Bhowani Junction (36 page)

The bike gathered speed, and Victoria stiffened. There was a clearing below on the bank of the stream; one tent was up, and Birkhe and Manbir were putting up the other. We crashed on faster and faster, and she screamed, ‘
Rodney!
Don’t be a fool!’ We shot, bouncing, across the clearing, and I headed the bike toward a thick bush. Then I let go of the handlebars, and we both put up our hands and crashed down among the bending twigs and the rushing leaves.

I helped her up and dusted her seat officiously, while she grumbled at me. Birkhe called out, ‘The sahib has come.’ Manbir said, ‘I can see that, O one-pubic-hair! Make tea.’ We
smelled wood-smoke and saw a little fire burning between four big stones near their tent. I called out, ‘Where’s the shikari?’

Kulloo came forward. He’d been squatting at the edge of the trees, but I hadn’t noticed him. He was a small wiry man. He said, ‘I am here.’

I said, ‘Any news? Have you tied the bait out?’

There is news.’ Kulloo was a man who spoke in measured tones and would not be hurried. He said, The leopard killed two days ago, up the river, the other side of the railway.’ He pointed upstream. I could just see a corner of the railway bridge among the distant tree-tops.

‘He is a young male,’ Kulloo continued. ‘He killed a small chital. I found its remains the same evening. He will be hungry again now. I have bought a kid in the village and tied it out. You are late, sahib.’

I said, ‘I know. I’m sorry. Is it a good noisy kid?’

‘It is well spoken,’ he said.

‘We’d better get a move on,’ I said.

Birkhe brought tea, and we sipped it slowly. Then he delved in a yakdan and brought out some food I’d had cooked and wrapped in Bhowani. Manbir filled the thermos. He was in a good temper again. I blew on my tea and told Victoria we really ought to have been in the machan earlier than this. She said, ‘But then we wouldn’t have bicycled up the hill, would we?’ and smiled at me. Birkhe handed me my shooting coat, and I began to load up—rifle, ammunition, nightsight, torch and attachment, matches, hurricane lantern, all sorts of odds and ends. ‘Okay.’ I said at last. ‘Now get your coat, and we’ll start.’

A few minutes before, Victoria had looked tired, but that was all gone. She walked behind Kulloo along the path, and I behind her. We followed the stream north for half a mile while the jungle thickened up on both sides, until we came to another small clearing very like the one in which the camp stood. A group of tall trees across the stream dominated both banks. On the near side a single big tree stood at the edge of the clearing. The machan was wedged in its lower branches where the tree forked, about fourteen feet up. A white kid, tied by a
short rope to a stake in the centre of the clearing, watched us, its ears twitching. A little boy was sitting at the foot of the tree with a tin-can in one hand and a stick in the other. Kulloo said, ‘You have not seen or heard anything?’

‘No, Father,’ the boy said.

The kid bleated loudly and tried to come up to us, but its rope was too short.

Kulloo said, ‘Good. You had better get up now, sahib.’

A rope hung down from the tree. Victoria looked unhappily at it, so I went up first, and between me and Kulloo and the little boy we soon had her scrambling over the edge of the machan. It swayed as she came on, and she sat down quickly. I let down the rope again, Kulloo tied the rifle to it, and I hauled up. One by one, everything came up. Victoria sat forward nervously and peered over the edge. The little boy threw up half a dozen stones, and I caught them and put them in a safe place. The kid shook its ears and watched us, silently now.

Kulloo turned up his face and asked, ‘All well, sahib?’

I said, ‘All well. Don’t come before sunrise unless I give the usual signal.’

He said, ‘All right, sahib.’

We watched the thin little man and his son walk off, one behind the other. In a minute the trees hid them. The white kid too looked after them, opened its mouth to bleat, then glanced up at Victoria and me on the machan and decided there was no need to feel lonely. It wandered two or three times round its post, tucked its feet under it, and sat down.

‘That kid’s too intelligent for its starion in life,’ I muttered.

‘I do feel sorry for it,’ she whispered back. It was a pretty little animal with a pink nose and a short twitchy tail.

‘So do I,’ I said. I picked up the rifle, took a thin cord from my pocket, tied one end round the small of the grip, and the other end fairly short, to a branch of the tree beside me. Then I fixed the torch and the nightsight, loaded the rifle, slipped on the safety catch, and leaned back against the tree trunk. From there I took aim at the kid and at a few other points round the clearing and then laid the rifle down.

