The amount of volcanic debris increased, and after another ten minutes, Jade spied a rocky outcrop that showed signs of recent human visitation. At least, that was what the nearby stack of firewood indicated.
“Fuel for cooking or keeping animals away,” whispered Chiumbo. “Someone may be back yet tonight, Simba Jike.”
They waited in the shadows for another fifteen minutes, listening for any sound of life from the recess beneath the outcrop. Finally Jade motioned for Chiumbo to stay put and keep watch while she crept over to the rocks and crouched behind a boulder.
Chiumbo nodded an “all clear” and Jade slowly eased around her rock. If someone was supposed to be on guard, he was sleeping on the job. More likely, these men didn’t plan on anyone’s searching for them and hadn’t even set a guard. She was right. The place was vacated at least for the moment. Jade motioned for Chiumbo to join her.
Together they inspected the hideout. The rocks blasted away from the top during the last eruption had formed a natural recess nearly ten feet wide and just about as deep. It was almost tall enough for her to stand in upright. All along the right wall lay ivory tusks, stacked like cordwood. Jade counted at least eleven pairs, two large enough to be from bulls. She knew that one of those bulls was the ancient patriarch whose death she’d witnessed. Tucked against the wall lay two tiny tusks, the baby ivory.
Jade’s fingernails stabbed her palms as she clenched her fists in anger. Then she again remembered the dead King’s African Rifle soldier and her perspective shifted. These elephant deaths were tragic and in some cases cruelly prolonged, but that soldier was murdered plain and simple. He’d died trying to protect these animals. She vowed to make these poachers pay to avenge his death. Driving them from the mountain would not be enough.
“We need to send another runner and report this place to Captain Smythe,” she said.
“What is in those boxes?” asked Chiumbo. He pointed to the back wall.
“I don’t know. Maybe food stores.” She took another look around the area for intruders and headed to the back, stooping slightly. “I’ll take a look.”
She left Chiumbo to keep watch again, although, at this point, they were both sitting ducks if the raiders returned to their stash. She counted more on their making some noise as they approached to give her warning. If they were so arrogant to leave this place unguarded, they might feel secure enough to talk loudly as they came near.
The wooden crates were nailed shut, and Jade looked around for something to use as a pry bar. That was when she noticed that one lid had already been removed and simply set back in place. She raised the wooden lid and tried to peer inside, but the back end of the cache was completely in shadow. Jade slipped off her pack and reached inside for her Eveready slide-switch flashlight, a gift from her parents. She prayed the batteries still held power and decided to keep its use to a minimum, but once she beheld the contents, she couldn’t stop looking. The box was loaded with Gew 98 Mauser rifles.
“Sweet Millard Fillmore on a tightrope,” she swore.
Suddenly she felt the need to examine the other boxes, too. Scanning the floor with her light, she found the pry bar that had been used to open the first case. She took it up, turned off her light, and set to work raising the lid of another crate. It, too, was filled with the same make of rifle. A third and smaller crate contained ammunition. She left the two crates underneath these unopened, replaced the lids, and put the pry bar back where she had found it before she rejoined Chiumbo. Then she motioned for him to hide with her under cover of the forest while they pondered their next move.
“They will kill many more elephants with all those rifles, Simba Jike,” Chiumbo said.
Jade shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. They weren’t elephant guns and the bullets aren’t right for elephants. Besides, why would they still be using their drugged arrows when they have all those weapons at their disposal?” She took off her hat and ran a hand through her short black hair. “It looks more like they’re arming for battle. Those rifles might not take down an elephant, but they’d sure kill a lot of humans.”
But what humans?
she wondered.
“What do you wish to do, Memsabu?”
“I wish to send them all to perdition’s door,” answered Jade. Then, seeing the confusion of her tracker’s face, she added, “I want to take some of those rifles for evidence, preferably all of them.”
“We cannot carry them all at once, Memsabu. We will have to make several trips. That will be dangerous.”
