Echoes From A Distant Land Part 13

'I see.'

'I'm told she was having trouble keeping her roses safe. An old female elephant would come some nights to pluck and eat every last one of them. Sister Rosalba would rush outside and chase her away. One night, she went out, thinking it was the same elephant, but it was a young bull.' She wrung her thin white fingers together. 'It must have been awful for the sisters. She had been thrown to the ground and ... crushed.'

Sam thanked her and headed back to his parents' compound, but he wasn't ready to meet more friends and relatives. He took a side path that he recalled led to the stream that supplied the village. It was at this stream he'd once seen a leopard, thinking it was an irimu - a spirit. He remembered he almost wept at the power and the beauty of it; even now there were tears in his eyes recollecting it.

But it wasn't the memory of a leopard that brought on his melancholy. It was Sister Rosalba's face that came back from beyond his years of absence. How could he have so cruelly ignored her letters? She had given him a hunger for knowledge, even when that knowledge was difficult to accept. If G.o.d didn't dwell on Kirinyaga, where else could he live? It was she who had planted a seed in his mind that sprouted as soon as the light of an opportunity appeared. It would have taken so little effort to respond to her letters, and to have her pa.s.s on his love to his family.

He could see her bustling among the children, her veil flying behind, while in pursuit of some urgent matter, probably a child in distress. Sam recalled her as always busy, always hurrying, but what had she achieved? Within the context of his experiences in America he now knew more about the life Sister Rosalba had left behind in Rome, or whatever other city had been her home. How could she leave that sophistication and find satisfaction in teaching dirt-ignorant kids in a little place like Igobu? And then to die here, suddenly and ignominiously, under the large flat pad of an elephant. It was too bizarre and too wasteful of a life that might have achieved something useful elsewhere. He tried to imagine his own life continuing on the path he was taking until Ira lifted him from it. He shuddered.

He returned to his father's hut, his eyes still hot with tears, but he had lost the ability to socialise. His family pressed him to stay overnight, but he couldn't. He realised the village where he had spent his childhood could never again be home. He left, promising to return another day.

As he headed back to his car, he realised he would find it difficult to keep his promise to return. He had changed too much. It brought to mind another conversation with Sister Rosalba.

He'd been to see the mondo mogo for a love potion to use on Mothoni. The nuns didn't approve of the tribe's witch doctor, and Sister Rosalba challenged him about his beliefs.

'Samson, Samson,' she'd said, shaking her head. 'I know it must be hard for you. On one hand you want to have a good education, one that will see you enter the white man's world. The Lord knows you have the ability. But on the other hand you are first a Kikuyu; and you are now about to become a warrior.'

'Yes, Sister,' he'd said.

'Do you remember what we have taught you about the Kikuyu ways?'

'Yes, Sister.'

'And you remember what we've said about the games you boys play with the girls at this time of your life?'

'Yes, Sister.'

'Hmm, then what is it to be?'

Sam didn't understand the question.

'What do you want to be, Samson? A Kikuyu warrior or an educated man?'

Remembering his reply now, he was wryly amused by his younger self's naivety.

'Why can't I be both?'

Impossible. He couldn't be both. Not then; not now. His time in America had irretrievably changed him. There was now no choice. The country was racing towards a European culture. He was no longer a warrior. He wasn't sure if he were even a Kikuyu any more.

CHAPTER 16.

Dana awoke with Edward's freckled arm flung across her body and the sheets in a tangle. His chest rose and fell with the rhythmic breathing of sleep and he was softly snoring. She had always found it slightly distasteful to awake beside the man she had been intimate with during the night. It was one of the reasons they didn't share a bedroom.

She knew Edward preferred to sleep where he fell at the end of love-making, and last night Dana had been prepared to be accommodating.

In fact, the whole evening had been composed to please Edward. Dana had unashamedly set out to seduce her husband so he would be in a favourable frame of mind for the matter she intended to raise with him. She knew he would be difficult to convince, but equally, she knew she had to try.

The night had begun as it usually did. They dressed for dinner, although there was just the two of them. She wore a clinging silk gown that swept the floor. It was a little old-fas.h.i.+oned and she seldom wore it, but it was Edward's favourite.

They made small talk while Faizal, their Somali servant, served the soup. During the appetiser - a very tender guinea fowl - Dana began to act a little flirtatiously. After Faizal had served the impala and coconut main course, Dana told Edward she was wearing the pink suspender belt that he particularly admired under her gown. This sparked his interest, but then during dessert she added that she was wearing no underwear. The night's progression was then almost a.s.sured.

