In all his life Flynn had never wanted anything with such obsessive passion as he wanted those tusks.
Now he sat silently staring into the camp-fire, remembering all these things, and the lust within him was tighter and more compelling than he had ever felt for a woman.
At last he looked up at the scout and said huskily, ‘Tomorrow, with the first light, we will go to the village of Yetu, at Sania.’
A fly settled on Herman Fleischer’s cheek and rubbed its front feet together in delight, as it savoured the prospect of drinking from the droplet of sweat that quivered precariously at the level of his ear lobe.
The Askari standing behind Herman’s chair flicked the zebra tail switch with such skill, that not one of the long black hairs touched the Commissioner’s face, and the fly darted away to take its place in the circuit that orbited around Herman’s head.
Herman hardly noticed the interruption. He was sunk down in the chair, glowering at the two old men who squatted on the dusty parade ground below the veranda. The silence was a blanket that lay on them all in the stupefying heat. The two headmen waited patiently. They had spoken, and now they waited for the Bwana Mkuba to reply.
‘How many have been killed?’ Herman asked at last, and the senior of the two headmen answered.
‘Lord, as many as the fingers of both your hands. But these are the ones of which we are certain, there may be others.’
Herman’s concern was not for the dead, but their numbers would be a measure of the seriousness of the situation. Ritual murder was the first stage on the road to rebellion. It started with a dozen men meeting in the moonlight, dressed in cloaks of leopard skin, with designs of white clay painted on their faces. With the crude iron claws strapped to their hands, they would ceremoniously mutilate a young girl, and then devour certain parts of her body. This was harmless entertainment in Herman’s view, but when it happened more frequently, it generated in the district a mood of abject terror. This was the climate of revolt. Then the leopard priests would walk through the villages in the night, walk openly in procession with the torches burning, and the men who lay shivering within the barricaded huts would listen to the chanted instructions from the macabre little procession – and they would obey.
It had happened ten years earlier at Salito. The priests had ordered them to resist the tax expedition that year. They had slaughtered the visiting Commissioner and twenty of his Askari, and they cut the bodies into small pieces with which they festooned the thorn trees.
Three months later a battalion of German infantry had disembarked at Dar es Salaam and marched to Salito. They burned the villages and they shot everything – men, women, children, chickens, dogs and goats. The final casualty list could only be estimated, but the officer commanding the battalion boasted that they had killed two thousand human beings. He was probably exaggerating. Nevertheless, the Salito hills were still devoid of human life and habitation to this day. The whole episode was irritating and costly – and Herman Fleischer wanted no repetition of it during his term of office.
On the principle that prevention was better than cure, he decided to go down and conduct a few ritual sacrifices of his own. He humped himself forward in his chair, and spoke to his sergeant of Askari.
‘Twenty men. We will leave for the village of Yetu, at Sania, tomorrow before dawn. Do not forget the ropes.’
– 34 –
On the Sania Heights, in the heat of the day, an elephant stood under the wide branches of a wild fig-tree. He was asleep on his feet but his head was propped up by two long columns of stained ivory. He slept as an old man sleeps, fitfully, never sinking very deep below the level of consciousness. Occasionally the tattered grey ears flapped, and each time a fine haze of flies rose around his head. They hung in the hot air and then settled again. The rims of the elephant’s ears were raw where the flies had eaten down through the thick skin. The flies were everywhere. The humid green shade beneath the wild fig was murmurous with the sound of their wings.
Across the divide of the Sania Heights, four miles from the spot where the old bull slept, three men were moving up one of the bush-choked gulleys towards the ridge.
Mohammed was leading. He moved fast, half-crouched to peer at the ground, glancing up occasionally to anticipate the run of the spoor he was following. He stopped at a place where a grove of mapundu trees had carpeted the ground beneath them with a stinking, jellified mass of rotten berries. He looked back at the two white men and indicated the marks in the earth, and the pyramid of bright yellow dung that lay upon it. ‘He stopped here for the first time in the heat, but it was not to his liking, and he has gone on.’
