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running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled
his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating
them with relish.
{'Fisi,'} M'Cola would say and shake his head in delighted sorrow at
there being such an awful beast. Fisi, the hyena, hermaphroditic,
self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer,
potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler,
camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion
leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back,
mongrel dog-smart in the face; whack from the little Mannlicher and then the
horrid circle starting. 'Fisi,' M'Cola laughed, ashamed of him, shaking his
bald black head. 'Fisi. Eats himself. Fisi.'
The hyena was a dirty joke but bird shooting was a clean joke. My
whisky was a clean joke. There were many variations of that joke. Some we
come to later. The Mohammedans and all religions were a joke. A joke on all
the people who had them. Charo, the other gun bearer, was short, very
serious and highly religious. All Ramadan he never swallowed his saliva
until sunset and when the sun was almost down I'd see him watching
nervously. He had a bottle with him of some sort of tea and he would finger
it and watch the sun and I would see M'Cola watching him and pretending not
to see. This was not outrightly funny to him. This was something that he
could not laugh about openly but that he felt superior to and wondered at
the silliness of it. The Mohammedan religion was very fashionable and all
the higher social grades among the boys were Mohammedans. It was something
that gave caste, something to believe in, something fashionable and
god-giving to suffer a little for each year, something that made you
superior to other people, something that gave you more complicated habits of
eating, something that I understood and M'Cola did not understand, nor care
about, and he watched Charo watch for the sun to set with that blank look on
his face that it put on about all things that he was not a part of. Charo
was deadly thirsty and truly devout and the sun set very slowly. I looked at
it, red over the trees, nudged him and he grinned. M'Cola offered me the
water bottle solemnly. I shook my head and Charo grinned again. M'Cola
looked blank. Then the sun was down and Charo had the bottle tilted up, his
Adam's apple rising and falling greedily and M'Cola looking at him and then
looking away.
In the early days, before we became good friends, he did not trust me
at all. When anything came up he went into this blankness. I liked Charo
much better then. We understood each other on the question of religion and
Charo admired my shooting and always shook hands and smiled when we had
killed anything particularly good. This was flattering and pleasing. M'Cola
looked on all this early shooting as a series of lucky accidents. We were
supposed to shoot. We had not yet shot anything that amounted to anything
and he was not really my gun bearer. He was Mr. Jackson Phillip's gun bearer
and he had been loaned to me. I meant nothing to him. He did not like me nor
dislike me. He was politely contemptuous of Karl. Who he liked was Mama.
The evening we killed the first lion it was dark when we came in sight
of camp. The killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory. It
was agreed beforehand that P.O.M. should have the first shot but since it
was the first lion any of us had ever shot at, and it was very late in the
day, really too late to take the lion on, once he was hit we were to make a
dogfight of it and anyone was free to get him. This was a good plan as it
was nearly sundown and if the lion got into cover, wounded, it would be too
dark to do anything about it without a mess. I remember seeing the lion
looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby looking tree
in a patch of orchard bush and P.O.M. kneeling to shoot and wanting to tell
her to sit down and make sure of him. Then there was the short-barrelled
explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a run, a
strange, heavy-shouldered, foot-swinging, cat run. I hit him with the
Springfield and he went down and spun over and I shot again, too quickly,
and threw a cloud of dirt over him. But there he was, stretched out, on his
belly, and, with the sun just over the top of the trees, and the grass very
green, we walked up on him like a posse, or a gang of Black and Tans, guns
ready and cocked, not knowing whether he was stunned or dead. When we were
close M'Cola threw a stone at him. It hit him in the flank and from the way
it hit you could tell he was a dead animal. I was sure P.O.M. had hit him
but there was only one bullet hole, well back, just below the spine and
ranging forward to come to the surface under the skin of the chest. You
could feel the bullet under the skin and M'Cola made a slit and cut it out.
It was a 220-grain solid bullet from the Springfield and it had raked him,
going through lungs and heart.
I was so surprised by the way he had rolled over dead from the shot
after we had been prepared for a charge, for heroics, and for drama, that I
felt more let down than pleased. It was our first lion and we were very
ignorant and this was not what we had paid to see. Charo and M'Cola both
shook P.O.M.'s hand and then Charo came over and shook hands with me.
'Good shot, B'wana,' he said in Swahili. {'Piga m'uzuri.'}
'Did you shoot, Karl?' I asked.
'No. I was just going to when you shot.'
'You didn't shoot him, Pop?'
'No. You'd have heard it.' He opened the breech and took out the two
big 450 No. 2's.
'I'm sure I missed him,' P.O.M. said.
'I was sure you hit him.. I still think you hit him,' I said.
'Mama hit,' M'Cola said.
'Where?' Charo asked.
'Hit,' said M'Cola. 'Hit.'
'You rolled him over,' Pop said to me. 'God, he went over like a
rabbit.'
'I couldn't believe it.'
'Mama {piga,'} M'Cola said. {''Piga Simba.'}
As we saw the camp fire in the dark ahead of us, coming in that night,
M'Cola suddenly commenced to shout a stream of high-pitched, rapid, singing
words in Wakamba ending in the word {'Simb}a{'}. Someone at the camp shouted
back one word. D 47
'Mama!' M'Cola shouted. Then another long stream. Then 'Mama! Mama!'
Through the dark came all the porters, the cook, the skinner, the boys,
and the headman.
'Mama!' M'Cola shouted. 'Mama {piga Simba.'}
The boys came dancing, crowing, and beating time and chanting something
from down in their chests that started like a cough and sounded like {'Hey
la Mama! Hay la Mama! Hey la Mama!'}
The rolling-eyed skinner picked P.O.M. up, the big cook and the boys
held her, and the others pressing forward to lift and if not to lift to
touch and hold, they danced and sang through the dark around the fire and to
our tent.
{'Hey la Mama! huh! huh! huh! Hay la Mama! huh! huh! huh!'} they sang
the lion dance with that deep, lion asthmatic cough in it. Then at the tent
they put her down and everyone, very shyly, shook hands, the boys saying
{'m'uzuri, Memsahib,''} and M'Cola and the porters all saying {''m'uzuri},
Mama' with much feeling in the accenting of the word 'Mama'.
Afterwards in the chairs in front of the fire, sitting with the drinks,
Pop said, 'You shot it. M'Cola would kill anyone who said you didn't.'
'You know, I feel as though I did shoot it,' P.O.M. said. 'I don't
believe I'd be able to stand it if I really had shot it. I'd be too proud.
Isn't triumph marvellous?'
'Good old Mama,' Karl said.
'I believe you did shoot him,' I said.
'Oh, let's not go into that,' P.O.M. said. 'I feel so wonderful about
just being supposed to have killed him. You know people never used to carry
me on their shoulders much at home.'
'No one knows how to behave in America,' Pop said. 'Most uncivilized.'
'We'll carry you in Key West,' Karl said. 'Poor old Mama.'
'Let's not talk about it,' P.O.M. said. 'I like it too much. Shouldn't
I maybe distribute largess?'
'They didn't do it for that,' Pop said. 'But it is all right to give
something to celebrate.'
'Oh, I want to give them all a great deal of money,' P.O.M. said.
'Isn't triumph simply marvellous?'
'Good old Mama,' I said. 'You killed him.'
'No, I didn't. Don't lie to me. Just let me enjoy my triumph.'
Anyway M'Cola did not trust me for a long time. Until P.O.M.'s licence
ran out, she was his favourite and we were simply a lot of people who
interfered and kept Mama from shooting things. Once her licence was out and
she was no longer shooting, she dropped back into non-combatant status with
him and as we began to hunt kudu and Pop stayed in camp and sent us out
alone with the trackers, Karl with Charo and M'Cola and I together, M'Cola
dropped Pop visibly in his estimation. It was only temporary of course. He
was Pop's man and I believe his working estimations were only from day to
day and required an unbroken series of events to have any meaning. But
something had happened between us.
It dated back to the time of Droopy, after I had come back from being
ill in Nairobi and we had gone on a foot safari to hunt rhino in the forest.
Droopy was a real savage with lids to his eyes that nearly covered them,
handsome, with a great deal of style, a fine hunter and a beautiful tracker.
He was about thirty-five, I should think, and wore only a piece of cloth
knotted over one shoulder, and a fez that some hunter had given him. He
always carried a spear. M'Cola wore an old U. S. Army khaki tunic, complete
with buttons, that had originally been brought out for Droopy, who had been
away somewhere and had missed getting it. Twice Pop had brought it out for
Droopy and finally M'Cola had said, 'Give it to me'.
