they looked like a line of fat black bugs on a clean sheet.
He knew what they were immediately, and with a surging uplift of excitement he counted them. Eighteen! he shouted aloud. It's a new herd, What is it, dear? She looked up from the scone she was spreading with jam. It's a new herd of buffalo, he exulted. They must have come in from the north. It's beginning to work already. In the field of the binoculars he saw one of the great bovine animals emerge into a clearing in the long grass.
He could see not only its wide black back, but the heavy head and spreading ears beneath the mournfully drooping horns. The sunlight caught the bosses of the polished black horns so that they glittered like gunmetal.
He felt an enormous proprietary pride. They were his own. The first to come into the sanctuary he was building for them. Look. He offered her the binoculars, and she wiped her hands carefully and pointed the glasses over the cliff. There on the edge of the swamp. He pointed, with the pride and joy shining on his face.
I can see them, she agreed smiling happily for him. How nice, dear. Then she swung the binoculars in a wide sweep across the river to where the roof of the homestead showed above the trees. Doesn't it look so nice with its new thatch? she said proudly. I just can't wait to move in. The following day they moved up from the shack of crude thatch and canvas at the old camp under the sycamore fig trees, and a pair of swallows moved in with them.
The swiftly darting birds began to build their neat nest with little shiny globs of mud under the eaves of the new yellow thatch against the crisply whitewashed wall of Kimberley brick.
That's the best of all possible luck, Mark laughed. They make such a mess, said Marion doubtfully, but that night, for the first time ever, she initiated their lovemaking; rolling comfortably on to her back in the doublebed, drawing up her nightdress to her waist, and spreading her warm womanly thighs. It's all right, if you want to, dear. And because she was kind and loved him so, he was as quick and as considerate as he could be. Was that good, then, dear? It was wonderful, he told her, and he had a sudden vivid image of a lovely vital woman, with a body that was lithe and swift and, and his guilt was brutal like a fist below the heart. He tried to thrust the image away, but it ran ahead of him through his dreams, laughing and dancing and teasing, so that in the morning there were dark blue smears beneath his eyes and he felt fretful and restless. I'm going up the valley on patrol. He did not look up from his coffee.
You only came back last Friday. She was surprised.
I want to look for those buffalo again, he said. Very well, dear. I'll pack your bag, how long will you be gone, I'll put in your sweater and the jacket, it's cool in the evenings, it's a good thing I baked yesterday -'she prattled on cheerfully, and he had a sudden terrible urge to shout at her to be silent. It will give me a chance to plant out the garden. It will be nice to have fresh vegetables again, and I haven't written a letter for ages. They'll be wondering about us at home. He rose from the table and went out to saddle Trojan.
The flogging explosion of heavy wings roused Mark from his reverie and he straightened in the saddle just as a dozen of the big birds rose from the edge of the reed-beds.
They were those dirty buff-coloured vultures, powering upwards as they were disturbed by Mark's approach, and undergoing that almost magical transformation from gross ugliness into beautiful planing flight.
Mark tethered Trojan and slipped the Marinlicher from its scabbard as a precaution. He felt a tickle of excitement, hopes high that he had come upon a kill by one of the big predatory cats. Perhaps even a lion, one of the animals for which he still searched the valley in vain.
The buffalo lay at the edge of the damp soft ground, half hidden by the reeds and it was so freshly dead that the vultures had not yet managed to penetrate the thick black hide, nor to spoil the sign which was deeply trodden and torn into the damp earth. They had only gouged out the uppermost eye and, with their beaks, scratched the softer skin around the bull's anus, for that was always their access point to a big thick-skinned carcass.
The buffalo was a big mature bull, the great boss of his horns grown solidly together across the crown of his skull, a huge head of horn, forty-eight inches from tip to tip. He was big in the body also, bigger than a prize Hereford stud bull, and he was bald across the shoulders, the scarred grey hide scabbed with dried mud and bunches of bush ticks.
Mark thrust his hand into the crease of skin between the back legs and felt the residual body warmth. He's been dead less than three hours, he decided, and squatted down beside the huge body to determine the cause of death. The bull seemed unmarked until Mark managed to roll him over, exerting all his strength and using the stiffly out-thrust limbs to move the ton and a half of dead weight.
He saw immediately the death wounds, one was behind the shoulder, through the ribs, and Mark's hunter's eye saw instantly that it was a heart-stroke, a wide-lipped wound, driven home deeply; the clotted heart blood that poured from it had jellied on the damp earth.
If there was any doubt at all as to the cause of that injury, it was dispelled instantly when he looked to the second wound. This was a frontal stroke, at the base of the neck, angled in skilfully between bone, to reach the heart again, and the weapon had not been withdrawn, it was still plunged in to the hilt and the shaft was snapped short where the bull had fallen upon it.
Mark grasped the broken shaft, placed one booted foot against the bull's shoulder and grunted with the effort it required to withdraw the blade against the reluctant suck of clinging flesh.
He examined it with interest. It was one of those broadbladed stabbing spears, the assegai which had been designed by the old king Chaka himself. Mark remembered Sean Courtney reminiscing about the Zulu wars, Isandhlwana, and Morma Gorge. They can put one of those assegais into a man's chest and send the point two feet out between his shoulder blades, and when they clear the blade, the withdrawal seems to suck a man as white as though he had his life blood pumped out of him by a machine. Sean had paused for a moment to stare into the camp fire. As they clear, they shout 'Ngidhla! ' -I have eaten! Once you have heard it, you'll not forget it. Forty years later, the memory still makes the hair come up on the back of my neck. Now still holding the short heavy assegai, Mark remembered that Chaka himself had hunted the buffalo with a similar weapon. A casual diversion between campaigns and as Mark glanced from the blade to the great black beast, he felt his anger tempered with reluctant admiration. His anger was for the wanton destruction of one of his precious animals, and his admiration was for the special type of courage that had done the deed.
Thinking of the man, Mark realized that there must have been special circumstances for that man to abandon such a valuable, skilfully and lovingly wrought weapon together with the prize he had risked his life to hunt.
Mark began to back-track the sign in the soft black earth, and he found where the bull had come up one of the tunnellike pathways through the reeds after drinking. He found where the huntsman had waited in thick cover beside the path, and his bare footprints were unmistakable.
Pungushe! exclaimed Mark.
