‘Yeah, that’s part of the attraction. Also, I want to make a difference.’
‘You will – hell, you’ll end up saving some endangered tiger or something.’
Miranda had laughed.
‘There aren’t any tigers in Africa?’
‘Stop kidding.’ Then her tone was serious again. ‘I want to make a difference. Like you do.’
‘I don’t know that I make a difference. I’m just a small part of a big machine.’
‘Don’t give me that simple soldier crap, Dad. I thought about military service myself, you know, after nine-eleven.’
His heart skipped a couple of beats. ‘You haven’t done anything stupid, have you?’
‘Relax. I thought about the reserve, but I think I’m better off channelling my energies into other areas.’
‘Like your studies, right?’
‘Sure. But serving your country is not something to downplay, Dad. You know how proud I am of you, don’t you?’
Miranda had gone to Africa to study man-eaters. Her mentor, this damned Professor Wallis, had sent her into the Zambezi Valley – to look for animals that ate people. How could Jed have let this happen? How could this goddamned academic have consigned his daughter to an early death?
Most other fathers in America would hire a lawyer and sue the ass off Professor Wallis. If the professor had been a man, Jed would have killed him. At least, that was how he felt now. In fact, his plan was to track her down as soon as he had finished his business in Zimbabwe – although exactly what that business would be he still did not know. He needed to talk to the police and the National Parks staff, Miranda’s fellow researchers, and the people from the US State Department who had so far been handling the matter of his daughter’s disappearance.
After all that was done, Jed wanted to look Wallis in the eye and ask her to account for her actions.
Jed knew Miranda was a wilful young woman, passionately committed to wildlife conservation, but he wanted to make sure she had been fully aware of the risks she would face.
Part of him knew that she would have gone into her assignment with her eyes wide open. She was a smart girl, a straight-A student, yet had a practical side to her and was at home in the outdoors. He had seen her change a tyre on his SUV – just to prove to him that she could – replace the oil and fuel filters on her own car; start a fire in the wilderness; hike all day; and climb a vertical cliff face unaided.
What he feared, though, was that she had taken unnecessary risks. She had backpacked around Australia and New Zealand in the year after she graduated from college and he knew she had used the trip to feed a growing hunger for adventure sports. Highspeed downhill mountain biking, whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, skydiving, hang-gliding and para-sailing, she had tried them all.
Patti had blamed him for Miranda’s wild streak. He took risks for a living, but, if he was honest with himself, he had the same passion for danger and addiction to risk as his headstrong daughter.
Miranda had chosen to go to a politically unstable continent to study dangerous animals. In Mana Pools National Park, Miranda had boasted in one of her emails, she slept in a tent in the middle of the bush without a fence of any kind to keep wild animals at bay. How had it happened? he wondered.
Had she been careless, and simply left the door of her tent open? Had she left the tent to answer the call of nature? Had the lion, or lions, been brazen enough to rip through the flimsy nylon walls? He chided himself. He was already accepting the official version of events – that Miranda had been taken by one of the animals she was so intent on saving. He wanted so much to believe that she was still alive. He forced the morbid thoughts of her death from his mind.
He was the heir to one of the last remaining natural paradises on earth. He lived in harmony with the animals around him, but there was no disputing that he was the boss, and that the environment in which he lived, as beautiful as it was, was there solely for his pleasure and sustenance. It was, if not in name or on paper, his kingdom, and he was, if not by decree or charter, the king.
Mashumba was a warrior. An old man, as was plain to see, but still a fighter and, when opportunity arose, a lover of note. He had sired more offspring than he cared to remember and had been in more fights than there were butterfly-shaped leaves on a mopani tree in the height of summer.
He rested by the river now, for the sun was high above the valley and the sands that flanked the shimmering blue ribbon were so bright with reflected light it hurt the eye to look at them. And so, with a yawn, he shifted his position to get back into the shade and, as was his norm at this time of day, drifted off into sleep.
In his dreams he saw the herd of zebra grazing on the grass of the floodplain, the stallion raising his head and sniffing the breeze. He saw the fleet-footed impala leaping through the bush, the docile water-buck grazing in the marshes. He saw the cantankerous old bull buffalo, the most dangerous prey a hunter could face. He remembered glorious feasts he had presided over, and saw again his offspring and wives and his dear departed brothers.
His family was gone now. It belonged to others. He and his brother had been kicked out of their own extended clan, replaced by younger, fitter contenders for their fickle wives’ affections. Such was the way of his tribe.
His world was changing, little by little every year, but he had learned long ago to cope with change. He had learned to live with the white man and his strange ways, and to make little adjustments in his day-to-day life so that he could exist side by side with him. There was room in his valley for everyone, even the whites and their noisy machines. As long as they respected him, he would allow them to visit his home.
Of his brother there was no sign. He had seen him in the night, but lost sight of him before dawn.
He too was probably sleeping away the hottest part of the day. They would see each other for a drink in the evening, if not before.
A fish eagle landed in the tree above him. Its mournful, whining call woke him. He opened one eye and looked at the bird. It was the definitive sound of the valley, but it never ceased to annoy him when he was trying to take a midday nap, or hunt. If he could have reached the bird, he would have killed it.
Mashumba yawned again and thought about dinner. The thing he missed most about his ex-wives, even more than the coupling, was the way they fed him and his brother. How sweet it was at the end of a hard day or a long night to find a feast waiting for him. It was the natural order of things. He and his brother took care of them – in every sense of the word – and, likewise, they were fed. That was what he missed most.
He stood, for the sun had caught up with him yet again, scratched himself and then pissed on the opposite side of the tree to where he intended to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. He was very particular about some things. As he was settling down for the remainder of his nap a flicker of movement caught his eye. It was down on the riverbank, on the sand.
