The Prey (20 page)

The Australian woman was lost to their conversation, snapping picture after picture with her expensive digital camera. Finally she lowered it and just gazed at Marula. ‘He’s beautiful.’

Tertia saw the look again. It had changed, as it did for most people, from surprise to awe to rapture. She had seen people cry at their first elephant sighting. Kylie put her hand on her heart. It was an instinctive gesture, not meant to be seen. Tertia loved seeing this type of reaction in first-time visitors. She wanted not to hate the woman at this moment, but business was business.

‘His name is Marula,’ she said softly.

‘Like the drink they were offering on the South African Airways flight?’ Still not taking her eyes off him.

Marula snatched a tuft of grass with the finger-like tips of his trunk, brushed it against his leg to remove the loose soil, and popped the brittle blades into his mouth. ‘That’s Amarula, but it’s made from the same thing, the marula fruit. All elephants love the fruit, when they ripen, but Marula’s always been particularly berserk for them. We tried putting up a boma many years ago – that’s a fenced enclosure – to keep some rhino we were relocating to the reserve from the Kruger Park before the fences came down between us and them. The idea was the rhino would get used to their surroundings. Unfortunately one of Marula’s favourite trees was in the boma and he destroyed the fence faster than we could erect it. We had to relocate the boma eventually.’

‘Look at his eyelashes,’ Kylie said.

Tertia saw how the majesty of the animal was working its magic. This woman had made it to the top of a man’s game by not taking shit from anyone, and now she was totally disarmed, rendered childlike by an old elephant. Tertia hoped she could make this work to her advantage. ‘He comes here every year, following the ancient game trails that are programmed into his memory like some mammalian GPS. This is where he feels comfortable, Kylie, where he feels at home.’

The woman blinked, as though coming out of a trance, and Tertia wondered if she had overdone it a bit by suddenly using her first name. ‘Ancient?’

‘His ancestors would have followed the same routes,’ Tertia said.

‘Hang on,’ Kylie said, looking away from the elephant. The glow had faded and her emerald eyes locked onto Tertia’s. ‘You just said “before the fences came down between them and us”, didn’t you?’

Tertia shrugged. She turned the key in the ignition.

‘Lion Plains didn’t become part of the greater Kruger National Park until 1993. Before that you were simply part of the Sabi Sand Game Reserve, fenced off from the national park. That elephant’s only been roaming the greater Kruger for the past twenty years, not for generations.’

Tertia waved her hand in the air again, then engaged gear.

‘In fact,’ the Australian droned behind her, ‘from what I’ve read, it’s likely his ancestors would have been born in Mozambique as so many elephants had been killed in this part of South Africa that by the time he was born they were almost eradicated. His parents probably moved from Mozambique into the lowveld and then eventually onto your farm about the time your family was switching it from cattle to game.’

Tertia looked back over her shoulder as she drove. ‘What’s your point?’

‘His family has relocated a couple of times. He can do it again.’

Tertia sighed. She had underestimated the woman, but she wasn’t ready to give up yet, no matter how hopeless the odds. ‘Maybe. But he’ll be going backwards next time, not forwards.’

*

Chris had seen how Tertia had continued to seethe on the rest of the short drive to Lion Plains. She’d thought she had the measure of Kylie, but the Australian had pulled back from her moment of weakness – her first sighting of an elephant in the wild – and set Tertia back on her butt.

He was pleased they were staying the night, even though Kylie had questioned the need for it at first. It was three in the afternoon when they arrived at the lodge, allowing them just half an hour before high tea, followed by the regular afternoon game drive at four.

Tertia stopped the Land Rover and, after curtly telling them the schedule, walked off to her office.

‘We can skip the game drive if you want,’ Cameron said to Kylie.

Chris didn’t appear to be part of the decision-making process, but he was fine with that.

‘Oh well, we’re here now, and I don’t know if I want to spend any longer with that woman than I have to,’ Kylie said with a laugh, which Chris thought was forced.

The truth was Kylie now actually
did
want to get back into an open Land Rover and go for another drive. Certainly she was
right – it would be a more pleasant experience than spending an hour or two more than necessary across a table from Tertia – but he had seen the same thing that Tertia had. Kylie had just sampled her first real taste of Africa and she was ready for more.

