huge and dark, in two great curves nearly touching the middle of his back.
He was a bull all right. God, what a bull.
'Doumi,' said M'Cola in my ear. 'Doumi!'
I hit him and at the roar he was down. I saw him up, the others
passing, spreading out, then bunching. I missed him. Then I saw him going
almost straight away up the valley in the tall grass and I hit him again and
he went out of sight. The sable now were going up the hill at the head of
the valley, up the hill at our right, up the hill in the timber across the
valley, spread out and travelling fast. Now that I had seen a bull I knew
they all were cows including the first one I had shot. The bull never showed
and I was absolutely sure that we would find him where I had seen him go
down in the long grass.
The outfit were all up and I shook off handshaking and thumb pulling
before we started down through the trees and over the edge of the gully and
to the meadow on a dead run. My eyes, my mind, and all inside of me were
full of the blackness of that sable bull and the sweep of those horns and I
was thanking God I had the rifle reloaded before he came out. But it was
excited shooting, all of it, and I was not proud of it. I had gotten excited
and shot at the whole animal instead of the right place and I was ashamed,
but the outfit now were drunk excited. I would have walked but you could not
hold them, they were like a pack of dogs as we ran. As we crossed the meadow
opening where we had first seen the seven and went beyond where the bull had
gone out of sight, the grass suddenly was high and over our heads and every
one slowed down. There were two washed-out concealed ravines ten or twelve
feet deep that ran down to the watercourse and what had looked a smooth
grass-filled basin was very broken, tricky country with grass that was from
waist-high to well above our heads. We found blood at once and it led off to
the left, across the watercourse and up the hillside on the left toward the
head of the valley. I thought that was the first sable but it seemed a wider
swing than he had seemed to make when we watched him going from above in the
timber. I made a circle to look for the big bull but I could not pick his
track from the mass of tracks and in the high grass and the broken terrain
it was difficult to figure just where he had gone.
They were all for the blood spoor and it was like trying to make
badly-trained bird dogs hunt a dead bird when they are crazy to be off after
the rest of the covey.
'Doumi! Doumi!' I said. 'Kubwa Sana! The bull. The big bull.'
'Yes,' everybody agreed. 'Here! Here!' The blood spoor that crossed the
watercourse.
Finally I took that trail thinking we must get them one at a time, and
knowing this one was hard hit and the other would keep. Then, too, I might
be wrong and this might be the big bull, he might possibly have turned in
the high grass and crossed here as we were running down. I had been wrong
before, I remembered.
We trailed fast up the hillside, into the timber, the blood was
splashed freely; made a turn toward the right, climbing steeply, and at the
head of the valley in some large rocks jumped a sable. It went scrambling
and bounding off through the rocks. I saw in an instant that it was not hit
and knew that, in spite of the back-swung dark horns, it was a cow from the
dark chestnut colour. But I saw this just in time to keep from shooting. I
had started to pull when I lowered the rifle.
'Manamouki,' I said. 'It's a cow.'
M'Cola and the two Roman guides agreed. I had very nearly shot. We went
on perhaps five yards and another sable jumped. But this one was swaying its
head wildly and could not clear the rocks. It was hard hit and I took my
time, shot carefully, and broke its neck.
We came up to it, lying in the rocks, a large, deep chestnut-brown
animal, almost black, the horns black and curving handsomely back, there was
a white patch on the muzzle and back from the eye, there was a white belly;
but it was no bull.
M'Cola, still in doubt, verified this and feeling the short,
rudimentary teats said 'Manamouki', and shook his head sadly.
It was the first big bull that Garrick had pointed out.
'Bull down there,' I pointed.
'Yes,' said M'Cola.
I thought that we would give him time to get sick, if he were only
wounded, and then go down and find him. So I had M'Cola make the cuts for
taking off the head skin and we would leave the old man to skin out the head
while we went down after the bull.
I drank some water from the canteen. I was thirsty after the run and
the climb, and the sun was up now and it was getting hot. Then we went down
the opposite side of the valley from that we had just come up trailing the
wounded cow, and below, in the tall grass, casting in circles, commenced to
hunt for the trail of the bull. We could not find it.
The sable had been running in a bunch as they came out and any
individual track was confused or obliterated. We found some blood on the
grass stems where I had first hit him, then lost it, then found it again
where the other blood spoor turned off. Then the tracks had all split up as
they had gone, fan-wise, up the valley and the hills and we could not find
it again. Finally I found blood on a grass blade about fifty yards up the
valley and I plucked it and held it up. This was a mistake. I should have
brought them to it. Already everyone but M'Cola was losing faith in the
bull.
He was not there. He had disappeared. He had vanished. Perhaps he had
never existed. Who could say he was a real bull? If I had not plucked the
grass with the blood on it I might have held them. Growing there with blood
on it, it was evidence. Plucked, it meant nothing except to me and to
M'Cola. But I could find no more blood and they were all hunting
half-heartedly now. The only possible way was to quarter every foot of the
high grass and trace every foot of the gullies. It was very hot now and they
were only making a pretence of hunting.
Garrick came up. 'All cows,' he said. 'No bull. Just biggest cow. You
killed biggest cow. We found her. Smaller cow get away.'
'You wind-blown son of a bitch,' I said, then, using my fingers.
'Listen. Seven cows. Then fifteen cows and one bull. Bull hit. Here.'
'All cows,' said Garrick.
'One big cow hit. One bull hit.'
I was so sure sounding that they agreed to this and searched for a
while but I could see they were losing belief in the bull.
'If I had one good dog,' I thought. 'Just one good dog.'
Then Garrick came up. 'All cows,' he said. 'Very big cows.'
'You're a cow,' I said. 'Very big cow.'
This got a laugh from the Wanderobo-Masai, who was getting to look a
picture of sick misery. The brother half believed in the bull, I could see.
Husband, by now, did not believe in any of us. I didn't think he even
believed in the kudu of the night before. Well, after this shooting, I did
not blame him.
M'Cola came up. 'Hapana,' he said glumly. Then, 'B'wana, you shot that
bull?'
'Yes,' I said. For a minute I began to doubt whether there ever was a
bull. Then I saw again his heavy, high-withered blackness and the high rise
of his horns before they swept back, him running with the bunch, shoulder
higher than them and black as hell and as I saw it, M'Cola saw it again too
through the rising mist of the savage's unbelief in what he can no longer
see.
'Yes,' M'Cola agreed. 'I see him. You shoot him.'
I told it again. 'Seven cows. Shoot biggest. Fifteen cows, one bull.
Hit that bull.'
They all believed it now for a moment and circled, searching, but the
faith died at once in the heat of the sun and the tall grass blowing.
'All cows,' Garrick said. The Wanderobo-Masai nodded, his mouth open. I
could feel the comfortable lack of faith coming over me too. It was a damned
sight easier not to hunt in that sun in that shadeless pocket and in the sun
on that steep hillside. I told M'Cola we would hunt up the valley on both
sides, finish skinning out the head, and he and I would come down alone and
find the bull. You could not hunt them against that unbelief. I had had no
chance to train them; no power to discipline. If there had been no law I
would have shot Garrick and they would all have hunted or cleared out. I
think they would have hunted. Garrick was not popular. He was simply poison.
M'Cola and I came back down the valley, quartered it like bird dogs,
circled and followed and checked track after track. I was hot and very
thirsty. The sun was something serious by now.
'Hapana,' M'Cola said. We could not find him. Whatever he was, we had
lost him.
'Maybe he was a cow. Maybe it was all goofy,' I thought, letting the
unbelief come in as a comfort. We were going to hunt up the hillside to the
right and then we would have checked it all and would take the cow head into
camp and see what the Roman had located.
I was dead thirsty and drained the canteen. We would get water in camp.
We started up the hill and I jumped a sable in some brush. I almost
loosed off at it before I saw it was a cow. That showed how one could be
hidden, I thought. We would have to get the men and go over it all again;
and then, from the old man, came a wild shouting.
'Doumi! Doumi!' in a high, screaming shout.
'Where?' I shouted, running across the hill toward him.
'There! There!' he shouted, pointing into the timber on the other side
of the head of the valley. 'There! There! There he goes! There!'
We came on a dead run but the bull was out of sight in the timber on
the hillside. The old man said he was huge, he was black, he had great
horns, and he came by him ten yards away, hit in two places, in the gut and
high up in the rump, hard hit but going fast, crossing the valley, through
the boulders and going up the hillside.
I gut-shot him, I thought. Then as he was going away I laid that one on
his stern. He lay down and was sick and we missed him. Then, when we were
past, he jumped.
'Come on,' I said. Everyone was excited and ready to go now and the old
man was chattering about the bull as he folded the head skin and put the
head upon his own head and we started across through the rocks and up,
quartering up on to the hillside. There, where the old man had pointed, was
a very big sable track, the hoof marks spread wide, the tracks grading up
into the timber and there was blood, plenty of it.
We trailed him fast, hoping to jump him and have a shot, and it was
easy trailing in the shade of the trees with plenty of blood to follow. But
he kept climbing, grading up around the hill, and he was travelling fast. We
kept the blood bright and wet but we could not come up on him. I did not
track but kept watching ahead thinking I might see him as he looked back, or
see him down, or cutting down across the hill through the timber, and M'Cola
and Garrick were tracking, aided by every one but the old man who staggered
along with the sable skull and head skin held on his own grey head. M'Cola
had hung the empty water bottle on him, and Garrick had loaded him with the
cinema camera. It was hard going for the old man.
Once we came on a place where the bull had rested and watched his back
track, there was a little pool of blood on a rock where he had stood, behind
some bushes, and I cursed the wind that blew our scent on ahead of us. There
was a big breeze blowing now and I was certain we had no chance of
surprising him, our scent would keep everything moving out of the way ahead
of us as long as anything could move. I thought of trying to circle ahead
with M'Cola and let them track but we were moving fast, the blood was still
bright on the stones and on the fallen leaves and grass and the hills were
too steep for us to make a circle. I did not see how we could lose him.
