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if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it
all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of the bullet to the
end of the business and, being a little out of my head, thought perhaps what
I was going through was a punishment for all hunters. Then, getting well,
decided if it was a punishment I had paid it and at least I knew what I was
doing. I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had
been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing
or another and I, truly, did not mind that any more. Since I still loved to
hunt I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could kill cleanly and
as soon as I lost that ability I would stop.
If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite
young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only
to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for
something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That
something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you
write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in
that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the
subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely, or
when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and
yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as
important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you
are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with,
knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before
man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy
island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out
about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value
because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after
the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the
Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the
martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as
the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-coloured, white-flecked,
ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue
water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the
load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the
flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes,
seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn
leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional
rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat, all this well shepherded by the boats
of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as
interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians, they have the
viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day
when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it
is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled
out the scow; and the palm. fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of
our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no
significance against one single, lasting thing -- the stream.
So, in the front seat, thinking of the sea and of the country, in a
little while we ran out of Aragon and down to the bank of a sand river, half
a mile wide, of golden-coloured sand, shored by green trees and broken by
islands of timber and in this river the water is underneath the sand and the
game comes down at night and digs in the sand with sharp-pointed hoofs and
water flows in and they drink. We cross this river and by now it was getting
to be afternoon and we passed many people on the road who were leaving the
country ahead where there was a famine and there were small trees and close
brush now beside the road, and then it commenced to climb and we came into
some blue hills, old, worn, wooded hills with trees like beeches and
clusters of huts with fire smoking and cattle home driven, flocks of sheep
and goats and patches of corn and I said to P.O.M., 'It's like Galicia'.
'Exactly,' she said. 'We've been through three provinces of Spain
to-day.'
'Is it really?' Pop asked.
'There's no difference,' I said. 'Only the buildings. It was like
Navarre in Droopy's country too. The limestone outcropping in the same way,
the way the land lies, the trees along the watercourses and the springs.'
'It's damned strange how you can love a country' Pop said.
'You two are very profound fellows,' P.O.M. said. 'But where are we
going to camp?'
'Here,' said Pop. 'As well as any place. We'll just find some water.'
We camped under some trees near three big wells where native women came
for water and, after drawing lots for location, Karl and I hunted in the
dusk around two of the hills across the road above the native village.
'It's all kudu country,' Pop said. 'You're liable to jump one
anywhere.'
But we saw nothing but some Masai cattle in the timber and came home,
in the dark, glad of the walk after a day in the car, to find camp up, Pop
and P.O.M. in pyjamas by the fire, and Karl not yet in.
He came in, furious for some reason, no kudu possibly, pale, and gaunt
looking and speaking to nobody.
Later, at the fire, he asked me where we had gone and I said we had
hunted around our hill until our guide had heard them; then cut up to the
top of the hill, down, and across country to camp.
'What do you mean, heard us?'
'He said he heard you. So did M'Cola.'
'I thought we drew lots for where we would hunt.'
'We did,' I said. 'But we didn't know we had gotten around to your side
until we heard you.'
'Did {you} hear us?'
'I heard something,' I said. 'And when I put my hand up to my ear to
listen the guide said something to M'Cola and M'Cola said, "B'wana". I said,
"What B'wana?" and he said, "B'wana Kabor". That's you. So we figured we'd
come to our limit and went up to the top and came back.'
He said nothing and looked very angry.
'Don't get sore about it,' I said.
'I'm not sore. I'm tired,' he said. I could believe it because of all
people no one can be gentler, more understanding, more self-sacrificing,
than Karl, but the kudu had become an obsession to him and he was not
himself, nor anything like himself.
'He better get one pretty quick,' P.O.M. said when he had gone into his
tent to bathe.
'Did you cut in on his country?' Pop asked me.
'Hell, no,' I said.
'He'll get one where we're going,' Pop said. 'He'll probably get a
fifty-incher. '
'All the better,' I said. 'But by God, I want to get one too.'
'You will, Old Timer,' Pop said. 'I haven't a thought but what you
will.'
'What the hell! We've got ten days.'
'We'll get sable too, you'll see. Once our luck starts to run.'
'How long have you ever had them hunt them in a good country?'
'Three weeks and leave without seeing one. And I've had them get them
the first half day. It's still hunting, the way you hunt a big buck at
home.'
'I love it,' I said. 'But I don't want that guy to beat me. Pop, he's
got the best buff, the best rhino, the best water-buck . . .'
'You beat him on oryx,' Pop said.
'What's an oryx?'
'He'll look damned handsome when you get him home.'
'I'm just kidding.'
'You beat him on impalla, on eland. You've got a first-rate bushbuck.
Your leopard's as good as his. But he'll beat you on anything where there's
luck. He's got damned wonderful luck and he's a good lad. I think he's off
his feed a little.'
'You know how fond I am of him. I like him as well as I like anyone.
But I want to see him have a good time. It's no fun to hunt if we get that
way about it.'
'You'll see. He'll get a kudu at this next camp and he'll be on top of
the wave.'
'I'm just a crabby bastard,' I said.
'Of course you are,' said Pop. 'But why not have a drink?'
'Right,' I said.
Karl came out, quiet, friendly, gentle, and understandingly delicate.
'It will be fine when we get to that new country,' he said.
'It will be swell,' I said.
'Tell me what it's like, Mr. Phillips,' he said to Pop.
'I don't know,' said Pop. 'But they say it's very pleasant hunting.
They're supposed to feed right out in the open. That old Dutchman claims
there are some remarkable heads.'
'I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,' Karl said to me.
'You'll get a sixty-incher.'
'No,' said Karl. 'Don't kid me. I'll be happy with any kudu.'
'You'll probably get a hell of a one,' Pop said.
'Don't kid me,' Karl said. 'I know how lucky I've been. I would be
happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.'
He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you
for it, and understand it.
'Good old Karl,' I said, warmed with whisky, understanding, and
sentiment.
'We're having a swell time, aren't we?' Karl said. 'Where's poor old
Mama?'
'I'm here,' said P.O.M. from the shadow. 'I'm one of those quiet
people.'
'By God if you're not,' Pop said. 'But you can puncture the old man
quick enough when he gets started.'
'That's what makes a woman a universal favourite,' P.O.M. told him.
'Give me another compliment, Mr. J.'
'By God, you're brave as a little terrier.' Pop and I had both been
drinking, it seemed.
'That's lovely.' P.O.M. sat far back in her chair, holding her hands
clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her quilted blue
robe in the firelight now, and the light on her black hair. 'I love it when
you all reach the little terrier stage. Then I know the war can't be far
away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?'
'Not me,' said Pop. 'Your husband, one of the bravest bastards that
ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.'
'Now he's drunk, we get the truth,' I said.
'Let's eat,' said P.O.M. 'I'm really frightfully hungry.'
We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road and beyond the
village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of
a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off,
eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light. We stopped
the car at the edge of the bush and getting out and sitting down with the
glasses saw there was a herd of kongoni scattered between us and the eland
and with the kongoni a single bull oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai
donkey with marvellous long, black, straight, back-slanting horns that
showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.
'You want to go after him?' I asked Karl.
'No. You go on.'
I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot in front of people and so
I said, 'All right'. Also I wanted to shoot, selfishly, and Karl was
unselfish. We wanted meat badly.
I walked along the road, not looking toward the game, trying to look
casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and down from the left shoulder
away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I
knew that if I moved toward them they would at once move off out of range
so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again,
and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling
and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the
top of his back and squeezed off. You do not hear the noise of the shot on
game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and to
the right, the whole plain backgrounding into moving animals against the
rise of the sun, the rocking-horse canter of the long-legged, grotesque
kongoni, the heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx
I had not seen before running with the kongoni. This sudden life and panic
all made background for the one I wanted, now trotting, three-quartering
away, his horns held high now and I stood to shoot running, got on him, the
whole animal miniatured in the aperture and I held above his shoulders,
swung ahead and squeezed and he was down, kicking, before the crack of the
bullet striking bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot
that broke a hind leg.
I ran toward him, then slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be
blown if he jumped and ran; but he was down for good. He had gone down so
suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid
I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first
shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I saw it was cutting the
lee from under him that brought him down. They all came up and Charo stuck
him to make him legal meat.
'Where did you hold on him the second time?' Karl asked.
'Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.'
'It was very pretty,' Dan said.
