yards.'
'The hell with that four-seventy,' I said. 'I can't shoot it. The
trigger's like the last turn of the key opening a sardine can.'
'Come on,' Pop said. 'We've got God knows how many rhino scattered
about here.'
'What about the buff?'
'Plenty of time for him later. We must let him stiffen up. Let him get
sick.'
'Suppose we'd been down there with all that stuff coming out.'
'Yes,' said Pop.
All this in whispers. I looked at P.O.M. She was like someone enjoying
a good musical show.
'Did you see where it hit him?'
'I couldn't tell?' she whispered. 'Do you suppose there are any more in
there?'
'Thousands,' I said. 'What do we do, Pop?'
'That bull may be just around the bend,' Pop said. 'Come on.'
We went along the bank, our nerves cocked, and as we came to the narrow
end of the reeds there was another rush of something heavy through the tall
stalks. I had the gun up waiting for whatever it was to show. But there was
only the waving of the reeds. M'Cola signalled with his hand not to shoot.
'The calf,' Pop said. 'Must have been two of them. Where's the bloody
bull?'
'How the hell do you see them?'
'Tell by the size.'
Then we were standing looking down into the stream bed, into the
shadows under the branches of the big trees, and off ahead down the stream
when M'Cola pointed up the hill on our right.
'Faro,' he whispered and reached me the glasses.
There on the hillside, head-on, wide, black, looking straight towards
us, ears twitching and head lifted, swaying as the nose searched for the
wind, was another rhino. He looked huge in the glasses. Pop was studying him
with his binoculars.
'He's no better than what you have,' he said softly.
'I can bust him right in the sticking place,' I whispered.
'You have only one more,' Pop whispered. 'You want a good one.'
I offered the glasses to P.O.M.
'I can see him without,' she said. 'He's huge.'
'He may charge,' Pop said. 'Then you'll have to take him.'
Then, as we watched, another rhino came into sight from behind a wide
feathery-topped tree. He was quite a bit smaller.
'By God, it's a calf,' Pop said. 'That one's a cow. Good thing you
didn't shoot her. She bloody well {may} charge too.'
'Is it the same cow?' I whispered.
'No. That other one had a hell of a horn.'
We all had the nervous exhilaration, like a laughing drunk, that a
sudden over-abundance, idiotic abundance of game makes. It is a feeling that
can come from any sort of game or fish that is ordinarily rare and that,
suddenly, you find in a ridiculously unbelievable abundance.
'Look at her. She knows there's something wrong. But she can't see us
or smell us.'
'She heard the shots.'
'She knows we're here. But she can't make it out.'
The rhino looked so huge, so ridiculous, and so fine to see, and I
sighted on her chest.
'It's a nice shot.'
'Perfect,' Pop said.
'What are we going to do?' P.O.M. said. She was practical.
'We'll work around her,' Pop said.
'If we keep low I don't believe our scent will carry up there once
we're past.'
'You can't teil,' Pop said. 'We don't want her to charge.'
She did not charge, but dropped her head, finally, and worked up the
hill followed by the nearly full-grown calf.
'Now,' said Pop, 'we'll let Droop go ahead and see if he can find the
bull's tracks. We might as well sit down.'
We sat in the shade and Droopy went up one side of the stream and the
local guide the other. They came back and said the bull had gone on down.
'Did any one ever see what son of horn he had?' I asked.
'Droop said he was good.'
M'Cola had gone up the hill a little way. Now he crouched and beckoned.
'Where?' Pop asked him. He pointed, crouched down, and as we crawled up
to him he handed me the glasses. They were a long way away on the jutting
ridge of one of the steep hillsides on the far side of the canyon, well down
the stream. We could see six, then eight buffalo, black, heavy necked, the
horns shining, standing on the point of a ridge. Some were grazing and
others stood, their heads up, watching.
'That one's a bull, ' Pop said, looking through the glasses.
'Which one?'
'Second from the right.'
'They all look like bulls to me.'
'They're a long way away. That one's a good bull. Now we've got to
cross the stream and work down toward them and try to get above them.'
'Will they stay there?'
'No. Probably they'll work down into this stream bed as soon as it's
hot.'
'Let's go.'