Pop had let him have it and M'Cola had worn it ever since. It, a pair
of shorts, his fuzzy wool curler's cap, and a knitted army sweater he wore
when washing the tunic, were the only garments I ever saw on the old man
until he took my bird-shooting coat. For shoes he used sandals cut from old
motor-car tyres. He had slim, handsome legs with well-turned ankles on the
style of Babe Ruth's and I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw
him with the tunic off and noticed how old his upper body was. It had that
aged look you see in photographs of Jeffries and Sharkey posing thirty years
after, the ugly, old-man biceps and the fallen pectoral muscles.
'How old is M'Cola?' I asked Pop.
'He must be over fifty,' Pop said. 'He's got a grown-up family in the
native reserve.'
'How are his kids?'
'No good, worthless. He can't handle them. We tried one as a porter.
But he was no good.'
M'Cola was not jealous of Droopy. He simply knew that Droopy was a
better man than he was. More of a hunter, a faster and a cleaner tracker,
and a great stylist in everything he did. He admired Droopy in the same way
we did and being out with him, it made him realize that he was wearing
Droopy's tunic and that he had been a porter before he became a gun bearer
and suddenly he ceased being an old timer and we were hunting together; he
and I hunting together and Droopy in command of the show.
That had been a fine hunt. The afternoon of the day we came into the
country we walked about four miles from camp along a deep rhino trail that
graded through the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees,
as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a
foot deep in the ground and smoothly worn and we left it where it slanted
down through a divide in the hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed,
sweating, the small, steep hill on the right to sit there with our backs
against the hilltop and glass the country. It was a green, pleasant country,
with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of a mountain, and
it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the
thick timber on the mountain. Fingers of the forest came down on to the head
of some of the slopes and it was there, at the forest edge, that we watched
for rhino to come out. If you looked away from the forest and the mountain
side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down
until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away,
across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of
Lake Manyara.
We all lay there on the hillside and watched the country carefully for
rhino. Droopy was on the other side of the hilltop, squatted on his heels,
looking, and M'Cola sat below us. There was a cool breeze from the east and
it blew the grass in waves on the hillsides. There were many large white
clouds and the tall trees of the forest on the mountain side grew so closely
and were so foliaged that it looked as though you could walk on their tops.
Behind this mountain there was a gap and then another mountain and the far
mountain was dark blue with forest in the distance.
Until five o'clock we did not see anything. Then, without the glasses,
I saw something moving over the shoulder of one of the valleys toward a
strip of the timber. In the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and
minute at the distance, red-coloured in the sun, moving with a quick
waterbug-like motion across the hill. Then there were three more of them
that came out of the forest, dark in the shadow, and two that fought,
tinily, in the glasses, pushing head-on, fighting in front of a clump of
bushes while we watched them and the light failed. It was too dark to get
down the hill, across the valley and up the narrow slope of mountain side to
them in time for a shot. So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the
dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot,
walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we
saw the firelight in the trees.
We were excited that night because we had seen the three rhino and
early the next morning while we were eating breakfast before starting out,
Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo he had found feeding at the edge
of the forest not two miles from camp. We went there, still tasting coffee
and kippers in the early morning heart-pounding of excitement, and the
native Droopy had left watching them pointed where they had crossed a deep
gulch and gone into an open patch of forest. He said there were two big
bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly
on the game trails, pushing the vines aside and seeing the tracks and the
quantities of fresh dung, but though we went on into the forest, where it
was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see or hear them.
Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but that was all. There
were numbers of rhino trails there in the woods and may strawy piles of
dung, but we saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some monkeys, and
when we came out we were wet to our waists from the dew, and the sun was
quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up, and we
knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out would have gone back deep into
the forest to rest out of the heat.
The others started back to camp with Pop and M'Cola. There was no meat
in camp, and I wanted to hunt back in a circle with Droopy to see if we
could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery
and it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk,
and to be able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for
the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked Droopy and liked to watch him walk.
He strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and
to feel the grass under my soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the
rifle, held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and
the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass;
with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England
orchard to walk through. I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted
to make a shot to impress Droopy.
From the top of one rise we saw two kongoni showing yellow on a
hillside about a mile away and I motioned to Droop that we would go after
them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and two cows.
Waterbuck was the one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat
and I had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the
buck as he tore away, remembered about the worthless meat, and having the
head, and did not shoot.
'No shoot kuro?' Droopy asked in Swahili. {'Doumi sana}. A good bull.'
I tried to tell him that I had a better one and that it was no good to
eat.
He grinned.
{'Piga kongoni m'uzuri.'}
Piga' was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should
sound or the announcement of a hit. 'M'uzuri', meaning good, well, better,
had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I
used to make up sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M'usuri in them, but
now it seemed natural, no longer to be italicized, just as all the words
came to seem the proper and natural words and there was nothing odd or
unseemly in the stretching of the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a man
carrying a spear. The tribal marks and the tattooed places seemed natural
and handsome adornments and I regretted not having any of my own. My own
scars were all informal, some irregular and sprawling, others simply puffy
welts. I had one on my forehead that people still commented on, asking if I
had bumped my head, but Droop had handsome ones beside his cheekbones and
others, symmetrical and decorative, on his chest and belly. I was thinking
that I had one good one, a sort of embossed Christmas tree, on the bottom of
my right foot that only served to wear out socks, when we jumped two
reedbuck. They went off through the trees and then stood at sixty yards, the
thin, graceful buck looking back, and I shot him high and a touch behind the
shoulder. He gave a jump and went off very fast.
'Piga.' Droopy smiled. We had both heard the whunk of the bullet.
'Kufa,' I told him. 'Dead.'
But when we came up to him, lying on his side, his heart was still
beating strongly, although to all appearances he was dead. Droopy had no
skinning knife and I had only a penknife to stick him with. I felt for the
heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under the
hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I
could feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push
it, but I felt around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against
my fingers. Once bled, I started to open him, with the little knife, still
showing off to Droopy, and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut away
the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside
it.
Droopy asked for the knife. Now he was going to show me something.
Skilfully he slit open the stomach and turned it inside, tripe side, out,
emptying the grass in it on the ground, shook it, then put the liver and
kidneys inside it and with the knife cut a switch from the tree the buck lay
under and sewed the stomach together with the withe so that the tripe made a
bag to carry the other delicacies in. Then he cut a pole and put the bag on
the end of it, running it through the flaps, and put it over his shoulder in
the way tramps carried their property in a handkerchief on the end of a
stick in Blue Jay corn plaster advertisements when we were children. It was
a good trick and I thought how I would show it to John Staib in Wyoming some
time and he would smile his deaf man's smile (you had to throw pebbles at
him to make him stop when you heard a bull bugle), and I knew what John
would say. He would say, 'By Godd, Urnust, dot's smardt'.
Droop handed me the stick, then took off his single garment, made a
sung and got the buck up on his back. I tried to help him and suggested by
signs that we cut a pole and sling him, carrying him between us, but he
wanted to carry him alone. So we started for camp, me with the tripe bag on
the end of a stick over my shoulder, my rifle slung, and Droopy staggering
steadily ahead, sweating heavily, under the buck. I tried to get him to hang
him in a tree and leave him until we could send out a couple of porters, and
to that end we put him in the crotch of a tree. But when Droopy saw that I
meant to go off and leave him there rather than simply allow him to drain he
got him down on to his shoulders again and we went on into camp, the boys,
around the cooking fire, all laughing at the tripe bag over my shoulder as
we came in.
This was the kind of hunting that I liked. No riding in cars, the
country broken up instead of the plains, and I was completely happy. I had
been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I
was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted
without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at
the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with
a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to
write, happy in knowing that at four o'clock we would be starting out to
hunt again. I would not even write a letter. The only person I really cared
about, except the children, was with nie, and I had no wish to share this
life with anyone who was not there, only to live it, being completely happy
and quite tired. I knew that I was shooting well and I had that feeling of
well-being and confidence that is so much more pleasant to have than to hear
about.
As it turned out, we started soon after three to be on the hill by
four. But it was nearly five before we saw the first rhino come bustling
short-leggedly across the ridge of hill in almost the same place we had seen
the rhino the night before. We sat where he went into the edge of the forest
near where we had seen the two fighting and then took a course that would
lead us down the hill, across the grown-over gully at the bottom, and up the
steep slope to where there was a thorn tree with yellow blossoms that marked
the place where we had seen the rhino go in.
