The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

PRAISE FOR WILBUR SMITH

‘Wilbur Smith rarely misses a trick’
Sunday Times

‘The world’s leading adventure writer’
Daily Express

‘Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he is a master’
Washington Post

‘The pace would do credit to a Porsche, and the invention is as bright and explosive as a fireworks display’
Sunday Telegraph

‘A violent saga . . . told with vigour and enthusiasm . . . Wilbur Smith spins a fine tale’
Evening Standard

‘A bonanza of excitement’
New York Times

‘. . . a natural storyteller who moves confidently and often splendidly in his period and sustains a flow of convincing incident’
Scotsman

‘Raw experience, grim realism, history and romance welded with mystery and the bewilderment of life itself’
Library Journal

‘A thundering good read’
Irish Times

‘Extrovert and vigorous . . . constantly changing incidents and memorable portraits’
Liverpool Daily Post

‘An immensely powerful book, disturbing and compulsive, harsh yet compassionate’
She

‘An epic novel . . . it would be hard to think of a theme that was more appropriate today . . . Smith writes with a great passion for the soul of
Africa’
Today

‘I read on to the last page, hooked by its frenzied inventiveness piling up incident upon incident . . . mighty entertainment’
Yorkshire Post

‘There is a streak of genuine poetry, all the more attractive for being unfeigned’
Sunday Telegraph

‘. . . action follows action . . . mystery is piled on mystery . . . tales to delight the millions of addicts of the gutsy adventure
story’
Sunday Express

‘Action-crammed’
Sunday Times

‘Rattling good adventure’
Evening Standard

Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University. He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the
successful publication of
When the Lion Feeds,
and has written over thirty novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books are now translated into
twenty-six languages.

Also by Wilbur Smith

THE COURTNEYS

When the Lion Feeds

The Sound of Thunder

A Sparrow Falls

Birds of Prey

Monsoon

Blue Horizon

The Triumph of the Sun

THE COURTNEYS OF AFRICA

The Burning Shore

Power of the Sword

Rage

A Time to Die

Golden Fox

THE BALLANTYNE NOVELS

A Falcon Flies

Men of Men

The Angels Weep

THE EGYPTIAN NOVELS

River God

The Seventh Scroll

Warlock

The Quest

also

The Dark of the Sun

Shout at the Devil

Gold Mine

The Diamond Hunters

The Sunbird

Eagle in the Sky

The Eye of the Tiger

Cry Wolf

Hungry as the Sea

Wild Justice

Elephant Song

PAN BOOKS

First published 1984 by William Heinemann Ltd

This edition published 1998 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-330-46743-8 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-46742-1 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-46745-2 in Microsoft Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-46744-5 in Mobipocket format

Copyright © Wilbur Smith 1984

The right of Wilbur Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic,
digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit
www.panmacmillan.com
to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and
you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you're always first to hear about our new releases.

This book is for my wife and the jewel
of my life, Mokhiniso, with all my love
and gratitude for the enchanted years
that I have been married to her

T
his small wind had travelled a thousand miles and more, up from the great wastes of the Kalahari Desert which the little
yellow Bushmen call ‘the Big Dry’. Now when it reached the escarpment of the Zambezi valley, it broke up into eddies and backlashes amongst the hills and the broken ground of the
rim.

The bull elephant stood just below the crest of one of the hills, much too canny to silhouette himself on the skyline. His bulk was screened by the new growth of leaves on the msasa trees, and
he blended with the grey rock of the slope behind him.

He reached up twenty feet and sucked the air into his wide, hair-rimmed nostrils, and then he rolled his trunk down and delicately blew into his own gaping mouth. The two olfactory organs in the
overhang of his upper lip flared open like pink rosebuds, and he tasted the air.

He tasted the fine peppery dust of the far deserts, the sweet pollens of a hundred wild plants, the warm bovine stench of the buffalo herd in the valley below, the cool tang of the water pool at
which they were drinking and wallowing: these and other scents he identified, and accurately he judged the proximity of the source of each odour.

However, these were not the scents for which he was searching. What he sought was the other acrid offensive smell which overlaid all the others. The smell of native tobacco smoke mingled with
the peculiar musk of the flesh-eater, rancid sweat in unwashed wool, of paraffin and carbolic soap and cured leather – the scent of man; it was there, as strong and close as it had been in
all the long days since the chase had begun.

Once again the old bull felt the atavistic rage rising in him. Countless generations of his kind had been pursued by that odour. Since a calf he had learned to hate and fear it, almost all his
life he had been driven by it.

