A Falcon Flies (67 page)

However, on the following day Fuller seemed stronger again, the fever had cooled, and they made a full day's march, but in the evening when they went into camp he had once more sunk very low.

When Robyn removed the dressing from the leg, it seemed to be less sensitive, and she was relieved – until she saw the colour of the skin around the ulceration. When she lifted the soiled dressing to her nose and sniffed it, she caught the taint that her professor of medicine at St Matthew's had taught her to watch for. It was not the usual taint of benign pus, but a more pervasive odour, the smell of a decomposing corpse. Her alarm flared, and she threw the dressing on the fire and with dread returned to her examination of the leg.

From the inside of the groin, down the wasted thigh muscles, there were the unmistakable scarlet lines beneath the thin pale skin, and the extreme sensitivity of the area seemed to have passed. It was almost as though Fuller had no further feeling in the leg.

Robyn tried to console herself that the change and mortification in the leg was unconnected with having carried him two days in a litter over rough ground. But what other reasons were there? She could find no answer. Before the move, the ulceration had been stabilized, for it was almost eighteen months since the slaver's ball had shattered the bone.

The movement in the litter must have precipitated some serious change in the limb, and this was the result.

Robyn felt herself culpable. She should have listened to Zouga. She had brought this on her own father. Gas-gangrene. She could only hope that she was wrong, but she knew she was not. The symptoms were unmistakable. She could only continue the march and hope they would reach the coast and civilization before the disease swept to its inevitable climax – but she knew that hope was futile.

She wished that she had been able to develop the same philosophical acceptance that most of her fellow physicians cultivated in the face of disease or injury which were beyond their training and ability to alleviate. But she knew she never could, always she would be victim of this helpless sense of frustration, and this time the patient was her own father.

She bound up the leg in a hot compress and knew that it was a pathetic gesture, like trying to hold back the tide with a child's sand-castle. In the morning the leg felt cooler to the touch, and the flesh seemed to have lost resilience so that her fingers left depressions as though she had touched unleavened bread. The smell was stronger.

They made a full day's march, and Fuller was silent and comatose in the litter as Robyn walked beside it. He no longer chanted psalms and wild exhortations to the Almighty, and she thanked God that at least there was no pain.

In the late afternoon they met a broad pathway, well travelled and running east and west as far as Robyn could see it. It fitted exactly the description and the location that her father had written of in his journal. Little Juba burst into tears and was rendered almost helpless with terror when she saw the road.

They found an encampment of deserted and dilapidated huts, that might have been those used by the slave-traders, and Robyn ordered camp there. She left the Mashona woman and the still snivelling and shivering Juba to tend Fuller Ballantyne, and she took only old Karanga with her. He armed himself with his long spear, and strutted like an ancient peacock to be so honoured. Within two miles, the pathway climbed steeply to pass through a saddle in a line of low hills.

Robyn was seeking evidence that this was indeed the slave road, the Hyena Road, as Juba called it tearfully.

She found her evidence on the saddle, lying in the grass a few paces from the edge of the track. It was a double yoke, hewn from a forked tree trunk and roughly dressed with an axe.

Robyn had studied the sketches in her father's journal, and she recognized it immediately. When the slave-masters did not have chains and cuffs, they used these yokes to bind their captives around their necks; two slaves linked together and forced to do everything in concert, march, eat, sleep and defecate – everything except escape.

Now all that remained of the slaves who had once worn the yoke were a few fragments of bone that the vultures and hyena had overlooked. There was something terribly sad and chilling about that roughly carved fork of wood, and Robyn could not bring herself to touch it. She said a short prayer for the unfortunate slaves who had died on that spot and then, with her knowledge that she was on the slave road confirmed, she turned back towards the camp.

That night she held counsel with the Hottentot Corporal, old Karanga and Juba.

‘This camp and road have not been used for this many days,' Karanga showed Robyn both hands twice with fingers spread, ‘twenty days.'

‘Which way did they go?' Robyn asked. She had come to have confidence in the old man's tracking ability.

