Spotted Cats
Authors: William G. Tapply
A Brady Coyne Mystery
William G. Tapply
For our friends Rick Boyer and Doc Adams
F
OR HIS EXPERT ADVICE
on the medical scenes in this story I wish to thank Dr Mark Robbins; and for their critical scrutiny of the manuscript in all of its many incarnations I am grateful to Rick Boyer, Jed Mattes, and Jackie Farber.
PROLOGUE
I
N ZAMBIA THE LEOPARD
is called
Nyalubwe.
In East Africa the natives call him
Chui,
and farther south he’s called
Ingwe.
But everywhere—in Africa, in Asia, in parts of Europe and the Middle East—the leopard is the same animal: a perfect killing machine, the most efficient mammal predator—aside from man—on earth. He kills people when they’re available, indiscriminately from other prey. Professional hunters do not believe that leopards fear man. Professional hunters do not believe that leopards fear anything. They are tricky and cautious, patient and bold, lightning fast and perfectly camouflaged. They kill what they can and they survive because it is their nature.
On the fifth day, one of the professional hunter’s native trackers found leopard signs. So they scouted the area for the tree on which to string up the bait.
Finding the proper tree is important. It’s got to have just the right angle so
Nyalubwe
can climb it, and then it’s got to level off more or less parallel to the ground, so he can crouch on it and rip off hunks of the bait. It’s got to have lots of grass and brush around it so he can slink up to it without being seen.
After they selected a good tree, they all piled into the Land-Rover and drove to the river. They sat hidden among the
miombo
tree scrub on a hillside for forty-five minutes. The professional hunter scanned the valley with his German binoculars while the client balanced his rifle across his knees. The native trackers and gunbearers crouched in the scrub, waiting with their stolid, infinite patience. Finally the hunter spotted a warthog trotting stiff-legged across the suncaked mudbank two hundred yards away. The client braced his rifle on his knees, lined up the animal in the crosshairs of his Weaver scope, and killed him clean. The wet chunk of the bullet thudding into the warthog’s side echoed back to the men a perceptible moment after the report of the rifle had died.
The professional hunter clapped his client on the shoulder. ‘Good shot. Your first African kill.’
‘Bloody warthog,’ said the client. But he grinned with pleasure. It had been a good shot at a moving target. It wasn’t his fault that he was only shooting bait.
The natives swarmed over the dead animal. They hacked away at the carcass, cutting off the nose and carving out the tusks, which their tribe prized. Then they heaved the body into the back of the Rover and drove it to the bait tree.
One of the trackers skidded up the trunk as nimble as
Nyalubwe
himself. The hunter stood off to the side where the hide—it’s called a hide, never a blind—would be erected. He motioned to the native to cut away some of the branches, so that when sighted through the scoped rifle the leopard would be silhouetted against the fading light of the sky as he went for the bait. The tracker sliced off the branches with his machete and dropped them to the ground where one of the others carefully picked them up and loaded them into the Rover. Freshly cut branches would set off alarms in
Nyalubwe
’s survival-tuned brain.
The gunbearers and trackers pulleyed the eighty-pound hunk of already foul-smelling warthog up to the horizontal branch of the bait tree with braided buffalo rawhide rope, where they wired it to the underside of the limb. After descending from the bait tree, they smeared the trunk with the warthog’s blood and offal to disguise the human smells and to lure
Nyalubwe
from the bush.
Building a good leopard hide is an art, and the professional hunter was an artist. It’s got to fit in perfectly. It’s got to be constructed entirely of materials native to the area, but you can’t cut nearby or
Nyalubwe
will smell the sap or see the fresh cuttings and be scared away. Bark and leaves and sticks and grass must be laced together and arranged so cunningly that if you walk away from it and then turn around to look for it, you won’t be able to distinguish it from the rest of the terrain. Inside, you set up a camp stool in front of an inconspicuous hole in the side of the hide. The rifle is propped up on forked sticks so that it is aimed at precisely where
Nyalubwe
will be when he’s flattened on that limb tearing away at the bait. When it’s set up right, the client has only to squeeze the trigger.
They hunted elephants forty miles away for the next five days. Then on the sixth day one of the trackers, who checked the bait each day, reported that a leopard had come to feed. The client sighted in his Remington .375, loaded with three-hundred-grain Silvertips, for forty-six paces—the forty-three they had measured from the hide to the base of the bait tree, and three more to account for the height of the bait, twenty feet above the ground.
At four in the afternoon, while the sun was still hot and high in the sky, the professional hunter and his client and seven natives piled into the Land-Rover and drove to the hide. While hunter and client installed themselves inside, the seven others milled around the area, talking and laughing and in general making their presence obvious.
