The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (6 page)

The sign had been pulled down, the retaining bolts ripped clear out. It lay face up, and though sun-faded, it was still legible:

Craig had a vivid mental image of the huge red beast with its humped back and swinging dewlap waddling under its own weight of beef around the show-ring with the blue rosette of the champion on
its cheek, and Jonathan ‘Bawu’ Ballantyne, Craig’s maternal grandfather, leading it proudly by the brass ring through its shiny wet nostrils.

Craig walked back to the VW and drove on through grassland that had once been thick and gold and sweet, but through which the bare dusty earth now showed like the balding scalp of a middle-aged
man. He was distressed by the condition of the grazing. Never, not even in the four-year drought of the fifties, had King’s Lynn grass been allowed to deteriorate like this, and Craig could
find no reason for it until he stopped again beside a clump of camel-thorn trees that threw their shade over the road.

When he switched off the engine, he heard the bleating amongst the camel-thorns and now he was truly shocked.

‘Goats!’ he spoke aloud. ‘They are running goats on King’s Lynn.’ Bawu Ballantyne’s ghost must be without rest or peace. Goats on his beloved grassland. Craig
went to look for them. There were two hundred or more in one herd. Some of the agile multi-coloured animals had climbed high into the trees and were eating bark and seed-pods, while others were
cropping the grass down to the roots so that it would die and the soil would sour. Craig had seen the devastation that these animals had created in the tribal trustlands.

There were two naked Matabele boys with the herd. They were delighted when Craig spoke to them in their own language. They stuffed the cheap candy that he had brought with him for just such a
meeting into their cheeks, and chattered without inhibition.

Yes, there were thirty families living on King’s Lynn now, and each family had its herd of goats – the finest goats in Matabeleland, they boasted through sticky lips, and under the
trees a horned old billy mounted a young nanny with a vigorous humping of his back. ‘See!’ cried the herdboys, ‘they breed with a will. Soon we will have more goats than any of
the other families.’

‘What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?’ Craig asked.

‘Gone!’ they told him proudly. ‘Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution.’

They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.

Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and
jewelled sunbirds. Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carcasses with relish.
Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.

The herdboys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the
overwhelming affection for these people. They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.

He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King’s Lynn. The lawns had died from lack of attention, and the goats had been in the flower-beds. Even at
this distance, Craig could see the main house was deserted. Windows were broken, leaving unsightly gaps like missing teeth, and most of the asbestos sheets had been stolen from the roof and the
roof-timbers were forlorn and skeletal against the sky. The roofing sheets had been used to build ramshackle squatters’ shacks down near the old cattle-pens.

Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters’ encampment. There were half a dozen families
living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.

‘I see you, old father.’ Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more
readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.

‘They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man’s cattle.’ The old man spat into the fire. ‘The
only ones with motor-cars are the government ministers. They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything
costs five times more – sugar and salt and soap – everything.’

During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were
experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.

‘We cannot afford cattle,’ the old man explained, ‘so we run goats. Goats!’ He spat again into the fire and watched his phlegm sizzle. ‘Goats! Like dirt-eating
Shona.’ His tribal hatred boiled like his spittle.

Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would
suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind’s eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like tanned leather and impossibly green
Ballantyne eyes, standing before him.

‘Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!’

However, the veranda was littered with rubble and bird-droppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.

He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge elephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig’s
great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s. Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King’s Lynn. Old grandpa Bawu had touched them each time he
passed, so that there had been a polished spot on the yellow ivory. Now there were only the holes in the masonry from which the bolts holding the ivory had been torn. The only family relics he had
inherited and still owned were the collection of leather-bound family journals, the laboriously hand-written records of his ancestors from the arrival of his great-great-grandfather in Africa over
a hundred years before. The tusks would complement the old books. He would search for them, he promised himself. Surely such rare treasures must be traceable.

He went into the derelict house. The shelving and built-in cupboards and floor-boards had been stripped out by the squatters in the valley for firewood, the window-panes used as targets by small
black boys with slingshots. The books, the portrait photographs from the walls, the carpets and heavy furniture of Rhodesian teak were all gone. The homestead was a shell, but a sturdy shell. With
an open palm Craig slapped the walls that great-greatgrandfather Zouga Ballantyne had built of hand-hewn stone and mortar that had had almost a hundred years to cure to adamantine hardness. His
palm made a solid ringing tone. It would take only a little imagination and a deal of money to transform the shell into a magnificent home once again.

Craig left the house and climbed the kopje behind it to the walled family cemetery that lay under the msasa trees beneath the rocky crest. There was grass growing up between the headstones. The
cemetery had been neglected but not vandalized, as had many of the other monuments left from the colonial era.

Craig sat on the edge of his grandfather’s grave and said, ‘Hello, Bawu. I’m back,’ and started as he almost heard the old man’s voice full of mock scorn speaking
in his mind.

‘Yes, every time you burn your arse you come running back here. What happened this time?’

‘I dried up, Bawu,’ he answered the accusation aloud and then was silent. He sat for a long time and very slowly he felt the tumult within him begin to subside a little.

