The Delta (20 page)

Before leaving for Africa she had changed her will and Martin had agreed to take on the role of Emma's legal guardian, until she turned eighteen, if something should happen to Sonja. Whether or not he was her real father, Emma liked and respected Martin and he was the closest thing she had ever had to a dad. Emma was headstrong and nearly an adult, but Sonja feared she was still young enough to go horribly off the rails without someone else to guide her for a couple more years. With her grandmother gone Emma would be alone in the world if Sonja was killed.

Sonja hadn't ever been afraid of being alone and she had certainly been happy enough for some time without a man in her life. She could outshoot, outswear, outdrink and outdrive most of the men she'd met in the army and as a mercenary. She'd raised a child virtually on her own and she was financially independent. Materially or even physically, she didn't
need
a man. It was laughably easy for her to get sex on the occasions her hormones told her she needed it. It was occasionally enjoyable, though invariably unrewarding. So why, she asked herself, did she think it was so important to connect with Stirling again?

Was it her version of what Sam had called the American dream? Did she, deep down, want to be part of a family in the traditional sense – husband and wife and child, with maybe another child before it was too late for her? She thought about it. Maybe.

Was she still in love with Stirling? Had she ever loved him? She'd been
in love
with him when they were both seventeen going on eighteen, although not enough for her to stay put and marry him. Would she still feel the same or even a fraction of the physical and emotional attraction to him when she saw him again?

Or was it, perhaps, the place, rather than the person that she loved more? Perhaps. Her version of the dream didn't include a mansion in Sandton or a cottage in the Cotswolds or even a game farm in Namibia. She rubbed the tattoo on her arm.

She just wanted to go home.

Sam slapped himself in the face. A mosquito was inside his net and had been buzzing around his ears for what seemed like an hour. He was hot, but had zipped himself into his sleeping bag partly to protect the rest of his body from the insect, and partly because he remembered the sight of the python sliding its way into the hollow log.

His left side ached from contact with the one rock he hadn't cleared from the ground under his mat. He rolled over. In his tent he'd had a thick, high-density foam camping mattress covered with green rip-stop canvas. He hadn't thought it too luxurious on those first two nights but now it lived in his memory alongside the five top luxury hotel beds he'd ever slept on. Sonja had not let him bring it with them because it was too bulky to strap to her old nag.

The ridiculously named Black Beauty neighed nervously from the shadows beyond the fire. Sam coughed as a breath of wind blew smoke into his net. Maybe he should have stayed in his tent, he thought, and waited for someone to come find him. The weird, wired, toned creature sleeping silently beyond the low flames may have saved his life after the episode with the bees, but she might yet get him killed out here in the bush with nothing but a nylon net between him and Africa's super-predators.

The mosquito let him know he'd missed by landing on the tip of his left ear and buzzing. He swatted again. ‘Goddamn.'

Then he heard the growl.

It was deep, low and continuous and it sounded almost like purring. It was as if someone had put his mum's house cat in front of a speaker, connected a massive amplifier and turned the treble to zero and the bass to full. He felt it in his chest. He swallowed hard and slowly lifted his head.

Sam looked around but saw nothing. The horse made another sound, higher pitched, and he heard its hooves shuffling in the dry grass. Sam saw something moving. He turned to the left and glimpsed the shadow of a flick of a tail cast briefly against the pale bark of the tree. The noise was still there.

‘Sonja,' he called softly.

‘Quiet.'

‘But …'

‘Lion. Stay still, and quiet. Under your net. Don't move.'

Stay still? He pulled the sleeping bag up to his chin and took a breath. When he started to feel light-headed he remembered to breathe again. Quietly. He thought it might have left, but then he heard a galloping sound. Had the horse snapped its tether?

The horse whinnied in pain.

Sam sat up and looked around him. The horse was thrashing, causing leaves and seed pods to rain down from the branches of the tree to which it was tied. There was a ripping sound and a deep, guttural growling.