'By evening,' Pop said, 'he'll tell us that he broke that off leg on
purpose. That's one of his favourite shots, you know. Did you ever hear him
explain it?'
While M'Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the
meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood,
on one leg, watching the skinning. He spoke to me at some length, and I
called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.
'He wants to know if you are going to shoot something else,' Pop said.
'He would like some hides but he doesn't care about oryx hide. It is almost
worthless, he says. He wonders if you would like to shoot a couple of
kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.'
'Tell him on our way back.'
Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.
'Tell him he can always find me around Harry's New York Bar,' I said.
The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.
'He says why did you shoot him twice?' Pop asked.
'Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later
in the day we shoot them once. In. the evening we are often half shot
ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr's.'
'He says what do you do with the horns?'
'Tell him in our tribe we give the horns to our wealthiest friends.
Tell him it is very exciting and sometimes members of the tribe are chased
across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.'
Pop told the Masai something and we shook hands again, parting on a
most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see
some other Masai coming along the road, earth-brown skins, and kneeing
forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.
Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap sack, the meat tied
inside the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road of
red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to the edge of the road,
we came up into some hills and through the little village of Kibaya where
there was a white rest house and a general store and much farming land. It
was here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting for a kudu to feed out
into the edge of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he
sat and nearly gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the
village of Kibaya and as it was still cool and the sun had not yet burned
off the dew from the grass I suggested we drink a bottle of that
silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman
in armour on it in order that we might remember the place better and even
appreciate it more. This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we
learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries to follow on
to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.
For a long time, while the sun rose and the day became hot we drove
through what Pop had described, when I asked him what the country was like
to the south, as a million miles of bloody Africa, bush close to the road
that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.
'There are very big elephant in there,' Pop said. 'But it's impossible
to hunt them. That's why they're very big. Simple, isn't it?'
After a long stretch of the million-mile country, the country began to
open out into dry, sandy, bush-bordered prairies that dried into a typical
desert country with occasional patches of bush where there was water, that
Pop said was like the northern frontier province of Kenya. We watched for
gerenuk, that long-necked antelope that resembles a praying mantis in its
way of carrying itself, and for the lesser kudu that we knew lived in this
desert bush, but the sun was high now and we saw nothing. Finally the road
began to lift gradually into the hills again, low, blue, wooded hills now,
with miles of sparse bush, a little thicker than orchard bush, between, and
ahead a pair of high, heavy, timbered hills that were big enough to be
mountains. These were on each side of the road and as we climbed in the car
where the red road narrowed there was a herd of hundreds of cattle ahead
being driven down to the coast by Somali cattle buyers; the principal buyer
walked ahead, tall, good-looking in white turban and coast clothing,
carrying an umbrella as a symbol of authority. We worked the car through the
herd, finally, and coming out wound our way through pleasant looking bush,
up and out into the open between the two mountains and on, half a mile, to a
mud and thatched village in the open clearing on a little low plateau beyond
the two mountains. Looking back, the mountains looked very fine and with
timber up their slopes, outcroppings of limestone and open glades and
meadows above the timber.
'Is this the place?'
'Yes,' said Dan. 'We will find where the camping place is.'
A very old, worn, and faded black man, with a stubble of white beard, a
farmer, dressed in a dirty once-white cloth gathered at the shoulder in the
manner of a Roman toga, came out from behind one of the mud and wattle huts,
and guided us back down the road and off it to the left to a very good camp
site. He was a very discouraged-looking old man and after Pop and Dan had
talked with him he went off, seeming more discouraged than before, to bring
some guides whose names Dan had written on a piece of paper as being
recommended by a Dutch hunter who had been here a year ago and who was Dan's
great friend.
We took the seats out of the car to use as a table and benches, and
spreading our coats to sit on had a lunch in the deep shade of a big tree,
drank some beer, and slept or read while we waited for the lorries to come
up. Before the lorries arrived the old man came back with the skinniest,
hungriest, most unsuccessful looking of Wanderobos who stood on one leg,
scratched the back of his neck and carried a bow and quiver of arrows and a
spear. Queried as to whether this was the guide whose name we had, the old
man admitted he was not and went off more discouraged than ever, to get the
official guides.
When we woke next the old man was standing with the two official and
highly-clothed-in-khaki guides and two others, quite naked, from the
village. There was a long palaver and the head one of the two khaki-panted
guides showed his credentials, a To Whom It May Concern, stating the bearer
knew the country well and was a reliable boy and capable tracker. This was
signed by so and so, professional hunter. The khaki-clothed guide referred
to this professional hunter as B'wana Simba and the name infuriated us all.
'Some bloke that killed a lion once,' Pop said.
'Tell him I am B'wana Fisi, the hyena slaughterer,' I told Dan. 'B'wana
Fisi chokes them with his naked hands.'
Dan was telling them something else.
'Ask them if they would like to meet B'wana Hop-Toad, the inventor of
the hoptoads and Mama Tziggi, who owns all these locusts.'
Dan ignored this. It seemed they were discussing money. After
ascertaining their customary daily wage, Pop told them if either of us
killed a kudu the guide would receive fifteen shillings.
'You mean a pound,' said the leading guide.
'They seem to know what they're up to,' Pop said. 'I must say I don't
care for this sportsman in spite of what B'wana Simba says.'
B'wana Simba, by the way, we later found out to be an excellent hunter
with a wonderful reputation on the coast.
'We'll put them into two lots and you draw from them,' Pop suggested,
'one naked one and one with breeches in each lot. I'm all for the naked
savage, myself, as a guide.'
On suggesting to the two testimonial-equipped, breeched guides that
they select an unclothed partner, we found this would not work out. Loud
Mouth, the financial and, now, theatrical, genius who was giving a
gesture-by-gesture reproduction of How B'wana Simba Killed His Last Kudu
interrupted it long enough to state he would only hunt with Abdullah.
Abdullah, the short, thick-nosed, educated one, was His Tracker. They always
hunted together. He himself did not track. He resumed the pantomime of
B'wana Simba and another character known as B'wana Doktor and the horned
beasts.
'We'll take the two savages as one lot and these two Oxonians as the
other,' Pop said.
<! {hate} that theatrical bastard,' I said.
'He may be marvellous,' Pop said doubtfully. 'Anyway, you're a tracker,
you know. The old man says the other two are good.'
'Thank you. Go to hell. Will you hold the straws?'
Pop arranged two grass stems in his fist. 'The long one is for David
Garrick and his pal,' he explained. 'The short one is the two nudist
sportsmen.'
'Do you want to draw first?'
'Go ahead,' Karl said.
I drew David Garrick and Abdullah.
'I got the bloody tragedian.'
'He may be very good,' Karl said.
'Do you want to trade?'
'No. He may be a marvel.'
'Now we'll draw for choice of beats. The long straw gets first choice,'
Pop explained.
'Go ahead and draw.'
Karl drew the short one.
'What are the beats?' I asked Pop.
There was a long conversation in which our David simulated the killing
of half a dozen kudu from different types of ambush, surprise, stalks in the
open, and jumping them in the bush.
Finally Pop said, 'It seems there's some sort of a saltlick where they
come to lick salt and thousands are slain. Then sometimes you just stroll
around the hill there and pot the poor beggars in the open. If you're
feeling frightfully fit, you climb for them and up in the crags you knock
them over as they stroll out to feed.'
'I'll take the salt-lick.'
'Mind you only shoot the very biggest sort,' Pop said.
'When do we start?' Karl asked.
'The salt-lick is supposed to be an early morning show,' Pop told us.
'But Old Hem might as well have a look at it to-night. It's about five miles
down the road before you start to walk. He'll start first and take the car.
You can start back in the hills any time after the sun gets a little farther
down.'
'What about the Memsahib?' I asked. 'Should she go with me?'
'I don't think it's advisable,' Pop said seriously. 'The fewer people
when you're after kudu the better.'
M'Cola, Theatre Business, Abdullah, and I came back that evening late
in the cool of the night and full of excitement as we came up to the fire.
The dust of the saltlick had been cut up and printed deep with fresh kudu
tracks and there were several big bull tracks. The blind made a marvellous
ambush and I was as confident and as sure of a shot at kudu the next morning
as I would be sure of a shot at ducks from a good blind, with a fine stock
of decoys out, cold weather, and the certainty of a flight on.
'It's airtight. It's foolproof. It's even a shame. What's his name,
Booth, Barrett, McCulIough -- you know who I mean . . .'
