The Angels Weep (26 page)

‘And a guinea on the bag,’ Harry agreed. He
levered a cartridge into the breech of his Lee Enfield rifle and
with one of his wild Indian whoops clapped his heels into his
horse’s flanks and drove straight at the nearest
beasts.

Ralph let him go, and held his own horse down to a trot.
Gently he angled in towards the rolling herds, careful not to
spook them prematurely, letting them concentrate on the flames
behind rather than the hunter ahead. This way he got in really
close, and picked out a good bull in the front rank. He leaned
into the rifle, and aimed into the barrel of the thick neck, just
where the bald scabby hide creased at the front of the
shoulder.

The shot was almost drowned by the din of pounding hooves and
bawling calves, but the bull dropped his nose to the earth, and
somersaulted over it, sliding on his back, kicking convulsively
in his death agony, and bellowing as mournfully as a foghorn in a
winter gale. The herds plunged into full gallop.

Steering his mount with his heels and toes, leaving both hands
free to load and aim and fire, Ralph pressed in against the wall
of dark bodies in gargantuan flight. Sometimes he was so close
that the rifle muzzle was merely inches from a monstrous neck or
shoulder, and the muzzle flash was quick and bright as a lance as
it buried itself in the thick black hide. At each crash of the
rifle, another beast went down, for at that range an experienced
huntsman could make a butchery of it. He fired until the hammer
fell on an empty chamber, and then crammed fresh rounds into the
magazine, and fired again as fast as he could pump the loading
handle, not lifting the butt from his shoulder nor his eye from
the sights.

The barrel was smoking hot, each shot now recoiling viciously
into his shoulder, so that his teeth cracked together in his jaws
and the forefinger of his right hand was bleeding, a flap of
loose skin torn from the second joint by the trigger guard, so he
was seconds slow on the reload, and then he was firing again.
Deafened by gunfire, each shot was a muted popping in his abused
eardrums, and the uproar of the galloping, bawling, bellowing
herd was dreamlike and far away. His vision was dulled by the
head-high bank of dust, and, as they tore once more into the
forest, by the sombre shadows of the tree-tops that met overhead.
He was bleeding from chin and lip and forehead where stones as
big as acorns had been thrown into his face by the flying hooves
ahead of him. Still he loaded and fired and reloaded. He had long
ago lost all count of the bag and the endless herd still pressed
close on both flanks of his floundering horse.

Suddenly one bandolier was empty, a hundred rounds fired, he
realized with surprise, and Ralph pulled a fresh one from his
saddlebag, instinctively ducking under a long branch and
straightening up to find an enormous bull galloping half a length
ahead of him.

It seemed to Ralph’s distorted vision to be the monarch
of all buffalo, with a spread of horns wider than a man could
reach, heavy as one of the granite boulders of the Matopos, so
old that the points were worn blunt and rounded. His rump and
back were grey and bald with age, the bush ticks hanging in blue
grapelike bunches in the deep folds of skin on each side of his
huge swinging testicles.

Ralph’s horse, almost blown now, could not hold him and
the bull was pulling away strongly, his huge quarters bunching
and contracting, cloven hooves driving almost hock-deep into the
soft sandy earth under the immense weight of his body. Ralph
stood in the stirrups and aimed for the spine at the base of the
bull’s long tufted tail as it lashed his own sides in the
fury of his run.

At the instant that Ralph fired, a branch snatched at his
shoulder and the shot flew wide, socking meatily into the round
black haunch. The bull tripped and checked, catching himself
before he went down, swinging abruptly aside with blood spurting
down his hind legs. Ralph gathered his exhausted horse to follow
him, but another thick grey tree-trunk sprang out of the dust
clouds ahead and forced him to turn hard the other way to avoid
it. Rough bark grazed his knee and the bull was lost in the ranks
of racing animals and the billowing dust.

‘Let him go,’ Ralph shouted aloud. There was no
chance that he could find a single animal again in this
multitude. He cranked another cartridge into the scorching breech
of his rifle, and shot a sleek red queen through the back of the
skull, and an instant later knocked her half-grown calf down with
a bullet through the shoulder.

The rifle was empty and he began to reload, concentrating all
his attention on the task, until suddenly some instinct warned
him and he glanced up.