Sonja's mosquito net twitched as she shrugged out from under it. She stood there, bare arms and legs glowing bronze in the reflected firelight, the ugly, squat assault rifle in her hands. She grasped the cocking handle and pulled it back viciously, letting the working parts fly forward with a menacing rattle.

‘
Voetsek!
' she screamed into the blackness but the lion or lions were not nearly as easily scared as the panting cheetah.

What happened to stay still and quiet? Sam wondered. He
watched Sonja stride away from the fire into the darkness, her rifle up and ready. ‘Sonja!'

She ignored him and pointed the barrel skywards.

Bang
,
bang
. Sam flinched with each shot. He saw her again, momentarily illuminated by the lightning flashes from the rifle's muzzle. The growling and tearing ceased, replaced by a snarled challenge.

Sonja fired again.

‘Oh, Jesus,' Sam said. He lifted the hem of his mosquito net, then had second thoughts, so he set it down again. He peered into the darkness but saw nothing. The horse was whinnying but its noises were fainter and he heard Sonja speaking soothing words. At least she was still alive. He lifted the net again, took a deep breath and got up, wearing only his boxer shorts. He looked around for a weapon and grabbed the end of a dead branch whose tip was in the fire. He hefted the improvised torch and walked into the nothingness.

He found her, kneeling in the dark. The horse was on its side, writhing in the grass. He ran the flame the length of its body and saw white bone showing through a rip on its right hind leg. Far worse, though, were the ghastly wounds at its throat, which bubbled and frothed with blood.

Sonja stood, pointed the rifle at the horse's thrashing head and pulled the trigger.

Sam flinched again.

She stood there, just staring down at the horse, which was at peace now.

‘The lions?'

‘Lioness,' she said. ‘Just one. She was …'

Sam held up the flaming end of the log. Sonja held her rifle loose in one hand now and wiped her eyes with the back of the other.

‘Are you OK?'

She turned and stared at him. ‘Of course I'm OK.'

He said nothing, and looked down at the horse to avoid her glare. ‘Um … sorry.'

She looked down at her hands and seemed to see the blood on them for the first time. ‘I'm fine. It was just a horse.' She rubbed them on her shorts three, four, five times. ‘The lioness was on her own, which probably means she's got cubs somewhere close by. They leave the pride to give birth and return once the cubs can look after themselves. She'll be dangerous. We should get back to the fire. Stoke it up.'

He nodded and they walked back to the relative safety of the flames. Sam busied himself dragging more logs onto the fire until it was blazing again, sparks shooting high into the clear night sky.

Sonja fetched her bedroll and dragged it to the same side of the fire as his. She laid it out between the bonfire and his mosquito net and sat down. She flicked the safety catch on the M4 to safe and laid it down on her sleeping bag, then sat down. ‘She'll come back to finish off the horse. If she's well fed she'll leave us alone, but females with young are unpredictable, aggressive. I'll keep watch.'

‘Let me—'

She silenced him with those green, feline eyes. ‘Get some sleep.'

‘You really think I can sleep after all that? After discovering there's an unpredictable aggressive lone female nearby?'

That made her smile, reluctantly, and he grinned back at her.

‘Adrenaline's a funny drug. You feel pumped, jazzed now, but you'll be unconscious in twenty minutes' time. The low's as incredible as the high.'

‘You sound like you know.' He didn't know where to sit and
couldn't go back to his bed right now, whatever she said, so he stood with his back to the flames, looking out into the night.

Her silence was a challenge to him. He didn't know why. Maybe he wanted her to stop treating him like an encumbrance or a stupid child. She stared into the flames. Beyond the ring of light cast by the fire he thought he heard movement in the bushes. No way could he go lie down now, whether she was keeping guard or not.

‘You were crying before.'

She snapped her head around and looked at him like he'd just hit her.

‘It's all right, you know. I was taught that it's not a bad thing, to let your emotions show. It's harder, supposedly, for a guy, but it's therapeutic. It took me a while to learn.'

‘To learn?' She shook her head.