They knew
Nyalubwe
was there, somewhere, watching, guarding his bait. They knew they couldn’t sneak into the hide without being seen. So after the two of them got settled, the others created noise and confusion before they drove off. Leopards are poor mathematicians.
The client set his .375 into the forked sticks and tapped it this way and that while he peered through the scope until the crosshairs settled on a spot a foot above the limb to which the rancid warthog was wired. Through the scope he could clearly see the claw marks on the bark and the flies swarming over the bait and the strings of freshly ripped flesh where
Nyalubwe
had already feasted.
The hunter had insisted they leave their wristwatches back in the Rover. Leopards can hear the ticking of miniature gears and the humming of tiny batteries.
They sat still and silent. And waited.
The professional hunter tapped his client’s knee and held a cigarette pack to him. The client arched his eyebrows in question. But they had already accounted for the direction of the breeze. The smell of smoke wouldn’t drive the leopard away. If he could smell the smoke, he could smell the men. Might as well smoke. Something for the nerves. Just don’t scratch the match.
Nyalubwe
could hear that.
After what seemed like hours, a large bird flapped squawking out of a distant tree. A moment later they heard the sudden, nervous chatter of a monkey somewhere off in the jungle. The hunter stiffened, and the client lifted his eyebrows. The hunter shrugged. Then an entire neighbourhood of monkeys began to shriek. The hunter turned and nodded to his client.
Nyalubwe
was coming.
The sun sank towards the horizon. The hide lay in deep shadows. They waited. It seemed like hours.
Suddenly the hunter tapped his client on the leg.
The client peered through the scope. A mottled expanse of gold, black, and amber filled the sight.
Nyalubwe
’s coat. The leopard seemed to have materialized out of the humid jungle air. He was in the rifle’s sights at the warthog carcass.
He was a big one, close to a hundred and fifty pounds, nearly seven feet from tip of nose to tip of tail. A real trophy. And a man-killer. All leopards are man-killers. This was not a comforting thought to either man.
The client took a deep breath. He felt the trembling in his hands and shoulders. A dribble of sweat ran down his side. His palms were wet. He wiped them on his pants. Then he touched the rough surface of the trigger with the ball of his forefinger. He braced the rifle in its rest with his left hand, adjusting it so that the crosshairs intersected the shoulder of the cat.
Another breath. He let it half out, squinted, tried to hold steady on the centre of the black spot just behind the cat’s shoulder, and squeezed.
The sudden roar of the rifle inside the hide sounded like an exploding bomb. All around them birds and monkeys began to scream.
‘Shit!’ muttered the professional hunter.
‘What?’ said the client. ‘What happened?’
‘He moved. He started to go just as you shot. You got him in the gut. He’s down in the grass.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘I don’t know. He’s wounded bad. He could be stone dead. He could live for a long time.’
‘So what do we do? Do we wait for him to die?’
‘No,’ said the professional hinter. ‘We can’t let him get away. He’s suffering, and he might start killing people. Anyway, it’s the law. I’ve got to go dig him out.’
‘But it’s almost dark.’
‘So I’ve got to go now.’
‘I’ll go with you.’
‘The hell you will. You wait right here. Don’t move.’
When a man goes into the grass after a leopard, he hopes the cat’s already dead. Usually it is. The hunter knew better than to count on it. He carried a cut-down old Winchester twelve-gauge pump. Six shells in the magazine and one in the chamber. Double-ought buckshot. A man never has time to raise a gun and aim when
Nyalubwe
comes after him. He only hopes for the chance to get the muzzle up. Then he’ll depress the trigger and hold it there and pump those shells back against the firing pin as fast as he can and hope to hell he can blow away the cat’s face before it can rip off his.
The hunter found gouts of fresh blood beneath the bait tree. He followed the spoor into a sea of head-high grass. He moved slowly, a cautious toe-to-heel step at a time, hoping he’d come upon a dead carcass, but knowing that a wounded leopard could be waiting. If he was lucky, he might hear the rustle of brittle grass the instant before the cat leaped. Otherwise, he would have to match his human reflexes against the jungle speed and single-minded intent of the desperate animal.
He went perhaps forty yards into the bush. It took fifteen minutes, one agonizing step at a time, every sense raw and alert.
The man’s sudden scream came from behind him, and close. It started low and gurgling in his throat, rose to a high-pitched agonizing cry, more animal than human, and then, abruptly, died.
The hunter pivoted and pushed quickly back through the bush. He found his client on his back, his gun thrown aside. The leopard was on him, his teeth sunk deep into the side of the man’s neck, all four paws swiping and swirling. The hunter raised his shotgun but dared not shoot. He raced forward and swung the gun butt at the leopard.