baking,
noontime  plain.  Nobody said  anything. I reached up my hand to M'Cola  for
more cartridges, shot  again, carefully,  and  missed, and on the tenth shot
broke his damned neck. I turned away without looking toward him.
     'Poor Papa,' P.O.M. said.
     'It's the light and the  wind,' Pop said. We  had not known each  other
very well then.  'They  were  all hitting the  same place. I could see  them
throw the dust.'
     'I was a bloody, stubborn fool,' I said.
     Anyway,  I could shoot  now.  So far, and  aided by flukes, my luck was
running now.
     We  came  on into sight  of camp and shouted. No one came  out. Finally
Karl came out of his tent. He went back as soon  as he saw us, then came out
again.
     'Hey, Karl,' I yelled. He waved and went back  in the  tent again. Then
came toward us.  He was shaky  with excitement and I saw he had been washing
blood off his hands.
     'What is it?'
     'Rhino,' he said.
     'Did you get in trouble with him?'
     'No. We killed him.'
     'Fine. Where is he?'
     'Over there behind that tree.'
     We went  over. There was the newly severed head of a rhino that  was  a
rhino. He was twice the  size  of the one I had killed. The little eyes were
shut  and a fresh drop of blood stood  in the corner of one like a tear. The
head bulked enormous  and the  horn swept up and  back in a  fine curve. The
hide was an inch  thick where it hung  in  a cape behind the head and was as
white where it was cut as freshly sliced coco-nut.
     'What is he? About thirty inches?'
     'Hell, no,' said Pop. 'Not thirty inches.'
     'But he iss a very fine one, Mr. Jackson,' Dan said.
     'Yes. He's a fine one,' Pop said.
     'Where did you get him?'
     'Just outside of camp.'
     'He wass standing in some bush. We heard him grunt.'
     'We thought he was a buffalo,' Karl said.
     'He iss a very fine one,' Dan repeated.
     'I'm damned glad you got him,' I said.
     There we were,  the three of us, wanting to congratulate, waiting to be
good sports about this rhino whose smaller horn was longer than our big one,
this huge, tear-eyed marvel of a rhino, this dead, head-severed dream rhino,
and instead we  all spoke  like people who were about to become seasick on a
boat, or  people who had suffered some heavy financial loss. We were ashamed
and  could  do  nothing  about it.  I wanted to  say something pleasant  and
hearty, instead, 'How many times did you shoot him?' I asked.
     'I don't know. We didn't count. Five or six, I guess.'
     'Five, I think,' said Dan.
     Poor Karl, faced by these three sad-faced congratulators, was beginning
to feel his pleasure in the rhino drained away from him.
     'We got one too,' said P.O.M.
     'That's fine,' said Karl. 'Is he bigger than this one?'
     'Hell, no. He's a lousy runt.'
     'I'm sorry,' Karl said. He meant it, simply and truly.
     'What the hell have you  got  to be sorry about with a rhino like that?
He's a beauty. Let me get the camera and take some pictures of him.'
     I went after  the camera. P.O.M. took me  by  the  arm and walked close
beside me.
     'Papa, please try to  act like  a human  being,' she  said. 'Poor Karl.
You're making him feel dreadfully.'
     'I know it,' I said. 'I'm trying not to act that way.'
     There was  Pop.  He shook his head. 'I never felt more of a four-letter
man,' he said. 'But it was like a kick in the stomach. I'm really delighted,
of course.'
     'Me too,' I said. 'I'd rather  have him beat me. You know that.  Truly.
But why couldn't he just get a good one, two or three inches longer? Why did
he have to get one that makes mine ridiculous? It just makes ours silly.'
     'You can always remember that shot.'
     'To hell with  that  shot.  That bloody  fluke. God,  what  a beautiful
rhino.'
     'Come  on,  let's pull  ourselves  together  and  try to act like white
people with him.'
     'We were {awful,'} P.O.M. said.
     'I know  it,' I said. 'And all the  time I was trying to be  jolly. You
{know} I'm delighted he has it.'
     'You were certainly jolly. Both of you,' P.O.M. said.
     'But did you  see M'Cola,' Pop asked.  M'Cola had looked  at  the rhino
dismally, shaken his head and walked away.
