The Monsoon (106 page)

Graceful and majestic in flight, they were grotesque and gruesome in repose.

After the birds came spotted doglike creatures that whooped and wailed like banshees, and little red foxes with black backs and silver flanks. Then they saw the first lions. Tom did not need Aboli to tell him what these great maned cats were: he recognized them from the coats-of arms of kings and noblemen in England, and from the illustrations in a hundred books in the library at High Weald. The roaring and monstrous grunting of these beasts in the night thrilled the men as they swung in their hammocks, and Sarah crept closer into Tom’s arms in the narrow bunk in their little cabin.

In the forests and glades they searched for sign of elephant, their intended quarry, whose tusks would repay for all this effort and endeavour. Fundi and Aboli pointed out great pad marks moulded rock hard in the sunbaked clay.

“These were made last season in the Big Wet,” they told Tom. Then they came across trees in the forest that had been cast down as though by a mighty wind, stripped of their topmost branches and bark. But the trees were dried out, and their injuries long ago withered.

“A year ago,” said Fundi.

“The herds have gone on and might not return for many seasons.” The land became hilly and the Lunga river twisted through the valleys, be con-Ling swifter, flawed with rapids.

Soon they could force their way through only with difficulty, for boulders and sharp black rocks guarded the channel, and each mile they went put the little Swallow in deeper peril.

In the end there was a place where the river formed an ox bow around a low, forested hill. Tom and Sarah went ashore and climbed to the top. They sat together on the brow and Tom surveyed the land below them through his telescope.

“It’s a natural fortress,” he said at last.

“We are surrounded on three sides by the river. We need only build a palisade across the narrow neck, and we will be secure from man and animal.” Then he turned and pointed out a small bay with smooth rock sides.

“There is a perfect mooring for the Swallow.”

“What will we do here?” Sarah asked.

“For there are still no elephants.”

“This will be our base camp,” he explained.

“From here we can press on into the interior by longboat or on foot, until we find the herds that Fundi has promised us.” They built a palisade of heavy logs across the neck of the ox bow They took ashore the cannon from the Swallow and mounted them in earthen emplacements to cover the glacis in front of the palisade. Then they constructed wooden huts and plastered the walls with mud, and thatched them with reeds from the riverbank.

Dr. Reynolds set up his clinic in one of the huts and laid out his surgical instruments and medicines. Each day he forced every member of the party to swallow a spoonful of the bitter grey quinine powder he had purchased in the markets of Zanzibar, and though the drug made their ears sing, and they protested and cursed him for it, there was no fever in the camp. Sarah became his willing apprentice, and soon she could stitch up the gash in a foot caused by a carelessly swung axe or administer a purge or bleed a sick man with as much aplomb as her teacher.

Sarah chose the site for their living hut at a discreet distance from the others. It had a fine view over the river valley to blue mountains in the distance. She used cotton cloth from the bolts of trade goods to sew curtains and bedclothes. Then she designed the furniture and had the ship’s carpenters build it for her.

Ned Tyler had a farmer’s instincts, and to augment the diet of venison and biscuit, he started a vegetable garden with seeds he had brought from England. He watered them through irrigation ditches he dug on the riverbank. Then he fought a never-ending war with the monkeys and apes that came to raid the green sprouts as they pushed out through the soil.

Within a few months the camp was complete, and Sarah named it Fort Providence. A week later, Tom loaded the longboats with trade goods, powder, muskets and shot.

With Fundi to guide them, he set out on a hunting and exploring expedition further upstream in search of the elusive elephant herds, and of the native tribes with whom they could open trade.

Ned Tyler was left, with five men, in charge of Fort Providence.

Sarah remained with Ned also, for Tom would not allow her to make the journey upstream until he knew what dangers lay ahead. She would take over Dr. Reynolds’s duties from him in his absence, and she had plans to continue her home-building work. She stood on the landing and waved to Tom until the longboats disappeared around the next bend in the river.

Three days” travel beyond the fort, the longboats moore d for the night at a confluence with a smaller stream.