The wounded bull had turned back to hunt him.

It came out of the gloom like a black avalanche, goring the
laggards out of its way, to cut a path for itself through the
racing black river of animals. Its nose was high, the muzzle
glistening wetly, and long silver strings of mucus dangled from
the flaring nostrils. It came quartering in and the dusty earth
exploded in pale puffs under the savagely driving hooves.

‘Come boy!’ Ralph yelled desperately at his tired
gelding, gathering him with knees and reins, turning him away
from the bull’s charge and at the same time cramming a
cartridge into the loading slot of the Winchester.

The bull closed in a crabbing rush, and Ralph swivelled the
rifle and fired point-blank into the gigantic head, knowing there
would be no time for another shot. The bull’s head flinched
and a splinter of slaty grey horn tore from the huge round
bosses, and then the bull steadied himself, moving with the grace
of a gazelle on his huge front legs. His head dropped. Ralph
could have reached out and touched the crest of shaggy hide
between his shoulders, instead he jerked his near leg from the
stirrup and lifted his knee as high as his chin, just as the bull
hooked the massive horns at the gelding’s flank. At the
place where Ralph’s knee had been a moment before, the
blunt tip of a black horn crashed into the horse’s
chest.

Ralph heard the ribs crackle and snap like dry sticks, and the
air from the gelding’s lungs was driven out of his throat
in a whistling scream. Horse and rider were lifted high. The
gelding was still screaming at the agony of his collapsed chest
as Ralph was thrown clear. The rifle spun from his hand and he
landed on his hip and shoulder and rolled to his knees. His right
leg was numbed by the shock, it pinned him for precious
seconds.

The buffalo was braced over the fallen gelding, front legs
splayed, armoured head low, blood dribbling and trickling down
its massive muscled quarters, and now it hooked at the horse,
catching him in the soft of his belly and splitting him open like
a cod on a fishwife’s block. Soft, wet entrails, slippery
as cooked spaghetti, were wrapped around the blunt point, and as
the bull tossed his head, he stripped them out of the gaping
belly cavity. The horse kicked once more, and then was still.

Dragging his right leg, Ralph crawled towards the base of a
wild teak.

‘Bazo!’ he screamed. ‘Bring the rifle! Bring
the horse! Bazo!’

He could hear the shrill of panic and terror in his own voice,
and the bull heard it also. It left the horse, and Ralph heard
the splayed hooves thudding into the sandy earth, heard the snort
of its breath and smelled the rank bovine reek of the animal. He
howled again and dragged himself to his feet, hopping on his good
leg. He knew he was not going to reach the mopani and he whirled
to face the enraged bull.

It was so close that he could see the wet trail of tears from
the corners of its pink-shot piggy little eyes running down the
shaggy black cheeks, and the spongy tongue, splotched pink and
grey, lolling from its jaws as it bellowed at him. The head went
down to hook him and split him, as it had the horse, but at that
instant another voice bellowed in Sindebele:

‘Hau! Thou uglier than death!’ The bull checked,
and pivoted on his stubby forelegs. ‘Come, thou
witches’ curse!’

Bazo was taking the bull off him, he galloped in out of the
rolling dust, dragging the spare horse on its lead rein, and he
angled in now across the bull’s front, taunting it with his
voice and flapping his monkey-skin cloak in its face. The bull
accepted the lure of the cloak, put his nose down, and went after
it. The horse that Bazo rode was still fresh, and it skittered
out of the arc of the great swinging head, and the bull’s
polished horn glinted at the top of its lunge.

‘Henshaw,’ Bazo yelled, ‘take the spare
horse.’ And he dropped the lead rein, sending the free
horse down on Ralph, still at full gallop.

Ralph crouched in its path, and the grey mare saw him and
swerved at the last moment, but Ralph leaped for the saddle, and
got a hold on the pommel. For a dozen strides he hopped beside
the mare, his feet skimming the ground as she carried him away.
Then he gathered himself and swung his weight up across her back.
His buttocks thumped onto the saddle, and he did not waste time
groping for the stirrups. He yanked the spare rifle from the
scabbard under his knee, and kicked the mare around after the
great black bull.

