Mr Greyling (Sar): Yes, Your Worship, my boy and me, we was cutting and hanging biltong, we didn't go out that day.
Mark could imagine the butchering of the game carcasses, the raw red meat hacked into long strips, soaked in buckets of brine, and then festooned on the branches of the trees, a scene of carnage he had witnessed so often before. When the meat had dried to black sticks, like chewing tobacco, it was packed into jute sacks for later carriage out on the pack donkeys. The wet meat dried to a quarter of its weight, and the resulting biltong was highly prized through Africa and commanded such a high price as to make the poaching a lucrative trade.
Magistrate: When did you become concerned by the deceased's absence?
Mr Greyling: Well, he didn't come into camp that night.
But we weren't worried like. Thought he might have been spooring up a hit one, and slept up a tree.
Further on in the evidence was the statement: Mr Greyling (SnrJ: Well, in the end we didn't find him until the fourth day. It was the assvogels, beg pardon, the vultures, that showed us where to look.
He had tried to climb the ridge at a bad place, we found where he had slipped and the gun was still under him. it must have been that shot we heard, we buried him right there, you see he wasn't fit to carry, what with the birds and the sun. We put up a nice cross, carved it myself, and I said the Christian words.
Mark refolded the transcript, and slipped it back into the pack. The tea was brewing and he sweetened it with thick condensed milk and brown sugar.
Blowing on the mug to cool it, and sipping at the sweet liquid, he pondered what he had gleaned. A rocky ridge, a bad place, within sound of gunshot of where he now sat, a cairn of stones, probably, and a wooden cross, perhaps long ago consumed by termites.
He had a month, but he wondered if that was time enough. On such slim directions it was a search that could take years, if luck ran against him.
Even if he was successful, he wasn't yet sure what he would do next. The main concern that drove him on was merely to find where the old man lay. After that he would know what to do.
He worked the ridges and the rocky ground on the south bank first. For ten days he climbed and descended the rugged rim of the basin, hard going against the grain of the natural geological formations, and at the end of that time he was lean as a greyhound, arms and face burned to the colour of a new loaf by the sun and with a dark crisp pelt of beard covering his jaw. The legs of his pants were tattered by the coarse, razor-edged grass and by the clumps of aptly named wait-a-bit thorns, that grabbed at him to delay his progress.
There was a rich treasure of bird life in the basin, even in the heated hush of midday, the air rang with their cries the fluting mournful whistle of a wood dove or the high piping chant of a white-headed fish eagle circling high overhead. In the early morning and again in the cool of the evening, the bush came alive with the jewelled flash of feathers, the scarlet breast of the impossibly beautiful Narina Trogon, named long ago for a Hottentot beauty by one of the old travellers, the metallic flash of a suribird as it hovered over the pearly fragrant flowers of a buffalo creeper, the little speckled woodpeckers tapping furiously with heads capped in cardinal red, and, in the reeds by the river, the ebony sheen of the long floating tail feathers of the Sakabula bird. All this helped to lighten the long weary hours of Mark's search, and a hundred times a day he paused, enchanted, to watch for a few precious moments.
However, of the larger animals he saw very little, although their sign was there. The big shiny pellets of kudu dung scattered along their secret pathways through the forest, the dried faeces of a leopard furry with baboon hair from its kill, the huge midden of a white rhinoceros, a mountain of scattered dung accumulated over the years as this strange animal returned to the same place daily to defecate.
Pausing beside the rhinoceros midden, Mark grinned as he remembered one of the old man's stories, the one that explained why the rhinoceros was so fearful of the porcupine and why he always scattered his own dung.
Once, long ago, he had borrowed from the porcupine a quill to sew up the tear in his skin caused by a red- tipped mimosa Thorn. When the job was done the rhinoceros had held the quill between his teeth as he admired his handiwork, but by accident he swallowed the quill.
Now, of course, he runs away to avoid having to face the porcupine's recriminations, and he sifts each load that he drops, to try and recover the missing quill.
The old man had a hundred yarns like that one to delight a small boy, and Mark felt close to him again; his determination to find his grave strengthened, as he shifted the rifle to his other shoulder and turned once more to the rocky ridge of the high ground.
On the tenth day, he was resting in the deep shade at the edge of a clearing of golden grass, when he had his first good sighting of larger game.
A small herd of graceful pale brown impala, led by three impressively homed rams, emerged from the far side of the clearing. They fed cautiously, every few seconds they froze into perfect stillness with only the big scooplike ears moving as they listened for danger, and their wet black noses snuffing silently.
Mark was out of meat, he had eaten the last of the bully the previous day, and he had brought the rifle for just this moment, to relieve a diet of mealie porridge, yet he found himself strangely reluctant to use it now, a reluctance he had never known as a boy. For the first time, he looked with eyes that saw not just meat but rare and unusual beauty.
The three rams moved slowly across the clearing, passing a hundred paces from where Mark sat silently, and then drifted away, pale shadows, into the thorn scrub. The does followed them, trotting to keep up, one with a lamb stumbling on long gawky legs at her flank, and at the rear of the troop was a half-grown doe.
one of her back legs was crippled, it was withered and stunted, swinging free of the ground and the animal was having difficulty keeping up with the herd. it had lost condition badly, bone of rib and spine showed clearly through a hide that lacked the gloss and shine of healthMark swung up the P. I 4 and the flat crack of the shot bounced from the cliffs across the river, and startled a flock of white-faced duck into whistling flight off the river.
Mark stooped over the doe as she lay in the grass and touched the long curled lashes that fringed the dark swimming eye.
There was no reflex blink, and the check for life was routine only. He knew the shot had taken her in the centre of the heart, an instantaneous kill. Always make the check. The old man's teachings again. Percy Young would tell you that himself if he could, but he was sitting there on a dead lion he had just shot, having a quiet pipe, when it came to life again. That's why he isn't around to tell you himself. Mark rolled the carcass and squatted to examine
