A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 31

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"We'll take ten minutes" rest here," Sean told them. "You can have a drink now." He looked at Claudia. "But try to limit it to two mouthfuls, unless you'd like to try some of that." He indicated the foul pool, and she grimaced.

He left her sitting beside her father and went to where Matatu stood alone at the head of the pool. "What is it?" he asked. After twenty years, he could read the little man's moods.

Matatu shook his head and his wrinkles sagged lugubriously.

"Something is not right here," Matatu told him. "The bull is unhappy. He goes one way and then the other. He travels swiftly, but without purpose. He does not feed, and he walks as though the ground burns his feet."

"Why is that, Matatu?" " do not know," he admitted. "But I do not like it, Bwana."

Sean left him and went back to where Claudia sat. "Let's take a look at your feet." He had spotted the slight lImp she had developed in the last hour.

"Are you serious?" She began to smile, but he took one of her feet in his lap, untied the laces, and pulled off her boot and sock.

Her feet were long and narrow like her hands, but the skin was delicate and there was a bright pink spot on her heel and another on the hall of her big toe. Sean cleaned the tender spots with cotton wool and surgical spirit. It gave him an intimate, sensuous pleasure to handle those finely formed feet, but he told her severely, "These must have been hurting you. Don't try and be brave-another few miles and you would have had blisters like a bunch of grapes, and we would have had a cripple on our hands."

He taped the tender spots. "Change socks," he ordered. "And the next time tell me as soon as it hurts." She obeyed him meekly, and they went on.

A little before noon, the spoor changed direction again and ran due east. "We have gained an hour or two on him," Sean whispered to Riccardo. "But Matatu doesn't like it and neither do I. He's spooky and tense and he's heading straight for the Mozambique border."

"Do you think he has sensed us?" Riccardo was worried, but Sean shook his head.

"Impossible. We're still hours behind. At noon they stopped again briefly to eat and rest. When they went on again, they had not gone more than a mile before they entered a grove of morula trees. The ripe yellow fruit lay thickly on the ground beneath them and the old bull had not been able to resist them. He had fed heartily, spending at least three hours in the grove, shaking the trees to bring down more fruit, then at last setting off again eastward as though suddenly remembering a rendezvous.

"At least we've gained three hours on him," Sean told them, but he was frowning. "We are only ten miles from the Mozambique border. If he crosses, we've lost him. Sean considered running the spoor. In the old days of the bush war, he and Job and Shadrach had never walked in pursuit of the enemy. Running, they had been able to cover sixty or seventy miles in a single day. He glanced back at Claudia; she might surprise him, for she moved like an athlete and despite the incipient blisters there was still a spring and snap in her step. Then he looked back at Riccardo and abandoned the idea. Riccardo was wilting in the ninety-five-degree heat of the valley. Sean tended to forget sometimes that Riccardo was only a year or two short of sixty. He had always been so fit, but now he was showing sips of distress, his eyes sunken in plum-colored hollows and a grayish cast to his skin.

"Old beggar is looking sick," Sean thought. "I can't push him harder."

He had let his attention wander, and now he almost ran into Matatu as the tracker stopped suddenly, still hunched over the spoor. "What is it?" he demanded. The little man's agitation was obvious. He was shaking his head and muttering in that obscure Ndorobo dialect that even Sean could not understand.

"What?"... " Sean broke off as he saw it. "Oh shit!" he blurted. Two separate pairs of human tracks had come in from the side and now overlaid the elephant bull's pad marks. Here the earth was sandy and friable, the tracks clear.

Two men, wearing rubber-soled shoes. Sean recognized the distinctive pattern of the soles... those ubiquitous Bata tennis shoes, locally manufactured and sold for a few dollars in every street market and general dealer's store.

Even Riccardo picked out the alien human prints. "Who the hell is that?" he demanded. But Sean ignored him and drew aside with Job to watch Matatu.

Matatu scurried back and forth, picking over the spoor like an old hen, and then came back to them. They squatted down, Job on one side of Sean, Matatu on the other-a council of war, from which only Shadrach was missing.

"Two men. One young and tall and thin, he walks on his toes.

The other older, shorter, fatter. Both are carrying packs and banduki. " Sean knew he had deduced all this from the length of stride, the different way the two men heeled and toed under packs, and the unbalancing of a heavy weapon carried in one hand. "They are foreigners. The men of the valley do not wear shoes, and these men came in from the north."

Zambian poachers," Job grunted. "They are after rhino horn, but they stumbled on the elephant and he is too big to let pass.

"Bastards!" said Sean bitterly. In 1970 there had been an estimated twelve thousand black rhinoceros left in Zambia across the Zambezi River. Now there were none, not a single animal left.

A Yemem nobleman would pay fifty thousand dollars for a dagger with a rhinoceros-horn handle, and the poachers organized themselves like military expeditions. There were still a few hundred rhinoceros left on the southern side of the Zambezi Valley, and from the Zambian side the poachers crossed the river in the night, slipping past the game department patrols. Many of the poachers had been bush fighters in the guerrilla war. They were hard men, killers of men as well as of the great animals on which they preyed.

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