We crossed the stream on a log and then another log and on the other
side, half way up the hillside, there was a deeply worn game trail that
graded along the bank under the heavily leafed branches of the trees. We
went along quite fast, but walking carefully, and below us, now, the stream
bed was covered solidly with foliage. It was still early in the morning but
the breeze was rising and the leaves stirred over our heads. We crossed one
ravine that came down to the stream, going into the thick bush to be out of
sight and stooping as we crossed behind trees in the small open place, then,
using the shoulder of the ravine as protection, we climbed so that we might
get high up the hillside above the buffalo and work down to them. We stopped
in the shelter of the ridge, me sweating heavily and fixing a handkerchief
inside the sweatband of my Stetson, and sent Droop ahead to look. He came
back to say they were gone. From above we could see nothing of them, so we
cut across the ravine and the hillside thinking we might intercept them on
their way down into the river bed. The next hillside had been burned and at
the bottom of the hill there was a burned area of bush. In the ash dust were
the tracks of the buffalo as they came down and into the thick jungle of the
stream bed. Here it was too overgrown and there were too many vines to
follow them. There were no tracks going down the stream so we knew they were
down in the part of the stream bed we had looked down on from the game
trail. Pop said there was nothing to do about them in there. It was so thick
that if we jumped them we could not get a shot. You could not tell one from
another, he said. All you could see would be a rush of black. An old bull
would be grey but a good herd bull might be as black as a cow. It wasn't any
good to jump them like that.
It was ten o'clock now and very hot in the open, the sun pegged and the
breeze lifted the ashes of the burned-over ground as we walked. Everything
would be in th
e thick cover now. We decided to find a shady place and lie
down and read in the cool; to have lunch and kill the hot part of the day.
Beyond the burned place we came toward the stream and stopped,
sweating, in the shadow of some very large trees. We unpacked our leather
coats and our raincoats and spread them on the grass at the foot of the
trees so that we could lean back against the trunks. P.O.M. got out the
books and M'Cola made a small fire and boiled water for tea.
The breeze was coming up and we could hear it in the high branches. It
was cool in the shade, but if you stirred into the sun, or as the sun
shifted the shadow while you read so that any part of you was out of the
shadow, the sun was heavy. Droopy had gone on down the stream to have a
look, and as we lay there, reading, I could smell the heat of the day
coming, the drying up of the dew, the heat on the leaves, and the heaviness
of the sun over the stream.
P.O.M. was reading {Spanish Gold}, by George A. Birmingham, and she
said it was no good. I still had the Sevastopol book of Tolstoy and in the
same volume I was reading a story called 'The Cossacks' that was very good.
In it were the summer heat, the mosquitoes, the feel of the forest in the
different seasons, and that river that the Tartars crossed, raiding, and I
was living in that Russia again.
I was thinking how real that Russia of the time of our Civil War was,
as real as any other place, as Michigan, or the prairie north of town and
the woods around Evan's game farm, of how, through Turgenev, I knew that I
had lived there, as I had been in the family Buddenbrooks, and had climbed
in and out of her window in {Le Rouge et Le Noir}, or the morning we had
come in the gates of Paris and seen Salcede torn apart by the horses at the
rack that time because I had been polite to the executioner the time they
killed Coconas and me, and I remember the Eve of St. Bartholomew's and how
we hunted Huguenots that night, and when they trapped me at her house that
time, and no feeling more true than finding the gate of the Louvre being
closed, nor of looking down at his body in the water where he fell from the
mast, and always, Italy, better than any book, lying in the chestnut woods,
and in the fall mist behind the Duomo going across the town to the Ospedale
Maggiore, the nails in my boots on the cobbles, and in the spring sudden
showers in the mountains and the smell of the regiment like a copper coin in
your mouth. So in the heat the train stopped at Dezenzano and there was Lago
de Garda and those troops are the Czech Legion, and the next time it was
raining, and the next time it was in the dark, and the next time you passed
it riding in a truck, and the next time you were coming from somewhere else,
and the next time you walked to it in the dark from Sermione. For we have
been there in the books and out of the books -- and where we go, if we are
any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and
the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any
importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now
wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is
not fashionable. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art
endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not
fashionable. People do not want to do it any more because they will be out
of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them. Also
it is very hard to do. So what? So I would go on reading about the river
that the Tartars came across when raiding, and the drunken old hunter and
the girl and how it was then in the different seasons.
Pop was reading {Richard Carvell}. We had bought what there was to buy
in Nairobi and we were pretty well to the end of the books.
'I've read this before,' Pop said. 'But it's a good story.'
'I can just remember it. But it was a good story then.'
'It's a jolly good story, but I wish I hadn't read it before.'
'This is terrible,' P.O.M. said. 'You couldn't read it.'
'Do you want this one?'
'Don't be ornamental,' she said. 'No, I'll finish this.'
'Goon. Take it.'
'I'll give it right back.'
'Hey, M'Cola,' I said. 'Beer?'
'N'Dio,' he said with great force, and from the chop box one of the
natives had carried on his head produced, in its straw casing, a bottle of
German beer, one of the sixty-four bottles Dan had brought from the German
trading station. Its neck was wrapped in silver foil and on its black and
yellow label there was a horseman in armour. It was still cool from the
night and opened by the tin-opener it creamed into three cups, thick-foamed,
full-bodied.
'No,' said Pop. 'Very bad for the liver.'
'Come on.'
'All right.'
We all drank and when M'Cola opened the second bottle Pop refused,
firmly.
