Endangered Page 4

  He remained silent, adjusting his sunglasses.

  “You needn’t concern yourself about my making a mistake,” she went on. “I’m old enough to make my own.”

  “Some mistakes are forever.”

  “Yes …” She settled back uneasily. “I know how I’m going to invest the rest of my life, and I won’t be wasting it chasing empty dreams or letting anyone decide to be the manager of my destiny. I’ve come back, like you, because I belong here. I’ve come to work with Vince and my father at Samburu.”

  From the corner of her eye she saw his head turn and felt his gaze studying her, so she folded her arms and stared straight ahead as though confident of tomorrow. She had been—until an hour ago.

  “Did you say Dr. Adler wants to work with your father researching the elephants at Samburu?”

  She wondered at the intensity of his question and looked at him. “Yes. Why?”

  He looked back to the road, thoughtfully.

  “Why do you ask?” she repeated when he remained silent.

  “What if I told you Vince is working with Toronto colleagues at Lake Rudolf? Would you reconsider going to Samburu?”

  Vince working at Rudolf? “What would he be doing there?”

  “Maybe he’s supporting an evolutionary cause.”

  “You mean looking for fossils? Impossible …” she began, then paused. “Anyway, my reason for going to Samburu is to help my father do research and to show the JESUS film. It’s a personal goal, but I expect to work it into my schedule.” She folded her arms. “Nothing can convince me to change my mind. As you said back at the lake—we know this land, the animals, the tribes. We love it, and we belong to it, like the Maasai.”

  He smiled. She looked away, assuming his smile was over amused pleasure in her dedication to the land, which they shared too deeply. She hastened, “Even if Vince wasn’t born here, he cares about the animals.”

  “Trying to convince me or yourself? He doesn’t understand Kenya—he never did. He was an evolutionary fanatic searching for fossils with a Dr. Willard at Rudolf, and he’s added some New Age religious philosophy.”

  “That’s absurd, Kash! He’s never even mentioned Lake Rudolf. He’s a conservationist to the core, and I told you, he’s a Christian.”

  “Is he? He claims to be, but he’s using the term very loosely. And as for the animals, Skyler would die to protect the elephants, but Vince—” He stopped, as though he had said too much.

  She realized that Kash sounded anything but the callous young native gone bad—and the leader of an elusive poaching outfit. She studied the side of his face curiously. There was no mistaking the fervency in his voice about protecting the elephants, and it contradicted everything he outwardly represented. “I don’t understand you,” she began quietly.

  Kash stepped on the accelerator. “Vince hired Dr. Katherine Walsh to work with him at Rudolf.”

  A woman? Who was Katherine Walsh?

  A hundred questions rushed to her mind, but she avoided them all, for Kash couldn’t be right. He was mistaken…or was he trying to plant doubts about Vince in her heart? Whatever the reason for his wanting to do so remained hidden, but she would eventually find out.

  “How do you know all this?” she asked. “When were you in Samburu? When did you see my father or even know about what’s happening there or at Rudolf?”

  “I can’t explain now, but Vince is here.”

  “I know that. He called me in Toronto two weeks ago.”

  “Did he know then that you were going to try to show the JESUS film to the Maasai?”

  “No,” she admitted reluctantly.

  “Vince will ask you to go with him to Samburu, to bring him to meet your father, but I’m asking you not to go.”

  Surprised and wondering at his motives, she mulled his words over in her mind without an immediate reply.

  “I don’t see why you should care,” she said after a minute.

  “I care. That’s all I can say right now.”

  “But Vince doesn’t need me to bring him to my father,” she protested.

  “No, but he’ll need you to ‘contact’ your father. Skyler has disappeared into the wilderness, and it’s his wish that no one, including Vince, find him until he’s prepared to show himself.”

  All this was new to Sable, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Why would her father disappear into the wilderness and not wish to be found?

  “None of this makes sense to me. Even if it’s true, what makes you think I can help Vince find my father?”

