Poacher (2 page)

Clearing his mind of all thought, he searched
for the buffalo over his open sights. When he had it centered, the
bull had already lowered its head for impact, typical of the last
few yards of a charge. Sam squeezed the trigger and rolled to his
left at the same instant. With a momentum of 750 kilogram’s moving
at 55 kilometers an hour the buffalo ploughed into the earth next
to him. He rolled once more, reloading and aiming at the same time.
He was sure the animal was dead, but ‘dead’ buffaloes were
notorious for their ability to get up and kill their pursuers. It
was good policy to kill them at least one more time. The next
bullet hit it at an angle behind the ear, exiting through the heavy
boss.

Aaron walked up and also gave it a shot in
the back of the head, grinning at the prostrate Sam. ‘Hey, nkosi,
what’s this lying down on the job? A man could get killed that
way.’ A glance at the carcass confirmed Sam’s suspicions – a broken
wire snare was embedded in the flesh around the animal’s neck, pus
oozing from the open wound. ‘Meat poachers,’ Aaron said. ‘Pity they
did not meet him in the reeds.’

On their way back the rain caught them five
kilometers from base camp. After the initial deluge it had settled
down to a steady drizzle which lifted Sam’s spirits
tremendously.

Drifting off into a peaceful sleep his last
thoughts were of gratitude for the water falling outside, quenching
the thirst of the veld he loved so dearly.

Ten kilometers to the North West, Rui dos
Santos was cursing the rain. For the past three hours he had been
huddling in the lee of a large boulder with his two accomplices,
trying to stay dry under their groundsheets. They did not have the
luxury of a tent, for ivory poachers crossing the wire from
Mozambique had to travel light. Rui was not only cursing because of
the discomfort – that was a small price to pay for the huge profits
they were reaping, selling ivory to the Chinese trader in Maputo.
What irked him was the fact that the big bull’s tracks were going
to be obliterated by morning, and they would have to start
searching blind again. The rain would also fill every pan and
hollow in the veld, causing elephants to disperse from the vicinity
of permanent water where they had spent the winter. In the coming
summer months hunting would become much more difficult and much
more dangerous, as venturing deep into the Park would increase
their chances of running into a ranger patrol.

The eastern boarder of the Kruger National
Park is also the border between South Africa and Mozambique. As it
is approximately three hundred kilometers long, running through
probably the only part of Africa that is as wild and untamed as it
was when the white man first set foot on the continent, the
maintenance if its integrity has been a headache to the South
African Government since the days of Paul Kruger himself. Before
settling for the present game fence, incorporating two
twenty-millimetre steel cables in the upper part of its three-metre
height, many alternatives were tried. The main considerations were
keeping poachers out and keeping big game in. The present fence
does neither. For an agile and determined human it is fairly easy
to scale the fence, hence the constant patrols by the South African
army and the rangers in the employ of the Parks Board. The lengths
of railway track, embedded in a cubic metre of concrete every
thirty yards to hold up the cables, do not stop a determined
elephant either. Fortunately, the indiscriminate shooting of any
game entering Mozambique discourages the highly intelligent
elephants from breaking out. At one stage a lethal electrified
fence was tried over a short distance. It killed two illegal
immigrants and six elephants. Then, at great expense, a variety of
natural barriers were tried. First, a band of sisal, six metres
wide and three hundred kilometres long was planted. On maturation
of these evergreen, thorny plants, the elephants and porcupines
proceeded to devour the whole of the eastern border of the Park in
due course. Next, one of the more toxic of the Euphorbia species
was tried. In man a scratch by one of these thorns evokes a violent
allergic reaction, and a single drop of the milky sap in an eye
results in permanent, agonising blindness. Although these succulent
plants were to be found in abundance in the area, the cultivated
plants would not grow satisfactorily.

The poaching by deserters from both the
Frelimo government army and the Mozambique National Resistance, of
especially elephant and rhino, and the infiltration of illegal
immigrants, are overlapping problems, fought nail and tooth by both
South African army and the Parks Board.

