08 Safari Adventure (4 page)

The warden said no. A leopard might climb in.’

‘I think he was just playing it safe when he said that. It’s not really very likely, is it?’

‘I wouldn’t take a chance on it.’

‘How about this small window over my bed?’ Roger suggested.

‘A leopard could get through it.’

‘It’s too high from the ground.’

‘You’d be surprised how high a leopard can jump.’

Roger lay quiet for a moment. Another rat - or was it the same one? - scuttled across the floor.

‘I don’t like the smell of this place,’ announced Roger. ‘I’m going to open that window.’

Hal answered sleepily, ‘Okay, you young idiot, open it. But don’t be surprised if you have a visitor.’

Roger opened the window, then flopped down under the covers and went to sleep.

He dreamed that he was tussling with his brother. Hal sat on him, squeezing the breath out of him.

He woke with a start. Something was on top of him. A leopard? He was about to scream and wrench himself free when another thought came to him.

Hal had said he would get him later. He had scared Hal out of his wits by pretending to be a wild beast about to spring upon his back. Now Hal was trying to scare him - make him think that a leopard had pounced on him. He would fool the big boob. He’d just lie there as calm as you please.

‘Ho, ho, hi, hum,’ he yawned. ‘Go back to bed, you big stiff. You’re not fooling me a bit’

He felt hot breath on his face. Sharp points like claws pressed through the blanket on to his arms.

‘You ought to cut your fingernails,’ he said.

The answer was a roar that sounded like a circular saw going through a knot.

Roger laughed. ‘Pretty poor imitation of a leopard. Now get off me -1 want to sleep.’

‘What’s going on over there?’ came from the other side of the room.

Roger’s blood froze. ‘Where are you, Hal?’ he quavered.

‘In bed, of course. Something woke me up. Sounded like a leopard.’

There was a scampering sound on the floor. Whatever it was that had landed on Roger leaped off and went careering madly round the room. Hal dug under his pillow for his flashlight and turned it on. Roger saw spots before his eyes - black spots on yellow chasing a big rat.

The leopard caught the rat, gripped it between his teeth, jumped on Roger, squeezing out of that terrified boy one wild yell, then leaped out of the window.

Roger found himself shivering and sweating at the same time. Hal got out of bed and came over.

‘Have you had enough fresh air?’ he asked. He closed the window. Without saying anything more, he sat down on the edge of the bed, put his hand on Roger’s arm and kept it there until the shivering died down. Then, with a final friendly pat, he went back to bed.

Roger lay listening to the sounds of the night. The animals had really taken over the camp. He recognized some of the sounds - the whine of a jackal, the hoot of an owl, and the familiar ‘ugh-ugh’ of the animal he had come to know so well, most numerous of all four-legged creatures in the East African animal land - the gnu or wildebeest.

There was the ‘meow’ that sounded like the voice of a house cat but came more probably from a beast twenty times as big, the cheetah. A rhino snorted like a car backfiring. There was a great clatter as the rubbish bin beside the kitchen went over. That might be the work of hyenas. He was more sure of it when he heard a loud chorus of laughter from those weird beasts - ‘tee-hee-hee-hee-hee-ha-ha’. From the distant river came an answering laugh from the hippos, a deep sound, ‘wah-wah-wah’ and, deeper still, ‘hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh’.

And for every sound he knew there were a dozen he did not know. He enjoyed listening to them - until he heard one he knew too well - the leopard’s saw going through a hard knot.

He buried one ear in his pillow, covered the other with his blanket, and slept.

It seemed only five minutes later when he was aroused by a knock on the door. He opened his eyes to the grey light of dawn.

The door opened and the warden’ Mark Crosby, came in.

‘You boys want to go on dawn patrol? It’s the best time of day to see the animals.’

The boys were surprised to see the warden on his feet. He must have a strong constitution. ‘How’s your arm?’ Hal asked. He saw the arm was bandaged.

‘Not bad at all,’ the warden said. ‘See, I can move it. I was lucky that the arrow just went through the fleshy part. A few days in a bandage and it will be okay. Pull on your clothes and we’ll have some coffee.’

