He worked it loose and examined it in the overhead light. It was bloody and jagged, and the bleeding had started again. But you aren't going to die from it, he reassured himself, and tossed the splinter out of the side window and reached for the first-aid kit which was under the VTR equipment in the back of the vehicle.
It was difficult to treat the wound in his own back, but he managed to smear it liberally with Betadine ointment and strap an untidy dressing over it and knot the ends of the bandage in front of his chest. All the time he was listening for other vehicles on the logging road, but he heard only the small jungle sounds of bird and insect and beast.
He found the Maglite in his kit and went back on foot to the road.
From the verge he examined the muddy rutted tracks. As he had hoped, the logging truck had completely obliterated the Landrover's tracks with its own massive multiple wheels. Only the spot where he had driven over the verge still carried the Landrover's prints. He picked up a dead branch and swept them away carefully. Then he turned his attention to the foliage that the Landrover had damaged as it crashed into the forest.
He rearranged it as naturally as possible and smeared mud on the raw broken ends of branches and twigs so they would not catch the eye.
After half an hour's work he was certain that nobody would suspect that a vehicle had left the road here and was hidden only fifty feet away in the dense undergrowth.
Almost immediately his work was put to the test. He saw headlights approaching from the direction of Sengi-Sengi. He drew back a little way into the forest and dropped flat. He smeared his face with a handful of mud and then covered the backs of his hands. His wind-cheater was dark forest green in colour; it would not show up in the lights.
He watched the vehicle approaching along the logging track.
It was moving slowly an as it drew level with his hiding-place he saw that it was an army transport painted in brown and green camouflage.
The rear was crowded with Hita. soldiers and he thought he glimpsed Chetti Singh's white turban in the driver's cab, but he couldn't be certain. One of the soldiers in the rear was flashing a spotlight along the verges of the road.
They were obviously searching for him.
Daniel dropped his face into the crook of his arm as the beam of the spotlight played over where he lay. The truck passed on without slowing and was soon out of sight.
Daniel stood up and hurried back to the stranded Landrover.
Swiftly he made a selection of items from the lockers, most importantly the hand-bearing compass. He packed them into the small day pack. From the first-aid kit he took field dressings and antiseptic and anti-malarial tablets. There was no food in the truck.
He'd have to live off the forest. He could not carry the pack the normal way without restarting the bleeding so he slung it over the other shoulder. He guessed that the wound really required stitching, but there was no way in which he could even attempt that.
I have to get across the MOMU track before first light, he thought.
That's the one place I'll be in the open and vulnerable.
He left the Landrover and struck out westwards. It was difficult to orientate in darkness and the dense forest. He was forced to flash the torch and study the compass every few hundred yards. The going was soft and uneven and his progress was slow as he found his way between the trees. When he reached the MOMU excavation the open sky above it was flushing with dawn's first light.
He could make out the trees on the far side of the clearing, but the MOMU itself had passed on weeks before and was already working six or seven miles further north. This part of the forest should be deserted, unless Kajo and Chetti Singh had sent a patrol down the strip to cut him off.
It was a chance he had to take. He left the shelter of the forest and started across. He sank to his ankles in the red mud and it sucked at his boots. Every second he expected to hear a shout or a shot, and he was panting with exertion when at last he reached the far tree-line.
He kept going for another hour before he took his first rest.
Already it was hot and the humidity was like a Turkish bath.
He stripped off all his clothing, except for shorts and boots, rolled it into a ball and buried it in the thick soft loam of the forest floor. His skin was toughened by sun and weather and he had a natural resistance to insect stings. In the Zambezi valley he had been able to tolerate even the bite of the swarming tsetse fly. As long as he kept the wound on his back covered he should be all right, he decided.
He stood up and went on. He navigated by compass and wristwatch, timing his average stride to give him an estimate of distance covered.
Every two hours he rested for ten minutes. By nightfall he calculated he had covered ten miles. At that rate it would take eight days to.
reach the Zaire border but, of course, he wouldn't be able to keep it up. There were mountains ahead, and glaciers and snowfields, and he had abandoned most of his clothing. it was going to be interesting out on the glaciers in his present attire, he decided, as he made a nest in the moist leaf mould and composed himself for sleep.
When he woke it was just light enough to see his hand in front of his face. He was hungry and the wound in his back was stiff and painful.
When he reached to touch it he found it was swollen and the flesh hot.
All we need is a nice little infection, he thought, and renewed the dressing as best he could.
By noon he was ravenously hungry. He found a nest of fat white grubs under the bark of a dead tree. They tasted like raw egg yolks. What doesn't kill you, makes you fat, he assured himself, and kept on towards the west, the compass in his hand. in the early afternoon he thought he recognized a type of edible fungus and nibbled a small piece as a trial.
In the late afternoon he reached the bank of a small clear stream, and as he was drinking he noticed a dark cigar shape lying at the bottom of the pool. He cut a stake and sharpened one end, carving a crude set of barbs above the point. Then he cut down one of the hanging ant's nests from the branches of a silk-cotton tree and sprinkled the big red ants on the surface of the pool, taking care to stand well back from the edge with the crude spear in his right hand.
Almost immediately the fish rose from the bottom and began to gulp down the struggling insects trapped in the surface film.
Daniel drove the point of his fish spear into its gils and brought it out flapping and kicking on to the bank. It was a barbeled catfish, as long as his arm. He ate his fill of the fatty yellow flesh and the rest of the carcass he smoked over a fire of green leaves. it should keep him going for a couple more days, he decided. He wrapped it in a package of leaves and put it in his pack.
However, when he woke the next morning his back was excruciatingly painful, and his stomach was swollen with gas and dysentery. He couldn't tell whether it was the insect grubs, the fungus or the stream water that had caused it, but by noon he was very weak. his diarrhea was almost unremitting, and the wound felt like a red-hot coal between his shoulder-blades.
It was about that time that Daniel had the first sensation that he was being followed. It was an instinct that he had realised he possessed when he was a patrol leader with the Scouts in the valley.
Johnny Nzou had trusted this sixth sense of his implicitly and it had never let them down. It was almost as though Daniel was able to pick up the malevolent concentration of the hunter following on his tracks.
Even in his pain and weakness Daniel looked back and felt a presence.