While they gathered firewood and built shelters of thorn branches to keep out nocturnal predators, Fundi and Aboli scouted the banks of the stream. They had been gone for only a short while before Fundi came scurrying back through the trees. His eyes were dancing with excitement as he poured out a flood of gabbled explanation. When he came to the end, Tom had understood only a few words.

He had to wait for Aboli to come into camp to hear the full report.

“Fresh sign,” Aboli told him.

“A day old. A big herd, maybe a hundred, and a few big bulls with them.”

“We must follow them at once.”

Tom was more excited than the little hunter, but Aboli pointed to the sun, which stood only a finger’s width above the treetops.

“It will be dark before we have gone a mile. We will start at first light in the morning. Such a herd will be easy to follow. They are moving slowly, feeding as they go, and they will leave a road through the forest.”

Before darkness fell, Tom had planned the expedition.

There would be four musketeers to attack the great beasts, himself and Aboli, All Wilson and Luke Jervis. Each hunter would have two men to carry the spare guns, to reload and to hand him a freshly charged musket after each discharge. Tom checked the weapons himself. They were the rifled muskets that he had purchased in London. He made certain there were spare flints for the locks, that the powder flasks were filled and the bullet bags bulged with antimony-hardened lead balls for the ten-bore firearms.

Ten-bore signified that ten of the lead balls it threw weighed one pound. While he worked on the weapons, Aboli filled the waterskins and made certain they had biscuit and dried meat for a three-day journey.

Even after the long day of rowing and dragging the boats through the shallows, everyone in the party was too excited to sleep. They sat late around the fires, listening to the strange sounds of the African night, the whistle and hoot of the night birds, the idiotic giggling of the hyena and the rumbling roars of a pride of lions hunting the far hills.

Often in the short time he had been with them, Tom had listened to the stories of Fundi as he told of the hunt for the mighty grey beasts, but he asked the little man to repeat them now. Aboli translated when Tom could not follow, but his own knowledge of the Lozi language was burgeoning, and he could understand much of what Fundi said.

Fundi explained again how the elephant had very poor eyesight, but possessed a sense of smell that could warn him of a hunter a mile or more upwind.

“He can suck up your scent out of the air and hold it in the bone cavities of his head, run with it for a great distance and blow it through his trunk into the mouths of his companions.”

“Into the mouths?” Tom questioned him avidly.

“Not the nostrils?”

“The smell of the Nzou is in the top lip,” Fundi explained. His name for the elephant denoted a wise old man, not an animal, and he used it with respect and affection, expressing the feeling of the true hunter for his quarry.

“There are pink buds in his mouth, like the flowers of the kigilia tree. With these he tastes the air.” With a stick Fundi drew the outline of the beast in the dust and they craned forward in the firelight to watch as he explained where a man must place his arrow to bring down one of the giants.

“Here!” He touched a spot behind the shoulder of his drawing.

“With great care not to strike the bones of the leg, which are like tree trunks. Deep! Drive the iron in deep, for the heart and the lungs are hidden behind skin this thick.” He showed the span of his thumb.

“And muscle and ribs.” He held out his arms.

“You must go in this deep to kill the Nzou, the wise old grey man of the forest.” When Fundi stopped talking at last, Tom implored him to continue, but he stood up with dignity.

“It will be a long, weary way tomorrow, and it is time to rest now. I will teach you more when we are on the spoor.”

Tom lay awake until the moon had almost completed its circuit of the heavens, excitement boiling in his blood.

When he closed his eyes the image of the quarry appeared in his imagination. He had never laid eyes on the living beast, but he had seen hundreds of their tusks piled in the markets of the Spice Islands, and he remembered again the mighty pair that his father had bought from Consul Grey in Zanzibar, which now stood in the library at High Weald.

“I will kill another beast like that one,” he promised himself, and in the hour before the dawn he fell into a sleep so deep and dark that Aboli had to shake him awake.

Tom left two men to guard the longboats, and in the first chilly glimmer of dawn they struck out along the trail that the elephant herd had left down the riverbank.