Flynn was sweating. It ran down his flushed jowls and dripped on to his already sodden shirt. ‘Yes,’ he nodded and a small cloud-burst of sweat scattered from his head at the movement. ‘He will have crossed the ridge.’
‘What makes you so certain?’ Sebastian spoke in the same sepulchral whisper as the others.
‘The cool evening breeze will come from the east – he will cross to the other side of the ridge to wait for it.’ Flynn spoke with irritation and wiped his face on the short sleeve of his shirt. ‘Now, you just remember, Bassie. This is my elephant, you understand that? You try for it and, so help me God, I’ll shoot you dead.’
Flynn nodded to Mohammed and they moved on up the slope, following the spoor that meandered between outcrops of grey granite and scrub.
The crest of the ridge was well defined, sharp as the spine of a starving ox. They paused below it, squatting to rest in the coarse brown grass. Flynn opened the binocular case that hung on his chest, lifted out the instrument and began to polish the lens with a scrap of cloth.
‘Stay here!’ Flynn ordered the other two, then on his belly he wriggled up towards the skyline. Using the cover of a tree stump, he lifted his head cautiously and peered over.
Below him the Sania Heights fell away at a gentle slope, fifteen hundred feet and ten miles to the plain below. The slope was broken and crenellated, riven into a thousand gulleys and ravines, covered over-all with a mantle of coarse brown scrub and dotted with clumps of bigger trees.
Flynn settled himself comfortably on his elbows and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. Systematically he began to examine each of the groves below him.
‘Yes!’ he whispered aloud, wriggling a little on his belly, staring at the picture puzzle beneath the spread branches of the tree, a mile away. In the shade there were shapes that made no sense, a mass too diffuse to be the trunk of the tree.
He lowered the glasses, and wiped away the sweat that clung in his eyebrows. He closed his eyes to rest them from the glare, then he opened them again and lifted the glasses.
For two long minutes he stared before suddenly the puzzle made sense. The bull was standing half away from him, merging with the trunk of the wild fig, the head and half the body obscured by the lower branches of the tree – and what he had taken to be the stem of a lesser tree was, in fact, a tusk of ivory.
A spasm of excitement closed on his chest.
‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes!’
Flynn planned his stalk with care, taking every precaution against the intervention of fate that twenty years of elephant hunting had taught him.
He had gone back to where Sebastian and Mohammed waited.
‘He’s there,’ he told them.
‘Can I come with you?’ Sebastian pleaded.
‘In a barrel you can,’ snarled Flynn as he sat and pulled off his heavy boots to replace them with the light sandals that Mohammed produced from the pack. ‘You stay here until you hear my shot. You so much as stick your nose over the ridge before that – and, so help me God, I’ll shoot it off.’
While Mohammed knelt in front of Flynn and strapped the leather pads to his knees to protect them as he crawled over rock and thorn, Flynn fortified himself from the gin bottle. As he recorked it, he glowered at Sebastian again. ‘That’s a promise!’ he said.
At the top of the ridge Flynn paused again
with only his eyes lifted over the skyline, while he plotted his stalk, fixing in his memory a procession of landmarks – an ant-hill, an outcrop of white quartz, a tree festooned with weaver birds’ nests – so that as he reached each of these he would know his exact position in relation to that of the elephant.
Then with the rifle cradled across the crook of his elbows he slid on his belly to begin the stalk.
Now, an hour after he had left the ridge, he saw before him through the grass a slab of granite like a headstone in an ancient cemetery. It stood square and weathered brown, and it was the end of the stalk.
He had marked it from the ridge as the point from which he would fire. It stood fifty yards from the wild fig-tree, at a right angle from the old bull’s position. It would give him cover as he rose to his knees to make the shot.
Anxious now, suddenly overcome with a premonition of disaster – sensing that somehow the cup would be dashed from his lips, the maid plucked from under him before the moment of fulfilment, Flynn started forward. Slithering towards the granite headstone, his face set hard in nervous anticipation, he reached the rock.