'Charles Laughton,' said Pop, pulling on his pipe.
'That's the one. Fred Astaire. Society's hoofer and the world's. He's
an ace. Found the blind and everything. Knew where the salt-lick was. Could
tell which way the wind blew by simply scattering dust. He's a marvel.
B'wana Simba trains 'em, pal. Pop, we have them in the container. It's only
a question of not spoiling the meat and selecting the more rugged specimens.
I'll kill you two to-morrow on that lick. Citizens, I feel very well.'
'What {have} you been drinking?'
'Not a damned thing, really. Call Garrick. Tell him I'll put him in the
cinema. Got a part for him. Little thing I thought up on the way home. It
may not work out but I like the plot. Othello or The Moor of Venice. D'you
like it? It's got a wonderful idea. You see this jig we call Othello falls
in love with this girl who's never been around at all so we call her
Desdemona. Like it? They've been after me to write it for years but I drew
the colour line. Let him go out and get a reputation, I told them. Harry
Wills, hell. Paulino beat him. Sharkey beat him. Dempsey beat Sharkey.
Camera knocked him out. What if nobody saw the punch? Where the hell were
we, Pop? Harry Greb is dead you know.'
'We were just coming into Town,' Pop said. 'Chaps were throwing things
at you and we couldn't find out why.'
'I remember,' P.O.M. said. 'Why didn't you make him draw the colour
line, Mr. J. P?'
'I was frightfully tired,' Pop said.
'You're very distinguished looking, though,' P.O.M. said. 'What are we
going to do with this goofy?'
'Throw a drink into the brute and see if he'll quiet down.'
'I'm quiet now,' I said. 'But, by God, I feel awfully good about
to-morrow.'
Just then who should come into camp but old Karl with his two naked
savages and his half-size, very devout Mohammedan gun bearer, Charo. In the
firelight old Karl looked a greyish, yellowish white in the face and he took
off his Stetson.
'Well, did you get one?' he asked.
'No. But they're there. What did you do?'
'Walked along a goddamned road. How do they expect to find kudu along a
road with nothing but cattle and huts and people?'
He did not look like himself and I thought he must be ill. But coming
in like a death's head when we had been clowning made me behave badly again
and I said, 'We drew lots, you know'.
'Of course,' he said bitterly. 'We hunted along a road. What would you
expect to see? Does that seem the way to hunt kudu to you?'
'But you'll get one on the salt-lick in the morning,' P.O.M. told him
very cheerfully.
I drank off the glass of whisky and soda and heard my voice say very
cheerfully, 'You'll be sure to get one on the salt-lick in the morning'.
'You're hunting it in the morning,' Karl said.
'No. You're hunting it. I had it to-night. We're changing off. That's
been understood. Isn't it, Pop?'
'Quite,' Pop said. No one was looking at anyone else.
'Have a whisky and soda, Karl,' P.O.M. said.
'All right,' Karl said.
We had one of those quiet meals. In bed in the tent, I said, 'What in
God's name prompted you to say that about him having the lick in the
morning?'
'I don't know. I don't think that's what I meant to say. I got mixed
up. Let's not talk about it.'
'I won the damned thing drawing lots. You can't go against lots. That's
the only way the luck has a chance to even up, ever.'
'Don't let's talk about it.'
'I don't think he's well now and he doesn't feel himself. The damned
things have gotten his goat and he's liable to blow that salt-lick higher
than a kite in the state he's in.'
'Please stop talking about it.'
'I will.'
'Good.'
'Well, we made him feel good anyway.'
'I don't know that we did. Please stop talking about it.'
'I will.'
'Good.'
'Good night,' she said.
'The hell with it,' I said. 'Good night.'
'Good night.'
In the morning Karl and his outfit started for the saltlick and
Garrick, Abdullah, M'Cola and I crossed the road, angled behind the village
up a dry watercourse and started climbing the mountains in a mist. We headed
up a pebbly, boulder-filled, dry stream bed overgrown with vines and brush
so that, climbing, you walked, stooping, in a steep tunnel of vines and
foliage. I sweated so that I was soaked through my shirt and undergarments
and when we came out on the shoulder of the mountain and stood, looking down
at the bank of clouds quilting over the entire valley below us, the morning
breeze chilled me and I had to put on my raincoat while we glassed the
country. I was too wet with sweat to sit down and I signed Garrick to keep
on going. We went around one side of the mountain, doubled back on a higher
grade and crossed over, out of the sun that was drying my wet shirt and
along the top of a series of grassy valleys, stopping to search each one
thoroughly with the field glasses. Finally we came to a sort of
amphitheatre, a bowl-like valley of very green grass with a small stream
down the middle and timber along the far side and all the lower edge. We sat
in the shadow against some rocks, out of any breeze, watching with the
glasses as the sun rose and lighted the opposite slopes, seeing two kudu
cows and a calf feed out from the timber, moving with the quickly browsing,
then head lifted, long-staring vigilance of all browsing animals in a
forest. Animals on a plain can see so far that they have confidence and feed
very differently from animals in the woods. We could see the vertical white
stripes on their grey flanks and it was very satisfying to watch them and to
be high in the mountain that early in the morning. Then, while we watched,
there was a boom, like a rockslide. I thought at first it was a boulder
falling, but M'Cola whispered.
'B'wana Kibor! Piga!' We listened for another shot but we did not hear
one and I {was} sure Karl had his kudu. The cows we were watching had heard
the shot and stood, listening, then went on feeding. But they fed into the
timber. I remembered the old saying of the Indian in camp, 'One shot, meat.
Two shots, maybe. Three shots, heap s -- t,' and I got out the dictionary to
translate it for M'Cola. However it came out seemed to amuse him and he
laughed and shook his head. We glassed that valley until the sun came on to
us, then hunted around the other side of the mountain and in another fine
valley saw the place where the other B'wana, B'wana Doktor he still sounded
like, had shot a fine bull kudu, but a Masai walked down the centre of the
valley while we were glassing it and when I pretended I was going to shoot
him Garrick became very dramatic insisting it was a man, a man, a man!
'Don't shoot men?' I asked him.
'No! No! No!' he said putting his hand to his head. I took the gun down
with great reluctance, clowning for M'Cola who was grinning, and it very hot
now, we walked across a meadow where the grass was knee high and truly
swarming with long, rose-coloured, gauze-winged locusts that rose in clouds
about us, making a whirring like a mowing machine, and climbing small hills
and going down a long steep slope, we made our way back to camp to find the
air of the valley drifting with flying locusts and Karl already in camp with
Us kudu.
Passing the skinner's tent he showed me the head which looked,
body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from
where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a
very strange and unfortunate kudu. Only the skin running from the eyes down
to the nostrils, smooth grey and delicately marked with white, and the big,
graceful ears were beautiful. The eyes were already dusty and there were
flies around them and the horns were heavy, coarse, and instead of
spiralling high they made a heavy turn and slanted straight out. It was a
freak head, heavy and ugly.
Pop was sitting under the dining tent smoking and reading.
'Where's Karl?' I asked him.
'In his tent, I think. What did you do?'
'Worked around the hill. Saw a couple of cows.'
'I'm awfully glad you got him,' I told Karl at the mouth of his tent.
'How was it?'
'We were in the blind and they motioned me to keep my head down and
then when I looked up there he was right beside us. He looked huge.'
'We heard you shoot. Where did you hit him?'
'In the leg first, I think. Then we trailed him and finally I hit him a
couple of more times and we got him.'
'I heard only one shot.'
'There were three or four,' Karl said.
'I guess the mountain shut off some if you were gone the other way
trailing him. He's got a heavy beam and a big spread.'
'Thanks,' Karl said. 'I hope you get a lot better one. They said there
was another one but I didn't see him.'
I went back to the dining tent where Pop and P.O.M. were. They did not
seem very elated about the kudu.
'What's the matter with you?' I asked.
'Did you see the head?' P.O.M. asked.
'Sure.'
'It's {awful} looking,' she said.
'It's a kudu. He's got another one still to go.'
'Charo and the trackers said there was another bull with this one. A
big bull with a wonderful head.'
'That's all right. I'll shoot him.'
'If he ever comes back.'
'It's fine he has one,' P.O.M. said.
'I'll bet he'll get the biggest one ever known, now,' I said.
'I'm sending him down with Dan to the sable country,' Pop said. 'That
was the agreement. The first to kill a kudu to get first crack at the
sable.'
