Trackers (28 page)

'Until the guitar player.' Wickus spat out the words, as if
it were a sinful occupation.

'He was a chap from Port Elizabeth, long hair, tight jeans
and big loose white shirts open to the belly button ...' said Lollie.

'Big gold chain on his hairy chest. What would a man want to
wear jewellery for?'

'He had sung in clubs and bars all over, but he wasn't very
good ...'

'You know the kind, the audience has to be a bit drunk ...'

'... so he came to play in the Intaba, it was a sort of bush
pub outside town ...'

'Wicked place.'

'... and one of Drika's haunts, and he and Drika linked up, a
red-hot affair, she was with him more than with her own child. Late nights, she
would end up in a drunken singalong with him. That was when people decided
enough is enough. First a couple of the men threatened the guitar man and told
him to pack his stuff, and two of them went to fetch Louis. He was up in the
northern Tuli with a Scandinavian hunting party, and they told him he had
better come home, his wife was creating a scandal.'

'Flea's father chased them away,' said Wickus.

'Louis didn't want to believe them, poor man. But two days
later, he came. Must have been brooding over it. By the time he got home, Drika
and her guitar man were gone. Louis was crushed, he loved that woman with all
he had. But the great tragedy was, he went looking for her, but by the time he
found her, she was dead, she and her guitar man, this side of Sun City, drove
off a bridge in the night, probably drunk, and they were both killed
instantly.'

'Hell,' said young Swannie.

'Bad, bad,' said Wickus.

'Louis brought his daughter up alone, and let me tell you, it
must have been very hard, because he mourned Drika for years. He withdrew
entirely, he only went to work when the money ran out and then he took Flea
with him ...'

'That's how she learned to track ...'

'She just about grew up in the bush
...'

'Some people say she is better than
her father.'

'I know there was an issue when she had to go to school,
Louis wouldn't hear of it, Welfare had to go and talk to him. Eventually he put
her in boarding school, although he didn't want to. She was with Swannie until
standard ... ?'

'Grade Six,' said Swannie, eager to contribute. 'You hardly
noticed her, she was a loner, a skinny girl who talked to no one, just kept to
herself.
Jissie,
she's changed,' he shook his
head in disbelief, the impact the adult Flea had made on him clearly visible.

'Louis found a permanent job. That's why they moved away,'
said Wickus. 'That was the time when private game reserves were shooting up
everywhere, and the concessions. Guys like Louis were suddenly very
sought-after, there were lots of new jobs, good money. They came to find him
and offered him a job up there in Moremi...'

'In Botswana,' said Lollie.

'Okavango.'

'Private tuition for the children.'

'That was the biggest thing for
Louis, he could see Flea every day.'

'Must be where she got her opportunity to study veterinary,
through the private schooling.'

'They left the area. Overnight almost. That's about all we
know really,' Lollie said.

'There were other stories ...'

'I don't know if you can always believe them ...'

'The one about the crocodile is true, Lollie. Div de Goede
heard it personally. And he knows Big Frik well.'

'Maybe ...'

Swannie couldn't suppress his curiosity any longer. 'What
crocodile story?'

'Div pitched up here with the story, must be six or seven
years ago. He's the rep for AgriChem, their head offices are in Nelspruit, Frik
is one of his big clients. He said the people from the Moremi concession turned
up at Frik's door one day and told him the whole story. How Louis grew odder
and odder with every year that passed. Sometimes he would just disappear, then
he would reappear a month later smelling like a native hut, all sweat and
woodsmoke, and then they would hear that Louis had been with the Bushmen again.
Sometimes Louis would make a big fire in the bush and then dance around it
until he went into a trance ...'

'I don't know if I believe that,' said Lollie.

'I'm just repeating what Div said. The thing is, apparently, Louis
began to unravel after the baboons attacked Flea ...'

'Hell!' said Swannie.

'That's just nonsense,' said Lollie.

'I don't know,' Wickus shrugged. 'They said it had been a bad
drought up there, late winter, the baboons were very aggressive, because there
was nothing to eat. Flea went walking with this
little
dog,
a Jack Russell terrier or something, she was terribly attached to
it.
Then the baboons came across them and they went for
the dog, blood lust, they get that way. And Flea tried to stop them and a big
male attacked her, terrible scratches and cuts across her torso and face. You
saw the eye, while she was here. Anyway, some of the natives came across them
and they threw stones at the baboons and saved Flea, but the little dog didn't
make it. But that's when Louis started to talk about how he was to blame, the
gods were angry with him because of something he had done as a child. When
they asked him what it was, he said he had eaten tortoise, that is a great
taboo with the Bushmen, only old people may eat it, or something like that. The
more they told him it was nonsense, the more he said the gods were punishing
him, that's why Drika died, why she messed around with other men, why his
father had died, why the baboons had attacked Flea. He said he must sacrifice
himself, it was the only way ...'

In a barely audible whisper, Swannie sighed, 'Hell.' 'That's
nonsense,' said Lollie.

'It wasn't nonsense to Louis. Anyway, they told Div, there in
that bar, that Louis had gone out into the bush, and had sat on the river bank,
and waited until a huge crocodile had dragged him into the waters of the
Okavango, because Louis was dead, and they didn't know what to do with Flea.
She must have been, I don't know, seventeen, eighteen. Frik was the
grandfather, could they bring the child to him? Frik just stood and looked at
them, and without a word, he shut the door in their faces. The Moremi people
went to Nelspruit in the hopes of finding someone there who could help, maybe
one of Frik's other daughters, they were Flea's aunts after all. Div bumped
into the men somewhere, probably a bar, he does like a good time, and they told
him the whole story.'

