Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur - Страница 36
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"I'm sorry. That was insolent. I'm truly happy for you.
We must celebrate-"Quickly she moved away from him.
In the cabinet in the kitchenette, she found a bottle of Glenlivet whisky with an inch left in the bottom and added it to the steaming coffee.
"Here's success to Zambezi Waters," she saluted him with the mug. "Now first tell me all about it and then I've got news for you also." Until after midnight he elaborated his plans for her: the development of the twin ranches in the south, the rebuilding of the homestead and the restocking with blood cattle, but mostly he dwelt upon his plans for Zambezi Waters and its wildlife, knowing that that was where her interest would centre.
"I was thinking I'd need a woman's touch in planning and laying out the camps, not just any woman, but one with an artistic flair and a knowledge and love of the African bush."
"Craig, if that is meant to describe me, I'm on a grant from the World Wildlife Trust, and I owe them all my time."
"It wouldn't take up much time," he protested, "just a consultancy. You could fly up for a day whenever you could fit it in." He saw her weaken. "And then, of course, once the camps were running, I'd want you to give a series of lectures and slide, shows of your photographs for the guests- I and he saw that he had touched the right key.
Likeany artist, she relished an opportunity to exhibit her work.
"I'm not making any promises," she told him sternly, but they both knew she would do it, and Craig felt his new burden of responsibility tighten appreciably.
"You said you had news for me," he reminded her at last, grateful for the chance to draw the evening out further.
But he was not prepared for her sudden change to deadly seriousness.
"Yes, I've got news," she paused, seemed to gather herself, and then went on, "I have picked up the spoor of the master poacher"
"My God! The bastard who wiped out those herds of jumbo? That is real news. Where? How?"
"You know that I have been up in the eastern highlands for the last ten days. What I didn't tell you is that I am running a leopard study in the mountains for the Wildlife Trust. I have people working for me in most of the jeopardy areas of the forest.
AVe are counting and mapping the ties of the recording their litters and kills, trying territo cats to estimate the effect of the new human influx on them a that sort of thing which me to one o my men.
He is a marvellously smelly old Shangane poacher, he must be eighty years old and his youngest wife is seventeen and presented him with twins last week. He is a complete rogue, with a tremendous sense of humour, and a taste for Scotch whisky two tots of Glenlivet and he gets talkative.
We were up in the Vumba mountains, just the two of us in camp, and after the second tot he let it slip that he had been offered two hundred dollars a leopard-skin. They would take as many as he could catch, and they would supply the steel spring traps. I gave him another tot, and learned that the offer had come from a very well-dressed young black, driving a government Land Rover. My old Shangane told the man he was afraid that he would be arrested and sent to gaol, but he was assured that he would be safe. That he would be under the protection of one of the great chiefs in Harare, a comrade minister who had been a famous warrior in the bush war and who still commanded his own private army." There was a hard cardboard folder on the camp-bed.
Sally-Anne fetched it and placed it in Craig's lap. Craig opened it. The top sheet was a full list of the Zimbabwe Cabinet. Twenty-six names, each with the portfolio set out beside it.
"We can narrow that down immediately very few of the Cabinet did any actual fighting," Sally-Anne pointed out. "Most of them spent the war in a suite at the Ritz in London or in a guest dacha on the Caspian Sea." She sat down on the cushion beside Craig, reached across and turned to the second sheet.
"Six names." She pointed. "Six field commanders." still too many," Craig murmured, and saw that Peter Fungabera's name headed the six.
"We can do better," Sally-Anne agreed. "A private army.
That must mean dissidents. The dissidents are all Matabele. Their leader would have to be of the same tribe." She turned to the third sheet. On it was a single name.
"One of the most successful field commanders. Matabele.
Minister of Tourism, and the Wildlife Department comes under him. It's an old chestnut, but those set to guard a treasure, are too often those who loot it. It all fits." Craig read the name aloud softly, "Tungata Zebiwe," and found that he didn't want it to be true. "But he was with me in the Game Department, he was my ranger-"
"As I said, the keepers have more opportunity to despoil than any other."
"But what would Sam do with the money? The master poacher must be coming millions of dollars. Sam lives a very frugal life, everybody knows that, no big house, no expensive cars, no gifts for women nor privately owned land no other expensive indulgences."
"Except, perhaps, the most expensive of all," Sally-Anne demurred quietly. Tower." Craig's further protestation died unuttered, and she nodded. "Power. Don't you see it, Craig? Running a private army of dissidents takes money, big, big money." Slowly the pattern was shaking itself into place, Craig admitted. Henry Pickering had warned him of an approaching Soviet-backed coup. The Russians had supported the Matabele ZIPRA faction during the war, so their candidate would almost certainly be Matabele.
Still Craig resisted it, clinging to his memories of the man who had been his-friend, probably the finest friend of his entire lifetime.
He remembered the essential decency of the man he had then known as Samson Kumalo, the mission-educated Christian of integrity and high principles, who had resigned with Craig from the Game Department when they svspected their immediate superior of being involved in 4*poaching ring. Was he now the master poacher himself? The man of fine compassion who had helped Craig when he was crippled and broken to take his single possession, his yacht, with him when he left Africa. Was he now the power-hungry plotter?
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