'That's fine.'
'Then as soon as you get your kudu we'll move down there too.'
{'Good.'}
That all seemed a year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way
out to the twenty-eight-mile salt-lick, the sun on our faces, just having
shot the guinea fowl, having, in the last five days, failed on the lick
where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big hills and the
small hills, having failed on the flats, losing a shot the night before on
this lick because of the Austrian's lorry, I knew there were only two days
more to hunt before we must leave. M'Cola knew it too, and we were hunting
together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a
shortness of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were
saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.
Kamau, the driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who,
with an old brown tweed coat some shooter had discarded, trousers heavily
patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed
always to give an impression of great elegance. Kamau was very modest,
quiet, and an excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country
and into an open, scrubby, desert-looking stretch, I looked at him, whose
elegance, achieved with an old coat and a safety pin, whose modesty,
pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first
were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would
have meant nothing to me except that we would be short a driver; while now
whenever or wherever he should die I would feel badly. Then abandoning the
sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what
a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the
look on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then,
we put up another flock of guineas. M'Cola handed nie the shotgun and I
shook my head. He nodded violently and said, 'Good. Very Good', and I told
Kamau to go on. This confused Garrick who began an oration. Didn't we want
guineas? Those were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer
that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook
a bull off of it, by a shot, to frighten him in the way we had seen the
lesser kudu leave the salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were in
the blind.
We left the lorry under some scrubby trees about two miles from the
lick and walked along the sandy road towards the first salt place which was
in the open to the left of the trail. We had gone about a mile keeping
absolutely quiet and walking in single file, Abdullah the educated tracker
leading, then me, M'Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of
us. Where the sand was thin over the clay there was a pool of water and you
could see that a heavy rain had drenched it all on ahead. I did not realize
what this meant but Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and
bared his teeth in anger.
'It's no good,' M'Cola whispered.
Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.
'Shut up, you bastard,' I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on
talking in above normal tones and I "looked up 'shut up' in the dictionary
while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn't find 'shut
up' so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he
closed it in surprise.
"Cola,' I said.
'Yes,' said M'Cola.
'What's the matter?'
'Salt no good.'
'Ah.'
So that was it. I had thought of the rain only as something that made
tracking easy.
'When the rain?' I asked.
'Last night,' M'Cola said.
Garrick started to talk and I placed the back of my hand against his
mouth.
"Cola.'
'Yes.'
'Other salt,' pointing in the direction of the big lick in the woods,
which I knew was a good bit higher because we went very slightly up hill
through the brush to reach it. 'Other salt good?'
'Maybe.'
M'Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed deeply
hurt but kept his mouth shut and we went on down the road, walking around
the wet places, to where, sure enough, the deep depression of the saltlick
was half filled with water. Garrick started to whisper a speech here but
M'Cola shut him up again.
'Come on,' I said, and, M'Cola ahead, we started trailing up the damp,
sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the trees to the upper
lick.
M'Cola stopped dead, leaned over to look at the damp sand, then
whispered, 'Man', to me. There was the track.
'Shenzi,' he said, which meant a wild man.
We trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and stalking the
lick carefully, up and into the blind. M'Cola shook his head.
'No good,' he said. 'Come on.'
We went over to the lick. There it was all written plainly. There were
the tracks of three big bull kudu in the moist bank beyond the lick where
they had come to the salt. Then there were the sudden, deep, knifely-cut
tracks where they made a spring when the bow twanged and the slashing
heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then,
far-spaced, the tracks running into the bush. We trailed them, all three,
but no man's track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.
M'Cola said, 'Shenzi!' putting great hate into the word. We picked up
the shenzi's tracks and saw where he had gone on back to the road. We
settled down in the blind and waited there until it was dark and a light
rain began to fall. Nothing came to the salt. In the rain we made our way
back to the lorry. Some wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away
from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.
Kamau had rigged a tent out of a big canvas ground cloth, hung my
mosquito net inside, and set up the canvas cot. M'Cola brought the food
inside the shelter tent.
Garrick and Abdullah built a fire and they, Kamau and M'Cola cooked
over it. They were going to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I
undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate
a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a couple of tin cups of half whisky
and water.
M'Cola came in, grave, solicitous, and very awkward inside a tent and
took my clothes out from where I had folded them to make a pillow and folded
them again, very un-neatly, and put them under the blankets. He brought
three tins to see if I did not want them. opened.
'No.'
'Chai?' he asked.
'The hell with it.'
'No chai?'
'Whisky better.'
'Yes,' he said feelingly. 'Yes.'
'Chai in the morning. Before the sun.'
'Yes, B'wana M'Kumba.'
'You sleep here. Out of the rain.' I pointed to the canvas where the
rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses,
ever hear. It was a lovely sound, even though it was hitching us.
'Yes.'
'Go on. Eat.'
'Yes. No chai?'
'The hell with tea.'
'Whisky?' he asked hopefully.
'Whisky finish.'
'Whisky,' he said confidently.
'All right,' I said. 'Go eat,' and pouring the cup half and half with
water got in under the mosquito bar, found my clothes and again made them
into a pillow, and lying on my side drank the whisky very slowly, resting on
one elbow, then dropped the cup down under the bar on to the ground, felt
under the cot for the Springfield, put the searchlight beside me in the bed
under the blanket, and went to sleep listening to the rain. I woke when I
heard M'Cola come in, make his bed and go to sleep, and I woke once in the
night and heard him sleeping by me; but in the morning he was up and had
made the tea before I was awake.
'Chai,' he said, pulling on my blanket.
'Bloody chai,' I said, sitting up still asleep.
It was a grey, wet morning. The rain had stopped but the mist hung over
the ground and we found the salt-lick rained out and not a track near it.
Then we hunted through the wet scrub on the flat hoping to find a track in
the soaked earth and trail a bull until we could see him. There were no
tracks. We crossed the road and followed the edge of the scrub around a
moor-like open stretch. I hoped we might find the rhino but while we came on
much fresh rhino dung there were no tracks since the rain. Once we heard
tick birds and looking up saw them in jerky flight above us headed to the
northward over the heavy scrub. We made a long circle through there but
found nothing but a fresh hyena track and a cow kudu track. In a tree M'Cola
pointed out a lesser kudu skull with one beautiful, long, curling horn. We
found the other horn below in the grass and I screwed it back on to its bone
base.
'Shenzi,' M'Cola said and imitated a man pulling a bow. The skull was
quite clean but the hollow horns had some damp residue in them, smelled
unbearably foul and, giving no sign of having noticed the stench, I handed
them to Garrick who promptly, without sign gave them to Abdullah. Abdullah
wrinkled the edge of his flat nose and shook his head. They really smelled
abominably. M'Cola and I grinned and Garrick looked virtuous.
I decided a good idea might be to drive along the road in the car,
watching for kudu, and hunt any likely-looking clearings. We went back to
the car and did this, working several clearings with no luck. By then the
sun was up and the road was becoming populous with travellers, both
white-clothed and naked, and we decided to head for camp. On our way in, we
stopped and stalked the other salt-lick. There was an impalla on it looking
very red where the sun struck his hide in the patches between the grey trees
and there were many kudu tracks. We smoothed them over and drove on into
camp to find a sky full of locusts passing over, going to the westward,
making the sky, as you looked up, seem a pink dither of flickering passage,
flickering like an old cinema film, but pink instead of grey. P.O.M. and Pop
came out and were very disappointed. No rain had fallen in camp and they had
been sure we would have something when we came in.
'Did my literary pal get off?'
'Yes,' Pop said. 'He's gone into Handeni.'
'He told me all about American women,' P.O.M. said. 'Poor old Poppa, I
was sure you'd get one. Danin the rain.'
'How are American women?'
'He thinks they're terrible.'
'Very sound fellow,' said Pop. 'Tell me just what happened to-day.'
We sat in the shade of the dining tent and I told them.
'A Wanderobo,' Pop said. 'They're frightful shots. Bad luck.'
'I thought it might be one of those travelling sportsmen you see with
their bows slung going along the road. He saw the lick by the road and
trailed up to the other one.'
'Not very likely. They carry those bows and arrows as protection.
They're not hunters.'
'Well, whoever it was put it on us. '
'Bad luck. That, and the rain. I've had scouts out here on both the
hills but they've seen nothing.'
