The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

Bawu Ballantyne’s ghost must be without rest or peace. Goats on his beloved grassland. Craig
went to look for them. There were two hundred or more in one herd. Some of the agile multi-coloured animals had climbed high into the trees and were eating bark and seed-pods, while others were
cropping the grass down to the roots so that it would die and the soil would sour. Craig had seen the devastation that these animals had created in the tribal trustlands.
    There were two naked Matabele boys with the herd. They were delighted when Craig spoke to them in their own language. They stuffed the cheap candy that he had brought with him for just such a
meeting into their cheeks, and chattered without inhibition.
    Yes, there were thirty families living on King’s Lynn now, and each family had its herd of goats – the finest goats in Matabeleland, they boasted through sticky lips, and under the
trees a horned old billy mounted a young nanny with a vigorous humping of his back. ‘See!’ cried the herdboys, ‘they breed with a will. Soon we will have more goats than any of
the other families.’
    ‘What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?’ Craig asked.
    ‘Gone!’ they told him proudly. ‘Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution.’
    They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.
    Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and
jewelled sunbirds. Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carcasses with relish.
Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.
    The herdboys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the
overwhelming affection for these people. They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.
    He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King’s Lynn. The lawns had died from lack of attention, and the goats had been in the flower-beds. Even at
this distance, Craig could see the main house was deserted. Windows were broken, leaving unsightly gaps like missing teeth, and most of the asbestos sheets had been stolen from the roof and the
roof-timbers were forlorn and skeletal against the sky. The roofing sheets had been used to build ramshackle squatters’ shacks down near the old cattle-pens.
    Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters’ encampment. There were half a dozen families
living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.
    ‘I see you, old father.’ Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more
readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.
    ‘They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man’s cattle.’ The old man spat into the fire. ‘The
only ones with motor-cars are the government ministers. They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything
costs five times more – sugar and salt and soap – everything.’
    During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had