"You know something?" Riccardo asked. "Claudia has never yet had an Eskimo turn down a lake or a mountain she has offered him, isn't that something? My little girl has a perfect score, never a single refusal."
"You are just plain lucky, Capo," Sean told him. "At least they might leave you something; here they took the lot."
Claudia woke to the clink of crockery outside the flap of her tent and Moses" polite cough. Nobody had ever brought her tea in bed before. It was a luxury that made her feel marvelously decadent.
It was still pitch dark and icy cold in the tent. She could hear the crackle of frost on the canvas as Moses opened the flap. She had never expected it to be so cold in Africa.
She sat up in the camp bed with a quilt over her shoulders, cupping her hands around the tea mug, and watched Moses fussing about the tent. He poured a bucket of hot water into her washbasin and set a clean white towel beside it. He filled the tooth mug with boiled drinking water and squeezed toothpaste onto her brush for her. Then he brought a brazier of burning charcoal and placed it in the center of the tent.
"Too cold today, Donna."
"And too damned early," Claudia agreed sleepily.
"Did you hear the lions roaring last night, Donna?"
"I didn't hear a thing." She yawned. They could have had a brass band playing "America, the Beautiful" beside her bed without waking her.
Moses finished laying out her clothes on the spare bed. He had polished her boots until they shone. "You want something, Donna, you call me," he told her as he backed out of the tent flap.
She shot out of the warm bed and stood over the brazier shivering while she held her panties over the coals to warm them before pulling them on.
The stars were still shining when she left the tent. She paused to look up, still amazed by the jeweled treasure chest of the southern sky. She picked out the Southern Cross with a sense of achievement, then went to the camp fire where the men were and held her hands out gratefully to the flames.
"You haven't changed since you were little." Her father smiled at her. "Do you remember how I used to battle to get you out of bed to go to school every morning?" And a waiter brought her a second cup of tea.
Sean whistled, and she heard Job start the Toyota and drive it around to the front gate of the stockade. They began pulling on their heavy gear: jerseys and anoraks, caps and woolen scarves.
When they trooped out to the hunting car, they found the rifles in the racks and Job and Shadrach, the two Matabeles, standing in the back with the little Ndorobo tracker between them. The tracker was a childlike figure who came only to Claudia's armpit, but he had an endearing wrinkled grin and bright mischievous eyes. She had been predisposed to like all the black camp staff, but Matatu was already her favorite. He reminded her of one of the dwarfs from Snow White. The three blacks were bundled up against the cold in army surplus greatcoats and knitted balaclava caps, and they answered Claudia's greeting with white grins in the darkness. All of them had fallen under her spell.
Sean took the wheel and Claudia sat on the front seat between him and her father. She crouched down behind the windshield and cuddled against Riccardo for warmth. In the short time she had been on safari, she had come to love this start to the day's adventure.
They drove slowly over the winding, bumpy track and as the night retreated before the advance of dawn Sean switched off the headlights.
Claudia peered into the comb return forest and down the grassy glades that intersected it that Sean called vleis, trying to be the first to spot some elusive and lovely creature. But it was always Sean or her father who murmured first, "Kudu on the left" or "That's a reedbuck." Or Matatu would lean over from the back to tap her shoulder and point out a rarer sight with his tiny pink-palmed hand.
The dusty track was pocked with the spoor of the animals that had crossed in the night. Once they came across the fresh droppings of an elephant, still steaming in the chill of dawn, a knee-high pile everybody climbed out of the Toyota to examine closely. At first Claudia had been disconcerted by this avid interest in dung, but now she was accustomed to it.
"Old beggar," Sean said. "On his last set of teeth."
"How do you know that?" she demanded.
"Can't chew his food," he replied. "Look at the twigs and leaves in the dung, almost whole."
Matatu was crouched by the spoor, examining the great round footprints, the size of trash can lids.
"See how smooth the pads of his feet are?" Sean said. "Worn down like an old set of car tires. Old and big."
"Is it him?" Riccardo asked eagerly, glancing at the.416 Rigby rifle in the gun rack behind his seat.
"Matatu will tell us." Sean shrugged, and the little Ndorobo spat in the dust, and shook his head mournfully as he stood up.
Then he spoke to Sean in piping falsetto Swahili.
"It's not the one we want. Matatu knows this bull," Sean translated. "We saw this one last year down near the river. He has one tusk broken off at the lip, and the other is worn down to a stump.
He might once have had a magnificent pair, but he's far over the other side of the hill now."
"You mean Matatu can recognize a particular elephant by his footprints?" Claudia looked incredulous.
"Matatu can recognize a particular buffalo out of a herd of five hundred, and he'll know that animal again two years later just by a glance at the spoor," Sean exaggerated a little for her. "Matatu isn't a tracker, he's a magician."
They drove on with small wonders occurring all around them: a kudu bull, gray as a ghost, striped with chalky lines, maned and humpbacked, his long corkscrew horns glinting in the gloom, slipped away into the forest; a genet cat caught out from his nocturnal prowling, spotted and golden as a miniature leopard, peered at them with astonishment from the brown grass of the verge; a kangaroo rat hopped ahead of the Toyota. Troops of chattering guinea fowl with waxen yellow helmets on their heads ran through the grass beside the track. Claudia no longer had to ask, "What is that bird?" or "What animal is that?" She was beginning to recognize them, and this added to her pleasure.
Just before sunrise, Sean parked the Toyota at the foot of a rocky hill that rose abruptly out of the forest and they climbed out stiffly and took off their heavy outer clothing. They climbed the side of the kopJe, three hundred feet of steep, uneven pathway, without a pause, and Claudia tried to disguise her ragged breathing as they came out on the summit. Sean had timed the ascent perfectly, and as they reached the top the sun burst out of the distant forest and lit it all with dramatic color and brilliance.
They looked out over a panorama of forest and glade that glowed with golden grass to other high sheer kopJes standing like fairy castles, all turreted and towered in the dawn. Other hills were great dumps of black rock, like the rubble left over from the Creation.
They shed their sweaters, for the climb had warmed them and even the first rays of the sun held the promise of the noonday heat.