Читать книгу Mukiwa - Peter Godwin - Страница 11

Our dogs were known as the ‘rat pack’ and they hunted very effectively in a pack even though they were only terrier-sized. Their talent for scrambling up trees was obviously a great asset when pursuing tree-borne quarry. The father of the clan, Toby, came from the SPCA dogs home in Salisbury. He had the same colouring as the dog on the Toby mug and was a high-spirited animal with an insatiable desire for chasing motorbikes. Unfortunately for Toby, he frequently caught them, and so he was usually afflicted with some burn or other injury. Eventually he lost one of his hind legs to a Honda 125, but he was soon up and about as a tripod. He continued to chase motorbikes, but his resultant loss of speed meant that he seldom caught them after that.

The reputation of the rat pack grew as their hunting prowess improved. They were small but they were many, and they marshalled themselves very effectively. They caught hares and guinea fowl, francolin and mongooses; they even managed to bring down duikers, and young bushbuck. Once they caught an armadillo. It rolled up in an armoured ball and they stayed at it. We heard the hysterical barking from the house and went to investigate.

Ordinary ant bears were rare enough sights, being nocturnal. Their holes, though, were everywhere, with new ones constantly popping up overnight in earth roads and causing broken ankles and broken axles. But their armoured cousin, the armadillo, was even rarer.

I scolded the dogs and chased them away from the rolled-up armadillo so that they knew it was on the prohibited list. Then I scrounged various scraps of food from Knighty to see if I could entice it out of its scales. It finally broke cover at the smell of cabbage. The tip of its long thin nose peeped out, then its dark little eyes darted around and its tongue flicked out to grab the cabbage leaf.

I used to go every day after that with food, always at the same time, and it was always there, waiting for me. It got so bold that as soon as it saw me it would scurry up and snuffle at my leg, making curious little grunting sounds. We even gave it a name, Arnold the Armadillo.

One morning Arnold was no longer there, and I assumed he had moved on to new foraging grounds, as he was bound to do eventually. That afternoon I was up in the tree house with Knighty when a procession of African workers came walking along the road beneath us from the direction of Erasmus estate. They were obviously in very high spirits, singing and laughing. When they got close we saw that they had a dead armadillo slung under a pole carried between two of the men’s shoulders. Its legs were tied to the pole and its head lolled underneath. I stopped them to ask where they had found it.

‘Lapa side,’ said one of the men, indicating my armadillo meeting place. ‘It was very strange, it came straight up to us without being afraid, and it even tried to bite me, pushing its head on my trousers,’ he explained. ‘So we killed it. I hit it on the head with knobkerrie. One time! Pow!” He swung his knobkerrie around in a pantomime of his victorious hunt.

I burst into tears.

‘Why?’ I screamed down at him. ‘Why did you kill him? You can’t even eat the meat!’

They were surprised by my anger, but Knighty explained to them that it was my pet.

The knobkerrie warrior looked crestfallen.

‘I am very sorry, little baas, we didn’t know it belonged to you. We thought it was a wild one.’

Then they continued on their way, the dead armadillo still swinging on its pole. After they were out of sight, I heard the singing and the laughing start up again.

‘They’re not sorry at all,’ I said bitterly. ‘Bastards.’

‘You mustn’t be cross, baas Peter,’ said Knighty. ‘They killed it because that one brings very good luck, it is very hard to find. If you find one you take it to the witch doctor and you will have good fortune.’

Later my mother was quite sympathetic and even made an unrealistic threat to get action taken because she thought the armadillo might be royal game.

My father sat in his armchair reading a week-old Rhodesia Herald.

‘It’s your own fault for interfering with nature. If you hadn’t tried to tame it as a pet, it would never have lost its fear of man and it wouldn’t have run up to them like that.’

I hotly denied this. But underneath I knew what he said was true and I was devastated. Arnold had died because of me. I cried myself to sleep that night.

A few weeks later, flicking through an animal book, I saw a picture of an armadillo. Only it wasn’t an armadillo, it was a scaly anteater. According to the book, armadillos were native to South America, only scaly anteaters were found in Africa. I hadn’t even known Arnold’s real species.

