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

isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were
experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.
    ‘We cannot afford cattle,’ the old man explained, ‘so we run goats. Goats!’ He spat again into the fire and watched his phlegm sizzle. ‘Goats! Like dirt-eating
Shona.’ His tribal hatred boiled like his spittle.
    Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would
suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind’s eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like tanned leather and impossibly green
Ballantyne eyes, standing before him.
    ‘Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!’
    However, the veranda was littered with rubble and bird-droppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.
    He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge elephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig’s
great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s. Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King’s Lynn. Old grandpa Bawu had touched them each time he
passed, so that there had been a polished spot on the yellow ivory. Now there were only the holes in the masonry from which the bolts holding the ivory had been torn. The only family relics he had
inherited and still owned were the collection of leather-bound family journals, the laboriously hand-written records of his ancestors from the arrival of his great-great-grandfather in Africa over
a hundred years before. The tusks would complement the old books. He would search for them, he promised himself. Surely such rare treasures must be traceable.
    He went into the derelict house. The shelving and built-in cupboards and floor-boards had been stripped out by the squatters in the valley for firewood, the window-panes used as targets by small
black boys with slingshots. The books, the portrait photographs from the walls, the carpets and heavy furniture of Rhodesian teak were all gone. The homestead was a shell, but a sturdy shell. With
an open palm Craig slapped the walls that great-greatgrandfather Zouga Ballantyne had built of hand-hewn stone and mortar that had had almost a hundred years to cure to adamantine hardness. His
palm made a solid ringing tone. It would take only a little imagination and a deal of money to transform the shell into a magnificent home once again.
    Craig left the house and climbed the kopje behind it to the walled family cemetery that lay under the msasa trees beneath the rocky crest. There was grass growing up between the headstones. The
cemetery had been neglected but not vandalized, as had many of the other monuments left from the colonial era.
    Craig sat on the edge of his grandfather’s grave and said, ‘Hello, Bawu. I’m back,’ and started as he almost heard the old man’s voice full of mock scorn speaking
in his mind.
    ‘Yes, every time you burn your arse you come running back here. What happened this time?’
    ‘I dried up, Bawu,’ he answered the accusation aloud and then was silent. He sat for a long time and very slowly he felt the tumult within him begin to subside a little.
    ‘The place is in a hell of a mess, Bawu,’ he spoke again, and the little blue-headed lizard on the old man’s headstone scuttled away at the sound of his voice. ‘The tusks
are gone from the veranda, and they are running goats on your best grass.’
    Again he was silent, but now he was beginning to calculate and scheme. He sat for nearly an hour, and then stood up.
    ‘Bawu, how would you like it if I could move the goats off your pasture?’ he asked, and walked back down the hill to where he had left the