A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 34

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"Run, my beauty," Sean breathed. "If I can't have you, nobody else will." And he turned his full attention back to the band of poachers.

It was immediately obvious that they were a crack unit. Two of them were throwing covering fire at the kopJe, while the third had run to where the leader had gone down in the grass and dragged him to his feet. The blue denim-clad leader had lost his rifle, and he was doubled up and clutching his side.

"Nicked him!" Sean muttered. He fired again. Dust flew above the grass as his bullet fell close beside them. The poachers began to pull out, dragging their leader with them, placing an ant-hill between them and the kopJe. Both Sean and Job were firing deliberately, but the range was increasing every second, and although Sean saw dust fly very close to the scurrying figures, they could not claim another hit before the band disappeared into the grass and scrub and the clatter of automatic fire dwindled into silence.

Sean and Job waited fifteen minutes, peering down into the valley, but they did not get another glimpse of the poachers. Sean stood up. "We'll go and take a look."

"Careful," Job warned. "They could have doubled back to lay an ambush." That was, another old guerrilla trick, and they went down the slope cautiously.

Matatu led them to where the poacher had fallen. It was an area of flattened grass. The man's weapon had disappeared; one of the other poachers must have retrieved it. Matatu picked one of the grass stems and held it out to Sean. The blood on it was almost dry.

However, the bleeding had not been profuse and they found less than a dozen droplets on the grass or balled on the dry earth.

"Flesh wound," Sean grunted. The drift of the breeze must have pushed the bullet off the vital areas of the man's body.

"Who do we follow, Tukutela or the poachers?" Job wanted to know. "The poachers will be halfway back to Lusaka by now." Sean grinned. "Follow the elephant!" he ordered Matatu.

They tracked Tukutela across the river-bed and up the farther side of the valley. After his first panicked rush, the old bull had settled down into that swinging stride that ate up the ground at a prodigious rate, and which he could keep up for days. He was boring away toward the east, toward the Mozambican border, deviating only slightly from his course to take a gap in a line of hills or to climb the easier gradient when there was no pass.

They ran hard on his spoor. Not having to take precautions against ambush, they could push themselves to the limit, but the elephant was pulling away from them and the day was wasting.

The sun was casting their long shadows ahead of them.

There was no defined border with Mozambique, no fence or cut line through the forest, but a sixth sense warned Sean that they had crossed.

He was about to give orders to halt when Job whistled softly and made a cut-out signal with his left hand. Matatu pulled up and nodded his head in agreement, and the three of them bunched up and stood looking along the faint spoor that ran ahead of them into the darkening eastern forest.

"Mozambique," Job said. "He has gone away." And the others did not deny it.

"He still goes fast." Matatu spat on the spoor. "Faster than any man can run. We will not see Tukutela again this year."

"Yes, but there will be another season," Sean said. "Next year, he will range back into the national park and come again in the new moon across the Chiwewe River. We will be waiting for him."

"Perhaps." Matatu took a pinch of snuff from the duiker-horn container that hung around his neck. "Or perhaps the poachers will find him again, or he will walk onto a land mine in an old battlefield in Mozambique, or perhaps he will die of his own great age The thought filled Sean with melancholy. Tukutela was a part of the old Africa. Sean had been born too late fully to experience that era. He had been able to glimpse only vestiges of it, yet he had a deep, nostalgic reverence for the history and past of his continent.

It was all going so fast, trodden under the greedy rush for power by the thoughtless hordes of the emerging nations, by the unbridled tribal rivalries and the lawlessness of this new age. Once again Africa was becoming the dark continent, but this time without the glory of its natural treasures-the wild game was decimated, the forests hacked down for fuel, the very earth abused by primitive and animal husbandry, and the Saharan desert each year marching southward. Tukutela was one of the very few real treasures.

Sean turned back. He had wanted that elephant. He had wanted him with the utmost parts of his being. Now, as he turned back into the west, the disappointment weighed down his legs and his heart, and he went heavily.

A little before midnight they found Riccardo and Claudia sleeping on a mattress of cut grass, under a lean-to shelter beside a fire that had burned down to coals, while Pumula sat guard at the second fire, close by.

Riccardo came awake the instant Sean touched his shoulder, and he scrambled up eagerly. "Did you find him? What happened?

What about the poachers?"

"He's gone, Capo. Across the border. We chased off the poachers, but Tukutela got clear away," Sean told him. Riccardo sagged back on the grass mattress and listened in silence while Sean described the chase and the contact with the poachers.

Claudia sat close to her father, and when Sean told them how Tukutela had crossed into Mozambique, she slipped her arm around his shoulders in a gesture of comfort.

"All right." Sean stood up. "There is one of my hunting tracks that cuts through about five miles south of here. Matatu and I will go back to fetch the truck, and Job will lead you to the track. I'll meet you there. Should take us four or five hours."

By the light of the stars alone, Matatu led Sean for four hours through forest and dense bush, bringing him at last unerringly to where the truck was parked.

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