Minutes later, on that third morning, we were on our way towards the improvised bridge we’d crossed the night before, a narrow tree trunk that hovered precariously above the current. One by one, with the others covering, we worked our way across. On the other side, McGrady took point with the tracker following. I followed up in the rear because I needed photographs.
Once on the far bank, the American pointed to a fresh set of boot prints in the dirt, hours old. Montgomery slowly lifted his head and, with the kind of gesture that comes with experience, sniffed the wind. ‘Nothing’, he said quietly. Then he turned to the Greek and quipped in his quaint, fractured English: ‘Dey long time gone…’
Since there wasn’t a whiff of those who’d come in the night, we had something more with which to occupy our thoughts as we trudged through a succession of broken forest country that stretched back all the way to the Zambezi. For some reason – clearly inexplicable but of immense consequence to us – our unknown ‘visitors’ had wavered in taking those final few steps across the water. Probably a gook reconnaissance team, McGrady ventured.
What had stopped them? We pondered the matter when we halted briefly for a break. There were no conclusions, though the incident sharpened everybody’s senses. By now we were moving even more cautiously than before, each one of us intent on putting more distance between them and us in the tall elephant grass that dominated large open areas adjacent to some of the clearings. We didn’t exactly expect to be ambushed – that was to have been our job – but there wasn’t a man among us whose safety hadn’t been flicked off in anticipation of what we believed to be inevitable.
After being on the road a few hours, the rest of the trail seemed clear. Several times it meandered towards clusters of tall rocks that you could see at a distance above the flat terrain. Even to this unseasoned eye, these landmarks were distinctive.
About noon that day, McGrady pointed towards a rocky outcrop ahead, much bigger than the rest. It was used as a collection point by groups of insurgents who entered from Zambia, he’d been told. He underscored its position on the map that he’d kept in a waterproof holder tucked into his webbing.
For the rest of that day’s patrol we kept well within the tree line. If there was any spotting to be done, we’d do it from the kind of cover that our Rhodesian Army friends embraced. Then, to be doubly sure, McGrady decided that we should occasionally double back on our tracks. We did that several times, but found nothing.
About an hour before sunset on that third day, we halted briefly for the customary snack. The march had been difficult and the heat had slowed our pace, but there was no stopping, not this deep into a totally unfamiliar terrain.
Dinner was simple: tea and kudu biltong,4 bought before we left civilization from the small fresh-produce store behind one of the big hotels in Bulawayo. It was enough to sustain a man for a ten-hour march.
‘It’s the only food I carry, light and full of protein and best of all, it never spoils in the sun’, said McGrady.
South Africa, and home, I felt, were suddenly rather distant, even though it had taken us only nine hours by road to reach the place which was to be our stomping ground for the next eight or ten days. Almost nothing goes to plan in wartime and the Rhodesian War was no different. It was the same with our patrol. By that third day, the hunt had lost its allure. In the words of the Greek, ‘it has become a totally fucking bore… I came here to kill and all we do is walk through this shitty bush country. We find nothing and then we walk some more.’