The people in the village knew about old Mashumba and his brother. They told stories about the two old men of the bush and how they now lived as bachelors. The children of the village knew to stay clear of them, not to wander too far down the river, past the bend, into the area that was their home.
Occasionally he would roam down the road, close to the village, but the women and the children stayed inside, or close to their green-painted houses inside the compound, when Mashumba was about, because since his wives had left him he had become a danger to them. The first occasion Mashumba had been tempted by a young woman from the village had taught him a lot. She had been walking to her work in the National Parks compound and he had seen her, across the floodplain, near the firewood stacks. She had screamed and Mashumba, realising he had been spotted, had run off into the bushes. Some of the men from the village had come looking for him, but he had hidden up in some reeds and watched and waited until night had fallen and the rattling, smoke-belching Land Rovers had gone. He had returned to his part of the valley, where he still reigned supreme, but he had remembered the sight of the woman. How easy it would have been to have her; how defenceless she had been.
The second one had been different. He had stalked her, carefully, through the bush, and watched her movements for a full day The next day he had waited for her, lying in the shadows of a big Natal mahogany tree. She had almost walked right up to him. She had been fair-skinned, not like the village women, but colour meant nothing to him. A white woman was as good as a black one as far as he was concerned. He felt no guilt about it at all, for the hunt and the capture came naturally. It was a necessity, since his wives had left him. It had been satisfying enough but, in a strange way, also mildly disappointing. It had been so easy to overpower her; there had been no great skill needed to catch the woman, no thrill of the hunt, no intense physical exertion.
The men had come looking for him again, as he knew they would, but he had melted further into the bush, and then cut back down to the river. He had continued to lie low, away from the roads, for many more days and, eventually, they had stopped looking for him.
And here was another one, down by the river. He felt the old desires coming back.
Precious Mpofu carried a fishing rod over her shoulder and a plastic bag full of tigerfish in her hand.
The prize catch of the Zambezi River, so named because of the yellow and black stripes down his shiny flank, was as good to eat as he was hard to catch. Precious and her family would eat well that night. Two tigers, maybe six kilos all up, and a couple of chessa as well.
It would have been safer to walk back along the riverbank, she had strayed too far as it was, but the afternoon sun was setting fast and the dirt road provided a quicker, more direct route back to the village. Precious decided the sooner she got the fish on the fire, the happier her ranger husband and two hungry children would be.
Precious had finished her morning’s work cleaning the big two-storey lodge she looked after. She had swept the floors, emptied the garbage bins into the incinerator and made the beds. The warden had said a new guest was arriving that day – a woman, by herself. The woman was from America, like the young one, Miranda, who had been killed by the lion. Precious liked Americans because they tipped in US dollars, although she had never received a cent from Miranda – one of the other maids washed and ironed her clothes and washed up her dirty dishes. Precious and the other maids were jealous of their colleague, whose name was Violet. Precious was sad that Miranda was gone – she was a nice person, even if she didn’t share the work around. However, Precious was not sad that Violet had gone. No one knew where she was, but everyone presumed she had hitchhiked out of the park to Kariba to change the US dollars Miranda had given her. With her benefactor dead, maybe Violet had decided to take her money and have a holiday.
Precious had decided she would do what she could to earn some foreign currency from the new American. She had cut some wildflowers from down near the river and put them in an empty half-litre gin bottle that one of the South African fishermen had left on the dining table. When she replaced the tablecloth she had set the flowers in the middle. She was glad the men had gone. They were loud, drunken and uncouth, and they had left the lodge in a disgusting mess. She had collected two bin bags full of empty beer cans and one of the men had let a cigarette burn down on the armrest of a lounge chair. She had reported the burn mark to the head ranger, but she doubted anything would come of it.
Precious knew how desperate the park was for guests, so the authorities would do nothing to penalise the fishermen, even if they were pigs. They hadn’t tipped her either.
After making the beds with fresh linen she had polished the concrete floors with Cobra wax until they gleamed. The lodge was old and had seen better days, but no one could say it was not clean. Her work finished, she had grabbed her fishing rod and one of the discarded plastic supermarket bags the South Africans had left behind in the rubbish, and set off to do her fishing. One nice thing the Boers had done – the only nice thing in nine days of drinking and singing and fishing – was to leave their worm box behind.
Precious had employed the worms to catch some small bream and, using the still-squirming fish as live bait, she had caught her tigers. Yes, she thought, the walk upstream had been worth it. The current in that particular spot was running well and the speed of the water had made the dying fish seem that little bit more alive. She had fooled the wily tiger and turned the tables on the hunter. She sang to herself as she walked up off the sand. The grass was cool on the bare soles of her feet after the sunsoaked riverbank.
Mashumba licked his lips in anticipation. He lowered himself into the grass as the woman walked up the sandy bank towards him. He would take her by complete surprise, just as he had taken the paleskinned one. He felt a slight breeze coming down the valley, from behind him, and the wind ruffled his long hair.
The woman stopped and looked around. She raised her nose slightly in the air and sniffed.
Mashumba grunted. It would be a close-run thing.
Precious knew that odour and she was instantly terrified. She smelled his scent in the bushes, but did not run. Slowly she turned her head, scanning the dry yellow grass from left to right, looking for him. She looked down on the ground and cursed her stupidity His footprints were there for her to see, if she had taken the time to look down instead of daydreaming. Her heart beat faster and sweat beaded her broad ebony forehead. I must not move, she told herself, although her legs wanted to break into flight. She wondered if she could make it to the river before he caught her. Stupid girl, she chided herself silently The river was full of crocodiles and hippos. Death awaited her at every turn.
Mashumba saw his prey was alert now. The time for stealth had passed. He stood, raising himself to his impressive full height. The breeze caught his hair again. He took a step forwards, then another.