Текст книги "A Time to Die"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

The men who watched his rage from afar laughed, and one of them said, "Tukutela, the Angry One."

It took Tukutela many long seasons before he at last succeeded in ripping that hateful collar from around his neck and hurling it into the top branches of a tree.

Although he recognized the sanctuary of the parks in which he now spent most of his days, Tukutela could not deny his deepest instincts, and at certain seasons of the year he became restless. The wanderlust came on him, the urge to follow once again the long migratory road his dam had first taken him over as an infant. He would be drawn to the boundary of the park by this irresistible longing and he would feed along it for days, gathering his courage until he could no longer contain himself. Then he would set out fearfully and nervously, but with high anticipation for the far-off fastnesses to the east.

Of these, the vast Zambezi swampland was his favorite. He did not recognize it as his birthplace, he only knew that here the waters seemed cooler and sweeter, the grazing more luxuriant and his sense of peace deeper than any other place in his world. This season as he crossed the Chiwewe River and headed east, the urge to return to that place seemed even greater.

He was old now, long past his seventieth year, and he was weary.

His joints ached so he walked with a stiff exaggerated gait. His old wounds pained him, especially the bullet that had driven through his bony skull and lodged beneath the skin above his right eye, It had formed a hard, encysted lump of gristle that he touched occasionally with the tip of his trunk when the pain was bad.

His craggy old head was weighed down by those huge ivory shafts; each day their burden was less supportable. Alone those tusks were a monument to his former glory. For the old bull was going back rapidly now. The sixth set of molars, the last and largest of his teeth, were all but worn away, and the starvation of age was upon him. Every day he was a little weaker, slowly his food was limited more and more to the softer, more readily masticated grasses and shoots, but he could not take enough of them.

His huge frame was gaunt and his skin hung in bags at his knees and around his neck. There was a sense of melancholy in him such as he had experienced only seldom in his life, the same feeling that had encompassed him as he waited for his dam to die beside the water hole. He did not recognize that feeling as the premonition of his own impending death.

It seemed to Tukutela that as soon as he crossed out of the park, the pursuit began. He imagined that it was more determined, more persistent than ever before. It seemed to him that the forest was full of the human creatures, following him, waiting for him at each turn, and he could not head directly eastward but must jink and twist to avoid the imaginary and real dangers that beset him.

However, when the sudden cacophony of gunfire roared out close behind him, Tukutela fled directly eastward at last, instead of doubling back toward the sanctuary of the park. It was a hundred miles and more to where the swamps began and the route was Perilous, but he could not deny the deep instinct that drove him on.

Ten hours later he stopped to bathe and drink and feed in an isolated marshy place, still a great distance from the true swamps.

This was one of the way stations on the old migratory road.

He had not been there for more than a few hours before the aircraft had rushed low overhead, filling the air with its buzzing roar, startling and angering Tukutela. In some vague way he associated this machine with the deadly danger of the hunters. It left the same foul stench on the air as the hunting vehicles he had encountered so often before, and he knew he could rest no longer in this place, the hunters were closing in.

The great swamps were his refuge, and he fled toward them.

"He won't stop now until he is into the swamps." Sean Courtney was squatting beside the spoor. "He's thoroughly alarmed, and we can't hope to catch him before he gets into them."

"How far?" Riccardo asked. Sean stood up and studied him as he replied.

"Eighty or ninety miles, Capo. Just a stroll." Riccardo wasn't looking well. There were dark sweat patches soaking through his shirt, and he seemed to have aged ten years in the last four days.

"What will we do if the old bugger keels over on us?" Sean wondered, then thrust that thought aside. "Okay, gang, we'll eat and sleep here.

Move on again at four."

He led them to the edge of the marsh, onto firm dry ground.

Fatigue and heat had dulled their appetites. They needed sleep more than food, and soon they were sprawled out in the shade like dead men.

Sean woke with the feeling that something was amiss; he sat up quickly, his hand already on the rifle, and swept a glance around to his feet. She was gone.

He strode out of the perimeter, and whistled for the sentry.

Pumula came in immediately.

"The donna," Sean demanded in Sindebele. "Where is she?"

"That way." Pumula pointed toward the river.

"You let her go?" Sean demanded.

"I thought she was going to the bush"-Pumula excused himself-"to relieve herself. I could not stop her."