Only recently there had been a hiatus in the lifelong pursuit and flight. For eleven years there had been surcease, a time of quiet for the herds along the Zambezi. The bull could not know nor
understand the reason, that there had been bitter civil war amongst his tormentors, war that had turned these vast areas along the south bank of the Zambezi into an undefended buffer zone, too
dangerous for ivory-hunters or even for the game rangers whose duties included the cull of surplus elephant populations. The herds had prospered in those years, but now the persecution had begun
again with all the old implacable ferocity.

With the rage and the terror still upon him, the old bull lifted his trunk again and sucked the dreaded scent into the sinuses of his bony skull. Then he turned and moving silently he crossed
the rocky ridge, a mere greyish blur for an instant against the clear blue of the African sky. Still carrying the scent, he strode down to where his herd was spread along the back slope.

There were almost three hundred elephant scattered amongst the trees. Most of the breeding cows had calves with them, some so young that they looked like fat little piglets, small enough to fit
under their mothers’ bellies. They rolled up their tiny trunks onto their foreheads and craned upwards to the teats that hung on swollen dugs between the dams’ front legs.

The older calves cavorted about, romping and playing noisy tag, until in exasperation one of their elders would tear a branch from one of the trees and, wielding it in his trunk, lay about him,
scattering the importunate youngsters in squealing mock consternation.

The cows and young bulls fed with unhurried deliberation, working a trunk deep into a dense, fiercely thorned thicket to pluck a handful of ripe berries then place them well back in the throat
like an old man swallowing aspirin; or using the point of a stained ivory tusk to loosen the bark of a msasa tree and then strip ten feet of it and stuff it happily beyond the drooping triangular
lower lip; or raising their entire bulk on their back legs like a begging dog to reach up with outstretched trunk to the tender leaves at the top of a tall tree, or using a broad forehead and four
tons of weight to shake another tree until it tossed and whipped and released a shower of ripe pods. Further down the slope two young bulls had combined their strength to topple a sixty-footer
whose top leaves were beyond even their long reach. As it fell with a crackle of tearing fibres, the herd bull crossed the ridge and immediately the happy uproar ceased abruptly, to be replaced by
quiet that was startling in its contrast.

The calves pressed anxiously to their mothers’ flanks, and the grown beasts froze defensively, ears outstretched and only the tips of their trunks questing.

The bull came down to them with his swinging stride, carrying his thick yellow ivories high, his alarm evident in the cock of his tattered ears. He was still carrying the man-smell in his head,
and when he reached the nearest group of cows, he extended his trunk and blew it over them.

Instantly they spun away, instinctively turning downwind so that the pursuers’ scent must always be carried to them. The rest of the herd saw the manoeuvre and fell into their running
formation, closing up with the calves and nursing mothers in the centre, the old barren queens surrounding them, the young bulls pointing the herd and the older bulls and their attendant askaris on
the flanks, and they went away in the swinging, ground-devouring stride that they could maintain for a day and a night and another day without check.

As he fled, the old bull was confused. No pursuit that he had ever experienced was as persistent as this had been. It had lasted for eight days now, and yet the pursuers never closed in to make
contact with the herd. They were in the south, giving him their scent, but almost always keeping beyond the limited range of his weak eyesight. There seemed to be many of them, more than he had
ever encountered in all his wanderings, a line of them stretched like a net across the southern routes. Only once had he seen them. On the fifth day, having reached the limits of forbearance, he
had turned the herd and tried to break back through their line, and they had been there to head him off, the tiny upright sticklike figures, so deceptively frail and yet so deadly, springing up
from the yellow grass, barring his escape to the south, flapping blankets and beating on empty paraffin tins, until his courage failed and the old bull turned back, and led his herds once more down
the rugged escarpment towards the great river.

The escarpment was threaded by elephant trails used for ten thousand years by the herds, trails that followed the easier gradients and found the passes and ports through the ironstone ramparts.
The old bull worked his herd down one of these, and the herd strung out in single file through the narrow places and spread out again beyond.

He kept them going through the night. Though there was no moon, the fat white stars hung close against the earth, and the herd moved almost soundlessly through the dark forests. Once, after
midnight, the old bull fell back and waited beside the trail, letting his herd go on. Within the hour he caught again the tainted man-smell on the wind, fainter and very much more distant –
but there, always there, and he hurried forward to catch up with his cows.

In the dawn they entered the area which he had not visited in ten years. The narrow strip along the river which had been the scene of intense human activity during the long-drawn-out war, and
which for that reason he had avoided until now when he was reluctantly driven into it once again.