Two guides arrived and took Cameron and Kylie’s bags and led them off to their rooms. ‘See you at three-thirty?’ Kylie said to him.

‘
Ja
, I’d never miss a game drive,’ Chris said. He loved the bush. She gave him a wave and walked off behind the guide.

Chris wondered what Cameron thought of the exchange between the women. Cameron had been quiet on the trip up from Barberton – quiet since the rescue.

Chris had thought they were all going to die – Cameron for sure – when he had leapt on the grenade. Cameron had been annoyed at him, he knew, for telling the reporter from
Beeld
about the incident with the grenade. When he thought about it now it seemed like something out of a movie, but at the time his terror had been all too real. And Cameron, why had he done that? Chris liked to think he would have sacrificed himself for the others, but he doubted it.

Kylie’s reaction had been interesting, too. She had run towards Cameron, not from him. Chris couldn’t have done much of anything. He had Luis on his back so he couldn’t have jumped. He had fallen onto the rock-cut steps and waited for the explosion that should have shredded Cameron’s body.

But it hadn’t happened. The grenade was a dud.

Cameron, shaken but still in control, had eventually got to his feet and ushered first Kylie and then Chris and Luis to the next landing. He then kicked the grenade down the shaft to the next level. Explosive Ordnance Disposal technicians from the army had later been called in to get rid of the explosive and to search the
zama zamas’
workings for more explosives and weapons.

Nine of the illegal miners had been killed in the rockfalls and thirty had been rounded up, some of them injured, by the police who had been forced, belatedly, to go underground after Cameron’s
one-man commando raid had rescued Chris and disrupted Wellington’s operation.

Wellington himself had got away. While Chris knew the other
zama zamas
would have escaped through the labyrinth of old tunnels and some might have stayed to regroup and start work again, Wellington’s operation had been dealt a blow that might end it forever in Eureka. Much of his equipment had been destroyed or confiscated, and his workforce slashed.

Chris checked his watch. It was 15:10. He had less than twenty minutes. He knew he should probably go to his room and check emails. Instead he walked into the old farmhouse that had been converted to the lodge’s dining and bar area.

He went through the entrance foyer and turned right down a corridor that led to a new extension that housed the lodge’s administrative offices. The administrative assistant’s office was empty. Tertia’s was next door.

Chris felt his pulse start to throb in his carotid artery and he was suddenly short of breath as he put his hand on the door handle. He turned the knob.

Tertia looked up from her laptop, unsmiling.

Chris kept his eyes on her and closed the door behind him.

She glanced down, looking at her watch. ‘You have to be on a game drive in eighteen minutes.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you want to talk about what happened to you?’

He gave a brief shake of his head and took a step towards her desk.

She swallowed, then just sat there, lips slightly parted.

He walked to her, around the desk, and she looked up at him as he stood, so close that his leg was touching her thigh.

Tertia looked up at him. ‘There isn’t time.’ But she was already wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. He could see the rise and fall of her chest.

Chris didn’t bother trying to convince her with words. He reached for his jeans and unzipped his fly. She swivelled in her office chair
and spread her knees so her khaki skirt was hiked up and her legs were either side of him. Still sitting, she leaned forward and pulled his penis from his pants. She glanced up, catching his eye, and he saw her sly smile.

He wrapped his hand in her hair and guided her face onto him, just as she opened her mouth to take him. She wanted him as much as he wanted her, but it made him feel good to gently push her head down. She moaned, deep in the back of her throat, as he felt her lips brushing against his groin.

Chris relaxed his grip but kept his hands in her hair until he was close. When he was nearly ready he pulled away, revelling in the cheated look on her face, her wanton smile. He was breathing deep now, hungry for release. He swiped the accounts and letters and pens and paperclips from her desktop with the back of his hand, and when he saw her flash of annoyance he grabbed her by the elbow and lifted her from the chair so that her bum was against the edge of her desk.

