Assegai

Many months later two horsemen rode stirrup to stirrup along the bank of the Athi river. The grooms followed at a distance, leading the spare horses. The riders wore wide-brimmed slouch hats and carried their lances at rest. Before them, the wide green expanse of the Athi plains stretched to the horizon. It was dotted with herds of zebra, ostriches, impala and wildebeest. A pair of giraffe stared down at them with great dark eyes as they rode past at a distance of only a hundred paces.

‘Sir, I can’t stand it much longer,’ Leon told his favourite uncle. ‘I’ll have to put in for a transfer to another regiment.’

‘I doubt any would have you, my boy. You have a large black mark on your service record,’ said Colonel Penrod Ballantyne, commanding officer of the 1st Regiment, The King’s African Rifles. ‘What about India? I might put in a word for you with a few friends who were in South Africa with me.’ Penrod was testing him.

‘Thank you, sir, but I would never dream of leaving Africa,’ Leon replied. ‘When you were weaned on Nile water you can never break the shackles.’

Penrod nodded. It was the reply he had expected. He took a silver case from his top pocket and tapped out a Player’s Gold Leaf. He put it between his lips and offered one to Leon.

‘Thank you, sir, but I don’t indulge.’ Leon read the engraving on the inside of the lid before his uncle closed it. ‘To Twopence, happy 50th birthday from your adoring wife, Saffron.’ Aunt Saffron had a quirky sense of humour. Her nickname for Penrod had originally been Penny but after all their years of marriage she had decided his value had doubled.

‘Well, sir, if no one else will have me I suppose I’ll just have to put in my papers and resign my commission – I’ve already wasted nearly three years wandering in small circles in the wilderness, getting nowhere, at the behest of Major Snell. I can’t take any more.’

Penrod considered this, but before he could decide on a suitable reply a movement further down the riverbank caught his eye. A warthog boar trotted out of a dense clump of riverine scrub. His curved white tusks almost met above his comically hideous face, which was decorated with the black wart-like protuberances that gave him his name. He carried his tufted tail straight as a ruler, pointing up at the sky. ‘Here we go!’ Penrod shouted. ‘Tally ho and away!’ He kicked his heels into his mare’s flanks and she was off.

Leon raced after him, leaning along the neck of his polo pony as he couched his long pig spear. ‘By God, this one’s a huge brute. Look at those tusks! Up and at him, Uncle!’

Penrod’s mare ran lightly, closing swiftly on the quarry, but Leon’s bay gelding pushed up half a length behind her streaming tail. The warthog heard their hoofs thundering, stopped and looked back. He stared at the charging horses with astonishment, then whipped around and darted away across the plain kicking up puffs of dust with each beat of his sharp little hoofs, but he could not outrun the mare.

Penrod leaned out of the saddle and lined up the point of his spear, aiming at the patch of bald grey skin between the animal’s humped shoulder-blades.

‘Stick him, Twopence!’ In his excitement Leon called the name reserved for exclusive use by his aunt. Penrod showed no sign of having heard. He carried home his charge, the point of his spear arrowing in towards the boar’s withers. But at the last instant the warthog changed direction and doubled back under the mare’s front legs. Even she, bred and trained to follow a bouncing polo ball adroitly, could not counter the manoeuvre and overran the quarry. The spear head glanced off the boar’s tough hide without drawing blood, and Penrod pulled the mare’s head around steeply. She pranced and mouthed the bit, her eyes wild with the excitement of the chase.

‘Come away, my darling! Full tilt and hell for leather!’ Penrod exhorted her, and touched her ribs with blunted rowels. She came around again for the next run, but Leon cut across her line and his pony fastened on the warthog’s hindquarters as though he was attached to it by a leash. Horse and rider stayed with the pig as it twisted, turned and doubled desperately. They went around in a circle, Penrod laughing and shouting advice after them.

