"What more can I sayT" she asked. "I was wrong."
"At this late hour your newfound humility is most touching."
His low voice lashed her. "Sure, you were wrong. Just as you and your people are wrong to try and starve an African nation of thirty million souls into acceptance of another one of your naive solutions. When the damage you have inflicted is beyond repair, Will you again say, "I'm sorry, I was wrong" and walk away and leave my land and my people to bleed and suffer?"
"What can I do?"
"We have thirty days of safari remaining," he said bitterly. "I want you to keep out of my hair for that time. The only reason I don't cancel the show right now and send you packing back to your Eskimos and your human rights is that I just happen to think your father is a pretty fine man. From now on you are under sufferance. One more peep out of you and you are on the next plane back to Anchorage. Do I make myself clear?"
"Abundantly." There was a trace of spirit in her tone once more.
Neither of them spoke again during the rough ride down to the ford and back up the far bank to the glade in which the bait tree stood.
By that time Job and Matatu had a fire going. The glow of the flames guided Sean to where Shadrach lay, and he climbed out of the Toyota and went to him immediately.
"How is the pain?" He squatted beside him.
"It is a little thing," Shadrach replied, but Sean saw the lie in the gray tone of his skin and the sunken eyeballs, and he filled a disposable syringe from a glass ampule of morphine. He waited for the drug to take effect before they lifted Shadrach between them and laid him in the back of the truck.
Job and Matatu had skinned both lions while they waited, and they loaded the bundle of green salted skins onto the hood, where it would cool in the night wind.
"It's a hell of a lion," Sean told Riccardo. "You've got yourself a magnificent trophy!"
Riccardo shook his head and said, "Let's get Shadrach back to camp.
Sean drove with care, rolling the truck gently over the rougher spots, trying to protect Shadrach from the worst jolting. Claudia insisted on sitting in the back with Shadrach, cushioning his head on her lap. Riccardo sat up in front with Sean. He asked quietly, "What happens now?"
"I'll radio Harare as soon as we get into camp. They'll have a private ambulance at the airport to meet him. I'll be gone a couple of days. I'll see Shadrach well taken care of and, of course, I'll have to put in a report to the government game department and try and square it."
"I hadn't gotten around to thinking about that," Riccardo said.
"We killed a lioness with cubs and had a man mauled. What will the government do?"
Sean shrugged. "There is a better than even chance they'll pull my license and take the concession away from me."
"Hell, Sean, I didn't realize. is there anything I can do?"
"Not a thing, Capo, but thanks for the offer. You are out of it.It's between me and the department."
"I could take full blame for the lioness, say I shot her."
"No good." Sean shook his head. "No blame on the clients.
That's departmental doctrine. Whatever you do, I am fully responsible."
"If they pull your license-" Riccardo hesitated, and Sean shook his head again.
"No, Capo, they won't cancel the safari. That's also departmental doctrine. Finish the safari. Don't offend the paying client.
Government needs the hard currency you bring. Only after you have left, they'll bring out the ax for me. You are out of it. I'll be back in two days, and we'll hunt that big elephant together. You don't have to worry."
"You make me sound like a selfish bastard. I'm worrying about you and your license, not about enjoying myself."
"We'll both enjoy ourselves, Capo. After all, if I do lose my license, it will be the last time you and I ever hunt together."
Claudia could overhear the conversation from where she sat in the back of the truck, and she knew why her father did not reply.
He knew it was his last hunt, license or no license. Claudia had taken an emotional battering during the last few hours, and thinking about Riccardo now, she felt the tears well up and scald her eyelids. She fought them back. Then it was no longer worth the effort and she wept for all of them, for her father and the lioness and the cubs, for that beautiful male lion, and for Shadrach and his shattered leg.
One of her tears fell onto Shadrach's upturned face, and he stared up at her in perturbation. She wiped the droplet from his cheek with her thumb, and her voice was thick and muffled with grief as she whispered to him, "It's going to be all right, Shadrach." Even she realized what a crass and famous lie that was.
Sean had a scheduled radio contact with his office in Harare at ten every evening. The journey home was so slow that they reached camp with only minutes to rig the aerial and connect the radio to the Toyota's twelve-volt battery before the scheduled hour.
The contact was good; one of the reasons for the late schedule was the better radio reception in the cool of the evening. Reema's voice, with its Gujurati intonation, came through dearly. She was a pretty Hindu girl who ran Sean's Harare office with ruthless efficiency.
"We have a casevac." Sean used the terminology of the bush war for casualty evacuation. "I want an ambulance standing by to meet me."
"Okay fine, Sean."
"Set up a person-to-person telephone call with my brother Garrick in Johannesburg for ten A.M. tomorrow."
"Will do, Sean."
"Make an appointment for me to see the director of the game department tomorrow afternoon."
"Director is in New York for the wildlife conference, Sean. The deputy director is in charge."
Sean switched off the hand microphone while he swore bitterly.
He had forgotten about the wildlife conference. Then he pressed the "transmit" button again.
"Okay, Reema my love, get me an appointment with Geoffrey Manguza then."
"Sounds serious, Sean."
"We just invented the word."
"What is your ETA? I'll have to file an emergency flight plan for you." The security authority was always so jittery about South African hot pursuit of terrorists into Zimbabwe or pre-emptive South African raids on terrorist facilities in Harare itself that it usually required flight plans to be filed forty-eight hours in advance.
"Take off here in fifty minutes. ETA Harare twenty-three hundred hours. Pilot and two par," Sean told her.
It was half an hour's drive from the camp to the airstrip. Riccardo and Claudia were in the Toyota when they drove out.
Sean took the back seats out of the Beechcraft and placed a mattress on the floor for Shadrach. By this time Shadrach was feverish and restive. His temperature was 101, and the glands in his groin were as hard and lumpy as walnuts. Afraid of what he might find, Sean didn't want to look under the dressings on the leg, but one of the minor claw wounds on Shadrach's belly was definitely infected already, weeping watery pus and emitting the first faint odor of putrescence.