Coming straight up the slope in sight of the thorn tree, the wind
blowing across the hill, I tried to walk as slowly as I could and put a
handkerchief inside the sweatband of my hat to keep the perspiration out of
my glasses. I expected to shoot at any minute and I wanted to slow up enough
so my heart would not be pounding. In shooting large animals there is no
reason ever to miss if you have a clear shot and can shoot and know where to
shoot, unless you are unsteady from a run or a climb or fog your glasses,
break them or run out of cloth or paper to wipe them clean. The glasses were
the biggest hazard and I used to carry four handkerchiefs and change them
from the left to the right pocket when they were wet.
We came up to the yellow blossomed tree very carefully, like people
walking up to a bevy of quail the dogs have pointed, and the rhino was not
in sight. We went all through the edge of the forest and it was full of
tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and
it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side
of the mountain, hoping to see a rhino in the open glades. When it was
almost too dark to shoot, I saw Droopy stop and crouch. With his head down
he motioned us forward. Crawling up, we saw a large rhino and a small one
standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.
'Cow and calf,' Pop said softly. 'Can't shoot her. Let me look at her
horn.' He took the glasses from M'Cola.
'Can she see us?' P.O.M. asked.
'No.'
'How far are they?'
'Must be nearly five hundred yards.'
'My God, she looks big,' I whispered.
'She's a big cow,' Pop said. 'Wonder what became of the bull?' He was
pleased and excited by the sight of game. 'Too dark to shoot unless we're
right on him.'
The rhinos had turned and were feeding. They never seemed to move
slowly. They either bustled or stood still.
'What makes them so red?' P.O.M. asked. 'Rolling in the mud,' Pop
answered. 'We better get along while there's light.'
The sun --was down when we came out of the forest and looked down the
slope and across to the hill where we had watched from with our glasses. We
should have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back
up the trail the way we had come, but we decided, like fools, to grade
straight across the mountainside below the edge of the forest. So in the
dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed
only as wooded patches until you were in them, slid down, clung to vines,
stumbled and climbed and slid again, down and down, then steeply,
impossibly, up, hearing the rustle of night things and the cough of a
leopard hunting baboons, me scared of snakes, and touching each root and
branch with snake fear in the dark.
To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into
the moonlight and the long, too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed
one foot up to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at a time,
leaning forward against the grade and the altitude, dead tired and gun
weary, single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the top
where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and
on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into
camp.
So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a
whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the canvas bath had been
a quarter filled with hot water.
{'Bathi}, B'wana.'
'Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,' you say.
'I never could,' says P.O.M. 'You all made me.'
'You climbed better than any of us.'
'Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?'
'I wonder,' Pop said. 'I suppose it's merely condition.'
'It's riding in the damned cars that ruins us.'
'If we did that walk every night we could come back in three nights
from now and never feel it.'
'Yes. But I'd be as scared of snakes if we did it every night for a
year.'
'You'd get over it.'
'No,' I said. 'They scare me stiff. Do you remember that time we
touched hands behind the tree?'
'Rather,' said Pop. 'You jumped two yards. Are you really afraid of
them, or only talking?'
'They scare me sick,' I said. 'They always have.'
'What's the matter with you men?' P.O.M. said. 'Why haven't I heard
anything about the war to-night?'
'We're too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?'
'Not me,' said Pop. 'Where is that boy with the whisky?' Then calling
in that feeble, clowning falsetto, 'Kayti... Katy-ay!'
{'Bathi,'} said Molo again softly, but insistently.
'Too tired.'
'Memsahib {bathi,'} Molo said hopefully.
'I'll go,' said P.O.M. 'But you two hurry up with your drinking. I'm
hungry.'
'{Bathi,'} said Kayti severely to Pop.
{'Bathi} yourself,' said Pop. 'Don't bully me.'
Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.
'All right. All right,' said Pop. 'Going to have one?' he asked.
'We'll have just one,' I said, 'and then we'll {bathi.'}
{'Bathi}, B'wana M'Kumba,' Molo said. P.O.M. came toward the fire
wearing her blue dressing-gown and mosquito boots.
'Go on,' she said. 'You can have another when you come out. There's
nice, warm, muddy water.'
'They bully us,' Pop said.
'Do you remember the time we were sheep hunting and your hat blew off
and nearly fell on to the ram?' I asked her, the whisky racing my mind back
to Wyoming.
'Go take your {bathi,'} P.O.M. said. 'I'm going to have a gimlet.'
In the morning we were dressed before daylight, ate breakfast, and were
hunting the forest edge and the sunken valleys where Droop had seen the
buffalo before the sun was up. But they were not there. It was a long hunt
and we came back to camp and decided to send the lorries for porters and
move with a foot safari to where there was supposed to be water in a stream
that came down out of the mountain beyond where we had seen the rhinos the
night before. Being camped there we could hunt a new country along the
forest edge and we would be much closer to the mountain.
The trucks were to bring in Karl from his kudu camp where he seemed to
be getting disgusted, or discouraged, or both, and he could go down to the
Rift Valley the next day and kill some meat and try for an oryx. If we found
good rhino we would send for him. We did not want to fire any shots where we
were going except at rhino in order not to scare them, and we needed meat.
The rhino seemed very shy and I knew from Wyoming how the shy game will all
shift out of a small country, a country being an area, a valley or range of
hills, a man can hunt in, after a shot or two. We planned this all out, Pop
consulting with Droopy, and then sent the lorries off with Dan to recruit
porters.
Late in the afternoon they were back with Karl, his outfit, and forty
M'Bulus, good-looking savages with a pompous headman who wore the only pair
of shorts among them. Karl was thin now, his skin sallow, his eyes very
tired looking and he seemed a little desperate. He had been eight days in
the kudu camp in the hills, hunting hard, with no one with him who spoke any
English, and they had only seen two cows and jumped a bull out of range. The
guides claimed they had seen another bull but Karl had thought it was
kongoni, or that they said it was a kongoni, and had not shot. He was bitter
about this and it was not a happy outfit.
'I never saw his horns. I don't believe it was a bull,' he said. Kudu
hunting was a touchy subject with him now and we let it alone.
'He'll get an oryx down there and he'll feel better,' Pop said. 'It's
gotten on his nerves a little.'
Karl agreed to the plan for us to move ahead into the new country, and
for him to go down for meat.
'Whatever you say,' he said. 'Absolutely whatever you say.'
'It will give him some shooting,' Pop said. 'Then he'll feel better.'
'We'll get one. Then you get one. Whoever gets his first can go on down
after oryx. You'll probably get an oryx to-morrow anyway when you're hunting
meat.'
'Whatever you say,' Karl said. His mind was bitterly revolving eight
blank days of hill climbing in the heat, out before daybreak, back at dark,
hunting an animal whose Swahili name he could not then remember, with
trackers in whom he had no confidence, coming back to eat alone, no one to
whom he could talk, his wife nine thousand miles and three months away, and
how was his dog and how was his job, and god-damn it where were they and
what if he missed one when he got a shot, he wouldn't, you never missed when
it was really important, he was sure of that, that was one of the tenets of
his faith, but what if he got excited and missed, and why didn't he get any
letters, what did the guide say kongoni for that time, they did, he knew
they did, but he said nothing of all that, only, 'Whatever you say', a
little desperately.
'Come on, cheer up, you bastard,' I said.
'I'm cheerful. What's the matter with you?'
'Have a drink.'
'I don't want a drink. I want a kudu.'
Later Pop said, 'I thought he'd do well off by himself with no one to
hurry him or rattle him. He'll be all right. He's a good lad.'
'He wants someone to tell him exactly what to do and still leave him
alone and not rattle him,' I said. 'It's hell for him to shoot in front of
everybody. He's not a damned show-off like me.'
'He made a damned fine shot at that leopard,' Pop said.
'Two of them,' I said. 'The second was as good as the first. Hell, he
can shoot. On the range he'll shoot the pants off of any of us. But he
worries about it and I rattle him trying to get him to speed up.'
'You're a little hard on him sometimes,' Pop said.
'Hell, he knows me. He knows what I think of him. He doesn't mind.'
'I still think he'll find himself off by himself,' Pop said. 'It's just
a question of confidence. He's really a good shot.'
'He's got the best buff, the best waterbuck, and the best lion, now,' I
said. 'He's got nothing to worry about.'
'The Memsahib has the best lion, brother. Don't make any mistake about
that.'
'I'm glad of that. But he's got a damned fine lion and a big leopard.
