Shooting Butterflies (25 page)

‘Come,' Jamison said as he once again picked up Aunt Rose, making sure she was steady on her feet and that she'd her walking stick before letting her go. Bevin stepped up to walk next to her down the path.

‘I really appreciate all that you do for my aunt,' Bevin said. ‘I know she can be a handful.'

Jamison smiled. ‘It is my pleasure. She's a very special person in her heart.'

Wayne smiled, because he'd seen how she could be written off as nasty with her comments, like those she'd made about her nurses when they were having tea. Yet Bevin had told him a little about her help in the TTL. He thought that perhaps she wasn't so much bitter, but more like fresh white bread. Baked hard and crusty on the outside, but once you got inside, through that hard shell, the white soft centre was fluffy, a delight.

The staff at the camp all came out to greet their madam, and Wayne could see genuine affection for her shown from each of them. He wondered if Bevin's family appreciated how much this was her home, where she was a much loved matriarch.

It didn't matter to them that they had a new owner of the land, the people there still considered her their madam and their friend. They were part of her family that she'd been with all the years that Bevin had been in South Africa. She was leaving her family behind when she moved. These people would miss her.

He looked out at the large waterhole in front of the camp. He could see where fresh water pumped from deep in the earth to spill into the cement reservoir that then overflowed and fed the dam with its wall made from natural rocks and sand.

There were elephants bathing in the water and a herd of zebra grazed under the trees. A baby zebra, asleep flat on the ground, could have been mistaken for dead had its tail not periodically swished flies away. Wildebeest dug at the roots of the already short cropped grass. Ducks swam in the dam and dived for food, pointing their bottoms upwards before bobbing back up.

Wayne thought of the time he'd stolen off in the weekend and Samuel, their driver, had driven him and Tara into Hluhluwe National Park where they had watched the animals. How she'd loved the giraffe walking along the road, their slow uneven gallop as Samuel banged the side of the
bakkie
to move them along so they could get out the reserve in time and not be in trouble with the authorities for being late out. How the family of three giraffe had run down the centre of the road instead of off it, blocking them for longer, and Tara had laughed at them, the sound forever etched in his heart. He thought of his trips as a Recce that he'd taken with Bevin and the others into the Etosha National Park. The giant ghost elephants covered in white sand. The vastness of the sands and the herds of oryx with their long javelin horns as they trudged through the orange sands heading further west.

He had always felt unusually at peace during those times, despite the war that raged around them. He felt it again now within this fence line. The same feeling he'd had when Terry the lion was taking up more than half his bunk, or when Terry was with him in the bush.

Leaving Bevin to sit with his aunt in the shade of the communal area, Wayne slowly walked towards the viewing hide at the end of the path. This also had elephant motifs cut into the thatch. Inside was cool after the hot sun. There were benches in the front near the half cut wall under the thatch and a large comfortable looking three-seater couch at the back. He chose to sit on the bench and rest his arms on the wall. The elephant at the waterhole were
moving off, coming towards the hide, ambling in a disorganised mass. One young bull elephant came up to the hide and rubbed his butt against one of the corner posts of the roof, which caused the whole structure to shake.

Wayne stayed still, not wanting to disturb the beautiful youngster.

Once he'd completed the scratch, he ran his head along the edge of the thatch, his trunk inside, touching the wall, as if looking for something. When he touched Wayne, he stilled. His trunk tested Wayne's arm, and the rough elephant hair felt strange on his skin but he didn't move.

‘Hey buddy, nothing to eat here,' he said softly, as he raised his hand and stroked the trunk. ‘A friendly pat, but no food.'

The elephant exhaled and stilled as he patted him, leaving his trunk to be gently scratched by Wayne. ‘You're a beauty.'

‘He likes you,' Jamison said from behind him. ‘Most people pull away when the elephant want to interact, but you didn't. You're used to large animals?'

‘No. We had a lion in our camp, but not lots of experience with elephants.'

