08 Safari Adventure (15 page)

There is no quick and easy way to remove an elephant’s tusk. It is strongly rooted in the great beast’s bone and flesh. To chop it out with an axe is an almost superhuman task. The easiest method is to allow the carcass to decay for a week - then the tusk can be worked loose.

But it must have been evident to Blackbeard that he was not going to be allowed a week. In less than three hours the interfering strangers would be back with their cars and men. A few of the tusks had been chopped out but more than ninety per cent of them remained. It must have been a sore disappointment for the poacher chief to have to leave behind a store of ivory that would have added perhaps a hundred thousand dollars to his illegal loot.

The killer king’s operations became more secretive. He and his poacher army seemed to have vanished. The Stork scouted hill and dale, forest and plain, without spotting a single trespasser. There were no more trap-lines, no more explosions, no more fires. There were no more camps of grass shacks. Perhaps there were no more poachers.

‘Do you think we’ve really frightened them off?’ Roger wondered.

‘No. But I don’t understand where they can be. It’s almost as if they had gone underground.’

Underground. It made Roger think. He remembered his own experience underground, in the elephant pit.

Had the poachers dug themselves in? Tomorrow he would keep an eye open for brush-covered pits.

Back at the lodge the boys found Singh.

‘Well, my friends, have you caught your man yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘If I were you I ‘d give it up. We’ve been trying for years to get hold of him. But he’s just too smart for us. In some ways I must say I admire him. The way he slips through your fingers is quite amazing, don’t you think? But of course you’ll get him yet. You Americans are so clever.’

Hal pretended not to see the hidden sarcasm in this remark.

The judge was evidently very well satisfied with himself. Hal encouraged his self-esteem.

‘By the way,’ he said, the warden told me of your contribution to the Wildlife Society. That was very generous of you,’

The judge smiled expansively and waved his hand. ‘Nothing, my dear boy, nothing. I only wish it could have been more. Unfortunately, salaries are limited in my profession. But I am willing to do without some of the luxuries of life in order to help the poor dear animals.’

‘Quite noble of you,’ Hal said. ‘Too bad you don’t have any income besides your salary. Some judges make out quite well, you know.’

The judge’s face darkened. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Well, take a purely imaginary case. Suppose you were not such an honest and noble judge. Suppose you were secretly in the poaching racket. When any poachers came into your court you could let them off with little or no punishment. You could close your eyes to what the big operators are doing - and they would make it worth your while. You could become rich - and all the time you could pose as a great friend of the animals. And every once in a while you could make a gift to the Wildlife Society just to keep everybody fooled.’

The judge was flushing deeply and his usually soft eyes were like hard, steel swordpoints. Then he forced a laugh.

‘As you say, this is all purely imaginary,’ he said. ‘Quite impossible for a true lover of animals.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Hal, caressing Chee who had wandered in through the open door. Chee bared his teeth at the judge and snarled deeply.

Hal excused himself and went out. He looked back through a window screened with shrubbery. The judge’s behaviour was remarkable. For the moment he seemed to have gone mad. He struck the desk a blow with his fist, then leaped up, strode backwards and forwards as if in a fever, came to where Chee was lying and gave the animal a vicious kick in the throat. Chee sprang up and came for him, spitting, biting, and clawing. Singh kicked the animal repeatedly, then drew a knife. Before he could use it, the wrist of the hand that held the knife was between the cheetah’s teeth. The knife fell to the floor and the judge collapsed into a chair. Chee, still snarling, walked out

Hal went to his banda and thought about what he had seen. So this was the great animal-lover! The cheetah evidently didn’t think so and Hal trusted the animal more than the man. Hal was more convinced than ever that Sindar Singh was a colossal crook - otherwise why did he react so violently to Hal’s ‘purely imaginary’ story? But still there was no real proof.

‘I believe those are pits,’ exclaimed Roger, looking down through the Perspex bubble.

Hal, at the controls, scanned the earth below. He could see no pits - but there were many spots where the brush had been cut and was now lying in mats, and those mats might be the covers of pits. Were poachers hidden beneath?

