Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 29

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Isaac Mtwetwe answered the call almost immediately the Karoi telephone exchange made the connection to Mana Pools.  Isaac, Daniel blurted with relief.  When did you get back?  I have just walked into my office this minute, Isaac told him.  We got back ten minutes ago.  I have one man wounded.  I must get him to hospital.  You made contact, then?  Yes, we made contact.  Like you said, Danny, a big gang, bad guys.  Did you get any prisoners, Isaac?  Daniel demanded eagerly.

if you managed to grab a couple of them, we're home and dry.  Isaac Mtwetwe stood at the wheel of the twenty-foot assault craft and ran downriver in the night.

His rangers squatted on the deck below the gunwale and huddled into their greatcoats, for it was cold out on the water with the wind of their passage accentuating the chill of the river mist.

The outboard motor was running rough and cutting out intermittently.

Twice Isaac had to let the boat drift while he went back to work on it.

it badly needed a full overhaul, but there was never enough foreign exchange available for spares to be imported.  He got her running again and pointed the bows downstream.

A thick slice of moon spiked up above the dark trees that lined the bank of the Zambezi.  it gave Isaac just enough light to push the boat up to top speed.  Although he knew each curve and stretch of the river intimately for the next fifty miles, right down to Tete and the Mozambique border, the shallows and rocky outcrops were too complex even for him to run in complete darkness.  The glow of moonlight turned the patches of river mist to iridescent pearl dust and gave to the open water a lustre like polished black obsidian.  The subdued hum of the motor and the speed of their progress gave no advance warning.  They drew level with the hippopotamuses feeding in the reedbanks before the monstrous amphibians were aware of their arrival.

In panic they tobogganed down the steep and slippery paths into the river, and went through the surface in a welter of spray.  The flocks of wild duck roosting in the lagoons and quiet backwaters were more alert.

The assault boat's approach sent them aloft on whistling wings, silhouetted against the rising moon.

Isaac knew exactly where he was heading.  He had been a freedom fighter during the bush war and he had crossed this same river to raid the white farms and harass the security forces of Ian Smith's illegal regime.  He knew all the techniques and tricks that the poachers employed.  Some of them had been his comrades-in-arms in the struggle, but they were the new enemy now.  He hated them as much as he had ever hated the Selous Scouts or the Rhodesian Light Infantry.

The Zambezi was almost half a mile wide along this stretch below Chirundu and Mana Pools.  The raiders would need craft to cross its mighty green flood.  They would get them the same way the guerrillas once had, from the local fisherfolk.

The Zambezi supports an itinerant population of fishermen who build their villages upon her banks.  The villages are impermanent, for the tenor of their lives is dictated by the Zambezi's moods.  When the river floods her banks and inundates the flood plains, the people must move to higher ground.

They must follow the migrations of the shoals of tilapia and tiger fish and barbeled catfish on which they live, so every few months the clusters of rude thatched huts with their fishsmoking racks and smouldering fires are abandoned and allowed to fall into decay as the tribe moves on.

It was part of Isaac's duty to monitor the movements of the fisherfolk, for their exploitation of the river had a profound effect on the river ecology.  Now he smelled the smoke and the odour of drying fish on the night air, and throttled back the motor.  Softly he crept in towards the northern bank.  If the poachers had come from Zambia, that was where they would return.

The odour of fish was stronger and tendrils of smoke drifted out low across the water to mingle with the mist.  There were four huts with shaggy thatched roofs in an angle of the bank, and four long dugout canoes drawn up on the narrow beach below them.

Isaac nosed the assault craft on to the beach and jumped ashore, leaving one of his rangers to hold the bows.  An old woman crawled out of the low door of one of the huts.  She wore only a skirt of lechwe antelope. skins around her waist and her breasts were empty and pendulous.

. I see you, old mother, Isaac greeted her respectfully.  He always took pains to maintain good relations with the riverfolk.  I see you, my son, the old woman giggled, and Isaac smelled the rank odour of cannabis on her.  The Batonka people pound the weed into a paste, then mould it with fresh cow-dung into balls which they dry in the sun and smoke in clay pipes with reed mouthpieces.

The Government had granted them special dispensation to continue the tradition.  It was particularly prevalent amongst the old women of the tribe.  Are all your men in their huts?  Isaac asked quietly.  Are all the canoes on the beach?  The old woman blew her nose before she replied.  She blocked one nostril with her thumb and from the other shot a shaft of silver mucus into the fire.  She wiped the residue from her upper lip with the palm of her hand.  All my sons and their wives are asleep in the huts, and their children with them, she cackled.  You saw no strange men with guns who wished you to ferry them across the river?

Isaac insisted, and the old woman shook her head and scratched herself.

We saw no strangers.  I honour you, old mother, Isaac told her formally, and pressed a small paper packet of sugar into her withered paw.  Stay in peace.  He ran back to the assault craft.  The ranger cast off and jumped aboard as soon as Isaac started the motor.

The next village was three miles further downstream.  Once again Isaac went ashore.  He knew the headman of this village and found him sitting alone in the smoke from the fish-drying fires to keep off the singing clouds of malarial mosquitoes.

Twenty years before, the headman-had lost one of his feet to a crocodile, but he was still one of the most intrepid boatmen on the river.

Isaac greeted him and gave him a packet of cigarettes and squatted beside him in the smoke.  You sit alone, Babo.  Why can't you sleep?

Are there things that trouble you?  An old man has many memories to trouble him.

The headman was evasive.  Like strangers with guns who demand passage in your canoes?  Isaac asked.  Did you give them what they wanted, Babo?

The headman shook his head.  One of the children saw them crossing the flood plains and ran to warn the village.  We had time to hide the canoes in the reedbeds and run away into the bush.  How many men?

Isaac encouraged him.

The old man showed the fingers of both hands twice.  They were hard men with guns, and faces like lions, he whispered.  We were afraid.

When was this, Babo?  The night before last, the headman replied. When they found no people in the village and no canoes, they were angry.

They shouted at each other and waved their guns, but in the end they went away.  He pointed with his chin, eastwards down the river.  But now I am afraid they will return.  That is why I sit awake while the village sleeps.  Are the people of Mbepura still camped at the place of the Red Birds?  Isaac asked, and the headman nodded.  I think that after these hard men left here, they went down to Mbepura's village.

Thank you, old father.  The place of the Red Birds was named for the flocks of carmine-breasted bee-eaters which burrow their nests into the steep cutaway bank of the river at that point.  Mbepura's village was on the north bank, across the river from the clay cliff of the breeding colony.  Isaac approached it with the engine idling softly, allowing the flow of the Zambezi to drift him down.  All his rangers were alert.

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