‘
Eish
, a lion. You know they never tame down totally?' Jamison said.

Wayne smiled, he'd lost count of the number of people who had told him that about lions. The elephant attempted to feel his chest, still looking for food. His trunk travelled over his chest, and then lower towards his stomach.

Jamison passed him an apple, and motioned for him to put it in his top pocket.

‘Sneaky!' Wayne said.

The elephant, now smelling the apple, touched its trunk upwards again, and nudged it out the pocket. With the apple fully secured in his trunk, he pulled it out, and put it in his mouth. Within moments, his trunk was back, looking for another snack.

‘You're a greedy guts,' Wayne said as he stroked the trunk.

Jamison laughed. ‘Come on, Jumbo, out, you had a snack, someone else's turn now.' He pushed at the trunk and it reluctantly left
Wayne, sliding back over the wall and the young elephant walked away.

Another took its place.

‘As long as they find someone in here willing to give them apples, they will hang around the hide,' Jamison explained.

‘So you cheat. You give them fresh water to bathe in, and apples so that the tourists can see them up close and personal,' Wayne said.

‘I guess you could say that, but I call it giving them incentive to keep calling around.'

Wayne fed another elephant, and another after that. Sitting in silence the two men simply passed the time together.

Wayne looked at the waterhole, at the giraffe who'd just come down to drink. They bent their necks so elegantly with their bodies looking so awkward, yet he knew that their agility when neck fighting was amazing. He saw guinea fowl run at the edge of the security fence that protected the camp, and heard a loud ker-bek-ker-bek-ker-bek, krrrrr. He felt purpose grow inside him.

He'd been right in beginning the regeneration of his Kujana. This was definitely the direction he wanted to take his farm in. He looked to the heavens to thank his father for his foresight in gifting it to him, and felt a sadness that it had taken the death of his father for him to realise exactly which direction he wanted to take his life in.

‘This is a magnificent camp you have built here, you should be proud of it.' Wayne indicated all around with his hands.

‘I am. It's everything that Widow Crosby and I set out to make and the tourists come in from everywhere to stay at Amarose Lodge.'

‘So now that she's sold it, will you stay here or will you move on?'

‘That depends on a lot of factors,' Jamison said.

‘This was all your idea. Until you arrived at the farm Mrs Crosby was content just doing what her husband had done before her, growing tobacco.'

‘She liked my ideas, and to be honest it revitalised her. She came alive while we were building Amarose. She was far from her family,
she needed to have something to believe in – and someone to believe in her.'

‘I can imagine.'

‘And the new owners have taken you on. You happy to stay?' Wayne asked.

‘At the moment, yes. I have a wife, and we are settled.'

‘If you ever have cause to leave, I could use a man like you on my farm Kujana in Hluhluwe,' Wayne said.

‘Is it a fair distance away from anywhere?'

Wayne laughed. ‘Guess in the old days it was. But not anymore.'

Jamison shook his head. ‘Thank you, but for now I will say no. Until Madam Crosby goes to her new home South Africa, and the new owners move to Amarose full time, I am needed here—' But he never continued, as Bevin stuck his head into the hide. ‘Hey, Aunt Rose says she's ready to go home.'

Reluctantly, Wayne got up to leave. As he did so, his wallet fell from his pocket and open on the floor.

Jamison picked it up but instead of handing it to Wayne right away, he stood staring at the photographs that were inside. One was the picture of Tara holding Josha when he was first born.

Wayne put his hand out.

Jamison quickly passed it over to him. ‘Sorry, but your wife and baby are very beautiful. I didn't realise that you were married and had a family.'

‘I have a family, but I have to find her again before I can marry her,' Wayne admitted reluctantly as he put the wallet back in his pocket.

13

Finding Shilo

Piet Retief Farm, Zimbabwe

1992

Buffel rocked backwards in his new leather recliner. As he cranked the handle on his right the footrest popped out to support his feet, still in their
velskoene.
He looked around his lounge room at his trophies.