'Well, we're not hitched until to-morrow night. When do we have to
all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of the bullet to the
end of the business and, being a little out of my head, thought perhaps what
I was going through was a punishment for all hunters. Then, getting well,
decided if it was a punishment I had paid it and at least I knew what I was
doing. I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had
been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing
or another and I, truly, did not mind that any more. Since I still loved to
hunt I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could kill cleanly and
as soon as I lost that ability I would stop.
If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite
young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only
to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for
something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That
something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you
write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in
that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the
subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely, or
when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and
yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as
important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you
are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with,
knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before
man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy
island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out
about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value
because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after
the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the
Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the
martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as
the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-coloured, white-flecked,
ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue
water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the
load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the
flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes,
seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn
leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional
rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat, all this well shepherded by the boats
of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as
interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians, they have the
viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day
when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it
is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled
out the scow; and the palm. fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of
our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no
significance against one single, lasting thing -- the stream.
So, in the front seat, thinking of the sea and of the country, in a
little while we ran out of Aragon and down to the bank of a sand river, half
a mile wide, of golden-coloured sand, shored by green trees and broken by
islands of timber and in this river the water is underneath the sand and the
game comes down at night and digs in the sand with sharp-pointed hoofs and
water flows in and they drink. We cross this river and by now it was getting
to be afternoon and we passed many people on the road who were leaving the
country ahead where there was a famine and there were small trees and close
brush now beside the road, and then it commenced to climb and we came into
some blue hills, old, worn, wooded hills with trees like beeches and
clusters of huts with fire smoking and cattle home driven, flocks of sheep
and goats and patches of corn and I said to P.O.M., 'It's like Galicia'.
'Exactly,' she said. 'We've been through three provinces of Spain
to-day.'
'Is it really?' Pop asked.
'There's no difference,' I said. 'Only the buildings. It was like
Navarre in Droopy's country too. The limestone outcropping in the same way,
the way the land lies, the trees along the watercourses and the springs.'
'It's damned strange how you can love a country' Pop said.
'You two are very profound fellows,' P.O.M. said. 'But where are we
going to camp?'
'Here,' said Pop. 'As well as any place. We'll just find some water.'
We camped under some trees near three big wells where native women came
for water and, after drawing lots for location, Karl and I hunted in the
dusk around two of the hills across the road above the native village.
'It's all kudu country,' Pop said. 'You're liable to jump one
anywhere.'
But we saw nothing but some Masai cattle in the timber and came home,
in the dark, glad of the walk after a day in the car, to find camp up, Pop
and P.O.M. in pyjamas by the fire, and Karl not yet in.
He came in, furious for some reason, no kudu possibly, pale, and gaunt
looking and speaking to nobody.
Later, at the fire, he asked me where we had gone and I said we had
hunted around our hill until our guide had heard them; then cut up to the
top of the hill, down, and across country to camp.
'What do you mean, heard us?'
'He said he heard you. So did M'Cola.'
'I thought we drew lots for where we would hunt.'
'We did,' I said. 'But we didn't know we had gotten around to your side
until we heard you.'
'Did {you} hear us?'
'I heard something,' I said. 'And when I put my hand up to my ear to
listen the guide said something to M'Cola and M'Cola said, "B'wana". I said,
"What B'wana?" and he said, "B'wana Kabor". That's you. So we figured we'd
come to our limit and went up to the top and came back.'
He said nothing and looked very angry.
'Don't get sore about it,' I said.
'I'm not sore. I'm tired,' he said. I could believe it because of all
people no one can be gentler, more understanding, more self-sacrificing,
than Karl, but the kudu had become an obsession to him and he was not
himself, nor anything like himself.
'He better get one pretty quick,' P.O.M. said when he had gone into his
tent to bathe.
'Did you cut in on his country?' Pop asked me.
'Hell, no,' I said.
'He'll get one where we're going,' Pop said. 'He'll probably get a
fifty-incher. '
'All the better,' I said. 'But by God, I want to get one too.'
'You will, Old Timer,' Pop said. 'I haven't a thought but what you
will.'
'What the hell! We've got ten days.'
'We'll get sable too, you'll see. Once our luck starts to run.'
'How long have you ever had them hunt them in a good country?'
'Three weeks and leave without seeing one. And I've had them get them
the first half day. It's still hunting, the way you hunt a big buck at
home.'
'I love it,' I said. 'But I don't want that guy to beat me. Pop, he's
got the best buff, the best rhino, the best water-buck . . .'
'You beat him on oryx,' Pop said.
'What's an oryx?'
'He'll look damned handsome when you get him home.'
'I'm just kidding.'
'You beat him on impalla, on eland. You've got a first-rate bushbuck.
Your leopard's as good as his. But he'll beat you on anything where there's
luck. He's got damned wonderful luck and he's a good lad. I think he's off
his feed a little.'
'You know how fond I am of him. I like him as well as I like anyone.
But I want to see him have a good time. It's no fun to hunt if we get that
way about it.'
'You'll see. He'll get a kudu at this next camp and he'll be on top of
the wave.'
'I'm just a crabby bastard,' I said.
'Of course you are,' said Pop. 'But why not have a drink?'
'Right,' I said.
Karl came out, quiet, friendly, gentle, and understandingly delicate.
'It will be fine when we get to that new country,' he said.
'It will be swell,' I said.
'Tell me what it's like, Mr. Phillips,' he said to Pop.
'I don't know,' said Pop. 'But they say it's very pleasant hunting.
They're supposed to feed right out in the open. That old Dutchman claims
there are some remarkable heads.'
'I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,' Karl said to me.
'You'll get a sixty-incher.'
'No,' said Karl. 'Don't kid me. I'll be happy with any kudu.'
'You'll probably get a hell of a one,' Pop said.
'Don't kid me,' Karl said. 'I know how lucky I've been. I would be
happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.'
He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you
for it, and understand it.
'Good old Karl,' I said, warmed with whisky, understanding, and
sentiment.
'We're having a swell time, aren't we?' Karl said. 'Where's poor old
Mama?'
'I'm here,' said P.O.M. from the shadow. 'I'm one of those quiet
people.'
'By God if you're not,' Pop said. 'But you can puncture the old man
quick enough when he gets started.'
'That's what makes a woman a universal favourite,' P.O.M. told him.
'Give me another compliment, Mr. J.'
'By God, you're brave as a little terrier.' Pop and I had both been
drinking, it seemed.
'That's lovely.' P.O.M. sat far back in her chair, holding her hands
clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her quilted blue
robe in the firelight now, and the light on her black hair. 'I love it when
you all reach the little terrier stage. Then I know the war can't be far
away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?'
'Not me,' said Pop. 'Your husband, one of the bravest bastards that
ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.'
'Now he's drunk, we get the truth,' I said.
'Let's eat,' said P.O.M. 'I'm really frightfully hungry.'
We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road and beyond the
village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of
a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off,
eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light. We stopped
the car at the edge of the bush and getting out and sitting down with the
glasses saw there was a herd of kongoni scattered between us and the eland
and with the kongoni a single bull oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai
donkey with marvellous long, black, straight, back-slanting horns that
showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.
'You want to go after him?' I asked Karl.
'No. You go on.'
I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot in front of people and so
I said, 'All right'. Also I wanted to shoot, selfishly, and Karl was
unselfish. We wanted meat badly.
I walked along the road, not looking toward the game, trying to look
casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and down from the left shoulder
away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I
knew that if I moved toward them they would at once move off out of range
so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again,
and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling
and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the
top of his back and squeezed off. You do not hear the noise of the shot on
game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and to
the right, the whole plain backgrounding into moving animals against the
rise of the sun, the rocking-horse canter of the long-legged, grotesque
kongoni, the heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx
I had not seen before running with the kongoni. This sudden life and panic
all made background for the one I wanted, now trotting, three-quartering
away, his horns held high now and I stood to shoot running, got on him, the
whole animal miniatured in the aperture and I held above his shoulders,
swung ahead and squeezed and he was down, kicking, before the crack of the
bullet striking bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot
that broke a hind leg.
I ran toward him, then slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be
blown if he jumped and ran; but he was down for good. He had gone down so
suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid
I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first
shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I saw it was cutting the
lee from under him that brought him down. They all came up and Charo stuck
him to make him legal meat.
'Where did you hold on him the second time?' Karl asked.
'Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.'
'It was very pretty,' Dan said.
