‘And now, my fine-feathered friend, it’s time to come back down to earth. For you the fun is over. You’ve work to do. First, you must see to the horses and make sure they’re taken back safely to Nairobi. Then you will gather up the trophies we left at the camps along the way. Make sure they’re well dried and salted, pack them up and get them to the railway at Kapiti Plains. They have to be shipped to the Smithsonian in America as soon as possible, yesterday for preference. You must service all the equipment and the vehicles, including all five ox-wagons and the two trucks. Everything has been on the road for the better part of a year, and some of it is in ruinous condition. Then you must get it back to Tandala Camp so that it can be made ready for our next clients. I’ve several booked and then there’s Lord Eastmont – it’s two years since he arranged his safari with me. Of course, you’ll have Hennie du Rand to help you, but even so it’ll keep you out of mischief for quite a while. Not much time for the Nairobi ladies, I’m afraid.’
Percy winked at him. ‘As for me, I’m going to leave you to it. I’m heading back to Nairobi. My old buffalo leg is hurting like blue blazes and Doc Thompson’s the only man who can fix it.’
Several months later Leon drove one of the trucks with assorted kit into Tandala, followed closely by the second with Hennie du Rand at the wheel. Since dawn that day they had come almost two hundred miles over rutted and dusty roads. Leon switched off the engine, which stuttered to a halt. He climbed down stiffly from the driver’s seat, took off his hat and slapped it against his leg, then coughed in the resulting cloud of talcum-fine dust.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Percy came out of his tent. ‘I’d just about given you up for dead. I want to speak to you, sharpish.’
‘Where’s the fire?’ Leon asked. ‘I’ve been driving since three this morning. I need a bath and a shave before I utter another word, and I’m in no mood to take bullshit from anyone, not even you, Percy.’
‘Whoa now!’ Percy grinned. ‘You have your bath. You sure as hell need it. Then I’d like a few minutes of your precious time.’
An hour later Leon came into the mess tent, where Percy was sitting at the long table with his wire-rimmed reading glasses on the end of his nose. On the table in front of him was a pile of unanswered letters, accounts, cash books and other documents. His writing fingers were black with ink.
‘I’m sorry, Percy. I shouldn’t have gone for you like that.’ Leon was contrite.
‘Think nothing of it.’ Percy replaced his pen in the inkwell and waved him to the chair on the opposite side of the table. ‘Famous man like you has the right to be uppity sometimes.’
‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.’ Leon bridled again. ‘All I am around here is a famous dogsbody.’
‘Here!’ Percy pushed a pile of newsprint across the table. ‘You’d better read these. Give your sagging morale a boost.’
Mystified at first, Leon began to make his way through the sheaf. He found that the clippings had been taken from dozens of newspapers and magazines from across North America and Europe, publications as diverse as the
The next featured Leon holding a pair of long, curved elephant tusks so that they formed an archway high above his head, the caption beneath it declaring, ‘The greatest hunter in Africa with a pair of record elephant tusks’. Other articles pictured Leon aiming a rifle at an imaginary beast out of frame, or galloping a horse across the savannah among herds of wild game, always rakish and debonair. There were hundreds of column inches of text. Leon counted forty-seven separate articles. The last was headlined, ‘The man who saved my life. Did you not find that a lot more invigorating than eighteen holes of golf? Byline Andrew Fagan, Senior Contributing Editor, American Associated Press.’
