'Shasa, this arrived for you this morning and it has been cluttering up the house all day. Please get rid of it, whatever it is." Centaine had lived on alone at Rhodes Hill for almost a year after Blair's death before Shasa had been able to persuade her to close the L ,use up and return to Weltevreden. Now she ran a strict routine to which they were all expected to conform.
'Now what on earth is this?" Shasa tentatively attempted to lift one end of the long package, and then grunted. 'It's made of lead, whatever it is." 'Hold on, Pater,' Garry called from the top of the staircase. 'You'll bust something." He came bounding down the stairs, three at a time.
'I'll do that for you - where do you want it?" 'The gun room will do. Thanks, Garry." Garry enjoyed showing off his strength and he lifted the heavy package easily, and manoeuvred it down the passageway, then through the gun-room door and laid it on the lion skin in front of the fireplace.
'Do you want me to open it?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer went to work on it.
Isabella perched on the desk, determined not to miss anything, and none of them spoke until Garry had stripped away the last sheet of hessian and stood back.
'It's magnificent,' Shasa breathed. 'I have never seen anythi quite like that in my life before." It was a single tusk of curved ivor almost ten foot long, as thick as a pretty girl's waist at one end or tapering to a blunt point at the other.
'It must weigh almost a hundred and fifty pounds,' Garry sail 'But just look at the workmanship." Shasa knew that the ivory workers of Zanzibar were the only from who could do something like this. The entire length of the tusk ha been carved with hunting scenes of exquisite detail and the fine execution.
'It's beautiful." Even Isabella was impressed. 'Who sent it to you' 'There is an envelope --' Shasa pointed to the litter of discarde, wrappings, and Garry picked it out and passed it to him.
The envelope contained a single sheet of notepaper.
In camp on the Tona rive Dear Dad, Kenya.
Happy birthday - I'll be thinking of you on the day. This is my best jumb to date - 146 lbs. before the carving.
Why don't you come hunting with me?
Love, Sean With the note in one hand, Shasa squatted beside the tusk ant stroked the creamy smooth surface. The carvings depicted a herd all elephant, hundreds of them in a single herd. From old bulls and breeding cows to tiny calves, they fled in a long spiral frieze around the ivory shaft, diminishing in elegant perspective towards the point.
The herd was harassed and attacked by hunters along its length, beginning with men in lionskins armed with bows and poisoned arrows, or with broad-bladed elephant spears; towards the end of this primeval cavalcade the hu0ters were on horseback and wielding modern firearms. The path of the herd was strewn with great fallen carcasses, and it was beautiful and real and tragic.
However, it was neither the beauty nor the tragedy that thickened Shasa's voice as he said, 'Will you two leave me alone, please." He did not look around at them, he did not want them to see his face.
For once Isabella did not argue, but took Garry's hand and led him from the room.
'He hasn't forgotten my birthday,' Shasa murmured, as he stroked the ivory. 'Not once since he left." He coughed and stood up abruptly, jerked the handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew his nose loudly and then wiped his eyes.
'And I haven't even written to him, I haven't even replied to one of his letters." He stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket and went to stand at the window, staring out over the lawns where the peacocks strutted. 'The stupid cruel thing is that he has always been my favourite of the three of them. Oh God, I'd give anything to see him again." The rain was icy grey, drifting like smoke over the thick forests of bamboo that cloaked the crests of the Aberdare Mountains.
The four of them moved in single file with the Ndorobo tracker on the point, following the spoor in the forest earth that beneath the litter of 'fallen bamboo leaves was the colour and consistency of molten chocolate.
.Sen Courtney took the second position, covering the tracker and poisedto make any quick decision. He was the youngest of the three white Then but command had quite naturally devolved upon him.
Nobody had contested it.
The third man in the line, Alistair Sparks, was the youngest son of a Kenyan settler family. Although he possessed enormous powers of endurance, was a fine natural shot and a consummate bushman, he was lazy and evasive and needed to be pushed to exercise all his skills to the full.
Raymond Harris was on the drag at number four. He was almost fifty years old, full of malaria and gin, but in his time had been one of the l-gendary white hunters of East Africa. He had taught Sean everyth lg he knew, until the pupil had excelled the master. Now Raymond was content to bring up the rear and let Sean and Matatu, the tracker, get them into position for the kill.
Matatu was naked except for his filthy tattered loincloth and the rain made tiny rivulets down his glossy black hide. He worked the spoor with the same instinct and superhuman sense of sight, smell and hearing, as one of the wild animals of the forest. They had been following these tracks for two days already, stopping only when the light failed completely each night, and taking up the chase again with the first flush of dawn.
The spoor was running sweet and hot. Sean was probably as good a tracker as a white man could be and he judged that they were only four or five hours behind and gaining swiftly. The quarry had angled up the steep slope of this nameless peak, heading to cross the ridge just below the main crest. Sean caught glimpses of the top through the dense vault of bamboo over their heads and the blown streamers of misty rain.
Suddenly Matatu stopped dead, and Sean popped his tongue to warn the others and froze with his thumb on the safety-catch of the big double-barrelled Gibbs.
After a moment Matatu turned abruptly aside, dropping the spoor, and went sliding as swiftly and silently as a dark serpent down the slope, away from the line and direction of the quarry.
Five years before, when Sean had first taken Matatu into his service, he might have protested and tried to force him to stay with the run of the spoor, but now he followed without argument, and although he was going at his best hunting speed, he just managed to hold the tracker in sight.
Sean was dressed in a cloak of colobus monkey skins and he wore Somali sandals of elephant hide on his feet and a shaggy cap of monkey skin covered his obviously Caucasian hair. His arms, legs and face were blackened with a mixture of rancid hippo fat and soot, and he had not bathed in two weeks. He looked and smelled like the men he was hunting.
There were five Mau Mau in the band that they were pursuing, all of them members of the notorious gang run by the self-styled General Kimathi. Five days previously they had attacked one of the coffee shambas near Nyeri in the foothills of the mountain range. They had disembowelled the white overseer and stuffed his severed genitals into his mouth, and they had chopped off his wife's limbs with the heavy-bladed pangas, beginning at wrist and ankle and working gradually towards the trunk of her body, until they hacked through the great joints in her shoulders and groin.
Sean and his group of scouts had reached the shamba almost twelve hours after the gang had fled. They had left the Land-Rover and taken the spoor on foot.
Matatu took them directly down the slope. The narrow river at the bottom was a tumultuous silver torrent. Sean stripped off his furs and sandals and went into it naked. The cold chilled his bones until they ached and the roaring water swirled over his head but he carried the line across and then brought the others safely over.