Tukutela was the dark gray of volcanic rock, tall and gaunt; even at this distance Sean could make out the folds and tucks of his ancient riven hide and the knotted outline of his spine beneath it. His ears, their edges tattered and eroded like a pair of battle ensigns torn with shot and blackened with the smoke of cannon, fanned gently out with each stride.



Tukutela's tusks were also black, stained with age and the sap of the tan trees he had destroyed with them. From his gaping lower lip the tusks flared outward, then curved in again toward each other so the tips almost met nine feet from his lip. They were without taper, solid columns of ivory hanging so low that in the center they drooped below the level of the winter grass. Even that massive frame seemed overburdened by them. There would probably never be another pair of tusks like that again. This elephant was legend and history.



Sean felt a hot flare of guilt. No matter what the legality of it, the killing of this beast would be a crime against Africa, an affront to the gods of the wilderness and the very soul of man. Yet he knew he would not hesitate to do it, and that knowledge added poignancy to his sense of guilt. To a hunter, the nobler the quarry, the greater the compulsion to take the trophy. Job whistled again, pointing, diverting Sean's attention from the elephant, and only then did Sean see the poachers.



They were already closing in on the bull. He could see all four of them. They had just left the trees at the bottom of the slope and were moving in single file into the grassy meadow. The grass reached to their armpits, and their heads and shoulders bobbed like the cork line of a fishnet in the pale sea of grass. Each of them carried an AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.



The light swift bullets those weapons fired were not at all suitable for hunting massive-bodied species, but Sean knew the technique. They would get in close and all four would open fire together, blazing hundreds of rounds into the bull, riddling his lungs with copper-jacketed bullets, bringing him down under the sheer weight of automatic firepower.



The line of poachers was swinging out to flank the elephant, not heading directly toward him but keeping well below the wind, so that a fluke of the breeze would not carry their scent to him.



Despite this detour, they were running hard and gaining on him swiftly. The bull was still unaware of their existence, heading with long swaying strides down toward the river-bed, but Sean realized that at this rate they would intercept him and open fire before he could reach it himself.



The government directive from the game department to the concessionaires was in plain language. Unauthorized armed men in a hunting concession, if apprehended in what was clearly a hunting operation, were presumed to be poachers. Four game department rangers and one concessionaire had been murdered by poachers during the past four years, and the directive was that fire could be opened on poachers without warning. The prime minister, Robert Mugabe, made it even plainer. "Shoot to kill" were his exact words. The.577 Nitro EWress was a devastating weapon at close quarters, but over a 1un dred yards the heavy bullet dropped away rapidly. The group of poachers was six hundred yards away across the valley floor. Sean jumped up and, crouching low, slipped across the face of the slope to where Job was lying behind a fallen tree trunk.



He dropped down beside him. "Give me the Weatherby," he ordered, taking the lighter weapon from Job's hands. Job was an excellent shot, but this called for Bisley championship-standard marksmanship.



Sean jerked the bolt open and checked that there was a cartridge in the chamber. It was a 180-grain Nosier, and Sean tried to drop over hundred yards, the range of six estimate how much the buffet would firing downhill with a light breeze on his left shoulder. He remembered from the ballistic table that the bullet drop at 350 would be six inches, while at 600 yards it would probably be four feet or more.



While he worked it out, he stripped off his shirt, rolled it into a bundle, and placed it on the fallen tree trunk behind which he and Job were crouched.



"Back me with the big banduki. Shoot very high with it," he told Job. He settled behind the tree trunk, resting the fore end of the Weatherby on the pad of the shirt. He screwed the variable telescopic lens to full power and gazed through it.



He picked up the heads of the file of poachers. At this magnification, he could recognize two of the men as Matatu had described them from their spoor. The tall, lean one was leading. He wore a blue denim jacket, traditional guerrilla uniform from the days of the bush war. Behind him came the shorter, heavier man. He had a tiger-striped camouflage cap on his head and wore a plain khaki shirt.



Beyond them Sean could see the elephant. The magnification of the lens foreshortened the range so that the poachers seemed very close to their quarry. Even as he watched them, the leader of the column unslung the automatic rifle from his shoulder and made a gesture with his other hand. Behind him the other three poachers fanned out into a skirmishing line and slipped their rifles off their shoulders, holding them at high port.



Sean snuggled down behind the Weatherby, digging in his heels, regulating his breathing, his forefinger resting lightly on the trigger. He picked out the tall leader in the denim jacket and let the cross hairs of the telescopic sights drift over the man's head.



The image wavered and quivered in the heat. Sean watched the watery lines of mirage, for they were indicators of the strength and direction of the breeze; when they leaned over, the breeze was gusting, but they rose straight upward like smoke in the lulls between gusts.



He drew a long breath, let half of it out, and held the rest. The mirage steadied in a lull, and he took aim a full body length above the poacher's head. The image looked good, but he did not pull the trigger. He squeezed the grip of the rifle with his whole hand as though he were modeling clay. The butt plate slammed back into his shoulder as the barrel jumped high in the typically vicious Weatherby recoil, and he lost sight of the target.



Before he could collect himself, Job exulted, "Shayile! A hit!"



so And when Sean brought the lens back there were only three heads showing above the grass.



All three poachers had turned and were firing their weapons back toward the slope where Sean and Job were hidden, blazing wildly on fully automatic, their AKs beating like the rattle of kettledrums.



Beyond them Sean saw the old bull elephant in full flight. His ears streaming back and his great black tusks lifted high above the grass, he crashed into the narrow ribbon of dark bush and out the other side.



"Run, my beauty," Sean breathed. "If I can't have you, nobody else will." And he turned his full attention back to the band of poachers.



It was immediately obvious that they were a crack unit. Two of them were throwing covering fire at the kopJe, while the third had run to where the leader had gone down in the grass and dragged him to his feet. The blue denim-clad leader had lost his rifle, and he was doubled up and clutching his side.



"Nicked him!" Sean muttered. He fired again. Dust flew above the grass as his bullet fell close beside them. The poachers began to pull out, dragging their leader with them, placing an ant-hill between them and the kopJe. Both Sean and Job were firing deliberately, but the range was increasing every second, and although Sean saw dust fly very close to the scurrying figures, they could not claim another hit before the band disappeared into the grass and scrub and the clatter of automatic fire dwindled into silence.



Sean and Job waited fifteen minutes, peering down into the valley, but they did not get another glimpse of the poachers. Sean stood up. "We'll go and take a look."



"Careful," Job warned. "They could have doubled back to lay an ambush." That was, another old guerrilla trick, and they went down the slope cautiously.



Matatu led them to where the poacher had fallen. It was an area of flattened grass. The man's weapon had disappeared; one of the other poachers must have retrieved it. Matatu picked one of the grass stems and held it out to Sean. The blood on it was almost dry.



However, the bleeding had not been profuse and they found less than a dozen droplets on the grass or balled on the dry earth.



"Flesh wound," Sean grunted. The drift of the breeze must have pushed the bullet off the vital areas of the man's body.



"Who do we follow, Tukutela or the poachers?" Job wanted to know. "The poachers will be halfway back to Lusaka by now." Sean grinned. "Follow the elephant!" he ordered Matatu.



They tracked Tukutela across the river-bed and up the farther side of the valley. After his first panicked rush, the old bull had settled down into that swinging stride that ate up the ground at a prodigious rate, and which he could keep up for days. He was boring away toward the east, toward the Mozambican border, deviating only slightly from his course to take a gap in a line of hills or to climb the easier gradient when there was no pass.



They ran hard on his spoor. Not having to take precautions against ambush, they could push themselves to the limit, but the elephant was pulling away from them and the day was wasting.



The sun was casting their long shadows ahead of them.



There was no defined border with Mozambique, no fence or cut line through the forest, but a sixth sense warned Sean that they had crossed.



He was about to give orders to halt when Job whistled softly and made a cut-out signal with his left hand. Matatu pulled up and nodded his head in agreement, and the three of them bunched up and stood looking along the faint spoor that ran ahead of them into the darkening eastern forest.



"Mozambique," Job said. "He has gone away." And the others did not deny it.



"He still goes fast." Matatu spat on the spoor. "Faster than any man can run. We will not see Tukutela again this year."



"Yes, but there will be another season," Sean said. "Next year, he will range back into the national park and come again in the new moon across the Chiwewe River. We will be waiting for him."



"Perhaps." Matatu took a pinch of snuff from the duiker-horn container that hung around his neck. "Or perhaps the poachers will find him again, or he will walk onto a land mine in an old battlefield in Mozambique, or perhaps he will die of his own great age The thought filled Sean with melancholy. Tukutela was a part of the old Africa. Sean had been born too late fully to experience that era. He had been able to glimpse only vestiges of it, yet he had a deep, nostalgic reverence for the history and past of his continent.



It was all going so fast, trodden under the greedy rush for power by the thoughtless hordes of the emerging nations, by the unbridled tribal rivalries and the lawlessness of this new age. Once again Africa was becoming the dark continent, but this time without the glory of its natural treasures-the wild game was decimated, the forests hacked down for fuel, the very earth abused by primitive and animal husbandry, and the Saharan desert each year marching southward. Tukutela was one of the very few real treasures.



Sean turned back. He had wanted that elephant. He had wanted him with the utmost parts of his being. Now, as he turned back into the west, the disappointment weighed down his legs and his heart, and he went heavily.



A little before midnight they found Riccardo and Claudia sleeping on a mattress of cut grass, under a lean-to shelter beside a fire that had burned down to coals, while Pumula sat guard at the second fire, close by.



Riccardo came awake the instant Sean touched his shoulder, and he scrambled up eagerly. "Did you find him? What happened?



What about the poachers?"



"He's gone, Capo. Across the border. We chased off the poachers, but Tukutela got clear away," Sean told him. Riccardo sagged back on the grass mattress and listened in silence while Sean described the chase and the contact with the poachers.



Claudia sat close to her father, and when Sean told them how Tukutela had crossed into Mozambique, she slipped her arm around his shoulders in a gesture of comfort.



"All right." Sean stood up. "There is one of my hunting tracks that cuts through about five miles south of here. Matatu and I will go back to fetch the truck, and Job will lead you to the track. I'll meet you there. Should take us four or five hours."



By the light of the stars alone, Matatu led Sean for four hours through forest and dense bush, bringing him at last unerringly to where the truck was parked.



It was another hour's drive to the rendezvous, where they found Claudia, Riccardo, and the others sitting beside a fire on the verge of the rough track. They climbed wearily into the truck, and Sean turned back and headed towards camp. It was four in the morning, over twenty-four hours since they had set out on the hunt with such high hopes.



They drove in silence for a while, Claudia asleep on her father's shoulder. Then Riccardo asked thoughtfully, "Do you know where Tukutela, has gone?"



"Beyond our reach, Capo," Sean told him grimly.



"Seriously." Riccardo was impatient. "Is there one of his regular haunts where he will be headed?"



"That's rough country in there," Sean murmured. "Chaos and confusion. Villages burned and deserted, two armies fighting each other, with Mugabe's lads joining in."



"Where has that elephant gone?" Riccardo insisted. "He must have an established range."



Sean nodded. "We have worked it out, Job, Matatu, and I. We reckon he holes up from July to September in the swamps below the Cabora Bossa dam. Then in late September or the beginning of October, he crosses the Zambezi and heads north into Malawi, into the dense rain forest around Mlanje. He hides there until after the rains break and then comes south again, crosses the Zambezi near Tete and goes back into the Chiwewe National Park again."



"So he'll be heading for the swamps now?" Riccardo asked.



"More than likely." Sean nodded. "We'll get another crack at him next season, Capo."



At dawn they reached camp, where there were steaming hot showers and freshly ironed clothes ready for them, and a huge breakfast spread in the dining tent. Sean loaded crispy bacon and fried eggs onto their plates.



"When we have finished breakfast, we'll catch up on some of the sleep we missed last night, sack out until lunchtime."



"Suits me," Claudia agreed readily.



"Then we'll have a conference. We must work out our plans for the rest of the safari. We still have almost three weeks. We can try for another bull elephant. I can't offer you anything like Tukutela, but we might be able to find a sixty-pounder for you, Capo."



"I don't want a sixty-pounder," Riccardo said. "I want Tukutela."



"Don't we all, but let's drop it now." Sean's irritation was undisguised. "We can't do anything about it. Let's just drop the subject."



"What if we crossed the border and followed him into the swamps?" Riccardo did not look up from his eggs and bacon, and Sean studied his face before he laughed mirthlessly.



"For a moment you had me worried. I thought you meant it.



We'll get Tukutela next season."



"There isn't going to be another season," Riccardo told him.



You know damn well Geoffrey Manguza is going to pull your license and take Chiwewe away from you."



"Thanks, Capo, you certainly know how to make me feel good."



"No sense fooling ourselves. This is our last chance at that elephant."



"Correction." Sean shook his head. "It's over for this season.



We had our chance and we blew it."



"Not if we follow him into Mozambique," Riccardo said. "Follow him into the swamps."



Sean stared at him, "My God, you are serious!" "I told you, there is nothing that I want more in this life than that elephant."



"So you expect Job and Matatu and me to commit suicide for a whim of yours."



"No, I don't expect it for a whim-let's say for half a minion dollars."



Sean shook his head, but no words came out, and Riccardo went on. "I feel responsible for you losing your license. With half a million you could buy a good concession in Zambia or Botswana or fifty thousand acres of game ranch in South Africa. Half a million. Think about it."



Sean jumped up from the breakfast table so violently he knocked his plate to the ground. He strode away without looking back.



He stood alone at the edge of the camp, staring down toward the river where a small herd of impala were drinking and a white headed fish eagle sat on a dead tree above the green water. He did not see them.



He thought about what it would be like next year without his own concession. He owed his brother Garry almost fifty thousand dollars, and his overdraft at the bank in Harare was touching ten thousand. Reema had told him the bank manager was anxious to speak to him, but Sean had avoided the appointment on his last visit to Harare.



He was over forty and he had accumulated nothing. His father might be delighted to welcome him back to the family company, but his brother Garry was the chairman now and he would be less enthusiastic.



He thought about air-conditioned offices, neckties and dark business suits, interminable meetings with lawyers and engineers, rush-hour traffic and the smell of the city.



He thought about his father's philosophy, heartily endorsed by his brother, that a man had to start at the bottom of the company and "work his way up.." Garry had more than twenty years" start up on him. Garry loved it and he hated it.



He thought about half a million dollars. With that amount of money in his back pocket, he could thumb his nose at his bank manager, at Geoffrey Manguza, at Garry Courtney, and at the rest of the world and tell them all to go and get stuffed.



He turned away from the river and started down the path to Job's tent. Job was eating alone at his own camp fire, served by his younger wife. He gave her a quiet order to leave when he saw Sean coming. Then he took the coffee pot off the coals, poured a second mug, and dribbled condensed milk from the can into it.



Sean sat on the carved native stool beside him and took the mug from him. He spoke in Sindebele.



"What would you think of a man who followed a great elephant like Tukutela to his secret place in the swamps along the Zambezi?" "A man of such stupidity does not bear thinking of." Job blew on his coffee to cool it, and they were silent for a long while.



Matatu, who had been sleeping in his hut nearby, sensed the presence of his master, and came out, blinking and yawning in the early sunlight, to squat at Sean's feet. Sean let his hand rest on the little man's shoulder for a moment. He felt him wriggle with pleasure under the touch. He did not even have to ask Matatu. He would go where Sean went, without question, without a moment's hesitation, so Sean spoke directly to Job.



"Job, old friend of many years, I give you something else to think on. Monterro wants to follow the elephant. He is offering half a million dollar. What do you think of half a million dollars?"



Job sighed. "I do not have to think too long on that. When do we leave?"



Sean squeezed his arm hard and stood up.



Riccardo was seated at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee and a cigar. Claudia was beside him, and he could see they had been arguing. The girl's face was still flushed and her eyes asparkle, but she lapsed into silence as Sean entered the tent.



"Capo," Sean said, you have no idea what it will be like across there. It will be Vietnam all over again, but this time without the backup of the U.S. Army. Do you understand that?"



Riccardo nodded. "I want to go."



"All right. Here are my terms. You will sign an indemnity for whatever happens to you. I am not responsible."



"Agreed."



"Then I want a written acknowledgement of debt for the full amount, binding on your estate in the event of your death."



"Give me the paper."



"You are crazy, Capo, do you know that?"



"Sure." Riccardo grinned. "But what about you?"



"Oh, I was born crazy." Sean laughed with him as they shook hands, and then he sobered. "I want to fly a reconnaissance along the border to make sure there are no surprises waiting for us. If all is clear, we'll cross tonight. It will mean forced marches and traveling light. I want to be in and out in under ten days."



Riccardo nodded. Sean told him, "Get some rest now. You are going to need it."



He was about to turn away when he caught Claudia's furious gaze. "I'll radio Reema to send down another charter flight to pick you up tomorrow. She'll wangle you on the first commercial flight back to Anchorage."



Claudia seemed about to reply when Riccardo laid his hand over hers. "Okay," he said. "She'll go. I'll see to it."



"Damn right she'll go," Sean said. "She certainly isn't coming into Mozambique with us."



Sean taped over the identification markings on the Beechcraft's wings and fuselage, obliterating them from the scrutiny of any ground observer. He made certain the tape was so firmly adhered to the metalwork that the slipstream could not strip it away. While he worked, Job checked the emergency stores aboard the aircraft in case they were forced down. Rather than the heavy double barreled rifle, he loaded Sean's lightweight 30/06 with the black fiberglass stock.



They took off and Sean banked onto an easterly heading, keeping barely fifty feet above the treetops. He flew with the map on his lap, checking each landmark as it appeared ahead of them. Job sat beside him in the right-hand seat, while Matatu was in the seat behind Job. Even after all these years, Matatu was terrified of flying and still occasionally suffered from airsickness. Sean refused to allow him to sit in the seat behind him.



"Silly little bugger will puke down the back of my neck again."



So Job had to run that risk.



They reached the border and turned northward along it, searching for troop movements or any evidence of human presence. They found nothing, and thirty minutes later they saw the sheen of water on the horizon, an inland sea formed by the man-made dam on the Zambezi River.



"Cabora Bossa," Sean grunted. The hydroelectric scheme, one of the biggest and most expensive in Africa, had been built by the Portuguese before they relinquished the colony to self-government.



Although the South Africans would have taken all the power the project could supply, transporting it southward across the grids to their great mines at Palabora in the Transvaal, and although the revenue would have gone a long way toward alleviating Mozambique's desperate economic plight, Cabora Bossa no longer sold a single kilowatt of electricity. The southbound power lines were so continually being sabotaged by the rebel forces, and the government troops were so demoralized that they made little attempt to protect the repair crews from attack. Thus it had been years since a repair had even been attempted.



"By now the turbines are probably just piles of rust. Score another sweeping triumph for African Marxism." Sean chuckled and dropped a wing to turn 180 degrees and head back southward.



On this leg he flew deeper into Mozambique, setting a zigzag course to cover more ground, once again searching for occupied villages or mobile military units.