Sean had already started to run down the hippo path into the him.

Sean was ten paces from the reeds that surrounded the largest and deepest of the pools, when he heard the splash of water ahead.

"This silly bitch is going to drive me crazy," he told himself as he burst out on the edge of the pool.

The pool was a hundred yards across, deep and green and still.

For all its comical appearance, the hippopotamus is the most dangerous animal in Africa. It has probably killed more human beings than all the other dangerous species put together. The old bulls are cantankerous and aggressive, a cow with a new calf will attack without provocation, and a bite from those gaping jaws whose tusks are adapted to shearing coarse river reeds will cut a man in two. The crocodile is a sly and efficient killer. This pool was the ideal haunt of both hippos and crocodiles, and Claudia Monterro was in it up to her waist.

Her wet clothing, shirt and panties and socks, all freshly washed, were draped over the reeds at the edge, and Claudia was facing away from him, leaning forward and with both hands working up a lather of soap in her hair.

The skin of her back was lightly tanned and flawless except for the pale line left by the strap of a bikini top across her shoulder blades. Her flanks were lean but elegantly shaped into the waist, and the knuckles of her spine just showed between the ridges of fine athletic muscle on each side of it.

"What the hell do you think you're doings" Sean snarled. She turned to face him, hands still in her soapy hair, eyes screwed up against the suds.

"Is this how you get your jollies?" she demanded, making not the slightest effort to cover her bosom. "You pervert, creeping and peeping?"

"Get your arse out of there before you get it bitten off by a croc." Her jibe had stung him, but even in his anger he saw that her breasts were better than he had guessed. The cold water made the points stick out at him.

"Stop gawking!" she yelled back at him. "And get lost!" She ducked her head under and then stood erect once again, soap lather streaming down her body, her hair shining and slick as a sheet of black silk over her shoulders.

"Get out of there, damn you, I'm not going to stand here arguing," he ordered.

"I'll get out when I'm good and ready."

Sean plunged straight into the pool and reached her before she could avoid him. He seized her arm, and though it was slippery with soap, he dragged her toward the bank, kicking and lashing at him with her free hand, spitting with fury.

"You bastard, I hate you! Leave me alone!"

He controlled her easily with one hand. In the other, he still held his big double-barreled rifle. His khaki shorts ran water and his velskoen boots squelched as he dragged her out. He snatched up her wet shirt and threw it at her.

"Get dressed!"

"You've got no right! I'm not going to accept this, you brutal ham-handed... you've hurt my arm." She proffered her upper arm, exhibiting his red finger marks on the skin, holding the wet shirt loosely at her side, shaking and pale with rage.

Strangely, it was her navel that drew his eyes. It stared accusingly at him from the flat plain of her midriff like a cyclopean eye, a perfect dimple at that moment more erotic than even the dense triangular bush of sodden hair beneath it. He dragged his eyes away. She was so angry she seemed totally oblivious of her nudity.

He thought she might actually attack him, and he stepped back. As he did so he looked beyond her and saw a tiny arrowhead of ripples slipping silently across the still green surface of the pool toward them. At the apex of the V-shaped ripple were two black lumps; gnarled and no bigger than a pair of large walnuts, they came at surprising speed.

Sean grabbed her arm, the same arm about whose injuries she was complaining, and jerked her back past him and away from the water's edge so viciously that she sprawled on her hands and knees in the mud.

He swung up the.577 Express rifle and aimed between the black eye lumps of the approaching crocodile. The eyes were at least nine inches apart, he calculated as he rode the pip of the foresight between them-a big old mugger.

The thunder of the rifle was stunning in the silence of the reeds and the bullet flicked an ostrich feather of spray from the surface, dead center between the eye protuberances. The crocodile rolled sluggishly onto its back, its tiny brain mangled by the shot.

Claudia scrambled to her feet and stared over his shoulder as the reptile flashed its butter-yellow saurian belly. Sixteen feet from chin to the tip of its long crested tail, its jaws clicked as its nerves spasmed from the brain shot. The fangs, as long and thick as a human forefinger, overlapped the grinning scaly lips. It sank slowly back into the pool, the creamy belly fading into the green depths.

Claudia's fury had evaporated. She was staring into the pool, shivering uncontrollably, shaking her wet hair.