‘They were moving along the road towards the sunrise, and they have not yet returned,' quavered Karanga.

‘It is even as he says,' Juba agreed, and it must have been an effort to agree with somebody for whom she had such disdain and jealousy. ‘The slavers will make this the last caravan before the rains. There will be no trading after the rivers are full, and the Hyena Road will grow grass until the dry season comes again.'

‘So there is a caravan of slavers ahead of us,' Robyn mused. ‘If we follow the road we may overtake them.'

The Hottentot Corporal interrupted. ‘That will not be possible, madam. They are weeks ahead of us.'

‘Then we will meet them returning, after having sold their slaves.'

The Corporal nodded and Robyn asked him, ‘Will you be able to defend us, if the slavers decide to attack our column?'

‘Me and my men,' the Corporal drew himself to his full height, ‘are a match for a hundred dirty slavers,' he paused and then went on, ‘and you shoot like a man, madam!'

Robyn smiled. ‘All right,' she nodded. ‘We will follow the road down to the sea.'

And the Corporal grinned at her. ‘I am sick of this country and its savages, I long to see the cloud on Table Mountain and wash the taste of dust from my throat with good Cape Smoke once again.'

T
he hyena was an old male. There were patches of fur missing from his thick shaggy coat, and his flat, almost snakelike head was covered with scars, his ears ripped away by thorns and a hundred snapping, snarling encounters over the decomposing carcasses of men and animals. His lip had been torn up into the soft of the nostril in one of these fights and had healed askew, so that the yellow teeth in one side of his upper jaw were exposed in a hideous grin.

His teeth were worn with age, so that he could no longer crush the heavy bones that made up the bulk of hyena diet, and unable to compete, he had been driven from the hunting pack.

There had been no human corpses along the trail since the slave column had passed weeks before, and game was scarce in this dry country. Since then the hyena had subsisted on scrapings, the fresh dung of jackal and baboon, a nest of field mice, the long-abandoned and addled egg of an ostrich which had burst in a sulphurous geyser of gas and putrefied liquid when he pawed at it. However, even though the hyena was starving, he still stood almost three foot high at the shoulder and weighed 140 pounds.

His belly under the matted and scruffy coat was concave as that of a greyhound. From high ungainly shoulders, his spine slanted back in a bony ridge to his scraggy hindquarters.

He carried his head low, snuffling at the earth for offal and scourings, but when the scent came down on the wind to him, he lifted his head on high and flared his deformed nostrils.

There was the smell of wood smoke, of human presence, which he had grown to associate with a source of food, but sharper, clearer than all the others was a smell that made the saliva run from his twisted, scarred jaws in drooling silver ropes. He went lolloping into a swaying, uneven trot up into the wind following the tantalizing drift of that odour. The scent that had attracted the old dog hyena was the cloyingly sweet taint of a gangrenous leg.

T
he hyena lay on the outskirts of the camp. It lay like a dog, with its chin on its front paws and its hindlegs and its bushy tail drawn up under its belly, flat behind a clump of coarse elephant grass. It watched the activity about the smoking watch fires.

Only its eyes rolled in their sockets, and the ragged stumps of its ears twitched and cocked to the cadence of human voices, and the unexpected sounds of a bucket or an axe on a stump of firewood.

Once in a while a puff of wind would bring a whiff of the scent that had first attracted the hyena, and it would snuffle it, suppressing with difficulty the little anxious cries that rose in its throat.

As the evening shadows thickened, a human figure, a half-naked black woman, left the camp, and came towards its hiding place. The hyena gathered itself to fly but before she reached the place where it lay, Juba paused and looked about her carefully without seeing the animal, then she lifted the flap of her beaded apron, lowered herself and squatted. The hyena cringed and watched her. When she stood and returned to the camp, the creature, emboldened by the oncoming night, crept forward and wolfed down that which Juba had left.

Its appetite was piqued and as the night fell, it inflated its chest, curled its bushy tail up over its back and uttered its drawn-out haunting cry, ascending sharply in key, ‘Ooooauw! Oooo-auw!' – a cry so familiar to every man and woman in the camp that hardly one of them bothered to look up.

