Are there any more tricks we can use now, old friencr"
"Fire?" Matatu suggested, but without conviction.
Sean shook his head. "The wind is against us. We'd cook ourselves if we torched the forest."
Matatu hung his head. "If we keep the women and children with us, there are no more tricks," he admitted. "We are slow, and we leave a spoor that a blind man can follow in a moonless night." He shook his small, grizzled head miserably. "The only trick we have left is to fight them, and after that we are dead, my Bwana.
"Go back, Matatu. Find how close behind us they really are. We will go ahead and find a good place to fight them." He touched the little man's shoulder, then let him go. Sean watched him disappear g the tree trunks and then deliberately altered his expression before he turned to Claudia, striking a lighter, more carefree pose and putting a lift in his tone.
"How's our patient?" he asked. "She looks pretty chirpy to me."
"The chloroquine has done wonders." Claudia bounced the child on her lap and, as if to confirm her improvement, Minnie stuck her thumb in her mouth and smiled shyly around it at Sean.
He felt her smile tug at him with wholly unexpected poignancy.
Claudia laughed. "No female is immune to your fatal charms.
You've collected yourself another fan."
"Typical woman-all she really wants is a free ride." But he stroked the child's soft, woolly little head. "All right, sweetness, your horsey is ready to go."
Trustingly Minnie held out both arms, and he swung her up on to his back and strapped her there.
Claudia pulled herself stiffly to her feet and for a moment leaned against him. "Do you know something? You are a much nicer person than you pretend to be."
"Fooled you, didn't IT"
"I'd like to see you with a baby of your own," she whispered.
"Now you really terrify me. Let's go before you come up with any more crazy ideas like that one."
But the idea lingered with him as they ran on through the forest-a son of his own from this woman.
He had never even thought about that before, and then, as though to complement the idea, he felt a tiny hand reach across his shoulder from behind and touch his beard, stroking it as lightly as an alighting butterfly. Minnie was reciprocating the caress he had bestowed on her a few minutes earlier, and for a moment his throat closed up and made it difficult for him to breathe. He took her tiny hand in his. It was as silken and fragile as the wing of a hummingbird, and he was overcome with a feeling of terrible regret. Regret that there would never be a son-he accepted that at last--or a daughter. It was almost over. The hunting pack was very close behind. They could never outrun them. There was no escape; all they could hope for was a good pl in which to make the final stand. After that there was nothin'o escape, no future.
He was so wrapped up in Ins melancholy that he had run out into the open before he realized it. Claudia pulled up so sharply in front of him that he almost ran into her. He stopped at her side, d they looked about them with puzzled uncertainty.
an The forest had been laid waste. As far ahead as they could see, the great hardwoods had been swept away as though by a hurricane. Only the stumps remained, raw and bleeding gum as red as heart's blood.
The earth was torn and scarred where the huge trunks had come crashing down. Bright piles of sawdust remained where their branches had been stripped and the logs cut into lengths, and between the windrows of discarded branches and wilting boughs were the drag roads along which the precious timber had been hauled away.
Miriam stopped beside Sean. "This is where my people were forced to work," she said softly. "Frelimo came and took them to cut the trees. They chained them together and made them work until the meat was torn from the bones of their hands. They beat them like oxen and worked them until they fell and could not rise."
"How many people?" Sean asked. "So many trees have been destroyed."
"Perhaps a man or woman died for every tree," Miriam whispered "They took everybody, thousands upon tens of thousands."
She pointed to the horizon. "They work far south now, and they leave no tree standing."?
Sean felt the anger beginning to rise through his amazement.
This was destruction on a scale that affronted the law of nature and the sanctity of life itself. It was not just that those trees had taken three hundred years to reach their full majesty and had been destroyed with a few hours" callous work with the ax blades. It was more, much more. This forest was the source and fountain of myriad forms of life, inset and bird, mammal and reptile, of man himself. In this vast devastation all would perish.
It did not end there. With his own fate determined, with a term and a number of the hours that remained of his own life, Sean was overtaken by a prophetic melancholia. He realized that the destruction of this forest was symbolic of the predicament of the entire continent.
In a few fleeting decades, Africa had been overtaken by its own inherent savagery. The checks that had been placed on it by a century of colonialism had been struck off.
Chains perhaps those checks had been, but since being freed of them the peoples of Africa had been rushing headlong, with almost suicidal abandon, toward their own destruction.
Sean felt himself shaking with impotent rage at the folly of it and at the same time saddened, sickened almost unto death, by the terrible tragedy of it all.
"If I have to die," he thought, "then it's best to do so before I N see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed."
With his arm around Claudia's thin shoulders and the little black girl strapped on his back, he turned and looked back the way they had come. At that moment, Matatu came scampering out of the forest behind them. There was desperate urgency in his gait and the fear of death in his small wizened features. "They are very close, my Bwana. They have two trackers leading them. I watched them work-we will not throw them off.
They are good."
"How many troopers with them?" With an effort Sean cast off he oppressive mantle of dejection.
"As many as the grass on the plains of Serengeti," Matatu replied.
"They run like a pack of wild dogs on the hunt and they are hard men and fierce. Even the three of us will not stand too long against them."
Sean roused himself and looked around him. The cut line in which they stood was a natural killing ground, devoid of cover except for the knee-high stumps of hardwood. The open ground stretched two hundred meters wide to where the deadwood was piled in untidy windrows, the leaves long, withered, and browned, the branches forming a natural barricade.
"We'll make our stand there," Sean decided swiftly, and signaled Alphonso forward. They crossed the open ground at a run, bunched up with the two women in the middle. Miriam was drag her little brother along by one arm, and Alphonso ran protectively beside them. The big Shangane was heavily burdened with the radio and the packs of ammunition and stores they had picked UP from the ambush at the Save River, but he had also carried Mickey whenever the boy tired, setting him down on his feet for only short intervals. The three Shanganes, man, woman, and boy child, had very swiftly formed their own distinct core within the band, drawn together by tribal loyalties and natural physical attraction. Sean knew he could rely on Alphonso to take care of his trac own, and that allowed him to concentrate on his own particular charges, Claudia, Matatu, and now the little girl.