Then he took us up and into a rocky, ravine-cut country where the
trailing was slow and the climbing difficult. Here, I thought, we would jump
him in a gully but the spatters of blood, not so bright now, went on around
the boulders, over the rocks and up and up and left us on a rim-rock ledge.
He must have gone down from there. It was too steep above for him. to have
gone over the top of the hill. There was no other way to go but down, but
how had he gone, and down which ravine? I sent them looking down three
possible ways and got out on the rim to try to sight him. They could not
find any spoor, and then the Wanderobo-Masai called from below and to the
right that he had blood and, climbing down, . we saw it on a rock and then
followed it in occasional drying splatters down through a steep descent to
the meadow below. I was encouraged when he started down hill and in the
knee-high, heavy grass of the meadow trailing was easy again, because the
grass brushed against his belly and while you could not see tracks clearly
without stooping double and parting the grass to look, yet the blood spoor
was plain on the grass blades. But it was dry now and dully shiny and I knew
we had lost much time on him when he rim-rocked us on the hill.
Finally his trail crossed the dry watercourse about where we had first
come in sight of the meadow in the morning and led away into the sloping,
sparsely-wooded country on the far side. There were no clouds and I could
feel the sun now, not just as heat but as a heavy deadly weight on my head
and I was very thirsty. It was very hot but it was not the heat that
bothered. It was the weight of the sun.
Garrick had given up tracking seriously and was only contributing
theatrical successes of discovering blood when M'Cola and I were checked. He
would do no routine tracking any more, but would rest and then track in
irritating spurts. The Wanderobo-Masai was useless as a blue-jay and I had
M'Cola give him the big rifle to carry so that we would get some use out of
him. The Roman's brother was obviously not a hunter and the husband was not
very interested. He did not seem to be a hunter either. As we trailed,
slowly, the ground, hard now as the sun had baked it, the blood only black
spots and splatters on the short grass, one by one the brother, Garrick, and
the Wanderobo-Masai dropped out and sat in the shade of the scattered trees.
The sun was terrific and as it was necessary to track with heads bent
down and stooping, in spite of a handkerchief spread over my neck I had a
pounding ache in my head.
M'Cola was tracking slowly, steadily, and absolutely absorbed in the
problem. His bare, bald head gleamed with sweat and when it ran down in his
eyes he would pluck a grass stem, hold it with each hand and shave the sweat
off his forehead and bald black crown with the stem.
We went on slowly. I had always sworn to Pop that I could out-track
M'Cola but I realized now that in the past I had been giving a sort of
Garrick performance in picking up the spoor when it was lost and that in
straight, steady trailing, now in the heat, with the sun really bad, truly
bad so that you could feel what it was doing to your head, cooking it to
hell, trailing in short grass on hard ground where a blood spot was a dry,
black blister on a grass blade, difficult to see; that you must find the
next little black spot perhaps twenty yards away, one holding the last blood
while the other found the next, then going on, one on each side of the
trail; pointing with a grass stem at the spots to save talking, until it ran
out again and you marked the last bood with your eye and both made casts to
pick it up again, signalling with a hand up, my mouth too dry to talk, a
heat shimmer over the ground now when you straightened up to let your neck
stop aching and looked ahead, I knew M'Cola was immeasurably the better man
and the better tracker. Have to tell Pop, I thought.
At this point M'Cola made a joke. My mouth was so dry that it was hard
to talk.
'B'wana,' M'Cola said, looking at me when I had straiglitened up and
was leaning my neck back to get the crick out of it.
'Yes?'
'Whisky?' and he offered me the flask.
'You bastard,' I said in English, and he chuckled and shook his head.
'Hapana whisky?'
'You savage,' I said in Swahili.
We started tracking again, M'Cola shaking his head and very amused, and
in a little while the grass was longer and it was easier again. We crossed
all that semi-open country we had seen from the hillside in the morning and
going down a slope the tracks swung back into high grass. In this higher
grass I found that by half shutting my eyes I could see his trail where he
had shouldered through the grass and I went ahead fast without trailing by
the blood, to M'Cola's amazement, but then we came out on very short grass
and rock again and now the trailing was the hardest yet.
He was not bleeding much now; the sun and the heat must have dried the
wounds and we found only an occasional small starry splatter on the rocky
ground.
Garrick came up and made a couple of brilliant discoveries of blood
spots, then sat down under a tree. Under another tree I could see the poor
old Wanderobo-Masai holding his first and last job as gun-bearer. Under
another was the old man, the sable head beside him like some black-mass
symbol, his equipment hanging from his shoulders. M'Cola and I went on
trailing very slowly and laboriously across the long stony slope and back
and up into another tree-scattered meadow, and through it, and into a long
field with piled up boulders at the end. In the middle of this field we lost
the trail completely and circled and hunted for nearly two hours before we
found blood again.
The old man found it for us below the boulders and to the right half a
mile away. He had gone ahead down there on his own idea of what the bull
would have done. The old man was a hunter.
Then we trailed him very slowly, on to hard stony ground a mile away.
But we could not trail from there. The ground was too hard to leave a track
and we never found blood again. Then we hunted on our various theories of
where the bull would go, but the country was too big and we had no luck.
'No good,' M'Cola said.
I straightened up and went over to the shade of a big tree. It felt
cool as water and the breeze cooled my skin through the wet shirt. I was
thinking about the bull and wishing to God I had never hit him. Now I had
wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out
of that country. He never showed any tendency to circle back. To-night he
would die and the hyenas would eat him, or, worse, they would get him before
he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive. The
first one that hit that blood spoor would stay with it until he found him.
Then he would call up the others. I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him
and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed
it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the
seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no
guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. But I
felt rotten sick over this sable bull. Besides, I wanted him, I wanted him
damned badly, I wanted him more than I would admit. Well, we had played our
string out with him. Our chance was at the start when he was down and we
missed him. We had lost that. No, our best chance, the only chance a
rifleman should ever ask, was when I had a shot and shot at the whole animal
instead of calling the shot. It was my own lousy fault. I was a son of a
bitch to have gut-shot him. It came from over-confidence in being able to do
a thing and then omitting one of the steps in how it is done. Well, we had
lost him. I doubted if there was a dog in the world could trail him now in
that heat. Still that was the only chance. I got out the dictionary and
asked the old man if there were any dogs at the Roman's place.
'No,' said the old man. 'Hapana.'
We made a very wide circle and I sent the brother and the husband out
in another circle. We found nothing, no trace, no tracks, no blood, and I
told M'Cola we would start for camp. The Roman's brother and the husband
went up the valley to get the meat of the sable cow we had shot. We were
beaten.
M'Cola and I ahead, the other following, we went across the long heat
haze of the open country, down to cross the dry watercourse, and up and into
the grateful shade of the trail through the woods. As we were going along
through the broken sunlight and shadow, the floor of the forest smooth and
springy where we cut across to save distance from the trail, we saw, less
than a hundred yards away, a herd of sable standing in the timber looking at
us. I pulled back the bolt and looked for the best pair of horns.
'Doumi,' Garrick whispered. 'Doumi kubwa sana!'
I looked where he pointed. It was a very big cow sable, dark chestnut,
white marks on the face, white belly, heavy built and with a fine curving
pair of horns. She was standing broadside to us with her head turned,
looking. I looked carefully at the whole lot. They were all cows, evidently
the bunch whose bull I had wounded and lost, and they had come over the hill
and herded up again together here.
'We go to camp,' I said to M'Cola.
As we started forward the sable jumped and ran past us, crossing the
trail ahead. At every good pair of cow horns, Garrick said, 'Bull, B'wana.
Big, big bull. Shoot, B'wana. Shoot, oh shoot!'
'All cows,' I said to M'Cola when they were past, running in a panic
through the sun-splashed timber.
'Yes,' he agreed.
'Old man,' I said. The old man came up.
'Let the guide carry that,' I said.
The old man lowered the cow sable head.
'No,' said Garrick.
'Yes,' I said. 'Bloody well yes.'
We went on through the woods toward camp. I was feeling better, much
better. All through the day I had never thought once of the kudu. Now we
were coming home to where they were waiting.
It seemed much longer coming home although, usually, the return over a
new trail is shorter. I was tired all the way into my bones, my head felt
cooked, and I was thirstier than I had ever been in my life. But suddenly,
walking through the woods, it was much cooler. A cloud had come over the
sun.
We came out of the timber and down on to the flat and in sight of the
thorn fence. The sun was behind a bank of clouds now and then in a little
while the sky was covered completely and the clouds looked heavy and
threatening. I thought perhaps this had been the last clear hot day; unusual
heat before the rains. First I thought: if it had only rained, so that the
ground would hold a track, we could have stayed with that bull for ever;
then, looking at the heavy, woolly clouds that so quickly had covered all
the sky, I thought that if we were going to join the outfit, and get the car
across that ten-mile stretch of black cotton road on the way to Handeni, we
had better start. I pointed to the sky.
'Bad,' M'Cola agreed.
'Go to the camp of B'wana M'Kubwa?'
'Better.' Then, vigorously, accepting the decision, 'N'Dio. N'Dio.'
'We go,' I said.
Arrived at the thorn fence and the hut, we broke camp fast. There was a
runner there from our last camp who had brought a note, written before
P.O.M, and Pop had left, and bringing my mosquito net. There was nothing in
the note, only good luck and that they were starting. I drank some water
from one of our canvas bags, sat on a petrol tin and looked at the sky. I
could not, conscientiously, chance staying. If it rained here we might not
even be able to get out to the road. If it rained heavily on the road, we
would never get out to the coast that season. Both the Austrian and Pop had
said that, I had to go.
That was settled, so. there was no use to think how much I wanted to
stay. The day's fatigue helped make the decision easy. Everything was being
loaded into the car and they were all gathering up their meat from the
sticks around the ashes of the fire.