I felt Victoria fumbling in the pocket of her bush shirt for a cigarette. I put out my hand to stop her, and kept it over hers. After a few minutes I whispered, ‘Relax.’ She was all tense. The first time an old peacock screamed she was going to go up like a jack-in-the-box. I thought we were quite likely to see some peafowl soon. There were a few bijasal trees across the stream into which they might come to roost.

The jungle quietened as the day faded. Slowly the edges of leaf and tree blurred, the water ran slowly, and the sound of its tinkling grew louder. She sat unmoving beside me, and her hand under mine. Something passed between our hands so that she was no longer taut, while I was keyed up to see, as though for the first time, miracles that I had seen a thousand times. The evening came, and after that the dark, and I held her hand so that she should remark the mystery of those changes. She did not stir when the first peacock crashed in with a heavy beat of wings and a scream and a thud as it landed in the branches opposite. The kid began to bleat. For half an hour the peafowl flew in and settled noisily on their roosts. In the darkness the screaming, high in the trees over there, was eerie but yet so obviously familiar that she moved her hand under mine and pressed a little closer against me. I moved carefully to let her settle back against the tree. I put my left arm loosely over her shoulders, and she went to sleep. She was a drowsy peahen, and I a wakeful cock, and we were alone.

About one o’clock I heard something moving below us. The sound was little more than an exhalation in the dry leaves at the foot of our tree. The moon was just rising. I pressed Victoria gently under her left ear. She reached down as though to pull up a sheet, remembered, and pulled her hand back quickly. I squeezed a little harder and took my arm away. My hand brushed over her hak, and then I brought the rifle up.

There were two sounds—the small, determined, restless stamping of the kid, and the other. The kid was a white blur, the other, nothing. The moonlight had not reached down there yet. Only the tops of the trees were silvered a long way off the hillside.

I snapped on the torch, and the shaft of light sprang out. I
felt Victoria holding her breath as she waited for the bang. A yellow hang-tailed pariah bitch stood there, blinking in the light, on the other side of the kid. I switched off the torch.

She squeezed my arm sympathetically. I lowered the rifle across my knees and reached out for the thermos. She uncorked it for me, and we drank slowly, careful not to let the tea gurgle in the neck of the flask. Mosquitoes whined about us, and there were lumps on my face and wrists. The pariah ran away noisily. I wondered why it had taken so long to go.

When the tea was put away we watched the moon riding up among cumulus clouds. It was a hot, close night. An airplane passed over, below the cloud base, its lights weaving like fireflies among the terraced branches. She took my hand again, and we both wanted to be up there with the pilot, to look down with him through the slanted windows on this jungle and ourselves. There was thunder in the south-west. When the plane had gone the thunder soared and grumbled round the jungle. She would find it strange to live in England, where the monsoon never came. Silent lightning hovered impatiently among the trees guarding the southern horizon.

The mosqnitoes came back. I had learned to take them, but Victoria had a skin like a baby’s bottom, and she twisted and turned and couldn’t get comfortable, anyhow. I think she longed for the end of the night, and certainly she sighed with relief when the leaves began to take on a silvery bleach. The stream quietened, and a dim mist drew on across the grass, a mist as insubstantial as a bridal veil. Soon we could see the post the white kid was tied to, and Victoria fell asleep.

The next time I nudged her she was on the edge of wakefulness, anyway. She had stirred, half awake and half asleep, as the peafowl woke up and crashed out of their trees and flew away. She sat up with a luxurious sigh and turned her head to smile at me. She stretched back her arms and yawned. In one second she was going to say, ‘I bet I look awful.’

I jabbed the point of my elbow into her ribs, and she swallowed the yawn and looked up. The kid was there, circling round its post, facing outward, its head bravely down. The pariah bitch circled round outside the kid, her teeth bared,
trying to work up the courage to attack this thing which she knew had no teeth and no horns and yet stood so fiercely at bay.

Still Victoria hadn’t seen.

The bitch darted in a pace, lost her nerve, and fell back. She was thin, and swaybacked with the weight of the milk in her dugs.

I murmured, ‘Look right.’