     'He's a wonderful  rhino,' P.O.M. said. 'We must act  decently and make
Karl feel good.'
     But it was too  late. We could not make Karl  feel good  and for a long
time we could not feel  good  ourselves. The porters came into camp with the
loads and we could see them all, and all of our outfit, go over to where the
rhino head lay in the shade. They were  all very quiet. Only the skinner was
delighted to see such a rhino head in camp.
     'M'uzuri  sana,' he said to me. And measured the horn with shiftings of
his widespread hand. 'Kubwa sana!'
     'N'Dio. M'uzuri sana,' I agreed.
     'B'wana Kabor shoot him?'
     'Yes.'
     'M'uzuri sana.'
     'Yes,' I agreed. 'M'uzuri sana.'
     The  skinner was  the only gent in the outfit. We had tried, in all the
shoot, never to be competitive. Karl and
     I had each tried to give the other the better chance on everything that
came up. I was, truly, very fond of  him and  he  was entirely unselfish and
altogether self-sacrificing. I knew  I could outshoot him and I could always
outwalk him  and,  steadily, he  got  trophies  that  made  mine  dwarfs  in
comparison. He had done some of  the worst shooting at game I  had ever seen
and I had shot badly twice on the trip, at that grant  and at a bustard once
on the  plain, still he beat me  on all the tangible things we  had to show.
For  a while we had joked about it  and I knew everything would even up. But
it didn't even up. Now, on this rhino hunt, I had taken  the  first crack at
the country.  We had  sent  him after  meat  while  we  had  gone into a new
country. We had not treated him badly, but we had not  treated him too well,
and still he had  beaten me. Not  only beaten, beaten was all right.  He had
made my  rhino look so small that  I could  never keep him in the same small
town where we lived. He had wiped him out. I had the shot I had made on  him
to  remember  and nothing could take that  away except that it was so bloody
marvellous  I knew  I would wonder, sooner or later, if it was not  really a
fluke in spite of my unholy self-confidence.  Old Karl had put it  on us all
right with that rhino. He was in his tent now, writing a letter.
     Under the dining tent fly Pop and I talked over what we had better do.
     'He's  got  his  rhino anyway,' Pop said.  'That saves us time. Now you
can't stand on that one.'
     'No.'
     'But this country is washed out. Something wrong with it. Droopy claims
to  know  a good  country  about  three hours from here  in the  lorries and
another hour or so on with the porters. We can head for there this afternoon
with  a light  outfit,  send the lorries back, and Karl  and Dan can move on
down to M'uto Umbu and he can get his oryx.'
     'Fine.'
     'He has a chance to  get a leopard on that  rhino carcass this evening,
too,  or in the morning. Dan said they  heard one. We'll  try to get a rhino
out of this country of Droopy's and then you join up with them and go on for
kudu. We want to leave plenty of time for them. '
     'Fine.'
     'Even if you don't get an oryx. You'll pick one up somewhere.'
     'Even if I don't get one at all, it's  all right. We'll get one another
time. I want a kudu, though. '
     'You'll get one. You're sure to.'
     'I'd rather get one, a good one, than all the rest. I don't give a damn
about  these rhino  outside of the fun of hunting them. But I'd  like to get
one that wouldn't look silly beside that dream rhino of his.'
     'Absolutely.'
     So we told Karl and he said: 'Whatever you  say. Sure.  I  hope you get
one  twice as  big. ' He really meant it. He  was feeling  better now and so
were we all.


        CHAPTER THREE

     Droopy's  country, when  we reached it  that evening,  after a hot ride
through red-soiled, bush-scrubby hills, looked awful. It was at the  edge of
a belt where all the  trees had been girdled  to  kill the tsetse flies. And
across from camp  was  a dusty, dirty native  village. The  soil was red and
eroded  and seemed to be  blowing away, and camp was pitched in a  high wind
under the sketchy  shade of  some dead  trees  on  a  hillside overlooking a
little stream and the mud village beyond. Before dark we followed Droopy and
two  local  guides  up past the  village and in a long climb to the top of a
rock-strewn ridge  that overlooked a deep  valley that was almost a  canyon.
