06 African Adventure (11 page)

‘My friend,’ he said in English.

‘If we are friends,’ Hal replied, ‘why did you let them steal our leopard?’

It was his plan,’ the chief said, glancing at the witchdoctor, ‘not mine. I knew nothing of it until they brought the leopard to the village. It should not have been done. We remember that you killed the man-eater that was killing our children. We are grateful.’

‘It was a strange way to show gratitude,’ Hal said.

‘That is true,’ the headman admitted. ‘But my people are not so bad as you think. They wanted to save my life. That feeling was greater than their gratitude.’ ‘They were about to kill our pet.’ ‘I tried to stop them. But a chief’s word is not strong when he is near death. Then the witchdoctor takes the power. Perhaps I did not try hard enough to stop them.

After all, I wanted to live. Perhaps our witchdoctor is right. Perhaps eating the heart of an animal that grows strong will make me grow strong. You are a good man. You would not want me to die if I could be saved by the death of an animal.’

Hal smiled and pressed the chief’s hand.

‘Of course I don’t want you to die. But how can you believe this nonsense? How could a leopard’s heart help you? You are educated. You know the new things, you even speak English. And yet you give in to this foolish old superstition.’

The chief closed his eyes and said gently, ‘Not all the old things are wrong. Not all the new things are true. You also have superstitions.’

Hal felt like a small boy being gently reproved by his father.

‘Indeed we do have our superstitions,’ he said. ‘We have much to learn, and we can learn a great deal from the people of Africa. Still -1 might have something in this black box that would help you.’

‘What is that?’

‘A medicine kit. I’m no doctor - but we often have to doctor each other on these trips. You seem to have a fever. May I take your temperature?’

A slight nod was his only answer. But when he opened the kit and took out the thermometer, the witchdoctor began to jabber violently.

‘He says,’ Toto translated, ‘that he knows this thing. It is full of poison and will kill the chief.’

The headman spoke sharply to the witchdoctor, then took the thermometer and put it into his own mouth.

Hal took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from the headman’s face. He put his fingers on the sick man’s pulse, watching the second hand of his watch. When he removed the thermometer and looked at the reading, he said:

‘No wonder you feel uncomfortable with a temperature of 103 and a ninety pulse. How long has this been going on?’

‘Since midnight.’

‘And before that?’

‘Headache. Chills. Shivering. I thought I would shake apart. They told me the air was warm, but to me it was icy cold.’

‘And your appetite?’

The chief turned his head away with a disgusted expression on his face.

‘I cannot bear the thought of eating. That is what sickened me most - the idea of swallowing the bloody heart of the leopard. I am sure it would rise again at once.’

‘Do you have pain?’

‘Everywhere. In every joint, every bone. I could not say where there is pain, for there is no place where it is not.’

‘It sounds to me,’ Hal said, ‘like an acute attack of malaria.’

He took a medical booklet from his kit and turned to malaria. Then he explored the contents of the black box and picked out two bottles, one marked paludrine and the other quinine. He removed one tablet of the first drug, two of the other. He turned to the witchdoctor.

‘Will you bring me a little water?’

The wizard angrily refused. Toto slipped out to the village well and returned with water in an ostrich shell. The chief willingly took the tablets and washed them down.

He paid no attention to the excited protests of his witchdoctor.

‘Now, try to sleep,’ Hal said. ‘In a few hours I’ll be back. I expect you to be much better.’

‘But if I am worse, my people will make you suffer. I think you had better not come back.’

‘I’ll be back,’ Hal said, and rose to leave the hut

The witchdoctor suddenly lunged forward and jerked the leopard from Roger’s arms. Roger struggled to get it back.

‘Leave it alone,’ Hal said sharply. ‘There are only three of us. Do you want to get into a fight with forty men? What’s the witchdoctor saying, Toto?’

‘He says he will keep the leopard. If the chief recovers, the leopard will be returned to us. If the chief does not recover, the leopard will be killed.’

Worried about his pet, Roger took it out on Hal. ‘Are you going to let them get away with this? What a milksop you’ve turned out to be! You know they’ll cut that cat into little pieces as soon as we get out of the village. Why don’t you do something?’