Victoria turned her head. Behind a tuft of grass not much higher or thicker than a woven waste-paper basket there was a leopard. The leopard crept forward upon the bitch, its stomach pressed close to the ground and its elbows high. When the bitch was facing in its direction, the leopard froze. When the bitch circled, the leopard crawled forward. The light was good and strong now. The mist hung in the jungle to the sides, and over the river, but not in the clearing.

The pariah darted in and caught the kid by the leg. The leopard bunched together, all four feet close set under the middle of its belly. Its tail rose slowly, like a bar. I fired.

The leopard’s tail sank down. The pariah let go of the kid and burst out in a frenzy of yelping. Victoria sat up with a gasp of excitement. I sat back and roared with laughter. The bitch streaked off, yelling, along the path toward the camp and village.

I said, ‘She thought it was the kid who made that bang. That’ll teach her to bully poor defenceless animals. Now, do you think you can throw a stone as far as that leopard, while I cover it, or are you really all woman?’

She took the stone and threw it out awkwardly, while I held my rifle aimed at the leopard. I suppose there’s some good anatomical reason why women always look as if they’re trying to throw their hands away when they throw a stone. The stone fell far short, and Victoria said, ‘It’s not fair. How can I throw sitting down?’

I lowered the rifle and said, ‘All woman. It’s just as well, usually. Now you can admire another of my masculine skills.’ I took a second stone, tossed it out with my left hand, and got the rifle up into my shoulder before the stone fell. It landed by
the leopard’s nose, but the leopard did not stir.

‘Fluke,’ Victoria grumbled.

I said, ‘How much will you bet?’ and threw another. That hit the leopard in the flank, and Victoria said, ‘Oh, darling, it’s really dead.’

I fired twice into the air with a ten-second interval. Victoria kissed me.

I said, ‘Let’s finish the food while we’re waiting. Tea, girl! I’m thirsty.’ And soon the shikari Kulloo came with his son and Birkhe and Manbir, and we walked back to the camp with the leopard slung on a pole among us and the kid bleating contentedly at our heels.

At the camp Kulloo wanted to know whether he should begin to skin the leopard immediately. I said, ‘No, it’ll keep till dusk. Let’s have a skinning party then. Bring along anyone who wants to come. Bring Bhansi Lall the Stationmasterbabu. Can you get five or six gallons of toddy?’

Kulloo’s taciturn face creased. He said, ‘I can get it. I’ll hang the leopard in the tree until evening. I’ll want some oil to keep the ants off.’

I nodded, and Kulloo and Birkhe and the little boy hung the leopard from a low branch and isolated the branch from the ground by banding the bark with kerosene.

When we had washed and eaten another breakfast we both felt sleepy. We went into the tent and loosened our clothes. The tent flies were up and the flap open so that the breeze could flow through. Victoria was ready first and lay quiet on the bedding. It was soft underneath and smelled of cut grass and leaves. I lay down beside her and closed my eyes. I don’t suppose she had ever slept in a tent and it was a while before she could absorb the special drowsiness of a sunny morning in the jungle. I heard Manbir grunt something to Birkhe, and Birkhe answer, ‘
Hawas.
’ A minute later the old man passed across the front of the tent with my shotgun on his shoulder. He did not look at us as we lay there, and soon the trees hid him.

In the end Victoria slept before I did. In sleep her face was calm and unmoved by the even breathing that lifted her chest.
There was none of the sulkiness which used to be in her expression when I first met her. A dawning of worry touched her mouth and round her eyelids, and I reached out my hand to stroke her. But I didn’t know what was the thought that had flitted into her sleep, or whether the touch of my hand would soothe or alarm her. Soon the buzzing of the flies turned to a rhythmic drone, and Birkhe’s small movements ebbed about the camp, and a train made a distant musical resonance in the jungle as it passed over the iron girder bridge, and I fell asleep.

We awoke together. I looked at her and put out my hand to her face. I said, ‘Get your bathing suit and come and have a swim.’

When she rubbed her forehead the sweaty dirt fell off in little black rolls, and she made a grimace of disgust at herself. She got what she wanted out of her suitcase and followed me to the stream. We worked up barefooted against the current, our trousers rolled above our knees. Half-way to the railway bridge we came to a pool It was ten or twelve feet across and no more than waist deep at best, but the water fell into it down a low fall and made white bubbles, and then swirled round in broad cool green streaks. It was late in the afternoon—I didn’t know or care exactly what time. Saturday afternoon. Victoria looked at the pool and round at the trees and said hesitantly, ‘Here?’