The beast was intent on Bazo still, chasing him in a grotesque
lumbering charge which covered the ground with uncanny speed. At
that moment a low branch caught the half-naked Matabele induna a
ringing crack across the shoulder and side of the head.

He was thrown sideways, the monkey-skin cloak flew away,
flapping like an overfed black crow, and Bazo slid further until
he was hanging upside down, his head almost brushing the ground
between his mount’s slashing hooves.

Coming up on the bull’s blood-splattered quarters, Ralph
fired into its back, probing for the spine in the mountain of
black hide and bulging muscle. He fired with a mechanical action,
cranking the loading handle, and the recoil dinned in upon his
ears, so he could barely hear the heavy lead bullets slapping
into the bull’s body with a sound like a housewife beating
a carpet. One of his bullets found the pumping lungs, for there
was a sudden torrent of frothy blood blown from both the
bull’s nostrils, and the wild charge broke down into a
short hampered trot.

Ralph came up alongside it, and it turned the great head and
looked at him through eyes that swam with the tears of its death
agony. Ralph reached across and almost touched the broad forehead
under the beetling horns with the muzzle of the rifle. The bull
flung his head back from the brain shot, and it dropped silently
onto its knees. It never moved again.

Ralph galloped on and caught the bridle of Bazo’s
running horse. He yanked it down to a halt.

‘Only a Matabele rides with his head in the stirrups and
his feet in the saddle,’ he gasped, and pulled Bazo
upright.

The dark skin was smeared from Bazo’s forehead by the
rough bark of the branch, the raw flesh was pale pink and
droplets of clear lymph welled up out of it like seed pearls.

‘Henshaw, my little Hawk,’ he replied thickly.
‘You screamed so loudly I thought you were losing your
virginity – with a horn, from behind.’

Ralph spluttered with shaky laughter, almost hysterical with
the relief from terror and mortal danger. Bazo shook his head to
clear it, his eyes came back into focus, and his grin was
wicked.

‘Go back to the women, Henshaw, for you cry like a
maiden. Give me your gun and I will win your guinea for
you.’

‘See if you can keep up,’ Ralph told him, and
booted his horse into a run. The reaction from terror came upon
him in a kind of atavistic madness, the wild soaring passion of
the hunter, and he fell upon the galloping herds in a murderous
frenzy.

The bushfire overtook them and put an end to the slaughter at
last. Ralph and Bazo were almost caught between the enveloping
arms of flame, but they broke through with the manes of their
horses frizzled and stinking from the heat and Ralph’s
shirt scorched in brown patches. Then from the sanctuary of the
back-burn, they watched in awe as the fire swept by on either
side. It was a gale of heat that whirled burning branches aloft,
and crashed from tree to tree, leaping a gap a hundred feet wide
with a deep whooshing roar and bursting the next tree asunder as
though it had been hit by a lyddite shell from a howitzer.

The flames sucked the air away so that they gasped for breath,
and the heat went deep into their lungs, so they coughed like
hemp-smokers. It seared the exposed skin of their faces, seemed
to dry the moisture from their eyeballs and dazzle their vision
as though they were staring into the fierce orb of the sun
itself.

Then the fire was gone, burning away into the west, and they
were silent and shaken, awed by the grandeur of its passing and
by their own insignificance in the face of such elemental
power.

It was the following morning before the earth had cooled
sufficiently for the skinners to go out to work. The carcasses of
the buffalo were half-roasted, the hair burned away on the upper
side, yet untouched on the side where they had lain against the
earth. The skinners worked in a landscape like a hellish vision
of Hieronymus Bosch, a desolate and blackened earth, grotesquely
twisted bare trees, with the hideous shapes of the vultures
crouched in the upper branches.

One team of skinners rolled the huge carcasses and made the
shallow incisions around the neck, down the limbs and swollen
bellies, then the next team hooked on the bullock teams and
stripped off the skin in a single slab, while the third team
scooped the coarse white rock salt over the wet hides and spread
them in the sun.

By the second day, the air was thick with the reek of hundreds
of rotting carcasses; and the chorus of cries and howls and
croakings of the scavengers was a fitting accompaniment to the
scene. Although the dun palls of smoke had cleared, the sky was
dark once again with wings, the glossy sable pinions of the
crows, the quick sharp stabbing wings of the little kites and the
great majestic spread of the vultures.