‘Come on, you little hothead,’ Hal replied, ‘before you get us into real trouble.’

The two brothers and Toto started down the hill. A stone caught Hal squarely between the shoulder-blades. The pain made him wince, but he did not turn round. Roger, who had often seen his elder brother’s courage, could not understand him now. Hal only said:

‘Better a stone than a poisoned arrow. Really, I don’t blame them. They’re worried about their chief.’

‘Well they have a nasty way of showing it,’ Roger growled.

At noon the three returned to the village. Men, women, and children ran out to meet them with smiles and friendly chatter.

‘He must be better,’ Hal guessed.

The chief was still lying down, but his eyes were bright and his greeting was warm. T’m all right,’ he said. ‘Just weak.’

Hal found that his temperature had dropped four degrees, his pulse was normal, the chills and the aches were gone.

Roger was looking anxiously about.

‘Bring in the boy’s leopard,’ the chief ordered. A man fetched the small animal and put it into Roger’s arms.

Everybody seemed very happy - nearly everybody. The only sour puss left was the witchdoctor.

It was a bad day for him. His people were laughing at him. His magic had failed. The sacrifice of a goat had not cured the chief. He had failed to take the heart of the leopard. Two boys had stopped him. The high and mighty witchdoctor, stopped by two boys! And one of these boys had cured the chief!

But the witchdoctor was not done. He was raving and ranting to everyone who would listen.

‘What is he saying?’ Hal asked Toto.

‘He says the chief is not cured. He says this is only the last flash of life before death, just as a star is brightest before it drops out of sight. He tells the people that the chief will die. You have poisoned him with the small white things you put in his mouth. And the glass tube you gave him to suck…’

‘The thermometer?’

‘Yes. It had something red in it. He says it was a deadly poison. It is a poison that makes a man feel better just before he dies. But the chief will surely die. And the spirits will punish all in the village because they did not trust their witchdoctor. So he tells the people.’

‘Do they believe him?’

‘Their minds are divided. They are happy that the chief is better. But if he dies they will believe you murdered him. They will believe their witchdoctor was right, and he will once more be great in their eyes.’

‘And I will be very small.’

‘You will be nothing. They will kill you as they would kill a rat.’

‘That’s what I like about you, Toto,’ Hal said. ‘You make everything sound so jolly.’

He gave his patient another tablet of paludrine and two of quinine. There was a disturbance at the door and Mali came pushing through the crowd. Breathless from his run up the hill from the camp, he could only gasp:

‘Bwana … buffalo … many!’

Hal did not need to know more. For days he had been watching for buffalo. Three were wanted by the London Zoo. He made his apologies to the chief.

‘You will forgive me if I leave at once. But I will come back to see if you are still improving.’

‘Thank you, my son.’ The words, and the smile that went with them, repaid Hal for all his trouble.

As the three made their way to the door, the witchdoctor’s voice rose shrill and harsh above the talk of the crowd. Toto interpreted his words.

‘The chief will die. The chief will die.’

‘I suppose nothing would please him more,’ Hal remarked.

From the hill they saw the buffalo. There were about a hundred of the big black beasts.

They looked like a hundred thunder-clouds. They didn’t seem to belong in this land of warmth and sunshine. They could start a storm that would be worse than any that could come out of the sky. They looked as if they were aching to do just that.

The entire herd was turned in one direction, facing the Hunt camp. They didn’t seem to like what they saw. An African buffalo never seems to like anything. An elephant or a lion or even a hyena has his pleasant moments, but a buffalo always looks as if he had got out of bed the wrong side. His angry red eyes glare out of an ugly, inky-black face, and he stands with his head stretched forward as if trying to reach you with those spear-pointed horns. They are the toughest and stubbornest horns worn by any beast in Africa. A big bull will measure four feet from the tip of one horn to the tip of the other. And he has a ton on four feet ready to push those horns through anything that doesn’t please him.

‘If they take a notion to hit the camp,’ Hal said, ‘they’ll flatten those tents as if a steam-roller had gone over them.’

The thought that their father, helpless on his cot, would not be able to escape such a stampede took the boys on the run down the hill.