When they came out on to the porch they found the boy had already placed a coffee pot and cups on the table. Morning mists were rising. The lower part of Kilimanjaro could not be seen but the snow-crowned top rising above the mists floated like a white cloud in the sky. The sun had already struck the snow and glaciers.

Here below it was still so dark that the shapes moving among the flat-topped acacia trees looked more like blobs of ink than animals.

Crosby saw Roger looking towards the kitchen as if he expected more than coffee. The warden laughed.

‘Our ways may seem a little odd to you. The animals are out in full force in the early morning, so we get our guests up at dawn and take them out to see the wild life, then bring them back at about nine for breakfast.’

‘Speaking of guests,’ said Hal, ‘none of these other bandas seems to be occupied.’

Crosby shook his head. ‘Very few tourists come here, now that the park has been overrun by killers. Tourists are afraid to come. That’s one of the serious effects of poaching. It scares off visitors. And that means it scares off money that this young nation of Kenya needs. The country’s biggest source of revenue has been the tourist business. Without the. money the tourists bring in, the country will go broke. So if we can get rid of the poachers we’ll not only save the animals - we’ll save Kenya.’

They climbed into the warden’s Land-Rover and set out. They had not gone more than half a mile before the trail was blocked by a herd of buffalo. Almost a hundred of the great shaggy black beasts faced them, with heads lowered. Crosby stopped the car.

‘I don’t think we’ll try to plough through that,’ he said.

A huge bull buffalo came out from the herd, advanced some twenty feet towards the Land-Rover and then stopped. He glared at the car and shook his big head.

That’s their leader,’ Crosby said. ‘If he takes a notion to charge us, they’ll all follow.’

‘Will they go round the car?’

‘Buffaloes don’t go round anything. They go through it. Many hunters claim they are the most dangerous animals in Africa. They stop at nothing. Their heads are like iron balls. After they had finished there would be nothing left of this car but scrap iron.’

‘And they have the bad habit of coming back,’ said Hal, remembering his own adventures with these determined beasts.

‘Yes,’ said Crosby. ‘Most animals do what damage they can. and then call it a day. But the buffalo comes back to make sure that you are good and dead. Of course they aren’t always dangerous. If nothing annoys then they may be as quiet as cows. That’s why we’re just sitting here, doing nothing. If they get it through their thick noddles that we mean no harm, they may wander off. It all depends on the poachers.’

‘What have the poachers to do with it?’

‘If a poacher’s arrow or spear has ever wounded that bull, he will hate everything human and he will very likely take it out on us. But I think I recognize him by that twisted right horn. I believe he’s been round the camp and I gave him a drink. Let’s see if he knows me.’

He opened the door and prepared to climb out. At once there was an angry roar from the big bull. The herd behind him began to stamp and bellow. The bull started forward and Hal longed to get his hands on the gear lever and back away.

But as the warden stepped down to where the bull could see him from head to foot the bull stopped and appeared to be thinking things over.

Then he turned towards the herd and said something that might have been bull-language for ‘This two-legged one is okay.’ With great dignity he moved off into the woods and the herd followed him.

Hal and Roger breathed again.

“Next stop, Poachers’ Lookout,’ said the warden as he climbed back behind the wheel.

They drove through some pleasant woodland where they saw long-faced hartebeest, waterbuck, gerenuk, and the lovely, leaping impala, expert in both the high jump and the long jump. The clown of the woods, the wart-hog, humph-humphed out of their way, and a family of baboons barked savagely as they passed.

They stopped to study a herd of a couple of dozen elephants who were breaking off branches from the trees and watching the approach of the car with much threatening spreading of ears and tossing of trunks. There were several huge bulls, also cows with calves. They were well off the trail, over humpy ground, and it was impossible to drive closer to them.

Hal, who wanted to photograph them, left the car, with the warden’s permission, and walked towards them. The intelligent animals knew the difference between a camera and a gun and allowed him to come within a hundred feet. He took eight photographs. But when the world’s biggest land animals found the fly-size human too annoying and seemed about ready to do something about it, Hal made a rather hasty retreat to the car.

Another half-mile and Crosby again brought the car to a halt.

‘Now I’m going to show you something remarkable. You won’t believe your eyes. Look over there.’