Over the past years poaching had become a
well organised international business with unscrupulous
‘businessmen’ raking in millions annually. The man in the field who
does the actual killing receives only a fraction of his
merchandise’s worth, while the big dealers scoop off the cream.
Their Swiss bank accounts swell every year as the endangered
species list grows longer and the elephant and rhinoceros
populations on the continent of Africa dwindle.

In 1978, rhinos were nearing extinction and
the elephant population on the continent of Africa had dropped to
1.6 million to about half a million. With an international ban on
the ivory trade, the price of the so-called ‘white gold’ had gone
soaring past the official price of 250 dollars a kilo. With the
dwindling animal populations in Central and East Africa, the focus
of the big smuggling networks had begun to shift towards the Kruger
National Park, one of the few last strongholds of the
pachyderms.

The population of about 8,000 elephants in
the Kruger Park was being kept constant by means of a well planned
culling program providing about seven tons of ivory annually. The
considerable proceeds of this harvest used to be ploughed right
back into the Kruger Park, contributing directly to the survival of
the species. With its CITES ban, however, millions of dollars worth
of ivory was now being stockpiled by the Parks Board.

Rui knew little of this, and cared even
less.

Six days a week, at exactly 7 a.m., the
twenty-two rangers in the Kruger Park communicated with
headquarters at Skukuza rest camp in a radio session. Sam used the
radio in his Toyota 4x4, while his assistants were breaking up
camp. To most of the rangers, radios were their only link with the
outside world, as there were no telephones deep into the Park. It
was tried long ago, but it was found that the elephants used the
telegraph poles as rubbing posts, with the result that no telephone
link lasted more than a couple of days.

John van Reenen’s voice broke through the
static at seven sharp. ‘Skukuza calling all rangers. Good morning
everyone. No general message from this side. 362, Louis, come in
please.’

Sam lighted his first pipe of the morning and
surveyed the dripping bush around him while his colleagues were
reporting in, starting with Louis Steyn stationed at an outpost
between Olifants and Letaba rest camps. The aromatic smoke of the
tobacco mingled with the smell of wet foliage, causing Sam to draw
a deep breath. The clear ‘trrrpp-chirrrrrr’ of a woodland
kingfisher contributed to Sam’s sense of well-being. Far off, in
one of the deep pools of the Nwanetzi river he could hear the
contented ‘honk honk’ of a hippo that had fed well the previous
night.

He was sitting sideways in the passenger
seat, his feet resting on the sill of the open door, holding the
pipe in his mouth with one hand, the microphone dangling in the
other. He was an extraordinarily big man, well over six feet,
pulling the scales at just over 230 well-proportioned pounds.
Constant exposure to the Lowveld sun had permanently bronzed his
face and forearms, and bleached his short hair to the colour of
winter grass. Eyes as grey as the granite hills abounding in the
Park completed the picture of rugged good looks. An aura of
unadulterated maleness emanated from the man like pheromones.

He was contemplating the efforts of a dung
beetle battling with a gigantic ball of wet dung, trying to push it
out of a footprint with its hind legs, when he was shaken from his
reverie by John van Reenen, the chief ranger, repeating his call
sign.

‘371, Sam, are you receiving me?’

‘I’m not receiving you too clearly, John. I
am not at my base station.’

‘Problems?’

‘No, I camped on the Nwanetzi last night. On
my way back now. I got the buffalo yesterday.’

‘Good. I got word from Nelspruit Hospital
this morning, your ranger will be up and about again in about six
weeks time.’

Sam sighed with relief. ‘Glad to hear that.
We had approximately sixty millimetres of rain here last night, but
it has cleared completely this morning with a very slight southerly
breeze. No messages.’

Sam put the mike back on its bracket and
walked over to where Aaron was drying the saddle of the XT500
scrambler, Sam’s favourite means of transport in the bush. ‘Mr van
Reenen says Sipho is going to be all right.’ Aaron straightened up
with a grin, which froze on his face s they heard a burst of
automatic rifle fire in the distance.

‘The elephant poachers! That’s an AK47.’
There was a mean glint of anticipation in Aaron’s eye.