'Don't you want to eat, B'wana?' Kamau asked me.
'No,' I said. Then in English, 'Too bloody tired.'
'Eat. You are hungry.'
'Later, in the car.'
M'Cola went by with a load, his big, flat face completely blank again.
It only {came} alive about hunting or some joke. I found a tin cup by the
fire and called to him to bring the whisky, and the blank face cracked at
the eyes and mouth into a smile as he took the flask out of his pocket.
'With water better,' he said.
'You black Chinaman.'
They were all working fast and the Roman's women came over and stood a
little way away watching the carrying and the packing of the car. There were
two of them, good-looking, well built, and shy, but interested. The Roman
was not back yet. I felt very badly to go off like this with no explanation
to him. I liked the Roman very much and had a high regard for him.
I took a drink of the whisky and water and looked at the two pairs of
kudu horns that leaned against the wall of the chicken coop hut. From the
white, cleanly picked skulls the horns rose in slow spirals that spreading
made a turn, another turn, and then curved delicately into those smooth,
ivory-like points. One pair was narrower and taller against the side of the
hut. The other was almost as tall but wider in spread and heavier in beam.
They were the colour of black walnut meats and they were beautiful to see. I
went over and stood the Springfield against the hut between them and the
tips reached past the muzzle of the rifle. As Kamau came back from carrying
a load to the car I told him to bring the camera and then had him stand
beside them while I took a picture. Then he picked them up, each head a
load, and carried them over to the car.
Garrick was talking loudly and in a roostery way to the Roman's women.
As near as I could make out he was offering them the empty petrol boxes in
exchange for a piece of something.
'Come here,' I called to him. He came over still feeling smart.
'Listen,' I told him in English. 'If I get through this safari without
socking you it's going to be a bloody marvel. And if I ever hit you I'll
break your mucking jaw. That's all.'
He did not understand the words but the tone made it clearer than if I
had got something out of the dictionary to tell him. I stood up and motioned
to the women that they could have the petrol tins and the cases. I was
damned if I could not have anything to do with them if I would let Garrick
make any passes.
'Get in the car,' I told him. 'No,' as he started to make delivery of
one of the petrol tins, 'in the car.' He went over to the car.
We were all packed now and ready to go. The horns were curling out the
back of the car, tied on to the loads. I left some money for the Roman and
one of the kudu hides with the boy. Then we got in the car. I got in the
front seat with the Wanderobo-Masai. Behind were M'Cola, Garrick, and the
runner, who was a man from the old man's village by the road. The old man
was crouched on top of the loads at the back, close under the roof.
We waved and started, passing more of the Roman's household, the older
and uglier part, roasting up piles of meat by a log fire beside the trail
that came up from the river through the maize field. We made the crossing
all right, the creek was down and the banks had dried and I looked back at
the field, the Roman's huts, and the stockade where we had camped, and the
blue hills, dark under the heavy sky, and I felt very badly not to have seen
the Roman and explain why we had gone off like this.
Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to
make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and
Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about
when we were cutting brush and shovelling; until I was certain I would have
to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child
does for a spanking. Kamau and M'Cola were both laughing at him. He was
playing the victorious leader home from the chase now. I thought it was
really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.
Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over
in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the
shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he sat down,
backwards. I never looked toward him, and M'Cola, Kamau, and I could not
look --at each other for fear we would laugh.
'I am hurt,' he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.
'Never get near a man shovelling,' I said in English. 'Damned
dangerous.'
'I am hurt,' said Garrick holding his belly.
'Rub it,' I told him and rubbed mine to show him how. We all got into
the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless,
theatrical bastard, so I told M'Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got
one out from under the loads in the back, we were going through the
deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked
around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely
again. He rubbed his belly and seemed to be telling them what a hell of a
man he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the old man watching
me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.
'Old man,' I said.
'Yes, B'wana.'
'A present,' and I handed what was left in the bottle back. There
wasn't much left but the foam and a very little beer.
'Beer?' asked M'Cola.
'By God, yes,' I said. I was thinking about beer and in my mind was
back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the
Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the
calf and came home that niglit around the mountain with the moonlight on the
fields of narcissi that grew on the meadows, and how we were drunk and
talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the
brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when
we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the
horse chestnut trees in bloom, and Chink and I again discussing writing and
whether you could call them waxen candela-bras. God, what bloody literary
discussions we had; we were literary as hell then just after the war, and
later there was the good beer at Lipp's at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at
the Cirque de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or after any other great fight where
you lost your voice and were still too excited to turn in; but beer was
mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags
for the Fusilier, crags for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong
beer for me. That was Chink then, quoting Robert Graves, then. We outgrew
some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The
old man knew it too. I had seen it in his eye the first time he saw me take
a drink.
'Beer,' said M'Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like
country, the engine hot under my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai as strong as
ever beside me, Kamau watching the grooves of the tyre tracks in the green
turf, and I hung my booted legs over the side to let my feet cool and drank
the beer and wished old Chink was along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith,
M.C., of His Majesty's Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss
how to describe this deer-park country and whether deer-park was enough to
call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant for
his years and the same sort of company. I was learning under Pop, while
Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our
ways had gone a long way apart.
But that damned sable bull. I should have killed him, but it was a
running shot. To hit him at all I had to use him all as a target. Yes, you
bastard, but what about the cow you missed twice, prone, standing broadside?
Was that a running shot? No. If I'd gone to bed last night I would not have
done that. Or if I'd wiped out the bore to get the oil out she would not
have thrown high the first time. Then I would not have pulled down and shot
under her the second shot. Every damned thing is your own fault if you're
any good. I thought I could shoot a shot-gun better than I could and I had
lost plenty of money backing my opinion, but I knew, coldly, and outside
myself, that I could shoot a rifle on game as well as any son of a bitch
that ever lived. Like hell I could. So what? So I gut-shot a sable bull and
let him get away. Could I shoot as well as I thought I could? Sure. Then why
did I miss on that cow? Hell, everybody is off sometime. You've got no
bloody business to be off. Who the hell are you? My conscience? Listen, I'm
all right with my conscience. I know just what kind of a son of a bitch I am
and I know what I can do well. If I hadn't had to leave and pull out I would
have got a sable bull. You know the Roman was a hunter. There was another
herd. Why did I have to make a one-night stand? Was that any way to hunt?
Hell, no. I'd make some money some way and when we came back we would come
to the old man's village in lorries, then pack in with porters so there
wouldn't be any damned car to worry about, send the porters --back, and make
a camp in the timber up the stream above the Roman's and hunt that country
slowly, living there and hunting out each day, sometimes laying off and
writing for a week, or writing half the day, or every other day, and get to
know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were brought up. I'd
see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came
through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not
have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed
out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in the
back, and instead of trailing that sable bull, gut-shot to hell, all day,
I'd lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long
enough so they belonged to me for ever. Sure, if Garrick didn't take his
B'wana Simba car in there and shoot the country out. But if he did I'd go on
down beyond those hills and there would be another country where a man could
live and hunt if he had time to live and hunt. They'd gone in wherever a car
could go. But there must be pockets like this all over, that no one knows
of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places.
'Beer?' asked M'Cola.
'Yes,' I said.
Sure, you couldn't make a living. Everyone had explained that. The
locusts came and ate your crops and the monsoon failed, and the rains did
not come, and everything dried up and died. There were ticks and fly to kill
the stock, and the mosquitoes gave you fever and maybe you got blackwater.
Your cattle would die and you would get no price for your coffee. It took an
Indian to make money from sisal and on the coast every coconut plantation
meant a man ruined by the idea of making money from copra. A white hunter
worked three months out of the year and drank for twelve and the Government
was ruining the country for the benefit of the Hindu and the natives. That
was what they told you. Sure. But I did not want to make money. All I wanted
was to live in it and have time to hunt. Already I had had one of the
diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my
large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an
unnumbered amount of times a day. There were remedies which cured this and
it was well worth going through for what I had seen and where I had been.
Besides I caught that on the dirty boat out from Marseilles. P.O.M, hadn't
been ill a day. Neither had Karl. I loved this country and I felt at home
and where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's
meant to go. Then, in my grandfather's time, Michigan was a malaria ridden
state. They called it fever and ague. And in Tortugas, where I'd spent
months, a thousand men once died of yellow fever. New continents and islands
try to frighten you with disease as a snake hisses. The snake may be
poisonous too. You kill them off. Hell, what I had a month ago would have
killed me in the old days before they invented the remedies. Maybe it would
and maybe I would have got well.
It is easier to keep well in a good country by taking simple
precautions than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good.
A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives I live in harmony
with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water,
so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the
sod is turned under, is cropped out, and next it starts to blow away as it
has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in
Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly
unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When
he quits using beasts and uses machines the earth defeats him quickly. The
machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he
cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders
and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and
we don't know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like
Mongolia.
I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it. I could
do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But
I would come back to where it pleased me to live, to really live. Not just
to let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place
to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a mess of it and I
would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere
else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others
come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had
seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for.
Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were
still good places to go.
I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of
birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and
writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I
could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were
what I liked to do. That and ski-ing. But my legs were bad now and it was
not worth the time you spent hunting good snow any more. You saw too many
people ski-ing now.
Now, the car making a turn around a bank and crossing a green, grassy
field, we came in sight of the Masai village.
When the Masai saw us they started running and we stopped, surrounded
by them, just below the stockade. There were the young warriors who had run
with us, and now their women and the children all came out to see us. The
children were all quite young and the men and women all seemed the same age.
There were no old people. They all seemed to be our great friends and we
gave a very successful party with refreshments in the shape of our bread
which they all ate with much laughing, the men first, then the women. Then I
had M'Cola open the two cans of mincemeat and the plum pudding and I cut
these into rations and passed them out. I had heard and read that the Masai
subsisted only on the blood of their cattle mixed with milk, drawing the
blood {off} from a wound in a vein of the neck made by shooting an arrow at
close range. These Masai, however, ate bread, cold mincemeat, and plum
pudding with great relish and much laughter and joking. One very tall and
handsome one kept asking me something that I did not understand and then
five or six more joined in. Whatever this was they wanted it very badly.
