Free Sunset at Sheba by John Harris Page A

see things because I’m looking for ‘em. They’re scattered now. They’re always like that till the sun gets up. You can see their heads out of the mist if you look careful.’
    He was glancing round him, moving slowly and deliberately in the saddle.
    ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Come on down when you hear me shoot.’
    ‘Will that mean you’ve got one?’
    ‘Usually does. I don’t miss often. You can get down in the valley with the cart, but keep upwind of ‘em, if you can. Then if they whiff you they’ll scatter towards me. Give me a chance to get across the other side first though. That’s all.’
    For a moment, as he sat with one leg cocked over the saddle he seemed almost statuesque on the little knoll, sharp against the brightening sky, then he kicked the horse into a gallop and a bunched flock of guinea-fowl in the distance, black-barred and grey, and squat and round as barrels, scattered quickly along the edge of the dusty track, moving like shining beads of lead, ‘chinking’ excitedly as their turkey heads disappeared into the stubby grass.
    He had been gone some time and she was feeling incredibly alone when at last she caught a glimpse of a group of animals at the far side of the valley above the milkiness of the mist, moving rapidly along the sloping bowl of the land. With a spasm of excitement she. knew at once they were springbok from the speed with which they moved. With their bright lithe bodies they seemed like a stream of water rippling in the growing daylight, almost as though their bodies reflected the glowing sky.
    For a moment, she was puzzled, for these couldn’t have been the herd that Sammy had seen, and she moved slowly farther into the valley, among the ghostly tops of the thorn trees. Her first glimpse of the nearer buck was of one or two dim ghostly shapes suspended against an invisible background, bodies without legs, heads without bodies. She had stumbled on them unexpectedly and she halted the cart, not quite sure what to do, and while she was still debating with herself, two shots rang out on her right.
    Twenty or thirty horned heads shot up immediately out of the mist where before she had only seen two or three. Then they began to move towards her and she saw the whole herd as the mist shifted. Like drops of bright water flung against a stone they broke apart abruptly at the alarm, then they swung together again like metal filings under the influence of a magnet. They were racing across the veld now in a straight line diagonally across her front and disappearing behind the fold of the next slope. Excitedly, she realised they would cross her path, and the next second the buck, sweeping up the slope in a strung-out cloud, rolled over the curve of the hill towards her, swinging past her almost as though they were all attached to the same string.
    Then they were spraying outwards round her, a whirlpool of racing animals in a cloud of dust to right and left of her, in full flight, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, springing and jinking as they passed her at top speed, giving little sneezy snorts as they leapt over each other in graceful nine-foot curves in their efforts to escape. She found herself screaming with excitement as the brown and black and white striped bodies shot past her, and almost too late she remembered the shotgun. Dragging it out of the cart, she blasted into the tail-end of the herd as it swept past, and to her delight, a big ram stumbled and fell.
    Before she knew what was happening, the rest had swept on up the slope, the sound of their feet dying through the drifting dust, bright shifting motes now where they had once been animals, disappearing over the top of the slope where the sun was already touching the curve of the earth, only tiny stirrings of movement, more like changes of light than the manoeuvres of a herd of antelope swinging out of danger and melting into the far pathway of the horizon.
    She laughed, her heart still thumping with excitement,