We had just finished a memorable safari in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, one on which I had taken a very fine leopard in the eleventh hour of the final day. It was my first. A male, it pegged out at nearly eight feet from nose to tail tip, and we were celebrating the kill, relaxing at Bill Winter’s home in Nanyuki before my departure stateside. It was a Sunday afternoon, cool and cloudy on the slopes of Mount Kenya. We decided to run down to the Sportsman’s Arms for tea. A British regimental band held forth on the hotel grounds that lazy evening, and we took our tea on the veranda to the strains of The Colonel Bogey March. You know the tune, but if not perhaps the words often sung to it will bring back the melody.
“It’s horseshit . . . that makes the grass grow green . . .” I sang them sotto voce between sips of piping hot Darjeeling.
“Look at that old gent, Bwana,” Bill whispered after swallowing a bite of lemon tart. He cast his eyes briefly to my left. Seated near us at a wickerwork garden table, one gouty foot propped on a chair as he beat time to the music, was a splendid wreck of a fellow, mottled of cheek but bright of eye, with a hoary set of side whiskers and a magnificent if somewhat drinksodden moustache. He sipped at a rust-colored gin and bitters, no ice.
“Sir George McArthur Ponsonby, V.C.,” Bill said. “A grand old ruin, hey? But he was a dume in his day, a real bull. Won the Victoria Cross at Passchendaele in the Great War, marched on Waziristan with General Climo in 1919, exemplary Colonial service, both military and civilian, in Nyasaland, the Cameroons and Tanganyika, a veteran of safaris mingi sana—many, many great hunts—back in the days when the word meant something, when they went in on foot, with porters balancing the loads on their heads. He can tell you a tale or two, old Sir George. What say we ask him over for a drink and a bit of a chin-wag?”
We did, and in due course Bill told Sir George about my leopard.
“Wasn’t by chance wearing gold ankle bracelets, was it?” Sir George asked when I finished my modest story. “Graven with mystical writing?”
“No, sir,” I answered, puzzled.
Bill was grinning behind his hand. “Should it have been?”
Sir George chuckled and assured me most definitely that it should not have been. Not if I valued my health and sanity.
Bill winked, then tugged his left earlobe, a signal advising me to activate the small tape recorder I carried in the breast pocket of my bush vest.
Sir George ordered another gin-and-bitters. When it arrived, he proceeded to relate a tale of his own concerning leopards, the tale of a strange and dreadful hunt. It had occurred nearly half a century earlier, in the same reaches of the NFD from where we had just returned.
Some years ago, he began, in the early 1920s he and another Englishman were hunting along the Ewaso Nyiro River, slowly following its sinuous route through that great game country to where it hemorrhages finally, as so many African rivers do, into the sands of an ever-expanding desert, leaving only a fetid marsh to punctuate its finish.
Here then is his tale, abridged only slightly so as not to offend what is blithely termed a “family” readership . . .
“In the course of our trek down the ‘Washo,’ we happened upon a small manyatta—a village of shabby grass huts—on the edge of the Lorian Swamp, where that great blood-red river ends its career. The inhabitants, a degenerate breed of Marsh ’Dorobos, had never seen white men before. They fled weeping at the approach of our safari. Our porters, feeling superior to these rude savages, laughed long and hard at them, making jests in raucous Kiswahili that accused the poor savages of such bestial sins as snake worship and intimate congress with hyenas.
“The naked bums of these dusky Adams and Eves had no sooner vanished into the nettles than our lads began looting. We had already discovered, to our mutual dismay, that there was no controlling these boisterous hirelings once theft was in prospect, short of shooting a few of them. Twice thus far we’d been forced to do so, and both of us feared that yet another such episode would precipitate a full-scale mutiny. Our ammunition was running low. We might not be able to quell a concerted uprising without burning the rest of it, at which point our own lives would be forfeit. And even if we slew enough of the obstreperous rascals to bring the remainder to their senses, would the survivors fulfill their duties to us the rest of the way to the Coast, or decamp in the dark of moon with all they could pilfer?
“What to do, what to do . . . My companion must have perceived my indecision. He smiled coolly.
“‘Heigh-ho,’ said Rawley. ‘I don’t know about you. Sir George, but I fear my heart’s all a-twitter.’
“The ball was now clearly in my court.
“‘By my troth, I care not,’ quoth I, with what I hoped was an insouciance equal to the moment. ‘We owe God a swoon, and let it go which way it will, he who swoons this year is quit for the next.’
“Rawley punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘Pukka sabib,’ said he.