Sam was shouting instructions to the other
rangers as he ran to fetch his rifle from the truck. ‘Leave the
tents and follow us in the truck!’ He grabbed his rifle from the
bracket and slung a portable radio over his shoulder. Aaron had
already started the big scrambler, and the moment Sam got on behind
him he roared off, raising a rooster tail of wet soil. The rest of
the rangers dropped what they were doing, grabbed their rifles and
ran for the truck. By the time Josiah got the truck started the
bike was long gone, but the single track in the wet ground was easy
to follow.

Rui and his men had been lucky. They had
started out at first light, and within twenty minutes they’d come
across bull’s fresh tracks in the mud. An hour later the elephant
had died in a hail of bullets amongst the fever trees.

There was an urgency in the way the three
bloody men hacked at the bone around the bases of the big tusks. In
another hour the heat from the Lowveld sun would start creating the
thermal updrafts needed by the vultures to get aloft, and by eleven
there would be hundreds of big carrion birds circling above the
carcass. These stacked towers of circling birds could be seen from
miles away, and someone was bound to come and investigate. By then
Rui wanted to be well on his way to the wire.

The thicket of fever trees and the high
humidity dampened the sound of the approaching motorcycle. Sam was
standing on the footrests with one hand on Aaron’s shoulder,
tracking. The three sets of footprints over the dish-like
indentations left by the lone bull stood out like a highway, and
they were travelling at speed.

Rui and his two accomplices never heard them
coming above their own jubilant chatter and the continuous whacking
of the axes into bone. As the big XT500 came roaring into the
clearing Rui and the man closest to him reacted instantly. They
grabbed their AK47s and ran. The third man, working on the bottom
tusk, was too slow. By the time he realised what was going on, he
was looking down the intimidating bore of the .458 Steyr
Mannlicher. Aaron grabbed the poacher, and all three of them went
down behind the carcass as one of the departing poachers started
firing his weapon over his shoulder. Sam popped up from behind the
elephant and let off a snap shot at the poacher, who went down with
a scream. The heavy .458 Nosler bullet had struck him on the elbow,
tearing off half his arm. The thunderous roar of the Mannlicher
pumped an extra squirt of adrenaline into Rui’s system, and he was
still picking up speed when he disappeared amongst the fever
trees.

While Aaron was handcuffing the first poacher
around the base of a sturdy sapling, Sam applied a tourniquet to
the other’s arm. He knew the third poacher was getting farther away
by the minute, but they were at least fifteen kilometres from the
border. There was just no way the man was going to get that far –
not with the clear imprints his boots were leaving in the sodden
soil.

After the first kilometre of running flat
out, Rui’s knees started buckling, and he knew he had to slow down.
His breath was a raw rasp in his throat, and his heart was pounding
against his ribs. He knew the man behind him was Sam Jenkins, and
he’d heard enough to know that he was in deep trouble. If half of
what he’d heard was true, trying for a shoot-out with Jenkins was
out of the question. Gripping his AK47 by the barrel he swung it
above his head and threw it as far away from his tracks as
possible. When the distant putter of the motorcycle became audible,
Rui put on a new burst of speed to get as far away from his rifle
as possible. He knew there was no way he could get away from this
man, but he could always claim that he didn’t do the shooting. With
a good lawyer he could be out again in a couple of months. When the
puttering behind him became a roar he stopped and put his hands on
his head.

Sam was scanning the ground in the area as
the bike skidded to a halt next to Rui. ‘Where did you dump your
rifle?’

‘I want a lawyer,’ Rui stated as Aaron
frisked him and put the cuffs on him.

Sam jacked a round into the chamber of the
.458 and pointed it at Rui’s groin. ‘Lawyer’s can’t do anything for
hyena shit. Where’s the AK?’

‘I did not carry a rifle.’

Sam sighed. ‘You see that warthog hole over
there?’

Rui let out a snort of contempt. Sam clicked
off the safety. ‘OK, Aaron, strip him. I’m not going to waste my
time searching for his gun.’ Before Rui realised what was going on,
Aaron had sliced through his belt, and proceeded to cut the clothes
off him with a vicious-looking knife. ‘Hey, hey! What are you
doing, man?’