The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (7 page)

‘Have another drink,’ Craig offered, and then steered Jock back to Rholands Ranching. ‘What did the consortium do with Rholands?’

‘Cunning bloody Krauts!’ Jock was slurring a little by now. ‘They took all the stock, bribed somebody in government to give them an export permit and shipped them over the
border to South Africa. I hear they sold for almost a million and a half down there. Remember, they were the very top breeding-stock, champions of champions. So they cleared over a million, and
then they repatriated their profit in gold shares and made another couple of million.’

‘They stripped the ranches and now they have abandoned them?’ Craig asked, and Jock nodded weightily.

‘They’re trying to sell the company, of course. I’ve got it on my books – but it would take a pile of capital to restock the ranches and get them going again. Nobody is
interested. Who wants to bring money into a country which is tottering on the brink? Answer me that!’

‘What is the asking price for the company?’ Craig enquired airily, and Jock Daniels sobered miraculously, and fastened Craig with a beady auctioneer’s eye.

‘You wouldn’t be interested?’ And his eye became beadier. ‘Did you really make a million dollars out of that book?’

‘What are they asking?’ Craig repeated.

‘Two million. That’s why I haven’t found a buyer. Lots of the local boys would love to get their paws on that grazing – but two million. Who the hell has that kind of
money in this country—’

‘Supposing they could be paid in Zürich, would that make a difference to the price?’ Craig asked.

‘Do a Shona’s armpits stink!’

‘How much difference?’

‘They might take a million – in Zürich.’

‘A quarter of a million?’

‘No ways, never – not in ten thousand years,’ Jock shook his head emphatically.

‘Telephone them. Tell them the ranches are over-run with squatters, and it would cause a political hoo-ha to try and move them now. Tell them they are running goats on the grazing, and in
a year’s time it will be a desert. Point out they will be getting their original investment out intact. Tell them the government has threatened to seize all land owned by absentee landlords.
They could lose the lot.’

‘All that is true,’ Jock grumped. ‘But a quarter of a million! You are wasting my time.’

‘Phone them.’

‘Who pays for the call?’

‘I do. You can’t lose, Jock.’

Jock sighed with resignation. ‘All right, I’ll call them.’

‘When?’

‘Friday today – no point in calling until Monday.’

‘All right, in the meantime can you get me a few cans of gas?’ Craig asked.

‘What do you wants gas for?’

‘I’m going up to the Chizarira. I haven’t been up there for ten years. If I’m going to buy it, I’d like to look at it again.’

‘I wouldn’t do that, Craig. That’s bandit country.’

‘The polite term is political dissidents.’

‘They are Matabele bandits,’ Jock said heavily, ‘and they’ll either shoot your arse full of more holes than you can use, or they will kidnap you for ransom – or
both.’

‘You get me some gas and I’ll take the chance. I’ll be back early next week to hear what your pals in Zürich have to say about the offer.’

I
t was marvellous country, still wild and untouched – no fences, no cultivated lands, no buildings – protected from the influx of
cattle and peasant farmers by the tsetse-fly belt which ran up from the Zambezi valley into the forests along the escarpment.

On the one side it was bounded by the Chizarira Game Reserve and on the other by the Mzolo Forest Reserve, both of which areas were vast reservoirs of wildlife. During the depression of the
1930s, old Bawu had chosen the country with care and paid sixpence an acre for it. One hundred thousand acres for two thousand five hundred pounds. ‘Of course, it will never be cattle
country,’ he told Craig once, as they camped under the wild fig trees beside a deep green pool of the Chizarira river and watched the sand-grouse come slanting down on quick wings across the
setting sun to land on the sugar-white sandbank beneath the far bank. ‘The grazing is sour, and the tsetse will kill anything you try to rear here – but for that reason it will always
be an unspoiled piece of old Africa.’

The old man had used it as a shooting lodge and a retreat. He had never strung barbed-wire nor built even a shack on the ground, preferring to sleep on the bare earth under the spreading
branches of the wild fig.

Very selectively Bawu had hunted here – elephant and lion and rhinoceros and buffalo – only the dangerous game, but he had jealously protected them from other rifles, even his own
sons and grandsons had been denied hunting rights.