"oh God, I didn't realize... how horrible." She swayed toward him, shattered and vulnerable. "I didn't know." Her body was cold from the pool, long and sleek and wet as she pressed against him.

"What is it?" Riccardo Monterro shouted from the edge of the reed bed.

"Sean, are you all right? What happened? Where's Claudia?"

At the sound of her father's voice, she jumped back from him guiltily and for the first time tried to cover her breasts and crotch.

"It's all right, Capo," Sean yelled back. "She's safe."

Claudia snatched up her panties and pulled them on hastily, hopping on one foot in the mud, turning her back to him as she picked up her shirt and thrust her arms into the sleeves. When she turned back to him, she had recovered her anger.

"I got a fright," she told him. "I didn't mean to grab you like that. Don't make any big deal out of it, buster." She zipped up the fly of her jeans and lifted her chin. "I would have grabbed the garbage man if he'd been handy."

"Okay, ducky, next time I'm going to let them bite you, lion or croc, what the hell."

"You shouldn't have any complaints," she said over her shoulder as she marched back up the path. "You got yourself a big eyeful and I noticed you made a meal of it, Colonel."

"You're right. You gave me a good peep. Not bad, a bit skinny perhaps-but not bad."

And his grin expanded as he saw the back of her neck turn angry red.

Riccardo ran down the path to meet them, frantic with worry, and he seized Claudia and hugged her with relief. "What happened, tesoro? Are you all right?"

"She tried to feed the crocs," Sean told him. "We are moving out in exactly thirty seconds from now. That shot will have alerted every ugly within ten miles."

"At least I got that filthy black muck off my face," Claudia told herself as they struck out away from the marshes. Her damp clothing felt cool and clean on her skin, and she was invigorated by her perilous bathe.

"No harm done," she thought. "Except I got ogled." Even that no longer troubled her. His eyes on her naked body had not been altogether offensive, and in retrospect there was a satisfaction in having tantalized him.

"Eat your heart out, lover boy." She watched his back as he strode out ahead of her. "That was the best you're ever likely to lay eyes on."

Within a mile her clothes had dried and she had no energy for

, any extraneous activity. The whole of her existence became the act of picking up one foot and swinging it forward after the other.

The heat was fierce and became fiercer still as they reached the rim of the escarpment of the Zambezi Valley and started down.

The air changed its character. It lay on the earth in silvery streams like water, it quivered and shimmered like curtains of crystal beads and changed the form and shape of things at a distance so that they squirmed and wriggled, doubled in size, assumed monstrous shapes in the mirage, or disappeared from view, swallowed up by the cascades of heated air.

Farther off the air was blue, so when she looked back, the escarpment down which they were climbing was washed with pale blue, misty and ethereal. The sky was a different blue, deep and vigorous, and the clouds stood on the firmament in towering ranges the colors of lead and silver, their bottoms cut cleanly horizontal to the earth, their heads shaped like full-rigged ships, mainsail and topsail, royal and skysail piled up into the heavens. Under the cloud ranges the air was trapped and lay upon the earth so it felt as heavy as hot syrup. They trudged along beneath its weight.

From the forest around them the minute black mo pane flies came swarming and gathered at the corners of their eyes and mouths, crawled up into their nostrils and into their ears to drink the moisture from their bodies. Their insistence was an exquisite torture.

As each long mile fell behind them, so vistas of the valley floor opened ahead. On the horizon they could at last make out the dark belt of riverine vegetation that marked the course of the great Zambezi. Always Matatu danced along ahead of them like a wraith, following a trail that no other eye than his could discern, tireless and unaffected by the heat, so that Sean had to call him back for the regular periods of rest with which he interrupted the march.

"There is no sign of game," Riccardo remarked, peering ahead through his binoculars. "We haven't seen so much as a rabbit since we crossed into Mozambique."

it was the first time he had spoken in hours, and Sean was encouraged. He had begun seriously worrying about his client.

Now he responded quickly.

"This was once a paradise of big game. I hunted here before the Portuguese pulled out and the buffalo were running in herds ten thousand strong."

"What happened to them?"

"Frelimo fed the army with them. They even offered me the contract for the slaughter. They couldn't understand why I refused. In the end they did it themselves."

"How did they do it?"

