only old Karanga with her. He armed himself with his long spear, and strutted like an ancient peacock to be so honoured.
Within two miles, the pathway climbed steeply to pass through a saddle in a line of low hills.
Robyn was seeking evidence that this was indeed the slave road, the Hyena Road, as Juba called it tearfully.
She found her evidence on the saddle, lying in the grass a few paces from the edge of the track. It was. a double yoke, hewn from a forked, tree trunk and roughly dressed with an axe.
Robyn had studied the sketches in her father's journal, and she recognized it immediately. When the slave- masters did not have chains and cuffs, they used these yokes to bind their captives around their necks; two slaves linked together and forced to do everything in concert, march, eat, sleep and defecate, everything except escape.
Now all that remained of the slaves who had once worn the yoke were a few fragments of bone that the vultures and hyena had overlooked. There was something terribly sad and chilling about that roughly carved fork of wood, and Robyn could not bring herself to touch it. She said a short prayer for the unfortunate slaves who had died on that spot and then, with her knowledge that she was on the slave road confirmed, she turned back towards the camp.
That night she held counsel with the Hottentot Corporal, old Karanga and Juba. This camp and road have not been used for this many days, Karanga showed Robyn both hands twice with fingers spread, twenty days. 'Which way did they go? ' Robyn asked. She had come to have confidence in the old man's tracking ability. They were moving along the road towards the sunrise, and they have not yet returned, ' quavered Karanga. It is even as he says, Juba agreed, and it must have been an effort to agree with somebody for whom she had such disdain and jealousy. 'The slavers will make this the last caravan before the rains. There will be no trading after the rivers are full, and the Hyena Road will grow grass until the dry season comes again. 'So there is a caravan of slavers ahead of us, Robyn mused. 'If we follow the road we may overtake them.'
The Hottentot Corporal interrupted. 'That will not be possible, madam. They are weeks ahead of us. 'Then we will meet them returnin& after having sold their slaves.'
The Corporal nodded and Robyn asked him, 'Will you be able to defend us, if the slavers decide to attack our column? ' The and my men, the Corporal drew himself to his full height, 'are a match for a hundred dirty slavers, he paused and then went on, 'and you shoot like a man, madamV Robyn smiled. 'All right, she nodded. 'We will follow the road down to the sea.'
And the Corporal grinned at her. 'I am sick of this country and its savages, I long to see the cloud on Table Mountain and wash the taste of dust from my throat with good Cape Smoke once again The hyena was an old male. There were patches of fur missing from his thick shaggy coat, and his flat, almost snakelike head was covered with scars, his ears ripped away by thorns and a hundred snapping, snarling encounters over the decomposing carcasses of men and animals.
His lip had been torn up into the soft of the nostril in one of these fights and had healed askew, so that the yellow teeth in one side of his upper jaw were exposed in a hideous grin.
His teeth were worn with age, so that he could no longer crush the heavy bones that made up the bulk of hyena diet, and unable to compete, he had been driven from the hunting-pack.
There had been no human corpses along the trail since the slave column had passed weeks before, and game was scarce in this dry country. Since then the hyena had subsisted on scrapings, the fresh dung of jackal and baboon, a nest of field mice, the long-abandoned and addled egg of an ostrich which had burst in a sulphurous geyser of gas and putrefied liquid when he pawed at it.
However, even though the hyena was starving, he still stood almost three foot high at the shoulder and weighed
140 pounds.
His belly under the matted and scruffy coat was concave as that of a greyhound. From high ungainly shoulders, his spine slanted back in a bony ridge to his scraggy hindquarters.
He carried his head low, snuffling at the earth for offal and scourings, but when the scent came down on the wind to him, he lifted his head on high and flared his deformed nostrils.
There was the smell of wood smoke, of human presence, which he had grown to associate with a source of food, but sharper, clearer than all the others was a smell that made the saliva run from his twisted, scarred jaws in drooling silver ropes. He went galloping into a swayin& uneven trot up into the wind following the tantalizing drift of that odour. The scent that had attracted the old dog hyena was the cloyingly sweet taint of a gangrenous leg.
The hyena lay on the outskirts of the camp. It lay like a dog, with its chin on its front paws and its hindlegs and its bushy tail drawn up under its belly, flat behind a clump of coarse elephant grass. it watched the activity about the smoking watch fires.
Only its eyes rolled in their sockets, and the ragged stumps of its ears twitched and cocked to the cadence of human voices, and the unexpected sounds of a bucket or an axe on a stump of firewood.
Once in a while a puff of wind would bring a whiff of the scent that had first attracted the hyena, and it would snuffle it, suppressing with difficulty the little anxious cries that rose in its throat.
As the evening shadows thickened, a human figure, a half-naked black woman, left the camp, and came towards its hiding-place. The hyena gathered itself to fly but before she reached the place where it lay, Juba paused and looked about her carefully without seeing the animal, then she lifted the flap of her beaded apron, lowered herself and squatted. The hyena cringed and watched her. When she stood and returned to the camp, the creature, emboldened by the oncoming ' night, crept forward and wolfed down that which Juba had left.
Its appetite was piqued and as the night fell, it inflated its chest, curled its bushy tail up over its back and uttered its drawn-out haunting cry, ascending sharply in key, 'Oooo-auw! Oooo-auw! ', a cry so familiar to every man and woman in the camp that hardly one of them bothered to look up.
Gradually the activity about the camp fires subsided, the sound of human voices became drowsy and intermittent, the fires faded, the flames sinking and the darkness crept in upon the camp, and the hyena crept in with it.
Twice a sudden loud voice put it to trembling flight and it galloped away into the bush, only to gather its courage at the renewed silence and creep back. It was long after midnight when the beast found a weak place in