Jade nodded. “And if we haul off an entire box, it will also alert them. We need to take the rifles, but leave the boxes behind to look like they are unopened.” She looked back the way they’d come. “We could do this in stages. First we remove a crateful of rifles here to this spot. Then we start taking as many as we can safely carry somewhere else to hide them.”
“Where?”
She thought for a moment. “To that hollow tree where I hid earlier today. They should be safe in there. But we need to hurry before we run out of daylight.”
Together Jade and Chiumbo lifted the rifles from the first crate. Jade had nearly left the cache when Chiumbo called to her from behind.
“Simba Jike, there is something else in this box.”
Jade set her rifles down and hurried back to him.
“It is a bag, I think,” he said. “I felt it when I reached for the last rifle.”
Jade turned on her flashlight. There in the light’s soft glow lay a leather drawstring pouch. She picked it up and heard the unmistakable clink of coins inside. She stuck the bag in her side pocket.
“No time to look now. We need to get moving.” She snatched up her armload of rifles and headed out of the cache and into the forest. Since they had emptied the first crate, she set the rifles down on the ground, ran back into the hideout, and carefully replaced the lid while Chiumbo waited for her to return.
“We’re already in the shadows here. I wonder how much time we have until we lose the sun,” she said when she rejoined him.
“Not enough time to come back and take the rifles from the second box, Simba Jike. The night animals will be on the prowl soon.” A leopard screamed in the distance, almost in response to the tracker’s statement, and once again, the baboons up at the lake took up their clamor.
“Right, we need to get these away and climb into a tree blind for the night. But I sure would like to set up another snare here before we go.”
“That will take too long, Memsabu. Bwana Avery will cut out my heart if you are hurt.”
Jade heard the urgency in his voice and heeded it. “I’d be more afraid of Memsabu Beverly, myself, but you’re right, Chiumbo. Someone is likely to return before dark as well. But there’s something else I want from here before we head back.”
Cautiously, Jade slipped once more into the sheltering rock recess and turned on her flashlight. If these men used this place as a rallying point, they must keep extra supplies here, and Chiumbo had said one of the two men who pursued her to her hiding place had traveled with only a rifle. She shivered as she remembered its blast reverberating in the hollow tree. Perhaps he also owned a bow but had left it behind. If so, she meant to find it.
She started on the wall opposite the ivory and worked her way to the back, shining the beam slowly over each object. Since bows warped easily when wet, she assumed any bow here would be placed farther back to keep it out of the rain and mist. She found it atop a bag of cornmeal.
“Gotcha,” she said as she snatched it up and inspected it. The bow was constructed of several thinner strips of wood tightly lashed together with sinew, making the end result stronger than any one thick limb. The bowstring appeared to be constructed from twisted plant fibers. Handmade and unique, it still bore a close resemblance to the broken bow she’d found next to the dead poacher yesterday.
The urge to search the remainder of this hideout seized her. After all, she rationalized, her knee didn’t hurt—well, not too much, surely not any more than one would expect from a wounded knee that had been walked on all day. They couldn’t be in any immediate danger, could they? Just how reliable was this ache?
A whistle of ascending notes sounded from the nearby woods, Chiumbo’s signal. Someone was coming up the trail. Jade turned off her light and slipped to the opening, keeping as close to the wall of ivory as possible. A quick peek out the opening showed her the way was still clear. She sprinted the short distance to the trees and crouched down, bow in hand.
Chiumbo pointed down the trail, and made walking motions with his fingers. Jade listened. She heard a few voices in the distance, one laughing. She slid the bow around her shoulders and let it rest across her back against her pack. Then she and Chiumbo gathered up the rifles and slipped farther back into the woods, keeping in the shadows.
