Murder on Safari by Elspeth Huxley Read Free Book Online

The rifle went up to his
    shoulder in a flash. A lioness! She had seen them, and was staring fixedly in their direction. He felt his heart pounding quickly, and he pressed the stock into his shoulder. It looked as though she might be crouching for a charge. His finger tightened on the trigger. Then the face moved: disappeared.
    It bobbed up again through the grass to
    the right and he swung the rifle round and sighted again. No, it was all right: she wasn’t coming. He lowered the rifle in relief and watched the grass wave as she lolloped away.
    “I’m glad you didn’t shoot the poor little waterbuck calf,” a low voice behind him said.
    Vachell experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. For crying out loud, he thought, a waterbuck calf!
    “Just trying out the sights of a new rifle,” he mumbled. They moved forward again, slowly.
    A few hundred yards farther on they came to a pool in the river with a game path leading down to it. The wet sand around the edge was pitted with spoor. They examined it silently, bending over the criss-crossed tracks. Vachell felt a fresh wave of misgiving. They all looked the same to him. How was he to know an impala from an oribi? There was the mark of a pad with five toes. Was it a lion or only a hyena?
    A low whistle came from his companion. She
    47
    was bending over a large, clear impression in the sand, about twenty inches across, with a slightly corrugated surface. Well, he could recognise that.
    There wasn’t anything else that could look like an elephant.
    He bent over it, nodded, and tried to look
    knowing. De Mare, he reflected with envy, could probably tell the animal’s age, sex, and size of its tusks from that spoor. The hunter had explained a bit about tracking on the way up. You could tell sex from the size and age from the imprint, he had said — the corrugations on the sole of the foot were sharper and deeper in the case of a young animal than with an old one. And sometimes a
    heavy tusker could be distinguished by the deeper imprint of his toes. Hell, Vachell thought, that guy could probably tell the colour of its eyes and its views on the Chinese war and whether it goes for blondes or brunettes by looking at its footprints.
    “Two big bulls,” Chris said in a low voice.
    “We’d better see which direction they’ve taken.”
    There was a steep sandy bank above the righthand margin of the pool, and Vachell had no difficulty in picking out the marks the elephants had
    made in scrambling up it. On top of the bank a game track led back into the bush. He could make out the great round impressions distinctly in the dust. A little way along he came to a pile of droppings, still slightly warm. He wondered how long
    droppings kept their heat, and how you told their 48
    age. Chris, behind him, turned over part of them with a stick and he observed a number of large beetles rolling the inside dung into neat balls.
    “About two hours old,” she whispered.
    He led on, wondering whether the bulls were
    feeding just ahead. If only they’d keep to the sand it would be all right. But of course they didn’t.
    Soon after they passed the droppings he lost the spoor. He cast about in the bush ahead and found a faint trail which led over a patch of dry grass and then petered out in a rocky gulley. Although he searched for ten minutes he couldn’t pick it up again. The stony ground seemed to stare back at him blankly, utterly uninformative.
    How could any one, he asked himself, spoor an animal over a lot of rocks and stones? There just weren’t any traces. In the back of his mind he knew that a native tracker could follow those bulls as easily as a passenger changing stations on the London Underground could follow the red light for Piccadilly. Where animals had walked, there must be traces Ч crushed grass stalks, torn-off leaves, little stirrings in the dust; invisible to the unskilled eye, but crying aloud to the initiated.
    That was the way a detective went to work.