They found only the patterns of old cultivated lands, now gone back to weed and bush, and burned-out deserted villages with no sign of human life around the shells of roofless huts.



Sean intersected the road running between Vila de Monica and Cabora Bossa and flew along it for ten miles. He was so low he could see the ruts and potholes in the surface and weeds growing in the wheel tracks. No vehicle had used it for months, perhaps years. The culverts and bridges had been destroyed by explosives and the bodies of mined vehicles, burned out and rusted, littered the verges.



He turned back toward the west and the border now, searching for a place that all three of them remembered so well. As they came up ahead, Sean recognized the symmetrical hillocks they called Inhlozane, "The Maiden's Breasts," and south of them the confluence of two minor rivers, now reduced to strings of green pools in wide sand beds.



Job pointed ahead. "There it is." In the back seat, Matatu forgot his fear and discomfort to cackle with laughter and clutch Sean's shoulder.



"Inhlozane. Do you remember, Bwana?"



Sean banked steeply over the junction of the two rivers, circling them, all three of them peering down. They could make out no trace of the old guerrilla camp. The last time they had been here was in the spring of"1976 and they had come as scouts--Ballantyne's Scouts.



Under interrogation, a prisoner had revealed the existence of a major guerrilla training camp in this area, and the Rhodesian high command had sent one of the Vampire jets over on a high photographic run. The camp had been cunningly concealed and every artifice of camouflage employed. However, the Rhodesian evaluators were highly skilled, most of them ex-R.A.F personnel. It is possible to camouflage the dugouts and hutments used by hundreds of men and women, but the pathways between them are the telltales. Thousands of feet moving daily between barracks and lecture huts, between mess halls and latrines, going out to forage for firewood or carrying water from the river, beat pathways that from the air look like the veins in a dead leaf.



"Between two and two and a half thousand," the air force photographic reconnaissance squadron leader had told the briefing. "They have been there for approximately six months, so training is almost complete. They are probably just waiting for the rains to break before beginning a major offensive."



A simultaneous incursion by two thousand trained terrorists would have strained the Rhodesian security forces" capabilities to breaking point.



"Preemptive strike," General Peter Walls, the Rhodesian commander in chief, had ordered. "I want a battle plan prepared within twenty-four hours." The code name chosen for the attack was "Popeye."



Rivalry between the Selous Scouts and the Ballantyne Scouts was fierce, and Sean had been jubilant when he had been given the ground attack role of "Popeye" in preference to the Selous lads.



They had gone in with the slow, ancient Dakotas, crowded on the benches along the fuselage, fifty men and their equipment to an aircraft, sitting on their parachutes. There were almost equal numbers of black and white troopers, but they were homogeneous in their camouflage paint. They had jumped from three hundred feet, just high enough for the parachutes to flare before they hit the ground. When they jumped from that height, they jokingly referred to themselves as "meat bombs."



The jump area was twelve miles from the guerrilla training camp, ninety-six miles inside the Mozambican border. They were on the ground an hour before sunset. All three hundred Scouts were assembled and ready to move out by nightfall.



They had made the approach march by moonlight, each man carrying a pack that weighed almost a hundred pounds, most of that weight made up of ammunition for the RPD machine guns.



They had reached the fork of the river after midnight and prepared their ambush position along the south bank, overlooking the dry river-bed and its shallow green pools and facing the training camp on the far bank.



With Job beside him, Sean crept along the bank, checking every position personally, speaking to his men in whispers, calling them by name. They had lain for the rest of the night behind their machine guns, and small sounds and smells of the wood smoke and cooking food had drifted across to them on the night breeze.



At dawn a bugle had sounded reveille in the dark forest that hid the camps, and they had seen the obscure movement of many persons in the gloom beneath the trees.



Twenty minutes later, Precisely at the moment of good shooting light, the Vampires had come whistling in from the west and dropped their napalm cansters. Towering bans of orange flame shot through with evil black smoke had erupted into the sky, palling the sunrise; the heat and the chemical stink of the napalm came rolling down to where the scouts lay in ambush. The VamPires had deliberately dropped their loads of napalm along the northern perimeter of the camp, sealing off that escape route with a wall of fire. The Canberra bombers came in twenty seconds behind the Vampires, and their bomb loads were fragmentation and high explosive. They fell into the camp with jarring crumping detonations, sending up fountains of dirt and debris, and the trainee guerrillas who survived came out of the forest, screaming and howling in a panic-stricken mob.



The napalm had cut them off from the north, and they poured into the river-bed and came running directly at the waiting machine guns. Sean let them come, studying them with a detached interest.



There were almost as many women as men, but it was difficult to differentiate between the sexes. They wore no uniform; some were in khaki shorts and T-shirts with portraits of guerrilla leaders or Political slogans printed on the chests. Others wore blue denim or bush jackets, and some were bare-chested and in their underwear.



Nearly all of them were young, in their middle or late teens, all of them terrified and running blindly to escape the conflagration of napalm and high explosive.



They splashed into the pools and the sand held their feet, slowing them. As they ran, they looked back over their shoulders at the flames and dust of the pomp, so none of them saw the gunners waiting for them on the south bank.



The river-bed was filled with struggling humanity, like a pit full of rats, and as the first of them reached the bank on which Sean lay and began to clamber up the steep earthen side, he blew a piercing blast on his whistle. The last note of the whistle was drowned out by gunfire, three hundred automatic weapons opening up together.



Sean had been hardened by years of brutal warfare, but even he found the carnage stunning. At close range, the volleys of machine-gun fire tore one human body to shreds, then went on to destroy the next rank and the next. Shots boiled the white sand of the river-bed so it rose in a waist-high fog turning the running figures to ghostly silhouettes in the dust, then hid them as they collapsed or were flung carelessly aside by point-blank bursts of fire.



The din lasted for four minutes. Then there were no more targets and the guns fell silent. They had fired fifty thousand bullets into the river-bed. The barrels of the guns were so hot that, like the plate of a stove, they ticked and pink led as they cooled. Though their ears were dulled and numbed by the roar of gunfire, they could hear the moans and cries of those who still lived in the river-bed.



Sean blew another blast on his whistle and they leaped down the bank and went forward in a skirmishing line.



Sean's orders were that the only prisoners to be taken were to be officers or political commissars. As they crossed the river, they shot those who showed any signs of life, holding the muzzles against their heads, a single bullet for each, making certain they would never recover from their Wounds to attack another Rhodesian farmhouse or hack the arms and legs off the black villagers who refused to supply them with food and women. They left nobody alive in the river-bed. Then they went on to sweep through the camp, tossing grenades into the dugouts and searching the huts for survivors and, more important, for maps and documents. Like all good Marxists, the guerrillas were obsessed with record keeping.



The capture of the camp archives was one of the major priorities of "Popeye. Racing at the head of his men, Sean was the first to reach headquarters hut in the center of the camp. He recognized it by the gaudy flag drooping on its flagpole in front.



The doorway was dangerous. He fired a burst through the grass wall and then dived in headfirst through the window. There was a tall black man in the front office. He was dressed in blue denim, and he was scooping armfuls of documents out of the paraffin boxes that served as filing cabinets and dumping them in the center of the floor. Clearly he was going to attempt to burn them, but now he dropped his armful of paper and reached for the pistol in the holster on his belt.



Sean kicked his legs out from under him and, as he dropped, slammed the butt of his weapon into the side of his neck just below the ear. As Sean rolled to his feet, Matatu appeared beside him like a grinning gnome and stooped to slit the unconscious guerrilla's throat with his skinning knife.



"No!" Sean stopped him. "We want that one." Job was seconds behind him, bursting into the room with the heavy RPD machine gun held ready across his hip.



"Okay, Captain," Sean ordered him, "get a detail to recover all this burnt." He glanced at his watch. "The choppers will be here in twenty minutes."



The Rhodesian Air Force was desperately short of helicopters.



Rhodesia was under sanction by every nation in the world except South Africa, and a British warship was blockading the Mozambique Channel to deny those ports to them.



They could risk only two helicopters for this operation. One of those was loaded with captured documents, almost five tons of them: lists of the trainees and their organization, target priorities and supply sheets, equipment dossiers, training manuals, field evaluations of Rhodesian countermeasures, communist propaganda, maps of the attack routes and safe corridors, the entire order of battle of the guerrilla army. It was a treasure trove, its aquisition a greater blow to the enemy than the hundreds of bodies lying in the river-bed, but it filled one of the precious helicopters.



The second Alouette helicopter Sean used for casevac" and for ferrying out the prisoners. However, the Scouts had taken more casualties than he had anticipated: three troopers had been injured in the parachute drop, torn cartilage and sprained ligaments, and five others had been wounded by the desultory and quickly suppressed counterfire of the more plucky of the guerrillas. Then one of the guerrillas had feigned dead in the river-bed and thrown a grenade when the Scouts came forward, killing a black trooper and wounding two others. The Scouts always took their dead out for decent burial and the trooper's corpse was already in its green plastic body bag.



In addition to his own casualties, Sean's men had captured eight suspected officers and commissars. The guerrilla leaders wore no insignia of rank but could usually be identified by the superior quality of their clothing, by their sunglasses, wristwatches, and the rows of ball-point pens in their breast pockets.



They had too many passengers for the helicopters, and Sean was forced to keep some of his prisoners with him for the outward march. He picked those who looked fit enough to survive a forced march with the Scouts. One of these was the man they had captured in the command hut.



Forty-five minutes after the attack had begun, the last helicopter took off and the Scouts were ready to move out. They could expect the Frelimo counterattack to be dilatory and unenthusiastic, but Sean was taking no chances. He was on the riverbank surveying the carnage of the killing ground. They couldn't afford the time to make a body count, but the air force would run another reconnaissance later this morning and they would get a fair estimate from the photographs.



"Must be at least fifteen hundred" Sean decided. They were lying in heaps and windrows like newly cut wheat, and already the flies were hanging over them in a gray mist.



Sean turned away from the scene. "All right," he called. "Move them out!"



The first section of fifty men set off at a trot. The troop trucks would race across the border and come in as far as they could to meet them, but the men would still have to run thirty miles or more before they could ride, a full marathon under arms. But most of their ammunition had been shot away and their packs were almost empty.



Job hurried across to where Sean stood on the bank. "The prisoner you took, Colonel. I have recognized him. It's Comrade China himself."



"Are you sure?" Sean did not wait for Job to reply. "Damn, if I had known I would have sent him out on the chopper."



Comrade China was high on the wanted list of the Rhodesians.



He was the area commander of the entire northeastern sector, the equivalent of a major general and one of their most successful commanders, a man with a lot of interesting stories to tell to military intelligence.



"Make sure he gets out safely, Captain," Sean ordered brusquely. "Treat him like your new wife."



"China refuses to march," Job said. "We can't shoot him, and we can't carry him. He knows that."



under guard, Sean strode across to where the prisoner was held squatting sullenly with his hands behind his head.



"On your feet and march," Sean ordered. Comrade China spat on Sean's boots. Sean unbuckled his holster and drew the.357 Magnum revolver. He laid it against the side of the man's head.



"On your feet," he repeated. "Your last chance."



"You won't shoot," the man sneered. "You daren't shoot." And Sean fired, The muzzle was aimed over Comrade China's shoulder, but the barrel was pressed hard against his ear.



Comrade China screamed and clutched at his ear with both hands. A thin trickle of blood from his ruptured eardrum ran out between his fingers. "On your feet!" Sean said and still holding his damaged ear, Comrade China spat at him again. Sean laid the revolver barrel against his other ear. "After your ears, we will take out your eyes, with a sharp stick." Comrade China stood up.



At the double, move out." Job took over. He placed his hand between China's shoulder blades and sent him tottering down the riverbank.



Sean took one more look around the battlefield. it had been done swiftly and thoroughly, what the Scouts called "a good kill."



"All right, Matatu," Sean said softly. "Let's go home." And the little Ndorobo ran ahead of him.



When Comrade China faltered and his knees went rubbery and he collapsed from the agony of his burst eardrum, Sean gave him a subcutaneous shot of morphine from a disposable syringe and a drink from his water bottle.



"For a soldier of the revolution who shoots babies and chops the feet off old women, this is a stroll in the park," Sean told him.



Brace up, China, or I'll blow your other ear out." And he took one of China's elbows and Job the other. Between them they hoisted him to his feet and half carried him until the morphine had a chance to work, but they kept up the pace of the running column of Scouts through the forest and over the rolling rocky hills.



"You may have killed some of our people today." After a mile or so the morphine was working and China became loquacious.



"Today you have won a single little battle, Colonel Courtney, but tomorrow we will have won the war." China's voice was harsh with bitter self-righteousness.



"How do you know my name?" Sean asked with amusement.



"You are famous, Colonel, or should I say infamous. Under you, this pack of killer dogs is even more dangerous than when the murderous Ballantyne himself was leading it."



"Thank you for the pretty compliment, my old China, but aren't you claiming victory a little prematurely?"



"The side which controls the countryside by night wins the war.



"Mao Tse-tung." Sean smiled. "A most appropriate quotation for one of your kind."



"We control the Countryside at last, we have you bottled up in your villages and towns. Your white farmers are losing heart, their women are sick of war. The black peasants are openly sympathetic to our cause. Britain and the world are against you. Even South Africa, your only ally, is growing disenchanted with the struggle.



Soon, very soon..



They argued as they ran, and despite himself Sean could not suppress a grudging admiration for his prisoner. He was quick witted his command of English impressive and his grasp of politics and military tactics even more so. He was physically strong and fit.



Sean could feel the wiry muscle in his arm as he supported him, and few other men with a burst eardrum could have sustained the pace of the march.



"He would make a superb Scout," Sean thought. "If we could turn him" Many of his most valuable men were former guerrillas, captured and skillfully turned by Rhodesian intelligence.



So as they ran on he studied Comrade China with renewed interest. He was probably a few years younger than Sean. He had refined Nilotic features, more Ethiopian than Shana, a narrow high-bridged nose and chiseled lips rather than the broadly negroid. Even the morphine could not dim the intelligence of his large dark eyes. He was a handsome man, and of course he would be tough and utterly ruthless. He would not have reached his rank were he not.



"I want him," Sean decided. "My God, he would be worth another full regiment to us." And he tightened his grip on the man's arm, a proprietorial gesture. "This little darling is going to get the full treatment."



The vanguard ran into a Frelimo patrol in the middle of the morning and brushed them aside, hardly slackening their pace to do so. The corpses in their blotched Frelimo camouflage lay beside the track as they trotted past.



They came up with the troop convoy a little after midday. The trucks were guarded by Eland armored cars, and they had cans of ice-cold Castle beer in the cool boxes. The Scouts had covered forty-two miles in just over seven hours, and the beer tasted like nectar.



Sean gave a can to Comrade China. "Sorry about your ear," he told him, and saluted him with the beer can.



"I would have done the same to you." China smiled, but his eyes were inscrutable. "To our next meeting?" he suggested the toast.



"Until we meet again," Sean agreed, and handed him over to a guard detail under a white sergeant. Then he climbed into the Command armored car to lead the final stage of withdrawal.



Sean extricated his column and had them back across the border ten and a half hours after the attack began. Ian Smith, the prime minister, came on the radio net in person to congratulate him and inform him of his decoration, a bar to his Silver Cross.



Sean didn't learn about Comrade China's escape until the column went into laager that evening. Apparently China had slit the canvas hood of the troop truck and slipped through it while his guard was dozing. Undeterred by his manacles, he had dropped off the speeding truck, screened by the dust boiling out from the back wheels, and rolled into the head-high elephant grass along the verge.



Two months later Sean had seen an intelligence report that placed China in command of the successful attack that had wiped out a supply convoy on the Mount Darwin road.



"Yes, Matatu, I remember it all very well," Sean answered his question. He made one more steep turn above the site of the old terrorist base before he returned the Beechcraft to straight and level flight on a southerly heading.



He did not, however, fly as far southward as the railway line that linked the port of Beira to the landlocked Zimbabwean border.



This was a focus for all the military and rebel activity in the area, and the countryside would be swarming with Frelimo and Zimbabwean troops, all armed with RPG rockets and eager to get a shot at an unmarked low-flying aircraft with no flight authorization.



"At least," Sean told Job, "it looks like a possibility."



Job agreed. "The border opposite our camp seems undefended and deserted."



"Worth a try for half a million?" Sean asked. Job just grinned at him.



"One more little chore before we go home," Sean told them.



It required precise navigation and an eye for the terrain, but Sean crossed back into the Zimbabwean side, and by flying low they were able to pick out the spot where the previous day they had first come across the poachers" tracks; from that point, with Matatu craning his head to see down and calling directions, they found the tableland and valley where they had come up with the band of poachers and taken them under fire. From the air the distances seemed much shorter than they had on foot.



Matatu directed Sean along the trail the old bull had made toward the border. It seemed his gift for direction and terrain was not impaired by being high above the ground, and Sean was following their course on The map he held in his lap.



"We are crossing bact into Mozambique now." Sean was scribbling notes on the map.



"That way. Matatu leaned over the back of the seat and pointed out a more northerly track. Sean knew better than to argue with him and turned a few degrees left.



Minutes later Matatu demanded he turn slightly south again.



"Little bugger is actually sensing the old bull's trail, he is thinking like the elephant," Sean marveled. At that moment Matatu gave a squeak of triumph and pointed urgently out of the side window.



As they flashed across another dry river-bed, Sean glimpsed the tracks trodden in the soft sand. They were so deep that they were filled with shadow, a string of dark beads on the white background. Even Sean, who for twenty years had watched Matatu work, was amazed. On instinct alone, Matatu had followed the bull to this river crossing.



It was a supernatural feat.



Sean circled the tracks, his port wingtip pointing directly at them, so steep was his turn.



"Which way now?" he called to the back seat. Matatu tapped his shoulder and pointed downstream. Without demur, Sean followed the gnarled black finger.



there he is!" Job shouted suddenly. Matatu shrieked with laughter and clapped his hands, bouncing in his seat like a child at a pantomime.



A mile ahead the river ran into a wide vlei that still held water from the last rains. The elephant's humped back showed above the tops of the tall reeds that surrounded the pool, like a gray whale in a sea of green.



As they raced low toward him, the elephant heard the Beechcraft's engine. He lifted his head and spread his ears wide, turning to face them, and they saw his tusks, those legendary shafts of black ivory raised to the sky. The beauty of their curved symmetry struck Sean all over again.



There was just a glimpse of them as they flashed overhead, but the image was printed vividly on his mind's eye. Half a million dollars and those tusks-he had risked his LIFE a hundred times for much lesser prizes.



"Going back for another look?" Job asked, twisting his head to try and see back over the tailplane.



"No." Sean shook his head. "We don't want to disturb him more than necessary. We know where to find him. Let's go home."



"It's MY half-million dollars you're so gaily throwing around," Claudia told her father.



"How do you work that out?" Riccardo asked. He was lying on his camp bed dressed in a pair of silk pajama bottoms, his chest and feet bare. Claudia noticed that most of his body hair was still crisp, curly and black, with only a patch of fuzzy gray in the center of his chest.



