Shooting Butterflies (30 page)

‘So, Shilo, you are in the wind again,' he said.

He would revisit Kwazi, Shilo's best friend for so many years, and see if the man of the Blue Lady Shebeen knew anything about Jamison's whereabouts. Later. Later when he woke, because a wave of tiredness swept over him, and as he closed the corrugated iron doors to the old mushroom shed, a calmness overcame him, and he had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other one to get back inside his house. Throwing himself on his bed, he went back to sleep.

Buffel jerked awake, sitting upright in his bed, reaching for nothingness. The sun wasn't up yet.

‘Ugh,' he said.

Now that he was awake, he could shut his mind to the nightmare, to the sound of Impendla calling out to him. Demanding that he bring the butterfly to help him cross over into the afterlife. Telling Buffel that he was still trapped at the tree, that his spirit was still suffering.

Buffel hung his head.

So soon. Impendla was calling for new blood already.

He pulled his body from his bed, and walked naked into his modern ensuite bathroom. When he had first started on the pills from the doctor, renovating his farmhouse had helped him sleep. The hard work as he had physically demolished and then rebuilt parts of his home had left him exhausted each night. He had completed the renovations with the help of his tracker Gibson, who had surprised him by being able to build.

Still raw from Shilo's betrayal, he had been suspicious of Gibson when he first appeared at his farm looking for work a few weeks after Shilo had left. But Gibson had proved to be a useful all-rounder on the farm, and a bladdy good tracker for hunting. Patient, and knowledgeable of the bush, he was older than the other workers on the farm, but he was hard working.

Buffel cursed as he looked at the stranger staring back at him from the mirror.

He looked into the bloodshot eyes of a madman he thought he had laid to rest with the pills from his doctor. He was still tall. Still lean, he hadn't developed the beer gut that seemed to plague men his age. There was no outward sign that the man in the mirror didn't belong in society. He knew that he was still stronger than most men half his age, but he also knew that something was wrong inside his head.

It had been wrong for so many years.

He had tried using the doctor's sleeping medication to stop the nightmares, but they continued to play like a stuck record in his mind.

Impendla hanging in his tree.

The destruction of the tree when his father had reported it to the police force.

The dead children holding hands.

Impendla's own mother not looking at him, not wanting to claim his body as her son's.

Her subsequent disappearance.

The dead boys in the Grey Scouts, and the recreation of the details of the ritual he performed over and over during the war.

The butterfly dream.

The best dream, where Tara Wright saved Impendla and walked him over to the other side. Where she saved his tormented soul. Where she gave Buffel peace.

And finally, the newest, most frightening and disturbing of the nightmares, in which Impendla cried out to him because he had been forgotten. Cried aloud that his friend Kirk had forgotten him, and no longer cared about him.

In the silence of that dream after the screaming stopped, all the butterflies in the bush lost their wings and fell to the ground, dead. Tara fell dead to the ground before she reached Impendla.

There was no one left who could help Impendla to cross over.

It was already too late.

He looked into his own brown eyes staring back at him. Trying to ignore the blood vessels that streaked over the whites of his eyes.
The lines around his eyes looked deeper than when he'd last looked, like the dried claws from a wedge tail eagle he had once kept to decorate one of the warriors with.

He hated the face that stared back at him.

He turned away and climbed into the shower, letting the cold water pound his skin and punish him for being the survivor.

The one who should have died but didn't.

The one who after all these years still wasn't doing enough to save Impendla's soul.

He needed to visit his tree.

An hour later, dawn had only just turned pink in the African sky. A thin mist hung low on the bushveld, but no moisture brushed off the brown grass as Buffel made his way through the early morning. Go-away-birds serenaded his passing, and vervet monkeys scampered away from his direct path, but stopped close by to watch his progress. His silent step faltered as he noticed the spoor in the sand.