‘It’s my own little private paradise,’ he told Craig, ‘and I’m selfish enough to keep it like that.’

Craig doubted that the track through to the pools had been used since he and the old man had last been here together ten years before. It was totally overgrown, elephant had pushed mopani trees
down like primitive road-blocks, and heavy rains had washed it out.

‘Eat your heart out, Mr Avis,’ said Craig, and put the sturdy little Volkswagen to it.

However, the front-wheel drive vehicle was light enough and nippy enough to negotiate even the most unfriendly dry river-beds, although Craig had to corduroy the sandy bottoms with branches to
give it purchase in the fine sand. He lost the track half a dozen times, and only found it after laboriously casting ahead on foot.

He hit one ant-bear hole and had to jack up the front end to get out, and half the time he was finding ways around the elephant road-blocks. In the end he had to leave the Volkswagen and cover
the last few miles on foot. He reached the pools in the last glimmering of daylight.

He curled up in the single blanket that he had filched from the motel, and slept through without dreaming or stirring, to wake in the ruddy magic of an African dawn. He ate cold baked beans out
of the can and brewed coffee, then he left his pack and blanket under the wild figs and went down along the bank of the river.

On foot he could cover only a tiny portion of the wide wedge of wild country that spread over a hundred thousand acres, but the Chizarira river was the heart and artery of it. What he found here
would allow him to judge what changes there had been since his last visit.

Almost immediately he realized that there were still plenty of the more common varieties of wildlife in the forest: the big, spooky, spiral-horned kudu went bounding away, flicking their fluffy
white tails, and graceful little impala drifted like roseate smoke amongst the trees. Then he found signs of the rarer animals. First, the fresh pug-marks of a leopard in the clay at the
water’s edge where the cat had drunk during the night, and then, the elongated teardrop-shaped spoor and grapelike droppings of the magnificent sable antelope.

For his lunch he ate slices of dried sausage which he cut with his clasp-knife and sucked lumps of tart white cream of tartar from the pods of the baobab tree. When he moved on he came to an
extensive stand of dense wild ebony bush, and followed one of the narrow twisting game trails into it. He had gone only a hundred paces when he came on a small clearing in the midst of the thicket
of interwoven branches, and he experienced a surge of elation.

The clearing stank like a cattle-pen, but even ranker and gamier. He recognized it as an animal midden, a dunghill to which an animal returns habitually to defecate. From the character of the
faeces, composed of digested twigs and bark, and from the fact that these had been churned and scattered, Craig knew immediately that it was a midden of the black rhinoceros, one of Africa’s
rarest and most endangered species.

Unlike its cousin the white rhinoceros, who is a grazer on grassland and a lethargic and placid animal, the black rhinoceros is a browser on the lower branches of the thick bush which it
frequents. By nature it is a cantankerous, inquisitive, stupid and nervously irritable animal. It will charge anything that annoys it, including men, horses, lorries and even locomotives.

Before the war, one notorious beast had lived on the escarpment of the Zambezi valley where both road and railway began the plunge down towards the Victoria Falls. It had piled up a score of
eighteen lorries and buses, catching them on a steep section of road where they were reduced to a walking pace, and taking them head-on so that its horn crunched through the radiator in a burst of
steam. Then, perfectly satisfied, it would trot back into the thick bush with squeals of triumph.

Puffed up with success, it finally over-reached itself when it took on the Victoria Falls express, lumbering down the tracks like a medieval knight in the jousting lists. The locomotive was
doing twenty miles per hour and the rhinoceros weighed two tons and was making about the same speed in the opposite direction, so the meeting was monumental. The express came to a grinding halt
with wheels spinning helplessly, but the rhinoceros had reached the end of his career as a wrecker of radiators.

The latest deposit of dung on the midden had been within the preceding twelve hours, Craig estimated with delight, and the spoor indicated a family group of bull and cow with calf at heel.
Smiling, Craig recalled the old Matabele myth which accounted for the rhino’s habit of scattering its dung, and for its fear of the porcupine – the only animal in all the bush from
which it would fly in snorting panic.

