Wilbur Smith - Assegai

Kermit struggled to free himself, but Leon held him easily. ‘Listen, you idiot, you go into that water and the croc’s grandpapa will be waiting to meet you.’

‘But we’re going to lose him! I have to fish him out!’

‘No, you don’t! Manyoro and Loikot will wait here until tomorrow when the croc will have blown up with gas and floated to the surface. Then you and I will come back and put ropes on it.’

Kermit quietened down a little. ‘He’s going to be washed away downstream.’

‘The river is no longer flowing. This is a blind pool. Your croc ain’t going anywhere, chum.’

It was late afternoon, and they were sitting under the fly of Leon’s tent, drinking tea and endlessly going over the details of the crocodile hunt, when there was an excited stir and a hubbub ran through the encampment, indicating the imminent return of the President. Kermit jumped up. ‘Come on!’ he said to Leon. ‘Let’s go see what my old man’s bagged.’ He strode away, but turned back. ‘Don’t say anything about the croc. He won’t believe it until he sees it.’

Teddy Roosevelt rode into camp, and they were there to greet him when he dismounted and tossed the reins to a syce. He smiled when he saw Kermit, and there was a triumphant twinkle in the eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Kermit called. ‘Did you have a good day?’

‘Not bad. I opened the lion account.’

Kermit’s face fell. ‘You got a lion?’

‘Yep!’ the President affirmed, still smiling. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Kermit saw a party of bearers coming down the trail through the trees. They were carrying a tan body slung on a pole between them. They dumped their burden next to the taxidermy tent, and three of the Smithsonian scientists came out to view the day’s bag. They cut the ropes that bound the paws of the lion to the pole, and stretched the carcass on the ground to measure and photograph it.

Kermit laughed with relief. Even he, who knew little about them, could see that this was an immature lioness. ‘Hey, Dad!’ He chuckled as he turned to his father. ‘If you call that a real lion, I might as well call myself the President of the United States of America. She’s a baby.’

‘You’re right, son,’ his father agreed, still smiling smugly. ‘Poor little sweetheart, I had to shoot her. She wouldn’t let us get close to the body of her mate. She guarded it ferociously. At least we can have her mounted as part of a family group in one of the showcases in the African Hall at the museum. What do you think?’ He directed the question at George Lemmon, the chief of the team of scientists.

‘We’re delighted to have her, sir. She’s a fine specimen. Her hide is unblemished, it still has the immature spotting of a cub, and her teeth are perfect.’

The President looked back over his shoulder and remarked comfortably, ‘Oh, good! They’re bringing the male in now.’ Another team of bearers was just emerging from the forest. Four were staggering under the weight of the huge body they were carrying.

‘Good gracious! That looks like a very fine lion to me.’ Frederick Selous had come from his tent in his shirtsleeves, carrying his sketchpad. ‘We must make sure that those fellows handle it carefully. It would never do to have the skin abraded or damaged.’

The bearers came up with the lion swinging on the pole to the rhythm of their trot. They lowered it gently to the ground beside the lioness. Sammy Edwards, the head taxidermist, stretched it out carefully and ran his measuring tape from the tip of its onyx-black nose to the black tuft at the end of its tail. ‘Nine feet one inch.’ He looked up at the President. ‘That’s a great lion, sir, the largest I’ve ever had a tape on.’

After dinner that evening Kermit came to Leon’s tent. He brought with him a silver hip flask of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. They turned the lamp low, sat in the canvas chairs under the mosquito net and kept their voices to a whisper.

‘Andrew Fagan was the guest of honour this evening,’ Kermit told Leon. In response to Kermit’s invitation Fagan had arrived in camp during the afternoon. ‘He got on well with my father. The old man enjoyed having a new audience.’

They were silent for a few minutes, then Kermit went on, ‘I don’t grudge it to my father. He’s as keen as any of us to get good trophies, and he works like a man half his age. You weren’t there, of course, but I can tell you that he did rather overdo it at dinner tonight. He didn’t actually boast or gloat over me but he came damned close. Of course Fagan was lapping it all up.’

Leon studied the amber liquid in his glass and murmured sympathetically in agreement.

‘I mean it was a good lion, a fine lion, but it wasn’t the best lion anyone in Africa has ever taken, was it?’ Kermit asked earnestly.

‘You’re absolutely right. It was a very big-bodied lion, but its mane was a ruff. It wasn’t much bigger than a lady’s ostrich-feather boa,’ Leon assured him, and Kermit burst out laughing, then checked himself with a hand over his mouth. They were more than a hundred yards from the President’s tent, but the great man expected silence in camp after lights out.

‘A lady’s boa,’ Kermit repeated delightedly, then made an attempt at a feminine falsetto, ‘Are we off to the ballet, my darlings?’ They savoured the joke for a while and pulled at the Jack Daniel’s.

Then Kermit said, ‘Sometimes I almost hate my father. Does that make me evil?’

‘No, it makes you human.’

‘Tell me honestly, Leon, what did you really think of that lion?’

‘We can beat it.’

‘Do you think so? Do you honestly think so?’

‘Your father’s lion hasn’t a single black hair in its boa. Not one,’ he said, and Kermit had to smother another burst of laughter at the word ‘boa’. The Jack Daniel’s was warming his belly and lifting his spirits.

When his friend had controlled his mirth, Leon repeated, ‘We can beat it. We can get a bigger and blacker lion. Manyoro and Loikot are Masai. They have a special affinity with the big cats. They say we can do better, and I believe them.’

‘Tell me how we’re going to do it.’ Kermit gazed solemnly into his face.

‘We’ll make up a flying column and ride ahead of the main safari into the country beyond Masailand, where the lions haven’t been picked over for the last thousand years by the morani . We can move many times faster than the rest of them because they’re limited to the pace of the porters. In a few days we can have a lead of a hundred miles or more. When does the President plan to move on north, do you know?’

‘My father told us at dinner tonight that he plans to stay here for a while. It seems that a few days ago the local guides led him and Mr Selous to a large swamp about twenty miles east of here. Near it they found a set of tracks that Mr Selous believes may be those of a male sitatunga antelope, but they were larger than the species he himself discovered in 1881 in the Okavango delta. That one is named after him, Limnotragus selousi . He’s convinced my father that this may be an entirely new sub-species. To my father the opportunity of discovering a species previously unknown to science is irresistible. He dreams of a sitatunga named Limnotragus roosevelti . He would sacrifice his first-born for that.’ He grinned. ‘I expect he’ll want to hang around here until he finds this buck or convinces himself it doesn’t exist.’

‘I can understand his interest. What do you know about the sitatunga?’

‘Not much,’ Kermit admitted.

‘It’s a fascinating creature, very rare and elusive. It’s the only truly aquatic antelope. Its hoofs are so long and splayed that on land it can barely walk, but in deep mud or water it’s as agile as a catfish. When threatened it ducks under the surface and can remain submerged for hours with only the tips of its nostrils above the water.’