After the third shot, he said, ‘It’s not going to work. They won’t catch. We need something which will burn at once.’
The thought of spending a cold night defenceless on the dark edge of this terrible place with no alternative but to pull the leeches off by hand was enough to inspire Ann even further. ‘Film stock,’ she said, reaching into the open camera bag.
‘What?’
She pulled out the last of her unexposed films. ‘This stuff. Film acetate. Burns like fire lighters,’ she said, and jerked the ribbon of glistening brown out of the little tube. It was only a matter of moments before it was crushed into a loose ball and the pile of kindling was reassembled on top of it. This time, the explosion of the shot was followed almost at once by a crisp crackling and the smell of powder was subsumed below the acridity of blazing acetate and smouldering leaves.
Even now they had to keep themselves under rigid control, for the fire had to be nurtured, raised to a blaze, given at least the promise of some permanence and then corralled, restrained, stopped from running out of control. Only then could they turn to the almost overpowering urgency of the other matter in hand. And once they began, it did become overpowering. More important than hunger, thirst, dignity, modesty; more important than anything except, perhaps, death was the need to rid themselves of the creatures clinging to their skin. They stripped each other, all too aware that the loathsome things would be clustering in places where they could not be seen by their reluctant hosts. Then, with their clothing in steaming piles by the fire, first Ann then Robert stood with eyes closed and all their concentration focused on remaining still, while the other, with the glowing end of a smouldering stick, worried at the glistening, slug-like bodies until they reluctantly dropped free. Each time one fell, it was caught up and thrown immediately into the flames where it hissed and crackled like a toasting sausage.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight,’ Robert said as he worked on her cool, pale body.
She said nothing, preferring to remove her mind as far from the humiliating present as possible.
‘Those mosquitoes have surely made a mess of you,’ he continued, more to himself than to her. The firelight showed every intimate detail of her and none of it was unscathed. But her face had suffered worst of all; her eyes and lips were puffy with bites and the first of tonight’s mosquitoes were just beginning to arrive as he finished work on her. Compared to the leeches, the little insects hardly seemed worth a second thought.
At last, like Aborigines, they crouched side by side, naked and sluggishly bleeding from the myriad bites on their bodies, disregarding the thickening cloud of river mosquitoes hovering hungrily over their heads, holding their underwear as close to the flames as they dared until they at least were dry. As soon as some sort of dignity was restored to them, they began to arrange things around a circular blaze to give them some comfort. Ann set up makeshift racks upon which to hang the rest of their clothing until it was dry. Robert collected more wood to burn. Then they both pulled a log to sit on close enough to the flames to toast their toes, fingers and faces. They sat in silence, swatting desultorily until shirts, shorts and trousers began to darken in colour and to smell a little like toast.
Once they were vermin-free, warm and dry, they began to realize how hungry and thirsty they had become. The station in the township seemed a long, long way ago now; indeed, it was more than thirty-six hours since either of them had had anything to eat. But there was nothing to be done about it now. It was too dark to go hunting and although the jungle seemed dead, there was no guarantee that it was as empty of predators as it seemed. Stumbling about blindly with the gun would be a suicidal waste of time, even if either of them had been any kind of a hunter at all. Neither of them was. They banked up the fire, did their best to ensure that the circle of logs round it would stop it spreading across the jungle floor, made themselves beds of dry leaves with pillows of outer clothing and went to sleep hungry in their underwear. And, wisely, in their boots.
The last thing Robert did before sleep claimed him was to take the gun and some bullets from the camera bag which was supplementing Ann’s shorts as her pillow. The cold metal added nothing to the comfort of his own bunched-up shirt, but it added a great deal to his peace of mind, even though he took the considerable risk of setting it to automatic after he had loaded up. He was so exhausted that even the gnawing in his belly could not keep him awake for long — nor could the sight of Ann curled seductively so close at hand. He was idly pondering the paradox of the way in which her brief plain cotton underwear enhanced the attractiveness of a body he had just seen utterly exposed with no conscious reaction at all when he fell into a deep, dark slumber.
The smell of the fire was enough to keep the herd of elephants well away from them and the tall pachyderms finished their wallow and returned through the dead strip of jungle to the red plains beyond to spend a restless night searching for something to assuage the hunger which had replaced the urgency of thirst in their massive bodies. They were not the only animals moving among the dead trees, but even the most desperate of the predators was wary of the fire and so the two defenceless humans slept on in relative safety for the first few hours at least.
The leopard was old. Wounded in a cull and crippled with disease, it had been reduced to chasing injured or sickly birds in the days when Julius Karanga was president. In the years since, it had scavenged around the outskirts of N’Kuru villages, taking die odd goat, the occasional unwary dog, every now and then a child. It had been lucky to survive this long but now its luck was running out. The smell of the fire held no fears for its wise old nostrils, for this was not the stench of fire uncontrolled. Rather, it was a smell it knew well, which told of village camp fires, of offal to be scavenged, of soft, weak, unwary prey. Had it been capable of surprise, it might have wondered that there was no odour of roasting meat or boiling maize; but it was not. It was too hungry and intent upon feeding its hunger.
It came through the forest silently in the blackest moment of the night just before moonrise, and paused to look across the makeshift campsite from the edge of the forest. It noted the two still forms beyond the brightness of the fire and heard the restless rustle of their breathing. Saliva washed down the long channel of its mouth and all its claws slid out. Drooling with excitement, it filled the night with the hunting roar it had hardly used in the last decade and charged.
Robert jerked awake to see a bright yellow streak rushing towards him at unbelievable speed. He was sitting up almost before his eyes had opened and he was at such a point of tension that he fired the gun before he was properly awake. There was no thought of taking aim, no supple flick of switch, no red dot. He pointed at the middle of the thing and pulled the trigger.
‘ANN!’ he screamed as he fired, tearing his throat with the power of the sound he was making.
The leopard, recognising the muzzle flashes, turned, but too late. The bullets spat into its wounded shoulder and flipped it over into the fire. With its oily fur beginning to smoulder, the wounded animal writhed in the heart of the pile of glowing branches, scattering them hither and yon. From side to side it rolled, wildly trying to regain its feet. Its mangy, shaggy coat was on fire before it pulled itself to its feet and, blinded by die flames as its beard and whiskers ignited, its nostrils blocked by the stench of its own pelt burning, its ears all but deafened by its own wild screams, it charged again.