A large grey kudu with three distinct twists in its horns was hung next to an eland with long thick horns that had a single twist to them. He remembered that that eland had made him walk for hours. But he was so worth the wait. The perfect trophy on his wall, unmarred by a headshot, as he had waited patiently for the eland to expose his heart.

He put his own hand over his heart to feel the beat of life, just as his doctor had shown him years before. To feel the life inside himself, and to listen to his body.

When his body was happy, he could sleep, with no drugs and no nightmares.

When his body was restless, he needed to take the drugs, to stop the nightmares. To stop the darkness that threatened to pull him under. The new drugs helped his sleep, and they had slowed the frequency of the nightmares. They kept the voices of the children in his head hushed, but they never silenced them totally. He knew that only the butterfly would do that, one day, when he found her again. When he saved Impendla's soul. The doctor had said that he had a chemical imbalance, that the drugs would help make it right.

It was Gibson who had called in the doctor, one morning when he thought Buffel was dead. After a period of a few weeks of repeating nightmares, night sweats and hardly any sleep, Buffel had in desperation taken a full container of headache pills to try and stop the nightmares that plagued him. To quieten the voices of the children, and Impendla's cry for help. But the pills had made him sleep for too long. Gibson had entered his house to check on him when he hadn't come out in the morning as usual, and was still asleep in bed at ten o'clock.

Buffel had woken in hospital after they had pumped his stomach free of all the painkillers. The doctor had listened to what had happened, and he had prescribed medicines. He had explained to Buffel that he didn't need to stay on the medication all the time, if he didn't want to, as long as he listened to his body.

He had followed the doctor's advice, and soon he found that the voices would quieten down naturally when he was outside hunting, that was when his body felt the best. He had started hiring himself out as a professional hunter and guide, along with Gibson, and they had been contracted with different safari operators since.

He looked at his bull hippo. Its mouth set wide open, as if ready to fight. Its sharp tusks polished to perfection, the ivory shining as it caught the specialist lighting he'd had installed in the room and positioned to highlight the head. And every other head in the room.

He smiled at the hippo. Just the year before he'd shot that bull, the hippo had been added to some of the South African and Zimbabwean lists of dangerous game. It was a place well deserved. He knew that the river horse killed more people in Africa than all the
other members of the Big Five put together. They were extremely aggressive. And when the hippo made their way back to the water after grazing on the banks and encountered a human, the meeting often resulted in a fatality.

But that didn't make the hippo easier to kill.

It made it harder.

A challenge that Buffel enjoyed.

The bull hippo was hard to recognise within his water environment. You could hunt him on land, but the chances of him charging you were high, and invariably, you would end up ruining your trophy with a brain shot. The only option was to put the one and a half tonne beast down before he put you down. Permanently. And every hunter knew that anything smaller than a 40 calibre might not stop him.

Or perhaps you could be patient, recognise the bull from the cow in the water and shoot him with pin-point accuracy. The bull's head was only a little larger than the cow, but his tell was he had two tiny humps on either side of his nose where his lower tusks fit into his upper jaw.

The bull needed to be shot through the eye, or the not so clean alternative was a shot just below his ear. Although the hippo would sink down into the water and disappear, within the hour, his carcass would then float up to the surface again, and you could send in the trackers to recover the body.

His bull had taken fourteen men to pull him from the river. He'd used his trusty 416 Rigby with a soft nose up the spout, and he had no damage on the head from the bullet's exit.

His bull hippo was a trophy worth hunting.

All around the room, every trophy had been both shot and then mounted with patience, and skill. First his own, then the taxidermist's, who had painstakingly recreated the animal's size and bulk, with the synthetic materials for the inside, and then they tanned the leather outside. Lastly, they added in the glass eyes. The best quality eyes that didn't look dull, but made you want to reach out to the animal hanging on the wall, and touch it to see if it breathed,
as the animal appeared to watch you everywhere in the room, their expressions so real within the glass.