"My inheritance," she explained sweetly. "You're blowing my inheritance, Papa."



Riccardo chuckled. She had the sass of a divorce lawyer, coming bursting into his tent to renew the argument he thought he had finalized in the mess tent over breakfast.



"If I'm not going to get it in your will, the very least you can do is let me enjoy it with you now."



"According to the last audit, young lady, you will have a little over thirty-six million coming to you after taxes, after I've allowed myself this small extravagance. I hasten to add that every cent is tied up in a trust fund that not even the most crafty lawyers will ever break. I don't want you handing out my hard -earned loot to one of your bleeding-heart charities." "Papa, you know the money has never interested me. What interests me is coming with you on this crazy jaunt after the elephant.



I came to Africa with you on the understanding that I was to be included in everything. That was our bargain."



"I'll say it one more time, tesoro, my treasure." He only called her by that baby name when he was feeling very affectionate or very exasperated. "You're not coming into Mozambique with us."



"You'd go back on your solemn promise?" she accused.



"Without a qualm," he assured her. "if your safety or happiness was involved."



She jumped up from the canvas camp chair and began to prowl around the tent. He watched her with secret pleasure. Her arms were folded over those pert little breasts, and she was frowning heavily, but the frown left no lines on her smooth plastic skin. In looks she reminded him of the young Sophia Loren, his favorite actress.



Now she stopped beside the camp bed and glared down at him.



"You know I always get my way," she said. "Why don't you make it easier for both of us, and just say I can come."



"I'm sorry, tesoro. You aren't coming."



"all right." She drew a deep breath. "I don't want to do this, Papa, but you leave me no choice. I've begun to understand what this means to you, why you're prepared to pay such a vast sum for a chance to do it, but if I can't go with you, as is my right and my duty, then I'll prevent you from going."



He chuckled again, easily and unconcernedly.



"I'm serious, deadly serious, Papa. Please don't make me do it."



"How can you stop me, little girl?" he asked.



"I can tell Sean Courtney what Dr. Andrews told me."



Riccardo Monterro came to his feet in one lithe swift movement and seized her arms. "What did Andrews tell you?" he asked in a voice as thin and cutting as a razor blade.



"He told me that last November you had a little black spot on your right arm," she said. Instinctively he put his right arm behind his back, but she went on. "It had a pretty name, melanoma, like a girl's name, but it wasn't pretty at all, and you left it too late. He cut it out, but the pathologist graded it Clarke five-that's six months to a year, Papa. That's what he told me."



Riccardo Monterro sat down on the bed and his voice was suddenly very weary.



"When did he tell you?"



"Six weeks ago." She sat down beside him. "That's why I agreed to come to Africa with you. I didn't want to be apart from you for one day of the time we have left. That's why I am coming with you into Mozambique."



"No." He shook his head. "I can't let you."



"Then I'll tell Sean that at any moment it may reach your brain."



She did not have to elaborate. Dr. Andrews had been most graphic as he described the many possible directions the disease could take. If it went to the lungs, it would be death by suffocation, but if it affected the brain or nervous system, it would be either general paralysis or total derangement.



"You wouldn't," he said, shaking his head. "The last thing in my life that I really want. You wouldn't deny it to me?"



"Without a qualm," she said, repeating his own words. "If you refuse me my right to be with you for every one of these last days, and to be with you at the end as is the duty of a loving daughter."



"I can't let you." He let his face sink into the cup of his hands, a gesture of defeat that hurt her. It required all her resolve to keep her tone firm.



"And I can't let you die alone," she replied.



"You don't understand how much I want this thing. It's the last thing in my LIFE. The old bull and I will go together. You don't understand. If you did you wouldn't prevent me."



"I'm not preventing you," she said gently. "I want you to have it-if you'll let me come with you." As she said it, they both became aware of a faint vibration in the air, and together they looked up.



"The Beechcraft," Riccardo murmured. "Sean's on his way back to the airstrip." He glanced at his wristwatch. "He'll be here within the hour."



"And what will you tell him?" Claudia asked. "Will you tell him I'm coming with you?"



"No!" Sean bellowed. "No bloody fear! Forget the idea, Capo.



She can't come, and that's absolutely bloody final!"



"For half a big M, I get to call the shots," Riccardo told him quietly.



"I say she's coming, so she's coming."



They were standing beside the Toyota. Riccardo and Claudia had met Sean as he drove into camp. Sean drew a breath and glared at father and daughter as they stood side by side confronting him. He saw that their expressions were set and determined.



Sean had been on the point of bellowing again, but with an effort he checked himself. "Be reasonable, Capo," he said, moderating his tone. "You know it's impossible."



They stared at him grimly, closed against argument or reason.



"It's war out there. We'll take her."



"Claudia comes with us."



"The hell she does."



Claudia spoke for the first time. "What are you making a fuss about? Is it because I am a woman? There's nothing a man can do that I can't."



"Can you pee standing up?" He wanted to disconcert her, make her lose her temper, but she ignored the crude jibe and went on as though he had not spoken.



"You've seen me hike. I can stand the heat and the tsetse fly. I'm as good as my father."



He turned from her deliberately and spoke to Riccardo. "As her father, you can't allow it. Can you imagine what would happen to her if she were caught by a gang of Renamo cutthroats?"



He saw Riccardo flinch, but Claudia had seen it also, and before he could weaken she took his hand and spoke up firmly.



"Either I go or nobody goes, and you can kiss your half a million good-bye, Colonel Sean Courtney."



That was the key, the half-million dollars. She had him, and they both knew it. He couldn't afford to pass it by, but he made one last effort.



"Is she in charge around here, Capo? Do I take my orders from you or from her?"



"That won't work either." Claudia tried to keep her tone placatory, although she longed to tear into him with tooth and nail.



That crude sally of his rankled. "My father and I are agreed on this. Both of us go, or we call the deal off. Isn't that right, Papa?"



"I'm afraid that's it, Sean." Riccardo looked tired and discouraged. "It's not negotiable. If you want your money, you take Claudia along with us."



Sean turned on his heel and strode away toward his own tent, but after a few paces, he stopped and stood with his hands on his hips. His shouts had attracted the camp servants, and they hovered around the mess tent and peered out of the doorway and windows of the kitchen hut, apprehension mingled with curiosity. "What the hell are you all gawking at?" he roared. "Have you got no work to do around here?" And they disappeared.



He turned and walked slowly back to where the two of them stood beside the Toyota. "Okay," he agreed, staring coldly at Claudia. "Cut your own throat, but don't come to me for a bandage."



"I won't, that's a promise." Her voice was dripping honey, more irksome to him than straightforward gloating would have been, and they both knew their declared truce was at an end.



"We've got some paperwork to do, Capo." Sean led the way to the mess tent without looking back at them.



With two fingers, Sean typed out the indemnity statements on his old portable Remington, one for Riccardo and one for his daughter. Each began: "I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the danger and the illegality..." Then he typed an acknowledgement of debt for Riccardo to sign and called Job and the chef to witness the signature. He sealed all the copies in an envelope addressed to Reema at the Harare office and locked it in the small steel safe at the back of the mess tent.



"Let's do it, then," he said.



The poaching expedition would consist of the three whites, Job, Mattu, Pumula, and the stocky, bearded tracker who had picked UP Tukutela's spoor at the river crossing. His name was Dedan.



"It's too many, but each of those tusks weighs a hundred and thirty pounds," Sean explained. "Matatu is too small to act as a porter. We need four big men to bring them back."



Before the equipment was loaded into the Toyota, Sean ordered it laid out, and he opened and checked each pack. Claudia protested when he opened her personal pack. "That's an invasion of my privacy!"



"So take me to the Supreme Court, ducky," he challenged as he went through the pack remorselessly, throwing out most of the tubes and bottles of cosmetics, allowing her only three tubes of moisturizer and sunscreen.



"One change of underwear," he ordered, discarding half a dozen pairs of panties. "But you'll need two more pairs of thick socks.



Get them."



He pulled out her box of tampons. "Everything a man can do, and then some," he remarked coldly. "You don't need the box, it takes up too much space. Pack them loose." Her poorly suppressed fury gave him a sour pleasure.



By the time he had finished, they were down to the barest essentials, and the packs were carefully weighed and apportioned depending on the strength and physical condition of each bearer.



Sean, Job, Pumula, and Dedan carried sixty pounds each, Riccardo and Matatu forty, while Claudia was down to twenty-five pounds.



"I can carry more," she protested. "Give me forty, the same as Matatu." Sean did not bother to answer her.



"And what's more, I eat half as much as any of you!" But he had already turned away to supervise the loading of the Toyota.



There were still four hours of daylight remaining when they left Chiwewe camp, but Sean drove the first section very fast, jouncing them around in their seats. It was partly an expression of his objection to Claudia's presence but mostly an urgent desire to be at the jump-off point before nightfall.



As he drove, he spoke in a tightly controlled voice. "Before we commence this guided tour of the Mozambican paradise of the proletariat, this shining gem of African socialism, will you bear with me while I give you a few facts and figures." Nobody protested, so he went on. "Until 1975 Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. For almost five hundred years it had been under Portuguese control and had been a reasonably happy and prosperous community of some fifteen million souls. The Portuguese, unlike the British or German colonists, had a relaxed attitude toward miscegenation and the result was a large mulatto population and an official policy of assimilado under which any person of color, if he attained certain civilized standards, was considered to be white and enjoyed Portuguese nationality. It all worked very well, as indeed did most colonial administrations, especially those of the British."



"Bullshit," said Claudia demurely. "That's Limey propaganda. 91



"Limey?" Sean smiled thinly. "Careful, your prejudice is showing. Nonetheless, your average Indian or African living today in a former British colony is a damned sight worse off now than he was then.



Certainly that goes one hundred times more for your average black man living in Mozambique."



"At least they're free," Claudia cut in.



Sean laughed. "This is freedom? An economy managed under the well-known socialist principles of chaos and ruination which has resulted in a negative growth rate of up to ten percent per annum for every year since the Portuguese withdrawal, a foreign debt amounting to double the gross national product, a total breakdown in the educational system, only five percent of children regularly attending a recognized school, one doctor per forty-five thousand persons, only one person in ten with access to purified drinking water, infant mortality at three hundred forty per thousand births? The only worse countries in the world are Afghanistan and Angola, but as you say, at least they are free. In America, where everybody eats three huge meals a day, freedom may be a big deal, but in Africa a full belly counts for a hell of a lot more."



"It can't be as bad as that," she protested.



"No," he agreed, "it's a lot worse. I haven't mentioned two other factors, the civil war and AIDS. When the Portuguese were pushed out, they handed over to a dictator named Samara Machel and his Frelimo party. Machel was an avowed Marxist. He didn't believe in the nonsense of elections, and his rule was directly responsible for the present condition of the country and for the emergence of the National Mozambican Resistance or, as it is known to its friends and admirers, Renamo. Nobody know s much about it, what its objectives are, who its leaders are. All we know is that it controls most of the country, especially the north, and that it is made up of a pretty ruthless bunch of characters."



"Renamo is a South African front organization directed, supplied, and controlled from Pretoria," Claudia helped him out.



"Committed to the overthrow of sovereign government and the destabilization of the southern continent."



"Well done, ducky." Sean nodded approval. "You've been studying the wisdom and erudition of the Organization of African Unity and the nonaligned nations. You have even mastered their jargon. If only South Africa had the military and technological capability to commit half the skulduggery it is accused of, it would not be simply the most powerful country in Africa, it would be running the entire world."



"I keep forgetting you're one of them, which is silly of me. You don't attempt to conceal your bigotry. The simple fact is that your government and apartheid are the scourge and curse of Africa."



"Of course, we are responsible for everything-the AIDS epidemic, the famines of Ethiopia and Angola and Mozambique, the breakdown of government in Uganda and Zambia, the corruption in Nigeria and Zaire, it's all a dirty South African plot. We even killed Samara Machel, we fed vodka to the Russian crew of his Tupelov jet, and, with our incredibly sophisticated technology, lured them over the border. Machel hit one of our racist mountains with such force that his brains and major organs were instantly expelled from his body. Nevertheless, our apartheid doctors kept him alive long enough to torture state secrets out of him. That is the truth as determined by the UN and



OAU."



"Shut up," said Riccardo Monterro. "I've had enough. Shut up, both of you."



"Sorry." Sean grinned at him. "I get carried away. I just wanted to let you know what to expect when we cross the border. We can just hope that we aren't going to meet any of the lads from either Frelimo or Renamo. there is not a lot to choose between them.



They both shoot the same bullets."



The thought made the back of his own neck prickle, and he felt his mood lighten. He was going into mortal danger again, and the thrill of it began. having the girl with him no longer irked but rather heightened that anticipation, and he felt his resentment of her begin to fade. He was glad she was here rather than jetting back to Alaska. Sean drove on in a silence that gripped them all, even the men standing braced against the roll bar in the back of the Toyota. The closer they came to the border, the deeper the silence became.



At last Sean turned and looked over his shoulder, and Job nodded in agreement.



"This is it, ladies and gentlemen," Sean said quietly. "All change!" He let the Toyota trundle to a halt where the track crossed a stony ridge.



"Where are we?" Riccardo asked.



"As close as we can safely get to the border, about three miles.



From here, it's shanks" pony."



Riccardo swung one leg out of the truck, but Sean said sharply, "Hold it, Capo, step onto that slab of rock. Leave no tracks."



One at a time, each carrying his or her own pack, they alighted from the truck, at Sean's instruction stepping precisely in the footsteps of the person in front. Matatu was the last off, and he went backward, brushing over the signs with a switch of dried grass, wiping out every trace of their departure from the truck.



The chef had come with them to drive the truck back to the camp. "Go in peace, Mambo!" he called to Sean as he puffed away.



"Fat hope," Sean laughed, sending him off with a wave. Then to Job: "Antitracking, let's go!"



Neither Riccardo nor Claudia had ever watched anti tracking procedure, for while hunting they had always run free in pursuit.



The formation for anti tracking was Indian file, Job leading and everyone else stepping in his footprints. Behind them all Matatu, the old maestro, was covering the signs, replacing a pebble lichen side up, stroking a blade of grass into its original position, flicking at the earth with his grass switch, picking up a leaf dislodged from a low-hanging branch or the bruised blade of grass on which a foot had trodden.



Job avoided the gaime paths and soft ground, always choosing the line of march that was most obscure and yet moving surprisingly fast, so that within half an hour Claudia felt the chill of fresh sweat between her shoulder blades and at the cleavage of her shirt front.



Job led them to the top of a low kopJe, and Sean motioned to them to conceal themselves below the skyline with the sunset behind them.



Watching them work, Riccardo remarked softly, "Pumula and Dedan seem to know what they're doing." The two of them had moved out to guard the flanks without being ordered to do so.



"Yes." Sean settled down between him and Claudia, using the same low bush for cover. "They were both noncoms in the Scouts.



They've done this before."



"Why are we stopping here? Claudia asked.



"We are sitting on the border," Sean explained, "and we'll spend the last of the daylight studying the ground ahead. As soon as the moon comes up, we'll move in. You can relax until then."



He lifted his Zeiss binoculars and stared through them; a few yards away Job lay on his belly and focused his own pair of binoculars in the same direction. They lowered the binoculars from time to time to blink their vision clear or polish an imaginary speck from the lens. Claudia had noticed how they protected and looked after these most essential tools of their craft, but apart from that, their concentration on the terrain ahead was absolute and ended only when the last gleam of the sunset faded. Then Sean buttoned the binoculars into his top pocket and turned to her.



"Time for your makeup," he said. For a moment she did not understand. Then she felt the greasy touch of camouflage cream on her cheek and instinctively pulled away.



"Hold still," he snapped. "Your white face shines like a iniffor.



It's good for insects and sunburn also."



He daubed her face and the backs of her hands.



"Here comes the moon." Sean finished working on his own camouflage and screwed the top back on the tube of cream. "We can go in now."



Sean changed the formation once again, putting out Job and Pumula as flankers while he led the center. Once again Matatu brought up the rear, diligently sweeping their tracks.



Once Sean stopped and checked Claudia's equipment. A loose buckle on her pack had been tapping regularly in time with her stride, a noise so small that she had not noticed it.



"You sound like the charge of the Light Brigade," he breathed in her ear as he adjusted it.



"Arrogant bastard," she thought.



They went on in silence, an hour and then another hour without pausing. She never knew the exact moment when she crossed the border. The moonlight through the forest was silvery, and the shadows of the trees flickered over Sean's broad shoulders ahead of her.



Gradually the silence and the moonlight gave the march a dreamlike unreality, and she found herself mesmerized by it, her movements were like-those of a sleepwalker, so that when Sean stopped abruptly she bumped into him and might have fallen had he not whipped. a hard, muscular arm around her and held her.



They stood frozen, listening, staring into the dark forest. After almost five minutes Claudia moved slightly to free herself from his arm, but instantly his grip tightened and she submitted to it. Out on the right flank, Job gave a bird call, and noiselessly Sean sank to the ground, drawing her down with him. Her nerves strained tighter as she realized there must be real danger out there. Now his arm no longer annoyed her. Instinctively she relaxed and pressed a little closer to him. It felt good.



Another soft bird call from the darkness, and Sean put his lips to her ear. "Stay!" he breathed. She felt lonely and exposed as he released her and she watched him disappear like a ghost into the forest.



Sean moved in a low crouch, rifle in one hand, reaching forward to touch the earth with the fingers of his left hand, brushing away the dry twigs and leaves that might crackle under his foot before stepping forward. He sank down ten feet from where Job lay and glanced across at his dark shape. The pale palm of Job's hand flashed a signal, and Sean concentrated on the left front that Job had indicated, For long minutes he neither saw nor sensed anything untoward, but he trusted Job completely and he waited with a hunter's patience. Suddenly he caught a taint on the night air and he lifted his nose and sniffed at it. Both his confidence and his patience were repaid. It was the acrid stink of burning tobacco, one of those cheap black Portuguese cigarillos. He remembered them so well they had been issued to the guerrillas in the days of the bush war and were probably Frelimo issue still.



He signaled Job and they went forward, leopard-crawling, absolutely silently, for forty paces. Sean picked out the glow of the cigarette as a man drew on it. Then the man coughed, a soft phlegmy sound, and spat. He was at the base of one of the large trees directly ahead; now Sean could make out his shape. He was sitting with his back to the trunk.



"Who is he? Local tribesman? Poacher? Bee hunter? Refugee?"



None of those seemed likely. This one was awake and alert, almost certainly a sentry. As Sean reached that conclusion, he sensed other movement farther out, and he flattened against the earth.



Another man emerged from the forest and came directly to where the sentry was rising to his feet to meet him. As soon as he stood. Sean could make out the AK-47 rifle slung over his shoulder, muzzle down. The two men talked softly together.



IT', "Changing the guard," Sean thought as the new sentry leaned against the tree and the other man sauntered back into the forest.



"That is where the camp is," Sean guessed.



Still on his belly, he leopard-crawled forward, passing well wide of the sentry, who would be fresh and vigilant. Once he was within the perimeter, Sean rose into a crouch and went forward swiftly.



