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 pencil
s 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
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 af
ter 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