The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 52
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"Let's stay here for ever," said Vicky. "I'm so happy. I don't want it to end." "We'll stay a little longer," Ralph agreed, with his arm about Cathy's waist. "I told Doctor Jim we were coming up here to hunt buffalo. If we don't bring a few wagon-loads of hides back with us, the little doctor is going to start wondering." The evening wind came softly out of the east. Ralph knew that at this season it would hold steadily during the night, and increase with the warmth of the sun.
He sent out two teams of his Matabele, each team armed with a package of Swan Vestas and leading a span of trek oxen. They moved out eastwards and by dawn they had reached the bank of the Gwaai river.
Here they felled two big dried-out Thorn-trees and hooked the trek chains onto the trunks.
When they, put fire into the branches, the dried wood burned like a torch and the oxen panicked. The drivers ran beside each span, keeping them galloping in opposite directions, heading across the wind, dragging the blazing trees behind them and spreading a trail of sparks and flaring twigs through the tall dry grass. Within an hour, there was a forest fire burning across a front of many miles, with the wind behind it roaring down towards the long open vlei where Ralph's wagons were out spanned The smoke billowed heaven-high, a vast dun pall.
Ralph had roused the camp before first light, and he supervised the back-burn while the dew on the vlei subdued the flames and made them manageable. The Matabele put fire into the grass on the windward side of the open vlei and let it burn to the forest line on the far side.
Here they beat it out before it could take hold of the trees.
Isazi rolled his wagons out onto the blackened still-hot earth, and formed them into a square with his precious oxen penned in the centre. Then, for the first time, they had a chance to pause and look eastward. The dark smoke cloud of the forest fire blotted out the dawn, and their island of safety seemed suddenly very small in the path of that terrible conflagration. Even the mood of the usually cheerful Matabele was subdued, and they kept glancing uneasily at the boiling smoke line as they honed their skinning knives.
"We will be covered with soot," Cathy complained. "Everything will be filthy." "Amd a little singed, like as not," Ralph laughed, as he and Bazo checked the spare horses and slipped the rifles into their scabbards.
Then he came to Cathy and with an arm about her shoulders, told her, "You and Vicky are to stay in the wagons. Don't leave them, whatever happens. If you get a little warm, splash water on yourselves, but don't leave the wagons."
Then he sniffed the wind, and caught the first whiff of smoke. He winked at Harry, who had Vicky in his arms in a lingering farewell.
"I'll bet my share of the Wankie field against yours." "None of your crazy bets, Ralph Ballantyne," Vicky cut in quickly. "Harry has a wife to support now!" "A guinea, then!" Ralph moderated the wager.
"Done!" agreed Harry.
They shook hands on it and swung up into the saddles. Bazo led up Ralph's spare horse, with a rifle in the scabbard and a bandolier of bright brass cartridges looped to the pommel.
"Keep close, Bazo," Ralph told him, and looked across at Harry.
He had his own Matabele outrider and spare horse close behind him.
"Ready?" Ralph asked, and Harry nodded, and they trotted out of the laager.
The acrid stink of smoke was strong on the wind now, and the horses flared their nostrils nervously and stepped like cats over the hot ash of the back-burn.
"Just look at them!" Harry's voice was awed.
The herds of buffalo had begun moving down-wind ahead of the bushfire. Gradually one herd had merged with another, a hundred becoming five hundred, then a thousand. Then the thousand began multiplying, the westward movement becoming faster, black bodies packing closer, the earth beginning to tremble faintly under the iron-black hooves. Now every few minutes one of the herd bulls, an animal so black and solid that he seemed to be hewn from rock, would stop and turn back, stemming the moving tide of breeding cows. He would lift his mighty horned head with its crenellated bosses and snuffle the east wind into his wet nostrils, blink at the sting of the smoke, turn again and break into a heavy swinging trot, and his cows would be infected by his agitation, while the red calves bawled in bewilderment and pressed to the flanks of their dams.
Now the herds were being compressed against each other.
The huge beasts, the largest of them a ton and a half of flesh and bone, were moving shoulder to shoulder and muzzle to tail across a front almost a mile wide. The leaders came cascading out of the forest onto the edge of the vlei, while the serried ranks reached back into the looming dust and were hidden by the twisted silver trunks of the ms asa trees.
Ralph knotted the scarf up over his nose and mouth, and pulled his hat low over his eyes.
"Harry, my lad, every one that falls this side of the wagons," he made a wide gesture, "is mine. Everything that side is yours." "And a guinea on the bag," Harry agreed. He levered a cartridge into the breech of his Lee Enfield rifle and with one of his wild Indian whoops clapped his heels into his horse's flanks and drove straight at the nearest beasts.
Ralph let him go, and held his own horse down to a trot. Gently he angled in towards the rolling herds, careful not to spook them prematurely, letting them concentrate on the flames behind rather than the hunter ahead. This way he got in really close, and picked out a good bull in the front rank. He leaned into the rifle' and aimed into the barrel of the thick neck, just where the bald scabby hide creased at the front of the shoulder.
The shot was almost drowned by the din of pounding hooves and bawling calves, but the bull dropped his nose to the earth, and somersaulted over it, sliding on his back, kicking convulsively in his death agony, and bellowing as mournfully as a foghorn in a winter gale.
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