He found the camp in a fold of ground up against the hills. It was a fly camp no huts or shelters, only two small fires that had burned down to coals. He counted eleven men lying around the fires, all of them with a blanket pulled completely over their heads in typical African fashion. There might be five or six others on guard duty, but it was a small band.



Even lacking automatic weapons, Sean and his men could have dealt with them. All of Sean's men still carried their piano-wire no loses and Matatu his skinning knife with the blade so sharp it was honed down to half its original width. Nobody in the camp would even have woken up.



Sean shook his head with regret. He was certain now that these were either Frelimo regular troops or Renamo guerrillas. He had no quarrel with them, whoever they were. Just as long as they did not interfere with his elephant hunt. Sean backed away to where Job was waiting for him at the perimeter.



"Eleven of them at the fires," Sean breathed.



"I found two more sentries," Job said, nodding.



"Frelimo?"



"Who knows?" Job shrugged. Sean touched his arm and they crept away farther out of earshot of the camp so they could speak more freely.



"What do you think, Job?"



"A small group, they mean little. We can go around them."



"They could be the advance guard for a bigger party," Sean suggested.



"These are not crack troops," Job muttered contemptuously.



"Smoking on guard duty, sleeping next to a fire. They aren't soldiers, they are tourists." Sean smiled at the term of derision. He knew that Job's determination was more Anglo-Saxon than African. Once he had decided, it was difficult to dissuade him.



"You want to go on?" he asked.



"For five hundred thousand dollars?" Job whispered. "You're damned right I want to go on!"



Claudia was afraid. The African night was so charged with mystery, uncertainty, and menace. The wait aggravated her feeling of apprehension. Sean had been gone for almost an hour, and though her father was close beside her she felt alone and very vulnerable.



Suddenly Sean was back, and she experienced a rush of relief.



She wanted to reach out and cling to him and was ashamed of herself for the weakness. Sean was whispering to her father, and she drew close to listen. Her arm touched Sean's bare arm, but he did not seem to notice, so she left it there for the feeling of security and comfort it gave her.



"Small party of armed men camped up ahead," Sean was explaining. "Not more than twenty of them. We don't know who the hell they are, but we can circle around them and keep going, or we can turn back. It's up to you, Capo."



"I want that elephant!"



"This is probably your last chance to pull out," Sean warned him.



"You're wasting time," Riccardo said. Claudia was torn by her father's decision. It would have been such an anticlimax to turn back now, and yet her first taste of the real flavor of Africa had been disconcerting. She realized as the march resumed and she fell in behind Sean that this was the first time in her life that she had been beyond the trappings and buttresses of civilization, the first time there was no police force to protect her, no recourse to law or justice or mercy. Here she was as vulnerable as an antelope to the leopard, in a forest full of predators.



She quickened her step, closing up behind Sean, and found to her surprise that in some bizarre fashion she was more alive and aware than she had ever been before. For the first time in her life she was on the bottom rung of existence, the level of survival. It was a novel and quite overwhelming sensation. She was glad her father had not decided to turn back. Claudia had long since lost all sense of direction, for Sean led unpredictably. They turned and twisted through the forest, at times moving swiftly and at others creeping forward a stealthy pace at a time and then freezing into absolute stillness at a signal from the flank which she often had not even heard. She noticed that Sean looked up at the night sky every few minutes and guessed he was navigating by the stars, but to her their whorls and blazes and fields were as confused as the lights of a foreign city.



Then, after a while, she realized they had not turned or paused for a long while and were once again heading in a straight line.



Obviously they were clear of danger for the moment. With the excitement over, she soon felt the weight of her legs and the weariness in the small of her back. The pack between her shoulders seemed to have quadrupled in weight, and she glanced at her wristwatch. The luminous dial showed her that they had been going for almost five hours since circling around that hidden camp.



"When will we rest?" she wondered, but made it a point of honor to keep close behind Sean and not to lag by a single pace.



Almost as though a refrigerator door had opened, the temperature plunged, and when they crossed another open glade, the dew on the long grass soaked the legs of her trousers and her boots squelched. She shivered, in real discomfort for the first time.



"When will he rest?" She stared at Sean's back, resenting him, willing him to stop. On he went, ever on, and she had the feeling he was deliberately trying to humiliate her, to break her down, to force her to squeal for mercy.



"I'll show you." She did not slacken her pace as she reached back and unstrapped her Gore-Tex ski jacket from the top of her pack. It was really cold now, the frost crackled underfoot, and her feet were numb, but she kept her station in the line. Quite suddenly she realized that she could see clearly each thick glossy tress of hair down the back of Sean's neck.



"Dawn. I thought it would never come." As she thought it, Sean stopped at last. She pulled up beside him with the nerves in her legs jumping and trembling with fatigue.



"Sorry, Capo," Sean spoke softly past her. "I had to push a little. We had to get well clear of that bunch before light. How are you making out?"



"No problem," Riccardo muttered, but in the gray dawn light, his face looked pale and drawn. He was suffering as much as she was, and she hoped she didn't look as bad. He went to find a place to sit and lowered himself stiffly.



Sean glanced at Claudia, still standing beside him. Neither of them spoke, but he had a faint, enigmatic smile on his lips.



"Don't ask me how I feel," she thought. "I'd rather drink Drana than tell you the truth."



He inclined his head slightly, whether in condescension or respect, she wasn't sure. "First day and the third are always the worst," he said.



"I feel fine," she said. "I can go on quite happily."



"Sure." He grinned openly. "But you'd better go and look after Papa rather."



Sean brought mugs of tea to where she sat beside her father, wrapped in her lightweight down-filled sleeping bag against the dawn chill. Job had brewed it on a tiny smokeless fire that he extinguished immediately once the billy boiled. The tea was strong and sweet and scalding; she had never tasted anything more welcome. With it he handed her a stack of maize cakes and cold cuts of venison. She tried not to wolf them down.



"We'll move on in a few minutes," he warned her. When he saw the dismay in her eyes, he explained.



"We never sleep next to a cooking fire; it can attract the uglies." They went on for five miles. In the middle of the morning, on higher ground in a place secure and easily defended, Sean showed her how to scoop a hollow for her hip and use her pack as a pillow.



She fell asleep as though she had been sandbagged.



She could not believe it when he shook her awake only a minute later. "It's four o'clock." He handed her a mug and another stack of maize cakes. "You've slept six hours straight. We are moving out in five minutes."



Hastily she rolled her sleeping bag, then peered at herself in the metal hand mirror she had surreptitiously retrieved after Sean had thrown it out of her pack.



"Oh God," she whispered. The camouflage cream had caked and striped with her sweat. "I look like Al Jolson in drag." She tidied her hair, dragging her comb through the tangles, and then tied a scarf around it.



With short breaks every two hours, they kept going all that night.



At first Claudia's legs felt as though they were in plaster casts, but soon she walked the stiffness out of them and kept her place in the line without lagging, though the pace Sean set was every bit as hard as the previous night.



In the dawn, they drank tea. Claudia had begun to depend on the brew. She had always been a coffee drinker, but now on the march she found herself fantasizing over her next scalding mug of tea.



"It's the only thing keeping me going," she confided to her father, only half joking.



Riccardo nodded agreement. "They say the Limeys conquered their empire on the stuff."



Sean came across from where he had been in deep discussion with Matatu and Job. "We are only a few hours" march from the reed beds where we saw Tukutela from the air." He looked pointedly at Claudia. "I'd like to try and get there before we sleep, but of course some of us are a little hushed..." He let it hang between them, a dare and an accusation.



"I need a little stroll to settle my breakfast," she said amiably, but she wished her face was not coated with black cream. She hated ceding even the slightest advantage to him.



As Sean walked away, her father swirled the tea leaves in his mug and flicked them out.



"Don't fall for him, tesoro. He'd be too big a handful even for you."



She stared at him, outraged and appalled. "Fall for him? Are you out of your skull, Papa? I can't stand the sight of him."



"That's what I mean," he chuckled.



She jumped up and threw her pack onto her back with unnecessary strength, then told her father with disdain, "I could cope with him and five others like him with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back, but I've got better taste than that."



"Which is fortunate for you," he murmured just low enough so she was uncertain what he had said.



A little before noon that day, Matatu led them into the papyrus beds that surrounded the green pool they had seen from the air. He led them directly to the great dished spoor printed in the mud, and they gathered round to inspect it.



"See!" Matatu told them. "This is where Tukutela stood when he heard the indeki coming. Here and there he turned to look up in the sky and challenge us." Matatu imitated the old bull, holding his head at the same angle, humping his back and cupping his hands at each side of his head. It was such a faithful impression that for a moment he seemed to become the old bull and they all laughed. Claudia forgot her fatigue and applauded.



"Then what did the old bull do?" Sean demanded. Matatu spun and pointed along the run of the spoor.



"He went away with all his speed, he went fast and very far."



"Well," Sean said, "that puts us almost exactly forty-eight hours behind him and we have to sleep now. We'll be fifty-five hours behind him when we march again."



Tukutela's dam had been the matriarch of a herd of over one hundred beasts. She had come into her last period of estrus in her fifty-second year, and over the days it lasted, she had been mounted and serviced by six of the herd bulls, all young animals, vigorous and at the height of their powers.



It was the ideal formula for the conception of an extraordinary calf, old cow and young bull. Although it was uncertain which seed had taken root in her, the old cow had carried the genes of great elephants, big in body and tusk, natural intelligence, and the urge to dominate. These same genes had made her the leader of her herd, and now she transferred them to the fetus she carried in her womb.



She carried him twenty-two months, and then in the year when the German askaris under General von Lettow-Vorbeck were ravaging eastern Africa, the year 1915, she left the herd. Accompanied only by another old female past calf bearing, her companion of forty years, she went deep into the fastnesses of the swamps that lie on the south bank of the Zambezi River and there, on an islet fringed with ivory-nut palms, surrounded by miles of papyrus beds, and with the white-headed fish eagles chanting overhead, she cleared an area of sandy earth for her couch. When her time came, she spread her back legs and squatted over the open area, squealing in the agony of her labor, her trunk rolled up on her chest.



Her eyes had no tear ducts to drain them, so the tears poured freely down her withered cheeks as though she wept, and the spasms racked her huge, gaunt frame. The other old cow stood close beside her like a midwife, caressing her with her trunk, stroking her back and rumbling with sympathy. She forced out the calf's head and then rested for a minute before the last violent effort expelled the purple-pink fetal sac and the calf fell to the earth, rupturing the umbilical cord. Tukutela began to struggle immediately, still trapped in the glistening mucus-coated membrane, and the old cow, her companion, stood over him and, with the prehensile tip of her trunk, delicately stripped it away.



Then with her trunk his dam gently and lovingly lifted him to his feet and placed him between her front legs, making the deep, purring rumble of elephant contentment. Still wet and smooth and shining pinkly from his birthing, covered in copious gingery hair, almost blind, Tukutela rolled his little trunk back onto his forehead and reached up instinctively to the twin breasts on his mother's chest.



While he tasted the rich creamy milk for the very first time, his dam picked up the fetal sac and afterbirth and stuffed them into her mouth, chewing and swallowing and, at the same time, using her trunk to cover the damp and bloodstained spot on the earth with sand.



The three of them, his mother, her companion, and Tukutela, remained on the island for almost two weeks while the calf mastered the use of his legs and trunk, the pigment of his skin darkened, and his eyes adjusted to the harsh African sunlight. Then, when she considered him strong enough, she took him to find the herd, pushing him ahead of her and lifting him over the steep and difficult places.



The din of a hundred elephants feeding carried to them from afar, the crack and crash of breaking branches and the pig like squeals of the calves at play. Tukutela's dam trumpeted her return, and the herd came rushing up to greet her. Then, discovering the new calf, they crowded around to touch him with their trunks, puffing his scent into their mouths so they would recognize it always thereafter.



Tukutela cowered between his mother's front legs, overwhelmed by the huge bodies that surrounded him, making little baby noises of terror, but his mother draped her trunk over him and rumbled to reassure him. Within hours rather than days, he ventured out from her protection to join the other calves and to begin carving for himself a niche in the hierarchy of the breeding herd.



The herd was a close-knit group, almost all its members blood relatives, mutually reliant on each other so that the education and discipline of the young was a concern of all.



The calves were always kept in the center of the herd, and their antics were strictly supervised by the old barren cows who were their self-appointed nursemaids. Their care and protection was intense, but any infringement of the herd law was punished instantly: a tree branch wielded with gusto across the recalcitrant's back and hindquarters would ensure terrified squeals and instant obedience.



Tukutela learned his place in every situation: at the center when the herd was relaxed and feeding; between his mother's front legs when they were on the march or in flight from danger. He learned to react instantly to the alarm signal, learned to recognize it even when it was given by an animal on the further outskirts of the group.



At the signal, the instantaneous silence, in contrast to the preceding happy uproar of the herd, was an eerie phenomenon of elephant behavior.



Tukutela's development was closely parallel to the ages of a human being: His infancy lasted two years, during which time he shed the tiny milk tusks with which he had been born and entered on his juvenile years, when his true tusks emerged beyond his lips.



At first these were covered by a cap of smooth enamel, but as soon as he was weaned and began to use his tusks to feed with and to engage in mock combat with his peers, this was worn away and the true ivory beneath was exposed.



His tusks would continue to grow in length and girth throughout his entire life, even into his extreme old age. But the genes that dictated their extraordinary development came down from his dam along with all her other gifts of strength and bulk and intelligence.



By the age of three, Tukutela had learned the attitudes of threat and submission toward others, and his play was boisterous, with much ear flapping and threatening and barging, which further developed his unusually robust frame.



Once his dam weaned him, her care became less intensive and he was allowed more range and freedom, though he still came under her fierce protection at the first threat. On the march his place was still close beside her in the lead, so very early on he learned the herd's territory.



This was a vast area, from the shores of Lake Nyasa in the north to the rain forests of the Chimanimani Mountains in the south, west to the deep gorge where the Zambezi River forces itself between narrow rock cliffs with the roar of perpetual thunder and east five hundred miles to where the same mighty river spreads out across wide flood plains and swampy littoral before debauching through multiple mouths into the Indian Ocean.



He learned the mountain passes and the ancient elephant roads, he learned the groves where succulent fruits grew and the seasons when they ripened. She led him to burned-out savannahs just as the first tender green shoots pushed through the ashes and to the salt lakes where for thousands of years the elephants had come to. out lumps of mineral-rich earth with their tusks and eat it with all the relish of small boys with sticks of candy. over the centuries quarrying deep excavations in the red African earth.



The herd was on the Mavuradonha Mountains in the south when the msasa forests put out new leaf and their sap began to flow; they were in the dense rain forests on Mount Mlanje when the rest of the range baked in the long African droughts. Always the old cow led them to water, for the herd was totally dependent on that precious fluid. They had to drink each day or experience terrible hardship. They needed copious quantities to nurture their great bodies, to cleanse their hides, and, more simply, for the luxurious pleasure of the wallow. The watering hole was an important gathering place for the herd, a place where their bonds were reaffirmed and where many of their social rituals were played out.



Even the act of procreation usually took place in the water, and when the cows chose the place for their birthing, it was nearly always near water.



Sometimes there was abundant water-the great green African rivers, the mountains on which the perpetual drizzling rains fell, and the wide swamplands where they waded belly deep through papyrus beds to reach the islands. At other times, they had to dig for it in the dry riverbeds or patiently wait their turn at the seeps to thrust their trunks into the deep eye of the secret well and suck up a bitter brackish mouthful at a time. Their range was wide and their contact with human beings infrequent. There was a great war raging in a far-off land, and it had sucked most of the white men to its center. The men the herd encountered were usually half-naked, primitive tribesmen who fled before them. Yet Tukutela learned very early that a special aura of dread surrounded these strange hairless baboon like beings. At five years of age he could identify their peculiar acrid odor on a light breeze from many miles away, and even the faintest taint of it made him and the tire herd uneasy.



Tukutela was eleven years of age before he had his first Yet memorable encounter with human beings. One night following their time-honored route along the south bank of the Zambezi, his dam had stopped abruptly at the front of the herd and lifted her trunk at full stretch above her head to scent the air. Tukutela had imitated her and become aware of a tantalizing odor. He had puffed the taste of it into his mouth, and his saliva poured down and dribbled from his lower lip. The rest of the herd bunched up behind them and were almost immediately consumed by the same, appetite. None of them had ever smelled sugar cane before.



The old matriarch led them upwind and within a few miles they came out on an area of the riverbank that had been recently cleared and irrigated and planted with long sword shaped leaves glistened in the moonlight, and the aroma was rich and sweet and irresistible. The herd rushed into the new fields, Pulling up the Plants and stuffing them down their throats in a greedy passion.



The destruction was immense, and in the midst of it the herd was suddenly surrounded by lights and the shouts of men's voices and the beating of drums and metal cans. Panic and pandemonium overtook the herd, and as they charged out of the sugar field there was a shocking series of loud reports and the bright flash of gunfire "in the night. It was the first time Tukutela had ever smelled burned cordite smoke. He would remember it always and associate it with the squeals of the elephants who had been mortally hit.



The herd ran hard at first and then settled into the long stride that covered the ground at the speed of a cantering horse. By morning, one of the young cows, her first calf under her belly, could no longer keep up with the herd and slumped down on her front knees, bright blood trickling from the bullet wound in her Bank.



The matriarch turned back to assist her, but the cow could not rise and the matriarch moved up beside her.



Using tusks and trunk, she lifted the fallen animal to her feet and attempted to lead her away. It was in vain, for the dying animal slumped down and lay with her legs folded up under her.



The smell of her blood upset the herd and they milled about her, swinging their trunks and flapping their ears.



One of the herd bulls, in a desperate effort to revive the fallen cow, mounted her in a stylized attempt at copulation, but a gout Of arterial blood spurted from her wound and with a groan she toppled over on her side.



Unlike most animals, the elephant recognizes death, especially in one of its own group, and even the immature Tukutela was affected by the strange melancholy that followed the cows death.



Some members Of the herd approached the carcass and touched it with their trunks, almost a gesture of farewell, before they wandered away into the gray thorn scrub.



The matriarch stayed on when the others had left, and Tukutela stayed with her. He watched as his dam began to strip the Surrounding trees of their branches and pile them over the carcass of the dead cow.



Only when it was completely hidden under a mound of vegetation was she satisfied. The dead cow's unweaned calf had stayed beside its mother's corpse, and now the matriarch shooed it ahead of her as she followed the herd. Twice the calf tried to double back to where its mother lay, but the matriarch blocked it, turning it with her trunk and pushing it along.



A mile away, the rest of the herd was waiting in a gro yellow-stemmed fever trees. Many of the younger calves were suckling, and the matriarch pushed the orphan calf toward where one of the older calves, one almost due to be weaned, was showing only perfunctory interest in his mother's dugs. She shoved the orphan between the cow's front legs and instinctively the little animal rolled its trunk onto its forehead and reached up for the teat. The cow made no objection, accepting the role of foster mother with equanimity. The matriarch stood beside the pair, rumbling to them encouragingly, and when she led the herd on, the orphan calf had displaced the older calf between the cow's front legs.



