Thunderbolt Wilbur Smith (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

were plotting became clear, with the difficulties we’d face along the way becoming more obvious at each step, he started making suggestions. I’d gambled on this, his hardwired resourcefulness. It was in his DNA: faced with a problem, Mo couldn’t help trying to come up with a solution.

‘How are we going to handle the dogs then?’ Xander asked as we worked together to prise up a particularly reluctant stump.

‘I’ve already started,’ I replied, ‘by trying to gain their trust. I read a lot about dog training when we got Chester. Dogs read how you are around them. They’re all about body language. Project calm and confidence and a dog will pick up on it.’

Amelia, who was levering a crowbar under the stump’s tap root, now pulled it out, leaned on it, and said, ‘Sure, body language is a big thing for canines, as it is for all animals in fact, but in my experience, dogs are more about treats.’

‘We could save some of our food to feed to them,’ Xander suggested.

‘It would be a start,’ Amelia replied. ‘But I doubt they’d be much more impressed by that slop than we are. What we need and don’t have is meat.’

‘We could do with some of that ourselves,’ said Xander. ‘To help get our strength up.’ He jabbed at the stump listlessly with his shovel. ‘I’ve never felt so weak.’ He looked it. Despite us having been outside more or less constantly, working in the sun, his dark skin was tinged a sallow grey. ‘We’re not exactly going to stumble over a pack of sausages out here though, are we?’

Mo had been hacking back some scrub a little way off. He stopped now and said, ‘Not sausages, no.’

‘Sounds like there’s a but,’ said Amelia.

‘There are animals in the bush. You’ve heard the noises at night.’

‘We’re hardly equipped to bag an antelope though,’ I said.

‘There are ways of hunting for smaller prey. Fringe-tailed gerbils, acacia rats, Greenwood’s shrews, and so on. Boys in the camp have done it before. I’ve seen them. Using snares.’

I thought of the snares I’d seen in the rainforest in the Congo, set by poachers. They were horrible things, as likely to harm an endangered species as anything else. Was it wrong of me to allow Mo to teach us how to set them here? No, I decided. First, we weren’t in a national park or conservation area. And second, we were desperate. When I brought that up Amelia immediately suggested that the poachers had probably been desperate too, but I shut that thought out and set to learning from Mo.

He was a methodical teacher. We’d all learn how to build the snares, he said. That way we could make many between us. To start with he told us each to fetch the component parts: a stout forked stick (the sort that might make a good catapult, but bigger); three similarly strong straight sticks; and two lengths of string or twine, one thick, the other thin. That was it. Xander came up trumps on the string front with a discarded guy rope that we cut up using a sharp stone. For the thin string we butchered some shoelaces.

Once we had all the bits, we began by hammering the catapult stick, arms up, firmly into the ground. Then Mo showed us how to make a spring using one of the bits of string, wound round the ‘Y’ of the catapult and twisted tight with one of the long straight shafts.

It was ingenious: by delicately wedging the long arm against another of the straight sticks, which we’d also hammered into the ground, we created a spring-loaded arm on a hair trigger.

With the final component – the length of thinner shoelace – we made a noose which we attached to the sprung arm of the trap. The open ‘O’ of the noose went on the ground over the hair trigger, on top of which, Mo explained, we’d put the bait. Simple, but effective.

Once we’d got the materials together, making those first snares took less than half an hour. And over the next couple of days we scavenged more materials with which to make a few more.

Bait was the last ingredient. Mo suggested we use dollops of the very mush General Sir fed the rest of us for this purpose. Hearing that’s what we’d be tempting our prey with, I rolled my eyes.

‘You’re sure they’ll fall for that stuff?’

‘It may not be your favourite but for a rat or gerbil it’s rich … what do you call it?’ Mo said.

‘Pickings?’ said Xander.

‘In nutrients?’ said Amelia at the same time.

‘I was going to say “reward”, but what you suggest is fine.’

Mo never revelled in it, but he was indispensable on so many fronts. I could come up with ideas, such as bribing the enforcers, but Mo knew who would stay loyal to General Sir no matter what and he obviously had the words with which to bribe those he thought might give in to temptation. Even determining which kids we could persuade to make a run for it would have been impossible without him.

When we weren’t working, and whenever General Sir and his henchmen were out of sight, we set traps both near the field in which we were put to work, and in the bush nearer General Sir’s camp. Mo helped us choose the spots. Mostly these were little funnel-shaped clearings, or channels between clumps of scrub, anywhere a small animal might come upon the bait and take it.

And when we were safely in camp, Mo increasingly split his time between our little area and the bigger tent enclave housing the real child-soldiers-to-be, where, head bowed among a little group or sitting on a log with a child, he had what he described as ‘quiet conversations’.

The exact topic of these was anyone’s guess. We were powerless to do anything but wait for him to report back, and this he did without specifics. ‘I’m working on it,’ he might say. Or, ‘Softly, softly; patience