Guns and Guano Read online

CHAPTER 4: THE HUNT

  Years of disciplined living had given Dirk habits that no fancy party could break. As dawn rose in glory over the jungle of Hakon, he was up and exercising on the governor’s lawn, running laps and heaving rocks among the croquet hoops. On the veranda, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire waited for him to pause and catch breath.

  The servants were up early too. A gang came around the side of the house, chattering and laughing, spades and picks over their shoulders. Young and old, they walked bare-chested and bare-foot in the fresh morning air, relishing the sun’s rays and the gentle breeze blowing off the sea. As they noticed Dirk their stances stiffened and they walked past in silence, heads bowed.

  “Morning,” Dirk called out.

  They nodded silent responses and disappeared down the gravel path.

  “What ho!” Timothy Blaze-Simms wandered out of the house, bottle in one hand, glass in the other, bow-tie dangling free around his neck.

  “Up already?” Dirk asked, pausing in his labours.

  “Not so much ‘already’ as ‘still’.” Timothy blinked at the bright outdoor light, took a sip from his champagne.

  “You remember there’s a hunt this morning?” Dirk asked. His friend easily got distracted, and that occasionally made him unreliable as backup.

  “Oh yes.” Blaze-Simms flung himself down on a lawn-side bench, head at one end, feet sticking over the other. “Don’t worry about me. I can go days without sleep, when the whim seizes me.”

  “Listen, there’s something odd going on here.” Dirk stepped closer to his friend, lowering his voice so as not to be overheard. “You notice the servants last night?”

  A gentle snore was the only reply.

  By the time the rest of the household had risen and breakfasted, the hunting party was beginning to assemble. Arriving in small groups or pairs, two dozen of the island’s more prominent inhabitants galloped up the driveway, gravel crunching beneath their horses’ hooves, calling out excitedly to each other. The British were kitted out in a strange mix of formal jackets and large guns, giving them the appearance of an emergency militia raised to defend the home counties. They were in festive spirits, even Braithwaite laughing and joking as he sipped sherry brought out by the servants. The whole tone was bewildering, like no kind of hunt Dirk had ever been part of - more carnival than expedition into the wilds.

  The Frenchman, who Dirk had discovered was a businessman named Regis Marat, was trying to join in the jollity, but he responded blankly to the jokes and was clearly unimpressed with the sherry. His hulking “secretaries” seemed happy playing with their guns, though the looks they sometimes gave Dirk were downright hostile. He wondered if he’d done something to offend them, or if they just got riled when they weren’t the toughest guys in town.

  Isabelle emerged from the house and joined Dirk on the veranda. She was wearing jodhpurs and a jacket, and held a riding crop.

  “Ready for that little sport you mentioned?” She smiled and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

  Dirk paused before replying, grinding a cigarillo out beneath his boot.

  “Pardon my French, but why are we even going on this damn hunt?” he asked. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Firstly, Mr Dynamo, French is a language of sophistication and elegance.” Isabelle tapped the riding crop against her empty palm, counting off points. “The idea that it epitomises the cruder side of communication reflects a level of ignorance and prejudice most unbecoming of a citizen of the land of the free.

  “Secondly, our host has invited us on this hunt. Given that he has extended us such hospitality, it would be most impolite not to attend. Such niceties may have no value in New York or the mining outposts of the Black Hills, but in British territories manners are important. They are as oil to the social machine, ensuring its smooth and peaceful running.

  “Thirdly, in case you have forgotten, you are leading the hunt. It can hardly happen without you.”

  “Well that’s me told.” Dirk scowled.

  “Please don’t mope.” Isabelle shook her head. “One would think your mother never had to tell you off.”

  “She didn’t get much of a chance.” He’d barely been old enough to understand what was happening at the funeral, but some things left such a deep memory that they were never lost.

  “I’m so sorry.” Isabelle hung her head. “I didn’t know, but that was still thoughtless of me.”

  “It happens.” Dirk took a deep breath. “I should get ready to ride.”

  “Of course.” Isabelle went to join Cullen and Bekoe-Kumi, who were examining horses brought round from behind the house. Dirk wondered where the animals lived, because they sure hadn’t been in the stables.

  “Action time!” A breezy Blaze-Simms strode out onto the gravel, freshly groomed and sporting a clean jacket, a long paper-wrapped package over his shoulder and a small one in his hand.

  “How are you even moving?” Dirk asked.

  “Pluck of the English,” Timothy replied. “Besides, I couldn’t miss this. You know they hardly ever hunt around here? This is a real occasion.”

