Authors: Wilbur Smith
Jordan loved the bird for her beauty, and once she was trained Ralph occasionally let him carry her and stroke the hot sleek plumage under his gentle fingers. It was Jordan who found her name.
He took it from Plutarch’s
Lives
, which he was re-reading, and so the falcon was named Scipio, but Jordan accompanied the hunt only once, disgracing himself irretrievably by bursting
into tears at the moment of the kill. Ralph never invited him again.
The same rains that had undermined the No. 6 causeway had flooded every depression and vlei for a hundred miles around the New Rush diggings. Slowly, in the hot dry months since that deluge, the
shallower pools and swamps had dried out; but five miles south on the Cape Road, halfway to the low line of blue Magersfontein hills, there was still a wide body of open water, and already
reed-beds had grown up around its perimeter and colonies of scarlet and ebony bishop birds had woven their hanging basket nests on the nodding reed staffs. Amongst the reeds Ralph and Bazo built
their blind.
They drew the long, leafy fronds down over their own heads, careful not to slice their hands on the razor-edged leaves; the fluffy white silks snowed down on them from the laden seed heads of
the reeds, and they plaited the roof of stems in place, concealing themselves from the open sky.
Ralph scooped a handful of black mud and smeared it over his face. He knew that his white face turned upwards would shine like a mirror, catching the eye of even a high-flighted bird.
‘You should have been born Matabele, then you would not need mud.’ Bazo chuckled as he watched him, and Ralph made an obscene sign at him with his fingers before they settled down to
wait.
It was fascinating to see how Scipio, blind under the leather hood, could still pick up the beat of approaching wings long before the men could see or hear them, and they were alerted by the set
of her head and the anticipatory stretch of her talons.
‘Not yet, darling,’ Ralph whispered. ‘Soon now, darling.’
Then Bazo whistled sharply and pointed with his chin.
Across the swamp, still two miles out, very high against the empty sky, Ralph saw them. There were three of them, big black wings curving on the downbeat in that characteristic unhurried,
weighty action.
‘Here they come, my love,’ Ralph murmured to Scipio, and touched the russet-dappled breast with his lips and felt the beat of the fierce heart against his face.
‘God, but they are big,’ Ralph murmured, and the tiny shapely body on his arm was feather light. He had never flown her against geese before, and he was torn with doubts.
The V-shaped flight of geese went far out across the swamp in a leisurely descending circle and then they were coming back, low, flying into the sun. It was perfect. Scipio would have the sun
behind her when she towered, and Ralph thrust his doubts aside.
He slipped the soft leather hood off Scipio’s beautiful dove-grey head, and the yellow eyes opened like full moons, focusing swiftly. She shook out her feathers, swelling in size for a
moment, puffing out her breast – until she saw the thick black skein of geese against the sky, and her plumage flattened, going sleek and polished, steely in the early sunlight, and she
crouched forward on Ralph’s wrist.
Turning with her to follow the flight of the geese, Ralph could feel the rapier points of her talons through the cuff of his leather gauntlet and sense the tension of the small neat body. She
seemed to vibrate like a violin’s strings as the bow is drawn lightly across them.
With his free hand he broke the quick-release knot that secured the jesses to Scipio’s leg.
‘Hunt!’ he cried, and launched her, throwing her clear of the reed; and she went on high like a javelin, towering swiftly for the sun on wings shaped like the wicked blades of a pair
of fighting knives.
The geese saw her instantly, and stalled back on great wings that were suddenly ungainly with shock. Their tight V-formation broke up as each bird turned away – two of them rising, driving
hard for height while the third bird swung north again towards the river, dropped height steeply to pick up the speed he had lost in the initial stall of shock, and then levelled out low and winged
hard, neck outstretched, webbed feet tucked up under his tail.
Scipio was still towering, going up on wings that blurred with speed and turned to golden discs in the early slanting sunlight.
Her tactics were those of the instinctive killer. She needed every inch of height that she could achieve. She needed it to exchange for speed when she began her stoop, her body weight was many
times lighter than the huge birds she was hunting, and she had to kill with shock and speed.
Even as she went up her head was twisted to the side, watching, judging, as the game scattered away below her.
‘Don’t duck, my sweeting,’ Ralph called to her.
