He remembered a nursery rhyme that his Uncle William had recited to him as a child that began 'A hippo, what, ainus? ' Zouga was still smiling as the bull hippo surfaced fifty paces from the barge's side. The bulky grey head broke clear, the flaps of flesh that sealed the nostrils flared open as he breathed and the small round ears fluttered like the wings of a bird as he cleared them of water.
For a moment he stared at the strange vessels through pinkly inflamed, piggy blue eyes. Then he opened the full gape of his jaws, a cavern the colour and the texture of a pink rose. The tusks were yellow and curved to murderous cutting edges, quite capable of biting a bullock cleanly in half, and he no longer seemed fat and comical. Instead he looked exactly what he was, the most dangerous of all African big game.
Zouga knew that the hippopotamus had killed more human beings than all the elephant and lion and buffalo together. With ease they could crunch in the fragile hull of a dug-out canoe, the ubiquitous makoro of Africa, and then cut in half the terrified swimmers. They would readily leave the water to chase and kill any human who they believed threatened a calf, and in areas where they had been hunted they would attack without provocation.
However, the steel hulls of the barges were invulnerable even to the jaws and tusks of the massive creature, and Zouga could afford to watch with complete objectivity.
From the bull's gaping pink jaws came a challenging series of bellows, each mounting in volume and menace as he moved closer to drive off the intruders who threatened his females and their young. Camacho put his hand up behind his head, and tilted the beaver hat at a jaunty angle over one eye. As always, he was smiling as he swung up the rifle and fired.
Zouga saw the strike of the bullet deep in the animal's throat, it severed an artery and instantly bright crimson blood gushed against the roof of the open mouth, discolouring the gleaming tusks, and pouring in a quick flood over the rubbery, bewhiskered lips. The bull's bellow rose into a piercing scream of agony, and he lunged half clear of the surface in a burst of white water. I keel heem! ' roared Camacho, and his shout of laughter filled the sudden void of silence as the bull dived below the surface, leaving his blood to swirl away down the current.
Robyn had jumped up and was clinging to the barge's rail, a flush overlaying her sunbronzed cheeks and throat.
That was callous butchery, she said quietly. No point in it, Zouga agreed. 'The animal will die below the surface and be washed out to sea.
ut he was wrong, for the bull surfaced again, closer to the barge. His jaws still gaping and streaming gouts of blood, he thrashed and lunged in maddened circles, his bellows distorted by blood and water, as his death frenzy rose to a crescendo. Perhaps the bullet had damaged his brain, making it impossible for him to close his jaws or to control his limbs. I keel heem! ' roared Camacho, dancing with excitement on the foredeck of the second barge, pouring shot after shot into the immense grey body, grabbing a rifle from his black gunbearer or from his second loader as soon as it was primed.
His two black servants worked with the expertise of long practice, so that it seemed that Camacho always had a loaded rifle ready to snatch and waiting hands ready to take the smoking weapon from him the moment he had fired.
Slowly the string of barges drew away upstream, leaving; the stricken animal wallowing with increasing feebleness in its own expanding circle of blood-tinged waters, until at last it rolled belly upwards, all four stubby legs sticking up towards the sky for a moment before it sank at last and the blood was diluted and swept away downstream.
That was sickening, ' whispered Robyn. Yes, but he has trained those gunbearers of his damned well, said Zouga thoughtfully. 'If one is going to hunt elephant, that is the way to do it Two hours before sunset the Helen edged in towards the south bank. For the first time since leaving Quelimane there was some feature on the shore, beyond the endless reed swamps and sand-banks.
The bank was steeper here, rising ten feet above the river, and game paths had been cut into the grey earth by thousands of sharp hooves, and polished to shiny clay by the sliding wet bellies of the long lizard-like shapes of the big crocodiles that came tobogganing down the almost vertical slope when they were disturbed by Helen's churning propeller. The heavily armoured reptiles with the staring yellow eyes set on a hard horny scale atop the long saurian head repulsed Robyn, the first African animal to do so.
There were trees on the bank now, not just waving stands of papyrus. Chief of these were the graceful palms with stern s sculptured like a claret bottle. Ivory palms, Zouga told her. 'The fruit has a kernel like a ball of ivory.'
Then far beyond the palms, low against the ruddy evening sky, they could make out the first silhouette of hills and kopjes. They were leaving the delta at last, and that night the company would camp on firm ground, instead of soft white sand, and burn heavy logs on the camp fires rather than the pulpy papyrus stern s.
Zouga checked the sentries that Sergeant Cheroot had placed over the irreplaceable cargoes in the barges on which the whole expedition depended, then he supervised the siting of the tents before taking the Sharps rifle and starting out into the open forest and grassland beyond the camp site. I come weeth you, offered Camacho. 'We keel somethingYour job is to make camp, Zouga told him coolly, and the Portuguese flashed his smile and shrugged. I make one damn fine camp, you see.'
But as Zouga disappeared amongst the trees, the smile slid off his face, and he hawked in his throat and spat in the dust. Then he turned back into the turmoil of men raising canvas on poles, or drawing in branches of freshly cut thorns to build the scherm against marauding lions or scavenging hyena.
Camacho lashed out at a bare black back. 'Hurry, you one mother, twenty-seven fathers. ' The man cried out at the pain of the cured hippo-hide whip, redoubling his efforts as a purple welt, thick as a man's little finger, rose across his sweat-oiled muscles.
Camacho strode on towards the small grove of trees which Zouga had picked as the site for the tents of his sister and himself, and he saw that the tents had already been erected and that the woman was busy with the evening muster when she treated the ailments of the camp.
She had been seated at the collapsible camp table, but as Camacho approached, she rose and stooped to examine the foot of one of the bearers whose axe had slipped and almost severed a toe.
The Portuguese stopped abruptly. and his throat dried out as he watched her. As soon as they had left Quelimane, the woman had taken to wearing men's breeches.
Camacho found them more provocative than naked flesh itself. It was the first time he had ever seen a white woman dressed like this, and he found it hard to take his eyes off her. Whenever she was in sight, he would watch her surreptitiously, waiting hungrily for the moment when she stooped or leaned forward and the moleskin stretched over her buttocks, as it was now. It lasted too short a time, for the woman straightened up and began