The fat pad of the cat print looked like a sub-adult lion. The print was nearly ten centimetres in total, and the smaller imprints of the toes were more rounded. No claws extended. There had been no lion in that area for many years, so that left just one animal to claim the print.

A leopard, and from the size of the print, a big male.

Sure, its claws were retracted now, but when it took down a kudu with skill and strength alone, they would extend in all their glory. One of nature's best engineered killing machines, the leopard wasn't too proud to go scavenging when it needed to survive. He had long held the mighty
ingwe
in high esteem.

The spoor was fresh, not much wind to blow any sand over the print or distort it in any way. Still clear. No other tracks criss-crossing over it either. A perfect imprint. He would have been surprised to see any human prints this far inside the
sangoma
zone he'd created. Most of the black populations still respected the boundaries of the muti. Even muti that had been placed in the bush many years
before. The ground became known as sacred, and the population learnt to avoid it, rather than anger the
sangoma.

Buffel slid the strap of his .303 off his shoulder, and repositioned his rifle. He pushed the rubber-padded butt into his shoulder and slid the safety off, then slowly he pulled the bolt back and loaded a bullet. He was ready to defend himself should the need arise. Only an idiot saw spoor like that and didn't prepare for a charge, even from a usually elusive nocturnal animal.

He looked up into the canopy of the trees that were scattered around him. Leopards were famous for their strength and ability to haul their prey up into trees to avoid losing it to the hyenas. He searched with practised eyes above him and in the grass.

Nothing.

He continued forwards, slowly picking his way towards his destination. Alert.

Then he saw him.

In the large tree, the leopard paced along the branch. Its yellow eyes focused, keeping its balance. Its tail acted as a counter balance behind him as he hopped nimbly from one branch to another. The spotted coat shone golden in the rising light of early dawn. He approached a large V in the tree and wrapped his supple body up into a ball, using the space to secure himself. He yawned, and Buffel could see his large yellow teeth and pink tongue as he slowly closed his mouth, took one last brief look around his perimeter, and tucked his head down into his body. He closed his eyes.

Moments later, the leopard was asleep.

Buffel looked to the lower branches of the tree. Where six bodies should have hung, preserved and mummified into skeletons, decorated as warriors and tombis, now only bleached bone fragments were scattered around the tree. The skeletons were once wrapped in skins. Rope had bound around then, ensuring that their weapons could shield them in death and into the afterlife, did not fall off when hung in the tree. He could see where the nylon ropes had been shredded as hyena or jackal gnawed on them.

He looked at the leopard. At least he knew what had dislodged them from the tree in the first place for the other animals to scavange over.

He watched the leopard as it slept, unaware that he'd intruded on its territory.

No wonder Impendla was crying out to him. His butterfly escorts and warriors had been destroyed.

With meticulous slowness he sat cross-legged on the ground, and began to plan how he was going to replicate the sacrifice.

He damned Shilo to hell for bringing him to this place again.

If he had not seen him in the brochure, he would have been taking his client crossbow hunting right at that moment. Instead, he had cancelled with him, postponed indefinitely.

He couldn't have anyone around him for what he needed to do.

For waking the spirits of the dead.

For waking the nightmares, so that they could communicate again with him, and show him once more that
Mwari
's work was not completed.

Impendla's soul was still unsaved.

He watched the leopard through eyes that closed into slits. His breathing was soft and heavy, he was ready to sleep himself as he relaxed in the presence of the majestic beast who slept, aware that he would bark or growl should there be danger. A calmness overcame him.

He would not kill the
ingwe
that had adopted his tree into his territory, but he would ensure that the next time when he hung the sacrifices up, they would not be so easily dislodged. Leopard's fur was soft and beautiful and for years had been used for ceremonial robes and coats, but Buffel wanted the leopard to remain in the tree's territory. He wasn't about to sell the creature's valuable parts, the tail, claws and whiskers, as medicine to a muti-man or into the taxidermy trade for overseas fetishes. He wanted the leopard alive. Protecting his tree.

