'You wait here with M'Cola,' I whispered over my shoulder.
We followed Droopy into the thick, tall grass that was five feet above
our heads, walking carefully on the game trail, stooping forward, trying to
make no noise breathing. I was thinking of the buff the way I had seen them
when we had gotten the three that time, how the old bull had come out of the
bush, groggy as he was, and I could see the horns, the boss coming far down,
the muzzle out, the little eyes, the roll of fat and muscle on his
thin-haired, grey, scaly-hided neck, the heavy power and the rage in him,
and I admired him and respected him, but he was slow, and all the while we
shot I felt that it was fixed and that we had him. This was different, this
was no rapid fire, no pouring it on him as he comes groggy into the open, if
he comes now I must be quiet inside and put it down his nose as he comes
with the head out. He will have to put the head down to hook, like any bull,
and that will uncover the old place the boys wet their knuckles on and I
will get one in there and then must go sideways into the grass and he would
be Pop's from then on unless I could keep the rifle when I jumped. I was
sure I could get that one in and jump if I could wait and watch his head
come down. I knew I could do that and that the shot would kill him but how
long would it take? That was the whole thing. How long would it take? Now,
going forward, sure he was in here, I felt the elation, the best elation of
all, of certain action to come, action in which you had something to do, in
which you can kill and come out of it, doing something you are ignorant
about and so not scared, no one to worry about and no responsibility except
to perform something you feel sure you can perform, and I was walking softly
ahead watching Droopy's back and remembering to keep the sweat out of my
glasses when I heard a noise behind us and turned my head. It was P.O.M.
with M'Cola coming on our tracks.
'For God's sake,' Pop said. He was furious.
We got her back out of the grass and up on to the bank and made her
realize that she must stay there. She had not understood that she was to
stay behind. She had heard me whisper something but thought it was for her
to come behind M'Cola.
'That spooked me,' I said to Pop.
'She's like a little terrier,' he said. 'But it's not good enough.'
We were looking out over that grass.
'Droop wants to go still,' I said. 'I'll go as far as he will. When he
says no that lets us out. After all, I gut-shot the son of a bitch.'
'Mustn't do anything silly, though.'
'I can kill the son of a bitch if I get a shot at him. If he comes he's
got to give me a shot.'
The fright P.O.M. had given us about herself had made me noisy.
'Come on,' said Pop. We followed Droopy back in and it got worse and
worse, and I do not know about Pop but about half-way I changed to the big
gun and kept the safety off and my hand over the trigger guard and I was
plenty nervous by the time Droopy stopped and shook his head and whispered
'Hapana'. It had gotten so you could not see a foot ahead and it was all
turns and twists. It was really bad and the sun was only on the hillside
now. We both felt good because we had made Droopy do the calling off and I
was relieved as well. What we had followed him into had made my fancy
shooting plans seem very silly and I knew all we had in there was Pop to
blast him over with the four-fifty number two after I'd maybe miss him with
that lousy four-seventy. I had no confidence in anything but its noise any
more.
We were back trailing when we heard the porters on the hillside shout
and we ran crashing through the grass to try to get a high enough place to
see to shoot. They waved their arms and shouted that the buffalo had come
out of the reeds and gone past them and then M'Cola and Droopy were
pointing, and Pop had me by the sleeve trying to pull me to where I could
see them and then, in the sunlight, high up on the hillside against the
rocks I saw two buffalo. They shone very black in the sun and one was much
bigger than the other and I remember thinking this was our bull and that he
had picked up a cow and she had made the pace and kept him going. Droop had
handed me the Springfield and I slipped my arm through the sling and
sighting, the buff now all seen through the aperture, I froze myself inside
and held the bead on the top of his shoulder and as I started to squeeze he
started running and I swung ahead of him and loosed off. I saw him lower his
head and jump like a bucking horse as he comes out of the chutes and as I
threw the shell, slammed the bolt forward and shot again, behind him as he
were running I heard a low bellow. I stopped and yelled at Pop, 'Hear him?
I've got him, I tell you!'
'You hit him,' said Pop. 'Yes.'
'Goddamn it, I killed him. Didn't you hear him bellow?'
'No.'
'Listen!' We stood listening and there it came, clear, a long, moaning,
unmistakable bellow.
'By God,' Pop said. It was a very sad noise.
M'Cola grabbed my hand and Droopy slapped my back and all laughing we
started on a running scramble, sweating, rushing, up the ridge through the
trees and over rocks. I had to stop for breath, my heart pounding, and wiped
the sweat off my face and cleaned my glasses.
'Kufa!' M'Cola said, making the word for dead almost explosive in its
force. 'N'Dio! Kufa!'
'Kufa!' Droopy said grinning.
'Kufa!' M'Cola repeated and we shook hands again before we went on
climbing. Then, ahead of us, we saw him, on his back, throat stretched out
to the full, his weight on his horns, wedged against a tree. M'Cola put his
finger in the bullet hole in the centre of the shoulder and shook his head
happily.
