The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

  ‘We will find it,’ Comrade Lookout assured him. ‘And every month we will meet either here or there.’ Lookout pointed out two rendezvous, both prominent hillocks well distanced from the river, their peaks only bluish silhouettes on the horizon. ‘The signal of a meeting will be a small fire of green leaves, or three rifle shots evenly spaced.’

  ‘It is agreed.’

  ‘Now, Kuphela, leave the money in that ant-bear hole at your feet and take your woman back to camp.’

  Sally-Anne stayed very close beside him on the return, even taking his arm for reassurance every few hundred yards and looking back fearfully over her shoulder.

  ‘My God, Craig, those were real shufta, proper dyed-int-he-wool guerrillas. Why did they let us go?’

  ‘The best reason in the world – money.’ Craig’s chuckle was a little hoarse and breathless even in his own ears, and the adrenalin still buzzed in his blood. ‘For a miserly thousand dollars a month, I have just hired myself the toughest bunch of bodyguards and gamekeepers on the market. Pretty good bargain.’

  ‘You’re doing a deal with them?’ Sally-Anne demanded. ‘Isn’t that dangerous? It’s treason or something, surely?’

  ‘Probably, we just have to make sure that nobody finds out about it, won’t we?’

  The architect turned out to be another bargain. His designs were superb; the lodges would be built of natural stone, indigenous timber and thatch. They would blend unobtrusively into the chosen sites along the river. Sally-Anne worked with him on the interior layouts and the furnishings, and introduced charming little touches of her own.

  During the next few months, Sally-Anne’s work with the World Wildlife Trust took her away for long periods at a time, but on her travels she recruited the staff that they would need for Zambezi Waters.

  Firstly, she seduced a Swiss-trained chef away from one of the big hotel chains. Then she chose five young safari guides, all of them African-born, with a deep knowledge and love of the land and its wildlife and, most importantly, with the ability to convey that knowledge and love to others.

  Then she turned her attention to the design of the advertising brochures, using her own photographs and Craig’s text. ‘A kind of dress rehearsal for our book,’ she pointed out when she telephoned him from Johannesburg, and Craig realized for the first time just what he had taken on in agreeing to work with her. She was a perfectionist. It was either right or it wasn’t, and to get it right she would go to any lengths, and force him and the printers to do the same.

  The result was a miniature masterpiece in which colour was carefully co-ordinated and even the layout of blocks of print balanced her illustrations. She sent out copies to all the African travel specialists around the world, from Tokyo to Copenhagen.

  ‘We have to set an opening date,’ she told Craig, ‘and make sure that our first guests are newsworthy. You’ll have to offer them a freebie, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You aren’t thinking of a pop star?’ Craig grinned, and she shuddered.

  ‘I telephoned Daddy at the Embassy in London. He may be able to get Prince Andrew – but I’ll admit it’s a big “may be”. Henry Pickering knows Jane Fonda—’

  ‘My God, I never realized what an up-market broad you are.’

  ‘And while we are on the subject of celebrities, I think I can get a best-selling novelist who makes bad jokes and will probably drink more whisky than he is worth!’

  When Craig was ready to commence actual construction on Zambezi Waters, he complained to Peter Fungabera about the difficulty of finding labourers in the deep bush. Peter replied, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix that.’ And five days later, a convoy of army trucks arrived carrying two hundred detainees from the rehabilitation centres.

  ‘Slave labour,’ Sally-Anne told Craig with distaste.

  However, the access road to the Chizarira river was completed in just ten days, and Craig could telephone Sally-Anne in Harare and tell her, ‘I think we can confidently set the opening date for July 1st.’

  ‘That’s marvellous, Craig.’

  ‘When can you come up again? I haven’t seen you for almost a month.’

  ‘It’s only three weeks,’ she denied.

  ‘I have done another twenty pages on our book,’ he offered as bait. ‘We must go over it together soon.’

  ‘Send them to me.’

  ‘Come and get them.’

  ‘Okay,’ she capitulated. ‘Next week, Wednesday. Where will you be, King’s Lynn or Zambezi Waters?’

