
‘I don’t see any blood.’
‘The blood has dried,’ Mark told him. ‘The wound has closed.’
The contents of the brown bottle were long ago exhausted. Red faces were sweating heavily in the rising heat, eyes were bloodshot and high good humour turning to headaches and woolly tongues; none of them had remembered to bring a water bottle.
Two of them turned back.
An hour later Dirk Courtney snarled suspiciously, ‘This bloody nigger is giving us a burn run. Tell him I’ll take the horse-whip to him.’
‘The lioness is going strongly—’
‘I don’t believe it. I can’t see any spoor.’
Pungushe stopped abruptly, motioned them to stay and went forward cautiously into a low thicket of waterbessie scrub.
‘I’ve had a guts full of this,’ muttered one of the hunters miserably.
‘Me too.’
‘I’ve got work to do.’
Three more of them turned back, and those that remained sat their restless horses until Pungushe emerged from the thicket and beckoned them forward.
In the heart of the thicket, impressed deeply into the soft mound of a mole heap, he showed them the unmistakable pad of a lioness. It headed relentlessly southward.
‘All right,’ Dirk Courtney acknowledged. ‘He’s still on the spoor. Tell him to keep going.’
An hour after noon, the lioness led them on to a low unbroken cap of solid grey granite, and Pungushe sat down wearily. His muscles shone in the sunlight with sweat, as though they had been oiled. He looked up at Mark on the mule and shrugged with an expressive gesture of helplessness.
‘Dead spoor,’ said Mark. ‘Gone away.’
Dirk Courtney pulled up his horse’s head with a cruel jerk of the curb, and snapped at Mark.
‘Anders. I want to speak to you.’ He trotted away out of earshot of the group, and Mark followed him.
They stopped and faced each other, and Dirk’s mouth was twisted into a pinched and bitter line.
‘This is the second time you have been clever at my expense,’ he started grimly. ‘You could have had me as an ally – but instead you had my father send me a receipt for my gift. Now you and your savage have pulled another trick. I don’t know how you did it, but it’s the last time it will happen.’
He stared at Mark, and the slant of the eyes altered, once again that mad malevolent light burned in their depths.
‘A powerful friend I would have been – but a much more powerful enemy I am now. So far only my father’s protection has saved you. That will change. No man stands in my way, I swear that to you.’
He wheeled his horse, put spurs to it and galloped away. The other two disconsolate hunters trailed away after him.
Mark rode back to Pungushe, and they drank from the water-bottle and smoked a little before Mark asked, ‘Where is the lioness?’
‘We left her spoor two hours back.’
Mark glanced sharply at him, and Pungushe stood up and walked to another mole heap at the edge of the granite. He squatted beside it, and with a roll of his open palm outlined the fleshy pad of a lion paw, then he bunched his knuckles and rolled them for the toe marks.
Miraculously, the spoor of a full-grown lion appeared in the soft earth, and Pungushe looked up at Mark’s startled unbelieving expression and let out one of those whistling hippo-snorts of laughter, rocking back on his heels delightedly. ‘For two hours we followed the Tokoloshe,’2 he hooted.
‘I cannot see her,’ said Mark, carefully glassing the shallow wooded valley below them.
‘Oh! Jamela, who cannot see.’
‘Where is she, Pungushe?’
‘Do you see the forked tree, beyond the three round rocks—’ A step at a time he directed Mark’s gaze, until suddenly he made out just the two dark round blobs of her ears above the short yellow grass, about six hundred yards from where they sat. She was lying close in under the spread of a thorn thicket, and even as he watched, she lowered her head and the ears vanished.
‘Now that she is alone, she wishes to return to the place she knows well, beyond the Usutu. That is why she moves always that way, when the pain of the wound allows.’
Before they had come up with her, they had found three places where she had lain to rest, and at one such place there had been a smear of blood and a dozen yellow hairs glued into the clot. Pungushe had inspected the hairs, minutely; by colour and texture he could tell from which part of the lioness’ body they had come.
‘High in the right shoulder – and if she was bleeding inside she would be down already. But she is in great pain, for she walks short. The wound has stiffened. She cannot go far.’
Now Mark swung the glasses towards the west, and longingly stared through them at the blue misty loom of the cliffs of Chaka’s Gate, half a dozen miles away.
‘So close,’ he murmured, ‘so close.’ But the exhausted cat was dragging herself painfully away from sanctuary, back towards the ploughed lands, towards cattle and men and the dog packs.
Instinctively he turned in that direction now, swinging the binoculars in a long slow traverse across the north and east.
From the low ridge he had a good field of sight, across miles of light forest to the open chocolate expanse of ploughed land.
Something moved in the field of the binoculars and he blinked his eyes and refocused carefully. Three horsemen were coming slowly in their direction, and even at this range Mark could see the dogs running ahead of them.
Quickly he looked back at the leading rider. There was no mistaking that arrogantly erect figure. Dirk Courtney had not given up the hunt. He had merely returned to assemble a hunting-pack, and now the dogs were coming down fast on the smell of the wounded cat.
Mark laid a hand on the hard muscle of Pungushe’s shoulder, and with his free hand he pointed. The Zulu stood up and stared for a full minute at the oncoming horsemen, then he began to speak quickly.
‘Jamela, I will try to call the lioness, and lead her—’
Mark started to ask a question, but Pungushe stopped him harshly. ‘Can you pull the dogs away, or stop them?’
Mark thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Give me your snuff, Pungushe.’
He took the snuff horn that hung on a thong around his neck and handed it to Mark without question.
‘Go,’ said Mark. ‘Call my lioness for me.’
Pungushe slipped away down the ridge and left Mark to hurry to Trojan.
There were three sticks of black dried meat left in Mark’s food bag. He found two flat stones and pounded the dry meat into a fine powder between them, glancing up every few seconds to see the huntsmen coming on rapid
ly.
Once the meat was powdered he scooped it into his pannikin and added an ounce of native snuff from the horn, mixing the two powders with his fingers as he ran back down the ridge to intersect the lioness trail at the point they had left it.
When he reached the shoulder of the ridge where the wounded cat had skirted a rocky outcrop, he knelt and made three neat piles of the mixed powder directly in the path of the oncoming dogs.
The dried meat would be irresistible when they reached it, the dogs would sniff at it greedily.
He could hear them already, baying excitedly, coming on swiftly, leading the hunters at a canter. As he ran back up the ridge to where Trojan stood, Mark smiled bleakly. A hound with a good suck of fiery native snuff up his nose wasn’t going to smell anything else for at least twelve hours.
The lioness lay on her side, with her mouth open. She panted for air, and her chest pumped like a blacksmith’s bellows, and her eyes were tightly closed.
The bullet had been fired from her right quarter. It was a soft lead slug from a .455 Martini Hendry and it had taken her high in the shoulder, but far forward, cutting in through the heavy muscle and grazing the big joint of the shoulder, lacerating sinew and shattering that extraordinary small floating bone, found only in the shoulder of a lion, the lucky bone so prized as a hunter’s talisman.
The bullet had missed the artery as it plunged into the neck and lodged there beneath the skin, a lump the size of the top joint of a man’s thumb.
The flies swarmed joyously into the mouth of the wound, and she lifted her head and snapped at them, and then mewing softly at the agony that movement had caused, she began to lick the bullet hole carefully, the long tongue rasping roughly against her hide, curling pink and dextrous as it cleansed the fresh little trickle of watery blood that had sprung from it. Then she sank back wearily and closed her eyes again.