There was very real danger of it, for though Scipio was hungry to hunt, she had never been flown against birds such as these. Geese were not her natural prey; nature had not equipped her for the
shock of binding to something so massive.
As she climbed so the difference in size of hunter and hunted was emphasized; and then abruptly Scipio was at the height she judged sufficient and she hovered, ten beats of Ralph’s own
heart as he watched her standing in the air.
She was daunted, the game was too big, she was going to duck.
‘Hunt, darling, hunt!’ he called to her and she seemed to have heard him. She screamed that terrible death cry of the falcon, high and shrill and fierce, and then she folded her
wings and dropped into her stoop.
‘She’s taking the low bird,’ Ralph shouted his triumph; she was not going to duck, she had selected the goose that had dropped close to earth and was now crossing her front at
an acute angle.
‘There is the liver of a lion in that small body.’ Bazo’s voice was full of wonder as he stared upwards at the tiny deadly dart that fell against the blue.
They could hear the wind hissing through her half-cocked wings, see the infinitesimal movements of her tip feathers with which she controlled that terrible headlong plunge.
The goose flogged at the air, heavy, massive, black flashed with frosty white, its panic evident in every beat of its frantic wings.
The speed with which Scipio closed was chilling. Ralph felt the hair on the nape of his neck come erect as though an icy wind had touched him as Scipio reached forward with her steely
talons.
This was the moment for which he and the bird had worked and trained so long. The supreme moment of the kill – an involuntary cry burst from his throat, a primeval and animal sound, as
Scipio bound to the great goose and the sound of the hit was like a single beat of a bass drum that seemed to shake the very air about Ralph’s head.
The goose’s spread wings spun like the spokes of a wheel, and a burst of black feathers filled the air as though a shrapnel shell had been fired from a heavy cannon; and then the
goose’s body collapsed under the shock, one wing snapped and trailed down the sky as it fell, the long serpentine goose neck was arched back in the convulsion of death, and Scipio was bound
to the gigantic black body, her talons locked deep into the still frantically beating heart. The impetus of Scipio’s stoop had shattered bone in the big body and burst the pulsing blood
vessels around the goose’s heart.
Ralph started to run, whooping with excitement, and Bazo was at his shoulder, laughing, head thrown back, watching the birds fall, leaving a tracery of feathers like the plume of a comet in the
sky behind them.
A hawk binds to its prey, from the moment of strike unto the earth. A falcon does not. Scipio should break, and let the goose fall, but she had not; she was still locked in, and Ralph felt the
first frost of worry cool his excitement. Had his bird broken bone, or otherwise injured herself in that frightful impact?
‘Beauty!’ he called to her. ‘Unbind! Unbind!’ She could be caught under the heavy goose and crushed against the earth. It was not her way to hold on all the way in.
‘Unbind!’ he screamed again, and saw her flutter, stabbing at the air with those sharp-bladed wings. She was stunned, and the earth rushed up at her.
Then suddenly she lunged, unbinding, breaking loose from her kill, hovering, letting the goose go on to thud into the rocky earth beyond the swamp, only then sinking, dainty and poised, and
settling again upon the humped black carcass. Ralph felt his chest choked with pride and love for her courage and her beauty.
‘Kweet,’ Scipio called, when she saw Ralph. ‘Kweet,’ the recognition call, and she left the prize that she had risked her life to take and came readily to Ralph’s
hand.
He stooped over her, his eyes burning with pride, and kissed her lovely head.
‘I won’t make you do it again,’ he whispered. ‘I just had to see if you could do it – but I won’t ever make you do it again.’
R
alph fed the goose’s head to Scipio, and she tore it to pieces with her curved beak, between each morsel pausing to stare at Ralph.
‘The bird loves you,’ Bazo looked up from the fire over which he was roasting chunks of fat goose, the grease dripping onto the coals and frizzling sharply. Ralph smiled, lifted the
bird and kissed its bloody beak.
‘And I love her.’
‘You and the bird have the same spirit. Kamuza and I have spoken of it often.’
‘Nothing is as brave as my Scipio.’
Bazo shook his head. ‘Do you remember the day that Bakela would have killed me? In the moment that he took the gun to me he was mad, mad to the point of killing.’
Ralph’s expression changed. It was many months since he had intervened to save the young Matabele from the wrath of his father.
