Hunting the Moby-Dick of the Veldt : A TIME TO DIE <i> by Wilbur Smith (Random House: $19.95; 480 pp.) </i>

With “The Green Hills of Africa,” Ernest Hemingway took unfair advantage of anyone who wanted to sit down and write a good safari novel. Simply said, he did it best--contrasting the simple purity of the African tracker with the neuroses of the well-heeled white client, using the cunning of the hunted to test the mettle of the hunter.

Half a century later, Hemingway still owns the ground, but after 21 books, many of them successful best sellers in Britain and America, Wilbur Smith has earned the right to contest his crown. In “Time to Die,” Smith almost gets it right--using language sparsely and precisely to convey all the elements of the hunt, from the erotic thrill of facing down big game in its own element to the amazing affinity some Africans have developed for animals and the bush.

But then he blows the contest with the Old Master--and the integrity of the book--by allowing the plot to go haywire, in what reads suspiciously like someone’s mistaken idea of what Hollywood is looking for in an African bush thriller.

Smith lacks Hemingway’s ironic wit and underlying sense of the contradicting nobility/futility of the hunt, but he can stand up to the Old Man in his knowledge of guns and animals and the tall grass. This passage describing the simple but critical moment of the kill is typical of Smith at his best:

“The lion’s body filled most of the magnified field of the (gun sight). He could see the individual hairs in the dense curling bush of mane and the detail of each sculptured muscle beneath the skin. One inch behind the lion’s shoulder, on the lateral center line of its body, was a tiny scar on the sleek side. It was shaped like a horseshoe, and a lucky horseshoe, and it made a perfect aiming point. He aligned the cross hairs of the sight on the scar. They bounced slightly to the elevated beat of his own heart. He took up the slack in the trigger, feeling the final resistance under his finger before the sear released and the rifle fired.”

For 26 years, Rhodesian-born Smith has been chronicling the saga of the Courtney family, a French-blooded, South African clan that he has tracked through four generations to sketch how whites and blacks have grown up together--and yet apart--in the South African veldt for the last 400 years. Now the line has descended to Sean Courtney, great-grandson of the Sean Courtney who appeared in Smith’s first novel, “When the Lion Feeds” (1946). The brave, crusty Courtney is a professional hunter and a former colonel in the Rhodesian army who works a leased hunting concession in modern Zimbabwe.

Sean is retained to take a dying American businessman, Riccardo Monterro, on his last safari. The first half of the book is about their epic quest for one large “tusker”--a giant elephant, known as Tukutela, “the Angry One.”

For 60 years, Tukutela has been ranging an area the size of Tennessee, successfully evading poachers and hunters. Weighing in at seven tons, with huge grass-stained tusks longer than the tallest man, he takes on the role of a Moby-Dick, almost daring the hunters to follow him farther into the scrub. Glimpsed in a distant corner of Sean’s concession, he evades their traps and finally crosses into neighboring Mozambique.

Courtney thus faces a Hobson’s choice: either finish the safari on his concession and deny his client-friend’s dying wish to have a shot at the magnificent beast, or venture over the border into the midst of a nasty guerrilla war between two fierce African armies. Courtney’s dilemma is heightened when in the course of hunting a lion, one of his trackers is mauled, and a lioness with cubs is shot by mistake--both unpardonable sins under Zimbabwe’s strict game regulations. That means that at the end of this safari, he will almost certainly lose his professional hunter’s license; Monterro helps commit him to follow Tukutela with the offer of a half-million-dollar fee to carry on.

This is unfortunate for the reader, for when the safari strays into Mozambique, Smith loses his feel for the book. A settler’s son with an ax to grind, Smith is more intent on portraying the brutality and corrupt vision of the Marxist brigands and potentates who have taken over parts of southern Africa than on keeping to his original tale--the story of a great hunter’s last hunt.

There also is an intriguing subplot that might have been developed instead--as the bush-hardened Courtney finds himself falling for Monterro’s beautiful, city-bred daughter, Claudia. Their love affair, the hunt for Tukutela and Courtney’s interesting relationship with his loyal band of trackers offer the ingredients for a wonderful study of man and nature. But instead, Smith changes the book into a cheap thriller about Sean’s attempt to rescue Claudia from the clutches of a fiendish African guerrilla leader, General China.

Where in the early pages Smith devotes his considerable skills to explaining the tactics and logistics of hunting lion and elephant, he spends the latter half having Courtney doing outlandish nonsense, like trying to capture a fleet of Russian Hind helicopters for General China or training a band of illiterate guerrilla soldiers to accurately shoot sophisticated Russian surface-to-air Stinger missiles. In this section, Smith’s gift for the narrative sinks to the banal, as when General China tortures Claudia to the point where she loses some of her idealistic notions about African rule.

Smith is playing politics here; he’s representing the frustration of the Afrikaner at the simplistic view of many Americans and Europeans toward Africa. There is nothing wrong with Smith’s premise, of course: Many of Africa’s black leaders have shown themselves to be every bit as shallow and cruel as the European colonists they replaced. But it’s a shame to waste a good novel on the point,. and Smith isn’t very good at writing it, as evidenced in this cliche-driven exchange between Claudia and General China:

“ ‘My very dear Miss Monterro, your childlike belief in the myth of the essential goodness of mankind is really rather touching. I certainly have not fought so hard and so long to gain power simply to hand it over to a bunch of illiterate peasants. . . .’

“ ‘So you’re every bit as bad as you say the others are.’ There were hot spots of anger on Claudia’s cheeks. This was the man who had put chains on her wrists and incarcerated her in that vile pit. She hated him with all her strength.

“ ‘I think you are actually beginning to understand at last, even through the haze of your liberal emotions. In Africa, there are no good guys and no bad guys, there are simply winners and losers.’ He smiled again. ‘And I assure you, Miss Monterro, that I intend to be one of the winners.’ ”

Fortunately for Africa, only novelists--and, occasionally, Hollywood screenwriters--talk like that. Today in Africa some winners are starting to emerge. White South Africans of Smith’s generation are asking whether there can’t be some accommodation with the black majority. Some blacks--and South Africa probably has more college-educated blacks than any other 10 African countries--are asking whether majority rule has to mean expelling all the Sean Courtneys of the world. And there are still many animals left to hunt and photograph, thanks to the growing determination of people to save the continent’s great animal species and rain forests.

South Africa appears to be about ready to join the league of civilized nations. Smith is still working on old myths and old arguments, and in this book, Sean Courtney already sounds a little outdated.