tufts of new leaves. The head was screened, so he had to abandon his
intention of going for that shot.
However, the shoulder was exposed. He could make out the clear outline
of the blade beneath the glossy red-brown skin. The dik-dik was angled
slightly away from him, in the perfect position for the heart shot,
tucked in low behind the shoulder.
Unhurriedly he settled the reticule of the scope on the precise spot,
and squeezed the trigger.
The shot whip-cracked in the heavy heated air and the tiny antelope
bounded high, coming down to touch the earth already at a full run. Like
a rapier rather than a cutlass, the solid bullet had not struck with
sufficient shock to knock the dik-dik over. Head down, the dik-dik
dashed away in the typical frantic reaction to a bullet through the
heart. It was dead already, running only on the last dregs of oxygen in
its bloodstream.
'Oh, no! Not that way,' Nicholas cried as he jumped to his feet. The
tiny creature was racing straight towards the lip of the cliff. Blindly
leaped out into empty space and flipped into a somersault as it fell,
dropping from their sight, down almost two hundred feet into the chasm
of the Dandera river.
'That was a filthy bit of luck.' Nicholas jumped over the bush that had
hidden them and ran to the rim of the chasm. Royan followed him and the
two of them stood peering down into the giddy void.
'There it is!' She pointed, and he nodded. 'Yes, I can see it.'
The carcass lay directly below them, caught on an islet of rock in the
middle of the stream.
'What are you going to do?' she asked.
'I'll have to go down and get it.' He straightened up and stepped back
from the brink. 'Fortunately it's still early.
We have plenty of time to get the job done before dark.
I'll have to go back to camp to fetch the rope and to get some help.'
It was afternoon before they returned, panied by Boris, both his
trackers and two of the skinners. They brought with them four coils of
nylon rope.
Nicholas leaned out over the cliff and grunted with relief 'Well, the
carcass is still down there. I had visions of it being washed away.' He
supervised the trackers as they uncoiled the rope and laid it out down
the length of the clearing.
'We will need two coils of it to get down to the bottom he estimated
and joined them, painstakingly tying and checking the knot himself. Then
he plumbed the drop, lowering the end of the rope down the cliff until
it touch the surface of the water, and then hauling it back and
measuring it between the spread of his arms.
'Thirty fathoms. One hundred and eighty feet. I won't be able to climb
back that high,' he told Boris. 'You and your gang will have to haul me
back up.'
He anchored the rope end with a bowline to the hole of one of the wiry
thorn trees. Then he again tested it meticulously, getting all four of
the trackers and skinners to heave on it with their combined weight.
'That should do it,' he gave his opinion as he stripped to his shirt and