He rolled carefully on to his side and, holding the heavy rifle against his chest, he slipped the catch across and eased the rifle open, so that the click of the mechanism was muted. From the belt around his waist he selected two fat cartridges and examined the brass casings for tarnish or denting; with relief he saw the fingers that held them were steadier. He slipped the cartridges into the blank eyes of the breeches, and they slid home against the seatings with a soft metallic plong. And now his breathing was faintly ragged at the end of each inhalation. He closed the rifle, and with his thumb pushed the safety-catch forward into the ‘fire’ position.
His shoulder against the rough, sun-heated granite, he drew up his legs against his belly and rolled gently on to his knees. With his head bowed low and the rifle in his lap, he knelt behind the rock, and for the first time in an hour he lifted his head. He brought it up with inching deliberation. Slowly the crystalline texture of the granite passed before his eyes, then suddenly he looked across fifty yards of open ground at his elephant.
It stood broadside to him but the head was hidden by the leaves and branches of the wild fig. The brain shot was impossible from here. His eyes moved down on to the shoulder and he saw the outline of the bone beneath the thick grey skin. He picked out the point of the elbow and his eyes moved back into the barrel of the chest. He could visualize the heart pulsing softly there beneath the ribs, pink and soft and vital, throbbing like a giant sea anemone.
He lifted the rifle, and laid it across the rock in front of him. He looked along the barrels, and saw the blade of dry grass that was wound around the bead of the foresight, obscuring it. He lowered the rifle and with his thumb-nail picked away the shred of grass. Again he lifted and sighted.
The black blob of the foresight lay snugly in the deep, wide vee of the backsight; he moved the gun, riding the bead down across the old bull’s shoulder then back on to the chest. It lay there ready to kill, and he took up the slack in the trigger, gently, lovingly, with his forefinger.
The shout was faint, a tiny sound in the drowsy immensity of the hot African air. It came from the high ground above him.
‘Flynn!’ and again, ‘Flynn!’
In an explosive burst of movement under the wild fig-tree, the old bull swung his body with unbelievable speed, his great tusks riding high. He went away from Flynn at an awkward shambling run, his flight covered by the trunk of the fig-tree.
For stunned seconds, Flynn crouched behind the boulder, and with each second the chances of a shot dwindled. Flynn jumped to his feet and ran out to one side of the fig-tree, opening his field of fire for a snap shot at the bull as he fled, a try for the spine where it curved down between the massive haunches to the tuftless tail.
Spiked agony stabbed up through the ball of his lightly shod foot, as he trod squarely on a three-inch buffalo thorn. Red-tipped, wickedly barbed, it buried its full length in his flesh, and he stumbled to his knees crying a protest at the pain.
Two hundred yards away, the old bull disappeared into one of the wooded ravines, and was gone.
‘Flynn! Flynn!’
Sobbing in pain and frustration, his injured foot twisted up into his lap, Flynn sat in the grass and waited for Sebastian Oldsmith to come down to him.
‘I’ll let him get real dose,’ Flynn told himself. Sebastian was approaching with the long awkward strides of a man running downhill. He had lost his hat and the black tangled curls danced on his head at each stride. He was still shouting.
‘I’ll give it to him in the belly,’ Flynn decided. ‘Both barrels!’ and he groped for the rifle that lay beside him.
Sebastian saw him and swerved in his run.
Flynn hefted the rifle. ‘I warned him. I said I’d do it,’ and his right hand settled around the pistol grip of the rifle, his forefinger instinctively hooking forward for the trigger.
‘Flynn! Germans! A whole army of them. Just over the hill. Coming this way.’
‘Christ!’ said Flynn, immediately abandoning his homicidal intentions.
– 35 –
Lifting himself in the stirrups, Herman Fleischer reached behind to massage himself. His buttocks were of a plump, almost feminine, quantity and quality. After five hours in the saddle Herman longed to rest them. He had just crossed the ridge of the Sania Heights on his donkey, and it was cool here beneath the outspread branches of the wild fig-tree. He flirted with the temptation, decided to indulge himself, and turned to give the order to the troop of twenty Askari who stood behind him. All of them were watching him avidly, anticipating the order that would allow them to throw themselves down and relax.