It seemed that from then on the herd's contact with men bearing firearms became more frequent every season, especially when the bulls were with the breeding herd.



The mature bulls kept a loose liaison with the breeding herd.



They found the noisy and boisterous behavior of the young animals annoying and the competition for food demanding. No sooner would one of the bulls shake down a rain of ripe pods from the top branches of a tall thorn tree than a dozen youngsters would rush over to gobble them.



Or he would push over a msasa tree to get at the new leaf, leaning with his forehead against the trunk and snapping the three-foot diameter of hardwood with a report like a cannon shot, and immediately four or five greedy young cows would push themselves in front of him before he could sample the juicy pink leaves.



So the bulls would wander away from the herd, singly or in bachelor groups of three or four. Perhaps they also realized instinctively that the herd was likely to attract the hunters and they would be safer away from it. Sometimes they were only a few miles away, sometimes as far as thirty or forty, but they always seemed to be aware of the herd's location and would return when the cows were in season.



When the bulls were with the herd was the time there was most likely to be that sudden crash of gunfire, the squeal of wounded animals, and the headlong rush of huge panic-stricken bodies through the brush.



When Tukutela was a juvenile, under ten years of age, there had been six huge bulls associated with the herd, animals carrying thick shafts of ivory, but over the years he grew toward maturity, these were gradually whittled down. Each dry season one or more of them fell to the sound of rifle fire, and only the mediocre bulls, or those with worn or damaged ivory, remained.



By this time Tukutela had grown into an unusually large young bull and his tusks were beginning to develop, clean and white and sharp-pointed, already showing promise of what they would one day become. As he grew, so the matriarch, his dam, declined. Slowly the outline of her bones appeared through the folds and hangs of her wrinkled gray hide, so she became a gaunt and skeletal figure. Her sixth and last molar was already chipped and half worn away, she ate with difficulty, and the slow starvation age had begun. She relinquished her place at the head of the herd to a younger, more robust cow, and shambled along behind. On the steep places where the elephant road climbed the mountain passes Tukutela would wait for her at the crest, rumbling to bring her up over the difficult places, and he stood close to her in the night as he had as a calf.



It had been a dry season and the water holes were less than half full. The approaches to the water had been churned by the elephant herds and rhinoceros and buffklo to glutinous black mud, in some places deep as an elephant's belly, and it was here that the old matriarch stuck.



Lunging in an attempt to free herself, she fell over sideways and the mud sucked her down until only part of her head was clear.



She struggled for two days. Tukutela tried to help her, but even his enormous strength was of no avail. The mud held her fast and gave him no footing nor purchase. The old cow's struggles became weaker, her wild screams more feeble, until at last she was stiff and silent except for the hiss of her breathing.



It took two more days, and Tukutela stood beside her all that time. The herd had long since departed, but he remained. She gave no outward sign of passing from life to death other than the cessation of her harsh breathing, but Tukutela knew it instantly, and he lifted his trunk high and bugled out his grief in a cry that startled the wild fowl from the water hole in a cloud of noisy wings.



He went to the edge of the forest and plucked leafy boughs. He took them to the water hole and covered his dam's muddy carcass with them building for her a high green funeral pier. Then he left her and went into the veld.



He did not rejoin the herd for almost two years. By that time he was sexually mature and could no longer resist the scent of estrus the breeze brought down to him.



When he found the herd, it was gathered on the bank of the Kafue River, ten miles upstream from where it makes its confluence with the great Zambezi. Some of the herd members came out to meet him as he approached. They entwined their trunks with his and pushed their foreheads together in greeting, then allowed him to join the main body.



There were two cows in season, and one of them was an animal of similar age to Tukutela. She was prime, fat with good grazing and browsing the rains had raised. Her ivory was thin and very white, as straight and sharp as knitting needles, and her ears had not yet been torn or tattered by thorn and sharp twigs. She spread them now as she recognized Tukutela as her peer, and she came to twine her trunk with his.



They stood with their heads together, rumbling gently at each other, and then disentangled their trunks and began to caress each other lightly with the tips, moving down the length of each other's bodies until they stood head to tail.



The tips of the trunk are as sensitive and dextrous as the fingers of the human hand, and Tukutela reached down between her back legs and groped for her vaginal opening. She began to sway from side to side, rocking her whole body, an expression of extreme pleasure. As he manipulated her, so her estrus discharge flowed down freely, drenching his trunk, the aroma of it filling his head.



His penis emerged from its fleshy sheath, as long as a man is tall and as thick as one of his legs; the tip of it brushed the earth below his belly. Its length was variegated with blotches of pink and black, but the skin was smooth and shining and the head flared like the mouth of a trumpet. Elephants belong to the testiconda group, and his testicles were contained deep in the body cavity, so there was no external evidence of them.



When both of them were fully aroused, Tukutela nudged her gently down the bank and into the river. The green waters closed over them, intensifying their pleasure in each other, supporting their great bodies, buoying them up so they were light and nimble.



They submerged until only their trunks were above the surface, sporting together, bitaking out again like blowing whales, and the water poured off them in sheets, cleansing their gray hides of dust and dirt, darkening them to the color of coal.



Tukutela reared over her and placed his forelegs on each side of her back. In the water, she supported him easily. Her vagina was placed far forward between her back legs, and he needed all of his length to reach it. His penis took on a life of its own, pulsing and jerking and twisting as it flared upward to conform to the angle of her opening. Only the first third of its length was able to bury itself in her. His whole body shuddered and convulsed and both creatures trumpeted together and thrashed the waters to white foam.



He stayed with the herd three days, and then the female's estrus ended and Tukutela became restless. He had inherited his dam's instinct for survival, and he sensed danger with the herd. On the third day, he ghosted away into the gray thorn scrub. He went alone, with no other bull for company.



Each season when he returned to the herd he was stronger, his tusks longer and thicker, the vegetable juices darkening them to the color of alabaster. On occasion there were other bulls competing to service the females, and he had to fight for his right.



At first he was driven off by older, more experienced males, but each season his tusks and his cunning grew, until none of the other herd bulls stood up against him and he had his pick of the cows.



However, he never stayed more than a few days with the herd, and always he departed alone and sought out the places his dam had showed to him, the swamps inaccessible to man, the thickest forests, the tallest beds of elephant grass. It was as though he realized the danger those tusks would bring upon him.



In his thirty-fifth year he was a huge animal, weighing seven tons and standing over twelve feet at the shoulder. His tusks, though not anywhere as heavy as they would one day be, were perfectly symmetrical, long, and pointed.



For days after leaving the herd that season he had been unaccountably nervous. He moved restlessly, testing the air often, raising his trunk high and then puffing it into his mouth. Once or twice he detected it, but the acrid scent was faint, just a tiny shadow on his consciousness.



However, he could not keep moving endlessly. His huge frame required over a ton of grass and leaves and fruit and bark each day to sustain it. He had to stop to feed. In the early morning he stood in a dense grove of comb return trees, stripping bark. He used the point of a tusk to prize a gash in the bark, then he gripped the tag end in his trunk and with an upward jerk ripped loose a strip of bark fifteen feet up the hole of the tree. He rolled the bark into a ball and stuffed it into his mouth.



intent on his task, he relaxed his vigilance. An elephant has poor eyesight; he cannot distinguish stationary objects only a few yards distant, although he can instantly detect movement. Furthermore, his eyes are placed well back in the skull, impeding his forward view, and the spread of his ears tends to block his peripheral vision to the rear.



Using the small morning wind to negate the bull's marvelous sense of smell, moving with extreme stealth so his fine hearing was frustrated, the hunters approached him from behind, staying in his blind spot. There were two of them, and they had followed him ever since he had left the herd. Now they crept up very close to him.



The bull turned broadside to the hunters, ready to move on to the next tree, and showed them the long curved gleam of his tusks.



"Take him!" said one man to the other, and the Spanish maker of fine sherries lifted his double-barreled rifle, which was engraved and inlaid with gold, and aimed for Tukutela's brain.



Over his sights, he picked out the dark vertical cleft in the front of the ear and followed it down to its lowest point. That was where the actual opening of the eardrum was situated. Having found it, he moved his aim forward three inches along an imaginary line from the aperture of the ear toward the elephant's eye.



The Spanish sherry maker was on his first African safari. He had shot chamois and mouflon and red deer in the Pyrenees, but a wild African elephant is none of these timid creatures, and the Spaniard's heart was thudding into his ribs, his spectacles were fogged with sweat, and his hands shook. The professional hunter with him had patiently instructed him how and where to place his shot, but now he could not hold his aim on it, and every second his breathing became more labored, his aim more erratic. In desperation he jerked the trigger.



The bullet hit Tukutela a foot above his left eye and fifteen inches from the frontal lobe of the brain, but the honeycombed bony sponge of his skull cushioned the shock. He reeled back on his haunches, flung his trunk straight up above his head, and gave a deep roaring growl in his throat.



The Spanish hunter turned and ran, and Tukutela whirled to face the movement, launching himself off his haunches. The professional hunter was directly under his outstretched trunk, and he flung up his rifle and aimed into Tukutela's head, into the roof of his open mouth between the bases of the long curved tusks.



The firing pin fell on, dud primer with a click, the rifle misfired, and Tukutela swung his trunk down like the executioner's axe, crushing the man against the the earth.



The Spaniard was still running and Tukutela went after him, overhauling him effortlessly. He reached out his trunk and curled it around his waist. The man screamed and Tukutela tossed him thirty feet straight up into the air. He screamed all the way down until he hit the earth and the air was driven from his lungs.



Tukutela seized him by one ankle and swung his body against the trunk of the nearest tree with a force that burst the man's internal organs, spleen, liver, and lungs.



Tukutela raged through the forest with the corpse held in his trunk, beating it against the trees, lifting it high and slamming it down upon the earth until it disintegrated and he was left with only the stump of the leg in his grip. He flung that aside and went back to where he had left the professional hunter.



The blow from the trunk had shattered the hunter's collarbone, broken both his arms, and crushed in his ribs, but he was still alive and conscious. He saw Tukutela coming back for him, the long trunk dangling, the huge ears extended, blood from his wound dribbling down to mingle with the blood of the Spaniard that splattered his chest and front legs.



The hunter tried to drag his mangled body away. Tukutela placed one great foot in the center of his back, pinning him down.



Then, with his trunk, he plucked off his limbs, one at a time, legs and arms, tearing them away from the hip and shoulder joints, and throwing them aside. Finally he wrapped his trunk around the hunters head and pulled it away from the shoulders. It rolled like a ball bouncing across the ground as Tukutela hurled it from him.



His rage abated, overtaken by the pain in his head, and Tukutela stood over the bodies he had destroyed, rocking from one foot to the other, rumbling in his throat as first the pain and then the melancholy of death came over him.



Despite the pain in his head and the slow drip of blood into his eye from the wound above it, he began the ritual of death he had learned from his dam so many years previously. He gathered the parts of his victims, the squashed trunks and mutilated limbs, and piled them in a heap. He picked their accouterments out of the grass-rifles, hats, water bottles-and added them to the bloody pile. Then he began to strip the trees of leafy branches and to cover it all with a mound of green.



The bullet wound healed cleanly, but soon there were other scars to add to the little white star it left above his eye. A weighted spear from a deadfall trap opened his thick gray hide from shoulder to knee, and he almost died from the infection that followed. The spread of his ears caught on thorns and hooked twigs, the edges became tattered and eroded. He fought for cows when he joined the breeding herd, and although none of the other bulls could prevail against him, their tusks slashed and cut and marked him.



Then there were other encounters with men.



Despite the dire danger associated with it, that first taste of the sweet juice of the sugar cane so long ago had been addictive.



Tukutela became a compulsive garden raider. Sometimes he would lurk for days in the vicinity of a patch of cultivation, getting up his courage. Then, when there was no moon, in the deepest hours of the night, he would go in, stepping soundlessly as a cat on his big madded feet. Millet, maize, papaya, yams, he loved them all, but sugar cane he could never resist.



At first he allowed himself to be driven off by the flaming torches, the shouting, and the drums, but then he learned to answer the shouts with his own wild screams and to charge at the guardians of the forbidden gardens.



On separate occasions over the next ten years, he killed eight human beings in the course of his raids, pulling their bodies to pieces like a glutton dismembering a chicken carcass. He grew reckless in his greed for the sweet cane. Whereas after previous raids he would travel a hundred miles in a single nonstop march to distance himself from retribution, this season he began to return to the same field on consecutive nights.



The villagers had sent a message to the boma of the colonial district commissioner, begging for assistance. The D.C. had sent one of his ask ari armed with a.404 rifle and the ask ari was waiting for Tukutela. The ask ari was a Policeman and neither a great hunter nor marksman. He hid himself in a pit in the middle of the field, quite happy in his own mind that the elephant would not return to the field that night; for TuIkutela had already made a reputation for himself across his vast range and his habits were known. he was notorious as the garden raider who had killed so many villagers and who never returned to the scene of his crime.



The ask ari awoke from a deep sleep in the bottom of his pit to find Tukutela blotting out the stars over his head, munching on the standing cane. The ask ari snatched up his.404 and fired a bullet upward into Tukutela's belly. It was not a mortal wound, and Tukutela hunted the ask ari remorselessly, quartering downwind until he picked up the scent and following it to the pit where the man crouched paralyzed with terror. Tukutela put his trunk down into the pit and plucked him out.



The wound took many weeks to heal. The pain pawed at his guts, and Tukutela's hAtred of man grew upon it.



Though Tukutela could not understand the reason for it, his contact with man became ever more frequent. His old range was being whittled down; every season there were more tracks and roads cutting through his secret places. Motor vehicles, noisy and stinking, buzzed through the silent places of the veld. The great forests were being hacked down and the earth turned to the plow. Lights burned in the night, and human voices carried to him wherever he wandered. Tukutela's world was shrinking in upon him.



His tusks were growing all this time, longer and thicker, until in his sixtieth year they were great dark columns.



He killed another man in 1976, a black man who tried to defend his few wretched acres of millet with a throwing spear, but the head of the spear lodged in Tukutela's neck and formed a chronic source of infection, a constantly suppurating abscess.



Tukutela had long ago ceased to seek out the breeding herd. The scent of estrus on the wind awakened in him a sweet fleeting nostalgia, but the driving force of the procreative urge had dulled and he pursued his solitary ways through the shrinking forests.



There were some areas of his old range that remained untouched, and from experience Tukutela came to recognize them and to realize that they formed a sanctuary where he was safe from man's harassment. He did not understand that these were the national parks, where he was protected by law, but he spent more and more of his time in these areas and over the years learned their precise boundaries. In time he became reluctant to venture across them into the dangerous world beyond.



Even in these sanctuaries he was wary, driven always by his hatred and fear of men to attack them wherever he found them, or to fly from the first acrid taint of them on the breeze. His faith in the safety of the sanctuary was tested when the hunters found him even there. He heard the report of a firearm and felt the sting of the missile, not differentiating between the sound of a rifle and a dart gun, but when he tried to locate and destroy his attackers, a strange lethargy overtook him, a terrible weakness in his thick columnar legs, and he slumped unconscious to the earth. He awoke to the terrifying stench of men all around him, thick and repulsive on the air, even on his own skin where they had touched him. When he lumbered unsteadily to his feet, he found a strange serpentine device suspended around his neck and the chronic abscess on his neck caused by the spear wound was burning with the fires of antiseptics. He tried to wrench off the radio collar, but it defied even his might, and so, in frustration, he devastated the forest around him, smashing down the tall trees and ripping out the bushes.



The men who watched his rage from afar laughed, and one of them said, "Tukutela, the Angry One."



It took Tukutela many long seasons before he at last succeeded in ripping that hateful collar from around his neck and hurling it into the top branches of a tree.



Although he recognized the sanctuary of the parks in which he now spent most of his days, Tukutela could not deny his deepest instincts, and at certain seasons of the year he became restless. The wanderlust came on him, the urge to follow once again the long migratory road his dam had first taken him over as an infant. He would be drawn to the boundary of the park by this irresistible longing and he would feed along it for days, gathering his courage until he could no longer contain himself. Then he would set out fearfully and nervously, but with high anticipation for the far-off fastnesses to the east.



Of these, the vast Zambezi swampland was his favorite. He did not recognize it as his birthplace, he only knew that here the waters seemed cooler and sweeter, the grazing more luxuriant and his sense of peace deeper than any other place in his world. This season as he crossed the Chiwewe River and headed east, the urge to return to that place seemed even greater.



He was old now, long past his seventieth year, and he was weary.



His joints ached so he walked with a stiff exaggerated gait. His old wounds pained him, especially the bullet that had driven through his bony skull and lodged beneath the skin above his right eye, It had formed a hard, encysted lump of gristle that he touched occasionally with the tip of his trunk when the pain was bad.



His craggy old head was weighed down by those huge ivory shafts; each day their burden was less supportable. Alone those tusks were a monument to his former glory. For the old bull was going back rapidly now. The sixth set of molars, the last and largest of his teeth, were all but worn away, and the starvation of age was upon him. Every day he was a little weaker, slowly his food was limited more and more to the softer, more readily masticated grasses and shoots, but he could not take enough of them.



His huge frame was gaunt and his skin hung in bags at his knees and around his neck. There was a sense of melancholy in him such as he had experienced only seldom in his life, the same feeling that had encompassed him as he waited for his dam to die beside the water hole. He did not recognize that feeling as the premonition of his own impending death.



It seemed to Tukutela that as soon as he crossed out of the park, the pursuit began. He imagined that it was more determined, more persistent than ever before. It seemed to him that the forest was full of the human creatures, following him, waiting for him at each turn, and he could not head directly eastward but must jink and twist to avoid the imaginary and real dangers that beset him.



However, when the sudden cacophony of gunfire roared out close behind him, Tukutela fled directly eastward at last, instead of doubling back toward the sanctuary of the park. It was a hundred miles and more to where the swamps began and the route was Perilous, but he could not deny the deep instinct that drove him on.



Ten hours later he stopped to bathe and drink and feed in an isolated marshy place, still a great distance from the true swamps.



This was one of the way stations on the old migratory road.



He had not been there for more than a few hours before the aircraft had rushed low overhead, filling the air with its buzzing roar, startling and angering Tukutela. In some vague way he associated this machine with the deadly danger of the hunters. It left the same foul stench on the air as the hunting vehicles he had encountered so often before, and he knew he could rest no longer in this place, the hunters were closing in.



The great swamps were his refuge, and he fled toward them.



"He won't stop now until he is into the swamps." Sean Courtney was squatting beside the spoor. "He's thoroughly alarmed, and we can't hope to catch him before he gets into them."



"How far?" Riccardo asked. Sean stood up and studied him as he replied.



"Eighty or ninety miles, Capo. Just a stroll." Riccardo wasn't looking well. There were dark sweat patches soaking through his shirt, and he seemed to have aged ten years in the last four days.



"What will we do if the old bugger keels over on us?" Sean wondered, then thrust that thought aside. "Okay, gang, we'll eat and sleep here.