Everything he has is good. We've got plenty of time. He's got nothing to
worry about. What the hell is he so gloomy about?'
'We'll get an early start in the morning so we can finish it off before
it gets too hot for the little Memsahib.'
'She's in the best shape of any one.'
'She's marvellous. She's like a little terrier.'
We went out that afternoon and glassed the country from the hills and
never saw a thing. That night after supper we were in the tent. P.O.M.
disliked intensely being compared to a little terrier. If she must be like
any dog, and she did not wish to be, she would prefer a wolfhound, something
lean, racy, long-legged and ornamental. Her courage was so automatic and so
much a simple state of being that she never thought of danger; then, too,
danger was in the hands of Pop and for Pop she had a complete, clear-seeing,
absolutely trusting adoration. Pop was her ideal of how a man should be,
brave, gentle, comic, never losing his temper, never bragging, never
complaining except in a joke, tolerant, understanding, intelligent, drinking
a little too much as a good man should, and, to her eyes, very handsome.
'Don't you think Pop's handsome?'
'No,' I said. 'Droopy's handsome.'
'Droopy's {beautiful}. But don't you {really} think Pop's handsome?'
'Hell, no. I like him as well as any man I've ever known, but I'm
damned if he's handsome.'
'I think he's lovely looking. But you understand about how I feel about
him, don't you?'
'Sure. I'm as fond of the bastard myself.'
'But {don't} you think he's handsome, really?'
'Nope.'
Then, a little later:
'Well, who's handsome to you?'
'Belmonte and Pop. And you.'
'Don't be patriotic,' I said. 'Who's a beautiful woman?'
'Garbo.'
'Not any more. Josie is. Margot is.'
'Yes, they are. I know I'm not.'
'You're lovely.'
'Let's talk about Mr. J. P. I don't like you to call him Pop. It's not
dignified.'
'He and I aren't dignified together.'
'Yes, but I'm dignified with him. Don't you think he's wonderful?'
'Yes, and he doesn't have to read books written by some female he's
tried to help get published saying how he's yellow.'
'She's just jealous and malicious. You never should have helped her.
Some people never forgive that.'
'It's a shame, though, with all that talent gone to malice and nonsense
and self-praise. It's a goddamned shame, really. It's a shame you never knew
her before she went to pot. You know a funny thing; she never could write
dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do it from my stuff and used
it in that book. She had never written like that before. She never could
forgive learning that and she was afraid people would notice it, where she'd
learned it, so she had to attack me. It's a funny racket, really. But I
swear she was nice before she got ambitious. You would have liked her then,
really.'
'Maybe, but I don't think so,' said P.O.M. 'We have fun though, don't
we? Without all those people.'
'God damn it if we don't. I've had a better time every year since I can
remember.'
'But isn't Mr. J. P. wonderful? Really?'
'Yes. He's wonderful.'
'Oh, you're nice to say it. Poor Karl.'
'Why?'
'Without his wife.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Poor Karl.'
So in the morning, again, we started ahead of the porters and went down
and across the hills and through a deeply forested valley and then up and
across a long rise of country with high grass that made the walking
difficult, and on and up and across, resting sometimes in the shade of a
tree, and then on and up and down and across, all in high grass now, that
you had to break a trail in, and the sun was very hot. The five of us in
single file, Droop and M'Cola with a big gun apiece, hung with musettes and
water bottles and the cameras, we all sweating in the sun, Pop and I with
guns and the Memsahib trying to walk like Droopy, her Stetson tilted on one
side, happy to be on a trip, pleased about how comfortable her boots were,
we came finally to a thicket of thorn trees over a ravine that ran down from
the side of a ridge to the water and we leaned the guns against the trees
and went in under the close shade and lay on the ground P O M. got the books
out of one of the musettes and she and Pop read while I followed the ravine
down to the little stream that came out of the mountainside, and found a
fresh lion track and many rhino tunnels in the tall grass that came higher
than your head. It was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine and I was
glad to lean my back against the tree trunk and read in Tolstoy's
{Sevastopol}. It was a very young book and had one fine description of
fighting in it, where the French take the redoubt, and I thought about
Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a
writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to
write truly of, and those writers who had not seen it were always very
jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as
a subject, while, really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that
they had missed. Then Sevastopol made me think of the Boulevard Sevastopol
in Paris, about riding a bicycle down it in the rain on the way home from
Strassburg and the slipperiness of the rails of the tram cars and the
feeling of riding on greasy, slippery asphalt and cobble stones in traffic
in the rain, and how we had nearly lived on the Boulevard du Temple that
time, and I remembered the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and
the wall paper, and instead we had taken the upstairs of the pavilion in
Notre Dame des Champs in the courtyard with the sawmill {(and the sudden
whine of the saw, the smell of sawdust and the chestnut tree over the roof
with a mad woman downstairs)}, and the year worrying about money {(all of
the stories back in the post that came in through a slit in the saw-mill
door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always
anecdotes, sketches, conies, etc. They did not want them, and we lived on
poireaux and drank cahors and water)}, and how fine the fountains were at
the Place de L'Observatoire ({water sheen rippling on the bronze of horses'
manes, bronze breasts and shoulders, green under thin-flowing} {water)}, and
when they put up the bust of Flaubert in the Luxembourg on the short cut
through the gardens on the way to the rue Soufflot {(one that we believed
in, loved without criticism, heavy now in stone as an idol should be)}. He
had not seen war but he had seen a revolution and the Commune, and a
revolution is much the best if you do not become bigoted because every one
speaks the same language. Just as civil war is the best war for a writer,
the most complete. Stendhal had seen a war and Napoleon taught him to write.
He was teaching everybody then; but no one else learned. Dostoevski was made
by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is
forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary
shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if
they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and
maybe it wouldn't. He seemed sad, really, like Camera. Tolstoy was a small
man. Joyce was of medium height and he wore his eyes out. And that last
night, drunk, with Joyce and the thing he kept quoting from Edgar Quinet,
'Fraiche et rose comme au jour de la bataille'. I didn't have it right I
knew. And when you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three
years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.
What I had to do was work. I did not care, particularly, how it all
came out. I did not take my own life seriously any more, any one else's
life, yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I
would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing, it
was the one thing that always made you feel good, and in the meantime it was
my own damned life and I would lead it where and how I pleased. And where I
had led it now pleased me very much. This was a better sky than Italy. The
hell it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan in
the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but
not the country.
All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet,
but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it
already.
Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with
white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was
happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love,
when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never
have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and
more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for
that long, sudden-ended always, making time stand still, sometime so very
still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and,< it is slow in
starting. But you are not alone, because if you have ever really loved her
happy and untragic, she loves you always, no matter whom she loves nor where
she goes she loves you more. So if you have loved some woman and some
country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards, it makes no
difference. Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes
of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you
paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all
the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move
slowly. I have loved country all my life, the country was always better than
the people. I could only care about people a very few at a time.
P.O.M. was sleeping. She was always lovely to look at asleep, sleeping
quietly, close curled like an animal, with nothing of the being dead look
that Karl had asleep. Pop slept quietly too, you could see his soul was
close in his body. His body no longer housed him fittingly. It had gone on
and changed, thickening here, losing its lines, bloating a little there, but
inside he was young and lean and tall and hard as when he galloped lion on
the plain below Wami, and the pouches under his eyes were all outside, so
that now I saw him asleep the way P.O.M. saw him always. M'Cola was an old
man asleep, without history and without mystery. Droopy did not sleep. He
sat on his heels and watched for the safari.
We saw them coming a long way off. At first the boxes just showed above
the high grass, then a line of heads, then they were in a hollow, and there
was only the point of a spear in the sun, then they came up a rise of ground
and I could see the strung out line coming towards us. They had gone a
little too far to the left and Droopy waved to signal them toward us. They
made camp, Pop warning them to be quiet, and we sat under the dining tent
and were comfortable in the chairs and talked. That night we hunted and saw
nothing. The next morning we hunted and saw nothing and the next evening the
same. It was very interesting but there were no results. The wind blew hard
from the east and the ground was broken in short ridges of hills coming down
close {from} the forest so you could not get above it without sending your
scent on ahead of you on the wind to warn everything. You could not see into
the sun in the evening, nor on the heavy shadowed hillsides to the west,
beyond which the sun was setting at the time the rhino would be coming out
of the forest, so all the country to the westward was a loss in the evening
and in the country we could hunt we found nothing. Meat came in from Karl's
camp by some porters we sent back. They came in carrying quarters of tommy,
his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating
them with relish.