  “For the same reason Vince thinks so. You’re his daughter.”

  “So is Kate.”

  “But you’re the one interested in elephants, like Skyler.”

  “You know an awful lot for having just arrived back in Kenya. So why shouldn’t Vince be brought to my father’s camp?”

  “What if I told you he has plans to hunt ivory?”

  His suggestion left her speechless. She stared at him in astonishment. Of all people, he had the audacity to accuse Vince of poaching!

  “There isn’t a man more dedicated to wildlife,” she insisted.

  “Maybe…but I doubt it. Even if he has an interest, it’s not the same as ours.”

  She had no argument for that. There was a certain affinity between the great-grandchildren of the Kenya colonizers that outsiders didn’t understand. Vince was from Toronto, and even though he had studied Africa for years and knew more of its ancient history than even she did, it was impersonal knowledge. The history she shared with Kash bled and throbbed with pathos and heartbeat.

  But what of Kash’s poaching? How could he claim to still have an interest in the animals that he was now killing and capturing for money?

  Kash had lapsed into what she took for a moody silence, but it may have only been his way of contemplation. Whatever it was, she found it most attractive and looked away again, annoyed with herself for still feeling drawn to him.

  She glanced in the backseat and noticed the hunting rifle, maps, baggage, and the camera he had teasingly taken her picture with when she had slipped in the mud. What was he up to? What was he doing in this area of Amboseli now? What did it have to do with Smith and Browning Zoo Animals?

  The Kenyatta Game Viewing Lodge was twenty miles away now. They had left the Old Tukai region of Amboseli, with its swamps and acacia woodlands and soon entered the reserve’s plains, which consisted of hot, dry thornbush country. As Kash drove along they could see the Maasai herdsmen with their thin, horned cattle. The cattle reminded Sable of the drought and famine that were never far removed from Africa. Here on the Amboseli plains the nomadic Maasai moved from place to place for grazing land, burning the fields behind them to promote the growth of new young grass. Only in the Old Tukai area were the Maasai forbidden to bring their cattle, in order to preserve the area for the wild animals.

  They passed the mustard-colored acacia trees, saw a long-legged ostrich scooting through the plains dust, an impala leaping gracefully, a little dik-dik, and a herd of zebras.

  Kash slowed and she wondered why, glancing at him. “Elephants,” he explained.

  Sable didn’t see them, but they had knocked down trees everywhere so that the branches made a wild tangle of deadwood, like white bones.

  Kash swerved suddenly, and Sable clutched the seat as the Land Rover dove and bucked into thick thornbush. For a moment she didn’t know what had happened.

  “Elephants,” he repeated grimly, “and they’re not happy.”

  She looked toward a clump of dry, yellow trees not more than fifty feet away, her heart thumping with both fear and excitement. There were five of them, stately and enormous, and then she saw it—the carcass of another beast.

  “Oh no,” she whispered and began to open the door to get out when Kash’s warm hand grasped her arm.

  “Don’t move—” he warned in a quiet voice. She waited tensely, wise enough to know there was something else she hadn’t seen. Off to the right a bull elepha
nt came through the trees, his trunk lifting.

  “He’s going to charge!” she gasped.

  “No, he’s halfhearted. See his trunk?”

  The elephant’s trunk was extended to smell the air rather than rolled under to protect it in a charge. It sidestepped threateningly and flapped its ears, then walked away into the trees followed by the small herd, and to Sable’s joy a baby elephant slipped in between two huge elephants and moved off toward the river.

  When they’d gone and the dust had settled, Kash opened the door and got out. Sable followed.

  “Poachers,” he said flatly.

  “I can’t bear it again today—what is it, Kash?”

  “A rhino.”

  She turned away, emotion choking her throat.

  “It must have happened around the time Moffet was killed.” The restrained anger in his voice alerted her. She turned and looked at him, knowing now that he couldn’t have done it. She’d been wrong. A swell of pride flared up in her heart and something else—a warning that she could care again too deeply.