"From helicopters. They flew low over the herds and machine gunned them. They killed almost fifty thousand buffalo in three months. For all that time the sky was black with vultures and you could smell the killing fields from twenty miles off. When the buffalo were finished they started on the other game, the wildebeest and the zebra."

"What a cruel and savage land this is," Claudia said quietly.

"Surely you don't disapprove?" Sean asked. "It was done by black men, not whites. It couldn't possibly be wrong." He glanced at his Rolex wristwatch. "Time to move on."

He put out his hand to help Riccardo to his feet, but the older man shrugged the hand away. Nevertheless, Sean fell in beside him as the march resumed and let Claudia move up directly behind Matatu, while he chatted quietly to her father, jollying him along, trying to distract him from his weariness.

He recounted anecdotes from the bush war. He pointed out the site of the guerrilla training camp as they passed a few miles north of it and described the raid by the Ballantyne Scouts.

Riccardo was interested enough to ask questions. "This Comrade China sounds like a good field commander," he commented.

"Did you ever find out what happened to him after he escapedT"

"He was active right up to the end of the war. A tough cookie, all right. His men had to backpack all their munitions into Rhodesia, and a Russian T-5 antitank land mine weighs almost seventy pounds. The story goes that Comrade China brought in one of them at enormous cost in sweat and blood and laid it on the main Mount Darwin road for one of our regular armored patrols.

However, the local blacks had hired a bus that same weekend to go into town to watch the football match, and they touched off the land mine. There were sixty-five of them on the bus and twenty-three of them survived the explosion. Comrade China was so incensed by the waste of his precious T-5 that he sent for all the next of kin of the victims and the survivors who were still able to walk and fined them each ten dollars to cover the cost of another land mine."

Riccardo stopped and doubled over with laughter. Claudia turned on them furiously. "How can you laugh? That's the most outrageous story I've ever heard."

"Oh, I don't know," Sean replied evenly. "I don't think ten dollars was so outrageous. I think old China was being fairly lenient."

She tossed her head and lengthened her stride to catch up with Matatu, and Riccardo still chuckling, asked, "After the war, what happened to this character?"

Sean shrugged. "He was in the new government in Harare for a while, but then he disappeared in one of the political purges. He might have been liquidated.. the old revolutionaries are always looked on with distrust when the regime they fought for comes to power. Nobody likes sharing a bed with a trained killer and toppler of other rulers."

Sean called a halt an hour before dark for a brew of tea and their frugal evening meal. While Job cooked it over his small smokeless fire, Sean took Matatu aside and talked to him quietly. The tracker watched Sean's face as he spoke, nodding eagerly, and as soon as he finished Matatu slipped away, heading back the way they had come.

Riccardo looked a question as Sean came back to join them and he explained.

"I sent Matatu to backtrack us. Make sure we aren't being followed. I'm worried about that shot. It could have called up those uglies we found near the border."

Riccardo nodded. Then he asked, "Have you got a couple of aspirin, Sean?"

Sean opened the side flap of his pack and shook three tablets from their bottle.

"Headache?" he asked as he passed them to Riccardo, who nodded as he popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of hot tea.

"The dust and sun glare," he explained. But both Sean and Claudia were studying him and he bridled. "Damn it, don't look at me like that. I'm fine."

"Sure," Sean agreed smoothly. "Let's eat and move on to find a place to sleep." He went across to the cooking fire and squatted beside Job.

They talked softly.

"Papa," Claudia moved a little closer to her father and touched his arm. "How are you feeling, honestly?"

Don't worry about me, tesoro.

"it has started, hasn't it?"

"No," he replied, too swiftly.

Doc Andrews said there might be headaches."

"It's the sun."

"I love you, Papa," she said.

"I know, baby, and I love you too."

"An ocean and a mountain?" she asked.

"The stars and the moon," he confirmed, putting his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him.

As soon as they had eaten, Job doused the fire and Sean got them up and moving again. Tukutela's spoor was easy to follow in the soft earth, and he and Job had no need of Matatu for this stage.

However, at dark they were forced to stop for the night.

"We'll reach the swamps tomorrow afternoon," Sean promised Riccardo as they stretched out on top of their sleeping bags.