Near by was a grove of baobabs, fantastic trees that looked like blown-up hippos. They were huge like hippos, bulged like hippos, had bark like the hide of a hippo. One might almost believe that a herd of the hefty animals had come up from the river and stood here until they took root.

There were none of the usual grass huts of poachers among the trees and not a sign of human life. Yet there was something suspicious about those brush mats. There might be a small city of busy men beneath them.

‘It’s worth investigating,’ Hal said. He swung the plane about and headed home. ‘We’ll come back on wheels with our gang.’

For ten minutes the plane flew steadily on the homeward course. Then it began to weave and wobble as if it were drunk.

‘Pockets!’ guessed Roger.

‘I don’t think so,’ Hal said. ‘It’s not bumping the way it would if it were dropping into air pockets. Besides, why should there be up-and-down air currents here? You might expect turbulence over bad country, hills, cliffs - but not over a level plain like this one.’

‘Then what can it be? Are you wagging that stick?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Do you think the rudder has gone haywire?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s getting worse every minute. I think we’d better look for a place to land.’

The plane was now bucking like a frightened horse.

‘Your right wing,’ exclaimed Roger. ‘Look at it.’

The wing was dancing. It seemed about to come off and fly away on a trip of its own.

Hal brought the plane down in a steep glide. He barely missed the top of a tall kapok tree. The plane rocked dangerously.

‘I can’t hold her,’ Hal said. ‘She’s going to crash. She may burn. Be ready to jump clear.’

He famed off the ignition.

The plane struck the ground and bounced. There was a ripping, tearing sound, the right wing disappeared, the Stork crashed into an anthill and lay still.

‘Good,’ cried Hal.

‘What’s good about it?’

‘No fire. We’re alive. Isn’t that good?’

‘I suppose so,’ Roger said doubtfully. ‘What do we do now?’

They climbed out of the cabin and walked back fifty feet to inspect the torn-off wing.

‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ said Hal. ‘Why should that wing rip loose?’

Roger was inspecting the torn edge. ‘Looks fishy to me,’ he said. ‘Did this just tear - or was it cut?’

Hal studied the break, then stared at Roger.

‘Monkey business,’ he exclaimed. ‘See this straight line? That’s no natural break. Somebody has sawed part of the way through - just enough to weaken the wing. I suppose we can feel honoured. Somebody thinks us important enough to be worth murdering.’

Roger was rubbing his knee. What’s the matter?’ Hal asked.

‘Just a bump I got when we landed. Now what do we do? No radio in this crate. How about a signal fire?’

‘No luck. The lodge is a good fifty miles away. They wouldn’t see it. The only ones who would be likely to see it would be the poachers. And we don’t want them to

come down on us. A fire would be an open invitation to Mr Blackbeard.’

‘Then what do we do? Just sit here and wait for somebody to come looking for us?’

‘In a hundred miles of wild country? It might take weeks for them to find us. By that time we wouldn’t be worth finding. There’s only one way out of it. We’ve got to walk to the lodge.’

They went back to the plane. Hal noticed that Roger was limping-badly. ‘You’ll never make it,’ he said.

‘Never mind the knee,’ said Roger. ‘It will limber up.’

‘I’m afraid not. It will just get worse. Anyhow, one of us should stay here to look after the plane.’

‘Why does it need looking after? What could happen to it?’

‘Lots of things. A poacher might come on it and steal everything he could pry loose. Rhinos and elephants can get mighty curious. They completely wrecked a stalled plane up in Murchison a month ago. Hyenas have a taste for rubber - they’ll eat the tyres off the wheels if you give them a chance. You can help most by staying right here.’

‘Okay,’ Roger said reluctantly. ‘How long will it take you?’

‘Assuming we’re fifty miles from the lodge - I ‘d say it’ll be a ten-hour walk. Then it’ll take about two hours to get back here by truck. Twelve hours altogether.’

‘But it’s late afternoon already. You’d better wait until tomorrow morning.’

‘Cooler walking at night,’ Hal said. ‘And there’s a good moon. Don’t worry - I’ll get through all right. So long - take care of yourself. I’ll be seeing you round about five a.m.’