“At that point, Kabiza, our burly headman, emerged from a squalid hut with a woman in tow. He crowed lustily. The other lads gathered round in eager anticipation. It was the old story. Nothing better enlivens a friendly afternoon of looting than a spot of jiggery-pokery! Though our gang would have been content with a withered old crone, this woman was young, nubile and to some tastes, I reckon, quite lovely to gaze upon.
“She had something of the look of a Somali about her, a tall, lissome, coffee-colored wench with the poignant overbite and wide-set, almond ayes peculiar to Hamitic women. The women you see in those ancient Egyptian murals at the Victoria & Albert, you know, or among the Berbers and Tuaregs of contemporary Saharan Africa.
“Oddly enough, she didn’t seem frightened, though she must have known how these sessions inevitably end. One of the bullies, his passion and interest spent, brains his sobbing victim with disdainful swing of his knob-kerri. Yet she stood there in the mud, the late, low sunlight mottling her golden skin, and smiled inscrutably into the distance.
“An innocent young savage, you ask?
“I wondered myself, even then. A brace of delicate, artfully wrought ornaments, forged from some precious metal, encircled her trim ankles, touches of a higher, perhaps forgotten culture. The anklets winked in the day’s red decline. The girl’s cat-like eyes impressed me as well, empty as they were of any recognizable human emotion. They had a classic, almost Pharaonic look to them, as if they had been carved from antediluvian amber and buried for centuries in some great king’s tomb.
“Then she yawned, quite prettily it seemed to me, and turned to Kabiza with a playful smile.
“That worthy threw her to the ground, cast aside his shuka, the toga-like garb of the country, and with a low growl proceeded to cover her. The girl drew back her knees, whether in repulsion or acceptance of her fate, I know not. Kabiza’s rowdy cohorts cheered. He thrust home . . .
“I averted my eyes in shame, then looked back suddenly as a hideous, soul-chilling cry split the air.”
Sir George paused to sip his gin-and-bitters.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“Kabiza, of course,” he said, smiling wetly.
“The headman’s hips seemed to buck upward. He rolled to one side, on his back, his entrails spilled forth onto the mud in a welter of gore. His eyes bulged horribly, the scarred, ape-like face contorted in pain, his fingers clutching spasmodically at his innards as he tried vainly to replace them within his gaping abdomen. And Kabiza of course, disemboweled, shuddered and died a few moments later.”
Again Sir George paused for refreshment.
“And then?”
“The girl was gone!” Sir George said triumphantly. “We stood dumfounded. ‘My God!’ Rawley suddenly cried. ‘Look, there!’ He pointed toward a narrow alleyway that led between the huts into the depths of the swamp. I saw the thing for only an instant—the sleek, sinuous form of a leopard, its hind paws and white-furred underbelly spattered with blood, disappearing swiftly into the man-high marsh grass. Or so it seemed.
“We sat long and late at the campfire that night. Rawley had broken out the medicinal brandy—Napoleon, 1813, if I’m not mistaken—and we slugged it back as if it were hock. Our rifles stood leaning against our camp chairs. The firelight played eerily on Rawley’s manly features, aging him to a seamed simulacrum of himself, a feeble octogenarian if you will.
“Major Alistair Frederic Rawley-DePuis, D.S.O., V.C., late of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, was no stranger to the arcana of the African bush. Seconded at his own request to the King’s African Rifles at the end of the Boer War, he had battled Kikuyu, Turkana, Suk and Nandi spearmen from Kirinyaga to the Nyandarua, from Lake Rudolph to the Kisii Plateau. By his own modest count, he had slain full three score or more of these swarthy adversaries, all of them in single combat.
“‘It’s amazing,’ he told me once, a sweet smile playing about his lips, ‘how easily a bayonet slips into a man, and how difficult it is to withdraw.’
“He had fatally pistoled a laibon of the Kavirondo nation at point-blank range during a nefarious native ambush, wrestled a rungu from a crazed Maasai moran and killed him with his own warclub, been hexed by a Turkana witch whose potion of spider venom and euphorbia sap had been slipped to him into his sundowner by a turncoat batman and survived countless
life-threatening episodes of African mayhem and intrigue. After seventeen years of service on the Dark Continent, though, his good Dorsetshire common sense had been subtly altered. He had begun to believe in The Darkness.
“‘She’s a Leopard Woman,’ he said now. ‘No doubt of it. Sir George.’
“‘Oh, I say, old son; I could not help but splutter. ‘Isn’t that putting, er . . . just a touch too much credence in the arcane?’
