Binstead's Safari (18 page)

In the morning, he was ready to go. He packed everything he'd need, lifted the knapsack, took his extra canteen and his rifle, and went to join Nicholas.

There was a second man standing by the tea tent, whom Stan could not make out until he came closer. It was Robert, Millie's special friend. Nicholas evidently hadn't wanted to let him come with them, but Stan didn't mind. As long as they got the lion—that was the main thing, and as long as he was the one to get it.

They waited. Time passed so slowly, he couldn't imagine the morning would come, ever, nor that his life could change from the greyness out of which something was supposed to appear, although he didn't believe it would. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to go to sleep for a year at least, but he was strung up too high for sleep. Spasms of sorrow rushed over him every few minutes like nausea or approaching unconsciousness. And then, for
long periods he'd seem to blank out, not thinking of anything.

Nicholas tapped him on the arm. Stan stared ahead. He saw nothing. He saw darkness. The darkness began to move.

He raised his rifle and pushed up the safety catch.
Now,
he thought,
just
as
soon
as
I
get
it
perfect.
I
'
ll
blow
you
right
off
the
earth.

The world was still formless. The outlines, the exact definitions were not there until all at once everything was there and the lion too, hurling himself off to the side and breaking away, out of camp.

The three of them followed on foot, signalling to Amos as they went past the car park.

*

It was like the afternoon Millie died; the lion would allow them a glimpse of himself, then turn and make them follow. At the end of the first day, they had been led on in a circle almost to where they had started from, but they didn't go back to camp.

“Most peculiar damn beast,” Nicholas said. They took turns to watch through the night. Anything was possible with this animal.

In the morning, Robert had a fever and couldn't stand up. “Malaria,” Nicholas said. “We're not too far from camp. Shall we go on? If we lose him, we can walk home.”

“Let's keep going,” Stan said.

They added some extra rations of water and food to their packs and sent Amos on to the camp with Robert in the landrover.

Stan was feeling as if he too might have a fever. His eyes itched and he thought the dusty air pressed all over him
like the country itself, earth and sky together breathing their heat on him. The rash he'd been afflicted with weeks before had come back. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything except the lion. He kept walking.

Every once in a while tears slipped down the corners of his bloodshot eyes. He thought he heard Millie's voice a couple of times. It came to him in pieces rather than sentences or phrases. He was aware of her having spoken—perhaps, and then the sound wasn't there. He thought back to the first apartment they'd had: the one with the broken-down stove, the old icebox out in the back hall, the luscious green bank of leaves at the windows from the tree outside, which had been his real reason for choosing the place. He remembered her opening the oven door, reaching up to the cupboards, sewing his buttons on. Her image came to him looking happy, or thoughtful, or any way—all her looks, and the gesture she sometimes used—of leaning her head a little to one side; her special look for birthdays and Christmas when she was keeping a secret, like the look she'd had recently; her sweet ineptitude if she got things mixed up. He didn't understand how he could ever have lost his temper with her. But he had, all the time. All the time. And no one had ever been as nice as Millie.

He went over their lives through all the seasons of the year. One day came back to him when they had been walking side by side, he couldn't recall exactly when, but he knew where, and it had been in the fall: they were in town during the rush hour, as the offices had let out. The sun was going down into a lingering, autumnal evening, the hurrying crowd around seemed in a good mood, all—like them—young. He'd felt that everyone was going someplace exciting, but not hurrying too much, enjoying
the last of the day. Most of the trees were still green, but it was fall all right, suddenly. The air was crisp and spicy and contained a trace of smoke. They were walking home across the bridge, through the long reaches of the blue, lilac, purple dusk. The streetlights started to come on. They walked arm in arm the last few blocks. To the door, up the stairs, to the next door. The kitchen smelled like flowers from the apples she was keeping there.

*

It would have been easier if he could go on walking in a straight line and let his thoughts take their own course, but the day wasn't going to be like that. He would have to work hard to achieve his vengeance.

It was as if the lion knew. It repeated its usual strategy and they pursued, not in a circle this time but going ever deeper into the territory that belonged to the cult.

Just before noon, the animal climbed in among some rocks. Nicholas said, “You know, this is senseless. If we go on like this, we'll be trailing him clear across Africa. It's impossible, Stan.”

“I have a feeling he's taking us into his own neighbourhood.”

“He's still in there.”

“I mean, in the long run. That's what he has in mind. What's he doing?”

“Let's have something to eat while we think about it.”

Stan was glad of the rest. He put his hand up to his head. All day long, beginning with the fuzzy, colourless
pre-dawn
, he had strained for the sight of shapes that hadn't appeared. He had been looking at everything as if his eyesight itself might call things into being. At times now the world seemed to roll over, its surfaces merging, and he
felt himself ready to fall away backwards into sleep.

“It depends where he goes,” Nicholas said. “We could spend the night at any one of a number of villages. But, if he heads off to where we were the other day, or farther east, then I don't know. Not if they've got those celebrations on. In that case, we'll have to leg it home. I can't think why Amos hasn't come back.”

“We couldn't just sleep out in the open?”

“We could. I'd rather not have to.”

They did it all the time in the army, Stan thought. Even nowadays, when war was completely mechanized; if you were deep in the jungle or wandering around out in the field, you made some kind of shelter till the morning. That was another kind of hunting, too.

A picture came to him of Sunday lunch in the summers, long ago, at his mother's parents'. And from the other side of the family: his father telling him about Uncle George and Cousin Dunstan, who went to Africa to shoot lions. And they had brought back rugs and horned heads and lots of photographs. His room—in that other grandparents' house—had had zebra-skin rugs on the floor.

