This was the moment for which he and the bird had worked and trained so long. The supreme moment of the kill, an involuntary cry burst from his throat, a primeval and animal sound, as Scipio bound to the great goose and the sound of the hit was like a single beat of a bass drum that seemed to shake the very air about Ralph's head.
The goose's spread wings spun like the spokes of a wheel, and a burst of black feathers filled the air as though a shrapnel shell had been fired from a heavy cannon; and then the goose's body collapsed under the shock, one wing snapped and trailed down the sky as it fell, the long serpentine goose neck was arched back in the convulsion of death, and Scipio was bound to the gigantic black body, her talons locked deep into the still frantically beating heart. The impetus of Scipio's stoop had shattered bone in the big body and burst the pulsing blood vessels around the goose's heart.
Ralph started to run, whooping with excitement, and Bazo was at his shoulder, laughing, head thrown back, watching the birds fall, leaving a tracery of feathers like the plume of a comet in the sky behind them.
A hawk binds to its prey, from the moment of strike unto the earth. A falcon does not. Scipio should break, and let the goose fall, but she had not; she was still locked in, and Ralph felt the first frost of worry cool his excitement. Had his bird broken bone, or otherwise injured herself in that frightful impact?
'Beauty!' he called to her. 'Unbind! Unbind!' She could be caught under the heavy goose and crushed against the earth. It was not her way to hold on all the way in.
'Unbind!' he screamed again, and saw her flutter, stabbing at the air with those sharp-bladed wings. She was stunned, and the earth rushed up at her.
Then suddenly she lunged, unbinding, breaking loose from her kill, hovering, letting the goose go on to thud into the rocky earth beyond the swamp, only then sinking, dainty and poised, and settling again upon the humped black carcass. Ralph felt his chest choked with pride and love for her courage and her beauty.
'Kweet,' Scipio called, when she saw Ralph. 'Kweet,' the recognition call, and she left the prize that she had risked her life to take and came readily to Ralph's hand.
He stooped over her, his eyes burning with pride, and kissed her lovely head.
'I won't make you do it again,' he whispered. 'I just had to see if you could do it, but I won't ever make you do it again.'
Ralph fed the goose's head to Scipio, and she tore it to pieces with her curved beak, between each morsel pausing to stare at Ralph.
'The bird loves you,' Bazo looked up from the fire over which he was roasting chunks of fat goose, the grease dripping onto the coals and frizzling sharply. Ralph smiled, lifted the bird and kissed its bloody beak.
'And I love her.'
'You and the bird have the same spirit. Kamuza and I have spoken of it often.'
'Nothing is as brave as my Scipio.'
Bazo shook his head. 'Do you remember the day that Bakela would have killed me? In the moment that he took the gun to me he was mad, mad to the point of killing.'
Ralph's expression changed. It was many months since he had intervened to save the young Matabele from the wrath of his father.
'I have not spoken of it before.' Bazo held Ralph's eyes steadily. 'It is not the kind of matter about which a man chatters like a woman at the water hole. We will probably never speak of it again, you and I, but know you that it will never be forgotten -' Bazo paused, and then he said it solemnly. 'I shall remember, Henshaw.'
Ralph understood immediately. 'Henshaw, the hawk.'
The Matabele had given him a praise name, a thing not lightly done, a mark of enormous respect. His father was Bakela, the Fist, and now he was Henshaw, the Hawk, named for the brave and beautiful bird upon his wrist.
'I shall remember, Henshaw, my brother,' repeated Bazo, the Axe. 'I shall remember.'
Zouga was never entirely sure why he kept the rendezvous; certainly it was not merely because Jan Cheroot urged him to do so, nor the fact that the payment of 2000 pounds for the shattered chips of the great Ballantyne diamond had not lasted him as long as he had hoped, nor that the cost of the new stagings was rising all the time. His share looked to be more like two thousand than a thousand pounds. Sometimes in his least charitable moods Zouga suspected that Pickering and Rhodes and some other members of the committee were content to see the costs of the stagings rise and the pressure begin to squeeze out the smaller diggers. The going price of claims in the collapsed number 6 Section continued to drop as the cost of the stagings rose; and somebody was buying, if not Rhodes and his partners, then it must be Beit or Wemer, or even the newcomer, Barnato.
Perhaps Zouga kept the rendezvous to distract himself from these grave problems, perhaps he was merely intrigued by the mystery that surrounded it all, but when he looked at himself honestly it was more likely the prospect of profit. The whole affair reeked of profit, and Zouga was a desperate man. He had very little left to sell apart from the claims themselves. To sell the claims was to abandon his dream. He was ready to explore any other path, to take any risks, rather than that.
'There is a man who wishes to speak with you.' Jan Cheroot's words had started it, and something in his tone made Zouga look up sharply. They had been together many years and there was little they did not know of each other's moods and meanings.
'That is simple enough,' Zouga had told him. 'Send him to the camp.'
'He wishes to speak secretly, at a place where no other eyes will be watching.'
'That sounds like the way of a rogue,' Zouga frowned.
'What is the man's name?'
'I do not know his name,' Jan Cheroot admitted, and then when he saw Zouga's expression, he explained. 'He sent a child with a message.'
'Then send the child back to him, whoever he is. Tell him he will find me here every evening, and anything he has to discuss I will be pleased to listen to in the privacy of my tent.'
