06 African Adventure Read online

Hal took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from the headman’s face. He put his fingers on the sick man’s pulse, watching the second hand of his watch. When he removed the thermometer and looked at the reading, he said:

  ‘No wonder you feel uncomfortable with a temperature of 103 and a ninety pulse. How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Since midnight.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘Headache. Chills. Shivering. I thought I would shake apart. They told me the air was warm, but to me it was icy cold.’

  ‘And your appetite?’

  The chief turned his head away with a disgusted expression on his face.

  ‘I cannot bear the thought of eating. That is what sickened me most - the idea of swallowing the bloody heart of the leopard. I am sure it would rise again at once.’

  ‘Do you have pain?’

  ‘Everywhere. In every joint, every bone. I could not say where there is pain, for there is no place where it is not.’

  ‘It sounds to me,’ Hal said, ‘like an acute attack of malaria.’

  He took a medical booklet from his kit and turned to malaria. Then he explored the contents of the black box and picked out two bottles, one marked paludrine and the other quinine. He removed one tablet of the first drug, two of the other. He turned to the witchdoctor.

  ‘Will you bring me a little water?’

  The wizard angrily refused. Toto slipped out to the village well and returned with water in an ostrich shell. The chief willingly took the tablets and washed them down.

  He paid no attention to the excited protests of his witchdoctor.

  ‘Now, try to sleep,’ Hal said. ‘In a few hours I’ll be back. I expect you to be much better.’

  ‘But if I am worse, my people will make you suffer. I think you had better not come back.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Hal said, and rose to leave the hut

  The witchdoctor suddenly lunged forward and jerked the leopard from Roger’s arms. Roger struggled to get it back.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ Hal said sharply. ‘There are only three of us. Do you want to get into a fight with forty men? What’s the witchdoctor saying, Toto?’

  ‘He says he will keep the leopard. If the chief recovers, the leopard will be returned to us. If the chief does not recover, the leopard will be killed.’

  Worried about his pet, Roger took it out on Hal. ‘Are you going to let them get away with this? What a milksop you’ve turned out to be! You know they’ll cut that cat into little pieces as soon as we get out of the village. Why don’t you do something?’

  ‘Come on, you little hothead,’ Hal replied, ‘before you get us into real trouble.’

  The two brothers and Toto started down the hill. A stone caught Hal squarely between the shoulder-blades. The pain made him wince, but he did not turn round. Roger, who had often seen his elder brother’s courage, could not understand him now. Hal only said:

  ‘Better a stone than a poisoned arrow. Really, I don’t blame them. They’re worried about their chief.’

  ‘Well they have a nasty way of showing it,’ Roger growled.

  At noon the three returned to the village. Men, women, and children ran out to meet them with smiles and friendly chatter.

  ‘He must be better,’ Hal guessed.

  The chief was still lying down, but his eyes were bright and his greeting was warm. T’m all right,’ he said. ‘Just weak.’

  Hal found that his temperature had dropped four degrees, his pulse was normal, the chills and the aches were gone.

  Roger was looking anxiously about.

  ‘Bring in the boy’s leopard,’ the chief ordered. A man fetched the small animal and put it into Roger’s arms.

  Everybody seemed very happy - nearly everybody. The only sour puss left was the witchdoctor.

  It was a bad day for him. His people were laughing at him. His magic had failed. The sacrifice of a goat had not cured the chief. He had failed to take the heart of the leopard. Two boys had stopped him. The high and mighty witchdoctor, stopped by two boys! And one of these boys had cured the chief!

  But the witchdoctor was not done. He was raving and ranting to everyone who would listen.

  ‘What is he saying?’ Hal asked Toto.

  ‘He says the chief is not cured. He says this is only the last flash of life before death, just as a star is brightest before it drops out of sight. He tells the people that the chief will die. You have poisoned him with the small white things you put in his mouth. And the glass tube you gave him to suck…’

  ‘The thermometer?’