{'Fisi,'} M'Cola would say and shake his head in delighted sorrow at
there being such an awful beast. Fisi, the hyena, hermaphroditic,
self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer,
potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler,
camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion
leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back,
mongrel dog-smart in the face; whack from the little Mannlicher and then the
horrid circle starting. 'Fisi,' M'Cola laughed, ashamed of him, shaking his
bald black head. 'Fisi. Eats himself. Fisi.'
The hyena was a dirty joke but bird shooting was a clean joke. My
whisky was a clean joke. There were many variations of that joke. Some we
come to later. The Mohammedans and all religions were a joke. A joke on all
the people who had them. Charo, the other gun bearer, was short, very
serious and highly religious. All Ramadan he never swallowed his saliva
until sunset and when the sun was almost down I'd see him watching
nervously. He had a bottle with him of some sort of tea and he would finger
it and watch the sun and I would see M'Cola watching him and pretending not
to see. This was not outrightly funny to him. This was something that he
could not laugh about openly but that he felt superior to and wondered at
the silliness of it. The Mohammedan religion was very fashionable and all
the higher social grades among the boys were Mohammedans. It was something
that gave caste, something to believe in, something fashionable and
god-giving to suffer a little for each year, something that made you
superior to other people, something that gave you more complicated habits of
eating, something that I understood and M'Cola did not understand, nor care
about, and he watched Charo watch for the sun to set with that blank look on
his face that it put on about all things that he was not a part of. Charo
was deadly thirsty and truly devout and the sun set very slowly. I looked at
it, red over the trees, nudged him and he grinned. M'Cola offered me the
water bottle solemnly. I shook my head and Charo grinned again. M'Cola
looked blank. Then the sun was down and Charo had the bottle tilted up, his
Adam's apple rising and falling greedily and M'Cola looking at him and then
looking away.
In the early days, before we became good friends, he did not trust me
at all. When anything came up he went into this blankness. I liked Charo
much better then. We understood each other on the question of religion and
Charo admired my shooting and always shook hands and smiled when we had
killed anything particularly good. This was flattering and pleasing. M'Cola
looked on all this early shooting as a series of lucky accidents. We were
supposed to shoot. We had not yet shot anything that amounted to anything
and he was not really my gun bearer. He was Mr. Jackson Phillip's gun bearer
and he had been loaned to me. I meant nothing to him. He did not like me nor
dislike me. He was politely contemptuous of Karl. Who he liked was Mama.
The evening we killed the first lion it was dark when we came in sight
of camp. The killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory. It
was agreed beforehand that P.O.M. should have the first shot but since it
was the first lion any of us had ever shot at, and it was very late in the
day, really too late to take the lion on, once he was hit we were to make a
dogfight of it and anyone was free to get him. This was a good plan as it
was nearly sundown and if the lion got into cover, wounded, it would be too
dark to do anything about it without a mess. I remember seeing the lion
looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby looking tree
in a patch of orchard bush and P.O.M. kneeling to shoot and wanting to tell
her to sit down and make sure of him. Then there was the short-barrelled
explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a run, a
strange, heavy-shouldered, foot-swinging, cat run. I hit him with the
Springfield and he went down and spun over and I shot again, too quickly,
and threw a cloud of dirt over him. But there he was, stretched out, on his
belly, and, with the sun just over the top of the trees, and the grass very
green, we walked up on him like a posse, or a gang of Black and Tans, guns
ready and cocked, not knowing whether he was stunned or dead. When we were
close M'Cola threw a stone at him. It hit him in the flank and from the way
it hit you could tell he was a dead animal. I was sure P.O.M. had hit him
but there was only one bullet hole, well back, just below the spine and
ranging forward to come to the surface under the skin of the chest. You
could feel the bullet under the skin and M'Cola made a slit and cut it out.
It was a 220-grain solid bullet from the Springfield and it had raked him,
going through lungs and heart.
I was so surprised by the way he had rolled over dead from the shot
after we had been prepared for a charge, for heroics, and for drama, that I
felt more let down than pleased. It was our first lion and we were very
ignorant and this was not what we had paid to see. Charo and M'Cola both
shook P.O.M.'s hand and then Charo came over and shook hands with me.
'Good shot, B'wana,' he said in Swahili. {'Piga m'uzuri.'}
'Did you shoot, Karl?' I asked.
'No. I was just going to when you shot.'
'You didn't shoot him, Pop?'
'No. You'd have heard it.' He opened the breech and took out the two
big 450 No. 2's.
'I'm sure I missed him,' P.O.M. said.
'I was sure you hit him.. I still think you hit him,' I said.
'Mama hit,' M'Cola said.
'Where?' Charo asked.
'Hit,' said M'Cola. 'Hit.'
'You rolled him over,' Pop said to me. 'God, he went over like a
rabbit.'
'I couldn't believe it.'
'Mama {piga,'} M'Cola said. {''Piga Simba.'}
As we saw the camp fire in the dark ahead of us, coming in that night,
M'Cola suddenly commenced to shout a stream of high-pitched, rapid, singing
words in Wakamba ending in the word {'Simb}a{'}. Someone at the camp shouted
back one word. D 47
'Mama!' M'Cola shouted. Then another long stream. Then 'Mama! Mama!'
Through the dark came all the porters, the cook, the skinner, the boys,
and the headman.
'Mama!' M'Cola shouted. 'Mama {piga Simba.'}
The boys came dancing, crowing, and beating time and chanting something
from down in their chests that started like a cough and sounded like {'Hey
la Mama! Hay la Mama! Hey la Mama!'}
The rolling-eyed skinner picked P.O.M. up, the big cook and the boys
held her, and the others pressing forward to lift and if not to lift to
touch and hold, they danced and sang through the dark around the fire and to
our tent.
{'Hey la Mama! huh! huh! huh! Hay la Mama! huh! huh! huh!'} they sang
the lion dance with that deep, lion asthmatic cough in it. Then at the tent
they put her down and everyone, very shyly, shook hands, the boys saying
{'m'uzuri, Memsahib,''} and M'Cola and the porters all saying {''m'uzuri},
Mama' with much feeling in the accenting of the word 'Mama'.
Afterwards in the chairs in front of the fire, sitting with the drinks,
Pop said, 'You shot it. M'Cola would kill anyone who said you didn't.'
'You know, I feel as though I did shoot it,' P.O.M. said. 'I don't
believe I'd be able to stand it if I really had shot it. I'd be too proud.
Isn't triumph marvellous?'
'Good old Mama,' Karl said.
'I believe you did shoot him,' I said.
'Oh, let's not go into that,' P.O.M. said. 'I feel so wonderful about
just being supposed to have killed him. You know people never used to carry
me on their shoulders much at home.'
'No one knows how to behave in America,' Pop said. 'Most uncivilized.'
'We'll carry you in Key West,' Karl said. 'Poor old Mama.'
'Let's not talk about it,' P.O.M. said. 'I like it too much. Shouldn't
I maybe distribute largess?'
'They didn't do it for that,' Pop said. 'But it is all right to give
something to celebrate.'
'Oh, I want to give them all a great deal of money,' P.O.M. said.
'Isn't triumph simply marvellous?'
'Good old Mama,' I said. 'You killed him.'
'No, I didn't. Don't lie to me. Just let me enjoy my triumph.'
Anyway M'Cola did not trust me for a long time. Until P.O.M.'s licence
ran out, she was his favourite and we were simply a lot of people who
interfered and kept Mama from shooting things. Once her licence was out and
she was no longer shooting, she dropped back into non-combatant status with
him and as we began to hunt kudu and Pop stayed in camp and sent us out
alone with the trackers, Karl with Charo and M'Cola and I together, M'Cola
dropped Pop visibly in his estimation. It was only temporary of course. He
was Pop's man and I believe his working estimations were only from day to
day and required an unbroken series of events to have any meaning. But
something had happened between us.
It dated back to the time of Droopy, after I had come back from being
ill in Nairobi and we had gone on a foot safari to hunt rhino in the forest.
Droopy was a real savage with lids to his eyes that nearly covered them,
handsome, with a great deal of style, a fine hunter and a beautiful tracker.
He was about thirty-five, I should think, and wore only a piece of cloth
knotted over one shoulder, and a fez that some hunter had given him. He
always carried a spear. M'Cola wore an old U. S. Army khaki tunic, complete
with buttons, that had originally been brought out for Droopy, who had been
away somewhere and had missed getting it. Twice Pop had brought it out for
Droopy and finally M'Cola had said, 'Give it to me'.
