The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (19 page)

He bought young cows that had been artificially inseminated and were well in calf. He bought bulls of fine pedigree from famous blood-lines, and laboured through the documentation and inspection
and inoculation and quarantine and insurance that were necessary before they could be permitted to cross an international border. In the meantime he arranged for road transportation northwards to
King’s Lynn by contractors who specialized in carrying precious livestock.

He spent almost two million of his borrowed dollars before flying back to King’s Lynn to make the final preparations for the arrival of his cattle. The deliveries of the blood-stock were
to be staggered over a period of months, so that each consignment could be properly received and allowed to settle down before the arrival of the next batch.

The first to arrive were four young bulls, just ready to take up their stud duties. Craig had paid fifteen thousand dollars for each of them. Peter Fungabera was determined to make an important
occasion out of their arrival. He persuaded two of his brother ministers to attend the welcoming ceremony, though neither the prime minister nor the minister of tourism, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, was
available on that day.

Craig hired a marquee tent, while Joseph happily and importantly prepared one of his legendary
al fresco
banquets. Craig was still smarting from having paid out two million dollars, so he
went cheap on the champagne, ordering the imitation from the Cape of Good Hope rather than the genuine article.

The ministerial party arrived in a fleet of black Mercedes, accompanied by their heavily armed bodyguards, all sporting aviator-type sunglasses. Their ladies were dressed in full-length safari
prints, of the wildest and most improbable colours. The cheap sweet champagne went down as though a plug had been pulled out of a bath, and they were all soon twittering and giggling like a flock
of glossy starlings. The minister of education’s senior wife unbuttoned her blouse, produced a succulent black bosom, and gave the infant on her hip an early lunch while herself taking on
copious quantities of champagne. ‘Refuelling in flight,’ one of Craig’s white neighbours, who had been an RAF bomber-pilot, remarked with a grin.

Peter Fungabera was the last to arrive, wearing full dress, and driven by a young aide, a captain in the Third Brigade whom Craig had noticed on several other occasions. This time Peter
introduced him.

‘Captain Timon Nbebi.’

He was so thin as to appear almost frail. His eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles were too vulnerable for a soldier, and his grip was quick and nervous. Craig would have liked to have spoken
to him, but, by this time the transporter carrying the bulls was already grinding up the hills.

It arrived in a cloud of fine red dust before the enclosure of split poles that Craig had built to receive the bulls. The gangplank was lowered, but before the tailgate was raised Peter
Fungabera climbed up onto the dais and addressed the assembly.

‘Mr Craig Mellow is a man who could have chosen any country in the world to live in and, as an internationally bestselling writer, would have been welcomed there. He chose to return to
Zimbabwe, and in doing so has declared to all the world that here is a land where men of any colour, of any tribe – black or white, Mashona or Matabele – are free to live and work,
unafraid and unmolested, safe in the rule of just laws.’

After the political commercial, Peter Fungabera allowed himself a little joke. ‘We will now welcome to our midst these other new immigrants, in the sure knowledge that they will be the
fathers of many fine sons and daughters, and contribute to the prosperity of our own Zimbabwe.’

Peter Fungabera led the applause as Craig raised the gate and the first new immigrant emerged to stand blinking in the sunlight. He was an enormous beast, over a ton of bulging muscles under the
glistening red-brown hide. He had just endured sixteen hours penned up in a noisy, lurching machine. The tranquillizers he had been given had worn off, leaving him with a drug hangover and a bitter
grudge against the entire world. Now he looked down on the clapping throng, on the swirling colours of the women’s national costumes, and he found at last a focus for his irritation and
frustration. He let out a long ferocious bellow, and, dragging his handlers behind him, he launched himself like an avalanche down the gangplank.

The handlers released their hold on the restrainers, and the split-pole barrier exploded before his charge, as did the ministerial party. They scattered like sardines at the rush of a hungry
barracuda. High officials overtook their wives, in a race for the sanctuary of the jacaranda trees; infants strapped on the women’s backs howled as loudly as their dams.