  “Are…are you sure?” she asked to cover her feelings.

  “Same tire tracks. I noticed them this morning where Moffet was.”

  “You noticed…?” she began, surprised. “Then you already knew when I came to the trailer camp?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I don’t understand. You’re the boss of the zoo hunters.”

  “Yes, but I can’t explain now.”

  “It’s despicable,” she said, her voice shaking. “It’s the poachers who are the beasts! To kill a beautiful animal like this for nothing except a rhino horn.”

  Kash stooped in the dust to examine the footprints, all but destroyed now by the trek of game and the other elephants. “Money,” he said simply.

  Something in his voice troubled her, and she searched his face.

  Several brown hyenas emerged nervously from the dusk. Above, buzzards circled and landed in a tree, stark and colorless against the lavender sky billowing with silver clouds.

  Sable stood looking at the rhino and thought of Moffet. “Moffet trusted everyone. It was so unfair, so cruel….”

  He looked over at her, frowning, and stood. He walked up and, in a moment of silent understanding, put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her toward him. It seemed so right to be there with him, to accept his comfort as she had in the past. But receiving it now only brought the realization of how dreadfully she had missed it these two years. She pulled away as though an electric current had run between them. Had he felt the same?

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said in a husky voice and, taking her arm, led her back to the Land Rover.

  Four

  Amboseli was one of Kenya’s largest and most scenic wildlife reserves, with the entire plain dominated by the shining snow-covered cone of Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania rising to an astonishing height from the burning Serengeti. One of its two peaks, Kibo, was the highest point in Africa, over nineteen thousand feet above sea level, and sixteen thousand feet above the flat, hot plain of the reserve. To sit beside a fire outside the safari tents on a clear night, with the moon shining on the great ice cap high above, and hear lions roaring not so very far away was for Sable a cherished memory of having worked with her father, Kash, and Seth in earlier years.

  The Land Rover emerged from the mountain’s great shadow past several tall Maasai warriors, each carrying a serviceable spear. Their ocher-smeared bodies were reddish gold, and their elaborately plaited hair and the clean-cut lines of their somber aquiline features were, to Sable, reminiscent of the finely featured Ethiopians. Evidently recognizing the Land Rover and its male driver, they saluted back gravely, always courteous but distant, as was their way.

  She glanced curiously at Kash and saw his handsome profile, shadowed by his hat, as equally noncommittal. “You’ve been gone for two years. I’m surprised they’d know you.”

  His deliberate silence intensified her curiosity. Was there any reason to think that he hadn’t been gone? The possibility that he’d been in the area all this time without letting anyone know was rather intriguing. Why might he have wished to conceal it from her?

  Undaunted, she persisted. “How is it they recognized you, that they knew you?”

  “I’ve been working with the Kajaido Council,” he admitted.

  The Kajaido Council worked with the local Maasai to manage the Amboseli Game Reserve, and Sable was taken off guard. “For how long?”

  “About a year now.”

  “How come Gran doesn’t know you’re working with the Maasai?”

  “She does. Maybe she didn’t think it was important enough to tell you.”

  Everything Kash did was deemed important to Zenobia. Her grandmother had always thought well of him and his brother, Seth. During Sable’s stay in Toronto, her grandmother’s letters and telephone calls had kept her informed about what the family was doing and what was happening at the lodge, but if Kash had been back for a year now working on the reserve, why hadn’t she mentioned him? It was unusual. Sable had been under the impression that Kash had been in South Africa this whole time, working as a hunter-guide for a large international safari business.

  Then if Kash had been home these past months working with the Kajaido Council and the Maasai, had her grandmother kept him informed of Sable’s intentions about Vince and the work at Samburu? No wonder he knew the reasons for her return. But the mystery surrounding her father remained, as did Kash’s association with Smith and Browning. One thing seemed clear: she would get few answers to these questions from Kash now.

