Ralph started to run, whooping with excitement, and Bazo was at his shoulder, laughing, head thrown back, watching the birds fall, leaving a tracery of feathers like the plume of a comet in the sky behind them.
A hawk binds to its prey, from the moment of strike unto the earth. A falcon does not. Scipio should break, and let the goose fall, but she had not; she was still locked in, and Ralph felt the first frost of worry cool his excitement. Had his bird broken bone, or otherwise injured herself in that frightful impact?
"Beauty!" he called to her. "Unbind! Unbind!" She could be caught under the heavy goose and crushed against the earth. It was not her way to hold on all the way in.
"Unbind!" he screamed again, and saw her flutter, stabbing at the air with those sharp-bladed wings. She was stunned, and the earth rushed up at her.
Then suddenly she lunged, unbinding, breaking loose from her kill, hovering, letting the goose go on to thud into the rocky earth beyond the swamp, only then sinking, dainty and poised, and settling again upon the humped black carcass. Ralph felt his chest choked with pride and love for her courage and her beauty.
"Kweet," Scipio called, when she saw Ralph. "Kweet," the recognition call, and she left the prize that she had risked her life to take and came readily to Ralph's hand.
He stooped over her, his eyes burning with pride, and kissed her lovely head.
"I won't make you do it again," he whispered. "I just had to see if you could do it, but I won't ever make you do it again."
Ralph fed the goose's head to Scipio, and she tore it to pieces with her curved beak, between each morsel pausing to stare at Ralph.
"The bird loves you," Bazo looked up from the fire over which he was roasting chunks of fat goose, the grease dripping onto the coals and frizzling sharply. Ralph smiled, lifted the bird and kissed its bloody beak.
"And I love her."
"You and the bird have the same spirit. Kamuza and I have spoken of it often."
"Nothing is as brave as my Scipio."
Bazo shook his head. "Do you remember the day that Bakela would have killed me? In the moment that he took the gun to me he was mad, mad to the point of killing."
Ralph's expression changed. It was many months since he had intervened to save the young Matabele from the wrath of his father.
"I have not spoken of it before." Bazo held Ralph's eyes steadily. "It is not the kind of matter about which a man chatters like a woman at the water hole. We will probably never speak of it again, you and I, but know you that it will never be forgotten -" Bazo paused, and then he said it solemnly. "I shall remember, Henshaw."
Ralph understood immediately. "Henshaw, the hawk."
The Matabele had given him a praise name, a thing not lightly done, a mark of enormous respect. His father was Bakela, the Fist, and now he was Henshaw, the Hawk, named for the brave and beautiful bird upon his wrist.
"I shall remember, Henshaw, my brother," repeated Bazo, the Axe. "I shall remember."
Zouga was never entirely sure why he kept the rendezvous; certainly it was not merely because Jan Cheroot urged him to do so, nor the fact that the payment of 2000 pounds for the shattered chips of the great Ballantyne diamond had not lasted him as long as he had hoped, nor that the cost of the new stagings was rising all the time. His share looked to be more like two thousand than a thousand pounds. Sometimes in his least charitable moods Zouga suspected that Pickering and Rhodes and some other members of the committee were content to see the costs of the stagings rise and the pressure begin to squeeze out the smaller diggers. The going price of claims in the collapsed number 6 Section continued to drop as the cost of the stagings rose; and somebody was buying, if not Rhodes and his partners, then it must be Beit or Wemer, or even the newcomer, Barnato.
Perhaps Zouga kept the rendezvous to distract himself from these grave problems, perhaps he was merely intrigued by the mystery that surrounded it all, but when he looked at himself honestly it was more likely the prospect of profit. The whole affair reeked of profit, and Zouga was a desperate man. He had very little left to sell apart from the claims themselves. To sell the claims was to abandon his dream. He was ready to explore any other path, to take any risks, rather than that.
"There is a man who wishes to speak with you." Jan Cheroot's words had started it, and something in his tone made Zouga look up sharply. They had been together many years and there was little they did not know of each other's moods and meanings.
"That is simple enough," Zouga had told him. "Send him to the camp."
"He wishes to speak secretly, at a place where no other eyes will be watching."
"That sounds like the way of a rogue," Zouga frowned.
"What is the man's name?"
"I do not know his name," Jan Cheroot admitted, and then when he saw Zouga's expression, he explained. "He sent a child with a message."
"Then send the child back to him, whoever he is. Tell him he will find me here every evening, and anything he has to discuss I will be pleased to listen to in the privacy of my tent."
"As you wish," Jan Cheroot grunted, and the wrinkles on his face deepened so that he looked like a pickled walnut. "Then we will continue to eat maize porridge And they did not discuss it again, not for many weeks, but the worm was planted and it gnawed away at Zouga until he was the one who asked.
"Jan Cheroot, what of your nameless friend. What was his reply?"
"He sent word that it was not possible to help a man who refused to help himself," Jan Cheroot told him airily.
"And it is clear to all the world that we have no need of help. Look at your fine clothes, it is the fashion now to have the buttocks hanging out of the pants., Zouga smiled at the hyperbole, for his breeches were neatly patched. Jordan had seen to that.
"And look at me," Jan Cheroot went on. "What reason do I have for complaint? I was paid a year ago,"
"wasn't,"
"Six months ago," Zouga corrected him.
"I cannot remember," Jan Cheroot sulked. "The same way I have forgotten what beef tastes like."
"When the stagings are completed -" Zouga began, and Jan Cheroot snorted.
"They are more likely to fall on our heads. At least then we won't have to worry about being hungry."
Serious defects had shown up in the design of the stagings. They had been unable to support the weight of cable. The cables between them weighed over three hundred tons and they had to be stretched to sufficient tension to carry the gravel buckies without sagging excessively.
The very first day of operation the stagings at the north end of the section gave under the strain. Two winches tore loose and the wires fell twanging and snaking into the diggings. There had been a gravel bucky on the rope, carrying five black workmen down to the floor of the workings to begin re-opening the long deserted claims. They screamed the whole way down as the bucky spun and twisted, throwing them clear, and the tangle of snapping silver cables caught them up like the tentacles of some voracious sea-monster.
it took the rest of the day to bring out the fearfully mutilated bodies, and the Diggers" Committee closed the number 6 Section again while modifications were made to reinforce the stagings.
The number 6 Section was still closed.
Zouga had one bottle of Cape brandy leftwhich he had been saving but now he fetched it from his locker, pulled the cork with his teeth and poured into their two mugs.
He and Jan Cheroot drank in moody silence for a while, and then Zouga sighed.
"Tell your friend I will meet him," he said.
Pale dust chalked the sky above the plain, so that the distances drifted away, dreamlike and insubstantial, to an indefinite horizon.
There was no living thing, no bird nor vulture in the milky blue sky, no ripple of flocks nor smoky drift of springbuck herds through the low scrub.