The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Read Online Free Page B

this moment in an Italian restaurant
in Greenwich Village.
    He turned the photograph with a suppressed violence. Beneath it was a view into the trumpet-shaped throat of the magnificent maroon and gold bloom of kigelia Africana , Craig’s
favourite wild flower. In the lustrous depths of the flower nestled a tiny beetle like a precious emerald, shiny iridescent green. It was a perfect arrangement of shape and colour, and he found he
hated her for it.
    There were many others. One of a grinning lout of a militia man with an AK 47 rifle on his shoulder and a necklace of cured human ears around his neck, a caricature of savagery and arrogance;
another of a wrinkled witchdoctor hung with horns and beads and skulls and all the grisly accoutrements of his trade, his patient stretched out on the bare, dusty earth before him in the process of
being crudely cupped, her blood making shiny dark serpents across her dark skin. The patient was a woman in her prime with patterns of tattoos on her breasts and cheeks and forehead. Her teeth were
filed to points like those of a shark, a relic of the days of cannibalism, and her eyes, like those of a suffering animal, seemed filled with all the stoicism and patience of Africa.
    Then there was another contrasting photograph of African children in a school-room of poles and rude thatch. They shared a single reader between three of them, but all their hands were raised
eagerly to the young black teacher’s questions and all their faces lit by the burning desire for knowledge – it was all there, a complete record of hope and despair, of abject poverty
and great riches, of savagery and tenderness, of unrelenting elements and bursting fruitfulness, of pain and gentle humour. Craig could not bring himself to look at her again and he turned the
stiff glossy sheets slowly, savouring each image and delaying the moment when he must face her.
    Craig stopped suddenly, struck by a particularly poignant composition, an orchard of bleached bones. She had used black and white to heighten the dramatic effect, and the bones shone in the
brilliant African sunlight, acres of bones, great femur and tibia bleached like driftwood, huge rib-cages like the frames of stranded ocean clippers, and skulls the size of beer barrels with dark
caves for eye-sockets. Craig thought of the legendary elephant’s graveyard, the old hunters’ myth of the secret place where the elephants go to die.
    ‘Poachers,’ she said. ‘Two hundred and eighty-six carcasses,’ and now Craig looked up at her at last, startled by the number.
    ‘At one time?’ he asked, and she nodded.
    ‘They drove them into one of the old minefields.’
    Involuntarily, Craig shuddered and looked down at the photograph again. Under the table-top his right hand ran down his thigh until he felt the neat strap that held his leg, and he experienced a
choking empathy for the fate of those great pachyderms. He remembered his own minefield, and felt again the slamming impact of the explosion into his foot, as though he had been hit by the full
swing of a sledgehammer.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I know about your leg.’
    ‘She does her homework,’ Ashe said.
    ‘Shut up,’ Craig thought furiously. ‘Why don’t you both shut up.’ He hated anyone to mention the leg. If she had truly done her homework, she would have known that
– but it was not only mention of the leg, it was the elephants also. Once Craig had worked as a ranger in the game department. He knew them, had come to love them, and the evidence of this
slaughter sickened and appalled him. It increased his resentment of the girl; she had inflicted this upon him and he wanted to revenge himself; a childish urge to retaliate. But before he could do
it, the late guest arrived, diverting them into a round of Ashe’s introductions.
    ‘Craig, I want you to meet a special sort of guy.’ All of Ashe’s introductions came with a built-in commercial. ‘This is Henry