Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur - Страница 40
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Into the Land-Rover he loaded everything he had saved from the sale of the yacht: a suitcase full of clothing, a dozen of his favourite books and a leather trunk with brass bindings, his heaviest piece of luggage, that contained the family journals.
These journals were his entire inheritance, all that Bawu had left him. The rest of the old man's multi-million dollar estate, including the Rholands shares, had gone to his eldest son Douglas, Craig's uncle, who had sold out and cut for Australia. Yet those battered old leather bound, hand-written texts had been the greater treasurer Reading them had given Craig a sense of history and a pride in his ancestral line, which had armed him with sufficient confidence and understanding of period to sit down and write the book, which had in turn brought him all this: achievement, fame and fortune, even Rholands itself had come back to him through that box of old papers.
He wondered how many thousands of times he had but never like this, driven the road out to King's Lynn never as the patron. He stopped just short of the main gate, so that his feet could touch his own earth for the first time.
He stood upon it and looked around him at the golden grassland and the open groves of flat, topped acacia trees, at the lines of blue grey hills in the distance and the unblemished blue bowl of the sky over it all, then he knelt likea religious supplicant. It was the only movement in which the leg still hampered him a little. He scooped up 01"W sr 6 the earth in his cupped hands. It was almost as rich and as red as the beef that it would grow. By eye he divided the handful into two parts, and let a tenth part spill back to earth.
"That's your ten per cent, Peter Fungabera," he whispered to himself. "But this is mine and I swear to hold it for all my lifetime and to protect and cherish it, so help me God." Feeling only a little foolish at his own theatrics, he let the earth fall, dusted his hands on the seat of his pants and went back to the Land-Rover.
On the foothills before the homestead he met a tall lanky figure coming down the road. The man wore an oily unwashed blanket over his back and a brief loin-cloth; over his shoulder he carried his fighting-sticks. His feet were thrust into sandals cut from old car tyres, and his earrings were plastic stoppers from acid jars embellished with coloured beads that expanded his earlobes to three times normal size. He drove before him a small herd of multi, coloured goats.
41 see you, elder brother," Craig greeted him, and the old man exposed the gap in his yellow teeth as he grinned at the courtesy of the greeting and his recognition of Craig.
"I see you, Nkosi." He was the same old man that Craig had found squatting in the outbuildings of King's Lynn.
"When will it rain?" Craig asked him, and handed him a packet of cigarettes that he had brought for precisely such a meeting.
They fell into the leisurely question and answer routine that in Africa must precede any serious discussions.
"What is your name, old man?" A term of respect rather than an accusation of senility.
"I am called Shadrach."
"Tell me, Shadrach, are your goats for sale?" Craig could at last ask without being thought callow, and immediately a craftiness came into Shadrach's eyes.
"They are beautiful goats," he said. "To part with them would be like parting wrth my own children." Shadrach was the acknowledged spokesman and leader of the little community of squatters who had taken up residence on King's Lynn. Through him, Craig found he could negotiate with all of them, and he was relieved. It would save days and a great deal of emotional wear and tear.
He would not, however, deprive Shadrach of an opportunity to show off his bargaining skill, nor insult him by trying to hasten the proceedings, so these were extended over the next two days while Craig reroofed the old guest cottage with a sheet of heavy canvas, replaced the looted pump with a Lister diesel to raise water from the borehole and set up his new camp-bed in the bare bedroom of the cottage.
On the third day the sale price was agreed and Craig found himself the owner of almost two thousand goats. He paid off the sellers in cash, counting each note and coin into their hands to forestall argument, and then loaded his bleating acquisitions into four hired trucks and sent them into the Bulawayo abattoirs, flooding the market in the process and dropping the going price by fifty -per cent for a net loss on the entire transaction of a little over ten thousand dollars.
"Great start in business," he grinned, and sent for Shadrach.
"Tell me, old man, what do you know about cattle?" which was rather like asking a Polynesian what he knew about fish, or a Swiss if he had ever seen snow.
Shadrach drew himself up in indignation. "When I was this high he said stiffly, indicating an area below his right knee, "I squirted milk hot from the cow's teat into my own mouth. At this height," he moved up to the kneecap, "I had two hundred head in my sole charge. I freed the calves with these hands when they stuck in their mothers" wombs; I carried them on these shoulders when the ford was flooded. At this height," two inches above the knee, "I killed a lioness, stabbing her with my assegai when she attacked my herd-" Patiently Craig heard out the tale as it rose in small increments to shoulder height and Shadrach ended, "And you dare to ask me what I know about cattle!" "Soon on this grass I will graze cows so sleek and beautiful that to look upon them will dim your eyes with tears. I will have bulls whose coats shine like water in the sun, whose humps rise like great mountains on their backs and whose dewlaps, heavy with fat, sweep the earth when d-icy walk as the rain winds sweep the dust from the drought, stricken land."
"Haul" said Shadrach, an expletive of utter astonishment, impressed as much by Craig's lyricism as by his declaration of intention.
"I need a man who understands cattle and men," Craig told him.
Shadrach found him the men. From the squatter families he chose twenty, all of them strong and willing, not too young to be silly and flighty, not too old to be frail.
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