“‘Not at all, he replied. ‘Though I’ve never come across it myself, the literature teems with eyewitness reports of such phenomena. Many of these African witchwomen have the power, one way or t’other, to change themselves at will into leopards or hyenas or aardwolves, even puff adders or mambas if they so choose, or so at least I’ve read. An old mess-mate of mine, Colonel Sidney Cartwright-Graham, reports witnessing just such a transmogrification in his book, Nightdrums & Devilry in Danakil Land. Chapter XIII, I believe. And Professor Woolworthy, the Cambridge myth wallah, devotes three whole chapters to the phenomenon, citing numerous examples in one or another of his swotty tomes—Black Rites on the Blue Nile, if I’m not mistaken.’
“‘But might there not be a simpler explanation?’ I asked. ‘The girl could have had a knife secreted about her person, and when Kabiza jumped aboard, she gralloched him.’
“‘You saw the leopard as clearly as I,’ Rawley replied. ‘Where did it come from, and in broad daylight to boot?’
“He had a point, of course. Yet the eyes have a way of playing tricks on the forebrain, particularly at moments of sudden stress, when confusion reigns and events transpire too swiftly. The African bush, as I’m sure you chaps are well aware, provides an all-too-fertile ground for the sensitive European imagination. Fantasy runs riot.
“‘Well, at least the incident seems to have put a quietus to the porters’ mischief,’ I said. ‘I noticed them just now replacing their ill-gotten goods, all of them meek as lambs.’
“We decided to break camp at first light the following morning. The sooner we were clear of this unholy ground, the better. Another five days of long marches through the Hothori and Sabena deserts should find us on the banks of the Tana River, where we could hire new porters and continue our hunt in a more leisurely fashion, downriver toward Lamu and the coast.
“The boys built a tall, strong zareeba of thornbush around the manyatta, fueled up their fires, and wrapped themselves uneasily in their blankets for the night. We too retired. About three hours later, Rawley and I were awakened by screams and shouts. Snatching our rifles, we leaped out of the tent clad only in our kikois. Total confusion reigned.
“Finally, we were able to learn that the leopardess had returned, grabbed Achmed, one of our likeliest lads, between her jaws, then quick as a wink bounded clean over the top of the zareeba, back into that awful darkness. We could hear the poor boy screaming and bewailing his fate, the sound fading slowly into the depths of the morass.
“Then through the dark came an audible crunch, followed by silence. Rawley and I sat up the rest of the night, our rifles across our knees, but she did not return. No, no . . .
“No, she saved that for the morrow.”
Sir George finished his gin-and-bitters, ordered another from the comely Meru waitress hovering nearby with her tray, then continued.
“We were up before dawn, the boys gladly shouldering their heavy loads, our meager, dwindling supplies as well as an abundance of horns, hides and no small weight of ivory, for Rawley had slain a tembo whose tusks weighed more than 140 pounds each, and I one only marginally less toothy. Shunning a proper breakfast, we wolfed down a few pieces of biltong on the march.
“We gave the Lorian Swamp a wide berth as we skirted it, heading south by southeast for the Tana. Toward noon, just as we neared the end of the savannah, with the supposed safety of open desert visible dead ahead, the leopardness struck again.
“Creeping up through the tall grass, she nabbed the last porter in the long line. Nabbed him by the throat this time, so he could utter no more than a muffled shriek before she disappeared back into the waving grass, with him dangling crosswise in her jaws. Once more we were treated to the sound of The Queen of Darkness at table, harsh purrs of contentment emanating from her throughout her repast.
“We hurried on. Ironically enough, the Sabena Desert, one of the fiercest in the world, offered us our only hope of succor. Not even a spring hare could hide on its barren surface, much less a large, spotted cat, no matter how stealthy her approach. The pitiless sun, which dried us like so many pieces of that very biltong wherewith we had broken our fast, at the same time illumined everything under its gaze. We counted on it to highlight the leopardess, granting us at least enough law time to get off a shot or two—from my ‘best’ gun, a .450 Rigby Nitro Express double rifle, or
Rawley’s .303 Lee-Enfield. Ah, but Old Sol let us down, that he did.
“At midafternoon she appeared out of nowhere—perhaps a small, unnoticed depression in the otherwise flat ground. She disemboweled two more porters with quick paw slashes, leaving her just time enough, before we came up, to peel away their faces with her remorseless jaws. This time we did not pause to bury the bodies.
“All day it went that way, and the next day, and the one after that. Our route across that ghastly wasteland was marked, and perhaps still is, with the bones of our dead. And with the loads they were carrying. Many fine trophies went to waste out there, eaten no doubt by jackals and hyenas.
