The cub was lying very, very quietly inside that new pouch into which heaven had saved her. Only now and then there was a small little movement from somewhere near my belly button.
“You kissed me,” I said to Tensy as I started the car again. Then, without complaining, I drove off. “It was rather spontaneous,” I admitted to Cram, who gave me a wise look. Then on another note, I added: “We’ll have to phone Gum and tell him what happened.” He agreed, snorting like one of his bulldog forebears. “And find this one some food!” No comment. I pushed him down again, making him snort in protest, giving me a flatus that made me open the window.
As I still couldn’t get hold of Merby, I reported the incident by telephone to his acquaintance, a police officer, a political appointee, who helped himself by borrowing a spanner or two every time he visited Merby’s workshop. Captain Dubuzan was in charge of the investigations into cases of violence and murder in our province.
“Just go and make a statement and then bury them,” was all he said, “but bring me those leopard skins as proof.”
Indeed, as proof!
When I saw Tensy again a little later, I told her about this. She frowned and shook her head in confusion.
“Leopard skins are highly sought after!” I explained.
“Rather do what he says. He might ask you for your driver’s license. Where’s the cub?” she asked.
“With Mother,” I said as we went to make statements at the charge office. Then we left it all in the capable hands of Sergeant Hattawa, a trustworthy old policeman who, having acquired a great respect for Merby’s PI diving work for the police in the past, knew what he had with us. “Does your father know of this?”
“No. He was out.”
“You must come with me,” he said, indicating that he would have to visit the scene. “We’ll leave right away,” meaning we would be leaving Tensy behind this time.
They took the bodies of the two men to the mortuary.
I had a special request. “The superintendent said he wanted the skins and I should bring them to him.” When I went, the officer at the mortuary brought me the two leopard skin loin coverings in a plastic bag. I drove to the captain’s office and innocently offered him these. It was evening already. He sat there, playing drafts with one of his subordinates.
He smiled graciously and said: “No, I meant the skins of the leopards that were killed.”
“Sure, you could go there yourself to get them,” I dodged him. “By this time, the hyenas will have done their share, mind you.” His expression was negative. “I asked Officer Hattawa if he would take the skins to Headman Sh’ong, because they rightfully belonged to him.”
“No! You take them!” He was thinking of those hyenas, I guessed.
I phoned Gum and he said he’d join me. I took some farm stuff, went back, and flayed the carcasses just in time.
With his knife, Gum excised a morsel from the male leopard’s thigh. Holding it out to me at the tip of his knife, he said: “A bite?”
“Not without salt!” I objected rather disdainfully, feeling more or less like the first time I ate crayfish. No thank you, not dead leopard. But I remembered the story of how he and Merby ate raw leopard while they were still in the army and were not allowed to make a fire.
Then, as if showing me what the difference was between men and mice, he took it between his teeth and ate it with style.
That was Gum. How Grace could have married him I would never understand. She was the most delicate, prim and proper girl on earth. Maybe I was still crazy about her. “It doesn’t just go away. Ah, well, she’s too old anyway,” I said to myself while our gas lamp made its noise.
“Who?” Gum asked.
Since I was thinking out loud, I didn’t dare answer. “The leopard,” I said and Gum smiled wistfully.
“On our honeymoon,” he said, “we met a guy who wouldn’t eat leopard either, one I had killed with a knife. It wasn’t because we didn’t have salt, but because he said we had not bled it properly. But it was bled, all right. Its whole gut was cut open.”
“Did you get hurt?” Stupid question. He didn’t answer and just showed me his shoulder, where the scars bore an eternal mark of that event.
Some hyenas did turn up. They sat waiting outside the light of our torches and lamps. When we left, they went in with a flash and finished off the rest of the two leopard carcasses. I felt a touch of sadness, because these were the most beautiful creatures in the whole world.
At the entrance, as we left with our torches, Gum saw our binoculars lying in a bush, and also an old army one with a mobile cellphone still tucked in.
“My men have found the place where these two came up. They used mountaineering equipment from the mine’s side,” he said. “Two others in the gang also do rock climbing,” he went on, meaning more trouble. “Spuds had bought four complete sets of mountaineering equipment from wildlife packers months ago – for the mine. They’ve practised! Now they’re doing industrial spying.”
If only that were all. The men’s weapons, found later, gave a far deeper meaning to that intrusion. They had machine guns and some hand grenades hidden alongside two formidable Russian sables.
“This was a murder mission,” Gum said, “they were cut short by the storm.”
We had found all our stolen stuff, but at a price, since I simply had no time to study for the next day’s Biology test.
When I got hold of him at last, Merby asked me to tell him everything about what happened that afternoon. “And you went back there for the camera!” he scolded. “You could have asked me to go with you!”
“I tried to find you on your mobile, Merby! It’s just – I was worried about your camera.” He never wanted me to call him Dad, only Merby.
A light flashed in his eye. “Oh, I see. It was my camera!” Digital, expensive, and borrowing it was taboo, but at least it was safely back. He knew it had to do with my sister’s grave, and his advice was: “Okay, I agree, she’ll be buried in one of the caves, but leave it alone. Those caves are dangerous and they have tremors.”
Tall, poised and strong, he was all too unattached for a real father and it was once again the feeling I got as I looked at him sitting in his big armchair in our top lounge, reading his Time magazine. Coming from Griqualand, his main interest had been diamonds and rugby and he wasn’t going to lose his page.
Mother Andrietti stepped in: “Merby, leave Ladine’s matters to them …” She was straight, stout and very emotional, a soprano with her own, glorious background. When she sang, we knew about it; when she spoke like that, I loved her. She could have been my mother, but I doubted that too.
About a week later, with the leopard tragedy having been reported in the papers, I barged boldly into Neville Nobesy’s office on the far side of the mountain. He was in a meeting with his senior mine staff.
I threw down the newspaper in front of him.
“With my compliments, Sir!” I said, pointing to the gruesome photos I had taken of the leopards and the dead men. “Your former employees.” I turned and went out, having done exactly what Merby had told me to do.
Nobesy didn’t say a word, knowing I had him in a corner. His daughter, of course, had told everybody by then. Well, he had the proof in front of him. His men were industrial spies, and more. We knew that from one sentence on that mobile’s inbox. Tensy