They waited. Grasshoppers clicked. Heat shimmered. “What’s going to happen?” she whispered.
“The young male will die if it’s fallen flat and can’t get up,” Brandt explained. “These animals have hearts as heavy as a human head, so they can pump blood all the way up those long necks, but lying down too long will send too much blood to their brains and they’ll pass out and die. It’s why they sleep standing up.”
She swallowed, a strange desperation clawing up inside her. So much beauty in this land, even in this graceful fight. Yet it was combat. Harsh and deadly. Over a female, the right to mate. To create life.
The palette of this bushveldt—the stark reality of it, was just so in-your-face raw, life and death at its purest.
Hunt or be hunted, kill or be killed.
Just as she and Brandt were being hunted now, and could be killed.
When the fallen giraffe failed to get up, Brandt started the ignition and they began to move away. Dalilah turned in her seat, hoping. But he didn’t rise from the grass.
“You okay?” he said gently.
She bit her lip, nodded, thinking that even while on the run, Brandt had stolen a moment to stop and point those animals out to her, that he’d stayed to appreciate this world he inhabited, this Africa that she, too, loved. Curiosity about him deepened within her.
“Your name, Brandt,” she said quietly. “It comes from an Afrikaans word, doesn’t it?”
“Dutch. It means burned, or to burn.”
“Figures,” she said with a wry twist of her mouth.
He raised his brow, glanced at her.
“You were born in South Africa?”
“Yeah.” But he offered nothing more. Dalilah figured it was as much as she was going to get right now.
* * *
The early-morning sun had turned the raging floodwaters of the Tsholo River a burnished, seething chocolate color.
“There’s nothing here!” Amal snapped at his tracker. He could feel time bleeding through his fingers and he was not prepared to lose the Al Arif princess’s trail. Not when he’d gotten so close, had almost tasted his revenge.
Sweat beaded along his tracker’s brow as the man once more tried to cut for sign along the riverbank. But there was no trace of them at all along this stretch of the Tsholo. Horses whinnied and his other men shifted on their feet.
“Mbogo,” Amal yelled. “Fetch Jacob!”
Mbogo went to get the old man and pushed him in front of Amal.
“Why do you think they went north from the plane and not down here?”
“If they came by the sky,” said the old man, “then they probably have a long way to go. And now they have no more transport. If they are to go this long way on foot, they’ll need water, food, some shoes for the lady. Maybe they’ll want some more transport. From the sky the pilot would have seen a safari bush camp that lies north of here. A smart man would go to the camp first for supplies, and then try to cross the river before the flood. I think they’re on the other side already.”
Amal’s body vibrated with rage.
“Get my tracker,” he growled quietly to Mbogo through his teeth, then he turned back to Jacob. “Are you certain?”
“No, boss, but a hunter must track with his eyes and his head and his heart. This is what things are telling me.”
Amal inhaled deeply as Mbogo brought forward the tracker he’d enlisted in Zambia.
“Get on your knees,” Amal commanded as he unholstered his pistol. The man looked shocked.
“Now!”
He knelt before Amal, who pressed the nose of his gun to the man’s forehead and looked at Jacob. “This is what’ll happen to you if you mislead me.” Amal curled his finger round the trigger.
Jacob closed his eyes, turned his head away.
“Watch!” Amal yelled.
Slowly, Jacob met the Arab man’s eyes. In their depths he saw the Devil. Amal fired.
His tracker slumped forward to the ground.
“We try it your way now, Jacob. Find that pilot and the princess for me, and you’ll live.”
Not for one moment did Jacob believe this Devil would allow him to live once he’d found his prey. From the bottom of his soul, Jacob understood he had to kill this man before the man killed him. But first he would have to lead him close, very close, to what he was seeking. Then it would be Jacob’s chance.
Quietly the old man clicked his tongue for Jock to follow him and started back across the grassland toward Tautona’s airplane.
* * *
They passed through an area of tall trees where baboons swung, limb to limb in the canopy above them. The animals stopped and stared as they drove under the branches.
When they left the trees, all the birds seemed to fall mysteriously silent apart from one. Ha! Ha! HaaHaa!