“We tried, for the first few evenings, sitting up over the corpses of the newly slain in hopes of a shot at this demon leopardess. But she was too clever for us. While Rawley looked one way and I the other, she crept into camp unbeknownst and murdered a few more of our gibbering porters.
“Finally Rawley had had enough. ‘The next time she strikes, I’m going after her.’
“‘Man!’ I said, ‘that’s just what she wants. She’ll do for you, mark my words!’
“All the rational explanations I had held of Kabiza’s death had long since evaporated in the desert’s dry air, in the unmitigated terror of that awful, endless trek.
“‘She’s uncanny,’ I cried, ‘unkillable, the Devil herself, incarnate!’
“He smiled, rather sadly, I thought. As if he were resigned.
“‘I cannot sit idly by for one more hour without doing something,’ he calmly replied. He picked up his Lee-Enfield and checked its fittings, tightening an action screw here, a sling swivel there, then applying a thin coat of gun oil to the parts he felt required it. Lastly, he scrutinized his bullets for deformities, to ensure against jams. It was a work-worn weapon, that Enfield. It had seen service in South Africa, France, India and Africa, from Cairo to Capetown. It had dispatched more big game and more enemies of the Crown than any other dozen of its kind. Now it would pit its pluck, its English mettle (if you’ll pardon the pun) against the dark, daft power of the Supernatural . . .
“Just then came an all-too-familiar scream and gurgle, trailing off into the night. Without a moment’s hesitation, Rawley plunged into the gloom.”
Sir George stopped. The regimental band had packed up its instruments and long since departed. Night had fallen, and along with it a sharp, bone-biting chill. The old gentleman peered about, then shivered.
“Perhaps we’d best resume our conversation at a later date,” he said. “It’s getting a bit parky for these old bones.”
“No, no, Sir George!” I said, nearby babbling. “I’m leaving for America in the morning; don’t know when I’ll be back again. Why don’t you come inside and join us for supper? Be our guest. It would give me great pleasure.”
“Hmm,” he said doubtfully, knowing full well that he had his hook firmly planted in the comer of my mouth, through and through. The tippet would never part. “Perhaps just a small bite of something, a modest Ploughman’s Lunch, no more, but in from the cold, at any rate.”
It seemed to take forever, what with our moving inside, waiting for a table to be readied. Sir George making a long overdue visit to the loo, then ordering drinks and dinner. But finally he was settled.
“Where was I?”
“Rawley had just plunged . . .”
“Yes, yes—into the gloom. I sat there alone for a minute, maybe more. Then my suddenly aroused sense of shame at being thought a coward propelled me after him. I pushed through the zareeba into the chill desert night. Rawley was nowhere to be seen, not even as my eyes adjusted to the dark. Nor could I hear him. Or anything, for that matter, save some jackals yipping far away, off in the back of beyond. I walked cautiously forward, the loaded Rigby at high port arms, my thumb on the safety for a quick shot, rather as if I were on a rough shoot for suddenly springing red partridge.
“Off to my left I could see the dark line of a nullah—a coulee or gulch, I believe you Yanks call it. Somehow I was instantly, perhaps instinctively, certain that the final act of this ghastly tragedy would unfold right there. I walked toward it with mounting trepidation. As I neared the edge, I heard a low whistle. It was Rawley, hunkered down next to a boulder. I crouched low and made for him.
“‘She’s down there,’ he whispered. ‘Eating our man, the good Baraka. You can hear her at it.’ I listened. I could. ‘But you must return to camp, Sir George. This is my job, by rights. I invited you on this safari, and thus I am in command here.’
“‘Tummyrot,’ I answered. ‘I outrank you ten ways from Sunday. The King says so. Now what shall we do?’
“His smile brightened the night. ‘Good show,’ he murmured. ‘All you must do is cover me. I will work my way down to that next boulder, from which I should be able to see her. When I shoot, you must be alert to movement in any direction. She may flee at the shot if I miss her, even if I hit her for that matter. Or she will charge. And leopards, as you well know, especially supernatural ones, are chargers. Stop her if she comes for me. Understood?’
“I nodded, and Rawley began to inch his way down the steep wall of the nullah, taking infinite pains not to disturb a single one of the many small stones that littered its tilting surface. The rattle of even a pebble would set off the leopard’s fuse, causing her to explode in one direction or another.
“What felt like hours ticked past, lifetimes—spots crawled before my eyes—but finally he was in place. He looked back up the slope at me, raised his thumb, then slowly raised the Enfield . . .”
