Even though the forefront of his mind was focused on what Jock was saying, he was fully aware of his surroundings.
Nevertheless he almost missed it. He drove over it and went on for almost two hundred yards before it fully registered that he had passed something unusual. Perhaps it was a relic of his experiences during the bush war when any extraneous mark on the roadway could give warning of a land mine and violent death buried in the tracks. In those days he would have been much quicker to register and react, but the intervening years had blunted his reflexes.
He braked the truck and Jock broke off what he was saying and glanced at him quizzically. What is it? Don't know. Daniel swivelled in the seat as he reversed the Landcruiser back down the track. Probably nothing, he murmured, but there was a tiny niggling doubt in the back of his mind.
He stopped and pulled on the handbrake and climbed down out of the cab. I can't see anything. Jock hung out of the window on the far side. That's just it, Daniel agreed. There is a blank spot here.
He pointed down the dusty roadway whose surface was dimpled and pocked by the marvelous graffiti of the bush. The tiny v-shaped spurs of francolin and other birds, the serpentine tracks of insects and lizards, the larger hoof-prints of various species Of antelope and hare, mongoose and jackal were woven into an intricate tapestry of sign except at one point in the roadway where the soft surface was smooth and unblemished. Daniel squatted beside it and studied it for a moment. Somebody has swept sign, he said. So what's so bloody extraordinary about that?
Jock climbed down out of the truck and came to join him. Nothing, perhaps. He stood up. Or everything. Depends on how you look at it.
Shoot? Jock invited him. Only human beings cover their tracks, and only when they're up to no good. Besides that, there aren't supposed to be people wandering around on foot in the middle of a National Park.
Daniel skirted the area of soft earth that had been carefully swept with a leafy branch and stepped off the track into the stand of tussocked grass on the verge. Immediately he saw other signs of anti-tracking. The grass clumps had been crus bed and flattened as a party of men on foot had used them as stepping stones. It seemed to be a large party and Daniel felt the hair on his forearms and at the back of his neck prickle and lift.
Contact! he thought. It was like the old days with the Scouts when they first picked up the sign of a group of guerrilla terrorists. He experienced that same breathless feeling of excitement and the same stone of fear heavy in his bowels.
it took an effort to thrust those feelings aside. Those dangerous days were long past. Still he followed the sign. Although the chase had taken some elementary precautions, they were perfunctory. A cadre of Zanu in the war days would have been more professional. Within fifty yards of the road Daniel found the first clear print of a shod human foot, and a few yards further on the band had joined a narrow game track and formed in Indian file, abandoning all further attempts at anti-tracking. They had struck out in the direction of the escarpment and Chiwewe base camp with determined stride.
Daniel was amazed to find how large the band was. He counted the tracks of between sixteen and twenty individuals in the group.
After following them another two or three hundred yards Daniel stopped and thought about it carefully. Considering the size of the group and the direction from which they had come, the most obvious assumption was that they were a band of Zambian poachers who had crossed the Zambezi River on a raid for ivory and rhino horn. That would also explain the precautions they had taken to cover their tracks.
What he should do now was to warn Johnny Nzou so that he could get an anti-poaching unit in as fast as possible for a follow-up action.
Daniel pondered the best way to do this.
There was a telephone in the ranger's office at Mana Pools only an hour's drive ahead, or Daniel could turn back to Chiwewe headquarters and take the warning in person.
The decision was made for him as he made out the line of telephone poles in the forest not far ahead. These were cut from native timber and steeped in black creosote to discourage the attack of termites.
Between the poles the draped copper telephone wires gleamed in the late sunlight, except between two of the poles directly ahead.
Daniel hurried forward and then stopped abruptly.
The telephone wires had been cut and dangled from the white ceramic insulators at the top of the nearest pole. Daniel reached out for the end of one wire, and peered at it. There was no question about it. It had been deliberately cut. The shear marks made by the cutting edge of a pair of pliers were evident in the malleable red metal of the cable.
There were the milling tracks of many men at the base of the pole.
Why the hell would a poacher want to cut the telephone lines? Daniel wondered aloud, and his sense of unease turned to alarm. This begins to look really ugly. I have to warn Johnny. He has to get on to these gentlemen damned quickly.
Only one way to warn him now.
At a run he started back to where he had left the Landcruiser. What the hell is going on? Jock wanted to know as he jumped up into the cab and started the motor. I don't know, but I don't like it, whatever it is, Daniel told him as he reversed off the road and then swung back on to it, headed in the opposite direction.
Daniel drove fast now, ripping up a long bank of dust behind the Landcruiser, slowing only for the fords through the steep dry water-courses and then accelerating away again. As he drove, it occurred to him that the gang could reach the headquarters camp by cutting across the loop that the road made down the pass of the escarpment. It would be a steep climb up on to the plateau, but on foot they could cut almost thirty miles off the longer route that Daniel was forced to follow. He estimated that the telephone lines had been cut about five or six hours earlier. He arrived at that estimate by a process of fieldcraft deduction which included a study of the erosion of the spoor and the recovery time of trodden-down grass and vegetation.
He could not think of any reason why a gang of poachers should want to visit Chiwewe headquarters. On the contrary, he would expect them to give it the widest possible berth.
However, their tracks were headed resolutely in that direction, and they had cut the telephone wires. Their conduct was brazen and aggressive. If Chiwewe was indeed their destination then they could be there already. He glanced at his wristwatch.
Yes, they could have climbed the escarpment and, by hard marching, have reached the headquarters camp an hour or so ago.
But why? There were no tourists. In Kenya and other countries further north the poachers, having depleted the elephant herds, had taken to attacking and robbing foreign tourists.
Perhaps this gang had taken a tip from their northern counterparts.
But there are no tourists at Chiwewe. There's nothing of value he broke off as the fallacy of that assumption occurred to him. Shit! he whispered. The ivory. Suddenly dread chilled the sweat on his cheeks.
Johnny, he whispered. And Mavis and the kids. The Landcruiser was flying down the track now and he slid her into the first hairpin bend that led on to the slope of the escarpment.
As he. came through the corner at speed a huge white vehicle filled the road directly ahead of him. Even as Daniel hit the brakes and swung the Toyota hard over he realised that it was one of the refrigerator trucks.
He missed its front wing by a foot as he went up on to the verge and tore into a patch of scrub. He came to rest with the nose of the Toyota almost touching the trunk of a big mopane.