  He sprang into the saddle of a nearby horse, settling the large package in front of him.

  “What is that thing?” Dirk asked.

  “Wait and see,” Timothy said. “I think you’re going to like this one.”

  As the first hour of riding slid by, Dirk came to understand why the local residents didn’t hunt often. Hakon was the biggest of a cluster of guano islands, big enough to have a jungle and its own small mountain, but not to support the kind of big game for which Africa was famed. In its place, Cullen had developed something of a bastard sport, with a little fox-hunt-style chasing through fields and foliage and the odd bit of bird shooting. A pack of enthusiastic but ill-trained hounds scampered around the hunters, dashing off whenever they caught a scent. Sometimes they scared up parakeets, giving the party’s guns a target. More often they came back carrying a snake or vole, or were found barking at the heels of a nervous field hand.

  Blaze-Simms’s smaller package contained a device he called the Automated Aerial Beater. He unwrapped it as they rode, revealing a brass box half a foot across with a sack hanging from the top. With a flourish he lit the gas emerging from a cannister in the middle and the sack inflated, turning the device into a miniature airship. It sailed up above the jungle, then began to shake as its mechanisms rattled, scaring birds up out of the trees.

  Dirk applauded enthusiastically along with the rest of the hunting party. It was an ingenious device, and he could see that it might have uses beyond sport. But just as the hunters were readying their guns, flames sprang up the side of the inflated sack. There was a whoosh, a dull thud, and the balloon exploded.

  The Automated Aerial Beater crashed onto the path, scattering gears and chunks of brass casing.

  Many in the party found the whole thing hysterical, creating a pantomime atmosphere of inane banter and running jokes, to the evident bemusement of the oriental trader and his wife. They rode at the back of the group, whispering to each other and exchanging occasional comments with a disappointed-looking Blaze-Simms, who sat stroking his remaining paper package and gazing into the distance.

  Dirk, stuck at the head of the hunt and determined to make use of the time, turned his attention away from the dogs and onto quizzing Cullen.

  “So where do the rest of your guests live?” He gestured back at the hunting party. By now he’d heard a whole history of the island’s uses and ownership, but nothing that threw light on what he had seen at the mansion.

  “Mostly in Freeport.” Cullen smiled and shifted his rifle across his lap. “It used to be the slave depot, when this place lived off the Atlantic trade. The cages and cells are gone, thank God, but the docks still work. There are offices for the guano companies, warehouses and suchlike, and a hotel for visitors.

  “Nobody but me lives here full time. They stop by to check on operations for a month or two, then move on. Braithwa
ite’s as close as I have to a permanent neighbour, and even he’s never stayed more than a summer. In fact, you’ve come at the perfect time. Late spring and early summer are usually when we’re busiest, and the nearest to a social season that we can scrape together. Leave it four weeks and you’ll find me alone with the birds and the servants.”

  Cullen’s tone cast a different light on the conversation Dirk had overheard the previous night. The governor was clearly excited at the thought of having a social season. His claim to have felt obliged to throw the party looked more like an excuse.

  “I say, good shot!” Cullen exclaimed.

  A brightly coloured bird tumbled out of the air, to wild applause and some bickering over who’d hit it. A servant followed the dogs to retrieve this rare prize. To Dirk, it just looked a bit pathetic, a death that wouldn’t feed anyone or keep them safe. This wasn’t his sort of hunt.

  As they rode into the thicker parts of the jungle, the tone changed. Hushed by the lush beauty of their surroundings, even the English members of the party were reduced to whispers.

  For such a small island, Hakon had an amazing abundance of wildlife. Spirals of bright red leaves hung next to bursts of blue and yellow flowers. The hunters pointed in wonder at a rainbow hued blossom, only to see it spread its wings and flap away. Tree-frogs swam in the rain-filled cups of upturned leaves while bees buzzed from bloom to bloom, to be caught in the snapping jaws of a Venus flytrap. Somewhere in the warm green depths, a stream babbled its Edenic tune. Every space seemed swollen to bursting with life, the plants larger and more luscious even than those Dirk had seen in the Amazon basin.

  He paused to look at one of the carnivorous plants, letting the rest of the party drift past him. He was surprised to see Bekoe-Kumi and Braithwaite instinctively take the lead, not lost in the tourist’s reverie but alert to their surroundings, their shifting gazes those of true hunters not the British horse and hounds set.

  The oriental couple were at the back of the pack, riding with a stiff formality that accentuated their evident discomfort in the saddle. They reminded Dirk of folks he’d seen driving the railways out across the great west - both the Chinese labourers, strangely dignified under their sweat and dirt, and the white investors from back east who’d crop up once in a while, riding uneasily past half-laid tracks as they tried to fathom the works their wealth had encompassed.