  “Then you actually returned to Kenya before I did,” she said.

  “Yes, I’ve been back about a year now.”

  “I wasn’t aware you decided to come back….”

  “No, when I returned you’d left for Toronto with Vince.”

  She glanced at him uneasily. His casual tone suggested that she’d planned that excursion with Vince, when it had actually been the other way around, but it didn’t seem wise to discuss Vince when Kash was so negative about him. The purpose of her visit to Canada had been anything but a holiday. She wondered if he knew about her mother.

  “Did Gran explain about my mother?”

  He turned his head, thoughtful. “Yes, she told me.”

  Was that all he was willing to say? If Gran had explained about bringing Sable’s ill mother to Toronto, then he should understand why she wasn’t home at Kenyatta when he changed his mind and came back. She had gone with Vince because he had arranged for a specialist to treat her mother. Vince had been her encourager when she thought Kash had walked away, not that she would have deliberately sought his emotional support. She’d actually tried to avoid leaning on him.

  What was the verse in Psalms? “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.”

  The Lord Jesus would not fail when even a husband could not provide all the emotional strength a wife might need. Her mother had told her as much in Toronto when Sable had mistakenly blurted out, “Why isn’t Father here with us?” Tears sprang to Sable’s eyes as her mother’s wasted body came to mind, and she could hear her saying weakly, “Husbands are only human. I’m not resentful that Skyler isn’t here. Don’t you be. Something’s gone wrong…something in the reserve…I sense his prayers….”

  Her mother had often told her and Kate, “Find your deepest emotional support from your relationship with the Lord. Who knows us better than He? We are His daughters.”

  Her mother could say that, thought Sable, because for years she had labored alone as a missionary nurse with the Maasai and knew by trial and experience the faithful intentions of the Lord Jesus. Her mother had known what it was like to pass the so-called flower of youth and still be single with no prospects in view, fearing aloneness, yet knowing God could supply her heart’s desire as easily as a rose can bloom from a bush with thorns. Therefore, she was unafraid, confident in her aloneness.

  Julia Dunsmoor could wres
tle through prayer, stand for the Lord amid Satanic opposition in getting out the gospel in a hard place, and at the same time have no one close enough to share her deepest emotional needs. Sable’s mother had learned through trial and error how to cry out to her heavenly Father and cultivate that close union with Him. And according to the truthfulness of His promises, she had found Him sufficient for everything. Only after this long trek alone had the Lord brought Skyler into her life, resulting in marriage and children. Yes, her mother had been special.

  I want to know Christ like that, but am I willing to make the investment? To stand the dry times as well as when rivers of living water flow through my soul?

  “God isn’t in a hurry,” her mother had told her. “He will take all the time He needs to form you, shape you, chisel you into following the pathway to Christlikeness. And He knows the very things to bring into your life—or take away—to help you find that place of rest and blessing.”

  Sable became aware of Kash—he had slowed and was watching her with restrained interest.

  “When I came back to Kenyatta looking for you, Zenobia told me about Julia’s illness, and I wrote you in Toronto.”

  She turned her head, masking her utter surprise. He had written to her?

  He looked back to the road and pressed on the accelerator, and the needle began to climb. “I asked if you’d like me to come and be with you.”

  Her heart gave an odd little jerk.

  “You didn’t answer.”

  Sable wanted to tell him that she hadn’t received any letter, and yet it seemed wiser to not allow her emotions the undisciplined reaction of spilling all over him, desperately grabbing the first “feeler” of renewed interest he’d shown in two years.

  “I suppose Vince was all the help you needed,” he suggested.

  The almost gentle nudge brought her a moment of deep satisfaction. It was reminiscent of the way Kash sometimes tried to gauge her interest. In the past she had always rushed to throw “passion-wood” on the sparks, perhaps smothering them before they were ready.

  She glanced uneasily toward the speedometer, somehow thinking it might match his mood, and breathed, “Your presence would also have been…appreciated.”