Pop and P.O.M. came up, followed by the porters.
'By God, he's a better bull than we thought,' I said.
'He's not the same bull. This is a real bull. That must have been our
bull with him.'
'I thought he was with a cow. It was so far away I couldn't tell.'
'It must have been four hundred yards. By God, you {can} shoot that
little pipsqueak. '
'When I saw him put his head down between his legs and buck I knew we
had him. The light was wonderful on him.'
'I knew you had hit him, and I knew he wasn't the same bull. So I
thought we had two wounded buffalo to deal with. I didn't hear the first
bellow.'
'It was wonderful when we heard him bellow,' P.O.M. said. 'It's such a
sad sound. It's like hearing a horn in the woods.'
'It sounded awfully jolly to me,' Pop said. 'By God, we deserve a drink
on this. That was a shot. Why didn't you ever tell us you could shoot?'
'Go to hell.'
'You know he's
a damned good tracker, too, and what kind of a bird
shot?' he asked P.O.M.
'Isn't he a beautiful bull?' P.O.M. asked. 'He's a fine one. He's not
old but it's a fine head.'
We tried to take pictures but there was only the little box camera and
the shutter stuck, and there was a bitter argument about the shutter while
the light failed, and I was nervous now, irritable, righteous, pompous about
the shutter and inclined to be abusive because we could get no picture. You
cannot live on a plane of the sort of elation I had felt in the reeds and
having killed, even when it is only a buffalo, you feel a little quiet
inside. Killing is not a feeling that you share and I took a drink of water
and told P.O.M. I was sorry I was such a bastard about the camera. She said
it was all right and we were all right again looking at the buff with M'Cola
making the cuts for the headskin and we standing close together and feeling
fond of each other and understanding everything, camera and all. I took a
drink of the whisky and it had no taste and I felt no kick from it.
'Let me have another,' I said. The second one was all right.
We were going on ahead to camp with the chased-by-a-rhino spearman as
guide and Droop was going to skin out the head and they were going to
butcher and cache the meat in trees so the hyenas would not get it. They
were afraid to travel in the dark and I told Droopy he could keep my big
gun. He said he knew how to shoot so I took out the shells and put on the
safety and handing it to him told him to shoot. He put it to his shoulder,
shut the wrong eye, and pulled hard on the trigger, and again, and again.
Then I showed him about the safety and had him put it on and off and snap
the gun a couple of times. M'Cola became very superior during Droopy's
struggle to fire with the safety on and Droopy seemed to get much smaller. I
left him the gun and two cartridges and they were all busy butchering in the
dusk when we followed the spearsman and the tracks of the smaller buff,
home. We climbed around the tops of valleys, went across gulches, up and
down ravines and finally came on to the main ridge, it dark and cold in the
evening, the moon not yet up, we plodded along, all tired. Once M'Cola, in
the dark, loaded with Pop's heavy gun and an assortment of water bottles,
binoculars, and a musette bag of books, sung out a stream of what sounded
like curses at the guide who was striding ahead.
'What's he say?' I asked Pop.
'He's telling him not to show off his speed. That there is an old man
in the party.'
'Who does he mean, you or himself?'
'Both of us.'
We saw the moon come up, smoky red over the brown hills, and we came
down through the chinky lights of the village, the mud houses all closed
tight, and the smells of goats and sheep, and then across the stream and up
the bare slope to where the fire was burning in front of our tents. It was a
cold night with much wind.
In the morning we hunted, picked up a track at a spring and trailed a
rhino all over the high orchard country before he went down into a valley
that led, steeply, into the canyon. It was very hot and the tight boots of
the day before had chafed P.O.M.'s feet. She did not complain about them but
I could see they hurt her. We were all luxuriantly, restfully tired.
'The hell with them,' I said to Pop. 'I don't want to kill another one
unless he's big. We might hunt a week for a good one. Let's stand on the one
we have and pull out and join Karl. We can hunt oryx down there and get
those zebra hides and get on after the kudu.'
We were sitting under a tree on the summit of a hill and could see off
over all the country and the canyon running down to the Rift Valley and Lake
Manyara.
'It would be good fun to take porters and a light outfit and hunt on
ahead of them down through that valley and out to the lake,' Pop said.
'That would be swell. We could send the lorries around to meet us at
what's the name of the place?'
'Maji-Moto.'
'Why don't we do that?' P.O.M. asked.
'We'll ask Droopy how the valley is.'
Droopy didn't know but the spearman said it was very rough and bad
going where the stream came down through the rift wall. He did not think we
could get the loads through. We gave it up.
'That's the sort of trip to make, though,' Pop said. 'Porters don't
cost as much as petrol.'
'Can't we make trips like that when we come back?' P.O.M. asked.
'Yes,' Pop said. 'But for a big rhino you want to go up on Mount Kenya.
You'll get a real one there. Kudu's the prize here. You'd have to go up to
Kalal to get one in Kenya. Then if we get them we'll have time to go on down
in that Handeni country for sable.'