'But
why?' asked Swannie. 'Why did Louis let the croc get him?' 'To free his
daughter from the curse.'

...
trackers should
place themselves in the position of their quarry in order to anticipate the
route it may have taken. They will thereby be able to decide in advance where
they can expect to find signs and thus not waste time looking for them.

The Art of Tracking:
Principles of tracking

Lollie took Lotter to 'the office' to finalise the fax for
our flight clearance. I drank coffee with the Swanepoel men in the sitting
room. 'And where will you go from here?' Wickus asked.

'To Ehrlichmann,' I said deliberately.

'Aah ...' he said. Which meant he knew who that was.

'How do you know Ehrlichmann?'

'Through helping the Zimbabweans,' he said. 'Ehrlichmann was
involved in that from the early days.'

'Helping the Zimbabweans?'

'When that dirty rotten Mugabe started taking people's farms,
lots of the Zim farmers knew they had to get their stuff out of the country
quickly. We smuggled it out. Furniture, livestock, machinery, cars, tractors,
trailers, implements. Dollars, a few times, cardboard boxes full, you wouldn't
believe. Hell, once we brought a whole bloody cigarette factory through here,
I have no idea where they went with that. Anyway, Ehrlichmann was one of the
men on that side who helped organise the whole operation.'

I mulled that over before asking: 'And Diederik Brand?'

'Diederik was a buyer.'

'A buyer?'

'I thought you worked for him?'

'Since Saturday.'

'Oh. Look, the stuff that came from Zim ... The farmers over
there were looking for cash, what could they do with their machinery and
livestock in South Africa? Diederik bought them up, he was one of a few who
helped out that way. Then he would resell, on auctions and suchlike. I never
met him, just talked over the phone. A good man ... Once he even sent food and
medical equipment back to Zim, when Mugabe and his gang plundered the Red Cross
aid for their own benefit.' Wickus laughed softly and shook his head. 'I still
wonder where Diederik got the stuff...'

'He's an operator,' said Swannie, equally delighted.

'Heck, that's true. How does a Karoo farmer get his hands on
medical supplies from Norway?'

A mental alarm sounded in the back of my head. 'Norway, you
say?'

'On the crates, large as life. Karma or Karmer or something
... And "Oslo, Norge".'

'Kvaerner?'

'Something like that.'

Kvaerner was the Norwegian company that actually owned Techno
Arms, the manufacturer of the MAG-7. 'Did Ehrlichmann help with those medical
supplies?'

'Yes, he did,' said Wickus Swanepoel. 'Zimbabwe needs more
people like that.'

All three of them came to see us off in the plane. Lollie
kissed us goodbye, Wickus and Swannie gave us warm, friendly handshakes, as if
we had become part of their social circle.

As Lotter circled back above them and waggled his wings in a
final salute, we looked down on the three small figures waving with
outstretched arms, and Lotter said, 'Good people.' He, the Swanepoels, Emma,
spontaneously saw the good in others, they believed that people were inherently
good, or at least interesting, fascinating. I refrained from speaking, because
I'm not like that. I had sat and listened to the story of Flea van Jaarsveld
and wondered why no one had stepped in. Why had no one gone to Big Frik
Redelinghuys and said, 'It's your daughter and your grandchild, you idiot, wake
up'? Why hadn't the keepers of Musina's morals talked to Drika or warned Louis
earlier? When the people from Moremi came looking for Flea's next of kin after
Louis died, why had no one stepped forward and said, 'bring the girl to me'?
Why hadn't Wickus and Lollie done something themselves? It was no good telling
the story with quasi-altruistic remarks like, 'It's a sad story', more than ten
years after the damage was done. That was the trouble with our society; we had
become spectators, sideline critics. We couldn't wait to read about other
people's hardships, hear about them and pass on the stories. Always from the
moral high ground, of course. 'They got what was coming to them'. But no one
had the guts to step in.

Granted, My First Law was: Don't get involved, but the
critical difference was that I did not seek the moral high ground, I didn't
pretend to be 'good'...

I became aware I was angry. I knew where it was coming from.
Wickus and Lollie had deprived me of something: my motivation to ... well, what
did
I plan to do when I caught up with Flea?
Punish her? Expose her? And now? Now that the parallels had been drawn so
clearly between us - a slut for a mother, a madman for a father, a youth
effectively ruined by parents who should never have reproduced, and a family
and society that chose to look the other way, because it wasn't their problem.
Now I wished I would never find her, I hoped that whatever she had stuck on those
two rhinos would bring her escape and release.

I felt like turning around and going home.

But I couldn't. I had to get my Glock back. My whole life
depended on it.

Lotter looked down on the strip of cleared bush in a shallow valley
between high hills and he said: 'This is going to be tricky.'

'How tricky?'

'Very tricky.'

'We don't have to land,' I said, beginning to think of
alternatives, mainly involving road travel.

'Shut your eyes if you like,' with a grin that said he always
wanted to test the RV-7's limits.

He flew over the landing strip again, dipping a wing to see
better.

'What are you looking at?'

'There's no windsock ...'

'Is that a problem?'

'Naah ... not really.'

Then he made a wide turn before diving, aiming for a cleft
between two hills. 'Hold tight.'

I seriously considered shutting my eyes.

Rocks, bush and trees only metres from the wing tips, then he
turned sharply left, dropping even lower. The valley widened, the tree tops too
high, too near. The engine tone dropped, he worked the pedals and joystick, the
landing strip straight ahead, too short. We hit the ground with a jarring bump.
Lotter braked hard, my body strained against the safety webbing. The wall of
trees was coming up too fast.