Move on again at four."



He led them to the edge of the marsh, onto firm dry ground.



Fatigue and heat had dulled their appetites. They needed sleep more than food, and soon they were sprawled out in the shade like dead men.



Sean woke with the feeling that something was amiss; he sat up quickly, his hand already on the rifle, and swept a glance around to his feet. She was gone.



He strode out of the perimeter, and whistled for the sentry.



Pumula came in immediately.



"The donna," Sean demanded in Sindebele. "Where is she?"



"That way." Pumula pointed toward the river.



"You let her go?" Sean demanded.



"I thought she was going to the bush"-Pumula excused himself-"to relieve herself. I could not stop her."



Sean had already started to run down the hippo path into the him.



Sean was ten paces from the reeds that surrounded the largest and deepest of the pools, when he heard the splash of water ahead.



"This silly bitch is going to drive me crazy," he told himself as he burst out on the edge of the pool.



The pool was a hundred yards across, deep and green and still.



For all its comical appearance, the hippopotamus is the most dangerous animal in Africa. It has probably killed more human beings than all the other dangerous species put together. The old bulls are cantankerous and aggressive, a cow with a new calf will attack without provocation, and a bite from those gaping jaws whose tusks are adapted to shearing coarse river reeds will cut a man in two. The crocodile is a sly and efficient killer. This pool was the ideal haunt of both hippos and crocodiles, and Claudia Monterro was in it up to her waist.



Her wet clothing, shirt and panties and socks, all freshly washed, were draped over the reeds at the edge, and Claudia was facing away from him, leaning forward and with both hands working up a lather of soap in her hair.



The skin of her back was lightly tanned and flawless except for the pale line left by the strap of a bikini top across her shoulder blades. Her flanks were lean but elegantly shaped into the waist, and the knuckles of her spine just showed between the ridges of fine athletic muscle on each side of it.



"What the hell do you think you're doings" Sean snarled. She turned to face him, hands still in her soapy hair, eyes screwed up against the suds.



"Is this how you get your jollies?" she demanded, making not the slightest effort to cover her bosom. "You pervert, creeping and peeping?"



"Get your arse out of there before you get it bitten off by a croc." Her jibe had stung him, but even in his anger he saw that her breasts were better than he had guessed. The cold water made the points stick out at him.



"Stop gawking!" she yelled back at him. "And get lost!" She ducked her head under and then stood erect once again, soap lather streaming down her body, her hair shining and slick as a sheet of black silk over her shoulders.



"Get out of there, damn you, I'm not going to stand here arguing," he ordered.



"I'll get out when I'm good and ready."



Sean plunged straight into the pool and reached her before she could avoid him. He seized her arm, and though it was slippery with soap, he dragged her toward the bank, kicking and lashing at him with her free hand, spitting with fury.



"You bastard, I hate you! Leave me alone!"



He controlled her easily with one hand. In the other, he still held his big double-barreled rifle. His khaki shorts ran water and his velskoen boots squelched as he dragged her out. He snatched up her wet shirt and threw it at her.



"Get dressed!"



"You've got no right! I'm not going to accept this, you brutal ham-handed... you've hurt my arm." She proffered her upper arm, exhibiting his red finger marks on the skin, holding the wet shirt loosely at her side, shaking and pale with rage.



Strangely, it was her navel that drew his eyes. It stared accusingly at him from the flat plain of her midriff like a cyclopean eye, a perfect dimple at that moment more erotic than even the dense triangular bush of sodden hair beneath it. He dragged his eyes away. She was so angry she seemed totally oblivious of her nudity.



He thought she might actually attack him, and he stepped back. As he did so he looked beyond her and saw a tiny arrowhead of ripples slipping silently across the still green surface of the pool toward them. At the apex of the V-shaped ripple were two black lumps; gnarled and no bigger than a pair of large walnuts, they came at surprising speed.



Sean grabbed her arm, the same arm about whose injuries she was complaining, and jerked her back past him and away from the water's edge so viciously that she sprawled on her hands and knees in the mud.



He swung up the.577 Express rifle and aimed between the black eye lumps of the approaching crocodile. The eyes were at least nine inches apart, he calculated as he rode the pip of the foresight between them-a big old mugger.



The thunder of the rifle was stunning in the silence of the reeds and the bullet flicked an ostrich feather of spray from the surface, dead center between the eye protuberances. The crocodile rolled sluggishly onto its back, its tiny brain mangled by the shot.



Claudia scrambled to her feet and stared over his shoulder as the reptile flashed its butter-yellow saurian belly. Sixteen feet from chin to the tip of its long crested tail, its jaws clicked as its nerves spasmed from the brain shot. The fangs, as long and thick as a human forefinger, overlapped the grinning scaly lips. It sank slowly back into the pool, the creamy belly fading into the green depths.



Claudia's fury had evaporated. She was staring into the pool, shivering uncontrollably, shaking her wet hair.



"oh God, I didn't realize... how horrible." She swayed toward him, shattered and vulnerable. "I didn't know." Her body was cold from the pool, long and sleek and wet as she pressed against him.



"What is it?" Riccardo Monterro shouted from the edge of the reed bed.



"Sean, are you all right? What happened? Where's Claudia?"



At the sound of her father's voice, she jumped back from him guiltily and for the first time tried to cover her breasts and crotch.



"It's all right, Capo," Sean yelled back. "She's safe."



Claudia snatched up her panties and pulled them on hastily, hopping on one foot in the mud, turning her back to him as she picked up her shirt and thrust her arms into the sleeves. When she turned back to him, she had recovered her anger.



"I got a fright," she told him. "I didn't mean to grab you like that. Don't make any big deal out of it, buster." She zipped up the fly of her jeans and lifted her chin. "I would have grabbed the garbage man if he'd been handy."



"Okay, ducky, next time I'm going to let them bite you, lion or croc, what the hell."



"You shouldn't have any complaints," she said over her shoulder as she marched back up the path. "You got yourself a big eyeful and I noticed you made a meal of it, Colonel."



"You're right. You gave me a good peep. Not bad, a bit skinny perhaps-but not bad."



And his grin expanded as he saw the back of her neck turn angry red.



Riccardo ran down the path to meet them, frantic with worry, and he seized Claudia and hugged her with relief. "What happened, tesoro? Are you all right?"



"She tried to feed the crocs," Sean told him. "We are moving out in exactly thirty seconds from now. That shot will have alerted every ugly within ten miles."



"At least I got that filthy black muck off my face," Claudia told herself as they struck out away from the marshes. Her damp clothing felt cool and clean on her skin, and she was invigorated by her perilous bathe.



"No harm done," she thought. "Except I got ogled." Even that no longer troubled her. His eyes on her naked body had not been altogether offensive, and in retrospect there was a satisfaction in having tantalized him.



"Eat your heart out, lover boy." She watched his back as he strode out ahead of her. "That was the best you're ever likely to lay eyes on."



Within a mile her clothes had dried and she had no energy for



, any extraneous activity. The whole of her existence became the act of picking up one foot and swinging it forward after the other.



The heat was fierce and became fiercer still as they reached the rim of the escarpment of the Zambezi Valley and started down.



The air changed its character. It lay on the earth in silvery streams like water, it quivered and shimmered like curtains of crystal beads and changed the form and shape of things at a distance so that they squirmed and wriggled, doubled in size, assumed monstrous shapes in the mirage, or disappeared from view, swallowed up by the cascades of heated air.



Farther off the air was blue, so when she looked back, the escarpment down which they were climbing was washed with pale blue, misty and ethereal. The sky was a different blue, deep and vigorous, and the clouds stood on the firmament in towering ranges the colors of lead and silver, their bottoms cut cleanly horizontal to the earth, their heads shaped like full-rigged ships, mainsail and topsail, royal and skysail piled up into the heavens. Under the cloud ranges the air was trapped and lay upon the earth so it felt as heavy as hot syrup. They trudged along beneath its weight.



From the forest around them the minute black mo pane flies came swarming and gathered at the corners of their eyes and mouths, crawled up into their nostrils and into their ears to drink the moisture from their bodies. Their insistence was an exquisite torture.



As each long mile fell behind them, so vistas of the valley floor opened ahead. On the horizon they could at last make out the dark belt of riverine vegetation that marked the course of the great Zambezi. Always Matatu danced along ahead of them like a wraith, following a trail that no other eye than his could discern, tireless and unaffected by the heat, so that Sean had to call him back for the regular periods of rest with which he interrupted the march.



"There is no sign of game," Riccardo remarked, peering ahead through his binoculars. "We haven't seen so much as a rabbit since we crossed into Mozambique."



it was the first time he had spoken in hours, and Sean was encouraged. He had begun seriously worrying about his client.



Now he responded quickly.



"This was once a paradise of big game. I hunted here before the Portuguese pulled out and the buffalo were running in herds ten thousand strong."



"What happened to them?"



"Frelimo fed the army with them. They even offered me the contract for the slaughter. They couldn't understand why I refused. In the end they did it themselves."



"How did they do it?"



"From helicopters. They flew low over the herds and machine gunned them. They killed almost fifty thousand buffalo in three months. For all that time the sky was black with vultures and you could smell the killing fields from twenty miles off. When the buffalo were finished they started on the other game, the wildebeest and the zebra."



"What a cruel and savage land this is," Claudia said quietly.



"Surely you don't disapprove?" Sean asked. "It was done by black men, not whites. It couldn't possibly be wrong." He glanced at his Rolex wristwatch. "Time to move on."



He put out his hand to help Riccardo to his feet, but the older man shrugged the hand away. Nevertheless, Sean fell in beside him as the march resumed and let Claudia move up directly behind Matatu, while he chatted quietly to her father, jollying him along, trying to distract him from his weariness.



He recounted anecdotes from the bush war. He pointed out the site of the guerrilla training camp as they passed a few miles north of it and described the raid by the Ballantyne Scouts.



Riccardo was interested enough to ask questions. "This Comrade China sounds like a good field commander," he commented.



"Did you ever find out what happened to him after he escapedT"



"He was active right up to the end of the war. A tough cookie, all right. His men had to backpack all their munitions into Rhodesia, and a Russian T-5 antitank land mine weighs almost seventy pounds. The story goes that Comrade China brought in one of them at enormous cost in sweat and blood and laid it on the main Mount Darwin road for one of our regular armored patrols.



However, the local blacks had hired a bus that same weekend to go into town to watch the football match, and they touched off the land mine. There were sixty-five of them on the bus and twenty-three of them survived the explosion. Comrade China was so incensed by the waste of his precious T-5 that he sent for all the next of kin of the victims and the survivors who were still able to walk and fined them each ten dollars to cover the cost of another land mine."



Riccardo stopped and doubled over with laughter. Claudia turned on them furiously. "How can you laugh? That's the most outrageous story I've ever heard."



"Oh, I don't know," Sean replied evenly. "I don't think ten dollars was so outrageous. I think old China was being fairly lenient."



She tossed her head and lengthened her stride to catch up with Matatu, and Riccardo still chuckling, asked, "After the war, what happened to this character?"



Sean shrugged. "He was in the new government in Harare for a while, but then he disappeared in one of the political purges. He might have been liquidated.. the old revolutionaries are always looked on with distrust when the regime they fought for comes to power. Nobody likes sharing a bed with a trained killer and toppler of other rulers."



Sean called a halt an hour before dark for a brew of tea and their frugal evening meal. While Job cooked it over his small smokeless fire, Sean took Matatu aside and talked to him quietly. The tracker watched Sean's face as he spoke, nodding eagerly, and as soon as he finished Matatu slipped away, heading back the way they had come.



Riccardo looked a question as Sean came back to join them and he explained.



"I sent Matatu to backtrack us. Make sure we aren't being followed. I'm worried about that shot. It could have called up those uglies we found near the border."



Riccardo nodded. Then he asked, "Have you got a couple of aspirin, Sean?"



Sean opened the side flap of his pack and shook three tablets from their bottle.



"Headache?" he asked as he passed them to Riccardo, who nodded as he popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of hot tea.



"The dust and sun glare," he explained. But both Sean and Claudia were studying him and he bridled. "Damn it, don't look at me like that. I'm fine."



"Sure," Sean agreed smoothly. "Let's eat and move on to find a place to sleep." He went across to the cooking fire and squatted beside Job.



They talked softly.



"Papa," Claudia moved a little closer to her father and touched his arm. "How are you feeling, honestly?"



Don't worry about me, tesoro.



"it has started, hasn't it?"



"No," he replied, too swiftly.



Doc Andrews said there might be headaches."



"It's the sun."



"I love you, Papa," she said.



"I know, baby, and I love you too."



"An ocean and a mountain?" she asked.



"The stars and the moon," he confirmed, putting his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him.



As soon as they had eaten, Job doused the fire and Sean got them up and moving again. Tukutela's spoor was easy to follow in the soft earth, and he and Job had no need of Matatu for this stage.



However, at dark they were forced to stop for the night.



"We'll reach the swamps tomorrow afternoon," Sean promised Riccardo as they stretched out on top of their sleeping bags.



Claudia lay awake worrying about her father long after the others were asleep. Riccardo snored softly, lying on his back with his arms extended like a crucifix. When she raised herself on one elbow to look at him in the starlight, she heard Sean's light breathing alter subtly and sensed he had been awakened by her movement, He slept as lightly as a cat; sometimes he frightened her, But even her concern for her father was at last overcome and she fell into that dark, drugged sleep of exhaustion. Waking was like coming back from a faraway place.



"Wake up, come on, wake up." Sean was slapping her face lightly, and she pushed his hand away and sat up groggily.



"What?" she mumbled. "God, it's still dark."



He had left her and gone to her father. "Come on, Capo, wake UP, man, wake UP. "What the hell, what is it?" Riccardo's voice was slurred and grumpy.



"Matatu has just come into camp," Sean told them quietly. "We are being followed."



Claudia felt the icy wind of dread blow across her skin. "Followed? By whom?"



"We don't know," Sean said.



"The same bunch that was camped at the border?" Riccardo asked. His voice was still slurred.



"Possibly," Sean said.



"What are you going to do?" Claudia asked, annoyed that her tone sounded afraid and confused.



"We are going to give them the slip," Sean said. "Get up on your hind legs."



They had slept with their boots on. They had simply to roll their sleeping bags and they were ready to move out.



"Matatu is going to lead you away and cover your spoor," Sean explained. "Job and I are going to lay a false trail for them in the original direction. As soon as it's light we'll break away and circle back to join you."



"You aren't going to leave us alone?" Claudia blurted out fearfully, then bit it off.



"No, you won't be alone. Matatu and Pumula and Dedan will be with you," Sean told her disdainfully.



"What about the elephant?" Riccardo demanded. His voice had firmed. "Are you breaking off the hunt? You going to let my elephant get away?"



"For a few lousy gooks armed with a couple of lousy AK-47s?"



Sean chuckled. "Don't be ridiculous, Capo. We will shake them off and be after Tukutela again before you know it."



Sean and Job waited while Matatu assembled his group and then shepherded them away. By now Riccardo and Claudia had learned the basics of anti tracking and went swiftly under Matatu's direction while the tracker brushed and covered the signs behind them.



Once they were clear, Sean and Job trampled the area around the camp, back and forth and around in circles, until they had confused any remaining spoor. Then they fell into single file, Sean leading, and went away at a run. They did not make it too apparent that they were laying a false trail but adopted all the usual precautions, which would not fool a good tracker.



It was the old Scout pursuit pace Sean set, seven miles an hour, and gradually he began to veer off in a southerly direction. Matatu was heading northward toward the river, and Sean would lead the pursuit directly away from them.



While he ran, Sean puzzled over the identity of his pursuers government soldiers or rebels, poachers or simply armed bandits looking for plunder, it was impossible to guess. However, Matatu had been worried when he came into camp.



"They are good, Bwana, " he had told Sean. "They have done well to follow the spoor we left, and they are coming on fast. They move in formation like bush fighters, with flankers out."



"Didn't you get a good look?" Sean had asked.



little Ndorobo ha4 shook his head. "It was getting dark and I wanted to get back to, warn you. They were closing in swiftly."



"Even the best tracker won't be able to follow us in darkness.



We've got the rest of the night to get clear of them."



It was a strange reversal of roles, Sean thought grimly as he and Job trotted through the dark bush. They, the hunters, were now being hunted just as remorselessly.



At first he had considered breaking off the chase after the elephant and doubling back for the border. Riccardo Monterro's condition was causing him real concern, and so was Matatu's warning that their pursuers were skilled and appeared dangerous.



However, he had swiftly rejected the idea; they were beyond the point of no return.



"No turning back," Sean said aloud and grinned as he admitted to himself the true reasons for his determination, two ivory tusks and half a million dollars in cash, By now he was honestly not certain which of those was the most compelling. The tusks were beginning to loom large in his imagination. They represented the old Africa, a symbol of a better world that had vanished. He wanted them more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, except perhaps half a million dollars. He grinned again.



In the first light of dawn they were running directly southward, k and they had covered twenty miles since splitting off from the rest of the party.



"Time to disappear, Job," he grunted without breaking stride.



There must be no indication to the trackers following them that they were about to split again.



"Good place just ahead," Job agreed. He was running exactly in Sean's footprints.



"Do it," Sean said, and as they ran under the low branches of a grevia tree Job reached up and swung himself off the ground.



Sean did not look back, did not alter his stride. Job would work himself through the branches of the closely growing grevia. until he found a good place to drop off and anti track away.



Sean ran on for twenty minutes, once again curving away into the southwest, heading for a low ridge that just showed in the dawn ahead of him. He crossed the ridge and as he had anticipated from the lie of the terrain found a small river in the valley beyond. He drank at the edge of the pool and milled around, splashing water onto the bank as though he were bathing.



A tracker would expect him to choose this as a breakaway point, wading either upstream or downstream before leaving the river again. They would send scouts along both banks to search for SIP.



Sean waded downstream, supporting himself on overhanging branches to give them a trail to confirm their suspicions. Then, without leaving the water, he returned to the exact spot where he had entered the stream and on the bank carefully dried his feet and legs, replaced his dry velskoen shoes that he had hung around his neck on their laces, and backtracked on his incoming spoor.



He retraced his footsteps to the crest of the ridge, walking backward, stepping precisely on his original footprints. At the top of the ridge he employed the same trick Job had. He swung himself into the air from a branch and over handed himself well clear of the spoor before lowering himself to the edge of a rock slab and anti tracking away.



"Even Matatu wouldn't be able to unravel that," he thought with satisfaction as he struck off back toward the north at a run.



Two hours later he joined up with Job at the rendezvous, and in the early afternoon they came up with the other party waiting for them five miles north of the point where they had split up.



"Good to see you, Sean. We were beginning to worry," Riccardo told him as they shook hands. Even Claudia smiled as Sean flopped down beside her and said, "My kingdom for a cup of tea."



As he sipped at the mug Matatu brought him, he listened attentively to the little tracker. Matatu squatted beside Sean and chattered in his excited falsetto.



