The man had the cunning of, Mark sought for a simile, a properly disparaging simile, and then grinned as he found a suitable one. The man had the cunning of a jackal, but he was Zulu so Mark used the Zulu word Pungushe.
I will be watching for you, Pungushe. I'll catch you yet, little jackal. His mood improved with the insult, and as he crushed out his cigarette, he found himself anticipating the contest of bush skills between himself and Pungushe.
Now whenever Mark moved part of his attention was alert for the familiar footprints in the soft earthy places or for the glimpse of movement and the figure of a man among trees. Three times more he cut the spoor, but each time it was cold and wind-eroded, not worth following.
The days passed in majestic circle of sky and mountain, of sun and river and swamp, so that time seemed without end until he counted on his fingers and realized that his month was almost run. Then he felt the dread of leaving, a sinking of the spirits such as a child feels when moment of return to school comes at the end of an idyllic summer holiday.
That night he returned to the camp below the fig tree with the last of the light, and set his rifle against the stem of the tree. He stood a moment, stretching aching muscles and savouring the coming pleasure of hot coffee and a cheerful fire, when suddenly he stooped and then dropped to one knee to examine the earth, soft and fluffy with leaf mould.
Even in the bad light, there was no mistaking the print of broad bare feet. Quickly, Mark looked up and searched the darkening bush about him, feeling an uneasy chill at the knowledge that he might be observed at this very moment. Satisfied at last that he was alone he backtracked the spoor, and found that the mysterious stranger had searched his camp, had found the pack in the -tree and examined its contents, then returned them carefully, each item to its exact place and replaced the pack in the tree.
Had Mark not seen the spoor in the earth he would never have suspected that his pack had been touched.
It left him disquieted and ill at ease to know that the man he had tracked and followed had been tracking and probably watching him just as carefully, and with considerably greater success rewarding his efforts.
Mark slept badly that night, troubled by weird dreams in which he followed a dark figure that tap-tapped with a staff on the rocky dangerous path ahead of him, drawing slowly away from Mark without looking back, while Mark tried desperately to call to him to wait, but no sound came from his straining throat.
In the morning he slept late, and rose dull and heavyheaded to look up into a sky filled with slowly moving cumbersome ranges of dark bruised cumulus cloud that rolled in on the south-east wind from off the ocean. He knew soon it would rain, and that he should be going. His time had run, but in the end he promised himself a few last days, for the old man's sake and his own.
It rained that morning before noon, a mere taste of what was to come, but still a quick cold grey drenching downpour that caught Mark without shelter. Even though the sun poured through a gap in the clouds immediately afterwards, Mark found that the cold of the rain seemed to have penetrated his bones, and he shivered like a man with palsy in his sodden clothing.
only when the shivering persisted long after his clothes had dried, did Mark realize that it was exactly twenty- two days since his first night under the fig tree, and his first exposure to the river mosquitoes.
Another violent shivering fit caught him, and he realized that his life probably depended now on the bottle of quinine tablets in the pack high in the branches of the fig tree, and on whether he could reach it before the malaria struck with all its malignance.
it was four miles back to camp and he took a short route through thick Thorn and over a rocky ridge, to intersect the path again on the far side.
By the time he cut the path, he was feeling dizzy and light-headed, and he had to rest a moment. The cigarette he lit tasted bitter and stale, and as he ground the stub under his heel he saw the other spoor in the path. In this place it had been protected from the short downpour of rain by the dense spreading branches of a mahoba hobo tree. it overlaid his own outward spoor, moving in the same direction as he had, but the thing that shocked him was that the feet that had followed his had been booted, and shod with hob-nails. They were the narrower elongated feet of a white man. There seemed in that moment of sickness on the threshold of malaria to be something monstrously sinister in those booted tracks.
Another quick fit of shivering caught Mark, and then passed, leaving him momentarily clear-headed and with the illusion of strength, but when he stood to go on, his legs were still leaden. He had gone another five hundred yards back towards the river when a day-flighting owl called on the ridge behind him, at the point where he had just crossed.
Mark stopped abruptly, and tilted his head to listen. A tsetse fly bite at the back of his neck began to itch furiously, but he stood completely still as he listened.
The call of the owl was answered by a mate, the fluting hoot-hoot, skilfully imitated, but without the natural resonance. The second call had come from out on Mark's right, and a new chill that was not malaria rippled up his spine as he remembered the hooting owls on the escarpment above Ladyburg on that night so many months ago.
He began to hurry now, dragging his heavy almost disembodied legs along the winding path. He found that he was panting before he had gone another hundred yards, and that waves of physical nausea flowed upwards from the pit of his belly, gagging in his throat as the fever tightened its grip on him.
k His vision began to break up, starring and cracking like shattered mosaic work, irregular patches of darkness edged in bright iridescent colours, with occasional flashes of true vision, as though he looked out through gaps in the mosaic.
He struggled on desperately, expecting at any moment now to feel the spongy swamp grass under his feet and to enter the dark protective tunnels of papyrus which he knew so well, and which would screen him and direct him back to the old camp.
An owl hooted again, much closer this time and from a completely unexpected direction. Confused, and now frightened, Mark sank down at the base of a knob-thorn tree to rest and gather his reserves. His heart was pounding against his ribs, and the nausea was so powerful as almost to force him to retch, but he rode it for a moment longer and miraculously his vision opened as though a dark curtain had been drawn aside, and he realized immediately that in his fever blindness he had lost the path. He had no idea where he was now, or the direction in which he was facing.
Desperately he tried to relate the angle of the sun, or slope of the ground, or find some recognizable landmark,