  They bowed slightly in the saddle as he approached, not much more than a nod of the head. Dirk nodded back and pointed out a few interesting plants he’d noticed, trying to engage the couple in conversation. The man responded, but briefly and with a stiffness that matched his posture. Like his wife he kept scanning the jungle, not frantically but persistently, constantly absorbing his surroundings.

  Dirk was about to give up on the conversation when Isabelle joined them. Her bow was deeper than those of the orientals, and this seemed to please them. To Dirk she appeared to be talking about the same things he had, pointing out the same sights and sounds, making the same queries about the orientals themselves. And yet the tone was lighter, livelier. Where he had laboured to get a response, she drew them easily into quiet chatter about the jungle, the hunt, even themselves.

  His name was Hasegawa Minoru, hers Miura Noriko. Dirk was surprised that, as what seemed to be a married couple, they didn’t share a name or two, but he guessed that was an eastern thing. Like Braithwaite, Hasegawa Minoru had come to Hakon for the guano. He had some scheme about exporting it to places Dirk had never heard of, but all of which seemed to involve acquaintances of Isabelle. As business talk it sounded plausible, and though something made Dirk uneasy he figured it was just his own lack of grace. His contributions to the conversation were blunt and stumbling, while Isabelle responded with ease to the Orientals’ enquiries and followed up with curiosity on the things that they said. Dirk made a mental note to ask her later about oriental customs, as she seemed to know what was needed to put these folks at ease.

  There was a yapping up ahead and the lead horses jerked to a halt, whinnying and pawing the ground. Dirk excused himself and rode back to the head of the hunt. His own horse snorted as she neared the front, and he had to work the spurs to keep her moving. As he passed the others and broke into a clearing he saw why.

  The area was like a butcher’s board, strewn with entrails and spattered a raw, dripping red. Glistening strings of guts trembled beneath the paws of the dogs, who scampered around yipping gleefully for their masters. Dirk swung down from the saddle and approached one of the larger heaps. With the tip of his old Bowie knife he prodded carefully through the pieces, studying splintered bones and shredded skin. He’d only seen this sort of carnage on a battlefield, but here there were no sword strokes or bullet holes, only the smells of blood and ruptured bowels.

  Blaze-Simms jumped from his horse and approached the bloody remains, Braithwaite and Bekoe-Kumi close behind him.

  “Good heavens, what is it?” Blaze-Simms asked.

  “Looks like it were a mule.” Braithwaite peered at a piece of fur. “Locals sometimes let them graze free when they’re not using them, so that they don’t need so much feeding. A few of the older ones even live in the wild, just wandering around like they own the place.”

  “The poor blighter’s been absolutely shredded.” Timothy looked appalled. “Mostly by claws, by the looks of it, but there are teeth marks too.”

  “Whatever killed it weren’t hungry.” Braithwaite pointed at a long string of innards stretching towards the treeline. “There’s nowt missing but a few shreds of the hide.”

  “What about the heart?” A glimmer of excitement appeared in Blaze-Simms’s eyes. “Perhaps this was some sort of ritual.”

  “That’s over there.” Braithwaite pointed to a small, grisly heap. “Under the stomach.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Dirk followed the grisly trail out of the clearing. The guts reached their end not far into the treeline, but a set of bloody paw-prints continued west through the jungle.

  Braithwaite came up behind Dirk, stroking his beard as he gazed at the tracks.

  “Looks to me like ’twas a bear.” The Yorkshireman knelt down, dabbed at one of the prints, his finger coming away sticky with half-dried blood. “’Bout an hour ago.”

  “Many bears around here, Mr Braithwaite?” Dirk reckoned he could make a good guess for himself. This sort of jungle wasn’t normally bear country.

  “No lad.” Braithwaite shook his head thoughtfully. “And bears don’t attack mules, neither.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  A suspicion was settling over Dirk. He didn’t have enough details to fit it all together yet, but this jungle seemed as stilted and exaggerated as life in the governor’s mansion. Everything about it, every plant and animal, made sense as part of a jungle or a forest. Just not all together, and not with such success on such a tiny spot of land. If this was about guano, then it was mighty powerful guano.

  They walked back to the clearing, where Blaze-Simms was excitedly unwrapping his paper parcel.

  “What the hell is that?” Dirk asked.

  Timothy was holding something almost like a hunting rifle. Unlike a rifle, the stock was a mass of brass tubes and funnels, and the barrel consisted of three spiralling lengths of pipe.

