Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн бесплатно полностью без .TXT) 📗
Swiftly he made a selection of items from the lockers, most importantly the hand-bearing compass. He packed them into the small day pack. From the first-aid kit he took field dressings and antiseptic and anti-malarial tablets. There was no food in the truck.
He'd have to live off the forest. He could not carry the pack the normal way without restarting the bleeding so he slung it over the other shoulder. He guessed that the wound really required stitching, but there was no way in which he could even attempt that.
I have to get across the MOMU track before first light, he thought.
That's the one place I'll be in the open and vulnerable.
He left the Landrover and struck out westwards. It was difficult to orientate in darkness and the dense forest. He was forced to flash the torch and study the compass every few hundred yards. The going was soft and uneven and his progress was slow as he found his way between the trees. When he reached the MOMU excavation the open sky above it was flushing with dawn's first light.
He could make out the trees on the far side of the clearing, but the MOMU itself had passed on weeks before and was already working six or seven miles further north. This part of the forest should be deserted, unless Kajo and Chetti Singh had sent a patrol down the strip to cut him off.
It was a chance he had to take. He left the shelter of the forest and started across. He sank to his ankles in the red mud and it sucked at his boots. Every second he expected to hear a shout or a shot, and he was panting with exertion when at last he reached the far tree-line.
He kept going for another hour before he took his first rest.
Already it was hot and the humidity was like a Turkish bath.
He stripped off all his clothing, except for shorts and boots, rolled it into a ball and buried it in the thick soft loam of the forest floor. His skin was toughened by sun and weather and he had a natural resistance to insect stings. In the Zambezi valley he had been able to tolerate even the bite of the swarming tsetse fly. As long as he kept the wound on his back covered he should be all right, he decided.
He stood up and went on. He navigated by compass and wristwatch, timing his average stride to give him an estimate of distance covered.
Every two hours he rested for ten minutes. By nightfall he calculated he had covered ten miles. At that rate it would take eight days to.
reach the Zaire border but, of course, he wouldn't be able to keep it up. There were mountains ahead, and glaciers and snowfields, and he had abandoned most of his clothing. it was going to be interesting out on the glaciers in his present attire, he decided, as he made a nest in the moist leaf mould and composed himself for sleep.
When he woke it was just light enough to see his hand in front of his face. He was hungry and the wound in his back was stiff and painful.
When he reached to touch it he found it was swollen and the flesh hot.
All we need is a nice little infection, he thought, and renewed the dressing as best he could.
By noon he was ravenously hungry. He found a nest of fat white grubs under the bark of a dead tree. They tasted like raw egg yolks. What doesn't kill you, makes you fat, he assured himself, and kept on towards the west, the compass in his hand. in the early afternoon he thought he recognized a type of edible fungus and nibbled a small piece as a trial.
In the late afternoon he reached the bank of a small clear stream, and as he was drinking he noticed a dark cigar shape lying at the bottom of the pool. He cut a stake and sharpened one end, carving a crude set of barbs above the point. Then he cut down one of the hanging ant's nests from the branches of a silk-cotton tree and sprinkled the big red ants on the surface of the pool, taking care to stand well back from the edge with the crude spear in his right hand.
Almost immediately the fish rose from the bottom and began to gulp down the struggling insects trapped in the surface film.
Daniel drove the point of his fish spear into its gils and brought it out flapping and kicking on to the bank. It was a barbeled catfish, as long as his arm. He ate his fill of the fatty yellow flesh and the rest of the carcass he smoked over a fire of green leaves. it should keep him going for a couple more days, he decided. He wrapped it in a package of leaves and put it in his pack.
However, when he woke the next morning his back was excruciatingly painful, and his stomach was swollen with gas and dysentery. He couldn't tell whether it was the insect grubs, the fungus or the stream water that had caused it, but by noon he was very weak. his diarrhea was almost unremitting, and the wound felt like a red-hot coal between his shoulder-blades.
It was about that time that Daniel had the first sensation that he was being followed. It was an instinct that he had realised he possessed when he was a patrol leader with the Scouts in the valley.
Johnny Nzou had trusted this sixth sense of his implicitly and it had never let them down. It was almost as though Daniel was able to pick up the malevolent concentration of the hunter following on his tracks.
Even in his pain and weakness Daniel looked back and felt a presence.
He knew that he was out there, the hunter.
Anti-tracking, he told himself, knowing that it would slow his progress, but it would almost certainly throw off his real or imaginary pursuer, unless he was very good indeed, or unless Daniel's anti-tracking skills had atrophied.
At the next river-crossing he took to the water, and from then on he used every ruse and subterfuge to cover his tracks and throw off the pursuit.
Every mile he grew slower and weaker. The diarrhea never let up, his wound was beginning to stink, and he knew with clairvoyant certainty that the unseen hunter was still after him, and drawing closer every hour.
Over the years Chetti Singh, the master poacher, had developed various systems of contacting his hunters. In some areas it was easier than others.
In Zambia or Mozambique he had only to drive out to a remote village and talk to a wife or brother, and rely on them to pass the message.
In Botswana or Zimbabwe he could even rely on the local postal authority to deliver a letter or telegram, but contacting a wild pygmy in the Ubomo rain forest was the most uncertain and time-consuming of all.
The only way to do it was to drive down the main highway and stop at every duka or trading-store, to accost every halftame Bambuti that he met upon the roadside and bribe them to get a message to Pirri in the forest.
It was amazing how the wild pygmies maintained a network of communication over those vast and secret areas of the rain forest, but then they were garrulous and sociable people.
A honey-seeker from one tribe would meet a woman from another tribe who was gathering medicine plants far from her camp, and the word would be passed on, shouted from a forested hilltop in a high penetrating sing-song to another wanderer across the valley, or carried by canoe, along the big rivers, until at last it reached the man for whom it was intended. Sometimes it took weeks, sometimes, if the sender was fortunate, it might take only a few days.
This time Chetti Singh was extremely lucky. Two days after he had given the message to a straggling group of pygmy women at one of the river crossings, Pirri came to the rendezvous in the forest. As always he appeared with the dramatic suddenness of a forest sprite and asked for tobacco and gifts. Have you killed my elephant? Chetti Singh asked pointedly, and Pirri picked his nose and scratched himself between the legs with embarrassment. If you had not sent for me, the elephant would by now be dead. But he is not dead, Chetti Singh pointed out. And thus you have not earned those marvelous gifts I promised you. Just a little tobacco? Pirri pleaded. For I am your faithful slave, and my heart is full of love for you. just a small handful of tobacco? Chetti Singh gave him half what he asked for and while Pirri squatted down to suck and enjoy it, he went on, All I have promised you, I will give you that much again if you kill another creature for me, and bring me its head. What creature is this?