  ‘Yes. It had something red in it. He says it was a deadly poison. It is a poison that makes a man feel better just before he dies. But the chief will surely die. And the spirits will punish all in the village because they did not trust their witchdoctor. So he tells the people.’

  ‘Do they believe him?’

  ‘Their minds are divided. They are happy that the chief is better. But if he dies they will believe you murdered him. They will believe their witchdoctor was right, and he will once more be great in their eyes.’

  ‘And I will be very small.’

  ‘You will be nothing. They will kill you as they would kill a rat.’

  ‘That’s what I like about you, Toto,’ Hal said. ‘You make everything sound so jolly.’

  He gave his patient another tablet of paludrine and two of quinine. There was a disturbance at the door and Mali came pushing through the crowd. Breathless from his run up the hill from the camp, he could only gasp:

  ‘Bwana … buffalo … many!’

  Hal did not need to know more. For days he had been watching for buffalo. Three were wanted by the London Zoo. He made his apologies to the chief.

  ‘You will forgive me if I leave at once. But I will come back to see if you are still improving.’

  ‘Thank you, my son.’ The words, and the smile that went with them, repaid Hal for all his trouble.

  As the three made their way to the door, the witchdoctor’s voice rose shrill and harsh above the talk of the crowd. Toto interpreted his words.

  ‘The chief will die. The chief will die.’

  ‘I suppose nothing would please him more,’ Hal remarked.

  Chapter 13

  Charge of the heavy brigade

  From the hill they saw the buffalo. There were about a hundred of the big black beasts.

  They looked like a hundred thunder-clouds. They didn’t seem to belong in this land of warmth and sunshine. They could start a storm that would be worse than any that could come out of the sky. They looked as if they were aching to do just that.

  The entire herd was turned in one direction, facing the Hunt camp. They didn’t seem to like what they saw. An African buffalo never seems to like anything. An elephant or a lion or even a hyena has his pleasant moments, but a buffalo always looks as if he had got out of bed the wrong side. His angry red eyes glare out of an ugly, inky-black face, and he stands with his head stretched forward as if trying to reach you with those spear-pointed horns. They are the toughest and stubbornest horns worn by any beast in Africa. A big bull will measure four feet from the tip of one horn to the tip of the other. And he has a ton on four feet ready to push those horns through anything that doesn’t please him.

  ‘If they take a notion to hit the camp,’ Hal said, ‘they’ll flatten those tents as if a steam-roller had gone over them.’

  The thought that their father, helpless on his cot, would not be able to escape such a stampede took the boys on the run down the hill.

  They found the camp busy preparing for the battle with the thunder-clouds on four legs. The men were busy revving up the motors of the trucks. A take-‘emalive safari, if it hopes to catch and carry many large animals, must be well equipped with cars, and there were fourteen in the Hunt outfit.

  Not one of them was anything like the family car seen in city streets. They were heavy trucks and lorries, made heavier by metal rods and plates to enable them to stand the terrific
banging over rocks, into holes, over anthills, and hummocks.

  The lightest of them were the heavy, solid Land-Rovers, armour-plated like army tanks and equipped with four-wheel drive to get them out of bad bogs or deep sand. Then there were the stout Ford and Chev ‘catchers’, intended for chasing the big animals, and the big four-ton Bedfords and Land-Rovers, each carrying one or several huge crates or cages, in which the animals would be placed after they were nabbed by the catchers.

  ‘Our first job is to protect the camp,’ Hal said. He ordered the men to drive the cars up into position facing the buffalo. There they lined up with the camp behind them. In front of them, some five hundred yards away, was the black herd. The two armies, one of metal and the other of muscle, glowered at each other.

  Hal dashed into his father’s tent to report on what he had done.

  That’s fine,’ John Hunt said. ‘That ought to make them think twice. Trouble is, most of them leave the thinking to the big bulls in the front row. If just one of those bulls takes a notion to charge, all the rest will follow, like sheep. But that’s the only way they’re like sheep. They can be mighty mean. If they start to charge, there is only one thing to do - charge back.’