‘Stay with him, sir. Watch out for the tusks – he nearly had you there!’ The boar broke back on Leon’s blind side and almost reached the cover of the dense scrub from which he had appeared, but Leon, rising high in his stirrups, switched his spear neatly to his left hand and drove the point between the warthog’s shoulders. The animal took it cleanly through the heart. Leon let the shaft drop back as the gelding passed over the dying beast and the spearhead came free without jarring his wrist. The bright steel and two feet of the shaft behind it shone with the boar’s heart blood. It squealed once and its front legs folded under it. It dropped, slid on its snout, then flopped on to its side, gave three kicks with its back legs and was dead.

‘Oh, well done indeed, sir! A perfect kill!’ Penrod reined in beside his nephew. They were both laughing breathlessly. ‘What was that you called me a minute ago?’

‘I do beg your pardon, Uncle. In the heat of the moment it just slipped out.’

‘Well, slip it back in, you impudent puppy. No wonder Froggy Snell has it in for you. Deep down, I understand and sympathize with him.’

‘It’s been thirsty work. How about a cup of tea, sir?’ Leon changed the subject smoothly.

As soon as Ishmael had seen they had killed, he had parked the tuck wagon in the shade and was already lighting the fire.

‘That is the very least you can do to make amends. Twopence! What is the younger generation coming to?’ Penrod grumbled.

By the time they dismounted the kettle was brewing. ‘Three teaspoons of sugar, Ishmael, and a couple of your ginger snaps,’ Penrod ordered, as he sat in one of the canvas camp chairs in the shade.

‘Your honourable and esteemed lady wife would not like it, Effendi.’

‘My honourable and esteemed lady wife is in Cairo. She will not be partaking,’ Penrod reminded him, and reached for the biscuits as Ishmael placed the plate in front of him. He chewed with pleasure, washed down the crumbs with a swig of tea and smoothed his moustache. ‘So, what do you intend after you’ve resigned your commission, if you won’t go out to India?’

‘It’s Africa for me.’ Leon sipped from his own mug, then said thoughtfully, ‘I thought I might try my hand at elephant hunting.’

‘Elephant hunting?’ Penrod was incredulous. ‘As a profession? As Selous and Bell once did?’

‘Well, it’s always fascinated me, ever since I read the books about their adventures.’

‘Romantic nonsense! You’re thirty years too late. Those old boys had the whole of Africa to themselves. They went where they liked and did as they wanted. This is the modern age. Things have changed. Now there are roads and railways all over the place. No country in Africa is still issuing unrestricted elephant licences that allow the holder to slaughter thousands of the great beasts. All that is over, and a damn good thing too. Anyway, it was a hard, bitter life, dangerous and lonely too, year after year of wandering alone in the wilderness without anyone to talk to in your own language. Put the notion out of your head.’

Leon was crestfallen. He stared into his mug while Penrod fished out and lit another cigarette. ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he admitted at last.

‘Chin up, my boy.’ Penrod’s tone was kindly now. ‘You want to be a hunter? Well, a few men are making a fine living doing just that. They hire themselves out to guide visitors from overseas on safari. There are rich men from Europe and America, royalty, aristocrats and millionaires, who are willing to pay a fortune for the chance to bag an elephant or two. These days, African big-game hunting is all the rage in high society.’

‘White hunters? Like Tarlton and Cunninghame?’ Leon’s face was bright. ‘What a wonderful life that must be.’ His expression crumpled again. ‘But how would I get started? I have no money, and I won’t ask my father for help. He’d laugh at me anyway. And I don’t know anybody. Why would dukes and princes and business tycoons want to come all the way from Europe to hunt with me?’

‘I could take you to see a man I know. He might be willing to help you.’

‘When can we go?’

‘Tomorrow. His base camp is only a short ride out of Nairobi.’

‘Major Snell has given me orders to take a patrol up to Lake Turkana. I have to scout out a location to build a fort up there.’

‘Turkana!’ Penrod snorted with laughter. ‘Why would we need a fort up there?’

‘It’s his idea of fun. When I submit the reports he asks for, he sends them back to me with mocking comments scrawled in the margins.’

‘I’ll have a word with him, ask him to release you briefly for a special assignment.’

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.’