Nicholas said, “I think we should turn back, you know. This chap is playing cat and mouse with us. Come back in a day or two with a team of boys and chase him out of the long grass—that's the way. All right?”

“He won't be scared. He won't chase. He didn't make a sound when the stones were hitting him. I can't leave it now, anyway.”

“We'll come back. I think it's best, Stan.”

“We might never find him again, and then it would always be unfinished.”

Nicholas sighed. He sat silent, looking out and up at the
rocks. At last he said, “Some things never finish. And one can't expect them to. I remember I once travelled through a drought area with my father. People were walking along the road, looking for a place where there was water. Only one road, everything else like burnt toast, as far as the eye could see. They were walking and crawling and dying in front of us. They lay there or pulled themselves forward on hands and knees, over the ones who couldn't move. Thousands of them. I saw for the first time how quickly people can die, and in what numbers. It doesn't bear thinking about. We were in a landrover and we had water, food, we were in the pink of health. We were going to live. We moved through the whole of it and came out untouched. There was nothing we could have done. Hundreds of thousands of them. There are some things in life that are irreconcilable. Undigestible. They don't finish. You simply have to accept them and do what you can about the other things. The droughts are going to go on. The people are going to continue to die until they leave the place. There's no way of irrigating it, and no money to carry out such a project if if were possible.”

“I just have this feeling that if I don't get him and see him die, I can't leave. I've got to stay here till I get him.”

“But not today. You're falling asleep. And you look like Robert. Let's go.” Nicholas stood up. He held out his hand to Stan, who took it and heaved himself to his feet.

He felt dizzy and his throat was sore. But he wasn't sick.
It's
grief,
he thought.
It's
only
grief
and
that
will
go
away
as
soon
as
I
kill
the
lion.

“Come on,” Nicholas said.

They started back. Stan felt all right now that someone had taken the decision out of his hands.

It was a beautiful day, hot but dry; a wonderful
atmosphere that made everything look clean, fresh and sparkling. It was like a nightmare. The rash had ceased to have any effect on him, although he could see it in red lumps on the backs of his hands. It looked bad, but unimportant ailments were often the ones that appeared most dangerous. The really serious conditions usually remained invisible until it was too late.

“You think we'll get there before nightfall?” he asked.

“Not if we have to walk all the way,” Nicholas said. “I assume they'll come back for us. Perhaps something's happened.”

“But we're in a different place. How would they know?”

“Stan, you're whacked, aren't you?”

“Yes, of course.”

They passed through an orchard. The road ran through the middle of it. And they saw three elephant moving slowly across their path off in the distance. Then they came to a meadow of tall yellow grasses—another one of those places that looked almost as though it could be a wheatfield from the Middle West. It seemed like a nice place. Stan kept his head turned towards it. He remembered about going out to Indiana that time to give the lecture, and how he didn't take Millie along because he didn't want to. His eyes hurt. He kept them fixed on the same place and realized suddenly that he was seeing a man standing in the field and looking back at him. He stopped.

The man was of medium height, with a strong,
well-proportioned
build. His hair was brown, pushed back from his forehead. His eyes were looking straight into Stan's, looking straight into them. It was the same face, the same man who was in the photographs from Millie's wallet. Stan started forward to meet him.

Nicholas yelled, but Stan didn't hear. And he didn't
slow down until Nicholas's hand was on his arm, pulling him back.

“Where are you going? What are you doing? Are you mad?” Nicholas shouted at him.

Stan said, “The man out there. He's the man in the pictures.”

“What man?”

He turned back to the field. There was no one there. “He was right there just a minute ago. He was standing in the middle of the field.”

“You're seeing things. You're raving.”

“No. His eyes—he had a very penetrating look. He's the man in the picture.”

“Wait,” Nicholas told him. They both fell silent, looking at the field. A light breeze ran through the grass.

“Where did you say?”

Stan pointed.

“All right. There's something there, but not a man. Look, you can see. The grass doesn't move in quite the same—”

“That's him!” Stan called out, as they both saw the grasses break into motion and part like the waves of the sea. The lion rushed out to the side. Nicholas fired off two shots quickly, but missed. The lion kept going on into the trees until they couldn't see him any longer.

“He's turned the tables on us,” Nicholas said. “Come on.”

“You're going for him after all?”

“Of course. He's stalking us now. Can't have a thing like that behind us all the way home in the dark. This is one for the books, Stan.”

They waded out into the field, moving carefully. Stan hated this part. He had always disliked the idea of going
blind through tall grass after the large animals, but now he detested it additionally, because of Millie—even though that other field had been much easier to walk through and the grass had been only a few inches above knee-level.

Every smallest sound broke on him with tremendous force. He was afraid that if the lion charged, he would have no response left; his system would simply flood itself and stall. He'd had a car like that once. All machines, every body, could fail.

But the lion ran. Stan and Nicholas both fired and sprinted after it, ready to face it if it turned on them.

It kept going, up a hill, and the next thing they heard was screaming.

Nicholas was in front and a little to the left. Stan could see that the lion had hit a man on the other side of the rise, and that there was another man, standing, who was shooting at them.

They dropped down to the ground fast. Stan aimed at the man's legs, but the stranger had started to scuttle away towards a jeep parked behind a stand of trees.

“What's happening?” he asked. “Should I let him have it?”

“If you can bring him down without killing him.”

He fired again. As the man reached the trees, he fell over to the side.

“Got him. Left foot somewhere, maybe the ankle.”