Sometimes the dogs’ hunting expeditions took several days and ranged deep into the wattle plantations or far across the border. They would come back dusty, covered in blackjacks and brambles and small cuts, their paw pads and snouts raw. But they clearly enjoyed it and it was impossible to stop them.

One day Toby failed to come back from a hunt. The others trickled in one by one, looking rather confused and ashamed, but no Toby. My parents weren’t really that worried. He used to go missing for days at a time, but always turned up in the end. My father said he’d put the word out to all the estates to keep a lookout for Toby.

Violet, meanwhile, was making her own enquires in the compound. Finally she returned to me with some news. Toby, she’d been reliably informed, had been taken by a local witch doctor who was holding him captive on a nearby hill and offering his services as a stud for sixpence a time to anyone with a breeding bitch. According to Violet, Toby’s genes were much in demand because of his reputation as a tenacious hunter.

Apparently the witch doctor was doing brisk business.

Violet’s informant was very nervous and wouldn’t disclose the whereabouts of the witch doctor. Violet was reluctant to get the grown-ups involved. It was generally better not to where witchcraft was concerned. They didn’t really understand.

Her informant had agreed to convey a note to the witch doctor.

I got out my new set of Neo-Magics, a rainbow array of broad felt-tipped pens. They were a recent birthday present, made in South Africa, and only to be used for the most important art work. Having illicitly torn a large sheet of paper from my sister’s art sketchbook, I set about writing my first threatening letter.

I could speak Shona but I couldn’t write it. Violet couldn’t either so we decided to write the letter in English. The witch doctor could get an assistant to translate if necessary.

The next problem was how to address him. What was the correct mode of address for a witch doctor? In Shona he was called a nganga, but I didn’t know how to write that. We could just call him ‘Mr Witch Doctor’. But then I got to thinking about the phrase. A witch was usually a woman, wasn’t it, and this one was definitely a man.

I phoned my father at the office to ask him what a male witch was called. He was in the middle of a meeting, but Winfield the weighbridge clerk put me through anyway.

‘It’s a wizard, of course,’ my father replied. ‘Now, I’m very busy. I’ll talk to you later,’ and he hung up.

Choosing a suitably serious black Neo-Magic from the rainbow array, I wrote in capital letters:

DEAR MR WIZARD.

Then we decided to change to red, because red was the colour that made you stop at the traffic light in Umtali’s Main Street:

WE KNOW YOU HAVE TAKEN OUR DOG.

I took up the dark blue and continued:

HIS NAME IS TOBY. HE IS NOT YOUR DOG. HE BELONGS TO US.

I wasn’t sure what to say next.

‘You mustn’t be too cheeky to a witch doctor,’ warned Violet, ‘especially a bad one. Or he might put a spell on you.’

I didn’t really believe in all that stuff, and besides, we had to scare him a bit to get Toby back. With a purple Neo, I wrote:

UNLESS YOU RETURN TOBY TO US IN ONE DAY WE WILL TELL THE POLICE IN MELSETTER TO COME AND ARREST YOU AND LOCK YOU IN PRISIN.

I read it back. There was something lacking. So I added ominously, in bright orange:

WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.

‘If we know where he is, we would go there ourselves,’ Violet pointed out. She was right. It was an obvious bluff. I got out the black and crossed out the last line. But no matter how many times I crossed it out, in strokes that went up and down, from side to side and round and round, the neon orange lettering still showed clearly through. There was nothing I could do. So I gave up and finished in green:

FROM THE GODWINS.

I folded the letter and put it in a large white envelope that had been used to send my mother an advertisement for a new contraceptive pill. It still had the logo on the back. ‘GYNO-VLAR – puts you in control,’

I crossed out my mother’s name and our address and I wrote instead:

TO THE WIZARD, and underlined it.

Then, to make sure there could be no confusion with any other witch doctor, I added in brackets:

(WHO HAS STOLEN TOBY THE DOG).

Violet took the letter and passed it on to her informant. Then we waited.