Claudia lay awake worrying about her father long after the others were asleep. Riccardo snored softly, lying on his back with his arms extended like a crucifix. When she raised herself on one elbow to look at him in the starlight, she heard Sean's light breathing alter subtly and sensed he had been awakened by her movement, He slept as lightly as a cat; sometimes he frightened her, But even her concern for her father was at last overcome and she fell into that dark, drugged sleep of exhaustion. Waking was like coming back from a faraway place.

"Wake up, come on, wake up." Sean was slapping her face lightly, and she pushed his hand away and sat up groggily.

"What?" she mumbled. "God, it's still dark."

He had left her and gone to her father. "Come on, Capo, wake UP, man, wake UP. "What the hell, what is it?" Riccardo's voice was slurred and grumpy.

"Matatu has just come into camp," Sean told them quietly. "We are being followed."

Claudia felt the icy wind of dread blow across her skin. "Followed? By whom?"

"We don't know," Sean said.

"The same bunch that was camped at the border?" Riccardo asked. His voice was still slurred.

"Possibly," Sean said.

"What are you going to do?" Claudia asked, annoyed that her tone sounded afraid and confused.

"We are going to give them the slip," Sean said. "Get up on your hind legs."

They had slept with their boots on. They had simply to roll their sleeping bags and they were ready to move out.

"Matatu is going to lead you away and cover your spoor," Sean explained. "Job and I are going to lay a false trail for them in the original direction. As soon as it's light we'll break away and circle back to join you."

"You aren't going to leave us alone?" Claudia blurted out fearfully, then bit it off.

"No, you won't be alone. Matatu and Pumula and Dedan will be with you," Sean told her disdainfully.

"What about the elephant?" Riccardo demanded. His voice had firmed. "Are you breaking off the hunt? You going to let my elephant get away?"

"For a few lousy gooks armed with a couple of lousy AK-47s?"

Sean chuckled. "Don't be ridiculous, Capo. We will shake them off and be after Tukutela again before you know it."

Sean and Job waited while Matatu assembled his group and then shepherded them away. By now Riccardo and Claudia had learned the basics of anti tracking and went swiftly under Matatu's direction while the tracker brushed and covered the signs behind them.

Once they were clear, Sean and Job trampled the area around the camp, back and forth and around in circles, until they had confused any remaining spoor. Then they fell into single file, Sean leading, and went away at a run. They did not make it too apparent that they were laying a false trail but adopted all the usual precautions, which would not fool a good tracker.

It was the old Scout pursuit pace Sean set, seven miles an hour, and gradually he began to veer off in a southerly direction. Matatu was heading northward toward the river, and Sean would lead the pursuit directly away from them.

While he ran, Sean puzzled over the identity of his pursuers government soldiers or rebels, poachers or simply armed bandits looking for plunder, it was impossible to guess. However, Matatu had been worried when he came into camp.

"They are good, Bwana, " he had told Sean. "They have done well to follow the spoor we left, and they are coming on fast. They move in formation like bush fighters, with flankers out."

"Didn't you get a good look?" Sean had asked.

little Ndorobo ha4 shook his head. "It was getting dark and I wanted to get back to, warn you. They were closing in swiftly."

"Even the best tracker won't be able to follow us in darkness.

We've got the rest of the night to get clear of them."

It was a strange reversal of roles, Sean thought grimly as he and Job trotted through the dark bush. They, the hunters, were now being hunted just as remorselessly.

At first he had considered breaking off the chase after the elephant and doubling back for the border. Riccardo Monterro's condition was causing him real concern, and so was Matatu's warning that their pursuers were skilled and appeared dangerous.

However, he had swiftly rejected the idea; they were beyond the point of no return.

"No turning back," Sean said aloud and grinned as he admitted to himself the true reasons for his determination, two ivory tusks and half a million dollars in cash, By now he was honestly not certain which of those was the most compelling. The tusks were beginning to loom large in his imagination. They represented the old Africa, a symbol of a better world that had vanished. He wanted them more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, except perhaps half a million dollars. He grinned again.

In the first light of dawn they were running directly southward, k and they had covered twenty miles since splitting off from the rest of the party.

"Time to disappear, Job," he grunted without breaking stride.

There must be no indication to the trackers following them that they were about to split again.

"Good place just ahead," Job agreed. He was running exactly in Sean's footprints.

"Do it," Sean said, and as they ran under the low branches of a grevia tree Job reached up and swung himself off the ground.

