All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris Page A

did."
    "First reality lost touch with Tuleborné," Mary Burgess said dryly.
    "Come again?"
    "You must understand that living at Tuleborné was like living in a frontier prison. In 1920 there were no pontoon aeroplanes, no wireless for instant contact with the outside world. Lives depended on the twice-monthly visits of the paddle-wheel river steamer. The yellow river was their only highway, and they were seven hours upstream from the nearest station. The permanent population of Tuleborné numbered less than four hundred, including Negroes. The hillside, settlement consisted of the Catholic school and church, hospital buildings, mission bungalows, a barracks, a sawmill and a few ramshackle commercial and government buildings along the riverbank. It was only a hundred yards from the water's edge to the dense virgin forest, and continual clearing was in progress to keep the wild undergrowth from reclaiming the settlement. The trees of the encircling forest were everywhere more than a hundred feet high, and so packed together no breeze stirred in the stifling interior. A few trails used only by Negroes penetrated this wilderness. In the dry season when the river shrank below its sandbanks there was sometimes a mild breeze blowing upstream. But Eustace had returned during the wet season, when the sky looms incandescent and tons of water pour down on the red metal roofs of the station. The river smokes and swells dangerously and the teeming life of the forest is affected; from microscopic killers to the huge wallowing hippos, nature is in a frenzy.
    "It is all any man can do, no matter how well fortified by experience and faith, to cope with a wet season in the forest. But at Tuleborné, as Eustace struggled with his medical duties as well as those phantasms that plagued him day and. night, it seemed as if God had inexplicably focused His wrath on their little station. The afternoon deluge was accompanied by cyclonic winds, bolts of lightning that struck with earth-shattering power. When it wasn't raining, the driver ants were out in force, and the hippos fiercely attacked almost every Negro's canoe. Even the steamer was damaged by these brutes and had to lay up at Tuleborné for repairs. Two members of the crew went raving mad that same night and killed a fellow crew member with sjamboks ; in turn they had to be shot by local soldiers. Children at the school fell one by one into lethal comas, the cause unknown. Eustace's own daughter was affected. The steadily worsening storms uprooted trees and dashed them into mission buildings.
    "A local feticheur appeared and spoke of a heavy judgment to be visited upon the white man. That was enough for the majority of the Negroes, who began to vanish into the forest. The hospital was emptied almost overnight. The district commissioner roused himself from his usual alcoholic daze and ordered the entire station evacuated. Eustace, for the sake of the few critical patients still in his care, refused to go, as did the Jesuit priest and the nuns of the school."
    "What about the young man?" Luxton asked. "Jackson Holley. Did he remain with his father?"
    "No. He desperately wanted to stay, but his sister needed constant medical attention, which he could provide, if she was to live until they, reached the military hospital in Libreville. So the steamer, packed with refugees and riding very low in the water, left Tuleborné in the rain. Hours later, as they were sounding the siren for a landing at the town of Zenkitu, the steamer was battered by giant logs that came flooding into the mainstream from a tributary of the river. It quickly capsized. Nearly twenty passengers, thrown among the grinding logs, lost their lives. Jackson, clinging to his sister with one arm, thrashed his way to a sandbar. But his mother was not seen again."
    "Dreadful. One can almost believe there was a curse in control of their lives."
    "For myself, I am willing to believe only in the impartial hostility of nature,