As Aboli had told him, the sign was clear to read and they moved forward steadily. As the light strengthened they went faster, and the trees they passed were smashed and stripped of bark and branches. Huge piles of yellow dung littered the forest floor, and troops of monkeys and flocks of brown partridge-like wild birds were scratching in it for undigested seeds and fruits.

“Here!” Aboli pointed to one of these piles.

“This is the dropping of a very old bull, one that might carry heavy tusks. The ivory never stops growing until the beast dies.”

“How do you tell his dung from that of a young animal?” Tom wanted to know.

“The old man cannot digest his food properly. “Aboli dug his toe into the pile.

“See, the twigs are still whole, and the leaves entire.

Here, the nuts of the ivory palm, with half the flesh still on the pip.” Tom considered the first scrap he had been thrown of the tore of the hunt.

In the late morning they reached the point where the herd had left the stream and turned west towards the hills.

Here they crossed an area where the surface was of fine talc dust.

In this medium the imprint of the elephant pads was so detailed that each crack and wrinkle was faithfully preserved.

He reP Aboli pointed out a string of pad marks.

“This is the spoor of the great bull. See the size of each footprint, the front foot round and the back foot more oval in shape.” Aboli placed his own arm beside one of the tracks, using its length from the tip of his finger to the elbow as a “yardstick. So long means that he is a in ty bull, and see how his pads are worn smooth? He is of great age. Unless his tusks are worn or broken, this will truly be an animal worthy of the chase.” They crossed the first line of hills, and in the lush valley beyond Fundi and Aboli divined from the sign that the herd had fed and rested the previous night.

“We have gained many hours on them,” Fundi exulted.

“They are not far ahead.” But Tom was to learn that day that Fundi’s idea of distance did not coincide with his own. By nightfall they were still on the herd’s tracks, and Fundi was still assuring them that they were not far ahead.

All the white men in the party were nearing exhaustion, for sailors are not accustomed to covering such distances on foot. They had hardly the will left to eat a biscuit and a stick of dried meat, to swallow a few mouthfuls of water from the skins, before they fell asleep on the hard earth.

The next morning while it was still dark they were away again after the herd. Before long it was clear from the sign that they had lost much of their gain of the previous day, for the herd had kept moving westward in the moonlight while they had slept. For most of the white men the march became an endless torment of thirst, aching muscles and blistered feet. Tom was still young and tough and eager enough to make light of the hardship, forging along behind the trackers, with the heavy musket over his shoulders.

“Close! We are very close now.” Fundi grinned with malicious glee, and the gruelling miles dropped behind them. By now the waterskins were almost empty, and Tom had to warn the men with dire threats not to drink without permission. Tiny black flies swarmed around their heads and crawled into their ears, eyes and nostrils. The sun beat down like a hammer on an anvil and reflected up from the stony ground. The hooked thorns clawed at their legs as they passed, ripping their clothing and leaving bloody lines on their skin.

At last they found where the herd had stopped in a patch of dense forest, had spent many hours resting, dusting themselves, and breaking down branches, before it drifted on again, and the hunters finally made a real gain upon it.

Aboli pointed out to Tom how the dung that the herd was now dropping had not had time to dry, and when he thrust his finger into one pile he could feel the residual body heat. Clouds of brightly coloured butterflies hovered over the warm turds, to drink up the moisture. With renewed strength in their legs they increased the pace, and climbed another line of hills.

On the rocky slopes grew strange trees with swollen trunks and crowns of leafless branches on their tops, fifty feet above the ground.

At the base of one tree huge furry seed-pods were heaped. Aboli cracked one open-the black seeds inside were coated with a yellow pithy layer.

“Suck the seeds,” he said.

“The pleasant sour taste made their saliva flow again, and relieved the burning thirst of the march.

The line of hunters, burdened by their weapons and waterskins, toiled on up the hill. Just below the crest their heads went up. An awful sound came to them on the heated air, distant but stirring as the blast on a war trumpet. Though Tom had never heard the like before, he knew instinctively what it was.