Across  on the other side, were broken valleys that sloped steeply down into
the canyon. There  were  heavy growths  of  trees in the valleys  and grassy
slopes on the ridges between, and above there was the thick bamboo forest of
the  mountain. The canyon ran down  to the Rift Valley, seeming to narrow at
the  far  end where it  cut through the wall of the rift.  Beyond, above the
grassy ridges and slopes, were heavily forested hills. It looked a hell of a
country to hunt.
     'If you.  see one  across  there  you  have to go straight  down to the
bottom of the canyon. Then up one  of those timber  patches and across those
damned gullies.  You  can't  keep him in  sight  and  you'll  kill  yourself
climbing. It's  too steep. Those are the kind of innocent-looking gullies we
got into that night coming home.'
     'It looks very bad,' Pop agreed.
     'I've  hunted  a  country  just  like this for deer. The south slope of
Timber Creek in Wyoming. The slopes are  all too steep.  It's hell. It's too
broken. We'll take some punishment to-morrow.'
     P.O.M. said nothing.  Pop  had brought us here and  Pop would bring  us
out. All she had to do  was see her boots  did not hurt her feet.  They hurt
just a little now, and that was her only worry.
     I went on to dilate on the difficulties the country showed  and we went
home to  camp  in  the  dark all  very gloomy and full of  prejudice against
Droopy. The fire flamed brightly in the wind and we sat and watched the moon
rise and listened to the hyenas.  After we had a  few drinks we did not feel
so badly about the country.
     'Droopy swears it's good,' Pop said. 'This isn't where he wanted to  go
though, he  says. It  was another  place farther on. But he  swears this  is
good.'
     'I love Droopy,' P.O.M. said. 'I have perfect confidence in Droopy.'
     Droopy came up to the fire with two spear-carrying natives.
     'What does he hear?' I asked.
     There was  some  talk  by  the natives,  then Pop  said:  'One of these
sportsmen claims he was  chased by a huge rhino to-day. Of course nearly any
rhino would look huge when he was chasing him.'
     'Ask him how long the horn was.'
     The native showed that the horn was as long as his arm. Droopy grinned.
     'Tell him to go,' said Pop.
     'Where did all this happen?'
     'Oh, over  there somewhere,' Pop said. 'You know. Over there.  Way over
there. Where these things always happen.'
     'That's marvellous. Just where we want to go.'
     'The  good aspect is that Droopy's not at all depressed,' Pop said. 'He
seems very confident. After all, it's his show.'
     'Yes, but we have to do the climbing.'
     'Cheer him  up, will  you?' Pop said to  P.O.M. 'He's  getting  me very
depressed.'
     'Should we talk about how well he shoots?'
     'Too early in the evening. I'm not gloomy.  I've just seen that kind of
country before. It will be good for us  all right. Take  some of your  belly
off, Governor.'
     The next day I found that I was all wrong about that country.
     We had  breakfast before  daylight  and  were started  before  sunrise,
climbing the hill beyond the village  in single file.  Ahead  there  was the
local guide with a spear, then  Droopy with my heavy gun and a water bottle,
then me with the  Springfield, Pop with the  Mannlicher,  P.O.M. pleased, as
always  to  carry nothing,  M'Cola with  Pop's heavy gun and  another  water
bottle, and finally  two local  citizens with spears, water bags, and a chop
box with lunch. We planned to lay up in the  heat of the  middle of the  day
and not get back until  dark. It was fine climbing in the cool fresh morning
and  very  different  from toiling up this same trail  last evening  in  the
sunset  with all the  rocks  and dirt giving back the  heat  of the day. The
trail  was used regularly by cattle and the dust was powdered dry  and, now,
lightly  moistened from the dew. There  were many hyena  tracks and, as  the
trail came on to a ridge of  grey  rock so that you could look  down on both
sides into a steep ravine, and then went on along the edge of the canyon, we
saw a fresh rhino track in one of the dusty patches below the rocks.
     'He's just gone on ahead,' Pop said. 'They must wander all over here at
night.'
     Below, at the bottom of the canyon, we could see the tops of high trees
and in an opening see the flash of water. Across were the steep hillside and
the gullies  we had studied last night. Droopy and  the local guide, the one
who  had  been  chased  by  the  rhino, were  whispering together. Then they
started  down a steep path that  went in long  slants  down the  side of the
canyon.