Finally the tallest one made a very strange face and emitted a sound like a
dying pig. I understood finally: he was asking if we had one of those, and I
pressed the button of the klaxon. The children ran screaming, the warriors
laughed and laughed, and then as Kamau, in response to popular demand,
pressed the klaxon again and again, I watched the look of utter rapture and
ecstasy on the women's faces and knew that with that klaxon he could have
had any woman in the tribe.
Finally we had to go and after distributing the empty beer bottles, the
labels from the bottles, and finally the bottle caps, picked up by M'Cola
from the floor, we left, klaxoning the women into ecstasy, the children into
panic, and the warriors into delight. The warriors ran with us for a good
way but we had to make time, the going was good through the park-like
country and, in a little while, we waved to the last of them standing
straight and tall, in their brown skin garments, their clubbed pigtails
hanging, their faces stained a red-brown, leaning on their spears, looking
after us and smiling.
The sun was almost down and as I did not know the road I had the runner
get up in front to sit with the Wanderobo-Masai and help direct Kamau and I
sat in the back with M'Cola and Garrick. We were out of the park country and
on to the dry bush-spattered plain before the sun went down and I had
another bottle of the German beer and, watching the country, saw, suddenly,
that all the trees were full of white storks. I did not know whether they
were there in migration or were following the locusts but, in the twilight,
they were lovely to see and, deeply moved by them, I gave the old man a good
two fingers of beer that was left in the bottom of the bottle.
On the next bottle I forgot and drank it all before I remembered the
old man. (There were still storks in the trees and we saw some Grant's
gazelles feeding off to the right. A jackal, like a grey fox, trotted across
the road.) So I told M'Cola to open another bottle and we were through the
plain and climbing the long slope toward the road and the village, the two
mountains in sight now, and it almost dark and quite cold when I handed the
bottle to the old man, who took it where he was crouched up under the roof,
and nursed it tenderly.
At the village we stopped in the road in the dark, and I paid the
runner the amount it said to give him in the note he had brought. I paid the
old man the amount Pop said to pay him and a bonus. Then there was a big
dispute among them all. Garrick was to go to the main camp to get his money.
Abdullah insisted upon going along. He did not trust Garrick. The
Wanderobo-Masai insisted pitifully that he go. He was sure the others would
cheat him out of his share and I was fairly sure they would, too. There was
petrol that had been left for us to use in case we were short and for us to
bring in any event. We were overloaded and I did not know how the road was
ahead. But I thought we might carry Abdullah and Garrick and squeeze in the
Wanderobo-Masai. There was no question of the old man going. He had been
paid off and had agreed to the amount, but now he would not leave the car.
He crouched on top of the load and hung on to the ropes saying, 'I am going
with B'wana'.
M'Cola and Kamau had to break his handholds and pull" him off to
re-load, him shouting, 'I want to go with B'wana!'
While they were loading in the dark he held on to my arm and talked
very quietly in a language that I could not understand.
'You have the shillings,' I said.
'Yes, B'wana,' he said. That was not what it was about. The money was
all right.
Then, when we started to get in the car he broke away and started to
climb up through the back and on to the loads. Garrick and Abdullah pulled
him down.
'You can't go. There isn't room.'
He talked to me softly again, begging and pleading.
'No, there is no room.'
I remembered I had a small penknife and I got it out of my pocket and
put it in his hand. He pushed it back in my hand.
'No,' he said. 'No.'
He was quiet then and stood by the road. But when we started, he
started to run after the car and I could hear him in the dark screaming,
'B'wana! I want to go with B'wana!'
We went on up the road, the headlights making it seem like a boulevard
after where we had been. We drove fifty-five miles on that road in the dark
night without incident. I stayed awake until after we were through the bad
part, a long plain of deeply rutted black cotton where the headlights picked
out the trail through bushes and then, when the road was better, I went to
sleep, waking occasionally to see the headlights shining on a wall of tall
trees, or a naked bank, or when we ground in low gear up a steep place, the
light slanting up ahead.
Finally, when the speedometer showed fifty miles, we stopped and woke a
native in his hut and M'Cola asked about the camp. I slept again and then
woke as we were turning off the road and on a track through trees with the
fires of the camp showing ahead. Then as we came to where our lights shone
on the green tents I shouted and we all commenced to shout and blew the
klaxon and I let the gun off, the flame cutting up into the dark and it
making a great noise. Then we were stopped and out from Pop's tent I saw him
coming, thick and heavy in his dressing-gown, and then he had his arms
around my shoulders and said, 'You god damned bull fighter', and I was
clapping him on the back.
And I said, 'Look at them, Pop'.
'I saw them,' he said. 'The whole back of the car's full of them.'
Then I was holding P.O.M, tight, she feeling very small inside the
quilted bigness of the dressing-gown, and we were saying things to each
other.
Then Karl came out and I said, 'Hi, Karl'.
'I'm so damned glad,' he said. 'They're marvellous.'
M'Cola had the horns down by now and he and Kamau were holding them so
they could all see them in the light of the fire.
'What did you get?' I asked Karl. 'Just another one of those. What do
you call them?
Tendalla.'
'Swell,' I said. I knew I had one no one could beat and I hoped he had
a good one too. 'How big was he?'
Oh, fifty-seven,' Karl said.
'Let's see him,' I said, cold in the pit of my stomach.
'He's over there,' Pop said, and we went over. They were the biggest,
widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu
horns in the world. Suddenly, poisoned with envy, I did not want to see mine
again; never, never.
'That's great,' I said, the words coming out as cheerfully as a croak.
I tried it again. 'That's swell. How did you get him?'
'There were three,' Karl said. 'They were all as big as that. I
couldn't tell which was the biggest. We had a hell of a time. I hit him four
or five times.'
'He's a wonder,' I said. I was getting so I could do it a little better
but it would not fool anybody yet.
'I'm awfully glad you got yours,' Karl said. 'They're beauties. I want
to hear all about them in the morning. I know you're tired to-night. Good
night.'
He went off, delicate as always, so we could talk about it if we wanted
to.
'Come on over and have a drink,' I called.
'No thanks, I think I better go to bed. I've got a sort of headache.'
'Good night, Karl.'
'Good night. Good night, Poor Old Mamma.'
'Good night,' we all said.
By the fire, with whisky and soda, we talked and I told them about it
all.
'Perhaps they'll find the bull,' Pop said. 'We'll offer a reward for
the horns. Have them sent to the Game Department. How big is your biggest
one?'
'Fifty-two.'
'Over the curve?'
'Yes. Maybe he's a little better.'
'Inches don't mean anything,' Pop said. 'They're damned wonderful
kudu.'
'Sure. But why does he have to beat me so {bloody} badly?'
'He's got the luck,' Pop said. 'God, what a kudu. I've only seen one
head killed over fifty in my life before. That was up on Kalal.'
'We knew he had it when we left the other camp. The lorry came in and
told us,' P.O.M, said. 'I've spent all my time praying for you. Ask Mr. J.
P.'
'You'll never know what it meant to see that car come into the
firelight with those damned horns sticking out,' Pop said. 'You old
bastard.'
'It's wonderful,' P.O.M, said. 'Let's go and look at them again.'
'You can always remember how you shot them. That's what you really get
out of it,' Pop said. 'They're damned wonderful kudu.'
But I was bitter and I was bitter all night long. In the morning,
though, it was gone. It was all gone and I have never had it again.
Pop and I were up and looking at the heads before breakfast. It was a
grey, overcast morning and cold. The rains were coming.
'They're three marvellous kudu,' he said.
'They look all right with the big one this morning,' I said. They did,
too, strangely enough. I had accepted the big one now and was happy to see
him and that Karl had him. When you put them side by side they looked all
right. They really did. They all were big.
'I'm glad you're feeling better,' Pop said. 'I'm feeling better
myself.'
'I'm really glad he has him,' I said truly. 'Mine'll hold me.'
'We have very primitive emotions,' he said. 'It's impossible not to be
competitive. Spoils everything, though.'
'I'm all through with that,' I said. 'I'm all right again. I had quite
a trip, you know.'
'Did you not,' said Pop.
'Pop, what does it mean when they shake hands and get hold of your
thumb and pull it?'
'It's on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal. Who's
been doing that to you?'
'Everybody but Kamau.'
'You're getting to be a hell of a fellow,' Pop said. 'You must be an
old timer out here. Tell me, are you much of a tracker and bird shot?'
'Go to hell.'
'M'Cola has been doing that with you too?'
'Yes.'
'Well, well,' said Pop. 'Let's get the little Memsahib and have some
breakfast. Not that I'm feeling up to it.'
'I am,' I said. 'I haven't eaten anything since day before yesterday.'
'Drank some beer though, didn't you?'
'Ah, yes.'
'Beer's a food,' Pop said.
We got the little Memsahib and old Karl and had a very jolly breakfast.
A month later P.O.M., Karl, and Karl's wife who had come out and joined
us at Haifa, were sitting in the sun against a stone wall by the Sea of
Galilee eating some lunch and drinking a bottle of wine and watching the
grebes out on the lake. The hills made shadows on the water, which was flat
calm and rather stagnant looking. There were many grebes, making spreading
wakes in the water as they swam, and I was counting them and wondering why
they never were mentioned in the Bible. I decided that those people were not
naturalists.
'I'm not going to walk on it,' Karl said, looking out at the dreary
lake. 'It's been done already.'
'You know,' P.O.M, said, 'I can't remember it. I can't remember Mr. J.
P.'s face. And he's beautiful.
I think about him and think about him and I can't see him. It's
terrible. He isn't the way he looks in a photograph. In a little while I
won't be able to remember him at all. Already I can't see him.'
'You must remember him,' Karl said to her. 'I can remember him,' I
said. 'I'll write you a piece some time and put him in.'