The bull went into one side of the luncheon marquee, still at a dead run, gathering up the guy ropes on his massive shoulders, so the tent came down in graceful billows of canvas, trapping
beneath it a horde of panic-stricken revellers. He emerged from the further side of the collapsing marquee just as one of the younger ministerial wives sprinted, shrilling with terror, across his
path. He hooked at her with one long forward-raked horn, and the point caught in the fluttering hem of her dress. The bull jerked his head up and the brightly coloured material unwrapped from the
girl’s body like the string from a child’s top. She spun into an involuntary pirouette, caught her balance, and then, stark naked, went bounding up the hill with long legs flashing and
abundant breasts bouncing elastically.

‘Two to one, the filly to win by a tit,’ howled the RAF bomber-pilot ecstatically. He had also fuelled up on the cheap champagne.

The gaudy dress had wrapped itself around the bull’s head. It served to goad him beyond mere anger into the deadly passion of the corrida bull facing the matador’s cape. He swung his
great armed head from side to side, the dress swirling rakishly like a battle ensign in a high wind, and exposing one of his wicked little eyes – which lighted on the honourable minister of
education, the least fleet-footed of the runners, who was making heavy weather of the slope.

The minister was carrying the burden of flesh that behoves a man of such importance. His belly wobbled mountainously beneath his waistcoat. His face was grey as last night’s ashes, and he
screamed in a girlish falsetto of terror and exhaustion, ‘Shoot it! Shoot the devil!’

His bodyguards ignored the instruction. They were leading him by fifty paces and rapidly widening the gap.

Craig watched helplessly from his grandstand position on the transporter, as the bull lowered his head and drove up the slope after the fleeing minister. Dust spurted from under his hooves, and
he bellowed again. The blast of sound, only inches from the ministerial backside, seemed physically to lift and propel the honourable minister the last few paces, and he turned out to be a much
better climber than sprinter. He went up the trunk of the first jacaranda like a squirrel and hung precariously in the lower branches with the bull directly beneath him.

The bull bellowed again in murderous frustration, glaring up at the cowering figure, tore at the earth with his front hooves, and gored the air with full-blooded swings of his vicious,
white-tipped horns.

‘Do something!’ shrieked the minister. ‘Make it go away!’

His bodyguards looked back over their shoulders and, seeing the
impasse
, regained their courage. They halted, unslung their weapons and began cautiously closing in on the bull and his
victim.

‘No!’ Craig yelled over the rattle of loading automatic weapons. ‘Don’t shoot!’ He was certain that his insurance did not cover ‘death by deliberate
rifle-fire’, and, quite apart from the fifteen thousand dollars, a volley would sweep the area behind the bull, which included the marquee and its occupants, a scattering of fleeing women and
children and Craig himself.

One of the uniformed bodyguards raised his rifle and took aim. His recent exertions and terror did nothing for the steadiness of his hand. The muzzle of his weapon described widening circles in
the air.

‘No!’ Craig bellowed again and flung himself face down on the floor of the trailer. At that moment a tall, skinny figure stepped between the wavering rifle-muzzle and the great
bull.

‘Shadrach!’ whispered Craig thankfully, as the old man imperiously pushed up the rifle-barrel and then turned to face the bull.

‘I see you, Nkunzi Kakhulu! Great bull!’ he greeted him courteously.

The bull swung its head to the sound of his voice, and very clearly he saw Shadrach also. He snorted and nodded threateningly.

‘Hau! Prince of cattle! How beautiful you are!’ Shadrach advanced a pace towards those vicious pike-sharp horns.

The bull pawed at the earth and then made a warning rush at him. Shadrach stood him down and the bull stopped.

‘How noble your head!’ he crooned. ‘Your eyes are like dark moons!’

The bull hooked his horns towards him, but the swing was less vicious and Shadrach answered with another step forward. The shrieks of terror-struck women and children died away. Even the most
faint-hearted stopped running, and looked back at the old man and the red beast.

‘Your horns are sharp as the stabbing assegai of great Mzilikazi.’

Shadrach kept moving forward and the bull blinked uncertainly and squinted at him with red-rimmed eyes.

‘How glorious are your testicles,’ Shadrach murmured soothingly, ‘like huge round boulders of granite. Ten thousand cows will feel their weight and majesty.’