They found the camp busy preparing for the battle with the thunder-clouds on four legs. The men were busy revving up the motors of the trucks. A take-‘emalive safari, if it hopes to catch and carry many large animals, must be well equipped with cars, and there were fourteen in the Hunt outfit.

Not one of them was anything like the family car seen in city streets. They were heavy trucks and lorries, made heavier by metal rods and plates to enable them to stand the terrific banging over rocks, into holes, over anthills, and hummocks.

The lightest of them were the heavy, solid Land-Rovers, armour-plated like army tanks and equipped with four-wheel drive to get them out of bad bogs or deep sand. Then there were the stout Ford and Chev ‘catchers’, intended for chasing the big animals, and the big four-ton Bedfords and Land-Rovers, each carrying one or several huge crates or cages, in which the animals would be placed after they were nabbed by the catchers.

‘Our first job is to protect the camp,’ Hal said. He ordered the men to drive the cars up into position facing the buffalo. There they lined up with the camp behind them. In front of them, some five hundred yards away, was the black herd. The two armies, one of metal and the other of muscle, glowered at each other.

Hal dashed into his father’s tent to report on what he had done.

That’s fine,’ John Hunt said. ‘That ought to make them think twice. Trouble is, most of them leave the thinking to the big bulls in the front row. If just one of those bulls takes a notion to charge, all the rest will follow, like sheep. But that’s the only way they’re like sheep. They can be mighty mean. If they start to charge, there is only one thing to do - charge back.’

Hal ran out to instruct the men.

‘If they start coming, go to meet them!’

The fourteen drivers kept their motors going. Hal hurriedly appointed others to climb aboard certain of the trucks, so that they would be on hand to help when the time came for the catching and caging.

He did not forget that the whole safari numbered only thirty men, and he must leave enough of them in camp to defend it in case there was a surprise attack. For he knew the reputation of the buffalo - these beasts are as smart as they are mean. If they cannot attack you in front, they have the unpleasant habit of sneaking round and coming up on you from behind. Many hunters regard them as the most dangerous big game in Africa.

The elephant is larger, but sometimes sweet-tempered. The buffalo doesn’t know what sweet temper is. Some big game, such as the rhino, cannot see very well, some cannot hear very well, some cannot smell very well. The buffalo can see, hear, and smell perfectly.

You can dodge some animals. You can’t dodge a buffalo, because he is quick on his feet and will turn when you turn.

If another big animal gets you down and you play dead, he may wander away. Not so the buffalo. He isn’t satisfied to have you merely dead, he wants you flat. He will trample upon you until you are as thin as a French pancake.

Roger, unwilling to be left in camp, boarded a Powerwagon. Hal jumped in beside the driver of a Ford catcher. He was not too happy to discover that the driver was Joro, the man who had sworn to kill him. But there was no time now to think of such matters.

Over the coal-black bodies of the buffalo floated snow-white egrets. Some of them perched on the broad backs, plucking out insects from the cracks in the hide. Most of them circled in the air, sharing the excitement of the animals below them.

The lovely birds, whose feathers are prized for their beauty, contrasted oddly with the ugly monsters beneath them. Here was certainly a case of beauty and the beast. The black army seemed to be waving white flags.

Usually the white flag means surrender, but it was not so this time. Pawing the ground and snorting defiantly, the buffalo had no idea of giving up or running away.

Buffalo fear only two enemies. One is the lion, the other is the gun. They did not see either lions or guns, so why should they be afraid?

They saw men. A man has no horns, and it would take a dozen men to equal a buffalo in weight and more than that to match his strength.

Hal had hoped the buffalo would be worried by the lineup of cars. But to a buffalo’s eyes perhaps these things looked like houses or tents, nothing to be afraid of. And Hal himself was not so sure of victory when it occurred to him that this was going to be a contest between about thirty tons of car against a hundred tons of buffalo.

But how about noise? Many creatures were sensitive to noise. Hal put his hand on the horn-button and held it there. The drivers of the other cars got the idea, and fourteen powerful horns let out a roar that sent up the egrets in a white cloud and started the baboons down by the river chattering with terror.