There was a soft knock on the bedroom door. She slipped out from under Edward's arm and, at the door, took the tea tray from Faizal.

'Edward,' she said, as she placed the tray on the table beside her bed. 'Edward, darling. I have your tea.'

Stirring, he snuffled a form of reply.

'Come, darling. Take your tea. It'll pick you up.'

He opened an eye then closed it again. 'Thank you, darling,' he mumbled.

'Come on,' she coaxed. 'You were a lot more energetic last night, my dear.'

He smiled and lifted his head. 'Thanks to your shenanigans,' he said.

Dana chuckled. 'I didn't hear you complaining.'

She had to admit, it had been a successful seduction, culminating in her sitting astride him, suspender belt intact, and riding him to his climax.

He sat up and fondled her bottom through her silk dressing gown as she poured his tea.

'Now stop that,' she chided, and moved out of his reach to add the milk and sugar.

She sat in the armchair and watched as Edward took a tentative sip of his tea.

'Ahh ...!' he said, predictably. Dana could place a bet on which of the many vocal rituals he could use in any one of a range of situations. They included his little homily - G.o.d ...! Save ...! The King! - as he climaxed.

She let the tea revive him before beginning the conversation she'd spent days planning.

'Edward, darling?' she began.

'Hmm ...?'

'You know that we've discussed the matter of having a family of our own.'

There was a pause before he acknowledged her. 'Yes ...'

'Well, I've been thinking about it quite a bit lately.'

She waited for a response. When it didn't come, she went on. 'And I think that now would be a good time to start trying.'

He replaced his cup on the saucer. 'Now?'

'Yes,' she said, keeping her gaze on the bedspread rather than let him see the uncertainty in her eyes.

'Have you considered our lives here?' he asked. 'We would be most circ.u.mscribed by any attempt at a pregnancy. I presume I don't have to remind you that it was your extramarital affairs that put us here in the first place.'

You mean your debts, she thought, but kept her retort to herself.

'Your, ah, needs, Dana, gave rise to our decision to delay that sort of thing. Neither of us is suited to a monogamous relations.h.i.+p. We both know that.'

Dana knew it was silly to want a child under their present circ.u.mstances, but logic had taken flight at dusk on the hill as she watched the matriarch elephant lead her family from the forest to the distant lake.

'Couldn't we just try, and not change anything else?'

'That's preposterous! And have you get pregnant to G.o.d-knows-who? No, it will never do. We will stay with what we agreed; and when we go back to England, well ... we'll review the matter. Until then, I shan't hear another word on the subject.'

The African sky was ink black behind the stars. Across the heavens, the diamante band of the Milky Way was scattered like an unloved trinket. A shooting star appeared like an arrow piercing a black velvet curtain and was quickly gone.

Cool air spilled from the high ridges of the Aberdare Ranges. It rolled onto the farm's high eastern pastures, gathering the earthy scent of mist-moistened gra.s.s, then ambled through the vegetable shamba with its rows of beans, leeks and tomatoes. It played with the petunias around the veranda, where Dana reclined in a cane swing chair gazing at the silver sliver of the moon suspended in the sky like a lantern.

Midnight air, she called it.

The farmhouse, named Zephyr by her overly imaginative husband, creaked and sighed when the cool breeze arrived after twelve hours of hot equatorial sun. Edward had built Zephyr in the style familiar to any Englishman: two storeys, a short veranda skirting the main entrance, bedrooms each side of a central hall, whitewashed brick walls with protruding cas.e.m.e.nt windows and cedar s.h.i.+ngles that ran to the steeply pitched, corrugated-iron roof.

Midnight air. Dana enjoyed the symmetry of it: the warm gentle breeze by day, and the cool breath of night - the bold interloper - sneaking like a lover through the bedroom window when all is quiet.

But it was already five in the morning. Dana had been unable to sleep and had lain awake on her bed for hours in antic.i.p.ation of the excitement of the coming morning. When she finally conceded that sleep was impossible, she pulled on her khaki slacks, her pale green s.h.i.+rt with the many pockets and her leather vest to ward off the morning chill. Walking quietly down the hall, she pa.s.sed Edward's bedroom and the snuffling snores that always followed a night on the whisky, and entered the study, where she took her .350 Rigby Mauser and a double-barrelled shotgun from the gun rack.