The bull backed up a pace and gave another halfhearted toss of his head.

‘Your breath is hot as the north wind, my peerless king of bulls.’ Shadrach stretched out his hand slowly, and they watched in breathless silence.

‘My darling,’ Shadrach touched the glossy, wet, chocolate-coloured muzzle and the bull jerked away nervously, and then came back cautiously to snuffle at Shad-rach’s fingers.
‘My sweet darling, father of great bulls—’ gently Shadrach slipped his forefinger into the heavy bronze nose-ring and held the bull’s head. He stooped and placed his mouth
over the gaping, pink-lined nostrils and blew his own breath loudly into them. The bull shuddered, and Craig could clearly see the bunched muscle in his shoulders relaxing. Shadrach straightened
and, with his finger still through the nose-ring, walked away – and placidly the bull waddled after him with his dewlap swinging. A weak little cheer of relief and disbelief went up from his
audience, and subsided as Shadrach cast a withering contemptuous eye around him.

‘Nkosi!’ he called to Craig. ‘Get these chattering Mashona monkeys off our land. They are upsetting my darling,’ he ordered, and Craig hoped fervently that none of his
highly placed guests understood Sindebele.

Craig marvelled once again at the almost mystical bond that existed between the Nguni peoples and their cattle. From that age, long obscured by the mists of time, when the first herds had been
driven out of Egypt to begin the centuries-long migrations southwards, the destinies of black man and beast had been inexorably linked. This hump-backed strain of cattle had originated in India,
their genus
bos indicus
distinct from the European
bos taurus
, but over the ages had become as African as the tribes that cherished and shared their lives with them. It was strange,
Craig pondered, that the cattle-herding tribes seemed always to have been the most dominant and warlike: people such as the Masai and Bechuana and Zulu had always lorded it over the mere tillers of
the earth. Perhaps it was their constant need to search for grazing, to defend it against others and to protect their herds from predators, both human and animal, that made them so bellicose.

Watching Shadrach lead the huge bull away, there was no mistaking that lordly arrogance now, master and beast were noble in their alliance. Not so the minister of education, still clinging,
catlike, to his perch in the jacaranda. Craig went to add his entreaties to those of his bodyguards, who were encouraging him to descend to earth once more.

Peter Fungabera was the last of the official party to leave. He accompanied Craig on a tour of the homestead, sniffing appreciatively the sweet odour of the golden thatching grass that already
covered half the roof area.

‘My grandfather replaced the original thatch with corrugated asbestos during the war,’ Craig explained. ‘Your RPG-7 rocket shells were hot little darlings.’

‘Yes,’ Peter agreed evenly. ‘We started many a good bonfire with them.’

‘To tell the truth, I am grateful for the chance to restore the building. Thatch is cooler and more picturesque, and both the wiring and plumbing needed replacing—’

‘I must congratulate you on what you have accomplished in such a short time. You will soon be living in the grand manner that your ancestors have always enjoyed since they first seized
this land.’

Craig looked at him sharply, searching for malice, but Peter’s smile was as charming and easy as always.

‘All these improvements add vastly to the value of the property,’ Craig pointed out. ‘And you own a goodly share of them.’

‘Of course,’ Peter laid a hand placatingly on Craig’s forearm. ‘And you still have much work ahead of you. The development of Zambezi Waters, when will you begin on
that?’

‘I am almost ready to do so – as soon as the rest of the stock arrives, and I have Sally-Anne to assist with the details.’

‘Ah,’ said Peter. ‘Then you can begin immediately. Sally-Anne Jay flew into Harare airport yesterday morning.’ Craig felt a tingle of rising pleasure and
anticipation.

‘I’ll go into town this evening to phone her.’

Peter Fungabera clucked with annoyance. ‘Have they not installed your telephone yet? I’ll see you have it tomorrow. In the meantime you can patch through on my radio.’

The telephone linesman arrived before noon the following day, and Sally-Anne’s Cessna buzzed in from the east an hour later. Craig had a smudge pot of old engine oil and rags burning to
mark the disused airstrip and give her the wind direction, and she touched down and taxied to where he had parked the Land-Rover.