Nothing happened for two days, then on the afternoon of the third I spotted Toby trotting up our avenue of pines. He hopped nimbly over the cattle grid into our garden. He looked in good condition, but clearly exhausted and a bit embarrassed. Suspiciously, he was not at all hungry. He took a few tentative laps at a bowl of water I set down for him, and then curled up and immediately fell into a deep twitching sleep, in which he was clearly dreaming of recent triumphs, whether of the hunt or of the nganga’s canine boudoir I did not know.

In the coming months we spotted dozens of puppies bearing Toby markings – black and tan with a small white Superman shield on the chest – around the compound and as far afield as Chipinga. Violet said there were also lots of Toby dogs in the African reserve.

Some denigrated the rat pack, calling them kaffir dogs because they resembled the standard African mongrel dogs. We did try other dogs, more fashionable dogs, white man’s dogs. But we didn’t have much luck with pedigrees. They weren’t designed for the bush. They were fragile, impractical, and sometimes downright stupid. The dumbest of all our experiments was a Dalmatian bitch called Sally. Sally was good-natured to the point of imbecility. She had no sense of direction, no idea how to find her way home and no natural ability to survive in the wild.

At about the time we got Sally, there was another of the periodic leopard scares. Though seldom seen, leopards were a real problem in the area. They were considered vermin because they killed sheep and calves and domestic dogs, and in the reserves they picked off goats and the occasional piccanin. But they were notoriously difficult to track and shoot because they hunt only at night and live in the safety of the thickest undergrowth during the day. They are lazy hunters, preferring to lie in wait on branches for their quarry to pass below.

It took some time for us to realize that Sally the Dalmatian was responsible for the spate of leopard sightings. Plantation workers glimpsed a black and white spotted animal in the bush, and they didn’t tend to stick around for a better look. What else would it be but a leopard?

To stop the panic, my father drew up a poster which had two pictures on it, a Dalmatian and a leopard.

This is a leopard, read the text under the leopard, it is a member of the cat family, it eats goats and buck and sometimes people. It is dangerous and should not be approached.

And this is a Dalmatian, it said under the picture of Sally. It is a member of the dog family, and it is a pet. It is harmless and very friendly. DO NOT CONFUSE THESE TWO.

My father had the poster duplicated on the office Roneo machine and distributed to the estates. It was pinned up on staff notice boards, in the superintendents’ offices and on beer-hall walls.

Sally continued to wander, frequently getting lost, but after the bogus leopard incident, the Africans knew she was a dog and they would always return her. They would wait at the back door while my mother felt in her purse for some coins to reward them for their trouble. Soon this became a weekly event. I only found out years later that Sally’s wanderings were not always voluntary. I was passing through Silverstream and Winfield the weighbridge clerk and I were reminiscing.

‘And you remember the leopard dog?’ he said. ‘The one they used to kidnap for money?’

I laughed uncertainly with him.

‘For money?’

‘Oh, yes. It was a favourite trick. If someone was broke before payday, they would steal your dog and keep it at their hut for a few days. Then they would bring it back to your house saying that they had found it, and collect the reward.’

To combat the real leopard problem, Harry Lovat, the manager of Spitskop, in the hills above the Silverstream valley, kept a pack of hunting dogs. They were known as the leopard pack. They were big and ferocious and they were kept in a pen. Their sole purpose in life was to hunt leopard. We had donated a Dobermann cross to the leopard pack in preference to putting it down, because it kept biting people.

Our dog played a starring role in bringing down what was considered to be the biggest leopard anyone had ever seen, and we all trooped up to Harry Lovat’s house for a viewing. The fact that it was the biggest leopard anyone could remember seeing didn’t mean a great deal in itself as leopards were so seldom spotted. But no one let this fact diminish the occasion. The beast was proudly displayed on Lovat’s verandah, laid out on the red polished-cement floor.

It looked relatively intact and quite peaceful, as though it might have been luxuriously stretched out having an afternoon nap. But Lovat lifted its jaw and showed me where the dog had bitten a chunk out of its throat.