She loved the Rigby, but hated the shotgun. The Rigby was slender and potent. Its twenty-six-inch blue-grey barrel could deliver death at great distance and it had a satisfying recoil that knocked Dana's slender frame backwards if she were not properly braced.

The shotgun was ugly and heavy and, with the Rigby, too heavy for one gun bearer. She included it because Bill Judd had told her it was good insurance at close range, but it meant she would have to take Benard, the new boy, to help Jonathan, her regular gun bearer.

The fourth member of their safari would be Ndorobo, who would lead her to her quarry. On dainty feet, the little hunter would scamper into the hills above the farm where he would use his magic to find the hiding place of her lion. 'The night I was born, a lion was also born,' he'd once said in answer to her question about his hunting skills. 'He my brother. I know what he know.' It was the longest conversation he'd ever had with Dana, preferring at other times to use signs and grunts to make himself understood.

In the east, the hulking, shadowed shoulders of the Aberdares appeared against a faintly lighter sky. In silhouette they were enormous, and seemed more savage with their many folds and valleys concealed in the darkness. Among those secluded undulations, in the dappled gra.s.sy clearings before the hills merged into the bamboo forest, Dana's lion would be waiting. She wondered if it would know it was she who had already, if unsuccessfully, stalked it. Would it know that when it wandered into her domain it had set in motion the process of its own destruction? Would it know at the moment of its death that it was not a great white hunter who had bagged it, but a mere woman, part wanderer herself?

It was the antic.i.p.ation that thrilled her. Knowing that the wilderness she was about to enter might prove deadly made her skin tingle. It was like the interval - the heart-stopping moments - between the meeting of eyes between man and woman, and the confirmation that the desire was mutual.

She let her mind wander languidly back to the previous weekend's dinner party. It was a great success. Her present favourite was Archie who, like his wife, Polly, was a great dancer and the life of the party. But it wasn't a matter of choice in these matters, it was luck - that's what made it so exciting - so she had to wait and see what the cards would bring.

'I see you, bibi,' said a voice from the gloom.

She'd not heard him approach. She seldom did. 'I see you, Ndorobo,' she said, although he was still concealed in darkness.

'And bwana?'

'Sleeping.'

Ndorobo always asked, but Edward never joined them on safari. In these matters he chose to let his young wife do as she pleased.

She stood, pushed her fringe back, and captured it under the rim of her hat.

'Bring Jonathan and Benard,' she said. 'We go.'

In the Kenyan highlands, dawn never comes languidly from sleep. It leaps upon the landscape like a ravenous beast, devouring morning mists, tossing golden dawn colours into sleeping valleys.

Jonathan had arrived at the house owl-eyed, but as soon as Dana handed him the Rigby, he slung it over his shoulder and was immediately alert. Not so the young Benard, who shuffled his feet and let the snout of the shotgun dip dangerously close to the dirt until Jonathan gave him a poke.

Ten minutes from the house, Ndorobo spotted the lion's spoor in the damp soil and pointed it out to Dana. The huge pug mark, missing a claw on the front left paw, proved that the lion that had been stalking Edward's cattle for weeks was still around. Ndorobo had told her it was an old male with a limp, the likely result of a battle lost while trying to retain leaders.h.i.+p of the pride. 'He old. Very angry,' the little man had said sagely, making a pantomime of the old male skulking away, leaving his harem to the younger, stronger victor. He shook his head sadly, and added, 'Very angry, that old one.'

Without the pride to a.s.sist in the hunting, the old lion had grown hungry and in desperation had found easier game on the Northcotes' farm. He had taken two calves and a heifer in the last month.

Ndorobo scuttled among the gra.s.sy tussocks in a widening circle, head down, his skinny rump bobbing, until he found what he was seeking. A second set of pug marks told him the remainder of the story, which he shared with Dana without speaking a word. He swept his hand from the hills to the valley and pastureland. The big male had come out of the Aberdares, used the rocky outcrop on the property's northern boundary for reconnaissance, and pa.s.sed the point they were now standing before heading to the home pasture where the herdsmen had confined the cattle for safety. Another gesture indicated the uproar from the dogs - the barking that had awoken Dana around midnight - at which time the wily predator had retreated back into the hills to await a more favourable opportunity to seize one of Edward's cattle. Ndorobo pointed the way.

