The waters were as black and shining as anthracite in the last beams of the moon, and the tall trees along either bank were a silvered host, like two opposing armies of mythical giants.
Sean parked the Toyota well off the track and left one of the skinners to guard it. They fell naturally into established hunting formation, clients in the center. Purnula took up Shadrach's old position at the end. A muscular taciturn man with a thick woolly bush of a black beard, he carried Riccardo's Rigby on its sling.
All the men, including Riccardo, were carrying field packs and even Claudia carried her own water bottles. Job had Riccardo's second rifle, the Weatherby, over his shoulder, and as always Sean lugged the577 Nitro Express. Once the hunt had begun he never let it out of his hands. They moved out, heading upstream, and within a mile they had warmed up and were pushing harder. Sean noticed that Claudia moved well on those long legs of hers and was keeping up without difficulty. She gave him a saucy grin as she noticed his appraisal.
The dawn light was hardening when the tracker who had come in with the news of Tukutela's crossing exclaimed and pointed ahead. It was light enough to make out a fresh blaze on the trunk of a pod mahogany tree guarding a low place on the riverbank.
"There!" said the tracker. "I marked the spoor."
At a glance, Sean saW that this was a natural crossing for large animals. Troops of hippo had pioneered a pathway through the reed beds and dowp the ten-foot riverbank. Herds of buffalo and elephant passing over it had consolidated it and improved the gradient.
The African veld is crisscrossed with a network of game trails, and a dozen or so of these came in through the forest, like the spokes of a wheel, to concentrate on this river crossing. Everyone in the party quickened pace at the tracker's exclamation, but Matatu reached the main pathway ahead of them and darted down it, turning his head to use the light of dawn most effectively, dabbing lightly at the earth with the tip of the peeled wild willow wand he carried.
He had not gone five paces before he straightened and looked back at Sean, his features wreathed in wrinkles of happiness and excitement.
"It is him!" he chirped. "These are the feet of the father of all elephants. It is Tukutela! It is the Angry One!"
Sean looked down at the great dished spoor in the fine dust of the game path and felt as though a spring tide had begun to flow in his life. His excitement was replaced by a sense of destiny, an almost religious gravity. "Matatu," he said, "take the spoor!"
Formally he announced the start of the hunt.
The spoor was as clear as a highway, following the game trail directly into the forest away from the river.
The old bull was striding out briskly as though he knew the crossing was the danger point. Perhaps that was why he had chosen to cross at sunset, so that darkness would cover him until he was clear.
For five miles he had gone without a check and then suddenly had turned aside from the game trail into a thicket of rambling thorn that had come into blossom and new shoot. He had moved back and forth, feeding on the blooms and succulent shoots, and his spoor was confused, the thicket trampled and torn.
Matatu and Job went into the Thorn thicket to unravel it while the rest of the party hung back to let them work unhindered.
"I'm thirsty!" Claudia exclaimed as she unhooked one of the water bottles from her belt.
"No!" Sean stopped her. "If you drink on your first thirst, you'll want to drink all day, and we've only just begun."
She hesitated a moment, considering defying him, but then she hooked the bottle back on her belt. "You are a hard taskmaster," she said.
On the far side of the thicket, Matatu whistled softly.
"He has worked the spoor out," Sean told them, leading them through the thorn. "How much have gained?" he asked Matatu. They had started almost ten hours behind the bull, but -every time he had paused to feed, they had cut that lead.
"He did not feed long." Matatu shrugged. "And now he is going hard again."
The bull had turned off the game trail and was following a stony ridge, almost as if he were deliberately obscuring his own spoor.
He left no indications obvious enough for the average human eye to follow, but Matatu went after him with complete authority.
"Are you sure he's still on it?" Riccardo asked anxiously.
"Capo, you've hunted with Matatu too often to ask that question," Sean told him.
"But what can he see?" Claudia wanted to know. "It's just rocks and gravel."
"The elephant's pads leave a scuff on the rock. They bruise the lichen, leave smears of dust. There's fine grass growing between the stones. He has disturbed it, bending the stems in the direction of his passing. The disturbed grass catches the light differently."
"Could you follow it?" Claudia wanted to know. Sean shook his head. "No, I'm not a magician." They had been speaking in barely audible whispers, but Sean said, "That's enough chatter, let's keep it down to a bellow from now on."
So they went on in silence, and the forest about them was a perpetually changing show.
There were forty different varieties of the comb return family of trees, but this was not exclusively comb return forest, as many other varieties were mingled with them, each having a distinctive shape of trunk differing in the color and texture of its bark, some with branches denuded by winter, others with dense foliage of a myriad shades of green and gold and orange and cinnabar. At times the forest enclosed them like a palisade, then only moments later opened onto vistas of far hills and weirdly shaped kopjes, open glades, and vleis from some of which the tall grass had been burned, the tender shoots laying a carpet of green over the black ash. The new growth of grass had attracted herds of antelope into the vleis. They stood out in the open, sable antelopes with long horns curved like scimitars, the proud necks of blood Arabs, upper bodies sooty black as the ash of the vlei, their bellies snowy white.