The covenant - James A. Michener [384]
'Hear, hear!' the audience cried, but Saltwood asked his neighbor, Carleton the wagon builder, who served as mayor of the little town, 'What about the Boers?' and Carleton whispered, 'Tonight Boers don't count,' and Saltwood chuckled. 'Without them, he wouldn't be standing here tonight.'
At each step Friddley was eager to orate, dwelling upon the nobility of the queen in allowing her young son to come so far to receive the plaudits of the colony; he served the same purpose as the official flatterers at the court of King Dingane and his words were equally empty. But the prince was not diverted by this constant aggrandizement. 'When do we get to the battue?' he asked repeatedly, and once Grahamstown was passed, he stayed in the saddle for fifty miles a day.
Behind him the entourage rode in clouds of dust; the wagons creaked; the grooms helped along the horses gone lame; and Mr. Yorke performed heroics in keeping his cumbersome photographic wagon within striking distance of the others. When they slept in cots in their tents, he lay curled up in his wagon.
After a final ride of fifty-six miles in one day, they came at last to a large farm east of Bloemfontein, where an enormous plain a hundred miles in circumference lay hemmed in by low hills. Days before, at every pass through which game might escape, blacks had been stationed, one thousand in all, and on the late afternoon of 23 August i860 these beaters began slowly moving toward the central area which the prince would occupy next morning. As they moved, they drove ahead of them from all compass directions a monstrous herd of zebras, blesbok, eland, hartebeest, wildebeest, kudu, ostriches and the soon-to-be-extinct quagga. How many animals did the herd contain? Perhaps two hundred thousand, perhaps less, for no one could count the beasts as they moved in toward the center, then out to the perimeter. Some escaped through unguarded valleys; most were kept penned in by the multitude of beaters.
At dawn the prince, accompanied by twenty-four other guns, moved to the hunting ground, where Friddley laid down the rules: 'I shall ride at the prince's left, Major Saltwood to his right. We will not shoot. Our job will be to hand the prince freshly loaded guns as he fires at the beasts. Your Royal Highness, reach first to me on the left, then to Saltwood on the right. Now I want six good shots to ride behind us in a semicircle. You gentlemen may fire at the game occasionally, but your main task is to protect the prince, should any beast come at him. Is that understood?'
Just as the sun came up, the twenty-five guns took their positions, plus Friddley and Saltwood as handlers, plus ninety black servants, many with guns, plus eighteen white factotums, plus one thousand beaters out on the plains to get everything in readiness for 'the greatest hunt in history.' Only then did Friddley flash a signal, and the grand battue was under way.
The beaters close in raised a hullabaloo, whereupon the frightened animals in that quarter started to rush in the general direction of the waiting hunters. First a score of zebras rushed past, then a scattered flight of leaping springbok, then the main body of the herd. They came in turmoil, hundreds of them, thousands. At first they veered away from the hunters, and many escaped, but when the crush became sheer chaos, they galloped by within ten paces of the gunners, great concentrations of large animals running in terror.
The firing never ceased. 'Here, your Highness!' Friddley cried as he took the prince's empty gun, thrusting a freshly loaded one into his hands. After firing from ten inches into the side of a zebra, the prince would thrust his gun in Saltwood's general direction, and without even looking, reach for a fresh one, which he would again discharge at animals not ten paces away.
Meantime,