  Hal ran out to instruct the men.

  ‘If they start coming, go to meet them!’

  The fourteen drivers kept their motors going. Hal hurriedly appointed others to climb aboard certain of the trucks, so that they would be on hand to help when the time came for the catching and caging.

  He did not forget that the whole safari numbered only thirty men, and he must leave enough of them in camp to defend it in case there was a surprise attack. For he knew the reputation of the buffalo - these beasts are as smart as they are mean. If they cannot attack you in front, they have the unpleasant habit of sneaking round and coming up on you from behind. Many hunters regard them as the most dangerous big game in Africa.

  The elephant is larger, but sometimes sweet-tempered. The buffalo doesn’t know what sweet temper is. Some big game, such as the rhino, cannot see very well, some cannot hear very well, some cannot smell very well. The buffalo can see, hear, and smell perfectly.

  You can dodge some animals. You can’t dodge a buffalo, because he is quick on his feet and will turn when you turn.

  If another big animal gets you down and you play dead, he may wander away. Not so the buffalo. He isn’t satisfied to have you merely dead, he wants you flat. He will trample upon you until you are as thin as a French pancake.

  Roger, unwilling to be left in camp, boarded a Powerwagon. Hal jumped in beside the driver of a Ford catcher. He was not too happy to discover that the driver was Joro, the man who had sworn to kill him. But there was no time now to think of such matters.

  Over the coal-black bodies of the buffalo floated snow-white egrets. Some of them perched on the broad backs, plucking out insects from the cracks in the hide. Most of them circled in the air, sharing the excitement of the animals below them.

  The lovely birds, whose feathers are prized for their beauty, contrasted oddly with the ugly monsters beneath them. Here was certainly a case of beauty and the beast. The black army seemed to be waving white flags.

  Usually the white flag means surrender, but it was not so this time. Pawing the ground and snorting defiantly, the buffalo had no idea of giving up or running away.

  Buffalo fear only two enemies. One is the lion, the other is the gun. They did not see either lions or guns, so why should they be afraid?

  They saw men. A man has no horns, and it would take a dozen men to equal a buffalo in weight and more than that to match his strength.

  Hal had hoped the buffalo would be worried by the lineup of cars. But to a buffalo’s eyes perhaps these things looked like houses or tents, nothing to be afraid of. And Hal himself was not so sure of victory when it occurred to him that this was going to be a contest between about thirty tons of car against a hundred tons of buffalo.

  But how about noise? Many creatures were sensitive to noise. Hal put his hand on the horn-button and held it there. The drivers of the other cars got the idea, and fourteen powerful horns let out a roar that sent up the egrets in a white cloud and started the baboons down by the river chattering with terror.

  Instead of turning tail, the buffalo set up a tremendous bellowing that quite drowned the sound of the horns.

  They howled back at the noise as a dog may howl at music. The horn-blowers gave up. The deep-voiced choir continued for a few moments, then it also fell silent.

  A few of the bulls in the front line began to lose interest in the show. They started to graze on the sweet grass. They no longer faced forwards like an army about to march. Some turned broadside, and Hal began to hope that the danger of a charge was over.

  Then who should run out in front of the cars but the crazy colonel! He was carrying his -470. Hal remembered that Bigg had said he wanted a buffalo head. Now he saw his chance to get one. Hal shouted: ‘Bigg! Don’t shoot! Comeback!’ Bigg paid no attention. He raised his gun and levelled it on a huge bull, one of the leaders.

  Hal leaped from the truck and ran. Before he could reach Bigg, the gun fired. Bigg turned in time to receive a smashing blow in the face from Hal’s fist. The gun flew from his hands and he fell in a heap.

  The herd began to bellow again, but this rime they were not singing to the music of a car-horn orchestra. The bulls were roaring with rage, the cows were making loud snorts of alarm, the calves were mooing and running to their mothers for protection.