  “It’s a new gun I’ve been working on,” he explained, pumping a handle on the side. “It’s steam powered, but without the need for fire. You see, there’s a radium chamber here, next to the water tank, and by a series of swift mechanical compressions one can squeeze enough power from the radium to evaporate a brief but intense burst of steam. This drives a set of magnetised pellets up the barrel, and their spin around each other helps retain accuracy. It has quite a punch, and can fire an incredible distance, in theory.”

  “In theory?” Dirk eyed the contraption warily. He remembered how, in theory, Blaze-Simms’s automated server had brought a whole new era of swift service and perfect drinks for the Epiphany Club. In practice it had brought two fires, one
explosion and the infamous Champagne Tsunami before they shut it down.

  “This is the first chance I’ve had to fire it.” Blaze-Simms beamed with pride. “I look forward to testing its range.”

  “Lad,” Braithwaite interjected, “in this jungle, nothing’s got a range of more than a hundred yards. On account of that’s how far you can see.”

  “Oh.” Blaze-Simms slumped, then brightened. “Maybe if we flush out more birds? No cover in the sky.”

  “We’ve got more to worry about than birds.” Dirk vaulted into the saddle. “Come on, we’ve got a fresh trail. Let’s do some proper hunting at last.”

  Now that they had the bear’s trail, following it was easy. With or without blood it left hefty prints as it passed, crushing the undergrowth in its wake.

  The tone of the trip had changed. The horses had been spooked by the butchery in the clearing, and so had their riders. Many of the party were chattering about the prospect of a real kill, but it was a quieter chatter than before, all boisterousness drained away, and Cullen himself looked a little nervous despite Bekoe-Kumi’s presence at his side. Monsieur Marat was talking with Timothy, who was taking a screw-driver to the barrel of his gun. Dirk still took the lead, but Braithwaite rode up front with him now, alert in the saddle.

  “You seem to know a lot about animals and their insides, Mr Braithwaite,” Dirk said.

  “Aye, well, I’ve been quartermaster in some pretty queer corners of the Empire.” Braithwaite grinned broadly beneath his beard. “When you might have to skin and butcher a camel on five minutes notice, you start taking an interest in what’s inside. When I got home I joined one of them scientific clubs, learned some anatomy, zoology and such. Reckon I know my way round most of the animal kingdom by now.”

  “So how’d you reckon a bear ended up here?”

  “Probably Cullen.” Braithwaite glanced back at the ambassador. “He’s pulled some funny stunts in his time. Shipping in strange plants and animals or bits of exotic machinery, whatever takes his fancy. There’s at least three half-assembled breweries lurking round his place, and we had a wild lion ’til some poor bugger got his arm ripped off collecting its dung. Have you seen the ostrich pen? I like guano as much as the next man, more than my wife thinks I should, but you wouldn’t catch me keeping those buggers if their shit were made of gold.”

  “So he got a bear for the dung?”

  “That or the hunting. You don’t get much excitement round here if you don’t make it yourself.”

  Dirk shook his head. Cullen seemed a pretty sane guy, as Englishmen went. Now he was starting to sound like a crazy old uncle or some inbred Prussian aristo, lurching from one obsession to the next. How did that fit with what he’d seen the other night? The whole of Hakon was crowded with oddities. Logic said there had to be a pattern, so what was it?

  A distraction was what it was. Not the thing they’d come here for, and certainly not what he should think about now.

  “Another thing.” Braithwaite kept his voice low. “Have you seen the size of the plants around here?”

  Something stirred in the bushes up ahead. Dirk pulled out the hunting rifle holstered at his horse’s side. It was a fancy looking breach loader, with a long polished barrel and carved hard-wood stock, but unwieldy and without much stopping power. Against a bear in the jungle, Dirk wished he’d brought his Gravemaker. It might not have the range, but it’d brought down bison, a rhino and, one time, giant rats.

  A branch swung up. These was a flash of brown fur. Dirk snapped the rifle up and fired.

  The gunshot cracked like thunder through the jungle, waves of noise sending birds flying from their roosts. A pack of monkeys swung away in howling terror. For a moment Dirk saw a small body fall through the leaves, a half-eaten banana tumbling from its hand, and he felt a pang of sadness. Then there was a roar behind him.

  He turned to see the bear burst out of the greenery behind Hasegawa Minoru, a bloodstained whirlwind of hungry muscle and razor edges. The Chinaman raised his hands as the beast leapt, claws bared, ready to deal out death.