The Flame Trees of Thika (26 page)

‘Is that farther than Nairobi?’

He laughed in a chuckling manner, tucking in his chin, and said that it was, and started downhill towards the river where the
boomklop
was. This creature was growing more and more alarming, and besides, might well be miles and miles away. So I managed to stammer out, feeling dishonourably craven, that I must take back an immediate answer and leave the
boomklop
for another day.

‘You think I eat little girls?’ Mr Roos demanded, in a rather threatening voice.

As this appeared, in alliance with the
boomklop
, only too likely, I found myself tongue-tied. Mr Roos relented and turned back, saying he would find another
boomklop
next time I came, and that I was to say he would be over later to fix a trap for the leopard. His tone had a definite edge of contempt for us poor
rooinek
incompetents who could not fix a trap, nor shoot so large a lion, nor walk from Bulawayo, and whose young even showed a disposition to be afraid of the
boomklop
.

When he came over, he scorned Hereward’s trap. For one thing it had a live bait, whereas a hunk of high, stinking meat was what leopards really appreciated. They hoarded meat, Mr
Roos told us, in the branches of trees where hyenas and jackals could not reach it. Also they were clever, and when they came upon a live, tethered goat they suspected trickery. So Mr Roos put some foetid meat in the fork of a tree, just out of reach, and concealed near the tree’s foot a wicked steel gin with jagged, rusty teeth, which Hereward regarded with deep disapproval.

‘Not at all a sporting sort of thing.’

‘You want sport, or you want your cattle alive?’ Hereward of course wanted both, but Lettice was in such a state of mind about her dead Chang and threatened Zena that above all he wanted to see the dead leopard at his feet.

The trap was cleverly laid. It was in a patch of bush that invited the animal to approach the tree from one direction only, and so well concealed that, even when you knew it was there, you could not detect it.

For two nights nothing happened. Then we heard, first thing in the morning, that a leopard had been caught, but had escaped. Robin had no love for Mr Roos, so was delighted with this proof of his fallibility.

‘Never did think the fellow knew what he was talking about. Now he’s landed us all with an infuriated wounded leopard. Well, it’ll be up to him to finish it off. Always were a boastful lot, these Dutchmen….’

It was Twinkle’s safety that worried me. If the leopard would take Chang off a veranda, Twinkle roaming about the farm and garden invited tragedy. She slept in a lean-to shed next to the store, but in the daytime she had taken to wandering off goodness knows where. (Sometimes we did know, however: once she walked to a bed of young coffee trees and nipped off all their heads, and on another occasion demolished our entire bean crop.) When Randall Swift arrived to pay a call she bounded out from behind a bush and tumbled him off his bicycle. She had taken to playing hide-and-seek with the dogs, but Robin’s favourite, a spaniel growing old and fat and called Bancroft (after the actor, to whom Robin had seen a resemblance when young), refused to play and slunk off into corners in a state of mournful gloom whenever Twinkle put her black, quivering nose round the door. Twinkle teased him unmercifully, while he glared at her with a pathetic mixture of supplication and loathing. So both Robin
and Tilly were against Twinkle and wanted to get rid of her, although they did not want the leopard to do it for them. No one could quite escape Twinkle’s charm, and anyway she had entrusted herself to our protection.

N
OW
that the leopard was wounded, things were serious; knowing himself doomed, with nothing to lose, he might well try to bring a valedictory revenge down upon his enemies. So a leopard-hunt was swiftly organized.

I rode with Robin and Tilly to the scene of the escape, where a lot of people had already assembled. The leopard had not dragged the trap away, as we had supposed. There it was, on the end of its chain, with a lot of fur and blood on it. Where it had been concealed, the bush was trampled and uprooted, grass carried the rusty stains of blood, and bits of yellow fur clung to thorns. There had been a terrific lashing about, a scene of turmoil, rage, and agony, until the beast had freed himself by the most desperate expedient imaginable. He had evidently bitten off his own torn, bleeding foot to gain his freedom.

Even Mr Roos shook his head. ‘Never known it happen before. Man, he’s a
kali
one, this is.’
Kali
was another word we made much use of, it meant fierce or bold, savage or bad-tempered, and on the whole it was a term of respect.

