The Leopard Hunts in Darkness [antikvár]

This small wind had travelled a thousand miles and more, up from the great wastes of the Kalahari Desert which the little yellow Bushmen call 'the Big Dry'. Now when it reached the escarpment of the Zambezi valley, it broke up into eddies and backlashes amongst the hills and the broken ground of the rim. The bull elephant stood just below the crest of one of the hills, much too canny to silhouette himself on the skyline. His bulk was screened by the new growth of leaves on the msasa trees, and he blended with the grey rock of the slope behind him. He reached up twenty feet and sucked the air into his wide, hair-rimmed nostrils, and then he rolled his trunk down and delicately blew into his own gaping, mouth. The two olfactory organs in the overhang of his upper lip flared open like pink rosebuds, and he tasted the air. He tasted the fine peppery dust of the far deserts, the sweet pollens of a hundred wild plants, the warm bovine stench of the buffalo herd in the valley below, the cool tang of the water pool at which they were drinking and wallowing; these and other scents he identified, and accurately he judged the proximity of the source of each odour. However, these were not the scents for which he was searching. What he sought was the other acrid offensive smell which overlaid all the others. The smell of native tobacco smoke mingled with the peculiar musk of the flesh-eater, rancid sweat in unwashed wool, of paraffin and carbolic soap and cured leather - the scent of man; it was there, as strong and close as it had been in all the long days since the chase had begun. Once again the old bull felt the atavistic rage rising inside him. Countless generations of his kind had been pursued by that odour. Since a calf he had learned to hate and fear it, almost all his life he had been driven by it. Once recently there had been a hiatus in the lifelong pursuit and flight. For eleven years there had been surcease, a time of quiet for the herds along the Zambezi. The bull could not know nor understand the reason, that there had been bitter civil war amongst his tormentors, war that had turned these vast areas along the south bank of the Zambezi into an undefended buffer zone, too