Gradually the activity about the camp fires subsided, the sound of human voices became drowsy and intermittent, the fires faded, the flames sinking and the darkness crept in upon the camp, and the hyena crept in with it.

Twice a sudden loud voice put it to trembling flight and it galloped away into the bush, only to gather its courage at the renewed silence and creep back. It was long after midnight when the beast found a weak place in the protective
scherm
of thorn branches about the camp and quietly, furtively pushed its way through the opening.

The smell led it directly to an open-sided, thatched shelter in the centre of the enclosure, and with its belly low to the earth the huge dog-like animal slunk closer and fearfully closer.

R
obyn had fallen asleep beside her father's litter, still fully dressed and in a sitting position; she merely let her head fall forward on to her crossed arms and then overwhelmed by fatigue and worry and guilt she at last succumbed.

She awoke to the old man's shrill shrieks. There was complete darkness blanketing the camp, and Robyn thought for a moment that she was blinded by a nightmare. She scrambled wildly to her feet, not certain where she was and she stumbled over the litter. Her outflung arms brushed against something big and hairy, something that stank of death and excrement, a smell that blended sickeningly with the stench of her father's leg.

She screamed also, and the animal growled, a muffled sound through clenched jaws like a wolfhound with a bone. Fuller's shrieks and her screams had roused the camp, and somebody plunged a torch of dried grass into the ashes of the watch fire. It burst into flames, and after the utter blackness the orange light seemed bright as noonday.

The huge humpbacked animal had dragged Fuller from his litter in a welter of blankets and clothing. It had a grip on his lower body, and Robyn heard the sharp crack of bone splintering in those terrible jaws. The sound maddened her and she snatched up an axe that lay beside the pile of firewood and struck out at the dark misshapen body, feeling the axe strike solidly, and the hyena let out a choking howl.

The darkness and its own starvation had emboldened it. It had the taste in its mouth now, seeping through the blankets into its locked jaws and it would not relinquish its prey.

It turned and snapped at Robyn, its huge round eyes glowing yellow in the light of the flames and those terrible yellowed fangs clashing like the snap of a steel man-trap, closing on the axe handle inches from her fingers, jerking it out of her hand. Then it turned back to its prey, and once more locked its jaws on to the frail body. Fuller was so wasted that he was light as a child and the hyena dragged him swiftly towards the opening in the thorn
scherm
.

Still screaming for help, Robyn stumbled after them and seized her father's shoulders, while the hyena had him by the belly. The woman and the animal fought over him, the blunted yellow teeth ripping and tearing through the lining of Fuller's belly as the hyena strained back on its hindquarters, the neck stretched out at the pull.

The Hottentot Corporal dressed only in unlaced breeches, but brandishing his musket, ran towards them in the firelight.

‘Help me,' screamed Robyn. The hyena had reached the thorn fence, her feet were slipping in the loose dust, she was not able to hold Fuller.

‘Don't shoot!' Robyn screamed. ‘Don't shoot!' The danger from the musket was as great as from the animal.

The Corporal ran forward, reversing the musket and swung the butt at the hyena's head. It struck with a sharp crack of wood on bone, and the hyena released its grip. Finally, its natural cowardice overcame its greed. It turned and shambled through the opening in the thorn hedge and disappeared into the night.

‘Oh, sweet merciful God,' Robyn whispered as they carried Fuller back to the litter, ‘has he not suffered enough?'

Fuller Ballantyne lived out that night, but an hour after dawn that tenacious and tough old man at last relinquished his grip on life without having regained consciousness. It was as though a legend had passed, and an age had died with him. It left Robyn feeling numbed and disbelieving and she washed and dressed the frail and rotting husk for burial.

She buried him at the foot of a tall mukusi tree and carved into the bark with her own hand:

FULLER MORRIS BALLANTYNE

3rd Nov. 1788 17th Oct. 1860

‘In those days there were giants upon the earth.'