     We  stopped. I had not seen P.O.M. was limping, and in sudden whispered
family   bitterness  there   was  a  highly-righteous-on-both-sides   clash,
historically on unwearable shoes and boots  in the past, and imperatively on
these, which hurt. The  hurt was  lessened  by cutting off the  toes of  the
heavy short wool socks  worn over  ordinary socks, and then, by removing the
socks entirely, the boots made possible. Going  down-hill steeply made these
Spanish shooting boots too short in  the toe and there was an old  argument,
about this length of boot and whether the bootmaker, whose part I had taken,
unwittingly first, only as  interpreter, and  finally  embraced  his  theory
patriotically  as a  whole  and,  I  believed, by logic,  had overcome it by
adding  on  to the  heel.  But  they  hurt  now,  a stronger  logic, and the
situation was unhelped by the statement that men's new boots always hurt for
weeks  before  they became comfortable. Now, heavy  socks removed,  stepping
tentatively,  trying  the pressure  of  the leather  against  the toes,  the
argument  past, she wanting not to suffer, but to keep up and please  Mr. J.
P.,  me  ashamed  at having  been  a four-letter man about  boots, at  being
righteous against pain, at being righteous at all, at ever being  righteous,
stopping to whisper about it, both of us grinning at  what was whispered, it
all  right now,  the boots  too,  without  the heavy socks,  much better, me
hating  all  righteous bastards now,  one absent American friend especially,
having  just  removed  myself  from  that category, certainly  never  to  be
righteous again, watching Droopy ahead, we  went down the long  slant of the
trail  toward the  bottom of the canyon  where the trees were heavy and tall
and the floor of the canyon, that from above had been a narrow  gash, opened
to a forest-banked stream.
     We stood now in the shade of trees with great smooth trunks, circled at
their  base with the  line of  roots that showed  in rounded  ridges  up the
trunks  like arteries, the trunks  the yellow green of a French forest  on a
day in winter after rain. But these trees had a great spread of branches and
were  in leaf  and  below them,  in the stream  bed in the  sun,  reeds like
papyrus grass grew thick  as wheat and  twelve feet tall. There  was a  game
trail through the grass along the stream and Droopy was bent down looking at
it.  M'Cola  went over and looked and they  both  followed it a little  way,
stooped close over it, then came back to us.
     'Nyati,' M'Cola whispered. 'Buffalo.' Droopy whispered to Pop and  then
Pop said, softly in his throaty, whisky whisper, 'They're buff gone down the
river. Droop says there are some big bulls. They haven't come back.'
     'Let's follow them,' I said. 'I'd rather get another buff than rhino.'
     'It's as good a chance as any for rhino, too,' Pop said.
     'By God, isn't it a great looking country?' I said.
     'Splendid,' Pop said. 'Who would have imagined it?'
     'The trees  are  like  Andre's  pictures,'  P.O.M.  said. 'It's  simply
beautiful. Look  at that green.  It's Masson. Why can't a  good  painter see
this country?'
     'How are your boots?'
     'Fine.'
     As we trailed the buffalo we went very slowly and quietly. There was no
wind and we knew that when the breeze came up  it would be from the east and
blow up the canyon toward us. We  followed the game trail down the river-bed
and as we went the  grass was much higher. Twice we had to get down to crawl
and the reeds were so thick  you could not  see two feet  into  them.  Droop
found  a  fresh rhino track,  too, in the mud. I  began to think about  what
would  happen if  a rhino came  barging along this tunnel and  who  would do
what. It was exciting but I did not like it. It was too much like being in a
trap and there was P.O.M. to think about. Then as the stream made a bend and
we came out of the high grass to the bank I smelled  game very distinctly. I
do not  smoke, and hunting at home I  have several times  smelled elk in the
rutting season before I have seen them, and I can smell clearly where an old
bull has lain in the forest.  The bull elk has a strong musky smell. It is a
strong but pleasant odour and I know it well, but this smell I did not know.
     'I can smell them,' I whispered to Pop. He believed me.
     'What is it?'
     'I don't know but it's plenty strong. Can't you?'
     'No.'
