Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (полная версия книги .TXT) 📗

Each night Aboli crossed this makeshift boundary and ranged like a silent black ghost across the flat plain whose wide expanses cut off Table Mountain and its bastion of lesser hills from the main ranges of the African hinterland. The wild animals had not been driven off these plains, for few white hunters had been allowed to leave the confines of the colony to pursue them. Here, Aboli heard again the wild, heart-stopping chorus of a pride of hunting lions that he remembered from his childhood. The leopards sawed and coughed in the thickets, and often he startled unseen herds of antelope, whose hoofs drummed through the night.

Aboli needed a black bull. Twice he had been so close as to smell the buffalo herd in the thickets. The scent reminded him of his father's herds of cattle, which he had tended in his childhood, before his circumcision. He had heard the grunting of the great beasts and the lowing of the weaning calves, he had followed their deeply ploughed hoof marks and seen splashes of their wet dung still steaming in the moonlight. But each time as he closed with the herd, the wind had tricked him. They had sensed him and gone crashing away through the brush, galloping on until the sound of their flight dwindled into silence. Aboli could not pursue them further, for it was past midnight and he was still hours away from the bitter almond hedge and from his cell in the slave quarters.

On the third night he took the chance of creeping out of the window of the slave quarters an hour earlier than Sukeena had warned him was wise. One of the hounds rushed at him, but before it could alarm the watch, Aboli calmed it with a soft whistle. The hound recognized him and snuffled his hand. He stroked its head and whispered softly to it in the language of the forests and left it whining softly and wagging its tail as he slipped over the wall like a dark moon shadow.

During his previous hunts, he had discovered that each night the buffalo herd left the vastness of the dense forest to drink at a waterhole a mile or so beyond the boundary hedge. He knew that if he crossed it before midnight he might be able to catch them while they were still at the water. It was his best chance of being able to pick out a bull and make his stalk.

From the hollow tree at the edge of the forest he retrieved the bow that he had cut and carved from a branch of wild olive. Sukeena had stolen the single iron arrowhead from the collection of weapons that Governor Kleinhans had assembled during his service in the Indies, which now hung on the walls of the residence. It was unlikely that it would be missed from among the dozens of swords, shields and knives that made up the display.

"I will return it to you," he promised Sukeena "I would not have you suffer if it should be missed."

"Your need of it is great than my risk," she told him as she slipped the arrowhead, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, beneath the seat of the carriage. "I also had a father who was denied a decent burial."

Aboli had fitted the arrowhead to a reed shaft and bound it in place with twine and pitch. He had fl etched it with the moulted feathers from the hunting falcons housed in the mews behind the stables. However, he did not have time to search for the insect grubs from which to brew poison for the barbs, and so he must rely on this single shaft flying true to the mark.

Now as Aboli hunted in the shadows, himself another silent gliding shadow, he found old forgotten skills returning to him, and recalled the instruction that he had undergone as a young boy from the elders of his tribe. He felt the night wind softly caress his bare chest and flanks and was aware of its direction at all times as he circled the waterhole until it blew straight into his face. It brought down to him the rich bovine stench of the prey he sought.

The wind was strong enough to shake the tall reeds and cover any sound he might make so he could move in swiftly over the last hundred paces. Above the soughing of the north wind and the rustle of the reeds he heard a coughing grunt. He froze and nocked his single arrow.

Had the lions come to the water ahead of the herd, he wondered, for that had been a leonine sound. He stared ahead, and heard the sound of great hoofs plodding and sucking in the mud of the waterhole. Above the rippling heads of the reeds a dark shape moved, mountainous in the moonlight.

"A bull," he breathed. "A bull of a bull!"

The bull had finished drinking. The crafty old beast had come ahead of the cows and calves of the breeding herd. His back was coated with glistening wet mud from the wallow, and he plodded towards where Aboli crouched, his hoofs squelching in the mud.

Aboli lost sight of the prey as he sank down among the swaying stems and let him come on. But he could mark him by the sound of his heavy breathing, and by the rasping of the reeds dragging down his flanks. The bull was very close, but still out of Aboli's sight, when suddenly he shook his head as the reed stems tangled in his horns, and his ears flapped against his cheeks. If I reach out now I could touch his snout, Aboli thought. Every nerve in his body was drawn as tight as the bowstring in his fingers.

The reed bank parted in front of Aboli, and the massive head came through, the moonlight gleaming on the curved bosses of the horns. Abruptly the bull became aware of something amiss, of danger lurking close at hand, and he stopped and raised his huge black head. As he lifted his muzzle to test the air, his nose was wet and shining and water drooled from his mouth. He flared his nostrils into -dark pits and snuffled the air. Aboli could feel his breath hot upon his naked chest and his face.

The bull turned his head, questing for the scent of man or cat, for the hidden hunter. Aboli stayed still as a tree stump He was holding the heavy bow at full draw. The power of the olive branch and the gut bowstring were so fierce that even the granite muscles in his arms and shoulder bulged and trembled with the effort. As the bull turned his head he revealed the notch behind his ear where the neck fused with the bone of his skull and the massive boss of his horns. Aboli held his aim for one heartbeat longer, then loosed the arrow. It flashed and whirred in the moonlight, leaping from his hand and burying half its length in the massive black neck.

The bull reeled back. If the arrowhead had found the gap between the vertebrae of the spine, as Aboli had hoped, he would have dropped where he stood but the iron point struck the spine and was deflected by bone. It glanced aside but sliced through the great artery behind the jawbone. As the bull bucked and kicked to the stinging impact of the steel, the severed artery erupted and a spout of blood flew high in the air, black as an ostrich feather in the light of the moon..