  ‘Zambezi Waters. The electricians and plumbers are finishing up. I want to check it out.’

  ‘I’ll fly up.’

  She landed on the open ground beside the river where Craig’s labour gangs had surfaced a strip with gravel to make an all-weather landing ground and had even rigged a proper windsock for her arrival.

  The instant she jumped down from the cockpit Craig could see that she was furiously angry.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’ve lost two of your rhino.’ She strode towards him. ‘I spotted the carcasses from the air.’

  ‘Where?’ Craig was suddenly as angry as she was.

  ‘In the thick bush beyond the gorge. It’s poachers for certain. The carcasses are lying within fifty paces of each other. I made a few low passes, and the horns have been taken.’

  ‘Do you think they are Charlie and Lady Di?’ he demanded.

  From the air Craig and Sally-Anne had done a rhino count, and had identified twenty-seven individual animals on the estate, including four calves and nine breeding pairs of mature animals to whom they had given names. Charlie and Lady Di were a pair of young rhinoceros who had probably just come together. On foot Craig and Sally-Anne had been able to get close to them in the thick jessie bush that the pair had taken as their territory. Both of the animals carried fine horns, the male’s much thicker and heavier. The front horn, twenty inches long and weighing twenty pounds, would be worth at least ten thousand dollars to a poacher. The female, Lady Di, was a smaller animal with a thinner, finely curved pair of horns, and she had been heavily pregnant when last they saw her.

  ‘Yes. It’s them. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘There is some rough going this side of the gorge,’ Craig muttered. ‘We won’t get there before dark.’

  ‘Not with the Land-Rover,’ Sally-Anne agreed, ‘but I think I have found a place where I can get down. It’s only a mile or so from the kill.’

  Craig unslung his rifle from the clips behind the driver’s seat of the Land-Rover and checked the load.

  ‘Okay. Let’s go,’ he said.

  The poachers’ kill was in the remotest corner of the estate, almost on the rim of the rugged valley wall that fell away to the great river in the depths. The landing-ground that Sally-Anne had spotted was a narrow natural clearing at the head of the river gorge, and she had to abort her first approach and go round again. At the second attempt, she sneaked in over the tree-tops, and hit it just right.

  They left the Cessna in the clearing, and started down into the mouth of the gorge. Craig led, with the rifle cocked and ready. The poachers might still be at the kill.

  The vultures guided them the last mile. They were roosting in every tree around the kill, like grotesque black fruit. The area around the carcasses was beaten flat and open by the scavengers, and strewn with loose vulture feathers. As they walked up, half a dozen hyena went loping away with their peculiar high-shouldered gait. Even their fearsomely toothed jaws had not been able completely to devour the thick rhinoceros hide, though the poachers had hacked open the belly cavities of their victims to give them easy access.

  The carcasses were at least a week old, the stench of putrefaction was aggravated by that of the vulture dung which whitewashed the remains. The eyes had been picked from the sockets of the male’s head, and the ears and cheeks had been gnawed away. As Sally-Anne had seen from the air, the horns were gone, the hack marks of an axe still clearly visible on the exposed bone of the animal’s nose.

  Lookin
g down upon that ruined and rotting head, Craig found that he was shaking with anger and that the saliva had dried out in his mouth.

  ‘If I could find them, I would kill them,’ he said, and beside him Sally-Anne was pale and grim.

  ‘The bastards,’ she whispered, ‘the bloody, bloody bastards.’

  They walked across to the female. Here also the horns had been hacked off and her belly cavity opened. The hyena had dragged the calf out of her womb, and devoured most of it.

  Sally-Anne squatted down beside the pathetic remains. ‘Prince Billy,’ she whispered. ‘Poor little devil.’

  ‘There’s nothing more we can do here.’ Craig took her arm and lifted her to her feet. ‘Let’s go.’

  She dragged a little in his grip as he led her away.

  From the peak of the hill that Craig had arranged as the rendezvous with Comrade Lookout, they looked out across the brown land to where the river showed as a lush serpentine sprawl of denser forest almost at the extreme range of their vision.

  Craig had lit the signal fire of smoking green leaves a little after noon, and had fed it regularly since then. Now the sky was turning purple and blue and the hush and chill of evening fell over them, so that Sally-Anne shivered.

