In the first light of dawn they were running directly southward, k and they had covered twenty miles since splitting off from the rest of the party.
"Time to disappear, Job," he grunted without breaking stride.
There must be no indication to the trackers following them that they were about to split again.
"Good place just ahead," Job agreed. He was running exactly in Sean's footprints.
"Do it," Sean said, and as they ran under the low branches of a grevia tree Job reached up and swung himself off the ground.
Sean did not look back, did not alter his stride. Job would work himself through the branches of the closely growing grevia. until he found a good place to drop off and anti track away.
Sean ran on for twenty minutes, once again curving away into the southwest, heading for a low ridge that just showed in the dawn ahead of him. He crossed the ridge and as he had anticipated from the lie of the terrain found a small river in the valley beyond. He drank at the edge of the pool and milled around, splashing water onto the bank as though he were bathing.
A tracker would expect him to choose this as a breakaway point, wading either upstream or downstream before leaving the river again. They would send scouts along both banks to search for SIP.
Sean waded downstream, supporting himself on overhanging branches to give them a trail to confirm their suspicions. Then, without leaving the water, he returned to the exact spot where he had entered the stream and on the bank carefully dried his feet and legs, replaced his dry velskoen shoes that he had hung around his neck on their laces, and backtracked on his incoming spoor.
He retraced his footsteps to the crest of the ridge, walking backward, stepping precisely on his original footprints. At the top of the ridge he employed the same trick Job had. He swung himself into the air from a branch and over handed himself well clear of the spoor before lowering himself to the edge of a rock slab and anti tracking away.
"Even Matatu wouldn't be able to unravel that," he thought with satisfaction as he struck off back toward the north at a run.
Two hours later he joined up with Job at the rendezvous, and in the early afternoon they came up with the other party waiting for them five miles north of the point where they had split up.
"Good to see you, Sean. We were beginning to worry," Riccardo told him as they shook hands. Even Claudia smiled as Sean flopped down beside her and said, "My kingdom for a cup of tea."
As he sipped at the mug Matatu brought him, he listened attentively to the little tracker. Matatu squatted beside Sean and chattered in his excited falsetto.
"Matatu went back and kept an eye on the camp we left," Sean translated for Riccardo and Claudia's benefit. "He didn't dare approach too closely, but he saw the gang that was following us arrive This time he counted twelve of them. They searched the area of the camp, then took the bait and followed the false trail Job and I laid for them."
"So we're clear, then?" Riccardo asked.
"Looks like it," Sean agreed. "And if we push along we should be able to reach the beginning of the swamps either this evening or early tomorrow."
"What about Tukutela?" Riccardo asked.
"Well, we know from his track approximately where he would have reached the swamps. We'll just cast along the edge until we find where he went in, but we've lost a lot of ground on him. We'll have to go hard if we don't want him to get away from us. Do you feel up to it, Capo?"
"Never better," Riccardo said. "Lead on, man."
Before they set off again Sean went quickly over their packs.
They had consumed a great deal of the provisions, and he redistributed the remainder. By giving both Job and himself an extra ten pounds or so, he was able to reduce Riccardo's pack to twenty pounds and Claudia's to a mere ten, just her sleeping bag and personal items.
They both responded well to their reduced burdens, but again Sean marched beside Riccardo to encourage him and watch over him. Claudia was still going surprisingly well; he needn't have worried about her at all. Under her light pack she was stepping out lithely. He took pleasure in watching her long legs driving and her hard little buttocks oscillating in those tight blue jeans. They reminded him of the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.
They were on the valley floor now. There were open vleis and baobabs, those trees with bloated trunks, bark like a reptile's skin, and crooked bare branches from which a few late cream-of-tartar pods still hung. It was easy to see why the Zulus said the gods had accidentally planted the baobab upside down with its roots in the air.
Far ahead of them a slow standing cloud of evaporation marked the position of the swamps, and the alluvial soil was sandy and yielding underfoot.
"Just think of this, Capo." Sean was trying to divert him. "You are probably one of the last men who will ever hunt a great elephant in the classical tradition of the long chase. This is the way it should be done, man. Not grinding around in a Land-Rover and then leaning out of the window to kill him. This is how Selous and "Karamojo" Bell and Samaki" Salmon hunted their elephant."
He saw Riccardo's expression light up at the idea of being compared to those grand masters of the chase, men from another age when all elephants had been fair game. "Samaki" Sahnon had hunted and killed four thousand elephants in his lifetime. There had been a different morality in those days. Today a man with a bag of those dimensions would be accounted a villain and a criminal, but in his day "Samaki" Salmon had been respected and honored. He had even hunted with Edward, Prince of Wales, as his client.
Sean knew that Riccardo had an avid interest in the old-time elephant hunters, so he enlarged on their careers.
"If you want to do it the way "Karamojo" Bell did it, Capo, you have to walk like this. Bell wore out twenty-four pairs of boots a year and had to replace his porters and gun bearers every few weeks. They just couldn't keep up with him."
"That was the golden age." Riccardo extended his stride a little as he thought about it. "You and I should have lived then, Sean.
We were born after our time."
"A true hunter should kill a great elephant with his legs. He should walk him down. That's the respectful and proper way, and that is what you are doing now, Capo. Enjoy every step you take, for you are treading in old Bell's footprints."
Unfortunately the effects of Sean's encouragement were not enduring; within an hour Riccardo was flagging again and Sean noticed a new, disconcerting unsteadiness in his gait. He stumbled and would have fallen had not Sean caught his arm.
"We all need a five-minute break and a cup of tea." Sean led him to the shade.
When Job brought the tea mugs, Riccardo mumbled, "Have you got a couple more aspirins for me?"
"You all right, Capo?" he asked as he handed him the tablets.