Most of the Palmers’ Kikuyu labour had turned back into warriors, simply by abandoning their pangas, bringing out their long-bladed spears, and wearing their vermilion-sheathed swords, and they were standing about excitedly talking, or else without words, as tense as coiled springs, staring into the bush with eyes brightened by anticipation, and all the old dreams of warriors’ glory flooding back into their hearts.

Hereward and Alec Wilson, also, had a new urgency and vigour about their movements and voices, and looked pleased and purposeful. Even Robin was thoroughly awake, and grinning broadly. Only Mr Roos seemed quite unaltered, but then
the hunt was his normal element. The leopard had been tracked to a patch of thick bush and boulders on the bank of the river a mile or two upstream, and there he was no doubt angrily lying.

‘I don’t know what you fellows think,’ Hereward remarked, indicating that he had at any rate decided what they were to do. ‘Country’s too thick to beat through – wouldn’t be fair on the beaters. I’ll go in and walk him up with the four-fifty; that’ll settle the beggar’s hash if he tries any nonsense. You three go ahead to cut off his retreat and bag him if he breaks back towards the reserve. Alec, you see that bluff above the bit of bush he’s lying up in? That’s your stand. Robin, will you go down by the river near that patch of reeds? And Roos, will you cross the river and get up by that big tree where you’ll be able to command the bank opposite, and pick him off if he gets past the others?’

Although Hereward put his orders in the form of questions, these were not intended to be answered; the hunt was taking place on his land, so he had the right to direct it. But Mr Roos was not a directable man. When Robin and Alec strode off obediently to take up their allotted places, Mr Roos, squatting on his heels like a Kikuyu (a most useful position to master), continued to unravel the trap and its chain without paying any attention to the plan of campaign.

Hereward slid back his forehead in his peculiar manner, which could presage a smile or a display of icy displeasure, and pointed out that he could not proceed until Mr Roos had taken up his forward position.

‘You go ahead, man, finish him, the skin is yours.’

‘Good God! Is that all you’re thinking of, ‘he brute’s hide?’

Hereward glared at Mr Roos’s back as if at some robber of the poor-box caught in the act, and walked off without another word. When he spoke to Tilly his tone was usually mellow and ingratiating, but now he was so offended that he positively barked at her, telling her to take me back at once to the safety of the house, and to succour Lettice.

‘If you’ll lend me a rifle I’ll take Mr Roos’s place,’ Tilly suggested. Nothing caused her more distress than to be left out of anything that promised interest and novelty. As for fear, she
was without it, at least so far as it concerned the animal kingdom; she was sometimes nervous in the presence of machinery.

‘Have you gone out of your mind?’ Hereward demanded, quite unkindly. ‘I’m not going to have a woman under my protection exposed to danger from a wounded beast.’

‘It seems to be very much outnumbered,’ Tilly remarked. ‘At any rate I shall watch the hunt, and you can’t say I’m not protected here, with all these heavily armed warriors.’

Hereward visibly disapproved, but did not like to order her away in case, like Mr Roos, she should reveal herself as a rebel.

‘And then they say these Dutchmen are all born hunters,’ he muttered. ‘Hunters my foot! Damned box-wallahs, that’s all. Only interested in what they get for the pelt. Not an atom of sportsmanship in ’em….’

The Kikuyu were not avid hunters like the Masai, who made a martial exercise of it, and dressed up in splendid finery to ring a lion with spears, goad him to the charge, and then impale him. Nevertheless they enjoyed a hunt, and their spears had been lying a long time unused, thrust into the thatch of their huts; now they had brought them out in high spirits, and hoped perhaps to be brushed by the golden wings of glory and fanned by the hot breath of danger, and to have a topic for the harvest songs, and for lighting in the hearts of the young women a little flame of worship for the splendour and courage of the young men.

It was sad for them to stand about on the hillside, all dressed up and nowhere to go, because of Hereward’s edict. Of course Hereward was only acting like a good officer who does not risk the lives of his men if it can be avoided, and puts himself in the position of greatest danger. A wounded leopard is (as he would have put it) a nasty customer, and a spearman no match for him. No doubt Hereward was acting correctly, but the young men were left baulked and silent on the hillside, like guests asked to a banquet, and anticipating golden wine in crystal goblets, stuffed quails and peacocks’ tongues and perhaps rosebud-breasted dancing girls, only to be offered ham sandwiches and weak, lukewarm tea on the trestle-tables and hard benches of an institute hall.