He lifted her legs and pushed her skirt higher up her thigh. Her lacy pants came away in his hand with one forceful tug. She opened herself for him and wrapped herself around him as he drove into her in one long, hard thrust. She grunted, animal-like, as he fucked her.

Chris felt her fingernails on his back, clawing at him under the blue cotton of his Global Resources shirt.

‘Yes,’ she hissed.

He held her down, his hand on her chest, preventing her from hugging him, as he exploded inside her and felt the spasms of her body gripping his at the same time.

Chris pulled out of her, wiped himself with his hand and rubbed it up the inside of her thigh. Her eyes stayed on his. ‘I’m glad you’re back safe,’ she whispered.

He put her torn pants in the pocket of his jeans and walked out of her office, closing the door quietly behind him so no one would hear.

K
ylie sat next to Cameron on the first tier of seating in the open-top Land Rover, just behind where the guide would be sitting, and checked her watch.

‘Shall we wait a while longer?’ asked the guide, Tumi Mabunda, who looked no older than twenty-four. She had intricately braided hair, and a tailored uniform, and copper and elephant-hair bracelets encircled her wrists.

‘Chris definitely said he was coming,’ Kylie said. She was a punctual person who expected the same of others. This wasn’t a business meeting, but she found herself itching to get on the road. She thought of the elephant, how content it seemed and how relaxed it had been around them.

Cameron nodded but didn’t seem to be worried by Chris’s tardiness. He looked out over a tributary of the Sabie River, which snaked its way through a valley flanked by thick riverine forest, at the base of the rise on which Tertia’s lodge was set.

She wondered what was going through his mind. He’d been very quiet on the drive up from Barberton. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the company will pay for a counsellor, if that’s what you want.’

He smiled a little and snorted. ‘No, no. I’m fine on that front.
I don’t want to sound like a Rambo, but I saw much worse during my time in the army. My thoughts are elsewhere, that’s all. I’ll be ready for the meeting with Tertia later, though, don’t worry.’

‘You’re thinking about your daughter. Jessica?’

He looked at her. ‘How did you guess?’

‘What you did, for us, was incredibly brave, but it probably hurt her.’

He nodded. ‘You’re right. I think she thinks I have some kind of death wish, and that it’s somehow a reflection on her. I thought she’d be proud of me, but she was just angry.’

‘It’s none of my business, but with your wife …’

‘Sorry, Kylie, but you’re right. It’s my business, no one else’s.’

He was a prickly man, she thought. She had only been trying to reach out to him. She realised she hadn’t actually thanked him for what he had done for her, for all of them. If the grenade
had
gone off he would have been killed for sure, and she would have at least been wounded. Cameron looked at her, and she wondered if he was still thinking about the business with the grenade and the men he had killed, despite his bravado and his problems with his daughter.

‘Sorry!’ Chris strode up the pathway from his suite, tucking in a shirt as he walked.

Kylie saw he had changed and when he climbed on the Land Rover she saw his hair was damp. He smelled of soap.

‘
Ag
, I dozed for what I thought was ten minutes and it turned out to be twenty. Sorry, but I needed a shower to wake up again.’

‘That’s fine,’ she said. Cameron was gazing out over the river.

‘Right, shall we be off?’ Tumi asked. She started the engine and the Land Rover belched a cloud of black diesel. ‘This one we call Old Smokey. Should have been replaced a couple of years ago, but with things as they are …’

Kylie wondered if they were going to be preached at the whole time.

‘Sorry,’ Tumi said. ‘I didn’t mean to talk politics.’

‘It’s fine,’ Kylie said. ‘I understand how hard it must be for all of you who work here, knowing the lodge is going to close.’

Tumi shrugged. ‘Most of the guides and the other staff who work here – the cooks, the cleaners, the maids – are from the local community. Some of them will get jobs at the mine, and those who don’t will probably be absorbed onto the neighbouring game farms. The ones looking at jobs at the mine are expecting pay increases. Business hasn’t been good here and no one’s had a rise for a long time. The guides mostly work for tips, in any case.’

‘So some of you will be better off,’ Kylie said.

Tumi looked back at her. ‘I have got a degree in business, but I decided to come work in the bush for peanuts. My parents wanted to disown me, but there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be.’