The need for secrecy overrode Jade’s desire to see the poachers. If the raiders caught her and Chiumbo near their cache, they would be killed or sold, neither of which Beverly would approve of. Chiumbo set a silent but steady pace through the forest, and Jade followed. Both of them were in a highly vulnerable position with their arms full of rifles. The irony of being killed with a stack of empty rifles in her arms and a loaded one on her back wouldn’t have been wasted on Jade. She nudged Chiumbo from behind and the two hastened their steps.
As they headed around to the more gently sloped northern side, the entire forest became riddled with game trails, some nearly four feet wide. Within a half hour of leaving the cache, they happened upon one that led in the general direction they wanted to go. On the wider trail, the pair could make faster time. Once Jade felt sufficiently far from the raiders, she called a brief halt.
“We need to get back onto their original trail, Chiumbo. The one we followed to the cache. Otherwise, I can’t find that hollow tree.”
He nodded just as a groaning creak came from ahead of them, followed by a sharp snap that cracked like a .22 rifle. Jade heard the deep rumbling of gigantic bowels.
“There’s an elephant feeding up ahead,” she whispered. “Another reason to get off this trail.” She wanted to watch the elephant, to pretend nothing else was happening, but the load of rifles bearing down in her arms told her otherwise.
The hell with it.
She set the rifles on the side of the trail, took her camera out of her pack, and crept forward, eager to catch a glimpse of one of the forest giants.
A slight breeze wafted towards her, and Jade caught the strong, acrid scent of elephant. She knew not to trust the breeze, however. In the trees, it took strange eddies and swirls, so it might double back on her and carry her own scent to the beast. She hugged the right side of the trail, ready to duck behind a tree if necessary. A low, hollow rumble, almost soothing in nature, rolled from just ahead, and a higher-pitched whistling squeak answered.
A calf and mother!
Jade peeked around a tree trunk just as the mother reared up and braced her front feet against the base of a slender olive tree. Her sinuous trunk stretched skyward towards the upper heights and wrapped around one of the fresher, silver-green boughs. Then she pulled the branch towards her until the entire tree groaned and bent downward. At her feet, the calf bounced and extended its own puny trunk up as though it could assist its mother. Jade focused as quickly as possible and took the picture.
The branch snapped with a sharp crack that echoed off the surrounding trees. Mother and branch dropped to the ground, barely making a sound on the soft forest litter. The baby tugged eagerly at the newest and most tender leaves while its mother rubbed her trunk gently across the calf’s back. Jade was advancing the roll of film when the breeze shifted.
The female’s trunk went up and reached forward, catching Jade’s scent. She extended her ears straight out to the sides, a signal that Jade knew meant an imminent charge. Her baby, picking up on its mother’s agitation, started to fan its own tinier ears and trumpet, with a high-pitched squeal like a potato whistle. But the cow didn’t attack. Whether she lost Jade’s scent or became distracted by her baby’s antics, the cow pulled her ears back against her head and lowered her trunk to smack her calf to move behind her.
Knowing elephants have poor vision, Jade took advantage of the mother’s preoccupation with her young to duck behind the tree again, hoping the mother wouldn’t charge what she couldn’t see. Step by step, Jade eased back farther from the trail until, once again, the capricious, twisting air currents wafted the elephant’s odor to her.
Safe.
Something touched her on the left shoulder, and she jumped a foot in the air.
“Chiumbo, it’s you. You gave me a fright.”
“This way, Simba Jike,” he whispered, and nodded into the forest. “I found our trail.”
He had all the rifles cradled in his arms, and Jade relieved him of six as soon as she put her camera back in the pack. Then, as she prepared to follow him into the woods, she looked up the trail to where she’d left the mother elephant and her calf. She could just make out the mother’s massive sides and something else. A slender figure stood beside the elephant cow. Jade blinked in disbelief.
Boguli?
Chiumbo hissed at her to follow quickly. She turned to acknowledge his call, and when she glanced back, the elephant and her calf had moved on. Jade could see no sign of Boguli and wondered if she’d merely imagined him. She took a deep breath, hefted the rifles, and plunged after Chiumbo into the trees.