At that moment a steward arrived at our table with Sir George’s entree. It was a smoking platter of langouste, flown up to Nanyuki at great expense from Malindi on the coast. With the lobster came a bowl of melted butter, a tray of capers and sliced lemon, a mammoth serving of rice, veggies and pickles and an iced magnum of champagne, Moet & Chandon “Dorn Perignon,” no less. Some Ploughman’s Lunch. Bill and I were having bangers and mash.
“Enjoy,” I said, with a touch of acerbity. “But please go on with your story. And don’t hesitate to talk with your mouth full.”
Sir George laughed. “Bang!” he said.
“What?”
“Bang! Rawley fired at the leopard. I saw the long gout of flame from the Enfield’s muzzle and perhaps it blinded me for an instant. All hell broke loose, as they say. A loud, high-pitched pantherine shriek. The clatter of violently disturbed rocks. A long swift dark shape momentarily eclipsed the stars above Rawley’s boulder. Then his sudden, anguished cry of rage . . . All this in a heartbeat. The leopard had him, and he had her. I saw them for an instant, standing and swaying together like lovers, the leopard clutched in Rawley’s strong embrace, her hind claws working at his abdomen. But of course I couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting him. Then they toppled down into the nullah. I ran over to the edge and peered down, rifle at my shoulder.
“There she was—an elongate streak heading up the far side of the declivity. I swung with her and fired . . .”
The fork that Sir George had laden with lobster, rice and a tidbit of stewed tomato and held, poised at mouth-level, throughout this discourse, now disappeared into his maw. He chewed 30 times, maybe more, then finally swallowed. He muffled a belch behind his napkin. “And . . .?”
“Where was I . . .?”
“The shot, you’d just fired the Rigby . . .”
“Yes, a right and a left, bang-bang, like two shots run together. The recoil prevented me from seeing if either shot had told. I heard no scrabbling in the rocks, as from a moribund animal. Not a single cry from Rawley, not even a low moan. He was dead when I found him, poor chap. Disemboweled as completely as Kabiza.
“I dragged him back to camp by myself, the lads refusing to come beyond the zareeba until it became light. I sat by his body, waiting for dawn, thinking sad thoughts of Empire, and of the men who built it. They were heroes, all of them. Where is their like today?”
“And the leopard?” What happened to her?”
“Never found her,” Sir George said. “Pugmarks galore in the nullah, but no blood, no hair, no scuffmarks on the bare rock. I did find something, though.”
“What was it?”
“These,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his frayed bush jacket. The wrinkled old paw, covered with liver spots, trembled, then unclenched, palm up. In Sir George’s hands lay two well-worn golden anklets, graven with strange runes or cuneiforms. They looked ancient—far older even than this husk of a man who sat before me, smiling gently but quizzically into my soul.
Old beyond time itself . . .
“The lads and I found these on the dessicated body of an aged woman, who lay near a boulder at the top of the nullah. Just about in line with my shots. She had been there a long, long time, mummified by the sun and the hot, arid winds so that her corpse was light as a feather. God knows why the vultures and jackals hadn’t found her, or at least the driver ants. Her leathery body was clad in skins, dry as parchment now.”
We sat in silence as Sir George finished his lobster. He stretched finally, yawned behind his hand, shot a cuff and looked at his wristwatch. It was a fine old timepiece, perhaps a Patek Phillipe, but its leather band had been mended near the buckle with duct tape.
“Well,” he said, “you lads will have to finish the champers. No heeltaps, mind you! I’m afraid I must toddle off to slumberland. Young children and old men, they both require an early bedtime. You two young stalwarts will learn the truth of that maxim, all in the fullness of time.” He rose and smiled down at us, leaning his dropsical belly against the chair top.
“Thank you for my supper,” he said, “not to mention the liquid refreshment. And pleasant dreams, both of you.”
Sir George’s tale had made my own leopard, killed from a blind as most are nowadays, appear rather hum-drum. All I could remember of the hunt now was the interminable waiting, the insect bites, the yearning for a smoke, the leopard’s sudden appearance, as if from thin air, and then the shot that killed him. He dropped without a sound, stone dead to one touch of the trigger, one soft-pointed nip from the .375 H&H Magnum.
Talk about anticlimax. Rather like modern life, really: hurry up and wait, then wait some more. Just about the time you’re totally bored, bang, it’s over.
“What do you make of it?” I asked Bill when the old man was gone.
He laughed and shook his head.
“This is Africa, Bwana,” he said at last. “Anything can happen. But whatever the truth of the matter, it makes a nice bedtime story, doesn’t it?”
Editor’s Note: This story appeared in A Roaring in the Blood, published by Sporting Classics in 2006. It also is among 44 chapters from the book, Monsters, Mayhem and Miracles. Order your copy today!