They stopped and faced each other, and Dirk's mouth was twisted into a pinched and bitter line. This is the second time you have been clever at my expense, he started grimly. You could have had me as an ally, but instead you had my father send me a receipt for my gift Now you and your savage have pulled another trick. I don't know how you did it, but it's the last time it will happen. He stared at Mark, and the slant of the eyes altered, once again that mad malevolent light burned in their depths. A powerful friend I would have been, but a much more powerful enemy I am now. So far only my father's protection has saved you. That will change. No man stands in my way, I swear that to you.
He wheeled his horse, put spurs to it and galloped away.
The other two disconsolate hunters trailed away after him.
Mark rode back to Pungushe, and they drank from the water-bottle and smoked a little before Mark asked, Where is the lioness? We left her spoor two hours back. Mark glanced sharply at him, and Pungushe stood up and walked to another mole heap at the edge of the granite.
He squatted beside it, and with a roll of his open palm outlined the fleshy pad of a lion paw, then he bunched his knuckles and rolled them for the toe marks.
Miraculously, the spoor of a full-grown lion appeared in the soft earth, and Pungushe looked up at Mark's startled unbelieving expression and let out one of those whistling hippo-snorts of laughter, rocking back on his heels delightedly. For two hours we followed the Tokoloshe, '
he hooted.
I cannot see her, said Mark, carefully glassing the shallow wooded valley below them. Oh! Jamela, who cannot see. Where is she, Pungushe? Do you see the forked tree, beyond the three round rocks -'A step at a time he directed Mark's gaze, until suddenly he made out just the two dark round blobs of her ears above the short yellow grass, about six hundred yards from where they sat. She was lying close in under the spread of a thorn thicket, and even as he watched, she lowered her head and the ears vanished. Now that she is alone, she wishes to return to the place she knows well, beyond the Usutu. That is why she moves always that way, when the pain of the wound allows Before they had come up with her, they had found three places where she had lain to rest, and at one such place there had been a smear of blood and a dozen yellow hairs A Tokoloshe is a mythical creature from Zulu magical legend.
glued into the clot. Pungushe had inspected the hairs, minutely; by colour and texture he could tell from which part of the lioness body they had come. High in the right shoulder, and if she was bleeding inside she would be down already. But she is in great pain, for she walks short. The wound has stiffened. She cannot go far. Now Mark swung the glasses towards the west, and longingly stared through them at the blue misty loom of the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, half a dozen miles away. So close, he murmured, so close. But the exhausted cat was dragging herself painfully away from sanctuary, back towards the ploughed lands, towards cattle and men and the dog packs.
Instinctively he turned in that direction now, swinging the binoculars in a long slow traverse across the north and east.
From the low ridge he had a good field of sight, across miles of light forest to the open chocolate expanse of ploughed land.
Something moved in the field of the binoculars and he blinked his eyes and refocused carefully. Three horsemen were coming slowly in their direction, and even at this range Mark could see the dogs running ahead of them.
Quickly he looked back at the leading rider. There was no mistaking that arrogantly erect figure. Dirk Courtney had not given up the hunt. He had merely returned to assemble a hunting-pack, and now the dogs were coming down fast on the smell of the wounded cat.
Mark laid a hand on the hard muscle of Pungushe's shoulder, and with his free hand he pointed. The Zulu stood up and stared for a full minute at the oncoming horsemen, then he began to speak quickly.
Jamela, I will try to call the lioness, and lead her Mark started to ask a question, but Pungushe stopped him harshly. Can you pull the dogs away, or stop them? Mark thought for a moment, then nodded. Give me your snuff, Pungushe. He took the snuff horn that hung on a thong around his neck and handed it to Mark without question. Go, said Mark. Call my lioness for me. Pungushe slipped away down the ridge and left Mark to hurry to Trojan.
There were three sticks of black dried meat left in Mark's food bag. He found two flat stones and pounded the dry meat into a fine powder between them, glancing up every few seconds to see the huntsmen coming on rapidly.
Once the meat was powdered he scooped it into his pannikin and added an ounce of native snuff from the horn, mixin the two powders with his fingers as he ran back down the ridge to intersect the lioness trail at the point they had left it.
When he reached the shoulder of the ridge where the wounded cat had skirted a rocky outcrop, he knelt and made three neat piles of the mixed powder directly in the path of the oncoming dogs.
The dried meat would be irresistible when they reached it, the dogs would sniff at it greedily.
He could hear them already, baying excitedly, coming on swiftly, leading the hunters at a canter. As he ran back up the ridge to where Trojan stood, Mark smiled bleakly.
A hound with a good suck of fiery native snuff up his nose wasn't going to smell anything else for at least twelve hours.
The lioness lay on her side, with her mouth open. She panted for air, and her chest pumped like a blacksmith's bellows, and her eyes were tightly closed.
The bullet had been fired from her right quarter. It was a soft lead slug from a . 45 5 Martini Hendry and it had taken her high in the shoulder, but far forward, cutting in through the heavy muscle and grazing the big joint of the shoulder, lacerating sinew and shattering that extraordinary small floating bone, found only in the shoulder of a lion, the lucky bone so prized as a hunter's talisman.
The bullet had missed the artery as it plunged into the neck and lodged there beneath the skin, a lump the size of the top joint of a man's thumb.
The flies swarmed joyously into the mouth of the wound, and she lifted her head and snapped at them, and then mewing softly at the agony that movement had caused, she began to lick the bullet hole carefully, the long tongue rasping roughly against her hide, curling pink and dextrous as it cleansed the fresh little trickle of watery blood that had sprung from it. Then she sank back wearily and closed her eyes again.