‘The place is in a hell of a mess, Bawu,’ he spoke again, and the little blue-headed lizard on the old man’s headstone scuttled away at the sound of his voice. ‘The tusks
are gone from the veranda, and they are running goats on your best grass.’

Again he was silent, but now he was beginning to calculate and scheme. He sat for nearly an hour, and then stood up.

‘Bawu, how would you like it if I could move the goats off your pasture?’ he asked, and walked back down the hill to where he had left the Volkswagen.

I
t was a little before five o’clock when he drove back into town. The estate agency and auctioneering floor opposite the Standard Bank was
still open for business. The sign had even been repainted in scarlet, and as soon as Craig entered, he recognized the burly red-faced auctioneer in khaki shorts and short-sleeved, open-necked
shirt.

‘So you didn’t take the gap, like the rest of us did, Jock,’ Craig greeted Jock Daniels.

‘Taking the gap’ was the derogatory expression for emigrating. Out of 250,000 white Rhodesians, almost 150,000 had taken the gap since the beginning of hostilities, and most of those
had left since the war had been lost and the black government of Robert Mugabe had taken control.

Jock stared at him. ‘Craig!’ he exploded. ‘Craig Mellow!’ He took Craig’s hand in a horny brown paw. ‘No, I stayed, but sometimes it gets hellish lonely. But
you’ve done well, by God you have. They say in the papers that you have made a million out of that book. People here could hardly believe it. Old Craig Mellow, they said, fancy Craig Mellow
of all people.’

‘Is that what they said?’ Craig’s smile stiffened, and he took his hand back.

‘Can’t say I liked the book myself.’ Jock shook his head. ‘You made all the blacks look like bloody heroes – but that’s what they like overseas, isn’t
it? Black is beautiful – that’s what sells books, hey?’

‘Some of my reviewers called me a racist,’ Craig murmured. ‘You can’t keep all the people happy all of the time.’

Jock wasn’t listening. ‘Another thing, Craig, why did you have to make out that Mr Rhodes was a queer?’

Cecil Rhodes, the father of the white settlers, had been dead for eighty years, but the old-timers still called him Mr Rhodes.

‘I gave the reasons in the book,’ Craig tried to placate him.

‘He was a great man, Craig, but nowadays it’s the fashion for you young people to tear down greatness – like mongrels snapping at the heels of a lion.’ Craig could see
that Jock was warming to his subject, and he had to divert him.

‘How about a drink, Jock?’ he asked, and Jock paused. His rosy cheeks and swollen purple nose were not solely the products of the African sun.

‘Now, you’re making sense.’ Jock licked his lips. ‘It’s been a long thirsty day. Just let me lock up the shop.’

‘If I fetched a bottle, we could drink it here and talk privately.’

The last of Jock’s antagonism evaporated. ‘Damn good idea. The bottle store has a few bottles of Dimple Haig left – and get a bucket of ice while you are about it.’

They sat in Jock’s tiny cubicle of an office and drank the good whisky out of cheap thick tumblers. Jock Daniels’ mood mellowed perceptibly.

‘I didn’t leave, Craig, because there was nowhere to go. England? I haven’t been back there since the war. Trade unions and bloody weather – no thanks. South Africa? They
are going to go the same way that we did – at least we’ve got it over and done with.’ He poured again from the pinch bottle. ‘If you do go, they let you take two hundred
dollars with you. Two hundred dollars to start again when you are sixty-five years old – no bloody thanks.’

‘So what’s life like, Jock?’

‘You know what they call an optimist here?’ Jock asked. ‘It’s somebody who believes that things can’t get any worse.’ He bellowed with laughter and slapped
his bare hairy thigh. ‘No. I’m kidding. It’s not too bad. As long as you don’t expect the old standards, if you keep your mouth shut and stay away from politics, you can
still live a good life – probably as good as anywhere in the world.’

‘The big farmers and ranchers – how are they doing?’

‘They are the elite. The government has come to its senses. They’ve dropped all that crap about nationalizing the land. They’ve come to face the fact that if they are going to
feed the black masses, then they need the white farmers. They are becoming quite proud of them: when they get a state visitor – a communist Chinese or a Libyan minister – they give him
a tour of white farms to show him how good things are looking.’

‘What about the price of land?’

‘At the end of the war, when the blacks first took over and were shouting about taking the farms and handing them over to the masses, you couldn’t give the land away.’ Jock
gargled with his whisky. ‘Take your family company for instance, Rholands Ranching Company – that includes all three spreads: King’s Lynn, Queen’s Lynn and that big piece of
country up in the north bordering the Chizarira Game Reserve – your uncle Douglas sold the whole damned shooting match for quarter of a million dollars. Before the war he could have asked ten
million.’

‘Quarter of a million.’ Craig was shocked. ‘He gave it away!’

‘That included all the stock – prize Afrikander bulls and breeding cows, the lot,’ Jock related with relish. ‘You see, he had to get out. He had been a member of
Smith’s cabinet from the beginning and he knew that he would have been a marked man once the black government took over. He sold out to a Swiss-German consortium, and they paid him in
Zürich. Old Dougie took his family, and went to Aussie. Of course, he already had a few million outside the country, so he could buy himself a nice little cattle station up in Queensland.
It’s us poor buggers with everything we have tied up here that had to stay.’