  The bull that had been the colonel’s target was far from dead. The bullet had torn open his forehead. The thickness of the bone had prevented it from reaching the brain. The colonel had accomplished just one thing. He had turned this animal into a devil. An animal that had been only curious was now furious. A wounded buffalo thinks only of revenge.

  The bellowing bull tossed his head, flinging a spray of blood into the air from his wound, and then came on like a runaway locomotive, straight for Colonel Bigg.

  A moment before, there had been a good chance that the whole herd would start grazing and walk away. Now that chance was gone. The wounded bull had not taken two strides before every adult animal in the herd was on the move. On they came, a bellowing wave of black fury.

  Hal, back in the truck, nudged Joro. The car leaped forward, and so did every other car at almost the same instant. They moved just in time to save Colonel Bigg from being trampled to death by the animal he had wounded. They shot past him and closed in so that the bull could not reach him. He dizzily picked himself up, got his gun, and staggered back to camp.

  Meanwhile the black avalanche he had started came on and the pounding hooves made the earth shake. The animals in the front row could not have stopped now if they had wanted to. Those behind pushed them on. Dust rose in great clouds and through the clouds screamed the white birds.

  The buffalo did not seem in the least terrified by the fourteen iron monsters roaring in to meet them. The drivers did not try to go round rocks and ridges. The trucks bounced and leaped like bucking broncos.

  Roger found himself half the time in the air. At every bounce he went up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He was whanged at both ends, his head against the roof, his rear against the hard seat.

  Then the two armies met. Such a roaring of motors and bellowing of buffalo and excited shrieking of baboons and birds and all other creatures within earshot surely could never have been heard before in this quiet river valley.

  Heavy heads crashed into radiators, bent and twisted the metal, broke open the coils, spilled the water, and brought the cars to a shuddering halt. The horns of a buffalo join on the forehead in a boss of solid bone four inches thick, giving him a terrific battering-ram. Fenders were crumpled as if they had been cardboard, bumpers were broken, headlights smashed.

  The shock of the collision threw men forward out of their seats against the windscreens, and one windscreen was struck even harder from the outside when a bull making a mighty leap landed on the bo
nnet and his great helmet of bone smashed the glass.

  Four bulls concentrating on one truck pushed it backwards, slewed it sideways and toppled it upside-down. The car did not burst into flames. The quick-thinking African driver, when he saw the four black bulldozers about to crash into his vehicle, had turned off the ignition.

  Vultures streamed down out of the sky. They always appeared as if by magic whenever there seemed a promise of death.

  Here there was more than a promise. No man had been killed, but three of the animals lay motionless, blood streaming from their wounds. Their rock-hard heads had not suffered, but their necks or flanks had been gouged by their metal enemies. They would never again test their strength against a truck. Others, lying stunned for a while, got unsteadily to their feet. They shook their heads, rolled their eyes, but could not make up their minds to charge again. They turned to go. The rest of the herd hesitated.

  The drivers of all cars able to move were watching Hal’s car, for he was their leader.

  ‘Go ahead - slowly,’ Hal told Joro. The truck inched forward. The others did the same.

  It was just enough to discourage the buffalo from further attack. One after another the big brutes turned tail and began to trot away.

  Chapter 14

  Buffalo hunt

  This was the end of the battle. But not the end of the war.

  The real job was still to be done. Three buffalo must be caught and caged.

  Hal shouted instructions to the drivers of the trucks on either side, and they passed the word down the line. All trucks were to return to camp except two - Hal’s Ford Catcher and the Powerwagon carrying Roger. Hal knew this his brother would want to be in on the chase. Operators of the other cars must stand ready to drive out at once if their help was needed. Hal called some of the extra men to ride in the rear of Roger’s truck and his own.

  Hal slipped out into the catcher’s chair. This is a small seat outside the cab. It is strapped to the right front fender. The man who is to do the catching must sit in this chair.

  He holds a long pole with a noose at the end. The idea is to get the noose over the head of the running animal, but this is more easily said than done.