He strode off. Roger’s stomach called after him, ‘Bring a sandwich back with you.’

As die sun went down the animals that had spent the heat of the day in the forest began to come out.

They were greatly-interested in the plane. They gathered round it as if it had been the Ark and they were about to take a ride. Some of the smaller and more fearless ones tried to climb in with Roger. The baboons were determined to share the cabin with him. The vervet monkeys perching on the nose of the plane looked in through the Perspex.

Four rhinos looked the plane over carefully with many sniffs and snorts, perhaps thinking it was some new sort of beast. Then they retired to a short distance and held a conference.

They evidently decided that this strange creature had no business here. They lowered their heads and charged. Even one rhino could do serious damage to the fuselage. What might four do?

Roger threw open the hood and shouted. The rhinos stopped, blinking their weak eyes, tilting their ears to locate the source of the sound.

They held another conference. If they had been wise old elephants they might have reached an agreement. But being rhinos, irritable by nature and not very wise, they broke up the conference by fighting each other.

Gazelles and giraffes paraded round the plane examining it carefully. The famous jumpers, the impalas, had great fun leaping over it. A lurking leopard selected a waterbuck as its evening meal and broke its neck in one violent attack.

A terrifying scream ripped the air. It was loud enough and strong enough to come from a bull elephant - but Roger, when he got over the chill it gave him, remembered that it was just the night cry of the tree hyrax, a nocturnal animal only a foot or so long.

He was sorry to see the light go. The plane was left in shadow, and the shadow was climbing up the slope of Africa’s highest mountain. Now it was a mile high, now two miles, now it reached the snow line, now it blotted out the brilliant glow of the glaciers, and now having climbed almost four miles it left the peak of Kilimanjaro in darkness, just a pale grey ghost against a blue-black sky.

Roger tried to sleep.

He soon gave it up as a bad job. The seat was uncomfortable. He would be better off on the ground.

He climbed down and stretched out on the grass under the remaining wing. He depended upon the wing to scare off any inquisitive animals. It was so low that no rhino, elephant, buffalo, or hippo could get under it.

But he had forgotten about another dangerous wild animal. The ant.

News of his presence spread to the occupants of the anthill against which the plane had crashed. He woke up with a start when he felt some sharp nips on his arms and legs. Before he could get fully awake the nips had spread under his clothes over his entire body and he was one trembling jelly of pain.

He leaped to his feet, tore off his clothes, danced and brushed and slapped and for every ant he got rid of two others arrived. His audience of animals looked on in amazement.

Then one of them came to his aid. It was really not at all interested in aiding him, but just in getting a good meal.

The ant-bear known also as the aardvark (meaning earth pig) cannot pass up a chance to dine on ants. It sleeps all day. At nightfall it wakes and goes out hungrily searching for food.

It is a beast about four feet in length, weighs some-tiling like one hundred and forty pounds, has bear-like claws for digging, a tail like a kangaroo’s, long pointed ears that shoot off in different directions like those of a donkey, a snout like a pig’s and - most amazing of all -a sticky tongue eighteen inches long.

Roger’s visitor immediately began thrashing that remarkable tongue into the army of ants that streamed from the anthill to Roger’s trembling hide. The tongue, loaded with ants, was flicked back into the mouth, and down went the wriggling insects into the animal’s paunch. Out darted the glue-covered ribbon to get a new load.

The ant has an intelligence far greater than one would expect in so small a creature, and the marching column promptly turned about and tried to escape into the anthill. But there were still numerous ants feasting upon Roger. Suddenly he felt a light stroke up his leg. The ant-bear was quite accustomed to tongueing ants from the hides of other animals. And to this bear Roger was just another beast, a table spread with food,

The boy stood perfectly still in order not to frighten his rescuer, and let the sticky, tickling tongue caress his hide. The moon must have laughed as it looked down on the strange spectacle. Roger himself laughed, as the tongue tickled, and at once the ant-bear took fright and clumsily galloped off.

Roger dressed and decided to spend the rest of the night in the co-pilot’s seat, no matter how uncomfortable.