He was a bull all right. God, what a bull.
'Doumi,' said M'Cola in my ear. 'Doumi!'
I hit him and at the roar he was down. I saw him up, the others
passing, spreading out, then bunching. I missed him. Then I saw him going
almost straight away up the valley in the tall grass and I hit him again and
he went out of sight. The sable now were going up the hill at the head of
the valley, up the hill at our right, up the hill in the timber across the
valley, spread out and travelling fast. Now that I had seen a bull I knew
they all were cows including the first one I had shot. The bull never showed
and I was absolutely sure that we would find him where I had seen him go
down in the long grass.
The outfit were all up and I shook off handshaking and thumb pulling
before we started down through the trees and over the edge of the gully and
to the meadow on a dead run. My eyes, my mind, and all inside of me were
full of the blackness of that sable bull and the sweep of those horns and I
was thanking God I had the rifle reloaded before he came out. But it was
excited shooting, all of it, and I was not proud of it. I had gotten excited
and shot at the whole animal instead of the right place and I was ashamed,
but the outfit now were drunk excited. I would have walked but you could not
hold them, they were like a pack of dogs as we ran. As we crossed the meadow
opening where we had first seen the seven and went beyond where the bull had
gone out of sight, the grass suddenly was high and over our heads and every
one slowed down. There were two washed-out concealed ravines ten or twelve
feet deep that ran down to the watercourse and what had looked a smooth
grass-filled basin was very broken, tricky country with grass that was from
waist-high to well above our heads. We found blood at once and it led off to
the left, across the watercourse and up the hillside on the left toward the
head of the valley. I thought that was the first sable but it seemed a wider
swing than he had seemed to make when we watched him going from above in the
timber. I made a circle to look for the big bull but I could not pick his
track from the mass of tracks and in the high grass and the broken terrain
it was difficult to figure just where he had gone.
They were all for the blood spoor and it was like trying to make
badly-trained bird dogs hunt a dead bird when they are crazy to be off after
the rest of the covey.
'Doumi! Doumi!' I said. 'Kubwa Sana! The bull. The big bull.'
'Yes,' everybody agreed. 'Here! Here!' The blood spoor that crossed the
watercourse.
Finally I took that trail thinking we must get them one at a time, and
knowing this one was hard hit and the other would keep. Then, too, I might
be wrong and this might be the big bull, he might possibly have turned in
the high grass and crossed here as we were running down. I had been wrong
before, I remembered.
We trailed fast up the hillside, into the timber, the blood was
splashed freely; made a turn toward the right, climbing steeply, and at the
head of the valley in some large rocks jumped a sable. It went scrambling
and bounding off through the rocks. I saw in an instant that it was not hit
and knew that, in spite of the back-swung dark horns, it was a cow from the
dark chestnut colour. But I saw this just in time to keep from shooting. I
had started to pull when I lowered the rifle.
'Manamouki,' I said. 'It's a cow.'
M'Cola and the two Roman guides agreed. I had very nearly shot. We went
on perhaps five yards and another sable jumped. But this one was swaying its
head wildly and could not clear the rocks. It was hard hit and I took my
time, shot carefully, and broke its neck.
We came up to it, lying in the rocks, a large, deep chestnut-brown
animal, almost black, the horns black and curving handsomely back, there was
a white patch on the muzzle and back from the eye, there was a white belly;
but it was no bull.
M'Cola, still in doubt, verified this and feeling the short,
rudimentary teats said 'Manamouki', and shook his head sadly.
It was the first big bull that Garrick had pointed out.
'Bull down there,' I pointed.
'Yes,' said M'Cola.
I thought that we would give him time to get sick, if he were only
wounded, and then go down and find him. So I had M'Cola make the cuts for
taking off the head skin and we would leave the old man to skin out the head
while we went down after the bull.
I drank some water from the canteen. I was thirsty after the run and
the climb, and the sun was up now and it was getting hot. Then we went down
the opposite side of the valley from that we had just come up trailing the
wounded cow, and below, in the tall grass, casting in circles, commenced to
hunt for the trail of the bull. We could not find it.
The sable had been running in a bunch as they came out and any
individual track was confused or obliterated. We found some blood on the
grass stems where I had first hit him, then lost it, then found it again
where the other blood spoor turned off. Then the tracks had all split up as
they had gone, fan-wise, up the valley and the hills and we could not find
it again. Finally I found blood on a grass blade about fifty yards up the
valley and I plucked it and held it up. This was a mistake. I should have
brought them to it. Already everyone but M'Cola was losing faith in the
bull.
He was not there. He had disappeared. He had vanished. Perhaps he had
never existed. Who could say he was a real bull? If I had not plucked the
grass with the blood on it I might have held them. Growing there with blood
on it, it was evidence. Plucked, it meant nothing except to me and to
M'Cola. But I could find no more blood and they were all hunting
half-heartedly now. The only possible way was to quarter every foot of the
high grass and trace every foot of the gullies. It was very hot now and they
were only making a pretence of hunting.
Garrick came up. 'All cows,' he said. 'No bull. Just biggest cow. You
killed biggest cow. We found her. Smaller cow get away.'
'You wind-blown son of a bitch,' I said, then, using my fingers.
'Listen. Seven cows. Then fifteen cows and one bull. Bull hit. Here.'
'All cows,' said Garrick.
'One big cow hit. One bull hit.'
I was so sure sounding that they agreed to this and searched for a
while but I could see they were losing belief in the bull.
'If I had one good dog,' I thought. 'Just one good dog.'
Then Garrick came up. 'All cows,' he said. 'Very big cows.'
'You're a cow,' I said. 'Very big cow.'
This got a laugh from the Wanderobo-Masai, who was getting to look a
picture of sick misery. The brother half believed in the bull, I could see.
Husband, by now, did not believe in any of us. I didn't think he even
believed in the kudu of the night before. Well, after this shooting, I did
not blame him.
M'Cola came up. 'Hapana,' he said glumly. Then, 'B'wana, you shot that
bull?'
'Yes,' I said. For a minute I began to doubt whether there ever was a
bull. Then I saw again his heavy, high-withered blackness and the high rise
of his horns before they swept back, him running with the bunch, shoulder
higher than them and black as hell and as I saw it, M'Cola saw it again too
through the rising mist of the savage's unbelief in what he can no longer
see.
'Yes,' M'Cola agreed. 'I see him. You shoot him.'
I told it again. 'Seven cows. Shoot biggest. Fifteen cows, one bull.
Hit that bull.'
They all believed it now for a moment and circled, searching, but the
faith died at once in the heat of the sun and the tall grass blowing.
'All cows,' Garrick said. The Wanderobo-Masai nodded, his mouth open. I
could feel the comfortable lack of faith coming over me too. It was a damned
sight easier not to hunt in that sun in that shadeless pocket and in the sun
on that steep hillside. I told M'Cola we would hunt up the valley on both
sides, finish skinning out the head, and he and I would come down alone and
find the bull. You could not hunt them against that unbelief. I had had no
chance to train them; no power to discipline. If there had been no law I
would have shot Garrick and they would all have hunted or cleared out. I
think they would have hunted. Garrick was not popular. He was simply poison.
M'Cola and I came back down the valley, quartered it like bird dogs,
circled and followed and checked track after track. I was hot and very
thirsty. The sun was something serious by now.
'Hapana,' M'Cola said. We could not find him. Whatever he was, we had
lost him.
'Maybe he was a cow. Maybe it was all goofy,' I thought, letting the
unbelief come in as a comfort. We were going to hunt up the hillside to the
right and then we would have checked it all and would take the cow head into
camp and see what the Roman had located.
I was dead thirsty and drained the canteen. We would get water in camp.
We started up the hill and I jumped a sable in some brush. I almost
loosed off at it before I saw it was a cow. That showed how one could be
hidden, I thought. We would have to get the men and go over it all again;
and then, from the old man, came a wild shouting.
'Doumi! Doumi!' in a high, screaming shout.
'Where?' I shouted, running across the hill toward him.
'There! There!' he shouted, pointing into the timber on the other side
of the head of the valley. 'There! There! There he goes! There!'
We came on a dead run but the bull was out of sight in the timber on
the hillside. The old man said he was huge, he was black, he had great
horns, and he came by him ten yards away, hit in two places, in the gut and
high up in the rump, hard hit but going fast, crossing the valley, through
the boulders and going up the hillside.
I gut-shot him, I thought. Then as he was going away I laid that one on
his stern. He lay down and was sick and we missed him. Then, when we were
past, he jumped.
'Come on,' I said. Everyone was excited and ready to go now and the old
man was chattering about the bull as he folded the head skin and put the
head upon his own head and we started across through the rocks and up,
quartering up on to the hillside. There, where the old man had pointed, was
a very big sable track, the hoof marks spread wide, the tracks grading up
into the timber and there was blood, plenty of it.
We trailed him fast, hoping to jump him and have a shot, and it was
easy trailing in the shade of the trees with plenty of blood to follow. But
he kept climbing, grading up around the hill, and he was travelling fast. We
kept the blood bright and wet but we could not come up on him. I did not
track but kept watching ahead thinking I might see him as he looked back, or
see him down, or cutting down across the hill through the timber, and M'Cola
and Garrick were tracking, aided by every one but the old man who staggered
along with the sable skull and head skin held on his own grey head. M'Cola
had hung the empty water bottle on him, and Garrick had loaded him with the
cinema camera. It was hard going for the old man.
Once we came on a place where the bull had rested and watched his back
track, there was a little pool of blood on a rock where he had stood, behind
some bushes, and I cursed the wind that blew our scent on ahead of us. There
was a big breeze blowing now and I was certain we had no chance of
surprising him, our scent would keep everything moving out of the way ahead
of us as long as anything could move. I thought of trying to circle ahead
with M'Cola and let them track but we were moving fast, the blood was still
bright on the stones and on the fallen leaves and grass and the hills were
too steep for us to make a circle. I did not see how we could lose him.