'By evening,' Pop said, 'he'll tell us that he broke that off leg on
purpose. That's one of his favourite shots, you know. Did you ever hear him
explain it?'
While M'Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the
meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood,
on one leg, watching the skinning. He spoke to me at some length, and I
called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.
'He wants to know if you are going to shoot something else,' Pop said.
'He would like some hides but he doesn't care about oryx hide. It is almost
worthless, he says. He wonders if you would like to shoot a couple of
kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.'
'Tell him on our way back.'
Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.
'Tell him he can always find me around Harry's New York Bar,' I said.
The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.
'He says why did you shoot him twice?' Pop asked.
'Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later
in the day we shoot them once. In. the evening we are often half shot
ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr's.'
'He says what do you do with the horns?'
'Tell him in our tribe we give the horns to our wealthiest friends.
Tell him it is very exciting and sometimes members of the tribe are chased
across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.'
Pop told the Masai something and we shook hands again, parting on a
most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see
some other Masai coming along the road, earth-brown skins, and kneeing
forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.
Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap sack, the meat tied
inside the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road of
red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to the edge of the road,
we came up into some hills and through the little village of Kibaya where
there was a white rest house and a general store and much farming land. It
was here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting for a kudu to feed out
into the edge of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he
sat and nearly gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the
village of Kibaya and as it was still cool and the sun had not yet burned
off the dew from the grass I suggested we drink a bottle of that
silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman
in armour on it in order that we might remember the place better and even
appreciate it more. This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we
learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries to follow on
to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.
For a long time, while the sun rose and the day became hot we drove
through what Pop had described, when I asked him what the country was like
to the south, as a million miles of bloody Africa, bush close to the road
that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.
'There are very big elephant in there,' Pop said. 'But it's impossible
to hunt them. That's why they're very big. Simple, isn't it?'
After a long stretch of the million-mile country, the country began to
open out into dry, sandy, bush-bordered prairies that dried into a typical
desert country with occasional patches of bush where there was water, that
Pop said was like the northern frontier province of Kenya. We watched for
gerenuk, that long-necked antelope that resembles a praying mantis in its
way of carrying itself, and for the lesser kudu that we knew lived in this
desert bush, but the sun was high now and we saw nothing. Finally the road
began to lift gradually into the hills again, low, blue, wooded hills now,
with miles of sparse bush, a little thicker than orchard bush, between, and
ahead a pair of high, heavy, timbered hills that were big enough to be
mountains. These were on each side of the road and as we climbed in the car
where the red road narrowed there was a herd of hundreds of cattle ahead
being driven down to the coast by Somali cattle buyers; the principal buyer
walked ahead, tall, good-looking in white turban and coast clothing,
carrying an umbrella as a symbol of authority. We worked the car through the
herd, finally, and coming out wound our way through pleasant looking bush,
up and out into the open between the two mountains and on, half a mile, to a
mud and thatched village in the open clearing on a little low plateau beyond
the two mountains. Looking back, the mountains looked very fine and with
timber up their slopes, outcroppings of limestone and open glades and
meadows above the timber.
'Is this the place?'
'Yes,' said Dan. 'We will find where the camping place is.'
A very old, worn, and faded black man, with a stubble of white beard, a
farmer, dressed in a dirty once-white cloth gathered at the shoulder in the
manner of a Roman toga, came out from behind one of the mud and wattle huts,
and guided us back down the road and off it to the left to a very good camp
site. He was a very discouraged-looking old man and after Pop and Dan had
talked with him he went off, seeming more discouraged than before, to bring
some guides whose names Dan had written on a piece of paper as being
recommended by a Dutch hunter who had been here a year ago and who was Dan's
great friend.
We took the seats out of the car to use as a table and benches, and
spreading our coats to sit on had a lunch in the deep shade of a big tree,
drank some beer, and slept or read while we waited for the lorries to come
up. Before the lorries arrived the old man came back with the skinniest,
hungriest, most unsuccessful looking of Wanderobos who stood on one leg,
scratched the back of his neck and carried a bow and quiver of arrows and a
spear. Queried as to whether this was the guide whose name we had, the old
man admitted he was not and went off more discouraged than ever, to get the
official guides.
When we woke next the old man was standing with the two official and
highly-clothed-in-khaki guides and two others, quite naked, from the
village. There was a long palaver and the head one of the two khaki-panted
guides showed his credentials, a To Whom It May Concern, stating the bearer
knew the country well and was a reliable boy and capable tracker. This was
signed by so and so, professional hunter. The khaki-clothed guide referred
to this professional hunter as B'wana Simba and the name infuriated us all.
'Some bloke that killed a lion once,' Pop said.
'Tell him I am B'wana Fisi, the hyena slaughterer,' I told Dan. 'B'wana
Fisi chokes them with his naked hands.'
Dan was telling them something else.
'Ask them if they would like to meet B'wana Hop-Toad, the inventor of
the hoptoads and Mama Tziggi, who owns all these locusts.'
Dan ignored this. It seemed they were discussing money. After
ascertaining their customary daily wage, Pop told them if either of us
killed a kudu the guide would receive fifteen shillings.
'You mean a pound,' said the leading guide.
'They seem to know what they're up to,' Pop said. 'I must say I don't
care for this sportsman in spite of what B'wana Simba says.'
B'wana Simba, by the way, we later found out to be an excellent hunter
with a wonderful reputation on the coast.
'We'll put them into two lots and you draw from them,' Pop suggested,
'one naked one and one with breeches in each lot. I'm all for the naked
savage, myself, as a guide.'
On suggesting to the two testimonial-equipped, breeched guides that
they select an unclothed partner, we found this would not work out. Loud
Mouth, the financial and, now, theatrical, genius who was giving a
gesture-by-gesture reproduction of How B'wana Simba Killed His Last Kudu
interrupted it long enough to state he would only hunt with Abdullah.
Abdullah, the short, thick-nosed, educated one, was His Tracker. They always
hunted together. He himself did not track. He resumed the pantomime of
B'wana Simba and another character known as B'wana Doktor and the horned
beasts.
'We'll take the two savages as one lot and these two Oxonians as the
other,' Pop said.
<! {hate} that theatrical bastard,' I said.
'He may be marvellous,' Pop said doubtfully. 'Anyway, you're a tracker,
you know. The old man says the other two are good.'
'Thank you. Go to hell. Will you hold the straws?'
Pop arranged two grass stems in his fist. 'The long one is for David
Garrick and his pal,' he explained. 'The short one is the two nudist
sportsmen.'
'Do you want to draw first?'
'Go ahead,' Karl said.
I drew David Garrick and Abdullah.
'I got the bloody tragedian.'
'He may be very good,' Karl said.
'Do you want to trade?'
'No. He may be a marvel.'
'Now we'll draw for choice of beats. The long straw gets first choice,'
Pop explained.
'Go ahead and draw.'
Karl drew the short one.
'What are the beats?' I asked Pop.
There was a long conversation in which our David simulated the killing
of half a dozen kudu from different types of ambush, surprise, stalks in the
open, and jumping them in the bush.
Finally Pop said, 'It seems there's some sort of a saltlick where they
come to lick salt and thousands are slain. Then sometimes you just stroll
around the hill there and pot the poor beggars in the open. If you're
feeling frightfully fit, you climb for them and up in the crags you knock
them over as they stroll out to feed.'
'I'll take the salt-lick.'
'Mind you only shoot the very biggest sort,' Pop said.
'When do we start?' Karl asked.
'The salt-lick is supposed to be an early morning show,' Pop told us.
'But Old Hem might as well have a look at it to-night. It's about five miles
down the road before you start to walk. He'll start first and take the car.
You can start back in the hills any time after the sun gets a little farther
down.'
'What about the Memsahib?' I asked. 'Should she go with me?'
'I don't think it's advisable,' Pop said seriously. 'The fewer people
when you're after kudu the better.'
M'Cola, Theatre Business, Abdullah, and I came back that evening late
in the cool of the night and full of excitement as we came up to the fire.
The dust of the saltlick had been cut up and printed deep with fresh kudu
tracks and there were several big bull tracks. The blind made a marvellous
ambush and I was as confident and as sure of a shot at kudu the next morning
as I would be sure of a shot at ducks from a good blind, with a fine stock
of decoys out, cold weather, and the certainty of a flight on.
'It's airtight. It's foolproof. It's even a shame. What's his name,
Booth, Barrett, McCulIough -- you know who I mean . . .'