"Matatu went back and kept an eye on the camp we left," Sean translated for Riccardo and Claudia's benefit. "He didn't dare approach too closely, but he saw the gang that was following us arrive This time he counted twelve of them. They searched the area of the camp, then took the bait and followed the false trail Job and I laid for them."



"So we're clear, then?" Riccardo asked.



"Looks like it," Sean agreed. "And if we push along we should be able to reach the beginning of the swamps either this evening or early tomorrow."



"What about Tukutela?" Riccardo asked.



"Well, we know from his track approximately where he would have reached the swamps. We'll just cast along the edge until we find where he went in, but we've lost a lot of ground on him. We'll have to go hard if we don't want him to get away from us. Do you feel up to it, Capo?"



"Never better," Riccardo said. "Lead on, man."



Before they set off again Sean went quickly over their packs.



They had consumed a great deal of the provisions, and he redistributed the remainder. By giving both Job and himself an extra ten pounds or so, he was able to reduce Riccardo's pack to twenty pounds and Claudia's to a mere ten, just her sleeping bag and personal items.



They both responded well to their reduced burdens, but again Sean marched beside Riccardo to encourage him and watch over him. Claudia was still going surprisingly well; he needn't have worried about her at all. Under her light pack she was stepping out lithely. He took pleasure in watching her long legs driving and her hard little buttocks oscillating in those tight blue jeans. They reminded him of the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.



They were on the valley floor now. There were open vleis and baobabs, those trees with bloated trunks, bark like a reptile's skin, and crooked bare branches from which a few late cream-of-tartar pods still hung. It was easy to see why the Zulus said the gods had accidentally planted the baobab upside down with its roots in the air.



Far ahead of them a slow standing cloud of evaporation marked the position of the swamps, and the alluvial soil was sandy and yielding underfoot.



"Just think of this, Capo." Sean was trying to divert him. "You are probably one of the last men who will ever hunt a great elephant in the classical tradition of the long chase. This is the way it should be done, man. Not grinding around in a Land-Rover and then leaning out of the window to kill him. This is how Selous and "Karamojo" Bell and Samaki" Salmon hunted their elephant."



He saw Riccardo's expression light up at the idea of being compared to those grand masters of the chase, men from another age when all elephants had been fair game. "Samaki" Sahnon had hunted and killed four thousand elephants in his lifetime. There had been a different morality in those days. Today a man with a bag of those dimensions would be accounted a villain and a criminal, but in his day "Samaki" Salmon had been respected and honored. He had even hunted with Edward, Prince of Wales, as his client.



Sean knew that Riccardo had an avid interest in the old-time elephant hunters, so he enlarged on their careers.



"If you want to do it the way "Karamojo" Bell did it, Capo, you have to walk like this. Bell wore out twenty-four pairs of boots a year and had to replace his porters and gun bearers every few weeks. They just couldn't keep up with him."



"That was the golden age." Riccardo extended his stride a little as he thought about it. "You and I should have lived then, Sean.



We were born after our time."



"A true hunter should kill a great elephant with his legs. He should walk him down. That's the respectful and proper way, and that is what you are doing now, Capo. Enjoy every step you take, for you are treading in old Bell's footprints."



Unfortunately the effects of Sean's encouragement were not enduring; within an hour Riccardo was flagging again and Sean noticed a new, disconcerting unsteadiness in his gait. He stumbled and would have fallen had not Sean caught his arm.



"We all need a five-minute break and a cup of tea." Sean led him to the shade.



When Job brought the tea mugs, Riccardo mumbled, "Have you got a couple more aspirins for me?"



"You all right, Capo?" he asked as he handed him the tablets.



"Damned headache again, that's all." But he would not meet Sean's eyes.



Sean looked across at Claudia, who was sitting close beside her father, but she also avoided his gaze. "Do you two know something I don't?" Sean demanded. "You both look guilty as hell." He didn't wait for an answer but stood up and went to join Job at the small fire where he was baking a fresh batch of maize cakes for their evening meal.



"The aspirin will make you feel better," Claudia told her father softly.



"Of course. Aspirin's a surefire cure for cancer once it reaches the brain," he agreed. Then, as he saw her agonized expression, he blurted out, "I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that. Self-pity isn't my usual style."



"Is it bad, Papa?"



"I can tolerate the headache, but I'm getting a little double vision that worries me," he admitted. "Damn it, I was feeling so well a few days ago. It's all happened so quickly."



"The exertion," she said, pitying him. "Perhaps that's what has aggravated it. We should turn back."



"No," he said with utter finality. "Don't even talk about that again."



She inclined her head in aquiescence.



"The swamps aren't far ahead. Perhaps we'll have a chance to rest," she said.



"I don't want to rest," he said. "I realize just how little time I have left. I don't want to waste a moment of it."



Sean came back to them. "Are you ready to go on?"



Claudia glanced at her wristwatch. They had rested for less than half an hour. It was too short and she would have protested, but her father pushed himself to his feet.



"All set," he said, and she could see that even the short break had refreshed him.



They had been going only a few minutes when Riccardo said, quite cheerfully, "Those hamburgers Job has cooked smell just great. Makes me feel hungry."



"Those hamburgers are maize cakes," Sean chuckled. "Sorry to disappoint you. "You can't bullshit me." Riccardo chuckled with him. "I can smell the fried onions and beef."



"Papa." Claudia looked back over her shoulder and frowned sharply, and Riccardo stopped chuckling and looked distraught.



"There might be hallucinations," Doc Andrews had warned Claudia. "He may begin to see things or imagine various odors. I can't give you an exact progress of the disease, of course, and there may be periods of swift deterioration followed by longer periods of remission. Just remember, Claudia, that his fantasies will be very real to him, and episodes of hallucination can be followed by periods of complete lucidity."



That evening Sean would not stop to brew tea. "We have to try and make up the ground we've lost," he told them, so they ate the cold maize cakes and biltong-slivers of salted, air-dried venison-on the march.



"One large hamburger with fried onions and all the trimmings coming up, Capo," Sean teased him. Claudia glared at him, but Riccardo laughed uneasily and munched on the unappetizing fare as he walked.



They no longer had a spoor to follow, so Sean kept going lOng after night had fallen. The long, tortuous miles fell slowly behind them and the brilliant southern stars burned over their heads. It was almost midnight before they stopped and unrolled their sleeping bags.



Sean let them sleep until the dawn light was strong enough to make out the way ahead. The landscape had changed. During the night they had entered the region that was held in thrall by the great Zambezi. These were ancient flood plains that were inundated when the river broke its banks during the torrential rainy season.



They were dry now, although almost devoid of trees; a few long dead mo pane and acacia thorn trees drowned by the floods still held up twisted bare branches to the hazy blue sky, standing out on the empty plains like lonely sentinels.



As they moved out into the open, the dried mud had cracked in to brick lets beneath their feet, the edges curling up, and the clumps of swamp grass were brown and matted and dead from drought. When the breeze switched fitfully they could smell the swamps still out of view ahead, the odor of mud and rotting vegetation, The mirage shimmered across the plains, so there was no clear horizon; land and sky merged into each other like water. When they looked back the tree line crawled like a long black serpent below the milky sky, undulating and vibrating softly in the mirage, and the dust devils spun upon themselves twisting and swaying like belly dancers.



Out on the plain Sean felt exposed and vulnerable. There was just the scant chance of a Frelimo patrol plane passing this way to search for Renamo bands, and they were as obvious as fleas on a white sheet. He wanted to hurry but glanced back at Riccardo and knew that they would have to rest again soon.



Ahead of Sean, Matatu gave a cry that made his nerves jump. Sean knew what it meant and he ran forward, passing Claudia, and stopped beside Matatu.



"Well, all right!" He clapped Matatu's shoulder and went down on one knee to examine the earth.



"What is it?" Riccardo sounded alarmed, but Sean lifted his head and grinned at him.



"It's him. Tukutela. We've cut his spoor again just where Matatu predicted we would." And he touched the marks of the huge pads whose weight had crushed the brick lets of dried mud to talcum powder. The spoor was so clear that the difference between the bull's rounded front feet and the more oval hind feet was immediately apparent, and the forward edges of each footprint were nicked by his toenails.



"Still heading straight for the swamps." Sean stood and shaded his eyes against the glare as he followed the direction of the spoor.



Not far ahead another line of trees was drawn like a pencil along the horizon where a narrow curved finger of higher ground reached out across the plains.



"In a way we are fortunate," Sean remarked. "A few years ago there were so many herds of buffalo and game on these flats that Tukutela's spoor would have been wiped out in a few hours by their hooves. Now, since the Frelimo government converted them all to army rations, Tukutela is the only living thing for miles around."



"How far behind him are we?"



"We've made up a bit of ground." Sean lowered his hand from his eyes and turned to him. "But not enough, and if the uglies catch us out here in the open.... Luckily Tukutela's spoor is headed straight for the line of trees ahead. They will give us some cover."



He gestured to Matatu to take the spoor once again.



Now the expanse of the wide plain was dimpled with old anthills, mounds of clay thrown up by colonies of termites, some of them the size of a large cottage. Tukutela's spoor meandered between them. However, the line of growth was by now so close that they could make out individual trees. The finger of high ground formed a natural causeway from the edge of the forest across the wide plains to the beginning of the true swamps. There were ivory nut palms, bottle-stemmed palms, and low palms with their fan-shaped leaves, mixed with wild fig. On the highest ridge of the long causeway grew a few massive baobab, with trunks of elephantine gray bark.



With relief Sean followed the spoor of the old bull off the plain and into the trees of the isthmus. Here the elephant had stopped to dig out the juicy roots of an Bala palm and drop a pile of spongy yellow dung.



"The elephant rested here," Matatu explained, lowering his voice to a whisper. "He is an old man now and he tires easily. Here he stood to sleep, see how he shuffled his feet in the dust, and when he awoke he dusted his body. See where he scooped it up with his trunk and threw it over his back."



"How long did he stay here?" Sean asked. Matatu leaned his head to one side as he considered the question.



"He rested here until late yesterday afternoon when the sun was there."



Matatu pointed ten degrees above the western horizon.



"But when he went on he went more slowly. He feels safer now that he is close to the swamps. We have gained on him."



Sean exaggerated Matatu's estimate as he passed it on to Riccardo and Claudia. He wanted to encourage them. "We are making really good gains on him now." He put on a cheerful, confident air. "We might even catch up with him before he gets into the deep swamps, if we don't waste any time."



The spoor headed down the isthmus and the old bull had fed quietly as he moved along it, keeping up on top of the low ridge where the bush was thickest. Directly ahead of them stood another gigantic baobab tree. Its bark was gray and folded and riven as the old bull's hide.



For the moment Sean had left Riccardo's side and moved up to his original position behind Matatu. He wanted to caution the tracker not to set too fast a pace, but before he could speak he heard a strange, guttural cry behind him and he whirled around.



Riccardo's face was swollen and congested with blood. His eyes blazed and seemed to start from their sockets. Sean thought he was suffering from some kind of seizure, but he was pointing ahead, his hand, shaking with violent emotion.



"There he is," he croaked, in a thick unnatural voice. "For God's sake, can't you see him?"



Sean whirled and followed the direction of his outstretched arm.



"What is it, man?"



He was looking ahead, and he did not see Riccardo turn to Pumula and snatch the Rigby rifle off his shoulder, but he heard the metallic clash of the bolt as Riccardo chambered a cartridge.



"Capo, what the hell are you doing?" He reached out to restrain him, but Riccardo shoved him backward. Sean was in unprepared and off balance, and he staggered and almost fell.



Riccardo ran forward to the head of the line, stopped, and threw up the rifle.



"Capo, don't do it." Sean was sprinting to catch him, but the Rigby crashed out and the barrel jumped high, driving Riccardo back a pace with the heavy recoil.



"Have you gone crazy?" Sean could not reach him before he had fired again, and the heavy bullet tore a flurry of white wet bark from the trunk of the baobab. The echoes of the shot rolled across the plains.



"Capo." Sean reached him and seized the rifle, forcing the muzzle up toward the sky just as Riccardo fired the Rigby for the third time.



Sean wrested the weapon out of his grip.



"In the name of all that's holy, man, what on earth do you think you're doing?"



Their eardrums were numbed by the thunder of gunfire, and Sean's outraged voice sounded small and hollow after it.



"Tukutela," Riccardo mouthed. "Don't you see? Why did you stop me?" His face was still flushed and he was shaking like a man with malarial fever. He reached once more for the Rigby in Sean's grasp, but Sean jerked it away from him.



"Pull yourself together!" he shouted, tossing the empty rifle to Job. "Don't let him get it again." He turned back to Riccardo.



"Are you out of your mind? He seized him by the shoulders. "The sound of those shots will carry for miles."



"Leave me!" Riccardo struggled. "Don't you see him?" And Sean shook him viciously.



"Snap out of it, you're shooting at a tree. You've blown your lid!"



"Give me the rifle," Riccardo was pleading. Sean shook him again and roughly turned him to face the baobab.



"Look at it, you bloody madman! There's your elephant!" He shoved him toward it. "Take a good look!"



Claudia ran forward and tried to restrain Sean. "Leave him alone.



Can't you see he's sick?"



"He's gone crazy!" Sean pushed her aside. "He's calling up every Frelimo and Renamo thug within fifty miles, and he's chased any elephant... "



"Leave him," Claudia came back at him. Sean let go of her father and stepped back.



"All right, ducky, he's all yours."



Claudia rushed to her father and embraced him. "It's all right, Papa! It's going to be all right!"



Riccardo was staring uncomprehendingly at the deep raw oozing sap, in the bark of the baobab.



"I thought it was... " He shook his head weakly. "Why did I do that?



I don't... I thought it looked like an elephant."



"Yes, Papa, yes." Claudia was hugging him. "Don't upset yourself."



Job and the rest of the hunting team were quiet and unhappy, watching this strange episode that none of them could fathom.



Sean turned away in disgust. It took him a few seconds to get full control of himself, then he asked Matatu, you think we are close enough for Tukutela to have heard the shooting?"



"The swamps are close, and the sound carries over this flat earth as it does over water." Matatu shrugged. "Perhaps the elephant heard, who knows?"



Sean looked back the way they had come. From the ridge they could see out across the floodplain into the dusty distances.



" Job, what chance that the terrs heard? We'll find out the hard way, Sean. It depends how close behind us they are."



Sean shook himself, trying to rid himself of his anger the way a spaniel shakes off water, "We'll have to rest here. The mambo is sick.



Brew a billy of tea, and we'll decide what to do," he ordered.



He walked back to where Claudia was still holding her father.



She faced Sean defiantly, turning her body to shield Riccardo from him.



"Sorry I Pushed YOU around, Capo," Sean said mildly. "You gave me a hell of a fright."



"I don't understand," Riccardo mumbled. "I could have sworn it was him. I saw him so clearly." We will break for a cup of tea," Sean told him. "I think you've got a touch of the sun. It can turn a man's brain to jelly."



"He'll be fine in a few minutes," Claudia said confidently. Sean nodded coldly at her.



"Let's get him into the shade."



Riccardo leaned back against the hole of the baobab and closed his eyes. He looked pale and bewildered, and sweat droplets sparkled on his chin and upper lip. Claudia knelt beside him and dabbed them away with the corner of her scarf, but when she looked up at Sean he jerked his head in a Peremptory gesture and she stood up and followed him.



"This doesn't come as any surprise to you, does it?" he accused as soon as they were beyond earshot. She did not reply, and he went on, "Just what kind of daughter are you anyway? You knew he was sick and you let him come out on this jaunt."



Her lips were trembling and as he stared into them he saw that her honey-colored eyes were swimming. He had not expected tears from her. They took him by surprise. He felt his fury slipping away and he had to make an effort to bolster it.



"It's too late to start blubbering now, ducky. We've got to find a way to get him home. He's a sick man."



"He's not going home," she murmured, so low he barely caught All the words. Her tears were hanging on thick dark lashes and he stared at her in silence. She swallowed hard and then said, "He's not a sick man, Sean. He's dying. Cancer. It was diagnosed by a specialist before we left home. He predicted that it could attack the brain like this."



Sean's fury crumpled. "No," he said. "Not Capo."



"Why do you think I agreed to let him come and insisted on coming with him? I knew that this was his last hunt-and I wanted to be with him."



They were silent, staring at each other, then she said, "You care.



I can see you truly care for him. I didn't expect that."



"He's my friend," Sean said, puzzled himself by the depth of his own sadness.



"I didn't think you were capable of gentleness," she went on softly. "I may have misjudged you."



"Perhaps we misjudged each other," he said.



She nodded. "Perhaps we did," she said. "But thank you anyway. Thank you for caring about my father."



She began to turn away to go back to Riccardo, but Sean stopped her. "We still haven't settled anything," he said. "We haven't decided what we are going to do."



"We go on, of course," she answered. "Right to the bitter end.



That's what I promised him."



"You've got guts," he told her softly.



"If I have, then I got them from him," she replied, and went to her father.



The mug of tea and a half-dozen aspirin tablets revived Riccardo. He was acting and talking completely rationally again, and none of them made any further reference to his wild behavior, although quite naturally it had thrown a pall over all of them.



"We must move on, Capo," Sean told him. "Tukutela is walking away from us every minute we sit here."



They followed the ridge of high ground, and now the odor of the swamps was stronger, brought to them by the fitful, inconstant wind.



"That's one of the many reasons elephants like the swamps," Sean explained to Riccardo. "The wind is always shifting, turning and switching. It makes it much more difficult to get close to them."



There was a gap in the trees ahead. Sean stopped and they gazed out through it. "There they are," he said. "The Zambezi swamplands.



The ridge on which they stood was like the back of a sea serpent, swimming across the open flood plains Now, just ahead of them, it ducked below the surface and disappeared at the point where the open plains gave way to endless expanses of papyrus and reeds.



Sean raised his binoculars and surveyed the swamps ahead. The reed beds seemed limitless, but he had flown over them and he knew they were interspersed with shallow lagoons of open water and narrow winding channels. Farther out, almost on the horizon, he could see the loom of small islets, dark patches of almost impenetrable bush-crowned islands, and he could just make out the curved palm stems with their high fluffy heads.



The past season had been particularly dry and the water level would be low, in most places not more than waist deep, but the mud banks would be black and glutinous and the channels much deeper. The going would be arduous, and apart from the mud and water, reeds and water plants would impede each step they took, winding themselves around their legs as they tried to move.



For them each mile through the swamps would be the equivalent of five on dry land, while the elephant would be in his element. He loved mud and water. It supported his great bulk, and his foot pads were designed by nature to expand as he put his weight upon them, forcing a wide opening, and then to shrink in diameter as he lifted them, freeing themselves readily from the clinging mud.



Tukutela could gorge on reeds, soft water plants, and swamp grass, and the dense bushy islets would afford variety to his diet.



The suck of mud and the splash of water would warn him of an approaching enemy and the fitfully turning wind would protect him, bringing the scent of a pursuer down to him from every quarter. In all of Tukutela's wide range, this was the most difficult place to hunt him.



It's going to be a Sunday school picnic, Capo." Sean lowered the binoculars. "Those tusks are as good as hanging over the fireplace in your den already."