Then he took us up and into a rocky, ravine-cut country where the
trailing was slow and the climbing difficult. Here, I thought, we would jump
him in a gully but the spatters of blood, not so bright now, went on around
the boulders, over the rocks and up and up and left us on a rim-rock ledge.
He must have gone down from there. It was too steep above for him. to have
gone over the top of the hill. There was no other way to go but down, but
how had he gone, and down which ravine? I sent them looking down three
possible ways and got out on the rim to try to sight him. They could not
find any spoor, and then the Wanderobo-Masai called from below and to the
right that he had blood and, climbing down, . we saw it on a rock and then
followed it in occasional drying splatters down through a steep descent to
the meadow below. I was encouraged when he started down hill and in the
knee-high, heavy grass of the meadow trailing was easy again, because the
grass brushed against his belly and while you could not see tracks clearly
without stooping double and parting the grass to look, yet the blood spoor
was plain on the grass blades. But it was dry now and dully shiny and I knew
we had lost much time on him when he rim-rocked us on the hill.
Finally his trail crossed the dry watercourse about where we had first
come in sight of the meadow in the morning and led away into the sloping,
sparsely-wooded country on the far side. There were no clouds and I could
feel the sun now, not just as heat but as a heavy deadly weight on my head
and I was very thirsty. It was very hot but it was not the heat that
bothered. It was the weight of the sun.
Garrick had given up tracking seriously and was only contributing
theatrical successes of discovering blood when M'Cola and I were checked. He
would do no routine tracking any more, but would rest and then track in
irritating spurts. The Wanderobo-Masai was useless as a blue-jay and I had
M'Cola give him the big rifle to carry so that we would get some use out of
him. The Roman's brother was obviously not a hunter and the husband was not
very interested. He did not seem to be a hunter either. As we trailed,
slowly, the ground, hard now as the sun had baked it, the blood only black
spots and splatters on the short grass, one by one the brother, Garrick, and
the Wanderobo-Masai dropped out and sat in the shade of the scattered trees.
The sun was terrific and as it was necessary to track with heads bent
down and stooping, in spite of a handkerchief spread over my neck I had a
pounding ache in my head.
M'Cola was tracking slowly, steadily, and absolutely absorbed in the
problem. His bare, bald head gleamed with sweat and when it ran down in his
eyes he would pluck a grass stem, hold it with each hand and shave the sweat
off his forehead and bald black crown with the stem.
We went on slowly. I had always sworn to Pop that I could out-track
M'Cola but I realized now that in the past I had been giving a sort of
Garrick performance in picking up the spoor when it was lost and that in
straight, steady trailing, now in the heat, with the sun really bad, truly
bad so that you could feel what it was doing to your head, cooking it to
hell, trailing in short grass on hard ground where a blood spot was a dry,
black blister on a grass blade, difficult to see; that you must find the
next little black spot perhaps twenty yards away, one holding the last blood
while the other found the next, then going on, one on each side of the
trail; pointing with a grass stem at the spots to save talking, until it ran
out again and you marked the last bood with your eye and both made casts to
pick it up again, signalling with a hand up, my mouth too dry to talk, a
heat shimmer over the ground now when you straightened up to let your neck
stop aching and looked ahead, I knew M'Cola was immeasurably the better man
and the better tracker. Have to tell Pop, I thought.
At this point M'Cola made a joke. My mouth was so dry that it was hard
to talk.
'B'wana,' M'Cola said, looking at me when I had straiglitened up and
was leaning my neck back to get the crick out of it.
'Yes?'
'Whisky?' and he offered me the flask.
'You bastard,' I said in English, and he chuckled and shook his head.
'Hapana whisky?'
'You savage,' I said in Swahili.
We started tracking again, M'Cola shaking his head and very amused, and
in a little while the grass was longer and it was easier again. We crossed
all that semi-open country we had seen from the hillside in the morning and
going down a slope the tracks swung back into high grass. In this higher
grass I found that by half shutting my eyes I could see his trail where he
had shouldered through the grass and I went ahead fast without trailing by
the blood, to M'Cola's amazement, but then we came out on very short grass
and rock again and now the trailing was the hardest yet.
He was not bleeding much now; the sun and the heat must have dried the
wounds and we found only an occasional small starry splatter on the rocky
ground.
Garrick came up and made a couple of brilliant discoveries of blood
spots, then sat down under a tree. Under another tree I could see the poor
old Wanderobo-Masai holding his first and last job as gun-bearer. Under
another was the old man, the sable head beside him like some black-mass
symbol, his equipment hanging from his shoulders. M'Cola and I went on
trailing very slowly and laboriously across the long stony slope and back
and up into another tree-scattered meadow, and through it, and into a long
field with piled up boulders at the end. In the middle of this field we lost
the trail completely and circled and hunted for nearly two hours before we
found blood again.
The old man found it for us below the boulders and to the right half a
mile away. He had gone ahead down there on his own idea of what the bull
would have done. The old man was a hunter.
Then we trailed him very slowly, on to hard stony ground a mile away.
But we could not trail from there. The ground was too hard to leave a track
and we never found blood again. Then we hunted on our various theories of
where the bull would go, but the country was too big and we had no luck.
'No good,' M'Cola said.
I straightened up and went over to the shade of a big tree. It felt
cool as water and the breeze cooled my skin through the wet shirt. I was
thinking about the bull and wishing to God I had never hit him. Now I had
wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out
of that country. He never showed any tendency to circle back. To-night he
would die and the hyenas would eat him, or, worse, they would get him before
he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive. The
first one that hit that blood spoor would stay with it until he found him.
Then he would call up the others. I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him
and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed
it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the
seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no
guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. But I
felt rotten sick over this sable bull. Besides, I wanted him, I wanted him
damned badly, I wanted him more than I would admit. Well, we had played our
string out with him. Our chance was at the start when he was down and we
missed him. We had lost that. No, our best chance, the only chance a
rifleman should ever ask, was when I had a shot and shot at the whole animal
instead of calling the shot. It was my own lousy fault. I was a son of a
bitch to have gut-shot him. It came from over-confidence in being able to do
a thing and then omitting one of the steps in how it is done. Well, we had
lost him. I doubted if there was a dog in the world could trail him now in
that heat. Still that was the only chance. I got out the dictionary and
asked the old man if there were any dogs at the Roman's place.
'No,' said the old man. 'Hapana.'
We made a very wide circle and I sent the brother and the husband out
in another circle. We found nothing, no trace, no tracks, no blood, and I
told M'Cola we would start for camp. The Roman's brother and the husband
went up the valley to get the meat of the sable cow we had shot. We were
beaten.
M'Cola and I ahead, the other following, we went across the long heat
haze of the open country, down to cross the dry watercourse, and up and into
the grateful shade of the trail through the woods. As we were going along
through the broken sunlight and shadow, the floor of the forest smooth and
springy where we cut across to save distance from the trail, we saw, less
than a hundred yards away, a herd of sable standing in the timber looking at
us. I pulled back the bolt and looked for the best pair of horns.
'Doumi,' Garrick whispered. 'Doumi kubwa sana!'
I looked where he pointed. It was a very big cow sable, dark chestnut,
white marks on the face, white belly, heavy built and with a fine curving
pair of horns. She was standing broadside to us with her head turned,
looking. I looked carefully at the whole lot. They were all cows, evidently
the bunch whose bull I had wounded and lost, and they had come over the hill
and herded up again together here.
'We go to camp,' I said to M'Cola.
As we started forward the sable jumped and ran past us, crossing the
trail ahead. At every good pair of cow horns, Garrick said, 'Bull, B'wana.
Big, big bull. Shoot, B'wana. Shoot, oh shoot!'
'All cows,' I said to M'Cola when they were past, running in a panic
through the sun-splashed timber.
'Yes,' he agreed.
'Old man,' I said. The old man came up.
'Let the guide carry that,' I said.
The old man lowered the cow sable head.
'No,' said Garrick.
'Yes,' I said. 'Bloody well yes.'
We went on through the woods toward camp. I was feeling better, much
better. All through the day I had never thought once of the kudu. Now we
were coming home to where they were waiting.
It seemed much longer coming home although, usually, the return over a
new trail is shorter. I was tired all the way into my bones, my head felt
cooked, and I was thirstier than I had ever been in my life. But suddenly,
walking through the woods, it was much cooler. A cloud had come over the
sun.
We came out of the timber and down on to the flat and in sight of the
thorn fence. The sun was behind a bank of clouds now and then in a little
while the sky was covered completely and the clouds looked heavy and
threatening. I thought perhaps this had been the last clear hot day; unusual
heat before the rains. First I thought: if it had only rained, so that the
ground would hold a track, we could have stayed with that bull for ever;
then, looking at the heavy, woolly clouds that so quickly had covered all
the sky, I thought that if we were going to join the outfit, and get the car
across that ten-mile stretch of black cotton road on the way to Handeni, we
had better start. I pointed to the sky.
'Bad,' M'Cola agreed.
'Go to the camp of B'wana M'Kubwa?'
'Better.' Then, vigorously, accepting the decision, 'N'Dio. N'Dio.'
'We go,' I said.
Arrived at the thorn fence and the hut, we broke camp fast. There was a
runner there from our last camp who had brought a note, written before
P.O.M, and Pop had left, and bringing my mosquito net. There was nothing in
the note, only good luck and that they were starting. I drank some water
from one of our canvas bags, sat on a petrol tin and looked at the sky. I
could not, conscientiously, chance staying. If it rained here we might not
even be able to get out to the road. If it rained heavily on the road, we
would never get out to the coast that season. Both the Austrian and Pop had
said that, I had to go.
That was settled, so. there was no use to think how much I wanted to
stay. The day's fatigue helped make the decision easy. Everything was being
loaded into the car and they were all gathering up their meat from the
sticks around the ashes of the fire.
'Don't you want to eat, B'wana?' Kamau asked me.