Pop had let him have it and M'Cola had worn it ever since. It, a pair
of shorts, his fuzzy wool curler's cap, and a knitted army sweater he wore
when washing the tunic, were the only garments I ever saw on the old man
until he took my bird-shooting coat. For shoes he used sandals cut from old
motor-car tyres. He had slim, handsome legs with well-turned ankles on the
style of Babe Ruth's and I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw
him with the tunic off and noticed how old his upper body was. It had that
aged look you see in photographs of Jeffries and Sharkey posing thirty years
after, the ugly, old-man biceps and the fallen pectoral muscles.
'How old is M'Cola?' I asked Pop.
'He must be over fifty,' Pop said. 'He's got a grown-up family in the
native reserve.'
'How are his kids?'
'No good, worthless. He can't handle them. We tried one as a porter.
But he was no good.'
M'Cola was not jealous of Droopy. He simply knew that Droopy was a
better man than he was. More of a hunter, a faster and a cleaner tracker,
and a great stylist in everything he did. He admired Droopy in the same way
we did and being out with him, it made him realize that he was wearing
Droopy's tunic and that he had been a porter before he became a gun bearer
and suddenly he ceased being an old timer and we were hunting together; he
and I hunting together and Droopy in command of the show.
That had been a fine hunt. The afternoon of the day we came into the
country we walked about four miles from camp along a deep rhino trail that
graded through the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees,
as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a
foot deep in the ground and smoothly worn and we left it where it slanted
down through a divide in the hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed,
sweating, the small, steep hill on the right to sit there with our backs
against the hilltop and glass the country. It was a green, pleasant country,
with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of a mountain, and
it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the
thick timber on the mountain. Fingers of the forest came down on to the head
of some of the slopes and it was there, at the forest edge, that we watched
for rhino to come out. If you looked away from the forest and the mountain
side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down
until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away,
across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of
Lake Manyara.
We all lay there on the hillside and watched the country carefully for
rhino. Droopy was on the other side of the hilltop, squatted on his heels,
looking, and M'Cola sat below us. There was a cool breeze from the east and
it blew the grass in waves on the hillsides. There were many large white
clouds and the tall trees of the forest on the mountain side grew so closely
and were so foliaged that it looked as though you could walk on their tops.
Behind this mountain there was a gap and then another mountain and the far
mountain was dark blue with forest in the distance.
Until five o'clock we did not see anything. Then, without the glasses,
I saw something moving over the shoulder of one of the valleys toward a
strip of the timber. In the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and
minute at the distance, red-coloured in the sun, moving with a quick
waterbug-like motion across the hill. Then there were three more of them
that came out of the forest, dark in the shadow, and two that fought,
tinily, in the glasses, pushing head-on, fighting in front of a clump of
bushes while we watched them and the light failed. It was too dark to get
down the hill, across the valley and up the narrow slope of mountain side to
them in time for a shot. So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the
dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot,
walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we
saw the firelight in the trees.
We were excited that night because we had seen the three rhino and
early the next morning while we were eating breakfast before starting out,
Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo he had found feeding at the edge
of the forest not two miles from camp. We went there, still tasting coffee
and kippers in the early morning heart-pounding of excitement, and the
native Droopy had left watching them pointed where they had crossed a deep
gulch and gone into an open patch of forest. He said there were two big
bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly
on the game trails, pushing the vines aside and seeing the tracks and the
quantities of fresh dung, but though we went on into the forest, where it
was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see or hear them.
Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but that was all. There
were numbers of rhino trails there in the woods and may strawy piles of
dung, but we saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some monkeys, and
when we came out we were wet to our waists from the dew, and the sun was
quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up, and we
knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out would have gone back deep into
the forest to rest out of the heat.
The others started back to camp with Pop and M'Cola. There was no meat
in camp, and I wanted to hunt back in a circle with Droopy to see if we
could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery
and it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk,
and to be able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for
the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked Droopy and liked to watch him walk.
He strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and
to feel the grass under my soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the
rifle, held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and
the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass;
with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England
orchard to walk through. I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted
to make a shot to impress Droopy.
From the top of one rise we saw two kongoni showing yellow on a
hillside about a mile away and I motioned to Droop that we would go after
them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and two cows.
Waterbuck was the one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat
and I had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the
buck as he tore away, remembered about the worthless meat, and having the
head, and did not shoot.
'No shoot kuro?' Droopy asked in Swahili. {'Doumi sana}. A good bull.'
I tried to tell him that I had a better one and that it was no good to
eat.
He grinned.
{'Piga kongoni m'uzuri.'}
Piga' was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should
sound or the announcement of a hit. 'M'uzuri', meaning good, well, better,
had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I
used to make up sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M'usuri in them, but
now it seemed natural, no longer to be italicized, just as all the words
came to seem the proper and natural words and there was nothing odd or
unseemly in the stretching of the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a man
carrying a spear. The tribal marks and the tattooed places seemed natural
and handsome adornments and I regretted not having any of my own. My own
scars were all informal, some irregular and sprawling, others simply puffy
welts. I had one on my forehead that people still commented on, asking if I
had bumped my head, but Droop had handsome ones beside his cheekbones and
others, symmetrical and decorative, on his chest and belly. I was thinking
that I had one good one, a sort of embossed Christmas tree, on the bottom of
my right foot that only served to wear out socks, when we jumped two
reedbuck. They went off through the trees and then stood at sixty yards, the
thin, graceful buck looking back, and I shot him high and a touch behind the
shoulder. He gave a jump and went off very fast.
'Piga.' Droopy smiled. We had both heard the whunk of the bullet.
'Kufa,' I told him. 'Dead.'
But when we came up to him, lying on his side, his heart was still
beating strongly, although to all appearances he was dead. Droopy had no
skinning knife and I had only a penknife to stick him with. I felt for the
heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under the
hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I
could feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push
it, but I felt around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against
my fingers. Once bled, I started to open him, with the little knife, still
showing off to Droopy, and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut away
the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside
it.
Droopy asked for the knife. Now he was going to show me something.
Skilfully he slit open the stomach and turned it inside, tripe side, out,
emptying the grass in it on the ground, shook it, then put the liver and
kidneys inside it and with the knife cut a switch from the tree the buck lay
under and sewed the stomach together with the withe so that the tripe made a
bag to carry the other delicacies in. Then he cut a pole and put the bag on
the end of it, running it through the flaps, and put it over his shoulder in
the way tramps carried their property in a handkerchief on the end of a
stick in Blue Jay corn plaster advertisements when we were children. It was
a good trick and I thought how I would show it to John Staib in Wyoming some
time and he would smile his deaf man's smile (you had to throw pebbles at
him to make him stop when you heard a bull bugle), and I knew what John
would say. He would say, 'By Godd, Urnust, dot's smardt'.
Droop handed me the stick, then took off his single garment, made a
sung and got the buck up on his back. I tried to help him and suggested by
signs that we cut a pole and sling him, carrying him between us, but he
wanted to carry him alone. So we started for camp, me with the tripe bag on
the end of a stick over my shoulder, my rifle slung, and Droopy staggering
steadily ahead, sweating heavily, under the buck. I tried to get him to hang
him in a tree and leave him until we could send out a couple of porters, and
to that end we put him in the crotch of a tree. But when Droopy saw that I
meant to go off and leave him there rather than simply allow him to drain he
got him down on to his shoulders again and we went on into camp, the boys,
around the cooking fire, all laughing at the tripe bag over my shoulder as
we came in.
This was the kind of hunting that I liked. No riding in cars, the
country broken up instead of the plains, and I was completely happy. I had
been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I
was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted
without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at
the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with
a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to
write, happy in knowing that at four o'clock we would be starting out to
hunt again. I would not even write a letter. The only person I really cared
about, except the children, was with nie, and I had no wish to share this
life with anyone who was not there, only to live it, being completely happy
and quite tired. I knew that I was shooting well and I had that feeling of
well-being and confidence that is so much more pleasant to have than to hear
about.
As it turned out, we started soon after three to be on the hill by
four. But it was nearly five before we saw the first rhino come bustling
short-leggedly across the ridge of hill in almost the same place we had seen
the rhino the night before. We sat where he went into the edge of the forest
near where we had seen the two fighting and then took a course that would
lead us down the hill, across the grown-over gully at the bottom, and up the
steep slope to where there was a thorn tree with yellow blossoms that marked
the place where we had seen the rhino go in.