"the old bull's spoor went out to the very end of the land bridge and then down into the papyrus beds, where the undulating sea of green fronds swallowed the trail and left not a sign.



"Nobody can follow a trail in there." Riccardo stood at the line where dry friable earth ended and damp swamp mud began. "Nobody can find Tukutela in there," he repeated, staring at the wall of swamp growth higher than his head. "Surely they can't?"



"You are right, nobody can find him in there," Sean agreed.



"That is, nobody except Matatu."



% They were standing in the remains of a village that had been built on the end of the isthmus. Clearly the previous occupants had been fishermen, members of one of the small tribes who live along the banks of the Zambezi and make their livelihood from her abundant green waters. The racks on which they had dried their catches of tilapia bream and barbeled catfish still stood, but their huts had been burned to the ground.



Job was searching the outskirts of the village, and he whistled for Sean. When Sean went to join him he was standing over an object that lay in the short grass. At first glance Sean thought it was a bundle of rags, and then he saw the bones protruding from it. They were still partially covered by shreds of dried skin and flesh.



"When?" Sean asked.



"Six months ago, perhaps."



"How did he die?"



Job squatted beside the human skeleton. when he turned the skull, it snapped off the vertebrae of the neck like a ripe fruit. Job cupped it in his hands, and it grinned at him with empty eye sockets.



"Bullet through the back of the head," Job said. "Exit hole this side." It was like a third eye in the bone of the forehead.



Job replaced the skull and walked deeper into the grass. "Here's another," he called.



"Renamo has been through here," Sean gave his opinion. "Either looking for recruits or dried fish or both."



else it was Frelimo looking for Renamo rebels, and they decided to question them with an AK. "They get it from both sides. There "Poor buggers," Sean said.



will be plenty more of them lying around. They are the ones who escaped from the huts before they burned." he They started back toward the village and Sean said, ""If they were fishermen-theY would have had their canoes here. They will probably be hidden, but we could certainly use one. Go through the edge of the papyrus beds and then search the bush behind the village."



Sean crossed to where Riccardo and Claudia were sitting together.



As he came , he looked at her inquiringly and she nodded and smiled optimistically.



"Papa's doing fine. What is this place?"



He explained their reasoning as to the fate of the village.



"Why would they kill these innocent People?" Claudia was appalled.



you don't have to have a reason for killing "In Africa these days somebody other than a loaded gun in your hands and a fancy to fire it off."



"But what harm could they have done?" she insisted.



Sean shrugged. "Harboring rebels, withholding information,



hiding food, refusing the services of their women, any one of those crimes or none of them."



The sun was a red ball through the swamp haze, so low above the tops of the papyrus that Sean could look directly at it without screwing up his eyes.



"It'll be dark before we can leave," he decided. "We'll have to sleep here tonight and start again at first light tomorrow. One consolation is that now Tukutela has reached the swamps, he will slow down. He's probably not more than a couple of miles ahead of us right now." But as he said it he thought about those shots Riccardo had fired. If the bull had heard them, he would still be running. There was, however, no point in telling that to Riccardo.



He looked shaken and despondent, and he had been almost silent since the incident.



"He is just a husk of the Capo I knew, poor old devil. The last thing I can do for him is to get him that elephant." Sean's sympathy was genuine and unaffected and he sat down beside Riccardo and began to draw him out, describing what lay ahead and how they would hunt for the old bull in the papyrus beds.



The hunt was all that now seemed to interest Riccardo, and for the first time that day he became animated Once he even laughed.



Claudia flashed a grateful smile at Sean, then stood up and said, "I've got a little private business to attend to."



"Where are you off to?" Sean demanded immediately"



"The little girls" room," she told him. "And you are definitely not invited."



"Don't go wandering off too far, and no swimming this time," he ordered. "You'll get enough of that tomorrow."



"I hear and obey, O great white Bwana. " She gave him a sarcastic curtsy and set off out of the perimeter of the burned village.



Sean watched her go uneasily and was about to call another warning after her when there was a shout from the papyrus bed and his attention was diverted from Claudia.



He jumped up. "What is it, Job?" he yelled, and went down to the water's edge.



There were more confused shouts and splashing from the depths of the papyrus. Then Job and Matatu emerged, dragging something long and black and waterlogged between them.



"Our first bit of luck." Sean grinned at Riccardo and slapped him on the shoulder.



It was a traditional mokorro dugout canoe, about seventeen feet long, hewn from a single log of the sausage tree, Kigeha africana.



The body of the dugout was just wide enough for a person to sit ISO in it, but it was usually propelled by a man standing in the stem and wielding a long punt pole.



Job tipped the water out of the craft and they examined it carefully. The hull had been repaired and caulked in a few places but seemed reasonably sound. Search the village," Sean ordered. "They must have had caulking material here. See if you can find it, then send Dedan and Pumula to cut a couple of punt poles. Claudia screamed, and they all spun to face the sound. she screamed again. The sound was strangely muffled and far off, and Sean began to run, snatching up his rifle from where he had left it beside the nearest burned-out hut.



"Claudia!" he yelled. "Where are you?" Only his echo mocked him from the forest: "Where are you?... are You?"



nm 9 When Claudia stood up and rebuckled her belt, she found it came in easily a full two notches shorter around her waist. She smiled down at her belly with approval. Now it was no longer flat but definitely concave. The long march and frugal rations had stripped every last ounce of fat from her frame.



"Strange how in an age of plenty we set out to starve ourselves."



She smiled again. "I'm going to enjoy putting on those lost pounds, plenty of pasta and red wine when I get home," She started back toward the village, then realized that in her search for privacy she had gone further than she had intended and that a thicket of wiry thorn brush blocked her way back. She turned aside to circumvent it and came upon a broad pathway running directly down through the bush toward the edge of the swarnd. She followed it thankfully.



Claudia did not realize that she was following a hippo road, one of the wide thoroughfares the great amphibians followed on their nightly forays into the forest. However, the road had not been used for rnny months. The hippopotamus in the area had been decimated along with the other game. She was in a hurry to get back to her father, and she was feeling slightly uneasy at her isolation from the rest of the party. She strode down the pathway, just short of a run.



Ahead of her an old mat of dried papyrus stems was spread across the road from side to side. It had obviously been placed there by the previous occupants of the village, and although it served no purpose that Claudia could imagine, it was no obstacle to her progress and she stepped onto it without slackening her pace.



The Pitfall had been dug for the purpose of trapping a hippopotamus. It was ten feet deep with fannelshoped sides that would tumble one of the huge beasts down into its depth and wedge it securely between the earthen walls. The opening was covered by branches strong enough to carry the weight of a man or a lesser animal, but not that of a hippo. Over these branches the builders had spread the papyrus stems.



However, the pitfall had been built a long time previously and both branches and mat had rotted and weakened. They collapsed under Claudia's weight, and she screamed as she dropped through into the pit beneath, screamed again as she hit the sloping side and bounced off it. The bottom of the pit was covered with a few inches of stagnant water that had seeped into it. Claudia landed awkwardly with one leg twisted up under her and then rolled onto her back in the mud.



The breath had been driven from her lungs and there was a fierce pain in her left knee. For a few minutes she could not respond to the faint shouts she heard from above. She sat up, clutching her injured knee to her chest and gasping wildly to fill her agonized lungs. At last she managed a strangled shout.



"Here! I'm here!"



"Are you all right?" Sean's head appeared above her, peering down anxiously.



"I think so!" she gasped, and tried to stand up, but the pain shot through her knee and she fell back. "My knee," she said.



"Hold on. I'm coming down." Sean's head withdrew. She heard voices, Job and Matatu and her father. Then a coil of nylon rope dropped down toward her, unfurling as it fell. Sean lowered himself swiftly down the rope and dropped the last few feet to land with a splash in the mud beside her.



"I'm sorry," she said contritely. "I guess I've done it again."



"Don't apologize." He grinned. "I'm not conditioned to it. For once it's not your fault. Let's take a look at your leg."



He squatted beside her. "Move your foot. Capital! Can you bend your knee? Splendid! At least no bones broken. That's a relief. Let's get you out of this hole." He tied a loop in the end of the rope, slipped it over her head and shoulders, and settled it under her armpits.



"Okay, Job," he called up. "Take her up. Gently, man, gently."



As soon as they reached ground level, Sean made a more thorough examination of her knee.



He rolled up the leg of her jeans and said, "Shit!"



As a Scout commander he had extensive experience of the type of injury a paratrooper is prone to-broken bones, torn cartilage, sprained ligaments in ankle and knee. Already Claudia's knee was ballooning and the first tinge of bruising colored the smooth tanned skin.



"This might hurt a little," he warned, and manipulated her leg gently.



"Ouch!" she said. "That's damned sore."



"Okay." He nodded. "It's the medial ligament. I don't think you've torn it, it would be more painful if you had. Probably just sprained it."



"What does that mean?" she asked.



"Three days," he replied. "You won't be walking on it for at least three days."



He put his arm around her shoulders. "Can you stand up?" he asked. When she nodded, he helped her to her feet. She leaned against him, standing on her good leg.



"Try putting a little weight on it," he said.



immediately she exclaimed with pain. "No, I can't use it."



He stopped, picked her up in his arms as though she were a child, and carried her back to the village. She was surprised by his strength, and although her knee was beginning to throb, she relaxed in his arms. It was a good feeling. Papa had carried her like this when she was a little girl, and she had to resist the urge to lay her head against Sean's shoulder.



When they reached the village, he set her down in the clearing, and Matatu ran to fetch his pack. Her injury had diverted Riccardo's attention from his own troubles, and he came to fuss over his little girl in a way which ordinarily would have annoyed her.



Now she submitted to it, thankful for his revived animation and attention.



Sean strapped the knee with an elastic bandage from his first aid kit and gave her an anti inflammatory tablet to swallow with hot tea.



"That's about all we can do for it," he told her, and sat back.



"Only thing that will fix it is time.



"Why did you say three days?"



"It takes that long. I've seen a hundred knees just like yours, except that they were usually a lot more hairy and not nearly as pretty. "That's a compliment." She raised an eyebrow. "You're getting soft, Colonel."



"Part of the treatment, and of course totally insincere," he assured her with a grin. "The only question now, ducky, is what on earth are we going to do with you?"



"Leave me here," she said promptly.



"Are you out of your mind?" he asked. Riccardo backed him up immediately.



"That's out of the question."



"Look at it this way," she reasoned calmly. "I can't move for three days, by which time your elephant will be long gone, Papa."



She held up her hand to forestall his argument. "We can't go back.



You can't carry me. I can't walk. We would have to sit here anyway."



"We can't leave you alone. Don't be ridiculous."



"No," she agreed. "But you can leave someone to look after me while you go on after Tukutela."



"No." Riccardo shook his head.



"Sean," she appealed to him. "Make him see that it's the sensible thing to do."



He stared at her, and the admiration she saw in his gaze gave her a full warm feeling in her chest.



"Damn it" he said softly. "You're all right."



"Tell him it'll only be for a few days, Sean. We all know how much that elephant means to Papa. I want to give it to him as She almost said "last gift," but then she changed it to "as MY my special gift to him."



"I can't accept it, tesoro. " Riccardo's voice was gruff but blurred, and he lowered his head to hide his feelings.



"Make him go, Sean," Claudia insisted, gripping his forearm firmly. "Tell him I'll be as safe here with Job to look after me as I would be in the swamp with the two of you."



"She just may have a point, Capo," Sean said. "But, hell, it's not my business. It's between the two of you."



"Will you leave us alone, Sean?" Claudia asked. Without waiting for a reply, she turned to her father. "Come and sit here next to me, Papa." She patted the ground beside her. Sean stood up and walked away, leaving them together in the gathering darkness.



He went to sit beside Job. They sat in the companionable silence of old friends, drinking tea and smoking one of Sean's last cheroots, passing it back and forth between them.



An hour passed. It was dark before Riccardo came to where the two of them sat. he stood over them and his voice was rough and drawn with sadness.



"All right, Sean," he said. "She has convinced me to do as she wants. Will you make the arrangements to go on with the hunt first thing tomorrow morning? And, Job, will you stay here and look after my little girl for me?"



"I'll look after her for you, sir," he agreed. "You just go kill that elephant. We'll be here when you come back."



Working in the moonlight, they moved out of the burned-out village and built a fly camp a few hundred meters back in the forest.



They made a lean-to shelter for Claudia and under it placed a mattress of cut grass. Sean left the medical kit and most of their remaining provisions in the shelter with her. He detailed both Job and Dedan to remain with Claudia. Job would keep the light 30/06 rifle with the fiberglass stock, and Dedan had his ax and skinning knife.



"Send Dedan back to keep an eye on the isthmus. Any Frelimo or Renamo patrols will come that way. At the first sign of trouble, get the girl into the swamp and hide out on one of the islands."



Sean gave Job his final orders, then sauntered across to where Riccardo was taking leave of his daughter.



"Are you ready, Capo?"



Riccardo stood up quickly and walked away from Claudia without looking back.



"Don't get into any more trouble," Sean told her.



"You neither." She looked up at him. "And Sean, take care of Papa for me."



He squatted down in front of her and offered her his hand as he would have if she had been a man. He tried to think of something witty to say but could not.



"Okay, then?" he asked instead.



"Okay, then," she agreed. He stood up and walked down to the edge of the swamp where Matatu, Pumula, and Riccardo were waiting for him beside the dugout canoe.



Matatu took up his position in the bow of the frail craft, while Sean and Riccardo were amidships, sitting on their depleted packs and holding their rifles across their laps. Pumula stood in the stern with one of the freshly cut punt poles and propelled the dugout in response to Matatu's hand signals.



Within seconds of pushing off from the bank they were surrounded by a high palisade of papyrus and their view was restricted to the wall of reeds and the small patch of lemon-yellow dawn sky overhead. As they passed, the sharp, pointed leaves of the reeds dashed into their faces, threatening their eyes, and the webs the tiny swamp spiders had spun between the stems of the reeds wrapped over their faces, sticky and irritating. The night's clammy chill hung over the swamp, and when they came out suddenly into an open lagoon, there was a heavy mist lying over the surface and a flock of whistling ducks alarmed the dawn with the clatter of their wings.



The dugout was heavily overloaded with the four men aboard.



There was only an inch or so of freeboard, and if any one of them moved suddenly, water slopped on board. They were forced to use the tea billy to bail almost continually, but Matatu signaled them on.



The sun rose above the papyrus, and immediately the mist twisted into rising tendrils and was gone. The water lilies opened their cerulean blossoms and turned them to face the sunrise. Twice the four saw large crocodiles lying with just their eye knuckles exposed. They sank below the surface as the dugout slid toward them.



The swamp was alive with birds. Bitterns and secretive night herons lurked in the reed beds and little chocolate-brown jacanas danced over the lily pads on their long legs, while goliath herons as tall as a man fished the back waters of the lagoons. Overhead flew formations of pelicans and white egrets, cormorants and darters with serpentine necks, and huge flocks of wild ducks of a dozen Merent species.



The heat built up swiftly and was reflected from the surface of the water into their faces so that the two white men were soon sweating through their shirts. At places the water was only a few inches deep and they were forced to climb out and drag the dugout through to the next channel or lagoon. Under the matted reeds the mud was black and foul-smelling and reached to their knees.



In the shallower places the elephant's pads had left deep circular water-filled craters in the mud banks The spoor of the old bull led them ever deeper into the swamplands, but there was consolation in the swift progress the dugout made across the lagoons and channels, thrust on by the long punt pole. For a while Sean spelled Pumula in the stern, but soon Pumula could no longer abide his clumsy strokes and took the pole away from him.



There was room for only one man to stretch out in the bottom of the dugout. Riccardo slept in it that night while the others sat waist deep in the mud, leaning against the hull of the canoe and taking what rest the clouds of mosquitoes allowed them.



Early the following morning, when Sean stood up out of the mud, he found that his bare legs were swarming with black leeches.



The repulsive worms were attached to his skin, bloated with the blood they had sucked from him. Sean used a little of their precious supply of salt to rid himself of them. To pull them loose would leave a wound into which the leech had injected anticoagulants and which would continue to bleed profusely and probably become infected. However, a dab of salt on each leech made them twist and contort with agony and then fall off, leaving only a scaled wound on the skin.



When he opened his trousers, Sean found they had crawled up into the cleft between his buttocks and were hanging like black grapes from his genitalia. He shuddered with horror as he worked on them, while safely in the dugout Riccardo watched with interest and made a facetious comment: Hey, Sean, this must be the first time you've ever objected to a bit of head!"



Sean set the end of the punt pole in the mud and steadied it while Matatu shinned up it like a monkey and peered ahead. When he came down he told Sean, "I can see the islands. We are very close.



We will be there before noon, and unless Tukutela has heard us, he will be on one of the islands."



Sean knew from flights over the area and from study of his large-scale map that the islands formed a chain between the swamplands and the main channel of the Zambezi. They dragged the dugout through the shallows, Sean hauling on the nylon rope tied to the bow and Purnula and Matatu shoving in the stern.



When Riccardo offered to assist, Sean told him, "Take a free ride, Capo. I want you nicely rested so you don't have any excuses if you mess up your shot at Tukutela."



At last Sean saw the fronds of the palm trees rising above the screen of papyrus ahead. Abruptly the water deepened, and he went under to his chin. He dragged himself out and they all clambered back on board. Pumula poled them through to the first island. The vegetation was so dense that it overhung the water, and they had to push their way through to reach the shore.



The earth was gray and sandy, leached by a million floods, but it was good to have dry land underfoot. Sean spread out their wet clothing and equipment to dry while Matatu slipped away to make a circuit of the island. The water had just boiled in the billy when Matatu was back.



"Yes." He nodded at Sean. "He passed here yesterday early, while we were leaving the village, but he has settled down now. The peace of the river is upon him, and he feeds quietly. He left this island at sunrise this morning."



"Which way did he go?" Sean asked.



Matatu pointed. "There is another larger island close by."



AMULet's take a look."



Hill, Sean poured a mug of tea for Riccardo and left him with Pumula while he and Matatu skirted the northern shore, forcing their way through the dense growth until they reached the base of the tallest tree on the island and climbed into its top branches.



Sean settled into a high crotch of the tree, snapped off the few leafy twigs that obscured his view, and gazed out on a scene of magnificent desolation.



He was sixty feet above the island and could see to the misty horizon. The Zambezi flowed past the island. Its waters were an opaque glassy green so wide that distance had reduced the great trees that lined the far bank to a dark band that separated green water from the high alps of cumulus cloud that soared anvilheaded into the blue African sky.



The Zambezi flowed so swiftly that its surface was ruffled by eddies and whirlpools and wayward countercurrents. Floating carpets of swamp grass had been torn loose by the current and sailed past, seeming as substantial as the island beneath him. Sean thought about crossing that forbidding river in the frail dugout. It would take more than one trip to get them all across, and he abandoned the idea. There was only one way out, and that was back the way they had come.



He transferred his attention to the chain of islands that stood like sentinels between the mother river and her spreading swamps.

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