'Only a couple of bat-eared foxes,' he remarked, and passed the binoculars to the boys. They laughed at the antics of these quaint little animals, as they hunted grasshoppers in the short green grass in the centre of the vlei.
'Hey, Dad!" Sean's tone changed. 'There is a big old baboon in the top of that tree." He passed the binoculars back to his father.
'No,' Shasa said, without lowering the glasses. 'That's not a baboon. It's a human being!" He spoke in the vernacular to the two Ovambo trackers in the back of the jeep, and there was a quick but heated discussion, everybody taking differing views.
'All right, let's go and take a look." He drove the jeep out into the open vlei, and before they were half-way across there was no longer any doubt. In the top branches of a high mopani crouched a child, a little black girl dressed only in a loin cloth of cheap blue trade cotton.
'She's all alone,' Shasa exclaimed. 'Out here, fifty miles from the V' nearest 11age.
Shasa sent the jeep roaring across the last few hundred yards then pulled up in a rolling cloud of dust and ran to the base of the mopani.
He shouted up at the almost naked child. 'Come down!" and gestured to reinforce the command that she would certainly not understand.
She neither moved nor raised her head from the branch on which she lay.
Shasa looked around him quickly. At the base of the tree lay a blanket roll which had been ripped open, the threadbare blankets had been shredded and torn. A skin bag had also been xi.pned.and_ .... the-dry-maize--mea'r?t--contaiiaed had poured into the dust, there was a black three-legged pot lying on its side, a crude axe with the blade rough forged from a piece of scrap mild steel, and the shaft of a spear snapped off at the back of the head, but the point was missing.
A little farther off were scattered a few rags on which blood stains had dried black as tar, and some other objects which were covered by a living cloak of big shimmering iridescent flies. As Shasa approached, the flies rose in a buzzing cloud, revealing the pathetic remains on which they had been feasting. There were two pairs of human hands and feet, gnawed off at the wrists and ankles, and then - horribly - the heads. A man and a woman, their necks chewed through and the exposed vertebrae crushed by great fangs. Both heads were intact, although the mouths and nostrils and empty eyesockets were filled with the white rice pudding of eggs laid by the swarming flies. The grass was flattened over a wide area, crusted with dried blood, and the trodden dust was patterned with the unmistakable pug-marks of a fully grown male lion.
'The lion always leaves the head and hands and feet,' his Ovambo tracker said in a matter-of-fact voice, and Shasa nodded and turned to warn the boys to stay in the car. He was too late.
They had followed him and were studying the grisly relics with varied expressions - Sean with ghoulish relish, Michael with nauseated horror and Garry with intense clinical interest.
Swiftly Shasa covered the severed heads with the torn blankets.
He smelt that they were already in an advanced state of decomposition: they must have lain here many days. Then once again he turned his attention to the child in the branches high above them, calling urgently to her.
'She is dead,' said his tracker. 'These people have been dead four days at least. The little one has been in the tree all that time.
She is surely dead." Shasa would not accept that. He removed his boots and safari jacket and climbed into the mopani. He went up cautiously, testing each hand-hold and every branch before committing his weight to it.
To a height of ten feet above the ground the bark of the tree had been lacerated by claws. When the child was directly above him, almost within reach, Shasa called to her softly in Ovambo and then in Zulu.
'Hey, little one, can you hear me?" There was no movement and he saw that her limbs were thin as sticks, and her skin ash-grey with that peculiar dusty look that in the African presages death. Shasa eased himself up the last few feet and reached up to touch her leg. The skin was warm, and he felt an unaccountable rush of relief. He had expected the soft cold touch of death. However, the child was unconscious and her dehydrated body was light as a bird as Shasa gently loosened her grip on the branch and lifted her against his chest. He climbed down slowly, shielding her from any jarring or rough movement and when he reached the ground carried her to the jeep and laid her in the shade.
The first-aid kit contained a comprehensive collection of medical equipment. Long ago, Shasa had been forced to minister to one of his gunbearers mauled by a wounded buffalo and after that he never hunted without the kit, and he had learned to use all of it.
Swiftly he prepared a drip set and probed for the vein in the child's arm. The vein had collapsed, her pulse was weak and erratic, and he had to try again in the foot. This time he got the canula in and administered a full bag of Ringers lactate, and while it was flowing he added ten ccs of glucose solution to it. Only then did he attempt to make the child take water orally, and her swallowing reflex was still evident. A few drops at a time he got a full cup down her throat, and she showed the first signs of life, whimpering and stirring restlessly.
As he worked, he gave orders to his trackers over his shoulder.
'Take the spade, bury those people deep. It is strange that the hyena haven't found them yet, but make sure they don't do so later." One of the trackers held the child on his lap during the rough journey back to camp, protecting her from the jolts and heavy bumps. As soon as they arrived, Shasa strung the aerial of the short-wave radio to the highest tree in the grove, and after an hour of frustration finally made contact, not with the H'am Mine, but with one of the Courtney Company's geological exploration units that was a hundred miles closer.
Even then the contact was faint and scratchy and intermittent, but with many repetitions he got them to relay a message to the mine. They were to send an aircraft, with the mine doctor, to the landing strip at the police post at Rundu as soon as possible.
By this time, the little girl was conscious and talking to the Ovambo trackers in a weak piping voice that reminded Shasa of the chirping of a nestling sparrow. She was speaking an obscure dialect of one of the river people from Angola in the north, but the Ovambo was married to a woman of her tribe and could translate for Shasa.
The story she told was harrowing.
She and her parents had been on a journey to see her grandparents at the river village of Shakawe in the south, a trek on foot of hundreds of miles. Carrying all their worldly possessions, they had taken a short cut through this remote and deserted country when they had become aware that a lion was dogging them, following them through the forest - at first keeping its distance and then closing in.
Her father, an intrepid hunter, had realized the futility of stopping and trying to build some sort of shelter or of taking to the trees where the beast would besiege them. Instead he had tried to keep the lion off by shouting and clapping while he hurried to reach the river and the sanctuary of one of the fishing villages.
The child described the final attack when the animal, its thick ruff of black mane erect, had rushed in at the family, grunting and roaring. Her mother had only time enough to push the girl into the lowest branch of the mopani before the lion was on them. Her father had stood gallantly to meet it, and thrust his long spear into its chest, but the spear had snapped and the lion leapt upon him and tore out his bowels with a single swipe of curved yellow claws. Then it had sprung at the mother as she was attempting to climb into the mopani and hooked its claws into her back and dragged her down.
In her small birdlike voice the child described how the lion had eaten the corpses of her parents, down to the heads and feet and hands, while she watched from the upper branches. It had taken two days over the grisly feast, at intervals pausing to lick the spear wound in its shoulder. On the third day it had attempted to reach the child, ripping at the trunk of the mopani and roaring horribly. At last it had given up and wandered away into the forest, limping heavily with the wound. Even then the child had been too terrified to leave her perch and she had clung there until at last she had passed out with exhaustion and grief, exposure and fear.