A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 65

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When Riccardo offered to assist, Sean told him, "Take a free ride, Capo. I want you nicely rested so you don't have any excuses if you mess up your shot at Tukutela."

At last Sean saw the fronds of the palm trees rising above the screen of papyrus ahead. Abruptly the water deepened, and he went under to his chin. He dragged himself out and they all clambered back on board. Pumula poled them through to the first island. The vegetation was so dense that it overhung the water, and they had to push their way through to reach the shore.

The earth was gray and sandy, leached by a million floods, but it was good to have dry land underfoot. Sean spread out their wet clothing and equipment to dry while Matatu slipped away to make a circuit of the island. The water had just boiled in the billy when Matatu was back.

"Yes." He nodded at Sean. "He passed here yesterday early, while we were leaving the village, but he has settled down now. The peace of the river is upon him, and he feeds quietly. He left this island at sunrise this morning."

"Which way did he go?" Sean asked.

Matatu pointed. "There is another larger island close by."

AMULet's take a look."

Hill, Sean poured a mug of tea for Riccardo and left him with Pumula while he and Matatu skirted the northern shore, forcing their way through the dense growth until they reached the base of the tallest tree on the island and climbed into its top branches.

Sean settled into a high crotch of the tree, snapped off the few leafy twigs that obscured his view, and gazed out on a scene of magnificent desolation.

He was sixty feet above the island and could see to the misty horizon. The Zambezi flowed past the island. Its waters were an opaque glassy green so wide that distance had reduced the great trees that lined the far bank to a dark band that separated green water from the high alps of cumulus cloud that soared anvilheaded into the blue African sky.

The Zambezi flowed so swiftly that its surface was ruffled by eddies and whirlpools and wayward countercurrents. Floating carpets of swamp grass had been torn loose by the current and sailed past, seeming as substantial as the island beneath him. Sean thought about crossing that forbidding river in the frail dugout. It would take more than one trip to get them all across, and he abandoned the idea. There was only one way out, and that was back the way they had come.

He transferred his attention to the chain of islands that stood like sentinels between the mother river and her spreading swamps.

The nearest island in the chain was three hundred meters away; the channel between was clogged with reeds and water hyacinth and lily pads. The blooms of the water lilies were spots of electric blue against the green water, and even in the treetop Sean could catch wafts of their perfume.

Sean raised his binoculars and meticulously swept the channel and the nearest shore of the island, for even a great elephant could be swallowed up by the sweep and magnitude of this land- and waterscape.

Suddenly his nerves jumped as he saw weighty and ponderous movement in the reeds and the gleam of wet hide in the sunlight.

His excitement was stillborn, followed by the pull of disappointment in his guts, as he recognized the broad, misshapen head of a hippopotamus emerging from the swamps.

In the lens of his binoculars he could see the pink-shot piggy eyes and the bristles in the lisproportionately tiny ears. The hippo fluttered them like the wings of a bird, shaking off the droplets that sparkled like diamond chips, forming a halo above its huge head.

It plodded through the mud, crossing from one lagoon to another, pausing only to loose an explosive jet of liquid dung that it splattered with a violent stirring motion of its stubby tail. The force of this discharge flattened the reeds behind the obese animal.

With relief Sean watched it move on and submerge itself in the further lagoon. The rotten hull of the dugout would have offered no protection from those heavy, curved tusks in the gape of huge jaws.

At last Sean glanced across at Matatu in the fork beside him, and the little Ndorobo shook his head.

"He has moved on. So must we."

They scrambled down to the ground and went back to where they had left Riccardo. The voyage in the mokorro and a good night's sleep had invigorated him. He was on his feet, impatient and eager for the hunt, the way Sean had known him before.

"Anything?" he demanded.

"No." Sean shook his head. "But Matatu reckons we are close.

Absolute silence from now on."

While they loaded the dugout, Sean gulped a mug of the scalding tea and kicked sand over the fire.

They punted and pushed the canoe across the channel to the next island, and once again Sean climbed into a treetop while Matatu scurried into the dense undergrowth to pick up the elephant's spoor again. He was back within fifteen minutes and Sean slid out of the tree to meet him.

"He has moved on," Matatu whispered. "But the wind is bad."

Looking grave, he took the ash bag from his loincloth and shook out a puff of powdery white ash to demonstrate. "See how it turns and changes like the fancy of a Shangane whore."

Sean nodded, and before they crossed to the next island he stripped off his sleeveless bush shirt. Naked from the waist up, he could instantly feel the slightest vagary of the breeze on the sensitive skin of his upper body.

On the next island they found where Tukutela had left the water to go ashore, and the mud he had smeared on the brush as he passed was still slightly damp. Matatu shivered with excitement like a good dog getting his first whiff of a bird.

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