'Go on. It means more to you. I'm going to take a nap.'
'Poor old Mama?'
'Just a little.'
'All for me,' I said. M'Cola smiled and shook his head at this
drinking. I lay back against the tree and watched the wind bringing the
clouds and drank the beer slowly out of the bottle. It was cooler that way
and it was excellent beer. After a while Pop and P.O.M. were both asleep and
I got back the Sevastopol book and read in 'The Cossacks' again. It was a
good story.
When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and
mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer.
Then we read again and all went to sleep. I woke thirsty and was unscrewing
the top from a water bottle when I heard a rhino snort and crash in the
brush of the river bed. Pop was awake and heard it too and we took our guns,
without speaking, and started toward where the noise had come from. M'Cola
found the tracks. The rhino had come up the stream, evidently he had winded
us when he was only about thirty yards away, and had gone on up. We could
not follow the tracks the way the wind was blowing so we circled away from
the stream and back to the edge of the burned place to get above him and
then hunted very carefully against the wind along the stream through very
thick bush, but we did not find him. Finally Droopy found where he had gone
up the other side and on into the hills. From the tracks it did not seem a
particularly large one.
We were a long way from camp, at least four hours as we had come, and
much of it up-hill going back, certainly there would be that long climb out
of the canyon; we had a wounded buffalo to deal with, and when we came out
on the edge of the burned country again, we agreed that we should get P.O.M.
and get started. It was still hot, but the sun was on its wa
y down and for a
good way we would be on the heavily shaded game trail on the high bank above
the stream. When we found P.O.M. she pretended to be indignant at our going
off and leaving her alone but she was only teasing us.
We started off, Droop and his spearsman in the lead, walking along the
shadow of the trail that was broken by the sun through the leaves. Instead
of the cool early morning smell of the forest there was a nasty stink like
the mess cats make.
'What makes the stink?' I whispered to Pop.
'Baboons,' he said.
A whole tribe of them had gone on just ahead of us and their droppings
were everywhere. We came up to the place where the rhinos and the buff had
come out of the reeds and I located where I thought the buff had been when I
shot. M'Cola and Droopy were casting about like hounds and I thought they
were at least fifty yards too high up the bank when Droop held up a leaf.
'He's got blood,' Pop said. We went up to them. There was a great
quantity of blood, black now on the grass, and the trail was easy to follow.
Droop and M'Cola trailed one on each side, leaving the trail between them,
pointing to each blood spot formally with a long stem of grass. I always
thought it would be better for one to trail slowly and the other cast ahead
but this was the way they trailed, stooped heads, pointing each dried splash
with their grass stems and occasionally, when they picked up the tracks
after losing them, stooping to pluck a grass blade or a leaf that had the
black stain on it. I followed them with the Springfield, then came Pop, with
P.O.M. behind him. Droop carried my big gun and Pop had his. M'Cola had
P.O.M.'s Mannlicher slung over his shoulder. None of us spoke and everyone
seemed to regard it as a pretty serious business. In some high grass we
found blood, at a pretty good height on the grass leaves on both sides of
the trail where the buff had gone through the grass. That meant he was shot
clean through. You could not tell the original colour of the blood now, but
I had a moment of hoping he might be shot through the lungs. But farther on
we came on some droppings in the rocks with blood in them and then for a
while he had dropped dung wherever he climbed and all of it was
blood-spotted. It looked, now, like a gut shot or one through the paunch. I
was more ashamed of it all the time.
'If he comes don't worry about Droopy or the others,' Pop whispered.
'They'll get out of his way. Stop him.'
'Right up the nose,' I said.
'Don't try anything fancy,' Pop said. The trail climbed steadily, then
twice looped back on itself and for a time seemed to wander, without plan,
among some rocks. Once it lead down to the stream, crossed a rivulet of it
and then came back up on the same bank, grading up through the trees.
'I think we'll find him dead,' I whispered to Pop. That aimless turn
had made me see him, slow and hard hit, getting ready to go down.
'I hope so,' Pop said.
But the trail went on, where there was little grass now, and trailing
was much slower and more difficult. There were no tracks now that I could
see, only the probable line he would take, verified by a shiny dark splatter
of dried blood on a stone. Several times we lost it entirely and, the three
of us making casts, one would find it, point and whisper 'Damu', and we
would go on again. Finally it led down from a rocky hillside with the last
of the sun on it, down into the stream bed where there was a long, wide
patch of the highest dead reeds that we had seen. These were higher and
thicker even than the slough the buff had come out of in the morning and
there were several game trails that went into them.
'Not good enough to take the little Memsahib in there,' Pop said.
'Let her stay here with M'Cola,' I said.
'It's not good enough for the little Memsahib,' Pop repeated. 'I don't
know why we let her come.'
'She can wait here. Droop wants to go on.'
'Right you are. We'll have a look.'