'Charles Laughton,' said Pop, pulling on his pipe.
'That's the one. Fred Astaire. Society's hoofer and the world's. He's
an ace. Found the blind and everything. Knew where the salt-lick was. Could
tell which way the wind blew by simply scattering dust. He's a marvel.
B'wana Simba trains 'em, pal. Pop, we have them in the container. It's only
a question of not spoiling the meat and selecting the more rugged specimens.
I'll kill you two to-morrow on that lick. Citizens, I feel very well.'
'What {have} you been drinking?'
'Not a damned thing, really. Call Garrick. Tell him I'll put him in the
cinema. Got a part for him. Little thing I thought up on the way home. It
may not work out but I like the plot. Othello or The Moor of Venice. D'you
like it? It's got a wonderful idea. You see this jig we call Othello falls
in love with this girl who's never been around at all so we call her
Desdemona. Like it? They've been after me to write it for years but I drew
the colour line. Let him go out and get a reputation, I told them. Harry
Wills, hell. Paulino beat him. Sharkey beat him. Dempsey beat Sharkey.
Camera knocked him out. What if nobody saw the punch? Where the hell were
we, Pop? Harry Greb is dead you know.'
'We were just coming into Town,' Pop said. 'Chaps were throwing things
at you and we couldn't find out why.'
'I remember,' P.O.M. said. 'Why didn't you make him draw the colour
line, Mr. J. P?'
'I was frightfully tired,' Pop said.
'You're very distinguished looking, though,' P.O.M. said. 'What are we
going to do with this goofy?'
'Throw a drink into the brute and see if he'll quiet down.'
'I'm quiet now,' I said. 'But, by God, I feel awfully good about
to-morrow.'
Just then who should come into camp but old Karl with his two naked
savages and his half-size, very devout Mohammedan gun bearer, Charo. In the
firelight old Karl looked a greyish, yellowish white in the face and he took
off his Stetson.
'Well, did you get one?' he asked.
'No. But they're there. What did you do?'
'Walked along a goddamned road. How do they expect to find kudu along a
road with nothing but cattle and huts and people?'
He did not look like himself and I thought he must be ill. But coming
in like a death's head when we had been clowning made me behave badly again
and I said, 'We drew lots, you know'.
'Of course,' he said bitterly. 'We hunted along a road. What would you
expect to see? Does that seem the way to hunt kudu to you?'
'But you'll get one on the salt-lick in the morning,' P.O.M. told him
very cheerfully.
I drank off the glass of whisky and soda and heard my voice say very
cheerfully, 'You'll be sure to get one on the salt-lick in the morning'.
'You're hunting it in the morning,' Karl said.
'No. You're hunting it. I had it to-night. We're changing off. That's
been understood. Isn't it, Pop?'
'Quite,' Pop said. No one was looking at anyone else.
'Have a whisky and soda, Karl,' P.O.M. said.
'All right,' Karl said.
We had one of those quiet meals. In bed in the tent, I said, 'What in
God's name prompted you to say that about him having the lick in the
morning?'
'I don't know. I don't think that's what I meant to say. I got mixed
up. Let's not talk about it.'
'I won the damned thing drawing lots. You can't go against lots. That's
the only way the luck has a chance to even up, ever.'
'Don't let's talk about it.'
'I don't think he's well now and he doesn't feel himself. The damned
things have gotten his goat and he's liable to blow that salt-lick higher
than a kite in the state he's in.'
'Please stop talking about it.'
'I will.'
'Good.'
'Well, we made him feel good anyway.'
'I don't know that we did. Please stop talking about it.'
'I will.'
'Good.'
'Good night,' she said.
'The hell with it,' I said. 'Good night.'
'Good night.'
In the morning Karl and his outfit started for the saltlick and
Garrick, Abdullah, M'Cola and I crossed the road, angled behind the village
up a dry watercourse and started climbing the mountains in a mist. We headed
up a pebbly, boulder-filled, dry stream bed overgrown with vines and brush
so that, climbing, you walked, stooping, in a steep tunnel of vines and
foliage. I sweated so that I was soaked through my shirt and undergarments
and when we came out on the shoulder of the mountain and stood, looking down
at the bank of clouds quilting over the entire valley below us, the morning
breeze chilled me and I had to put on my raincoat while we glassed the
country. I was too wet with sweat to sit down and I signed Garrick to keep
on going. We went around one side of the mountain, doubled back on a higher
grade and crossed over, out of the sun that was drying my wet shirt and
along the top of a series of grassy valleys, stopping to search each one
thoroughly with the field glasses. Finally we came to a sort of
amphitheatre, a bowl-like valley of very green grass with a small stream
down the middle and timber along the far side and all the lower edge. We sat
in the shadow against some rocks, out of any breeze, watching with the
glasses as the sun rose and lighted the opposite slopes, seeing two kudu
cows and a calf feed out from the timber, moving with the quickly browsing,
then head lifted, long-staring vigilance of all browsing animals in a
forest. Animals on a plain can see so far that they have confidence and feed
very differently from animals in the woods. We could see the vertical white
stripes on their grey flanks and it was very satisfying to watch them and to
be high in the mountain that early in the morning. Then, while we watched,
there was a boom, like a rockslide. I thought at first it was a boulder
falling, but M'Cola whispered.
'B'wana Kibor! Piga!' We listened for another shot but we did not hear
one and I {was} sure Karl had his kudu. The cows we were watching had heard
the shot and stood, listening, then went on feeding. But they fed into the
timber. I remembered the old saying of the Indian in camp, 'One shot, meat.
Two shots, maybe. Three shots, heap s -- t,' and I got out the dictionary to
translate it for M'Cola. However it came out seemed to amuse him and he
laughed and shook his head. We glassed that valley until the sun came on to
us, then hunted around the other side of the mountain and in another fine
valley saw the place where the other B'wana, B'wana Doktor he still sounded
like, had shot a fine bull kudu, but a Masai walked down the centre of the
valley while we were glassing it and when I pretended I was going to shoot
him Garrick became very dramatic insisting it was a man, a man, a man!
'Don't shoot men?' I asked him.
'No! No! No!' he said putting his hand to his head. I took the gun down
with great reluctance, clowning for M'Cola who was grinning, and it very hot
now, we walked across a meadow where the grass was knee high and truly
swarming with long, rose-coloured, gauze-winged locusts that rose in clouds
about us, making a whirring like a mowing machine, and climbing small hills
and going down a long steep slope, we made our way back to camp to find the
air of the valley drifting with flying locusts and Karl already in camp with
Us kudu.
Passing the skinner's tent he showed me the head which looked,
body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from
where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a
very strange and unfortunate kudu. Only the skin running from the eyes down
to the nostrils, smooth grey and delicately marked with white, and the big,
graceful ears were beautiful. The eyes were already dusty and there were
flies around them and the horns were heavy, coarse, and instead of
spiralling high they made a heavy turn and slanted straight out. It was a
freak head, heavy and ugly.
Pop was sitting under the dining tent smoking and reading.
'Where's Karl?' I asked him.
'In his tent, I think. What did you do?'
'Worked around the hill. Saw a couple of cows.'
'I'm awfully glad you got him,' I told Karl at the mouth of his tent.
'How was it?'
'We were in the blind and they motioned me to keep my head down and
then when I looked up there he was right beside us. He looked huge.'
'We heard you shoot. Where did you hit him?'
'In the leg first, I think. Then we trailed him and finally I hit him a
couple of more times and we got him.'
'I heard only one shot.'
'There were three or four,' Karl said.
'I guess the mountain shut off some if you were gone the other way
trailing him. He's got a heavy beam and a big spread.'
'Thanks,' Karl said. 'I hope you get a lot better one. They said there
was another one but I didn't see him.'
I went back to the dining tent where Pop and P.O.M. were. They did not
seem very elated about the kudu.
'What's the matter with you?' I asked.
'Did you see the head?' P.O.M. asked.
'Sure.'
'It's {awful} looking,' she said.
'It's a kudu. He's got another one still to go.'
'Charo and the trackers said there was another bull with this one. A
big bull with a wonderful head.'
'That's all right. I'll shoot him.'
'If he ever comes back.'
'It's fine he has one,' P.O.M. said.
'I'll bet he'll get the biggest one ever known, now,' I said.
'I'm sending him down with Dan to the sable country,' Pop said. 'That
was the agreement. The first to kill a kudu to get first crack at the
sable.'
