Pungushe was aware of the wind in the same way as the helmsman of a tall ship is, for it was as important to him as it is to a mariner. He knew exactly at each moment of the day its force and direction, anticipated any change before it occurred and he did not have to carry an ash bag nor wet a finger, the knowledge was instinctive.
Now he moved carefully into a downwind position from the wounded animal. It did not occur to him to thank any providence for the constant easterly breeze that put him fairly between the cat and the near boundary of Chaka's Gate.
Silent as the cloud shadow moves across the earth, he moved in on the cat, judging the extreme limit of her acute hearing before kneeling facing where she lay three hundred yards away.
He filled and deflated his lungs rapidly a dozen times, the great muscled chest swelling and subsiding as he built up reserves of oxygen in his blood. Then he caught a full breath and stretched out his neck at a peculiar angle, cupping his hands to his gaping mouth to act as a sounding board.
From the depths of the straining chest issued a low drumming rattle, that rose and sank to a natural rhythm and ended with an abrupt little cough.
The lioness'head came up in a single flash of movement, her ears erect, her eyes alight with yellow lights, for in her pain and fear and confusion she had heard the old lion calling to her, that low, far-carrying assembly call with which he had directed her hunting so often, and which he had used to bring her to him when separated in thick bush.
The pain of rising was almost too much for her, the wound had stiffened and her neck and shoulder and chest were crushed under a granite boulder of agony, but at that moment she heard for the first time the distant yelping chorus of the dog pack. She and the old lion had been hunted by dogs before, and the sound gave her strength.
She came up and stood for a moment on three legs, favouring the right fore, panting heavily and then she went forward, whining softly at the pain, carrying the bad leg high, lunging for balance at each stride.
Mark watched from the ridge, saw the yellow cat start to move again, hobbling slowly westwards at last. Far ahead of her, keeping out of sight, the big Zulu trotted, pausing whenever she faltered to kneel and repeat the assembly call of a dominant male lion, and each time the lioness answered him with eager little mewling grunts and hobbled after him, westward towards the dreaming blue hills that guarded the Bubezi valley.
Mark had heard the old hunters stories before; old man Anders had always claimed that his gunbearer, who had been killed by an elephant on the Sabi River in 84, could call lions. However, Mark had never seen it done, and secretly had put the story into the category of the picturesque but apocryphal.
Now he saw it happening, and still wanted to doubt it.
He watched fascinated from his grandstand upon the ridge, and only a change in the clamour of the dog pack made him swing his binoculars back towards the east.
At the rocky shoulder of the ridge, where he had set his bait of powdered biltong and snuff, the pack milled confusedly. There were eight or nine dogs, a mongrel pack of terriers and boer hounds and ridgebacks.
The determined hunting chorus had disintegrated into a cacophony of whines and yelps, while Dirk Courtney over rode them, standing in his stirrups to lay about them furiously with the horse-whip.
Mark took Trojan's reins and led him down off the ridge, using what little cover there was, but confident that the huntsmen were too involved with their own problems to look ahead and see him.
When he reached the place beside the Thorn thicket where the lioness had last lain, he cut a branch with his clasp knife, and used it like a broom to brush away any sign the cat had left.
He followed slowly westwards towards Chaka's Gate, pausing every few minutes to listen for the drumming lion call, watching the ground as he moved, and using the branch to brush away all lion sign, covering for his lioness, until in the dusk they climbed a low saddle through the hills and in slow, drawn-out procession, went down to the Bubezi River.
Pungushe made his last call in darkness, and then ran out in a wide circle, leaving the lioness within a hundred yards of the river, knowing how she would be burned up by the heat of the wound and crazed for water.
He found Mark by the glow of his cigarette. Get up, said Mark, and gave him an arm. Pungushe did not argue. He had run almost without a pause since before dawn, and he swung up behind Mark.
They rode home, two up on Trojan's broad sway back, and neither of them spoke until they saw the lantern light in the cottage window.
Jamela, said Pungushe. I feel the way I did the day my first son was born. And there was a tone of wonder in his voice. I did not believe a man could feel thus for a devil that kills cattle and men. Lying in the darkness, with Marion beside him in the double bed, Mark told her about it. Trying to convey the wonder and the sense of achievement. He told her what Pungushe had said, and stumbled for words to describe his own feelings, to come haltingly at last into silence. That's very nice, dear. When are you going into town again? I want to buy some curtains for the kitchen. I thought a checked gingham would look pretty, what do you think, dear? The lioness gave birth to her cubs in the thick jessie bushes that choked one of the narrow tributary valleys which came down off the escarpment.
There were six cubs, but they were almost three weeks old when Mark first saw them. He and Pungushe lay belly down on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the valley when she led them back from the river in the dawn. The cubs followed her in an untidy straggle spread over a hundred yards.
The sinew in her right fore had healed crooked and slightly shorter, which gave her a heaviness in her gait, a roll like a sailor's, as she came up the draw. One of the cubs, more persistent than the rest was trying to suckle from her pendulant, heavy, multiple dugs as she walked.
He kept making clumsy flying leaps at them as they swung above his head, mostly he fell on his head and got trodden on by his mother's back feet, but once he succeeded and hung like a fat brown tick on one nipple. The lioness whirled about and cuffed him left and right, then began to lick him with a tongue that wrapped around his head entirely and knocked him on his back again.
One of the other cubs was stalking his siblings, crouching in ambush behind a single blade of grass, with flattened ears and viciously slitted eyes. When he leapt out on his brothers and sisters and they totally ignored his warlike manoeuvres, he covered his embarrassment by turning back and sniffing the grass blade with such attention that it seemed this had been his original intention.