Since arriving in the White Highlands nearly five years before, they had always been Edward's cattle because, as he seldom neglected to remind her, his was a landed family. Her antecedents were tinkers and fortune-tellers, as was obvious from her olive skin and emerald eyes. In any case, her motivation was not to save Edward's precious cattle: the lion had broken into the enclosure where she kept her thoroughbred mares and killed one before the staff chased it away.

It was the third time she'd made the journey into the hills in search of the old killer, and she was determined to avenge her loss by making it her last.

Ndorobo headed towards the hills, with Jonathan and the Rigby a pace ahead of Dana. He carried the rifle as all good gun bearers should - over the shoulder pointing forwards, with the b.u.t.t towards Dana. It meant that the Rigby was in arm's reach and in a position ready to be immediately fired. Benard took up the rear with the back-up heavy-calibre shotgun.

They climbed towards the east where the sun was still mercifully concealed behind the high timbered slopes. Even the previous farm owners, in their enthusiasm to supply the colony's insatiable demand for good timber, had made no attempt to clear this rough and broken land, smothered in meandering vines. It remained an outpost of the forest: a reminder of the wilderness that lay beyond the next valley. Occasionally a mist, or the remnants of a cloud, floated past them down the slope, tangling itself in the lianas and wrapping the roots of the soaring podocarpus trees in diaphanous silks.

They approached the crest of the first ridge and sunlight began to spear through the thinning trees. Dana s.h.i.+elded her eyes, but she did so reluctantly, not wis.h.i.+ng to miss the first moment when the glorious panorama was revealed.

Suddenly the ground gave way in a downward tilt. The trees parted and the morning breeze, Edward's zephyr, was chasing the mist away, revealing the verdant pasture with only the occasional giant podocarpus or cedar thrusting into view. This was where Edward had been fattening his cattle and where the old lion had found them easy pickings, before the herd was moved closer to the homestead.

The valley swept past their vantage point through an arc from Mt Kipipiri, carrying a tributary of the Malewa River northwards before it made its long sweeping bend to the west to join Lake Naivasha. On the far side of the valley rose the Aberdare foothills, the first part of which was the formidable and almost impenetrable bamboo forest. It was in this valley that Dana would have to take the lion. To hunt it in the forest was madness.

Dana and the gun bearers rested while Ndorobo inspected the trail ahead. He soon returned, his head bobbing with excitement.

'Hapa chini!' he said, pointing into the valley. 'Simba!'

Dana needed no Swahili to understand he'd found the lion. She and the others hurried after him to the rim of the valley, where Ndorobo stopped and pointed downwards. Straining her eyes for many moments, Dana saw what appeared to be a gra.s.s clump move. She took her field gla.s.ses from Benard, and focused them on the movement. It was her lion, but it was in a clearing and would be impossible to approach without being discovered.

Ndorobo had the answer. He pointed out a game path that swept away to the north and would keep them behind a small ridge until reaching the valley floor. On the north side of the lion there were at least a few small shrubs and trees that would offer some cover. The wind was favourable. Dana nodded and they hurried on behind Ndorobo, who moved across the slope as if floating a few inches above it. The others struggled to keep up.

Dana was perspiring when they reached the broad flat plain. There was a succession of scrubby bushes ahead, but the lion, if it were there at all, was lost in the gra.s.s, which stood three feet high in parts.

Ndorobo seemed to know exactly where it was concealed and led her on without hesitation. After a few moments he stopped and held up his hand, listening. After the exertion of the stalk, where she was almost doubled over to remain below the gra.s.s height, Dana could hear nothing but the blood pulsating in her ears.

Satisfied, Ndorobo continued, this time signalling to her that the lion was close and that they should be very silent.

He took a brief glance over the gra.s.s tops and nodded. Dana raised her eyes slowly. The old male lion was still in the clear, but only fifty yards from it was the beginning of the bamboo that ran up the side of the hill parallel to the lion's path. It appeared to have spotted them.

Jonathan silently handed her the Rigby. Keeping her eye on the lion, she took aim, waiting for it to show more of its flank, but it held its position, staring at them.

Dana knew the best range to attempt a lion kill was no more than sixty yards. She estimated the lion was just under a hundred yards away - the absolute limit recommended for a free-standing shot with the Rigby.

The lion opened its jaws, yawned, and ran its tongue around its lips. It then turned towards the bamboo.

Bill Judd swore that a lion always gave one last look before disappearing into cover.