What the boys saw was a broken-down tree. An elephant stood beside it.

‘What’s remarkable about that?’ asked Hal.

‘Watch.’

The bark of the tree-trunk had already been torn off and the white wood was exposed. Presently the elephant raised his tusks and punched them deep into the wood. He exerted his great strength and, with a loud ripping sound, tore off a sheet of wood an inch or two thick and - six feet long.

‘What in the world is he going to do with that?’

For answer, the elephant coiled the end of his trunk round the board, lifted it from his tusks, and actually put it in his mouth.

Crunch, crunch - he chewed it up as if it were nothing but a potato chip. Within ten seconds the six-foot plank had disappeared into his great inside.

He tore off strip after strip, chewed, then swallowed. He evidently thought it a delicious breakfast.

‘If he keeps that up,’ Roger said, ‘he’ll soon be a .wooden elephant’

The boys had often seen elephants eating the leaves of a tree or even the twigs. But they had never before seen one eating the tree-trunk itself.

This was surely a freak of nature. ‘I can’t think of anything else in the world that eats trees,’ Hal said.

“There’s one,’ Crosby replied. ‘The termite. But it doesn’t take a plank at a time.’

The elephant was so thoroughly enjoying his meal that he paid no attention to the car. He kept on filling himself with wood. Hal took photographs. People just wouldn’t believe this unless they could see it in pictures.

‘He was lucky to find a fallen tree.’

‘Lucky nothing,’ Crosby said. ‘He probably pushed it over himself.’

‘But that trunk is about five feet thick.’

‘Well, the elephant is more than five feet thick, and his strength matches his size. We lose a lot of trees to the elephants. If they can’t push a tree over they have another way of getting it down. They attack the standing tree on one side and keep cutting it until it falls. They are intelligent enough to step out of the way before it topples over. A young one who hadn’t learned to do this was pinned under the tree when it fell. We found him three days ago still under the tree with his back broken. He died before we could get him out.’

The car climbed a steep trail to Poachers’ Lookout. In front of a small pavilion a ranger stood with his eye glued to a telescope. He snapped to attention and saluted as the warden stepped out of the car.

‘See anything?’ asked Crosby.

‘No, bwana,’ said the ranger. ‘Except some birds.’

Crosby looked through the telescope. He let Hal take his place, and then Roger. They could plainly make out some vultures circling over a spot at the edge of a wood. They flew round and round as they usually do over a dying or dead animal.

‘Does it mean poachers?’ Hal asked.

‘I doubt it,’ said Crosby. ‘It’s only about two miles from our lodge. Surely they wouldn’t dare come that close. But we’ll go down and take a look.’

They drove to the spot. A large black hulk lay at the edge of a grove of trees. There was no sign of any poacher. As the men stepped out of the car a cloud of vultures rose from the black body and climbed to join the birds circling above.

‘Dead rhino,’ said Crosby, and led the way to the side of the fallen animal.

The animal was more than dead. He was hollow. There was a hole in his side as big as a barrel and his insides were gone. Nothing was left but a big black cave - and a terrible smell.

The boys stooped and looked into the cave. ‘Poor brute,’ Hal said. ‘Perhaps he fell sick and died and the hyenas, jackals, and vultures chewed this hole in him.’

‘Don’t you think poachers might have done it?’

Hal stood up. ‘Look. There are the bandas in full view. The warden thinks the poachers wouldn’t dare come so close to the lodge.’

Crosby was studying the animal’s head. That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘But I was mistaken. Both horns are gone. No animal would chew them off - they’re not good to eat. Poachers took them. And the animal didn’t die a natural death.’ He pointed to a ragged wound in the throat. ‘A spear did that! Now you get some idea of how bold these fellows can be. But you haven’t seen the worst yet. Jump into the car and I’ll show you something that beats all this hollow.’

After only a few minutes’ drive, the car stopped. This is the Tsavo River,’ Crosby said.

The boys could see no river. There was nothing but a stretch of rough black rock.

‘Have you ever walked on a river?’ said the warden. ‘Now’s your chance.’

He led the way out on to the bare black area. He stamped on the rock. It gave out a hollow sound. Hal studied the rock.