Coming straight up the slope in sight of the thorn tree, the wind
blowing across the hill, I tried to walk as slowly as I could and put a
handkerchief inside the sweatband of my hat to keep the perspiration out of
my glasses. I expected to shoot at any minute and I wanted to slow up enough
so my heart would not be pounding. In shooting large animals there is no
reason ever to miss if you have a clear shot and can shoot and know where to
shoot, unless you are unsteady from a run or a climb or fog your glasses,
break them or run out of cloth or paper to wipe them clean. The glasses were
the biggest hazard and I used to carry four handkerchiefs and change them
from the left to the right pocket when they were wet.
We came up to the yellow blossomed tree very carefully, like people
walking up to a bevy of quail the dogs have pointed, and the rhino was not
in sight. We went all through the edge of the forest and it was full of
tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and
it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side
of the mountain, hoping to see a rhino in the open glades. When it was
almost too dark to shoot, I saw Droopy stop and crouch. With his head down
he motioned us forward. Crawling up, we saw a large rhino and a small one
standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.
'Cow and calf,' Pop said softly. 'Can't shoot her. Let me look at her
horn.' He took the glasses from M'Cola.
'Can she see us?' P.O.M. asked.
'No.'
'How far are they?'
'Must be nearly five hundred yards.'
'My God, she looks big,' I whispered.
'She's a big cow,' Pop said. 'Wonder what became of the bull?' He was
pleased and excited by the sight of game. 'Too dark to shoot unless we're
right on him.'
The rhinos had turned and were feeding. They never seemed to move
slowly. They either bustled or stood still.
'What makes them so red?' P.O.M. asked. 'Rolling in the mud,' Pop
answered. 'We better get along while there's light.'
The sun --was down when we came out of the forest and looked down the
slope and across to the hill where we had watched from with our glasses. We
should have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back
up the trail the way we had come, but we decided, like fools, to grade
straight across the mountainside below the edge of the forest. So in the
dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed
only as wooded patches until you were in them, slid down, clung to vines,
stumbled and climbed and slid again, down and down, then steeply,
impossibly, up, hearing the rustle of night things and the cough of a
leopard hunting baboons, me scared of snakes, and touching each root and
branch with snake fear in the dark.
To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into
the moonlight and the long, too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed
one foot up to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at a time,
leaning forward against the grade and the altitude, dead tired and gun
weary, single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the top
where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and
on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into
camp.
So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a
whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the canvas bath had been
a quarter filled with hot water.
{'Bathi}, B'wana.'
'Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,' you say.
'I never could,' says P.O.M. 'You all made me.'
'You climbed better than any of us.'
'Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?'
'I wonder,' Pop said. 'I suppose it's merely condition.'
'It's riding in the damned cars that ruins us.'
'If we did that walk every night we could come back in three nights
from now and never feel it.'
'Yes. But I'd be as scared of snakes if we did it every night for a
year.'
'You'd get over it.'
'No,' I said. 'They scare me stiff. Do you remember that time we
touched hands behind the tree?'
'Rather,' said Pop. 'You jumped two yards. Are you really afraid of
them, or only talking?'
'They scare me sick,' I said. 'They always have.'
'What's the matter with you men?' P.O.M. said. 'Why haven't I heard
anything about the war to-night?'
'We're too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?'
'Not me,' said Pop. 'Where is that boy with the whisky?' Then calling
in that feeble, clowning falsetto, 'Kayti... Katy-ay!'
{'Bathi,'} said Molo again softly, but insistently.
'Too tired.'
'Memsahib {bathi,'} Molo said hopefully.
'I'll go,' said P.O.M. 'But you two hurry up with your drinking. I'm
hungry.'
'{Bathi,'} said Kayti severely to Pop.
{'Bathi} yourself,' said Pop. 'Don't bully me.'
Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.
'All right. All right,' said Pop. 'Going to have one?' he asked.
'We'll have just one,' I said, 'and then we'll {bathi.'}
{'Bathi}, B'wana M'Kumba,' Molo said. P.O.M. came toward the fire
wearing her blue dressing-gown and mosquito boots.
'Go on,' she said. 'You can have another when you come out. There's
nice, warm, muddy water.'
'They bully us,' Pop said.
'Do you remember the time we were sheep hunting and your hat blew off
and nearly fell on to the ram?' I asked her, the whisky racing my mind back
to Wyoming.
'Go take your {bathi,'} P.O.M. said. 'I'm going to have a gimlet.'
In the morning we were dressed before daylight, ate breakfast, and were
hunting the forest edge and the sunken valleys where Droop had seen the
buffalo before the sun was up. But they were not there. It was a long hunt
and we came back to camp and decided to send the lorries for porters and
move with a foot safari to where there was supposed to be water in a stream
that came down out of the mountain beyond where we had seen the rhinos the
night before. Being camped there we could hunt a new country along the
forest edge and we would be much closer to the mountain.
The trucks were to bring in Karl from his kudu camp where he seemed to
be getting disgusted, or discouraged, or both, and he could go down to the
Rift Valley the next day and kill some meat and try for an oryx. If we found
good rhino we would send for him. We did not want to fire any shots where we
were going except at rhino in order not to scare them, and we needed meat.
The rhino seemed very shy and I knew from Wyoming how the shy game will all
shift out of a small country, a country being an area, a valley or range of
hills, a man can hunt in, after a shot or two. We planned this all out, Pop
consulting with Droopy, and then sent the lorries off with Dan to recruit
porters.
Late in the afternoon they were back with Karl, his outfit, and forty
M'Bulus, good-looking savages with a pompous headman who wore the only pair
of shorts among them. Karl was thin now, his skin sallow, his eyes very
tired looking and he seemed a little desperate. He had been eight days in
the kudu camp in the hills, hunting hard, with no one with him who spoke any
English, and they had only seen two cows and jumped a bull out of range. The
guides claimed they had seen another bull but Karl had thought it was
kongoni, or that they said it was a kongoni, and had not shot. He was bitter
about this and it was not a happy outfit.
'I never saw his horns. I don't believe it was a bull,' he said. Kudu
hunting was a touchy subject with him now and we let it alone.
'He'll get an oryx down there and he'll feel better,' Pop said. 'It's
gotten on his nerves a little.'
Karl agreed to the plan for us to move ahead into the new country, and
for him to go down for meat.
'Whatever you say,' he said. 'Absolutely whatever you say.'
'It will give him some shooting,' Pop said. 'Then he'll feel better.'
'We'll get one. Then you get one. Whoever gets his first can go on down
after oryx. You'll probably get an oryx to-morrow anyway when you're hunting
meat.'
'Whatever you say,' Karl said. His mind was bitterly revolving eight
blank days of hill climbing in the heat, out before daybreak, back at dark,
hunting an animal whose Swahili name he could not then remember, with
trackers in whom he had no confidence, coming back to eat alone, no one to
whom he could talk, his wife nine thousand miles and three months away, and
how was his dog and how was his job, and god-damn it where were they and
what if he missed one when he got a shot, he wouldn't, you never missed when
it was really important, he was sure of that, that was one of the tenets of
his faith, but what if he got excited and missed, and why didn't he get any
letters, what did the guide say kongoni for that time, they did, he knew
they did, but he said nothing of all that, only, 'Whatever you say', a
little desperately.
'Come on, cheer up, you bastard,' I said.
'I'm cheerful. What's the matter with you?'
'Have a drink.'
'I don't want a drink. I want a kudu.'
Later Pop said, 'I thought he'd do well off by himself with no one to
hurry him or rattle him. He'll be all right. He's a good lad.'
'He wants someone to tell him exactly what to do and still leave him
alone and not rattle him,' I said. 'It's hell for him to shoot in front of
everybody. He's not a damned show-off like me.'
'He made a damned fine shot at that leopard,' Pop said.
'Two of them,' I said. 'The second was as good as the first. Hell, he
can shoot. On the range he'll shoot the pants off of any of us. But he
worries about it and I rattle him trying to get him to speed up.'
'You're a little hard on him sometimes,' Pop said.
'Hell, he knows me. He knows what I think of him. He doesn't mind.'
'I still think he'll find himself off by himself,' Pop said. 'It's just
a question of confidence. He's really a good shot.'
'He's got the best buff, the best waterbuck, and the best lion, now,' I
said. 'He's got nothing to worry about.'
'The Memsahib has the best lion, brother. Don't make any mistake about
that.'
'I'm glad of that. But he's got a damned fine lion and a big leopard.