'No,' I said. Then in English, 'Too bloody tired.'
'Eat. You are hungry.'
'Later, in the car.'
M'Cola went by with a load, his big, flat face completely blank again.
It only {came} alive about hunting or some joke. I found a tin cup by the
fire and called to him to bring the whisky, and the blank face cracked at
the eyes and mouth into a smile as he took the flask out of his pocket.
'With water better,' he said.
'You black Chinaman.'
They were all working fast and the Roman's women came over and stood a
little way away watching the carrying and the packing of the car. There were
two of them, good-looking, well built, and shy, but interested. The Roman
was not back yet. I felt very badly to go off like this with no explanation
to him. I liked the Roman very much and had a high regard for him.
I took a drink of the whisky and water and looked at the two pairs of
kudu horns that leaned against the wall of the chicken coop hut. From the
white, cleanly picked skulls the horns rose in slow spirals that spreading
made a turn, another turn, and then curved delicately into those smooth,
ivory-like points. One pair was narrower and taller against the side of the
hut. The other was almost as tall but wider in spread and heavier in beam.
They were the colour of black walnut meats and they were beautiful to see. I
went over and stood the Springfield against the hut between them and the
tips reached past the muzzle of the rifle. As Kamau came back from carrying
a load to the car I told him to bring the camera and then had him stand
beside them while I took a picture. Then he picked them up, each head a
load, and carried them over to the car.
Garrick was talking loudly and in a roostery way to the Roman's women.
As near as I could make out he was offering them the empty petrol boxes in
exchange for a piece of something.
'Come here,' I called to him. He came over still feeling smart.
'Listen,' I told him in English. 'If I get through this safari without
socking you it's going to be a bloody marvel. And if I ever hit you I'll
break your mucking jaw. That's all.'
He did not understand the words but the tone made it clearer than if I
had got something out of the dictionary to tell him. I stood up and motioned
to the women that they could have the petrol tins and the cases. I was
damned if I could not have anything to do with them if I would let Garrick
make any passes.
'Get in the car,' I told him. 'No,' as he started to make delivery of
one of the petrol tins, 'in the car.' He went over to the car.
We were all packed now and ready to go. The horns were curling out the
back of the car, tied on to the loads. I left some money for the Roman and
one of the kudu hides with the boy. Then we got in the car. I got in the
front seat with the Wanderobo-Masai. Behind were M'Cola, Garrick, and the
runner, who was a man from the old man's village by the road. The old man
was crouched on top of the loads at the back, close under the roof.
We waved and started, passing more of the Roman's household, the older
and uglier part, roasting up piles of meat by a log fire beside the trail
that came up from the river through the maize field. We made the crossing
all right, the creek was down and the banks had dried and I looked back at
the field, the Roman's huts, and the stockade where we had camped, and the
blue hills, dark under the heavy sky, and I felt very badly not to have seen
the Roman and explain why we had gone off like this.
Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to
make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and
Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about
when we were cutting brush and shovelling; until I was certain I would have
to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child
does for a spanking. Kamau and M'Cola were both laughing at him. He was
playing the victorious leader home from the chase now. I thought it was
really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.
Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over
in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the
shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he sat down,
backwards. I never looked toward him, and M'Cola, Kamau, and I could not
look --at each other for fear we would laugh.
'I am hurt,' he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.
'Never get near a man shovelling,' I said in English. 'Damned
dangerous.'
'I am hurt,' said Garrick holding his belly.
'Rub it,' I told him and rubbed mine to show him how. We all got into
the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless,
theatrical bastard, so I told M'Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got
one out from under the loads in the back, we were going through the
deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked
around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely
again. He rubbed his belly and seemed to be telling them what a hell of a
man he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the old man watching
me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.
'Old man,' I said.
'Yes, B'wana.'
'A present,' and I handed what was left in the bottle back. There
wasn't much left but the foam and a very little beer.
'Beer?' asked M'Cola.
'By God, yes,' I said. I was thinking about beer and in my mind was
back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the
Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the
calf and came home that niglit around the mountain with the moonlight on the
fields of narcissi that grew on the meadows, and how we were drunk and
talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the
brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when
we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the
horse chestnut trees in bloom, and Chink and I again discussing writing and
whether you could call them waxen candela-bras. God, what bloody literary
discussions we had; we were literary as hell then just after the war, and
later there was the good beer at Lipp's at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at
the Cirque de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or after any other great fight where
you lost your voice and were still too excited to turn in; but beer was
mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags
for the Fusilier, crags for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong
beer for me. That was Chink then, quoting Robert Graves, then. We outgrew
some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The
old man knew it too. I had seen it in his eye the first time he saw me take
a drink.
'Beer,' said M'Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like
country, the engine hot under my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai as strong as
ever beside me, Kamau watching the grooves of the tyre tracks in the green
turf, and I hung my booted legs over the side to let my feet cool and drank
the beer and wished old Chink was along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith,
M.C., of His Majesty's Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss
how to describe this deer-park country and whether deer-park was enough to
call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant for
his years and the same sort of company. I was learning under Pop, while
Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our
ways had gone a long way apart.
But that damned sable bull. I should have killed him, but it was a
running shot. To hit him at all I had to use him all as a target. Yes, you
bastard, but what about the cow you missed twice, prone, standing broadside?
Was that a running shot? No. If I'd gone to bed last night I would not have
done that. Or if I'd wiped out the bore to get the oil out she would not
have thrown high the first time. Then I would not have pulled down and shot
under her the second shot. Every damned thing is your own fault if you're
any good. I thought I could shoot a shot-gun better than I could and I had
lost plenty of money backing my opinion, but I knew, coldly, and outside
myself, that I could shoot a rifle on game as well as any son of a bitch
that ever lived. Like hell I could. So what? So I gut-shot a sable bull and
let him get away. Could I shoot as well as I thought I could? Sure. Then why
did I miss on that cow? Hell, everybody is off sometime. You've got no
bloody business to be off. Who the hell are you? My conscience? Listen, I'm
all right with my conscience. I know just what kind of a son of a bitch I am
and I know what I can do well. If I hadn't had to leave and pull out I would
have got a sable bull. You know the Roman was a hunter. There was another
herd. Why did I have to make a one-night stand? Was that any way to hunt?
Hell, no. I'd make some money some way and when we came back we would come
to the old man's village in lorries, then pack in with porters so there
wouldn't be any damned car to worry about, send the porters --back, and make
a camp in the timber up the stream above the Roman's and hunt that country
slowly, living there and hunting out each day, sometimes laying off and
writing for a week, or writing half the day, or every other day, and get to
know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were brought up. I'd
see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came
through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not
have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed
out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in the
back, and instead of trailing that sable bull, gut-shot to hell, all day,
I'd lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long
enough so they belonged to me for ever. Sure, if Garrick didn't take his
B'wana Simba car in there and shoot the country out. But if he did I'd go on
down beyond those hills and there would be another country where a man could
live and hunt if he had time to live and hunt. They'd gone in wherever a car
could go. But there must be pockets like this all over, that no one knows
of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places.
'Beer?' asked M'Cola.
'Yes,' I said.
Sure, you couldn't make a living. Everyone had explained that. The
locusts came and ate your crops and the monsoon failed, and the rains did
not come, and everything dried up and died. There were ticks and fly to kill
the stock, and the mosquitoes gave you fever and maybe you got blackwater.
Your cattle would die and you would get no price for your coffee. It took an
Indian to make money from sisal and on the coast every coconut plantation
meant a man ruined by the idea of making money from copra. A white hunter
worked three months out of the year and drank for twelve and the Government
was ruining the country for the benefit of the Hindu and the natives. That
was what they told you. Sure. But I did not want to make money. All I wanted
was to live in it and have time to hunt. Already I had had one of the
diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my
large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an
unnumbered amount of times a day. There were remedies which cured this and
it was well worth going through for what I had seen and where I had been.
Besides I caught that on the dirty boat out from Marseilles. P.O.M, hadn't
been ill a day. Neither had Karl. I loved this country and I felt at home
and where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's
meant to go. Then, in my grandfather's time, Michigan was a malaria ridden
state. They called it fever and ague. And in Tortugas, where I'd spent
months, a thousand men once died of yellow fever. New continents and islands
try to frighten you with disease as a snake hisses. The snake may be
poisonous too. You kill them off. Hell, what I had a month ago would have
killed me in the old days before they invented the remedies. Maybe it would
and maybe I would have got well.
It is easier to keep well in a good country by taking simple
precautions than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good.
A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives I live in harmony
with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water,
so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the
sod is turned under, is cropped out, and next it starts to blow away as it
has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in
Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly
unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When
he quits using beasts and uses machines the earth defeats him quickly. The
machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he
cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders
and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and
we don't know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like
Mongolia.
I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it. I could
do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But
I would come back to where it pleased me to live, to really live. Not just
to let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place
to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a mess of it and I
would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere
else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others
come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had
seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for.
Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were
still good places to go.
I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of
birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and
writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I
could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were
what I liked to do. That and ski-ing. But my legs were bad now and it was
not worth the time you spent hunting good snow any more. You saw too many
people ski-ing now.
Now, the car making a turn around a bank and crossing a green, grassy
field, we came in sight of the Masai village.
When the Masai saw us they started running and we stopped, surrounded
by them, just below the stockade. There were the young warriors who had run
with us, and now their women and the children all came out to see us. The
children were all quite young and the men and women all seemed the same age.
There were no old people. They all seemed to be our great friends and we
gave a very successful party with refreshments in the shape of our bread
which they all ate with much laughing, the men first, then the women. Then I
had M'Cola open the two cans of mincemeat and the plum pudding and I cut
these into rations and passed them out. I had heard and read that the Masai
subsisted only on the blood of their cattle mixed with milk, drawing the
blood {off} from a wound in a vein of the neck made by shooting an arrow at
close range. These Masai, however, ate bread, cold mincemeat, and plum
pudding with great relish and much laughter and joking. One very tall and
handsome one kept asking me something that I did not understand and then
five or six more joined in. Whatever this was they wanted it very badly.
