bastard managed to make a muck-up of a sitting shot like that? He had been shooting like a Bisley champion u The hunter suppressed a shiver and snapped his fingers for p to now. Christ, but that bush looked really nasty.
the number two gunbearer to bring up the heavy rifle.
'You will wait here with the bearers,' said the Russian quietly.
'Sir!' the hunter protested quickly. J can't let you go in alone.
I'd lose my licence. It's just not on-'
'Enough,'said Colo nO Bukharin.
'But, sit, you don't understand-'
'I said, enough!' The Russian never raised his voice, but those pale eyes silenced the younger man completely. He found suddenly that he was more afraid of this man than of losing his licence, or of the wounded bull in the bush and leapped back thankfully.
ahead. He subsided ste The Russian took The.458 from the gunbearer, shot the bolt back to check that it was loaded with soft-tipped bullets, and then handed it to Peter Fungabera. Peter took it from him, smiling slightly, hefted it, then handed it back to the gunbearer. Colonel Bukharin raised one silver eyebrow and smiled also.
The smile was mockery shaded with contempt.
Peter spoke sharply in Shana to the bearer, Th he, mambo! The man ran, and snatched another weapon from one of the other back bearers. He brought it back to Peter, clapping softly to show his respect.
Peter weighed this new weapon in his hands. It was a short-shafted stabbing assegai. The handle was of hardwood bound with copper wire. The blade was almost two feet long and four inches broad.
Carefully Peter shaved the hairs off the back of his thumb with the edge of the silver blade, then, deliberately, he shrugged off his jacket and stripped his trousers and jungle boots.
Dressed only in a pair of olive-green shorts and carrying the stabbing assegai, he said, 'This is the African way, Colonel.' The Russian was no longer smiling. 'But I do not expect a man of your years to hunt the same way.' Peter excuse d him courteously. 'You may use your rifle again.' The Russian nodded, conceding the exchange. He had lost that one, but now let's see if this black mtqik can make good his boast. Bukharin looked down at the spoor. The great hoof prints were the size of soup plates, and the thin watery gouts of blood were tinged with greenish- yellow dung from the ruptured bowels.
91 will track,' he said. 'You will watch for the break.' They moved off easily, with the Russian five paces ahead, stooped attentively to the blood spoor, and Peter Fungabera drifting behind him, the assegai held underhand, and his dark eyes covering the bush ahead with a steady rhythmic sweep, trained eyes not expecting to see the whole animal, searching for the little things, perhaps the shine of a wet muzzle or the drooping curve of a great horn.
Within twenty paces the bush closed in around them.
It was sultry green as a hothouse, dank vegetation pressing breathlessly around them. The air stank of the rotting leaf mould that deadened their footfalls. The silence was oppressive, so that the drag of a thorny branch across the Russian's leather leggings sounded loud as a truck engine.
He was sweating; perspiration soaked his shirt in a dark patch between the shoulder-blades and sparkled like dewdrops on the back of his neck. Peter could hear his ing, deep and harsh, but knew instinctively that it breath was not fear that worked in the Russian, but the pervading excitement of the hunter.
Peter Fungabera did not share it. There was a coldness in him where his own fear should have been. He had trained himself to that during the chimurenga. This was a necessary task, this thing with the assegai. It was to impress the Russian only, and with all fear and feeling anaesthetized by the coldness, Peter Fungabera prepared himself.
He felt his muscles charging, felt the tension build in his sinews and nerves until he was like an arrow, notched -bow against the curve of the long With his eyes he swept the bush directly in the run of the spoor only lightly, and concentrated his main attention on the flanks. This beast that they were hunting was the most cunning of all the dangerous game of Africa, except perhaps the leopard. But it was possessed of the brute strength of a hundred' leopards The lion will growl before he charges, the elephant will turn under the punishment of heavy bullets in the chest, but the Cape buffalo comes and in silence, and only one thing will stop his charge that is death.
A big, metallic-blue fly settled on Peter Fungabera's lip and crawled into his nostril. So complete was his concentration that he did not feel it, or brush it away. He watched the flanks, he concentrated the very essence of his being on the flanks.