When you read descriptions of hunts, it all seems very clear
and sensible, everyone concerned knows what he is about; but when you watch one there is little to be seen, and events do not follow one another with logical coherence.

On this occasion nothing happened for a long time and I soon grew bored: even Moyale had cropped all the grass he wanted and stood half asleep, swishing his tail and twitching his ears to keep in circulation some of the innumerable flies. I fell into a conversation with Njombo but Tilly hushed me, in case our voices should disturb the hunt. Mr Roos had disappeared. We did not see him go; the bush, or long brown grass, or reedy river-bed, had swallowed him. In his nondescript, untidy, and unmended khaki clothing he blended immediately into his surroundings like an antelope or lion. Somehow I did not think that he intended to be left out of the hunt. We could not see Alec, but in the distance Robin’s hat could be discerned protruding from behind a rock.

Once or twice we caught a glimpse of Hereward’s head and shoulders advancing at a slow pace through the green patch of bush about half-way up the bank. He was following the leopard’s spoor, and it must have been a jumpy business, for he could see ahead no more than two or three yards, and might well find himself upon it before he had the time to raise his rifle. His gun-bearer, who carried a second weapon, was said to have been in his youth an askari attached to one of the trading expeditions that used to trudge from the coast to Uganda and back again, and therefore to be reliable and iron-nerved, but no one had seen him in action, or knew whether his claim was true. Alec and Robin were too far off to be of any help to Hereward if the wounded leopard were to pounce.

When the silence was at last broken, everything was confused. There was a very loud shot, no doubt from Hereward’s enormous 450 (which kicked like an ostrich), and then another almost at once, and a sound like the sudden rip of calico, and a shout, all mixed up. The warriors beside us emitted short, sharp sounds like barks, and in the distance Robin’s hat appeared above the rocks, waving in the air. Then came an outbreak of other sounds: a shout, a rifle shot but not so loud, a crashing in the bush, a hubbub from the warriors. Tilly had a pair of binoculars and I heard her cry suddenly in a stiff voice: ‘Look out!’ and then
expel her breath in a moaning gasp. The control that had held back the Kikuyu snapped: they poured down the slope shouting and waving their spears, too late to use them, but taut as violin strings, musky with excitement, and leaping with long strides like reedbuck from hummock to boulder and through the tufted grass. I tried to follow on Moyale, but Tilly seized the reins.

‘Wait,’ she ordered. ‘Something went wrong, there was another leopard, I don’t know…’

But she caught sight of Hereward’s hat just before the warriors closed in, and we picked our way down the hill.

The tension in the air had affected our ponies and even Moyale jiggled and pranced, perhaps reminded by the shots and by smells whose impact was too light for our blunted senses to record – smells of cordite and blood and exhalations of fear and anxiety – of his youth upon the plains of Ogaden where he had chased giraffe or even lions, stung by the long spurs of his hard-sinewed, spear-hurling riders. The warriors had already started their thumping step around a circle, knees bent, buttocks out, swaying from side to side like running ostriches. They were chanting in short, sharp, open-throated bursts which would soon coalesce into an almost endless paean, links in a chain of throbbing sound. They made way for our ponies and we pushed through to the group in the centre where Hereward, like a stork, over-topped the others and glowed with gratified pride.

There were indeed two leopards, lying perhaps fifteen yards apart, half-hidden in grass of the same buff-yellow as their coats. One had a red mangled stump for a leg and the flies were buzzing round it quite oblivious of people, intent only on slaking their greed; its fur was stained and matted, its blue, rubbery lips drawn back to reveal sharp, yellow incisors and to impart to its round, cat-like face a most ferocious expression, the embodiment of savagery. And indeed with its mangled leg, its hunted end, it had every reason to be savage, but Hereward’s rifle had deprived it even of the final satisfaction of revenge.

The other leopard lay stretched out as if asleep, and I could at first see no injury, and for a moment drew back fearing it might not really be dead. It was a perfect animal; the soft skin with its barbaric markings lay like velvet over the stilled muscles and you felt that, should you touch a wiry whisker, the beast would
leap up as if you had released a spring, and vanish like a rocket.