as we left with our torches, Gum saw our binoculars lying in a bush, and also an old army one with a mobile cellphone still tucked in.
“My men have found the place where these two came up. They used mountaineering equipment from the mine’s side,” he said. “Two others in the gang also do rock climbing,” he went on, meaning more trouble. “Spuds had bought four complete sets of mountaineering equipment from wildlife packers months ago – for the mine. They’ve practised! Now they’re doing industrial spying.”
If only that were all. The men’s weapons, found later, gave a far deeper meaning to that intrusion. They had machine guns and some hand grenades hidden alongside two formidable Russian sables.
“This was a murder mission,” Gum said, “they were cut short by the storm.”
We had found all our stolen stuff, but at a price, since I simply had no time to study for the next day’s Biology test.
When I got hold of him at last, Merby asked me to tell him everything about what happened that afternoon. “And you went back there for the camera!” he scolded. “You could have asked me to go with you!”
“I tried to find you on your mobile, Merby! It’s just – I was worried about your camera.” He never wanted me to call him Dad, only Merby.
A light flashed in his eye. “Oh, I see. It was my camera!” Digital, expensive, and borrowing it was taboo, but at least it was safely back. He knew it had to do with my sister’s grave, and his advice was: “Okay, I agree, she’ll be buried in one of the caves, but leave it alone. Those caves are dangerous and they have tremors.”
Tall, poised and strong, he was all too unattached for a real father and it was once again the feeling I got as I looked at him sitting in his big armchair in our top lounge, reading his Time magazine. Coming from Griqualand, his main interest had been diamonds and rugby and he wasn’t going to lose his page.
Mother Andrietti stepped in: “Merby, leave Ladine’s matters to them …” She was straight, stout and very emotional, a soprano with her own, glorious background. When she sang, we knew about it; when she spoke like that, I loved her. She could have been my mother, but I doubted that too.
About a week later, with the leopard tragedy having been reported in the papers, I barged boldly into Neville Nobesy’s office on the far side of the mountain. He was in a meeting with his senior mine staff.
I threw down the newspaper in front of him.
“With my compliments, Sir!” I said, pointing to the gruesome photos I had taken of the leopards and the dead men. “Your former employees.” I turned and went out, having done exactly what Merby had told me to do.
Nobesy didn’t say a word, knowing I had him in a corner. His daughter, of course, had told everybody by then. Well, he had the proof in front of him. His men were industrial spies, and more. We knew that from one sentence on that mobile’s inbox. Tensy was right, but so were my deeper suspicions. We were small fry only to be scared off. Needing to please their boss, they pounced on our guns to try and hide their true mission. Taking the short cut through that thicket was their downfall.
“My men will know now where to wait for the other two,” was Gum’s final summary.
Something like a nutritional disaster did occur a day after the episode with the leopards.
“It’s like trying to fit a thirty-six tyre on a fourteen rim!” Merby stood looking at the spectacle, giving voice to his way of defining a leopard cub’s mouth and a cat mother’s teat.
The cat mother was Stella.
“She’s the biggest cat in the world,” reminded Mother. “I’ll give the kittens away! I’ve already got a home for one of them.”
Kittens were plentiful.
“The biggest ever house cat weighed twenty-eight pounds, and Stella weighs only eighteen. Check the Internet!” I argued, trying to impress Tensy, who came to collect their kitten sooner than planned, considering the crisis caused by the arrival of the leopard cub.
“You said we could have the little grey one,” she reminded Mother. “How much do you want for her?”
“Let’s wait another fortnight,” Mother said, surprising us all. The new big baby was draining every drop of Stella’s milk and the kittens were getting too little.
“This darling thing,” Merby said, pointing to the cub lying on a rug, sucking desperately on her only supply of food, “will have her new mother for breakfast within a month! We’ll have to get something bigger.”
“I know!” When Mother handled something it always worked, except for singing Verdi at two in the morning simply because she couldn’t sleep. She had been Gum’s tutor when he stayed with us and no cat ever came near them.
“This monster will be Stella’s end!” Merby said again, watching the cub.
“Her name is Shuna!” I said rather protectively. And that was it.
That is where Mother took over. “One day is all I need.” First, she telephoned the chief veterinarian at the nearest game reserve to get his opinion, which was: “It is very difficult.”
She also tried the National Nutrition Institute. Then she telephoned all the neighbours who might have lactating bitches, preferably big ones, but there were none at that point. While falling around, she came upon an unexpected foster-mother idea and it was not a cat she had in mind.
To explain, let me start at our regional fair a few months before and the most exciting race I ever saw.
Milky
Whenever Merby and I complained about her singing, Mother usually went out to the piggery, where there was “… a better appreciation for good music than in this house”, intentionally insulting us.
To get back at her, I had been hoping that some of the youngsters in there would start screaming along with her singing, but pigs are not dogs. They just slept and slept and slept and said “Oink” for food when she stopped.
Now, who ever thought that the Australians invented pig races? The real name is Praces, and so this is where Milky came in.
By way of introduction, a description appeared in a newspaper. (I’m sure they copied it from Mother’s diary, or maybe she submitted something):
A roar goes up from the crowd as the little pigs take the last bend before the end of the race.
The punters are mostly farmers from the district and some townspeople from Loponga. Tribal warriors come here specially to get hold of a piggy as cheaply as possible. Apart from the race, every loser is a future dish of pork. Those coming in last fetch the poorest prices at a rather unprofessional auction, where every contestant wears a band halfway around the neck saying in which position it ended. Ten races occur before 12h00, and then all the winners go into the final. Of course, there are many more losers than winners and this means that everybody can have some delicious dining to look forward to.
In this day’s final, three contestants were way ahead of the others.
“Come
