‘Why not?’
‘The park is 8,000 square miles... visitors can get lost.’
‘We have a map,’ Evan argued.
‘The service roads,’ Haagner said stolidly, ‘are not on the maps.’
Evan ate a packet of sandwiches mutinously and rolled down the window to throw out the plastic bag.
‘Do not do that,’ Haagner said sharply enough to stop him.
‘Why not?’
‘The animals eat them, and choke. No litter must be thrown. It kills the animals.’
‘Oh very well,’ said Evan ungraciously, and handed me the screwed up bag to return to the red box. The box was clipped shut and tidy, so I shoved it in my pocket. Evan polished off the job of being a nuisance by throwing out instead the half eaten crust of his cheese-and-tomato.
‘Do not feed the animals,’ said Haagner automatically.
‘Why not?’ Evan, belligerent, putting on an R.S.P.C.A. face.
‘It is unwise to teach animals that cars contain food.’
That silenced him flat. Conrad twitched an eyebrow at me and I arranged my face into as near impassiveness as one can get while falling about inside.
Owing to an olifant waving its ears at us within cricket ball distance we did not get back to Skukuza before the gates shut. Evan, oblivious to the fast setting sun, saw allegories all over the place and had Conrad wasting film by the mile, taking shots through glass. He had wanted Conrad to set up a tripod in the road to get steadier than hand-held pictures, but even he was slightly damped by the frantic quality in Haagner’s voice as he told him not to.
‘Olifant is the most dangerous of all the animals,’ he said earnestly, and Conrad equally earnestly assured him that for nothing on earth would he, Conrad, leave the safety of the Range Rover. Haagner wouldn’t even have the window open and wanted to drive away at once. It appeared that when olifants waved their ears like that they were expressing annoyance, and since they weighed seven tons and could charge at 25 m.p.h., it didn’t do to hang about.
Evan didn’t believe that any animal would have the gall to attack such important humans as E. Pentelow, director, and E. Lincoln, actor. He persuaded Conrad to get clicking, and Haagner sat there with the engine running and his foot on the clutch. When the elephant finally took one step in our direction we were off down the road with a jolt that threw Conrad, camera and all, to the floor.
I helped him up, while Evan complained about it to Haagner. The ranger, nearing the end of his patience, stopped the car with an equal jerk and hauled on the hand brake.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We wait.’
The elephant came out on to the road, a hundred yards behind us. The big ears were flapping like flags.
Conrad looked back. ‘Do drive on, dear boy,’ he said with anxiety in his voice.
Haagner folded his lips. The elephant decided to follow us. He was also accelerating to a trot.
It took more seconds than I cared before Evan cracked. He was saying ‘For God’s sake, where is the Arriflex?’ to Conrad, when it seemed at last to dawn on him that there might be some real danger.
‘Drive away,’ he said to Haagner urgently. ‘Can’t you see that that animal is charging?’
And it had tusks, I observed.
Haagner too decided that enough was enough. He had the hand brake off and the gears in mesh in one slick movement, and the elephant got a trunkful of dust.
‘What about the next car coming along?’ I asked. ‘They’ll meet it head on.’
Haagner shook his head. ‘No cars will come this way any more today. It is too late. They will all be near the camps now. And that olifant, he will go straight away into the bush. He will not stay on the road.’
Conrad looked at his watch. ‘How long will it take us to get back to Skukuza?’
‘With no more stops,’ Haagner said with bite, ‘about half an hour.’
‘But it is six fifteen already!’ Conrad said.
Haagner made a noncommittal movement of his head and didn’t answer. Evan appeared subdued into silence and a look of peaceful satisfaction awoke on the Afrikaaner’s face. For the whole of the rest of the way it stayed there, first in the quick dust, then in the reflected glow of the headlights. Before we reached Skukuza he swung the Range Rover down one of the no entry side roads, a detour which brought us after a mile or two suddenly and unexpectedly into a village of modern bungalows with tiny little flower gardens and street lighting.
We stared in amazement. A suburb, no less, set down greenly in the brown dry veldt.
‘This is the ranger village,’ Haagner said. ‘My house is over there, the third down that road. All the whites who work in the camp, and the white rangers, we live here. The Bantu rangers and workers also have villages in the park.’
‘But the lions,’ I said. ‘Are the villages safe, isolated like this?’
He smiled. ‘It is not isolated.’ The Range Rover came to the end of the houses, crossed about fifty unlit yards of road and sped straight into the back regions of Skukuza camp. ‘But also, no, it is not entirely safe. One must not walk far from the houses at night. Lions do not normally come near the gardens... and we have fences round them... but a young Bantu was taken by a lion one night on that short piece of road between our village and the camp. I knew him well. He had been told never to walk... it was truly sad.’
‘Are people often... taken... by lions?’ I asked, as he pulled up by our rondavels, and we unloaded ourselves, the cameras, and the red box.
‘No. Sometimes. Not often. People who work in the park; never visitors. It is safe in cars.’ He gave Evan one last meaningful stare. ‘Do not leave your car. To do so is not safe.’
Before dinner in the camp restaurant I put a call through to England. Two hours’ delay, they said, but by nine o’clock I was talking to Charlie.
Everything was fine, she said, the children were little hooligans, and she had been to see Nerissa.
‘I spent the whole day with her yesterday... Most of the time we just sat, because she felt awfully tired, but she didn’t seem to want me to go. I asked her the things you wanted... not all at once, but spread over...’
‘What did she say?’
‘Well... You were right about some things. She did tell Danilo she had Hodgkin’s disease. She said she didn’t know herself that it was fatal when she told him, but she doesn’t think he took much notice, because all he said was that he thought only young people got it.’
If he knew that, I thought, he knew a lot more.
‘Apparently he stayed with her for about ten days, and they became firm friends. That was how she described it. So she told him, before he went back to America, that she would be leaving him the horses as a personal gift, and also, as he was all the family she had, all the rest of her money after other bequests had been met.’
‘Lucky old Danilo.’
‘Yes... Well, he came to see her again, a few weeks ago, late July or early August. While you were in Spain, anyway. She knew by then that she was dying, but she didn’t mention it to Danilo. She did show him her will, though, as he seemed interested in it. She said he was so sweet when he had read it, and hoped not to be inheriting for twenty years.’
‘Little hypocrite.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie doubtfully, ‘because although you were right about so much, there is a distinct fly in the wood pile.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It can’t be Danilo who is making the horses lose. It simply cannot.’
‘It must be,’ I said. ‘And why not?’
‘Because when Nerissa told him she was worried about the way they were running, and wished she could find out what was wrong, it was Danilo himself who came up with the idea of sending you.’