Sean did not look back, did not alter his stride. Job would work himself through the branches of the closely growing grevia. until he found a good place to drop off and anti track away.

Sean ran on for twenty minutes, once again curving away into the southwest, heading for a low ridge that just showed in the dawn ahead of him. He crossed the ridge and as he had anticipated from the lie of the terrain found a small river in the valley beyond. He drank at the edge of the pool and milled around, splashing water onto the bank as though he were bathing.

A tracker would expect him to choose this as a breakaway point, wading either upstream or downstream before leaving the river again. They would send scouts along both banks to search for SIP.

Sean waded downstream, supporting himself on overhanging branches to give them a trail to confirm their suspicions. Then, without leaving the water, he returned to the exact spot where he had entered the stream and on the bank carefully dried his feet and legs, replaced his dry velskoen shoes that he had hung around his neck on their laces, and backtracked on his incoming spoor.

He retraced his footsteps to the crest of the ridge, walking backward, stepping precisely on his original footprints. At the top of the ridge he employed the same trick Job had. He swung himself into the air from a branch and over handed himself well clear of the spoor before lowering himself to the edge of a rock slab and anti tracking away.

"Even Matatu wouldn't be able to unravel that," he thought with satisfaction as he struck off back toward the north at a run.

Two hours later he joined up with Job at the rendezvous, and in the early afternoon they came up with the other party waiting for them five miles north of the point where they had split up.

"Good to see you, Sean. We were beginning to worry," Riccardo told him as they shook hands. Even Claudia smiled as Sean flopped down beside her and said, "My kingdom for a cup of tea."

As he sipped at the mug Matatu brought him, he listened attentively to the little tracker. Matatu squatted beside Sean and chattered in his excited falsetto.

"Matatu went back and kept an eye on the camp we left," Sean translated for Riccardo and Claudia's benefit. "He didn't dare approach too closely, but he saw the gang that was following us arrive This time he counted twelve of them. They searched the area of the camp, then took the bait and followed the false trail Job and I laid for them."

"So we're clear, then?" Riccardo asked.

"Looks like it," Sean agreed. "And if we push along we should be able to reach the beginning of the swamps either this evening or early tomorrow."

"What about Tukutela?" Riccardo asked.

"Well, we know from his track approximately where he would have reached the swamps. We'll just cast along the edge until we find where he went in, but we've lost a lot of ground on him. We'll have to go hard if we don't want him to get away from us. Do you feel up to it, Capo?"

"Never better," Riccardo said. "Lead on, man."

Before they set off again Sean went quickly over their packs.

They had consumed a great deal of the provisions, and he redistributed the remainder. By giving both Job and himself an extra ten pounds or so, he was able to reduce Riccardo's pack to twenty pounds and Claudia's to a mere ten, just her sleeping bag and personal items.

They both responded well to their reduced burdens, but again Sean marched beside Riccardo to encourage him and watch over him. Claudia was still going surprisingly well; he needn't have worried about her at all. Under her light pack she was stepping out lithely. He took pleasure in watching her long legs driving and her hard little buttocks oscillating in those tight blue jeans. They reminded him of the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.

They were on the valley floor now. There were open vleis and baobabs, those trees with bloated trunks, bark like a reptile's skin, and crooked bare branches from which a few late cream-of-tartar pods still hung. It was easy to see why the Zulus said the gods had accidentally planted the baobab upside down with its roots in the air.

Far ahead of them a slow standing cloud of evaporation marked the position of the swamps, and the alluvial soil was sandy and yielding underfoot.

"Just think of this, Capo." Sean was trying to divert him. "You are probably one of the last men who will ever hunt a great elephant in the classical tradition of the long chase. This is the way it should be done, man. Not grinding around in a Land-Rover and then leaning out of the window to kill him. This is how Selous and "Karamojo" Bell and Samaki" Salmon hunted their elephant."

He saw Riccardo's expression light up at the idea of being compared to those grand masters of the chase, men from another age when all elephants had been fair game. "Samaki" Sahnon had hunted and killed four thousand elephants in his lifetime. There had been a different morality in those days. Today a man with a bag of those dimensions would be accounted a villain and a criminal, but in his day "Samaki" Salmon had been respected and honored. He had even hunted with Edward, Prince of Wales, as his client.