'That's fine.'
'Then as soon as you get your kudu we'll move down there too.'
{'Good.'}
That all seemed a year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way
out to the twenty-eight-mile salt-lick, the sun on our faces, just having
shot the guinea fowl, having, in the last five days, failed on the lick
where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big hills and the
small hills, having failed on the flats, losing a shot the night before on
this lick because of the Austrian's lorry, I knew there were only two days
more to hunt before we must leave. M'Cola knew it too, and we were hunting
together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a
shortness of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were
saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.
Kamau, the driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who,
with an old brown tweed coat some shooter had discarded, trousers heavily
patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed
always to give an impression of great elegance. Kamau was very modest,
quiet, and an excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country
and into an open, scrubby, desert-looking stretch, I looked at him, whose
elegance, achieved with an old coat and a safety pin, whose modesty,
pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first
were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would
have meant nothing to me except that we would be short a driver; while now
whenever or wherever he should die I would feel badly. Then abandoning the
sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what
a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the
look on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then,
we put up another flock of guineas. M'Cola handed nie the shotgun and I
shook my head. He nodded violently and said, 'Good. Very Good', and I told
Kamau to go on. This confused Garrick who began an oration. Didn't we want
guineas? Those were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer
that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook
a bull off of it, by a shot, to frighten him in the way we had seen the
lesser kudu leave the salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were in
the blind.
We left the lorry under some scrubby trees about two miles from the
lick and walked along the sandy road towards the first salt place which was
in the open to the left of the trail. We had gone about a mile keeping
absolutely quiet and walking in single file, Abdullah the educated tracker
leading, then me, M'Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of
us. Where the sand was thin over the clay there was a pool of water and you
could see that a heavy rain had drenched it all on ahead. I did not realize
what this meant but Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and
bared his teeth in anger.
'It's no good,' M'Cola whispered.
Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.
'Shut up, you bastard,' I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on
talking in above normal tones and I "looked up 'shut up' in the dictionary
while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn't find 'shut
up' so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he
closed it in surprise.
"Cola,' I said.
'Yes,' said M'Cola.
'What's the matter?'
'Salt no good.'
'Ah.'
So that was it. I had thought of the rain only as something that made
tracking easy.
'When the rain?' I asked.
'Last night,' M'Cola said.
Garrick started to talk and I placed the back of my hand against his
mouth.
"Cola.'
'Yes.'
'Other salt,' pointing in the direction of the big lick in the woods,
which I knew was a good bit higher because we went very slightly up hill
through the brush to reach it. 'Other salt good?'
'Maybe.'
M'Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed deeply
hurt but kept his mouth shut and we went on down the road, walking around
the wet places, to where, sure enough, the deep depression of the saltlick
was half filled with water. Garrick started to whisper a speech here but
M'Cola shut him up again.
'Come on,' I said, and, M'Cola ahead, we started trailing up the damp,
sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the trees to the upper
lick.
M'Cola stopped dead, leaned over to look at the damp sand, then
whispered, 'Man', to me. There was the track.
'Shenzi,' he said, which meant a wild man.
We trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and stalking the
lick carefully, up and into the blind. M'Cola shook his head.
'No good,' he said. 'Come on.'
We went over to the lick. There it was all written plainly. There were
the tracks of three big bull kudu in the moist bank beyond the lick where
they had come to the salt. Then there were the sudden, deep, knifely-cut
tracks where they made a spring when the bow twanged and the slashing
heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then,
far-spaced, the tracks running into the bush. We trailed them, all three,
but no man's track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.
M'Cola said, 'Shenzi!' putting great hate into the word. We picked up
the shenzi's tracks and saw where he had gone on back to the road. We
settled down in the blind and waited there until it was dark and a light
rain began to fall. Nothing came to the salt. In the rain we made our way
back to the lorry. Some wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away
from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.
Kamau had rigged a tent out of a big canvas ground cloth, hung my
mosquito net inside, and set up the canvas cot. M'Cola brought the food
inside the shelter tent.
Garrick and Abdullah built a fire and they, Kamau and M'Cola cooked
over it. They were going to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I
undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate
a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a couple of tin cups of half whisky
and water.
M'Cola came in, grave, solicitous, and very awkward inside a tent and
took my clothes out from where I had folded them to make a pillow and folded
them again, very un-neatly, and put them under the blankets. He brought
three tins to see if I did not want them. opened.
'No.'
'Chai?' he asked.
'The hell with it.'
'No chai?'
'Whisky better.'
'Yes,' he said feelingly. 'Yes.'
'Chai in the morning. Before the sun.'
'Yes, B'wana M'Kumba.'
'You sleep here. Out of the rain.' I pointed to the canvas where the
rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses,
ever hear. It was a lovely sound, even though it was hitching us.
'Yes.'
'Go on. Eat.'
'Yes. No chai?'
'The hell with tea.'
'Whisky?' he asked hopefully.
'Whisky finish.'
'Whisky,' he said confidently.
'All right,' I said. 'Go eat,' and pouring the cup half and half with
water got in under the mosquito bar, found my clothes and again made them
into a pillow, and lying on my side drank the whisky very slowly, resting on
one elbow, then dropped the cup down under the bar on to the ground, felt
under the cot for the Springfield, put the searchlight beside me in the bed
under the blanket, and went to sleep listening to the rain. I woke when I
heard M'Cola come in, make his bed and go to sleep, and I woke once in the
night and heard him sleeping by me; but in the morning he was up and had
made the tea before I was awake.
'Chai,' he said, pulling on my blanket.
'Bloody chai,' I said, sitting up still asleep.
It was a grey, wet morning. The rain had stopped but the mist hung over
the ground and we found the salt-lick rained out and not a track near it.
Then we hunted through the wet scrub on the flat hoping to find a track in
the soaked earth and trail a bull until we could see him. There were no
tracks. We crossed the road and followed the edge of the scrub around a
moor-like open stretch. I hoped we might find the rhino but while we came on
much fresh rhino dung there were no tracks since the rain. Once we heard
tick birds and looking up saw them in jerky flight above us headed to the
northward over the heavy scrub. We made a long circle through there but
found nothing but a fresh hyena track and a cow kudu track. In a tree M'Cola
pointed out a lesser kudu skull with one beautiful, long, curling horn. We
found the other horn below in the grass and I screwed it back on to its bone
base.
'Shenzi,' M'Cola said and imitated a man pulling a bow. The skull was
quite clean but the hollow horns had some damp residue in them, smelled
unbearably foul and, giving no sign of having noticed the stench, I handed
them to Garrick who promptly, without sign gave them to Abdullah. Abdullah
wrinkled the edge of his flat nose and shook his head. They really smelled
abominably. M'Cola and I grinned and Garrick looked virtuous.
I decided a good idea might be to drive along the road in the car,
watching for kudu, and hunt any likely-looking clearings. We went back to
the car and did this, working several clearings with no luck. By then the
sun was up and the road was becoming populous with travellers, both
white-clothed and naked, and we decided to head for camp. On our way in, we
stopped and stalked the other salt-lick. There was an impalla on it looking
very red where the sun struck his hide in the patches between the grey trees
and there were many kudu tracks. We smoothed them over and drove on into
camp to find a sky full of locusts passing over, going to the westward,
making the sky, as you looked up, seem a pink dither of flickering passage,
flickering like an old cinema film, but pink instead of grey. P.O.M. and Pop
came out and were very disappointed. No rain had fallen in camp and they had
been sure we would have something when we came in.
'Did my literary pal get off?'
'Yes,' Pop said. 'He's gone into Handeni.'
'He told me all about American women,' P.O.M. said. 'Poor old Poppa, I
was sure you'd get one. Danin the rain.'
'How are American women?'
'He thinks they're terrible.'
'Very sound fellow,' said Pop. 'Tell me just what happened to-day.'
We sat in the shade of the dining tent and I told them.
'A Wanderobo,' Pop said. 'They're frightful shots. Bad luck.'
'I thought it might be one of those travelling sportsmen you see with
their bows slung going along the road. He saw the lick by the road and
trailed up to the other one.'
'Not very likely. They carry those bows and arrows as protection.
They're not hunters.'
'Well, whoever it was put it on us. '
'Bad luck. That, and the rain. I've had scouts out here on both the
hills but they've seen nothing.'
'Well, we're not hitched until to-morrow night. When do we have to