The Matabele related that once upon a time the rhino had borrowed a quill from the porcupine to sew up a tear caused by a thorn in his thick hide. The rhino promised to return the quill at their
next meeting. After repairing the rent with bark twine, the rhino placed the quill between his lips while he admired his handiwork, and inadvertently swallowed it. Now he is still searching for the
quill, and assiduously avoiding the porcupine’s recriminations.

The total world-wide population of the black rhinoceros probably did not exceed a few thousand individuals, and to have them still surviving here delighted Craig and made his tentative plans for
the area much more viable.

Still grinning, he followed the freshest tracks away from the midden, hoping for a sighting, and had gone only half a mile when just beyond the wall of grey impenetrable bush that flanked the
narrow trail, there was a sudden hissing, churring outcry of alarm calls and a cloud of brown ox-peckers rose above the scrub. These noisy birds lived in a symbiotic relationship with the larger
African game animals, feeding exclusively on the ticks and bloodsucking flies that infested them, and in return acting as wary sentinels to warn of danger.

Swiftly following the alarm, there was a deafening chuffing and snorting like that of a steam engine: with a crash, the bush parted and Craig got his longed-for sighting as an enormous grey
beast burst out onto the path not thirty paces ahead of him and, still uttering blasts of affronted indignation, peered short-sightedly over its long polished double horns for something to
charge.

Aware that the beast’s weak eyes could not distinguish a motionless man at more than fifteen paces, and that the light breeze was blowing directly into his face, Craig stood frozen but
poised to hurl himself to one side if the charge came his way. The rhino was switching his grey bulk from side to side with startling agility, the din of his ire unabated, and in Craig’s
fevered imagination his horn seemed to grow longer and sharper every second. Stealthily he reached for the clasp-knife in his pocket. The beast sensed the movement and trotted a half dozen paces
closer, so that Craig was on the periphery of his effective vision and in serious danger at last.

Using a short underhanded flick, he tossed the knife high over the beast’s head into the ebony thicket behind it, and there was a loud clatter as it struck a branch.

Instantly the rhino spun around and launched its huge grey body in a full and furious charge at the sound. The bush opened as though before a centurion tank, and the clattering, crashing charge
dwindled swiftly as the rhinoceros kept going up the side of the hill and over the crest in search of an adversary. Craig sat down heavily in the middle of the path, and doubled over with
breathless laughter in which were echoes of mild hysteria.

Within the next few hours, Craig had found three of the pans of stinking, stagnant water that these strange beasts prefer to the clean running water of the river, and he had decided where to
site the hides from which his tourists could view them at close range. Of course, he would furnish salt-licks beside the waterholes to make them even more attractive to the beasts, and bring them
in to be photographed and gawked at.

Sitting on a log, beside one of the waterholes, he reviewed the factors that favoured his plans. It was under an hour’s flight from here to the Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural
wonders of the world, that already attracted thousands of tourists each month. It would be only a short detour to his camp here, so that added little to the tourists’ original airfare. He had
an animal that very few other reserves or camps could offer, together with most of the other varieties of game, concentrated in a relatively small area. He had undeveloped reservations on both
boundaries to ensure a permanent source of interesting animal life.

What he had in mind was a champagne and caviar type of camp, on the lines of those private estates bordering the Kruger National Park in South Africa. He would put up small camps, sufficiently
isolated from each other so as to give the occupants the illusion of having the wilderness to themselves. He would provide charismatic and knowledgeable guides to take his tourists by Land-Rover
and on foot close to rare and potentially dangerous animals and make an adventure of it, and luxurious surroundings when they returned to camp in the evening – air-conditioning and fine food
and wines, pretty young hostesses to pamper them, wildlife movies and lectures by experts to instruct and entertain them. And he would charge them outrageously for it all, aiming at the very upper
level of the tourist trade.

It was after sunset when Craig limped back into his rudimentary camp under the wild figs, his face and arms reddened by the sun, tsetse-fly bites itching and swollen on the back of his neck, and
the stump of his leg tender and aching from the unaccustomed exertions. He was too tired to eat. He unstrapped his leg, drank a single whisky from the plastic mug, rolled into his blanket and was
almost immediately asleep. He woke for a few minutes during the night, and while he urinated he listened with sleepy pleasure to the distant roaring of a pride of hunting lions, and then returned
to his blanket.