A lone emperor swallowtail butterfly flew into his view and rested on his knee. The huge butterfly, as big as his hand, closed its
wings, then quickly opened them again. The six eyes on the back of the butterfly all looked at him from their camouflage of yellow and dark brown. The wavy edges soothed him, as he watched the fragile butterfly with its strange hind wings that sported tails. The top of its body was black. Yet when it snapped closed again, he could see that underneath, the wings were more yellow, as was the body. He remembered a time when the sky had been filled with white butterflies, like raindrops all around them. He had collected the butterflies with Impendla, and they had pinned them to boards, so proud of their collection of dead animals that once flew free in the bush, but Impendla's mother had thrown them away. She said that the white butterflies were their ancestors, those that were pure in heart, and they were now the angels of the bush, bringing blessings to those who struggled along their own path of life. They were the saviours.

The butterfly flew away, up towards the tree, and rested near the sleeping leopard.

It was a sign.

He needed to complete another ritual, only this time he needed more than one blonde-haired sacrifice to help Impendla cross over. Perhaps if he changed the ritual again and collected all six white girls, all those butterflies would guide Impendla's spirit home to rest.

They would be the butterflies to help set his own soul free.

17

Gabriel

Cape Town, South Africa

1992–1993

Gabriel looked over the copy of the police report on his desk. He blocked out the sounds from the busy
Cape Argus
newspaper office outside his door, and concentrated on the papers that had been assigned to him when his editor Stephen casually tossed them on his desk.

‘More of your black voodoo going on,' Stephen said.

‘Thanks, I'll take a look at it,' Gabe said, but his boss had already walked out and into the next office.

He opened the envelope. Another group of bodies had been found on the outskirts of District 6. As usual, there was to be no report in the paper about the ritual killings of the black children. There were so many kids who were killed for traditional muti. Most of them were chopped up. All the black children so far were unclaimed, as were many of those they found in a traditional ritual. Their parents too scared to come forward and claim those children who had been taken and mutilated.

He looked at the photographs of the bodies. A shallow grave had been dug and the bodies had been dumped into one mass grave, as if the parts that they didn't need for their ritual had no value.

He grasped the edge of the table with both hands as he fought the anger that boiled inside and threatened to burst out.

They were just children.

Even after all these years, he still didn't fully understand why these ritual killings still occurred in today's society. What type of person still believed that human body parts would help to cure an ailment, or increase the potency of a cure? Or bring wealth to someone who wasn't prepared to work hard to get it?

He looked at the pictures. The hands, tongues, lips, genitals and hearts, essential items to the muti trade, were often removed, and in some cases even the head was missing. That was a newer occurrence that was happening in South Africa, and it was a trend that was filtering downwards from Nigeria, as the people fled the genocide happening further north mingled with the accumulation of black people generally pushing south, and they brought with them their own versions of the muti trade. Human sacrifice was on the increase and it was a dangerous sign of the thriving muti trade that happened all over Africa.

Lately, he was seeing more and more of this style of killing cross his desk.

He dug in his drawer and pulled out another file.

The pictures were similar. The same parts removed. Only this time they had been performed in a more rural location, and the hyena had got into the grave. Only the fact that a game guard doing a patrol in the area had recognised some of the bones scattered around had led the police to that gruesome body cache.

He put the pictures side by side before pulling out his last file. It was a copy of an article taken from a microfiche in the archives, of an old ritual murder that he had stumbled across while working for the Bulawayo newspaper, and it had grabbed his attention. The case was from 1946. The sketch that had been done was an artist's impression.

What had fascinated him were the decorations adorning the murder victims. The dried animals, the skins, and the carefully assembled arsenal of weapons. The headline had caught his eye: ‘Native Ritual Murder Hanging Tree Found'. Having majored in African Studies at university along with his journalism degree, his interest was immediate.