Free Zambezi by Tony Park Page B

riverbank, on the sand.
    The people in the village knew about old Mashumba and his brother. They told stories about the two old men of the bush and how they now lived as bachelors. The children of the village knew to stay clear of them, not to wander too far down the river, past the bend, into the area that was their home.
    Occasionally he would roam down the road, close to the village, but the women and the children stayed inside, or close to their green-painted houses inside the compound, when Mashumba was about, because since his wives had left him he had become a danger to them. The first occasion Mashumba had been tempted by a young woman from the village had taught him a lot. She had been walking to her work in the National Parks compound and he had seen her, across the floodplain, near the firewood stacks. She had screamed and Mashumba, realising he had been spotted, had run off into the bushes. Some of the men from the village had come looking for him, but he had hidden up in some reeds and watched and waited until night had fallen and the rattling, smoke-belching Land Rovers had gone. He had returned to his part of the valley, where he still reigned supreme, but he had remembered the sight of the woman. How easy it would have been to have her; how defenceless she had been.
    The second one had been different. He had stalked her, carefully, through the bush, and watched her movements for a full day The next day he had waited for her, lying in the shadows of a big Natal mahogany tree. She had almost walked right up to him. She had been fair-skinned, not like the village women, but colour meant nothing to him. A white woman was as good as a black one as far as he was concerned. He felt no guilt about it at all, for the hunt and the capture came naturally. It was a necessity, since his wives had left him. It had been satisfying enough but, in a strange way, also mildly disappointing. It had been so easy to overpower her; there had been no great skill needed to catch the woman, no thrill of the hunt, no intense physical exertion.
    The men had come looking for him again, as he knew they would, but he had melted further into the bush, and then cut back down to the river. He had continued to lie low, away from the roads, for many more days and, eventually, they had stopped looking for him.
    And here was another one, down by the river. He felt the old desires coming back.
    Precious Mpofu carried a fishing rod over her shoulder and a plastic bag full of tigerfish in her hand.
    The prize catch of the Zambezi River, so named because of the yellow and black stripes down his shiny flank, was as good to eat as he was hard to catch. Precious and her family would eat well that night. Two tigers, maybe six kilos all up, and a couple of chessa as well.
    It would have been safer to walk back along the riverbank, she had strayed too far as it was, but the afternoon sun was setting fast and the dirt road provided a quicker, more direct route back to the village. Precious decided the sooner she got the fish on the fire, the happier her ranger husband and two hungry children would be.
    Precious had finished her morning’s work cleaning the big two-storey lodge she looked after. She had swept the floors, emptied the garbage bins into the incinerator and made the beds. The warden had said a new guest was arriving that day – a woman, by herself. The woman was from America, like the young one, Miranda, who had been killed by the lion. Precious liked Americans because they tipped in US dollars, although she had never received a cent from Miranda – one of the other maids washed and ironed her clothes and washed up her dirty dishes. Precious and the other maids were jealous of their colleague, whose name was Violet. Precious was sad that Miranda was gone – she was a nice person, even if she didn’t share the work around. However, Precious was not sad that Violet had gone. No one knew where she was, but everyone presumed she had hitchhiked