The Dark of the Sun - Smith Wilbur (читать книгу онлайн бесплатно полностью без регистрации .TXT) 📗
when I thought I had lost you, when I saw the tanker go over into the
riven" She swallowed and now her eyes were full of tears. "it was as
though the light had gone - it was so dark, so dark and cold without
you." Absorbed with him so that she had forgotten about the road,
Shermaine let the Ford veer and the offside wheels pumped into the rough
verge.
"Hey, watch it!" Bruce cautioned her. "Dearly as I love you also, I have
to admit that you're a lousy driver. Let me take her."
"Do you feel up to it?"
"Yes, pull into the side." Slowly, held to the speed of the lumbering
vehicles behind them, they drove on through the afternoon. Twice they
passed deserted Baluba villages beside the road, the grass huts
disintegrating and the small cultivated lands about them thickly
overgrown.
"My God, I'm hungry. I've got a headache from it and my belly feels as
though it's full of warm water," complained Bruce.
"Don't think you're the only one. This is the strictest diet I've ever
been on, must have lost two kilos! But I always lose in the wrong
place, never on my bottom."
"Good," Bruce said. "I like it just the way it is, never shed an ounce
there." He looked over his shoulder at the two gendarmes. "Are you
hungry?" he asked in French.
"Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the fat one. "I will not be able to sleep tonight,
if I must lie on an empty stomach."
"Perhaps it will not be necessary." Bruce let his eyes wander off the
road into the surrounding bush. The character of the country had changed
in the last hundred miles.
"This looks like game country. I've noticed plenty of spoor on the road.
Keep your eyes open." The trees were tall and widely spaced
with grass growing beneath them. Their branches did not interlock so
that the sky showed through. At intervals there were open glades filled
with green swamp grass and thickets of bamboo and ivory palms.
(We've got another half hour of daylight. We might run into something
before then." In the rear-view mirror he watched the lumbering column of
transports for a moment. They must be almost out of gasoline by now,
hardly enough for another half hour's driving.
There were compensations however; at least they were in open country now
and only eighty miles from Msapa junction.
He glanced at the petrol gauge - half the tank. The Ranchero still had
sufficient to get through even if the trucks were almost dry.
Of course! That was the answer. Find a good camp, leave the convoy, and
go on in the Ford to find help.
Without the trucks to slow him down he could get through to Msapa
junction in two hours. There was a telegraph in the station office, even
if the junction was still deserted.
"We'll stop on the other side of this stream," said Bruce and slowed the
Ford, changed into second gear and let it idle down the steep bank.
The stream was shallow. The water hardly reached the hubcaps as they
bumped across the rocky bottom. Bruce gunned the Ford up the far bank
into the forest again.
"There!" shouted one of the gendarmes from the back seat and Bruce
followed the direction of his arm.
Standing with humped shoulders, close beside the road, bunched together
with mournfully drooping horns, heads held low beneath the massive
bosses, bodies very big and black, were two old buffalo bulls.
Bruce hit the brakes, skidding the Ranchero to a stop, reaching for his
rifle at the same instant. He twisted the door handle, hit the door with
his shoulder and tumbled out on to his feet.
With a snort and a toss of their ungainly heads the buffalo started to
run.
Bruce picked the leader and aimed for the neck in front of the plunging
black shoulder. Leaning forward against the recoil of the rifle he fired
and heard the bullet strike with a meaty thump. The bull slowed,
breaking his run. The stubby forelegs settled and he slid
forward on his nose, rolling as he fell, dust and legs kicking.
Turning smoothly without taking the butt from his shoulder, swinging
with the run of the second bull, Bruce fired again, and again the thump
of bullet striking.
The buffalo stumbled, giving in the legs, then he steadied and galloped
on like a grotesque rocking horse, patches of baldness grey on his
flanks, big-bellied, running heavily.
Bruce shifted the bead of the foresight on to his shoulder and fired
twice in quick succession, aiming low for the heart, hitting each time,
the bull so close he could see the bullet wounds appear on the dark
skin.
The gallop broke into a trot, with head swinging low, mouth open, legs
beginning to fold. Aiming carefully for the head Bruce fired again. The
bull bellowed - a sad lonely sound - and collapsed into the grass.
The lorries had stopped in a line behind the Ford, and now from each of
them swarmed black men. jabbering happily, racing each other, they
streamed past Bruce to where the buffalo had fallen in the grass beside
the road.
"Nice shooting, boss," said Ruffy. "I'm going to have me a piece of
tripe the size of a blanket."
"Let's make camp first."
Bruce's ears were still singing with gunfire. "Get the lorries into a
ring." IT see to it." Bruce walked up to the nearest buffalo and watched
for a while as a dozen men strained to roll it on to its back and begin
butchering it. There were clusters of grape-blue ticks in the folds of
skin between the legs and body.
A good head, he noted mechanically, forty inches at least.
"Plenty of meat, Captain. Tonight we eat thick!" grinned one of his
gendarmes as he bent over the huge body to begin flensing.
"Plenty," agreed Bruce and turned back to the Ranchero.
In the heat of the kill it was a good feeling: the rifle's kick and your
stomach screwed up with excitement. But afterwards you felt a little bit
dirtied; sad and guilty as you do after lying with a woman you do not
love.
He climbed into the car and Shermaine sat away from him, withdrawn.
"They were so big and ugly - beautiful," she said softly.
"We needed the meat. I didn't kill them for fun." But he thought with a
little shame, I have killed many others for fun.
"Yes," she agreed. "We needed the meat." He turned the car off the road
and signalled to the truck drivers to pull in behind him.
Later it was all right again. The meat-rich smoke from a dozen cooking
fires drifted across the camp. The dark tree tops silhouetted against a
sky full of stars, the friendly glow of the fires, and laughter, men's
voices raised, someone singing, the night noises of the bush insects and
frogs in the nearby stream - a plate piled high with grilled fillets and
slabs of liver, a bottle of beer from Rutty's hoard, the air at last
cooler, a small breeze to keep the mosquitoes
away, and Shermaine sitting beside him on the blankets.
Ruffy drifted across to them in one hand a stick loaded with meat from
which the juice dripped and in the other hand a bottle held by the
throat.
"How's it for another beer, boss?"
"Enough." Bruce held up his hand. "I'm full to the back teeth."
"You're getting old, that's for sure. Me and the boys going to finish
them buffalo or die trying."