  ‘Cold?’ Craig asked.

  ‘And sad.’ Sally-Anne tensed but did not pull away when he put his arm around her shoulders. Then slowly she relaxed and pressed against him for the warmth of his body. Darkness blotted out their horizon and crept in upon them.

  ‘I see you, Kuphela.’ The voice was so close as to startle them both, and Sally-Anne jerked away from Craig almost guiltily. ‘You summoned me.’ Comrade Lookout stayed outside the feeble glow of the fire.

  ‘Where were you when somebody killed two of my bejane and stole their horns?’ Craig accused him roughly. ‘Where were you who promised to stand guard for me?’

  There was a long silence out in the darkness.

  ‘Where did this thing happen?’

  Craig told him.

  ‘That is far from here, far also from our camp. We did not know.’ His tone was apologetic, obviously Comrade Lookout felt he had failed in a bargain. ‘But we will find the ones who did this. We will follow them and find them.’

  ‘When you do, it is important that we know the name of the person who buys the horns from them,’ Craig ordered.

  ‘I will bring the name of that person to you,’ Comrade Lookout promised. ‘Watch for our signal fire on this hill.’

  Twelve days later, through his binoculars, Craig picked up the little grey feather of smoke on the distant whaleback of the hill. He drove alone to the assignation for Sally-Anne had left three days previously. She had wanted desperately to stay, but one of the directors of the Wildlife Trust was arriving in Harare and she had to be there to greet him.

  ‘I guess my grant for next year depends on it,’ she told Craig ruefully as she climbed into the Cessna, ‘but you phone me the minute you hear from your tame bandits.’

  Craig climbed the hill eagerly and on the crest he was breathing evenly and his leg felt strong and easy. He had grown truly hard and fit in these last months, and his anger was still strong upon him as he stood beside the smouldering remains of the signal fire.

  Twenty minutes passed before Comrade Lookout moved silently at the edge of the forest, still keeping in cover and with the automatic rifle in the crook of his arm.

  ‘You were not followed?’ Craig shook his head reassuringly. ‘We must always be careful, Kuphela.’

  ‘Did you find the men?’

  ‘Did you bring the money?’

  ‘Yes.’ Craig drew the thick envelope from the patch pocket of his bush-jacket. ‘Did you find the men?’

  ‘Cigarettes,’ Comrade Lookout teased him. ‘Did you bring cigarettes?’

  Craig tossed a pack to him, and Comrade Lookout lit one and inhaled deeply. ‘Hau!’ he said. ‘That is good.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Craig insisted.

  ‘There were three men. We followed their spoor from the kill – though it was almost ten days old, and they had tried to cover it.’ Comrade Lookout drew on his cigarette until sparks flew from the glowing tip. ‘Their village is on the escarpment of the valley three days’ march from here. They were Batonka apes,’ the Batonka are one of the primitive hunter-gatherer tribes that live along the valley of the Zambezi, ‘and they had the horns of your rhinoceros with them still. We took the three of them into the bush and we spoke to them for a long time.’ Craig felt his skin crawl as he imagined that extended conversation. He felt his anger subside to be replaced with a hollow feeling of guilt: he should have cautioned Comrade Lookout on his methods.

  ‘What did they tell you?’

  ‘They told me that there is a man, a city man who drives a motor-car and dresses like a white man. He buys the horns of rhinoceros, the skins of leopards and the teeth of ivory, and he pays more money than they have ever seen in their lives.’

  ‘Where and when do they meet him?’

  ‘He comes in each full moon, driving the road from Tuti Mission to the Shangani river. They wait on the road in the night for his coming.’

  Craig squatted beside the fire and thought for a few minutes, then looked up at Comrade Lookout. ‘You will tell these men that they will wait beside the road next full moon with the rhinoceros horns until this man comes in his motor-car – ’

  ‘That is not possible,’ Comrade Lookout interrupted him.

  ‘Why?’ Craig asked.

  ‘The men are dead.’

  Craig stared at him in utter dismay. ‘All three of them?’

