"They might take a million in Zdrich."
"A quarter of a million?"
"No ways, never not in ten thousand years," jock shook his head emphatically.
"Telephone them. Tell them the ranches are over-run with squatters, and it would cause a political boo, ha to try and move them now. Tell them they are running goats on the grazing, and in a* ear's time it will be a desert. Point "y out they will be "getting their original investment out intact. Tell them the government has threatened to seize all land owned by absentee landlords. They could lose the lot."
"All that is true," jock grumped. "But a quarter of a million! You are wasting my time."
"Phone them."
"Who pays for the call?"
"I do. You can't lose, Jock." Jock sighed with resignation. "All right, I'll call them."
"When?"
"Friday today no point in calling until Monday."
"All right, in the meantime can you get me a few cans of gas? "Craig asked.
"What do you wants gas for?"
"I'm going up to the Chizarira. I haven't been up there for ten years. If I'm going to buy it, I'd like to look at it again."
"I wouldn't do that, Craig. That's bandit country." IThe polite term is political dissidents."
"They are Matabele bandits," Jock said heavily, land they'll either shoot your arse full of more holes than you can use, or they will kidnap you for ransom or both."
"You get me some gas and I'll take the chance. I'll be back early next week to hear what your pals in Zurich have to say about the offer." t was marvelous country, still wild and untouched no fences, no cultivated lands, no buildings protected from the influx of cattle and peasant farmers by the tsetse-fly belt which ran up from the Zambezi valley into the forests along the escarpment.
On the one side it was bounded by the Chizarira Game Reserve and on the other by the Mzolo Forest Reserve, both of which areas were vast reservoirs of wildlife. During the depression of the 1930s, old Bawu had chosen the country with care and paid sixpence an acre for it. One hundred thousand acres for two thousand five hundred rids. "Of course, it will never be cattle country," he told pou Craig once, as they camped under the wild fig trees beside a deep green pool of the Chizarira river and watched the sand-grouse come slanting down on quick wings across the Ac setting sun to land on the sugar-white sandbank beneath the far bank. "The grazing is sour, and the tsetse will kill anything you try to rear here but for that reason it will always be an unspoiled piece of old Africa." The old man had used it as a shooting lodge and a retreat. He had never strung barbed, wire nor built even a shack on the ground, preferring to sleep on the bare earth under the spreading branches of the wild fig.
Very selectively Bawu had hunted here elephant and lion and rhinoceros and buffalo only the dangerous game, but he had jealously protected them from other rifles, even his own sons and grandsons had been denied hunting rights.
"It's my own little private paradise," he told Craig, "and I'm selfish enough to keep it like that." Craig doubted that the track through to the pools had been used since he and the old man had last been here together ten years before. It was totally overgrown, elephant had pushed mopani trees down like primitive road-blocks, and heavy rains had washed it out.
"Eat your heart out, Mr. Avis," said Craig, and put the sturdy little Volkswagen to it.
However, the front-wheel drive vehicle was light enough and nippy enough to negotiate even the most unfriendly dry river-beds, although Craig had to corduroy the sandy bottoms with branches to give it purchase in the fine sand. He lost the nick half a dozen times, and only found it after laboriotaly casting ahead on foot.
He hit one antlbear hole and had to jack up the front end to get out, and half the time he was finding ways around the elephant road-blocks. In the end he had to leave the Volkswagen and cover the last few miles on foot.
He reached the pools in the last limmering of daylight.
He curled up in the single blanket that he had filched from the motel, and slept through without dreaming or stirring, to wake in the ruddy magic of an African dawn.
He ate cold, baked beans out of the can and brewed coffee, then he left his pack and blanket under the wild figs and went down along the bank of the river.
On foot he could cover only a tiny portion of the wide wedge of wild country that spread over a hundred thousand acres, but the Chizarira river was the heart and artery of it.
What he found here would allow him to judge what changes there had been since his last visit.
Almost immediately he realized that there were still plenty of the more common varieties of wildlife in the forest: the big, spooky, spiral-homed kudu went bounding away, flicking their fluffy white tails, and graceful little impala drifted like roseate smoke amongst the trees. Then he found signs of the rarer animals. First, the fresh pug marks of a leopard in the clay at the water's edge where the cat had drunk during the night, and then, the elongated teardrop-shaped spoor and grape like droppings of the magnificent sable antelope.
For his lunch he ate slices of dried sausage which he cut with his clasp-knife and sucked lumps of tart white cream of tartar from the pods of the baobab tree. When he moved on he came to an extensive stand of dense wild ebony bush, and followed one of the narrow twisting game trails into it. He had gone only a hundred paces when he came on a small clearing in the midst of the thicket of interwoven branches, and he experienced a surge of elation.
The clearing stank likea cattle-pen, but even ranker and gamier. He recognized it as an animal midden, a dunghill to which an animal returns habitually to defecate.
From the character of the faeces, composed of digested twigs and bark, and from the fact that these had been churned and scattered, Craig knew immediately that it was a midden of the black rhinoceros, one of Africa's rarest and most endangered species.
Unlike its cousin the white rhinoceros, who is a grazer on grassland and a lethargic and placid animal, the black AA
rhinoceros is a browser on the lower branches of the thick bush which it frequents. By nature it is a cantankerous, inquisitive, stupid and nervously irritable animal. It will charge anything that annoys it, including men, horses, lorries and even locomotives.
Before the war, one notorious beast had lived on the escarpment of the Zambezi valley where both road and railway began the plunge down towards the Victoria Falls.
It had piled up a score of eighteen lorries and buses, catching them on a steep section of road where they were reduced to a walking pace, and taking them headon so that its horn crunched through the radiator in a burst of steam. Then, perfectly satisfied, it would trot back into the thick bush with squeals of triumph.
Puffed UP with success, it finally over-reached itself when it took on the Victoria Falls express, lumbering down the tracks likea medieval knight in the jousting lists. The locomotive was doing twenty miles per hour and the rhinoceros weighed two tons and was making about the same speed in the opposite direction, so the meeting was monumental. The express came to a grinding halt with wheels spinning helplessly, but the rhinoceros had reached the end of his career as a wrecker of radiators.