‘That’s where he’s most vulnerable. That’s where they’ve got to nail the bugger if they’re to stand any chance of bringing him down,’ Lovat explained, to a chorus of protests from the women. They had settled down in cane chairs, and were drinking Tanganda tea and eating flapjacks.

Lovat put his fingers into the leopard’s throat and fished out a thick blood vein. I was fascinated.

‘This vein here’s the jugular,’ he said, tugging at it to make sure I’d taken note. ‘It’s the main blood supply to the leopard’s brain. And a good hunting dog knows that if he gets a clear bite at the jugular, then the game’s over. Dogs: one, leopard: nil. Hah!’

He sat back on his haunches laughing and holding his bloodied hands out in front of him, and he called to the cook boy to bring him a cloth to wipe them.

‘If the pack is hunting well together, then some dogs will harry and divert the leopard while others will wait for the chance to go for the throat. It all depends on this teamwork because, obviously, a dog is no match for a leopard, one to one, especially a bastard this size.’

He gave the animal a kick with the end of his veldskoen, and its body quivered like a jelly.

‘It’s all about teamwork,’ he went on, ‘like in rugger, say, you’ve got some players whose job it is to pass the ball along and set up the try for the scorer – well, it’s much the same with a leopard pack.’

‘How do the dogs communicate with each other?’ I wondered.

‘Buggered if I know,’ shrugged Lovat.

We went over to check on the pack behind the house in their large pen, where they were busily devouring their reward, a great mound of offal and a stack of bones. They looked terrible, badly scratched and mauled and bloody. One had an ear that seemed more off than on. Another’s eye was swollen shut.

Lovat didn’t seem too concerned.

‘I’ll get the vet to give them the once-over tomorrow,’ he said.

He noticed me looking at one Rhodesian ridgeback that was lying on its side in the corner. It wasn’t eating like the others and it was breathing with great difficulty, in rasping shallow pants. The leopard’s claws had sliced a deep gash in its belly. The bleeding had stopped now but you could see where the wound cut through a layer of fat and muscle into the stomach.

‘We may have to put him down,’ Lovat conceded.

‘Dogs: one, leopard: one,’ I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. I was worried Lovat might think me soft.

Back on the verandah, as so often happened in these country gatherings, tea had made a seamless progression into sundowners, although the sun was still bright above the mountains and the brass ship’s clock on the wall showed just after four.

As the grown-ups settled into their second drink, one of the estate’s lorries drew up outside and a whole load of Africans piled off, about thirty of them, and approached the verandah. The ordinary dogs, several small mongrels that had been curled up asleep under various tables and chairs, began barking furiously.

‘Streuth!’ complained Lovat, hauling himself out of creaking rattan. ‘What the hell do this lot want?’

The crowd stopped a respectful distance from the house, and a representative, one of the estate’s bossboys, Zephaniah his name was, took a few steps forward to address Lovat. He launched into the complicated ritual of a Shona greeting.

‘Manheru,’ he said, clutching an ancient trilby in both hands to his groin.

‘Manheru,’ returned Lovat impatiently. It means good evening in Shona, and you graduate to it from ‘good afternoon’ once the day is losing heat.

‘Maswera heré,’ said the bossboy, which means ‘have you spent a good day?’ to which Lovat was supposed to reply, ‘I have spent a good day if you have spent a good day,’ and the bossboy would say, ‘I have indeed.’ And then Lovat could say, ‘Well in that case so have I.’

But Lovat had no time for such drawn-out pleasantries, and he cut the bossboy short.

‘Yes, yes. What is it, then? Who are all these people, Zephaniah? What do they want?’

Behind the bossboy the delegation were shuffling their feet and looking down at the lawn. Babies were mewling and small children coughing. A large woman at the front, holding a baby wrapped in a bright floral sheet, was openly weeping.

‘We heard that you have killed a leopard,’ stated Zephaniah.

‘That’s right,’ said Lovat. He anticipated a protest. ‘What about it?’

‘We should like to see it,’ requested Zephaniah, ‘this leopard.’