‘I have not spoken of it before.’ Bazo held Ralph’s eyes steadily. ‘It is not the kind of matter about which a man chatters like a woman at the water-hole. We will
probably never speak of it again, you and I, but know you that it will never be forgotten—’ Bazo paused, and then he said it solemnly. ‘I shall remember, Henshaw.’
Ralph understood immediately. ‘Henshaw, the hawk.’ The Matabele had given him a praise name, a thing not lightly done, a mark of enormous respect. His father was Bakela, the Fist,
and now he was Henshaw, the Hawk, named for the brave and beautiful bird upon his wrist.
‘I shall remember, Henshaw, my brother,’ repeated Bazo, the Axe. ‘I shall remember.’
Z
ouga was never entirely sure why he kept the rendezvous; certainly it was not merely because Jan Cheroot urged him to do so, nor the fact that
the payment of £2,000 for the shattered chips of the great Ballantyne diamond had not lasted him as long as he had hoped, nor that the cost of the new stagings was rising all the time. His
share looked to be more like two thousand than a thousand pounds. Sometimes in his least charitable moods Zouga suspected that Pickering and Rhodes and some other members of the committee were
content to see the costs of the stagings rise and the pressure begin to squeeze out the smaller diggers. The going price of claims in the collapsed No. 6 Section continued to drop as the cost of
the stagings rose; and somebody was buying, if not Rhodes and his partners, then it must be Beit or Werner, or even the newcomer, Barnato.
Perhaps Zouga kept the rendezvous to distract himself from these grave problems, perhaps he was merely intrigued by the mystery that surrounded it all, but when he looked at himself honestly it
was more likely the prospect of profit. The whole affair reeked of profit, and Zouga was a desperate man. He had very little left to sell apart from the claims themselves. To sell the claims was to
abandon his dream. He was ready to explore any other path, to take any risks, rather than that.
‘There is a man who wishes to speak with you.’ Jan Cheroot’s words had started it, and something in his tone made Zouga look up sharply. They had been together many years and
there was little they did not know of each other’s moods and meanings.
‘That is simple enough,’ Zouga had told him. ‘Send him to the camp.’
‘He wishes to speak secretly, at a place where no other eyes will be watching.’
‘That sounds like the way of a rogue,’ Zouga frowned. ‘What is the man’s name?’
‘I do not know his name,’ Jan Cheroot admitted, and then when he saw Zouga’s expression, he explained. ‘He sent a child with a message.’
‘Then send the child back to him, whoever he is. Tell him he will find me here every evening, and anything he has to discuss I will be pleased to listen to in the privacy of my
tent.’
‘As you wish,’ Jan Cheroot grunted, and the wrinkles on his face deepened so that he looked like a pickled walnut. ‘Then we will continue to eat maize porridge.’ And they
did not discuss it again, not for many weeks, but the worm was planted and it gnawed away at Zouga until he was the one who asked.
‘Jan Cheroot, what of your nameless friend? What was his reply?’
‘He sent word that it was not possible to help a man who refused to help himself,’ Jan Cheroot told him airily. ‘And it is clear to all the world that we have no need of help.
Look at your fine clothes, it is the fashion now to have the buttocks hanging out of the pants.’
Zouga smiled at the hyperbole, for his breeches were neatly patched. Jordan had seen to that.
‘And look at me,’ Jan Cheroot went on. ‘What reason do I have for complaint? I was paid a year ago, wasn’t I?’
‘Six months ago,’ Zouga corrected him.
‘I cannot remember,’ Jan Cheroot sulked. ‘The same way I have forgotten what beef tastes like.’
‘When the stagings are completed—’ Zouga began, and Jan Cheroot snorted.
‘They are more likely to fall on our heads. At least then we won’t have to worry about being hungry.’
Serious defects had shown up in the design of the stagings. They had been unable to support the weight of cable. The cables between them weighed over three hundred tons and they had to be
stretched to sufficient tension to carry the gravel buckies without sagging excessively.
The very first day of operation the stagings at the north end of the section gave under the strain. Two winches tore loose and the wires fell twanging and snaking into the diggings. There had
been a gravel bucky on the rope, carrying five black workmen down to the floor of the workings to begin re-opening the long deserted claims. They screamed the whole way down as the bucky spun and
twisted, throwing them clear, and the tangle of snapping silver cables caught them up like the tentacles of some voracious sea-monster.