Everything he has is good. We've got plenty of time. He's got nothing to
worry about. What the hell is he so gloomy about?'
'We'll get an early start in the morning so we can finish it off before
it gets too hot for the little Memsahib.'
'She's in the best shape of any one.'
'She's marvellous. She's like a little terrier.'
We went out that afternoon and glassed the country from the hills and
never saw a thing. That night after supper we were in the tent. P.O.M.
disliked intensely being compared to a little terrier. If she must be like
any dog, and she did not wish to be, she would prefer a wolfhound, something
lean, racy, long-legged and ornamental. Her courage was so automatic and so
much a simple state of being that she never thought of danger; then, too,
danger was in the hands of Pop and for Pop she had a complete, clear-seeing,
absolutely trusting adoration. Pop was her ideal of how a man should be,
brave, gentle, comic, never losing his temper, never bragging, never
complaining except in a joke, tolerant, understanding, intelligent, drinking
a little too much as a good man should, and, to her eyes, very handsome.
'Don't you think Pop's handsome?'
'No,' I said. 'Droopy's handsome.'
'Droopy's {beautiful}. But don't you {really} think Pop's handsome?'
'Hell, no. I like him as well as any man I've ever known, but I'm
damned if he's handsome.'
'I think he's lovely looking. But you understand about how I feel about
him, don't you?'
'Sure. I'm as fond of the bastard myself.'
'But {don't} you think he's handsome, really?'
'Nope.'
Then, a little later:
'Well, who's handsome to you?'
'Belmonte and Pop. And you.'
'Don't be patriotic,' I said. 'Who's a beautiful woman?'
'Garbo.'
'Not any more. Josie is. Margot is.'
'Yes, they are. I know I'm not.'
'You're lovely.'
'Let's talk about Mr. J. P. I don't like you to call him Pop. It's not
dignified.'
'He and I aren't dignified together.'
'Yes, but I'm dignified with him. Don't you think he's wonderful?'
'Yes, and he doesn't have to read books written by some female he's
tried to help get published saying how he's yellow.'
'She's just jealous and malicious. You never should have helped her.
Some people never forgive that.'
'It's a shame, though, with all that talent gone to malice and nonsense
and self-praise. It's a goddamned shame, really. It's a shame you never knew
her before she went to pot. You know a funny thing; she never could write
dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do it from my stuff and used
it in that book. She had never written like that before. She never could
forgive learning that and she was afraid people would notice it, where she'd
learned it, so she had to attack me. It's a funny racket, really. But I
swear she was nice before she got ambitious. You would have liked her then,
really.'
'Maybe, but I don't think so,' said P.O.M. 'We have fun though, don't
we? Without all those people.'
'God damn it if we don't. I've had a better time every year since I can
remember.'
'But isn't Mr. J. P. wonderful? Really?'
'Yes. He's wonderful.'
'Oh, you're nice to say it. Poor Karl.'
'Why?'
'Without his wife.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Poor Karl.'
So in the morning, again, we started ahead of the porters and went down
and across the hills and through a deeply forested valley and then up and
across a long rise of country with high grass that made the walking
difficult, and on and up and across, resting sometimes in the shade of a
tree, and then on and up and down and across, all in high grass now, that
you had to break a trail in, and the sun was very hot. The five of us in
single file, Droop and M'Cola with a big gun apiece, hung with musettes and
water bottles and the cameras, we all sweating in the sun, Pop and I with
guns and the Memsahib trying to walk like Droopy, her Stetson tilted on one
side, happy to be on a trip, pleased about how comfortable her boots were,
we came finally to a thicket of thorn trees over a ravine that ran down from
the side of a ridge to the water and we leaned the guns against the trees
and went in under the close shade and lay on the ground P O M. got the books
out of one of the musettes and she and Pop read while I followed the ravine
down to the little stream that came out of the mountainside, and found a
fresh lion track and many rhino tunnels in the tall grass that came higher
than your head. It was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine and I was
glad to lean my back against the tree trunk and read in Tolstoy's
{Sevastopol}. It was a very young book and had one fine description of
fighting in it, where the French take the redoubt, and I thought about
Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a
writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to
write truly of, and those writers who had not seen it were always very
jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as
a subject, while, really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that
they had missed. Then Sevastopol made me think of the Boulevard Sevastopol
in Paris, about riding a bicycle down it in the rain on the way home from
Strassburg and the slipperiness of the rails of the tram cars and the
feeling of riding on greasy, slippery asphalt and cobble stones in traffic
in the rain, and how we had nearly lived on the Boulevard du Temple that
time, and I remembered the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and
the wall paper, and instead we had taken the upstairs of the pavilion in
Notre Dame des Champs in the courtyard with the sawmill {(and the sudden
whine of the saw, the smell of sawdust and the chestnut tree over the roof
with a mad woman downstairs)}, and the year worrying about money {(all of
the stories back in the post that came in through a slit in the saw-mill
door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always
anecdotes, sketches, conies, etc. They did not want them, and we lived on
poireaux and drank cahors and water)}, and how fine the fountains were at
the Place de L'Observatoire ({water sheen rippling on the bronze of horses'
manes, bronze breasts and shoulders, green under thin-flowing} {water)}, and
when they put up the bust of Flaubert in the Luxembourg on the short cut
through the gardens on the way to the rue Soufflot {(one that we believed
in, loved without criticism, heavy now in stone as an idol should be)}. He
had not seen war but he had seen a revolution and the Commune, and a
revolution is much the best if you do not become bigoted because every one
speaks the same language. Just as civil war is the best war for a writer,
the most complete. Stendhal had seen a war and Napoleon taught him to write.
He was teaching everybody then; but no one else learned. Dostoevski was made
by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is
forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary
shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if
they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and
maybe it wouldn't. He seemed sad, really, like Camera. Tolstoy was a small
man. Joyce was of medium height and he wore his eyes out. And that last
night, drunk, with Joyce and the thing he kept quoting from Edgar Quinet,
'Fraiche et rose comme au jour de la bataille'. I didn't have it right I
knew. And when you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three
years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.
What I had to do was work. I did not care, particularly, how it all
came out. I did not take my own life seriously any more, any one else's
life, yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I
would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing, it
was the one thing that always made you feel good, and in the meantime it was
my own damned life and I would lead it where and how I pleased. And where I
had led it now pleased me very much. This was a better sky than Italy. The
hell it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan in
the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but
not the country.
All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet,
but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it
already.
Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with
white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was
happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love,
when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never
have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and
more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for
that long, sudden-ended always, making time stand still, sometime so very
still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and,< it is slow in
starting. But you are not alone, because if you have ever really loved her
happy and untragic, she loves you always, no matter whom she loves nor where
she goes she loves you more. So if you have loved some woman and some
country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards, it makes no
difference. Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes
of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you
paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all
the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move
slowly. I have loved country all my life, the country was always better than
the people. I could only care about people a very few at a time.
P.O.M. was sleeping. She was always lovely to look at asleep, sleeping
quietly, close curled like an animal, with nothing of the being dead look
that Karl had asleep. Pop slept quietly too, you could see his soul was
close in his body. His body no longer housed him fittingly. It had gone on
and changed, thickening here, losing its lines, bloating a little there, but
inside he was young and lean and tall and hard as when he galloped lion on
the plain below Wami, and the pouches under his eyes were all outside, so
that now I saw him asleep the way P.O.M. saw him always. M'Cola was an old
man asleep, without history and without mystery. Droopy did not sleep. He
sat on his heels and watched for the safari.
We saw them coming a long way off. At first the boxes just showed above
the high grass, then a line of heads, then they were in a hollow, and there
was only the point of a spear in the sun, then they came up a rise of ground
and I could see the strung out line coming towards us. They had gone a
little too far to the left and Droopy waved to signal them toward us. They
made camp, Pop warning them to be quiet, and we sat under the dining tent
and were comfortable in the chairs and talked. That night we hunted and saw
nothing. The next morning we hunted and saw nothing and the next evening the
same. It was very interesting but there were no results. The wind blew hard
from the east and the ground was broken in short ridges of hills coming down
close {from} the forest so you could not get above it without sending your
scent on ahead of you on the wind to warn everything. You could not see into
the sun in the evening, nor on the heavy shadowed hillsides to the west,
beyond which the sun was setting at the time the rhino would be coming out
of the forest, so all the country to the westward was a loss in the evening
and in the country we could hunt we found nothing. Meat came in from Karl's
camp by some porters we sent back. They came in carrying quarters of tommy,