'Let's get going,' I said without moving.
Since a long time we had all felt good about Karl's rhino. We were glad
he had it and all of that had taken on a correct perspective. Maybe he had
his oryx by now. I hoped so. He was a fine fellow, Karl, and it was good he
got these extra fine heads.
'How do you feel, poor old Mama?'
'I'm fine. If we {are} going I'll be just as glad to rest my feet. But
I love this kind of hunting.'
'Let's get back, eat, break camp, and get down there to-night.'
That night we got into our old camp at M'utu-Umbu, under the big trees,
not far from the road. It had been our first camp in Africa and the trees
were as big, as spreading, and as green, the stream as clear and fast
flowing, and the camp as fine as when we had first been there. The only
difference was that now it was hotter at night, the road in was hub-deep in
dust, and we had seen a lot of country.
CHAPTER FOUR
We had come down to the Rift Valley by a sandy red road across a high
plateau, then up and down through orchard-bushed hills, around a slope of
forest to the top of the rift wall where we could look down and see the
plain, the heavy forest below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine
of Lake Manyara rose-coloured at one end with a half million tiny dots that
were flamingoes. From there the road dropped steeply along the face of the
wall, down into the forest, on to the flatness of the valley, through
cultivated patches of green corn, bananas, and trees I did not know the
names of, walled thick with forest, past a Hindu's trading store and many
huts, over two bridges where clear, fast-flowing streams ran, through more
forest, thinning now to open glades, and into a dusty turn-off that led into
a deeply rutted, dust-filled track through bushes to the shade of M'utu-Umbu
camp.
That night after dinner we heard the flamingoes flighting in the dark.
It was like the sound the wings of ducks make as they go over before it is
light, b
ut slower, with a steady beat, and multiplied a thousand times. Pop
and I were a little drunk and P.O.M. was very tired. Karl was gloomy again.
We had taken the edge from his victories over rhino and now that was past
anyway and he was facing possible defeat by oryx. Then, too, they had found
not a leopard but a marvellous lion, a huge, black-maned lion that did not
want to leave, on the rhino carcass when they had gone there the next
morning and could not shoot him because he was in some sort of forest
reserve.
'That's rotten,' I said and I tried to feel bad about it but I was
still feeling much too good to appreciate any one else's gloom, and Pop and
I sat, tired through to our bones, drinking whisky and soda and talking.
The next day we hunted oryx in the dried-up dustiness of the Rift
Valley and finally found a herd way off at the edge of the wooded hills on
the far side above a Masai village. They were like a bunch of Masai donkeys
except for the beautiful straight-slanting black horns and all the heads
looked good. When you looked closely two or three were obviously better than
the others and sitting on the ground I picked what I thought was the very
best of the lot and as they strung out I made sure of this one. I heard the
bullet smack and watched the oryx circle out away from the others, the
circle quickening, and knew I had it. So I did not shoot again.
This was the one Karl had picked, too. I did not know that, but had
shot, deliberately selfish, to make sure of the best this time at least, but
he got another good one and they went off in a wind-lifted cloud of grey
dust as they galloped. Except for the miracle of their horns there was no
more excitement in shooting them than if they had been donkeys, and after
the lorry came up and M'Cola and Charo had skinned the heads out and cut up
the meat we rode home in the blowing dust, our faces grey with it, and the
valley one long heat mirage.
We stayed at that camp two days. We had to get some zebra hides that we
had promised friends at home and it needed time for the skinner to handle
them properly. Getting the zebra was no fun; the plain was dull, now that
the grass had dried, hot and dusty after the hills, and the picture that
remains is of sitting against an anthill with, in the distance, a herd of
zebra galloping in the grey heat haze, raising a dust, and on the yellow
plain, the birds circling over a white patch there, another beyond, there a
third, and looking back, the plume of dust of the lorry coming with the
skinners and the men to cut up the meat for the village. I did some bad
shooting in the heat on a Grant's gazelle that the volunteer skinners asked
me to kill them for meat, wounding him in a running shot after missing him
three or four times, and then following him across the plain until almost
noon in that heat until I got within range and killed him.
But that afternoon we went out along the road that ran through the
settlement and past the corner of the Hindu's general store, where he smiled
at us in well-oiled, unsuccessful-storekeeping, brotherly humanity, and
hopeful salesmanship, turned the car off to the left on to a track that went
into the deep forest, a narrow brush-bordered track through the heavy
timber, that crossed a stream on an unsound log and pole bridge and went on
until the timber thinned and we came out into a grassy savannah that
stretched ahead to the reed-edged, dried-up bed of the lake with, far
beyond, the shine of the water and the rose-pink of the flamingoes. There
were some grass huts of fishermen in the shade of the last trees and ahead
the wind blew across the grass of the savannah and the dried bed of the lake
showed a white-grey with many small animals humping across its baked surface
as our car alarmed them. They were reed buck and they looked strange and
awkward as they moved in the distance but trim and graceful as you saw them
standing close. We turned the car out through the thick, short grass and on