This was an unusually bold move, a group of black sightseers just dropping in uninvited on the estate manager’s house to view the latest curiosity. Lovat was annoyed. But Zephaniah continued:

‘This leopard has eaten her first-born child,’ he explained, and he pointed to the large woman weeping quietly behind him. Lovat found the manners to look contrite.

‘Her boy had eight years of age. The bus was late returning and he was walking home from the bus stop at dark, and then the leopard jumped on him,’ said the bossboy. ‘And then he died,’ he added. ‘Now this woman, she must see the leopard which has eaten her child.’

‘Why wasn’t this death reported to me, Zephaniah?’ Lovat admonished. ‘You know all deaths are supposed to be reported to the estate manager and noted down in the incident book, even the deaths of children.’ He was annoyed at being made to look a sloppy manager in front of my father.

Zephaniah shrugged his shoulders. Lovat sighed and turned to lead the delegation up on to the verandah. They gathered around the beast, making disapproving clucking noises and shaking their heads. Then the dead boy’s mother handed her baby to someone and began to emit a piercing keen that developed into a full-throated scream.

‘Ayyee! Ayyee!’

She rolled her eyes so that only their whites were visible, and she beat her breast with her fist and babbled hysterically at the prone animal.

The grown-ups were still sitting in the cane chairs, nursing their drinks and observing the scene without comment or intrusion. Every now and then my father would tap some ash from his cigarette into a big glass ashtray glued on to a severed elephant’s leg, one of Lovat’s hunting trophies.

The bereaved woman shook free of those supporting her and threw herself at the leopard. She kicked it in the stomach several times, then went down on her knees and tried to throttle the animal. She gripped its neck with both hands and began to bash its head on the cement floor. Each time it hit, the head made a dull thud, and the tongue lolled out of the slack jaw – the jaw that had crunched the bones of her first-born child.

The dogs began barking again at the commotion.

‘Now that’s quite enough,’ intervened Lovat, annoyed. ‘You’ll damage the pelt, going on like that. Up! Come on. Up!’

He motioned to Zephaniah, who prised the woman off the leopard with some difficulty.

The Africans talked briefly among themselves, then Zephaniah came hesitantly forward again.

‘We would like to take a part of the leopard,’ he said.

‘What do you mean? Which part?’ asked Lovat suspiciously.

‘We would like the heart.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ sighed Lovat. ‘This is all your bloody voodoo nonsense again isn’t it?’

Without waiting for an answer he asked: ‘If I let you take the heart, what’ll you do with it?’

Zephaniah looked self-conscious and uncomfortable. ‘It is our way,’ he said simply.

Lovat briefly canvassed opinion around the verandah.

‘Can’t do any harm, I suppose,’ said Mr Watson.

‘It’s all a bit gruesome,’ said his wife, scringing her nose.

‘We ought to find out exactly what they’ll do with it,’ advised my father, ever the stickler for detail. ‘It’s all tied up with witchcraft. God knows, they might end up killing someone.’

Lovat took the bossboy to one side and they talked for several minutes in low voices. Then Lovat reported back to the verandah.

‘Well, they’re an odd bunch, these munts. Old Zephaniah here, he reckons that according to their custom the mother of the dead boy must now eat the leopard’s heart to lift the curse that’s been put on her family.’

Mrs Watson’s nose scringed up even further.

‘Zephaniah says the kid was killed by the leopard because of a spell. They’re not sure who cast the spell but they’ve consulted a witch doctor, who said if she eats the heart that will put an end to it.’

Lovat thought for a moment and then came to a decision. ‘Well, I’ve got no use for it,’ he said. ‘I suppose they might as well have it, if they want it so damn badly. Just so long as they don’t muck up my leopard skin.’

With that he bellowed to the cook, who appeared almost immediately around the open door from where he had been surreptitiously observing events. They threw down some hessian sacks on the lawn and dragged the leopard down on to them. The cook disappeared into the kitchen and returned with an armful of knives. Zephaniah, the bereaved woman and the whole delegation gathered in a semi-circle and watched intently as Harry Lovat’s cook set about skinning the biggest leopard anyone could remember seeing.