The Russian checked, examining the change in the spoor, the plant of solid hooves, the puddle of loose bloody dung. This was where the bull had stood, after his first wild run. Peter Fungabera could imagine him, standing massive and black, with his nose held high, looking back towards the hunters with the spreading agony in his guts and liquid faeces from his torn intestines beginning to ooze uncontrollably down his quarters. Here he had stood and listened and heard their voices, and the hatred and anger had begun to seethe in him. Here the killing rage had begun.
He had dropped his head, and gone on, humping his back against the agony in his bowels, sustained by the rage within him.
The Russian glanced back at Peter, and they did not have to speak.
In unison they moved forward.
The bull was acting on an atavistic memory: everything he did had been done countless times before by his ancestors. From that first wild gallop as he received the bullet, the stop to listen and peer back, the gathering of great muscles, and now the more sedate trot, angling to resent his haunches to the fitful breeze so that the scent of the hunters would be borne down to him, great armoured head swinging from side to side as he began the search for the ambush point, it was all part of a pattern.
'Me bull crossed a narrow clearing ten paces across, forced his head into the wall of glossy green leaves on the far side, leaving it smeared with fresh bright blood, and went on another fifty yards. Then he turned sharply aside, and started back in a wide circle. Now he moved with deliberate stealth, insinuating his bulk gently through the intertwined creeper and branch a single pace at a time until he came back to the clearing again.
Here he stopped, hidden on the far edge of the clearing, covering from the side his own bloody tracks across the narrow opening, his body screened entirely by dense growth, and a terrible stillness settled upon him. He let the stinging flies feast on his open wound without shuddering his skin or swinging his tail. He did not twitch either of his large, Cup-shaped ears but strained them forward.
Not even his eyes blinked as he peered back along the blood spoor and waited for the hunters to come.
The Russian stepped lightly into the clearing, his gaze darting ahead to where blood painted branches hung on the far side and a huge body had forced its way through into the forest beyond. He started forward quietly. Peter Fungabera followed him, watching the flanks, moving likea dancer, his body glowing with a light sheen of sweat, the flat, hard muscle in his chest and arms changing shape at his slightest movement.
He saw the bull's eye. It caught the light likea new coin, and Peter froze. He snapped the fingers of his left hand, and the Russian froze with him. Peter Fungabera stared at the bull buffalo's eye, not quite sure what he was seeing, but knowing that it was in the right place thirty yards out on the left. If the bull had doubled, that was where he would be.
Peter blinked his eyes, and suddenly the image cleared.
He was no longer focused only on the eye, and so he could see the curve of one horn held so still that it could have been a branch. He saw the crenellations of the boss meeting above the bull's eye, and now he looked into the eye itself and it was likea glimpse into hell.
The bull charged. The forest burst open before his rush, branches crackled and broke, the leaves shook and fluttered as though struck by a hurricane and the bull came out into the clearing. He came out crabbing sideways, a deceptive but characteristic feint that had lulled many a hunter until the sudden direct I ge at the end.
He came fast. uhnsetemed impossible that any beast so enormous could move so fast. He was broad and tall as a granite kopje, his back and shoulder crusted with dried mud from the wallow, and there were obscene silvery bald patches on his shoulders and neck, crisscrossed with the long-healed scars of thorn and lions' claws.
From his open jaws drooled silver ropes of saliva, and tears had tracked wet lines down his hairy cheeks. A man could barely have encompassed that neck with both arms, or matched the spread of those horns with arms extended.
In the skin folds of his throat hung bunches of blue ticks like ripe grapes, and the rank bovine smell of him was choking in the hothouse of the forest.
He came on, majestic in his killing rage, and Peter Fungabera went out to meet him. He passed in front of the Russian just as Colonel Bukharin swung up the stubby heavy-calibre rifle, screening the shot, forcing him to throw the barrel up towards the sky. Peter moved likea dark forest wraith, crossing the bull at the opposite angle to his crabbing charge, taking him off balance so that the bull hooked at him likea boxer punching as he moves away, not timing the swing of horns, not sighting true, and Peter swayed away from it with his upper body only, letting the curved point hiss past his ribs by the breadth of a hand and then swaying back as the bull's head was flung high at