‘Lazy dogs!’ thought Herman as he scowled at them. He turned away from them, settled his aching posterior gently on to the saddle and growled. ‘Akwende! Let us go!’ His heels thumped against the flanks of his donkey and it started forward at a trot.
From a crotch in the trunk of the fig-tree ten feet above Herman’s head, Flynn O’Flynn viewed his departure over the double barrels of his rifle. He watched the patrol wind away down the slope and drop from sight over a fold in the ground before he put up the gun.
‘Phew! That was close.’ Sebastian’s voice came from the leafy mass above Flynn.
‘If he’d touched one foot to the ground, I’d have blown his bloody head off,’ said Flynn. He sounded as though he regretted missing the opportunity. ‘All right, Bassie, get me down out of this frigging tree.’
Fully dressed, except for his boots, Flynn sat against the base of the fig-tree and proffered his right foot to Sebastian. ‘ … I had him right there in my sights.’
‘Who?’ asked Sebastian.
‘The elephant, you idiot. For the first time I had him cold. And then … Yeow! What the hell are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to get the thorn out, Flynn.’
‘Feels like you’re trying to knock it in with a hammer.’
‘I can’t get a grip on it.’
‘Use your teeth. That’s the only way,’ Flynn instructed, and Sebastian paled a little at the thought. He considered Flynn’s foot. It was a large foot; corns on the toes, flakes of loose skin and other darker matter between them. Sebastian could smell it at a range of three feet. ‘Couldn’t you reach it with your own teeth, Flynn?’ he hedged.
‘You think I’m a goddamned contortionist?’
‘Mohammed?’ Sebastian’s eyes lit up with relief as he turned on the little gun-bearer. In answer to the question Mohammed drew back his lips in a death’s head grin, exposing his smooth, pink toothless gums. ‘Yes,’ agreed Sebastian. ‘I see what you mean.’ He returned his gaze to the foot, and studied it with sickened fascination. His adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.
‘Get on with it,’ said Flynn, and Sebastian stooped. There was a howl from Flynn, and Sebastian straightened up with the wet thorn gripped in his teeth. He spat it out explosively, and Mohammed handed him th
e gin bottle. Sebastian gargled from it loudly but when he lifted the bottle to his lips again, Flynn laid a restraining hand on his forearm. ‘Now don’t overdo it, Bassie boy,’ he remonstrated mildly, retrieved the bottle and placed it to his own mouth. It seemed to refuel Flynn’s anger, for when he removed the bottle his voice had fire in it. ‘That goddamn sneaking, sausage-eating slug. He spoiled the only chance I’ve ever had at that elephant.’ He paused to breathe heavily. ‘I’d like to do something really nasty to him, like … like …’ he searched for some atrocity to commit upon Herman Fleischer, and suddenly he found one. ‘My God!’ he said, and his scowl changed to a lovely smile. ‘That’s it!’
‘What?’ Sebastian was alarmed. He was certain that he would be selected as the vehicle of Flynn’s revenge. ‘What?’ he repeated.
‘We will go …’ said Flynn, ‘ … to Mahenge!’
‘Good Lord, that’s the German headquarters!’
‘Yes,’ said Flynn. ‘With no Commissioner and no Askari to guard it! They’ve just passed us, heading in the opposite direction.’
– 36 –
They hit Mahenge two hours before dawn, in that time of utter darkness when mankind’s vitality is at its lowest ebb. The defence put up by the corporal and five Askari whom Fleischer had left to guard his headquarters was hardly heroic. In fact, they were only half awakened by the lusty and indiscriminate use of Flynn’s boot, and by the time they were fully conscious, they found themselves securely locked behind the bars of the jail-house. There was only one casualty. It was, of course, Sebastian Oldsmith, who, in the excitement, ran into a half-open door. It was fortunate, as Flynn pointed out, that he struck the door with his head, otherwise he might have done himself injury. But as it was, he had recovered sufficiently by sunrise to watch the orgy of looting and vandalism in which Flynn and his gun-bearers indulged themselves.