On the verandah Mr Watson had started up a desultory game of darts. My father was busy recharging the drinks.

Harry Lovat’s cook boy was one of the best skinners in the business. Rumour had it that he and Lovat used to go on illegal hunting expeditions over the border. I even heard that the cook boy had once been a professional poacher and had been hired by Lovat because of his impressive skinning credentials.

Lovat and the cook boy turned the leopard over onto its back and splayed its legs outwards. Then, with confident movements, the cook boy set about his task. He made an incision at the tip of its chin and cut in deft little strokes all the way along its underbelly, stopping only once to shoo away the mongrels. The knife was superbly sharp and sliced easily through the spotted pelt, the blade’s progress marked by little crunching noises.

He kept cutting until he reached its balls. I stifled an embarrassed giggle at them. But without any hesitation the cook cut around the balls. Then he excised them and scooped them up from the animal’s groin. He made to throw this morsel to the dogs, but was stopped by a spontaneous outcry from his audience. Lovat, on his hands and knees assisting his cook, looked up in consternation.

‘Bloody hell! What is it now?’

Zephaniah spoke briefly to the cook boy, and the cook boy looked amused.

‘They want this one,’ he said, holding up the leopard’s severed genitals. ‘They want to use it for muti. It is very strong muti.’

Muti was Shona for medicine. But it didn’t usually mean western medicine, it meant traditional, witch-doctor medicine.

‘What the hell will they use it for?’ asked Lovat. He was becoming exasperated at their demands.

The cook boy looked abashed.

‘Well, what, for Christ’s sake?’ demanded Lovat.

The cook boy cast a furtive glance up at the white women sitting chatting on the verandah. Then, turning his back to them, he whispered to Lovat. ‘It is for ... It is for ... for if you cannot have children.’

Lovat looked confused. So the cook boy made a circle with his left thumb and forefinger and thrust his right forefinger rapidly in and out of the circle.

‘Jiggi jiggi. It is good for jiggi jiggi, if you eat this one,’ he whispered, and cast his eyes down in embarrassment.

It took Lovat a couple of seconds and then he roared with laughter and bellowed up to the verandah.

‘Get a load of this. These munts now want to take this leopard’s wedding tackle and bloody well scoff it as some sort of aphrodisiac or fertility booster. Un-bloody-believable, isn’t it?’

There was a general murmur of assent from the verandah.

Lovat addressed the cook and Zephaniah and the whole crowd of Africans.

‘You know, when are you munts going to get civilized? We send you to school. We teach you to read and write. We vaccinate you against disease. And you still want to eat a leopard’s bloody bollocks. I mean, Christ knows ...’

As he gave his little lecture, they all stared down at the ground, as silent as penitent schoolchildren.

‘Sure, give it to them then, if it’s so bloody important,’ said Lovat with a shrug.

The cook proffered the genitals to his audience and a small riot ensued as they scuffled with each other for possession. A tall elderly man with a grizzled beard emerged the victor. He held his prize aloft in one hand, away from the last few women still jumping futilely to reach it. Once he had established possession, all embarrassment vanished and they began to tease him bawdily about what it would do for his sex drive. The elderly man, unperturbed by the good-natured jibes, carefully wrapped the leopard’s genitals in a piece of old newspaper.

Satisfied with their various morsels of the leopard, the crowd hauled themselves back on the truck, pinned back the tailgate, and with a great belch of diesel fumes it clattered away.

In due course the leopard skin was mounted on a backing of green felt and hung at an angle on Harry Lovat’s sitting-room wall. He was very proud of it. He told everyone who came to visit that it was the biggest-leopard-that-anyone-had-ever-seen, and no one challenged the claim.

I noticed that, in time, when he was showing it off to women, he dropped the bit about the leopard having eaten a person. The women didn’t like that bit, they found it ghoulish, and it detracted from the trophy. With the men, though, it was still a source of pride.

‘Come and see my monster,’ Lovat would say, drawing them into the sitting room. ‘It’s a man-eater, you know.’

Not really a man-eater, I thought. More of a small-boy-eater. But I never said it aloud. I was worried Lovat might think me soft.