Finally the tallest one made a very strange face and emitted a sound like a
dying pig. I understood finally: he was asking if we had one of those, and I
pressed the button of the klaxon. The children ran screaming, the warriors
laughed and laughed, and then as Kamau, in response to popular demand,
pressed the klaxon again and again, I watched the look of utter rapture and
ecstasy on the women's faces and knew that with that klaxon he could have
had any woman in the tribe.
Finally we had to go and after distributing the empty beer bottles, the
labels from the bottles, and finally the bottle caps, picked up by M'Cola
from the floor, we left, klaxoning the women into ecstasy, the children into
panic, and the warriors into delight. The warriors ran with us for a good
way but we had to make time, the going was good through the park-like
country and, in a little while, we waved to the last of them standing
straight and tall, in their brown skin garments, their clubbed pigtails
hanging, their faces stained a red-brown, leaning on their spears, looking
after us and smiling.
The sun was almost down and as I did not know the road I had the runner
get up in front to sit with the Wanderobo-Masai and help direct Kamau and I
sat in the back with M'Cola and Garrick. We were out of the park country and
on to the dry bush-spattered plain before the sun went down and I had
another bottle of the German beer and, watching the country, saw, suddenly,
that all the trees were full of white storks. I did not know whether they
were there in migration or were following the locusts but, in the twilight,
they were lovely to see and, deeply moved by them, I gave the old man a good
two fingers of beer that was left in the bottom of the bottle.
On the next bottle I forgot and drank it all before I remembered the
old man. (There were still storks in the trees and we saw some Grant's
gazelles feeding off to the right. A jackal, like a grey fox, trotted across
the road.) So I told M'Cola to open another bottle and we were through the
plain and climbing the long slope toward the road and the village, the two
mountains in sight now, and it almost dark and quite cold when I handed the
bottle to the old man, who took it where he was crouched up under the roof,
and nursed it tenderly.
At the village we stopped in the road in the dark, and I paid the
runner the amount it said to give him in the note he had brought. I paid the
old man the amount Pop said to pay him and a bonus. Then there was a big
dispute among them all. Garrick was to go to the main camp to get his money.
Abdullah insisted upon going along. He did not trust Garrick. The
Wanderobo-Masai insisted pitifully that he go. He was sure the others would
cheat him out of his share and I was fairly sure they would, too. There was
petrol that had been left for us to use in case we were short and for us to
bring in any event. We were overloaded and I did not know how the road was
ahead. But I thought we might carry Abdullah and Garrick and squeeze in the
Wanderobo-Masai. There was no question of the old man going. He had been
paid off and had agreed to the amount, but now he would not leave the car.
He crouched on top of the load and hung on to the ropes saying, 'I am going
with B'wana'.
M'Cola and Kamau had to break his handholds and pull" him off to
re-load, him shouting, 'I want to go with B'wana!'
While they were loading in the dark he held on to my arm and talked
very quietly in a language that I could not understand.
'You have the shillings,' I said.
'Yes, B'wana,' he said. That was not what it was about. The money was
all right.
Then, when we started to get in the car he broke away and started to
climb up through the back and on to the loads. Garrick and Abdullah pulled
him down.
'You can't go. There isn't room.'
He talked to me softly again, begging and pleading.
'No, there is no room.'
I remembered I had a small penknife and I got it out of my pocket and
put it in his hand. He pushed it back in my hand.
'No,' he said. 'No.'
He was quiet then and stood by the road. But when we started, he
started to run after the car and I could hear him in the dark screaming,
'B'wana! I want to go with B'wana!'
We went on up the road, the headlights making it seem like a boulevard
after where we had been. We drove fifty-five miles on that road in the dark
night without incident. I stayed awake until after we were through the bad
part, a long plain of deeply rutted black cotton where the headlights picked
out the trail through bushes and then, when the road was better, I went to
sleep, waking occasionally to see the headlights shining on a wall of tall
trees, or a naked bank, or when we ground in low gear up a steep place, the
light slanting up ahead.
Finally, when the speedometer showed fifty miles, we stopped and woke a
native in his hut and M'Cola asked about the camp. I slept again and then
woke as we were turning off the road and on a track through trees with the
fires of the camp showing ahead. Then as we came to where our lights shone
on the green tents I shouted and we all commenced to shout and blew the
klaxon and I let the gun off, the flame cutting up into the dark and it
making a great noise. Then we were stopped and out from Pop's tent I saw him
coming, thick and heavy in his dressing-gown, and then he had his arms
around my shoulders and said, 'You god damned bull fighter', and I was
clapping him on the back.
And I said, 'Look at them, Pop'.
'I saw them,' he said. 'The whole back of the car's full of them.'
Then I was holding P.O.M, tight, she feeling very small inside the
quilted bigness of the dressing-gown, and we were saying things to each
other.
Then Karl came out and I said, 'Hi, Karl'.
'I'm so damned glad,' he said. 'They're marvellous.'
M'Cola had the horns down by now and he and Kamau were holding them so
they could all see them in the light of the fire.
'What did you get?' I asked Karl. 'Just another one of those. What do
you call them?
Tendalla.'
'Swell,' I said. I knew I had one no one could beat and I hoped he had
a good one too. 'How big was he?'
Oh, fifty-seven,' Karl said.
'Let's see him,' I said, cold in the pit of my stomach.
'He's over there,' Pop said, and we went over. They were the biggest,
widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu
horns in the world. Suddenly, poisoned with envy, I did not want to see mine
again; never, never.
'That's great,' I said, the words coming out as cheerfully as a croak.
I tried it again. 'That's swell. How did you get him?'
'There were three,' Karl said. 'They were all as big as that. I
couldn't tell which was the biggest. We had a hell of a time. I hit him four
or five times.'
'He's a wonder,' I said. I was getting so I could do it a little better
but it would not fool anybody yet.
'I'm awfully glad you got yours,' Karl said. 'They're beauties. I want
to hear all about them in the morning. I know you're tired to-night. Good
night.'
He went off, delicate as always, so we could talk about it if we wanted
to.
'Come on over and have a drink,' I called.
'No thanks, I think I better go to bed. I've got a sort of headache.'
'Good night, Karl.'
'Good night. Good night, Poor Old Mamma.'
'Good night,' we all said.
By the fire, with whisky and soda, we talked and I told them about it
all.
'Perhaps they'll find the bull,' Pop said. 'We'll offer a reward for
the horns. Have them sent to the Game Department. How big is your biggest
one?'
'Fifty-two.'
'Over the curve?'
'Yes. Maybe he's a little better.'
'Inches don't mean anything,' Pop said. 'They're damned wonderful
kudu.'
'Sure. But why does he have to beat me so {bloody} badly?'
'He's got the luck,' Pop said. 'God, what a kudu. I've only seen one
head killed over fifty in my life before. That was up on Kalal.'
'We knew he had it when we left the other camp. The lorry came in and
told us,' P.O.M, said. 'I've spent all my time praying for you. Ask Mr. J.
P.'
'You'll never know what it meant to see that car come into the
firelight with those damned horns sticking out,' Pop said. 'You old
bastard.'
'It's wonderful,' P.O.M, said. 'Let's go and look at them again.'
'You can always remember how you shot them. That's what you really get
out of it,' Pop said. 'They're damned wonderful kudu.'
But I was bitter and I was bitter all night long. In the morning,
though, it was gone. It was all gone and I have never had it again.
Pop and I were up and looking at the heads before breakfast. It was a
grey, overcast morning and cold. The rains were coming.
'They're three marvellous kudu,' he said.
'They look all right with the big one this morning,' I said. They did,
too, strangely enough. I had accepted the big one now and was happy to see
him and that Karl had him. When you put them side by side they looked all
right. They really did. They all were big.
'I'm glad you're feeling better,' Pop said. 'I'm feeling better
myself.'
'I'm really glad he has him,' I said truly. 'Mine'll hold me.'
'We have very primitive emotions,' he said. 'It's impossible not to be
competitive. Spoils everything, though.'
'I'm all through with that,' I said. 'I'm all right again. I had quite
a trip, you know.'
'Did you not,' said Pop.
'Pop, what does it mean when they shake hands and get hold of your
thumb and pull it?'
'It's on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal. Who's
been doing that to you?'
'Everybody but Kamau.'
'You're getting to be a hell of a fellow,' Pop said. 'You must be an
old timer out here. Tell me, are you much of a tracker and bird shot?'
'Go to hell.'
'M'Cola has been doing that with you too?'
'Yes.'
'Well, well,' said Pop. 'Let's get the little Memsahib and have some
breakfast. Not that I'm feeling up to it.'
'I am,' I said. 'I haven't eaten anything since day before yesterday.'
'Drank some beer though, didn't you?'
'Ah, yes.'
'Beer's a food,' Pop said.
We got the little Memsahib and old Karl and had a very jolly breakfast.
A month later P.O.M., Karl, and Karl's wife who had come out and joined
us at Haifa, were sitting in the sun against a stone wall by the Sea of
Galilee eating some lunch and drinking a bottle of wine and watching the
grebes out on the lake. The hills made shadows on the water, which was flat
calm and rather stagnant looking. There were many grebes, making spreading
wakes in the water as they swam, and I was counting them and wondering why
they never were mentioned in the Bible. I decided that those people were not
naturalists.
'I'm not going to walk on it,' Karl said, looking out at the dreary
lake. 'It's been done already.'
'You know,' P.O.M, said, 'I can't remember it. I can't remember Mr. J.
P.'s face. And he's beautiful.
I think about him and think about him and I can't see him. It's
terrible. He isn't the way he looks in a photograph. In a little while I
won't be able to remember him at all. Already I can't see him.'
'You must remember him,' Karl said to her. 'I can remember him,' I
said. 'I'll write you a piece some time and put him in.'