  ‘All three,’ Comrade Lookout nodded. His eyes were cold and flat and merciless.

  ‘But—’ Craig couldn’t bring himself to ask the question. He had set the guerrillas onto the poachers. It must have been like setting a pack of fox-terriers onto a domesticated hamster. Even though he had not meant it to happen, he was surely responsible. He felt sickened and ashamed.

  ‘Do not worry, Kuphela,’ Comrade Lookout reassured him kindly. ‘We have brought you the horns of your bejane, and the men were only dirty Batonka apes anyway.’

  Carrying the bark string bag of rhinoceros horns over his shoulder, Craig went down to the Land-Rover. He felt sick and weary and his leg hurt, but the draw-string bag cutting into his flesh did not gall him as sorely as his own conscience.

  The rhinoceros horns stood in a row on Peter Fungabera’s desk. Four of them – the tall front horns and the shorter rear horns.

  ‘Aphrodisiac,’ Peter murmured, touching one of them with his long, tapering fingers.

  ‘That’s a fallacy,’ Craig said. ‘Chemical analysis shows they contain no substance that could possibly be aphrodisiac in effect.’

  ‘They are nothing more than a type of agglutinated hair mass,’ Sally-Anne explained. ‘The effects that the failing Chinese roué seeks when he crushes it to powder and takes it with a draught of rose-water is merely sympathetic medicine – the horn is long and hard, voilà!’

  ‘Anyway, the Arab oil men will pay more for their knife-handles than the cunning old Chinese will pay for their personal daggers,’ Craig pointed out.

  ‘Whatever the final market, the fact is that there are two less rhino on Zambezi Waters than there were a month ago, and in another month how many more will have gone?’

  Peter Fungabera stood up and came around the desk on bare feet. His loin-cloth was freshly laundered and crisply ironed. He stood in front of them.

  ‘I have been pursuing my own lines of investigation,’ he said quietly. ‘And all of it seems to point in the same direction as Sally-Anne’s own reasoning led her. It seems absolutely certain that there is a highly organized poaching ring operating across the country. The tribesmen in the game-rich areas are being enticed into poaching and gathering the valuable animal products. They are collected by middlemen, many of whom are junior civil servants, such as district officers and game department rangers. The booty is accumulated in various remote and safe caches until t
he value is sufficient to warrant a large single consignment being sent out of the country.’

  Peter Fungabera began to pace slowly up and down the room.

  ‘The consignment is usually exported on a commercial Air Zimbabwe flight to Dar-es-Salaam on the Tanzania coast. We are not sure what happens at that end, but it probably goes out on a Soviet or Chinese freighter.’

  ‘The Soviets have no qualms about wildlife conservation,’ Sally-Anne nodded. ‘Sable-fur production and whaling are big foreign-exchange-eamers for them.’

  ‘What portfolio do Air Zimbabwe operations fall under?’ Craig asked suddenly.

  ‘The portfolio of the minister of tourism, the honourable Tungata Zebiwe,’ Peter replied smoothly, and they were all silent for a few moments before he went on. ‘When a consignment is due, the products are brought into Harare, all on the same day, or night. They are not stored, but go directly onto the aircraft under tight security conditions and are flown out almost immediately.’

  ‘How often does this happen?’ Craig asked and Peter Fungabera glanced enquiringly at his aide who was standing unobtrusively at the back of the room.

  ‘That varies,’ Captain Timon Nbebi replied. ‘In the rainy season the grass is long and the conditions in the bush are bad. There is little hunting activity, but during the dry months the poachers can work more efficiently. However, we have learned through our informant that a consignment is almost due and will in fact go out within the next two weeks—’

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ Peter Fungabera interrupted him with a small frown of annoyance; obviously he had wanted to deliver that information himself. ‘What we have also learned is that the head of the organization often takes an active part in the operation. For instance, that massacre of elephant in the abandoned minefield,’ Peter looked across at Sally-Anne, ‘the one that you photographed so vividly – well, we have learned that a government minister, we do not know for certain which one, went to the site in an army helicopter. We know that on two further occasions a high government official, reputedly of ministerial rank, was present when consignments were brought in to the airport for shipment.’