‘Yes. It never came natural to me. I was never a crier as a kid, except for the time I broke my leg. I didn't even cry when … when a good friend of mine passed away. But I learned.'

She picked up a stick and poked the fire. ‘You Americans. You live in a society in which men are taught to cry.' She shook her head at the absurdity of it. ‘In Africa there is so much sorrow people gave up crying long ago. In Zimbabwe, just across the border, children are starving, yet
you
have a generation that is being told to eat less in case they die of obesity.'

Finally, he'd got her talking, and she turned out to be just another American hater. He wished he hadn't bothered. ‘You Africans …'

She looked back at him.

‘White, black or brown, you can't help but screw up one of the most beautiful continents on earth. You think you've got a monopoly on sorrow? Well, if you do it's because every time the ball passes from one team to another you can't wait to stick a knife in it.'

‘An odd analogy.'

He clenched his fists. ‘Fuck it up, is what I mean, excuse my language.'

She laughed. ‘You're excused, but please go on.'

‘We have enough bad shit to deal with in America, too, believe it or not. At least our government is accountable to its people. Here – in Africa – whichever tribe is in power does its best to rob the rest of the country blind and, if it can get away with it, maybe kill off a few thousand of the opposition at the same time.'

‘Botswana's not like that,' she said.

‘Sure, maybe not as bad as the Afrikaners when they ruled South Africa, or the Shona in Zimbabwe, or the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, but they've moved Khoisan people off their homelands to dig new diamond mines.'

‘You know a lot about Africa for someone who's been here a week.'

He presumed she was being sarcastic, but didn't want to give her the satisfaction of acknowledging it. ‘I read. What do you know about America? About Americans?'

She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, then shut it. She seemed tempted to carry on with the argument, but another emotion or thought stilled her. She took a deep breath through her nostrils and when she spoke her voice was calm and low. ‘It's late. Get some sleep.'

He paced out to the darkness then back to the fire. ‘I told you, I can't sleep. Also, for the first time we were damn close there to actually having a conversation. It turned into an argument, but started because we were talking about crying.'

She glared at him, saying nothing.

Once upon a time he'd been happy to sit on the prairie or in hides and watch and listen and take notes. When he was
observing his coyotes in the wild, just them and him and the big sky and wide open plains, he truly felt like the happiest man in the world. He felt that was the way he should be; the reason why he had been put on earth, to form a link between humans and this misunderstood, maligned but amazing mammal. Now all he did was talk for a living. Talk shit.

They stared each other down. He knew that if he said a word right now she might never speak to him again. He didn't want that.

She looked away, back to the fire. ‘I don't like seeing animals die.'

He laughed.

She looked up at him, anger flaring in her eyes. ‘What? I tell you something about myself – admittedly to shut you up, to end your incessant questioning – and you
laugh
at me?'

‘You must be tired.' He squatted and placed his ten fingertips on the ground to steady himself. ‘Either that or you're a terrible liar. You told me you were a professional hunter yesterday, and now you tell me you cry when see an animal die?'

She unzipped her sleeping bag and slid into it, still wearing her boots. ‘You're right, I'm tired. If you're not going to sleep, then you can take first watch. Don't touch my rifle and wake me if you get too scared.'

The noise of a vehicle engine woke her. She sat upright, all senses alert instantly. The sun was breaching the dark tree line, a crescent of red beginning its morning chore of redecorating the landscape. She checked her watch. Four hours, maybe five? It was a long sleep for her.

Sam was standing, looking out towards the noise. ‘Morning. I only just heard it.' He took three steps in the direction of the noise.

She grabbed the M4 and got to her feet. ‘Sam, stop.' He looked
back at her. ‘The lioness, remember? She's over that way. Stay put. The smoke will bring them.'

The growl of the diesel was getting louder and she heard the snap of small trees being broken and the splintering crunch of fallen branches and dried leaves beneath off-road tyres.

Sam held his hand to his eyes to shield them from the brightness of a spotlight.