It had taken a little over half an hour for the Cessna to reach its destination.
‘Just look at that, hey,’ Andy had said when he spotted the girl frantically waving on the lawn. ‘I tell you, man, my sister’s the craziest chick in the whole of Malemba.’
Moses had laughed. ‘Don’t be cruel. Zalika has a good heart.’
Stratten brought the Cessna in to land with practised ease. By the time he was slowly taxiing to a halt, Zalika was arriving, trailed by a plume of dust, just a few yards away. She’d barely stopped the open-topped, olive-green Land Rover before she’d flung the handset down on to the passenger seat and was scampering towards the two young men emerging from the plane.
‘Moses!’ she shrieked delightedly, flinging herself at him and wrapping her arms round him. ‘It’s so great to see you again!’
‘You too,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder and smiling at her puppy-like enthusiasm.
‘Don’t I get a hug too?’ asked Andy.
‘Of course not,’ his sister replied, ‘I saw you at breakfast. You’ll have to be away for much longer than a few hours if you want a cuddle from me.’
Andy looked at his friend. ‘Like I told you, the girl’s crazy.’
‘And my brother,’ said Zalika, ‘is an arrogant, self-opinionated pig!’
The insult might have been more effective had not happiness been radiating from the girl like the warmth from an open fire.
They climbed into the Land Rover, Zalika slammed it into gear, and as the young men clung on for dear life she raced back up to the house.
6
The southeastern quadrant of Africa, from the equator to the Cape of Good Hope, contains some of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. But between those highlights lie countless miles of open savannah, which is a technical way of saying ‘an awful lot of dry grass, interrupted by the odd bush or tree’ – a harsh but not entirely unjustified description for much of the land on the Stratten Reserve. The glory of it lay in its animal inhabitants. And on days when the Big Five animals – lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and Cape buffalo – declined to make themselves visible, prosperous middle-aged tourists soon became hot, sweaty and disgruntled.
That was the situation facing a guide called Jannie Smuts as he drove his tourist-filled truck on a so-far fruitless safari. His customers had seen warthogs by the score, a few unimpressive varieties of deer and one listless giraffe. But that hardly amounted to value for the very large sums of money they’d paid for their African holiday. Smuts himself was endlessly fascinated by the marvels of the African sky: so dazzling with stars at night; so lurid at sunrise and sunset; so capricious in its ability to switch from limitlessly clear blue to massed ranks of mountainous thunderclouds, seemingly in an instant. He could see, however, that ‘Why don’t you folks look at the sky?’ wouldn’t go down too well, particularly since the truck’s canvas sunshade prevented them from actually seeing it.
He could feel the disappointment starting to mount behind him on the passenger seats. But as he pulled to a halt half a kilometre shy of the acacia grove and stood up and turned to face his customers, he felt confident he could turn things round.
‘I’ve got something pretty special for you now, folks,’ he said, his voice lowered, almost whispering, to create an air of tension and expectancy. ‘Just round the corner there’s a special spot where rhino like to gather to feed and drink. With any luck they’ll be there right now, and let me tell you, this is a sight worth seeing. And about time too, eh guys?’
There was a ripple of relieved laughter. Smuts grinned back, then sat back down in the driver’s seat and got the truck underway again.
They were still a couple of hundred metres from the grove when Smuts caught sight of jackals feasting on a giant grey carcass. He cursed under his breath and prayed that none of his customers had spotted what was going on. He braked again, hopped down to the ground and grabbed his rifle.
‘Just a minute, folks. I just want to see if any of our rhino buddies are in the area. Just don’t leave the truck, hey? Don’t want anyone getting lost.’
The laughter was a little more nervous this time, the tourists sensing there was something not quite right here.
Smuts was gone barely a minute. When he returned to the vehicle his face had lost all its good humour. He did not say a word to his passengers. Instead he picked up his radio and spoke in Afrikaans, not wanting anyone else in the truck to understand as he reported the presence of poachers.
Then he started up the engine again, pulled the truck into a three-point turn and headed back the way they had come.
‘Sorry about that, folks!’ Smuts shouted as he drove away. ‘Looks like our rhino buddies aren’t available. But don’t worry, this is a big reserve. And sooner or later we’ll find where its animals are hiding!’
7
When the news came through that poachers had killed Sinikwe and Fairchild, Dick Stratten’s first instinct was to go and investigate the incident himself. The younger men, however, were having none of it.
‘Come on, Dad, let me do it,’ Andy pleaded. ‘I could use some excitement.’
‘That’s what worries me,’ growled his father. ‘I don’t want any excitement, just someone to go and see what’s happened. If there’s going to be any action, any poachers getting scrubbed, I want some police right there so it’s all above board.’
‘Please, Mr Stratten, do not concern yourself,’ said Moses. ‘I am sure that no one will come to any harm.’
‘But Moses, dear,’ said Jacqui, ‘you must be tired after such a long flight from London. Wouldn’t you rather rest?’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Stratten, I’ll be fine. I slept very well on the plane. This will make me feel as though I have properly come home. Besides, you have been very generous to me. I would like the chance to be useful to you, to show my appreciation for all that you have done.’
‘Fair enough,’ Dick Stratten conceded. ‘Take a couple of the boys with you. I want all four of you armed. But you are only to fire in self-defence. Do you understand me? I don’t want you arsing about, trying to act like John Wayne.’
‘John who?’ Andy said with a grin.
‘You know exactly what I mean, young man. Be careful out there.’
‘Please, darling,’ said Jacqui, ‘do what your father says. And come back safe.’
Andy Stratten kissed his mother’s head as he passed her. ‘We will, Mum, no worries,’ he said, and then, to Moses, ‘Hey, boet, let’s cut!’
The two friends bantered back and forth as they drove out to the site where the shootings had been reported. But the conversation stopped when they came upon the mutilated corpses of the two rhinos.
‘Bastards!’ hissed Andy. He turned to Moses. ‘Welcome back to Africa. Not a lot has changed.’
‘Not yet, no,’ Moses agreed. ‘Come, let us see what happened here, and where the killers went.’
The four men began examining the crime scene, tracking every footprint across the grove, noting the patterns of cartridge shells as carefully as police forensics officers. Tracking spoor was a skill Andy had learned from his first footsteps. To the Ndebele it was a heritage that stretched back through countless generations to the very dawn of humankind.