     'Ask Droop.'
     Droopy nodded and grinned.
     'They take snuff,' Pop said. 'I don't know  whether  they can  scent or
not.'
     We  went on  into another bed of reeds that were  high  over our heads,
putting each foot down silently before lifting the other, walking as quietly
as in  a dream  or a slow motion  picture. I could  smell  whatever  it  was
clearly now, all  of the time, sometimes  stronger than at others. I did not
like it at all. We  were close  to the bank  now, and ahead, the  game trail
went straight out into a long  slough  of higher reeds than any we had  come
through.
     'I  can smell them  close as hell,'  I  whispered to Pop. 'No  kidding.
Really.'
     'I  believe you,' Pop said. 'Should  we get up  here on to the bank and
skirt this bit? We'll be above it.'
     'Good.' Then, when we were up, I said. 'That tall stun' had me spooked.
I wouldn't like to hunt in that.'
     'How'd you like to hunt elephant in that?' Pop whispered.
     'I wouldn't do it.'
     'Do you really hunt elephant in grass like that?' P.O.M. asked.
     'Yes,' Pop said. 'Get up on somebody's shoulders to shoot.'
     Better men than I am do it, I thought. I wouldn't do it.
     We  went along  the grassy right  bank,  on a sort of shelf, now in the
open, skirting a slough  of high dry reeds. Beyond on the opposite bank were
the heavy trees and above them the steep  bank of the canyon. You could  not
see the stream. Above us, on the right, were the hills, wooded in patches of
orchard bush.  Ahead, at the end of the slough of  reeds the banks  narrowed
and the branches of the big trees almost covered the stream. Suddenly Droopy
grabbed me and we both crouched down. He put the big gun in my hand and took
the Springfield. He pointed and around a curve in the bank I saw the head of
a  rhino with  a  long, wonderful-looking horn.  The  head was swaying and I
could  see  the ears forward and twitching, and see the  little pig  eyes. I
slipped the  safety  catch and motioned  Droopy  down.  Then I heard  M'Cola
saying,  'Toto!  Toto!'  and  he  grabbed  my arm.  Droopy  was  whispering,
'Manamouki! Manamouki! Manamouki!'  very fast and he and M'Cola were frantic
that I should  not shoot. It was a cow rhino with  a calf, and  as I lowered
the gun  she  gave a snort, crashed in the reeds, and was gone. I never  saw
the calf. We could see the  reeds  swaying where the two of them were moving
and then it was all quiet.
     'Damn shame,' Pop whispered. 'She had a beautiful horn.'
     'I was all set to bust her,' I said. 'I couldn't tell she was a cow.'
     'M'Cola saw the calf.'
     M'Cola was whispering to Pop and nodding his head emphatically.
     'He says there's another rhino in there,' Pop said. 'That he  heard him
snort.'
     'Let's  get  higher, where we can  see  them  if  they break, and throw
something in,' I said.
     'Good idea,' Pop agreed. 'Maybe the bull's there.'
     We went a little higher  up the bank where we  could  look out over the
lake of high reeds  and, with  Pop holding his big gun ready and  I with the
safety  off mine, M'Cola threw a club into the reeds where he had  heard the
snort. There was a wooshing snort and no movement, not a stir  in the reeds.
Then  there was  a crashing farther away and we could  see the reeds swaying
with the rush of something through them toward  the opposite bank, but could
not  see  what  was making  the movement. Then I  saw  the  black  back, the
wide-swept, point-lifted horns and then the quick-moving, climbing rush of a
buffalo  up  the  other  bank. He  went up, his neck  up  and  out, his head
horn-heavy, his  withers rounded like a fighting bull, in fast strong-legged
climb.  I was holding on the point where  his neck joined his  shoulder when
Pop stopped me.
     'He's not  a big one,' he said softly. 'I wouldn't take him  unless you
want him for meat.'
     He looked big to nie and now he stood, his head up, broadside, his head
swung toward us.
     'I've got three more on the licence and we're leaving their country,' I
said.
     'It's awfully good meat,'  Pop whispered. 'Go ahead then. Bust him. But
be ready for the rhino after you shoot.'
     I sat down, the big  gun  feeling  heavy  and unfamiliar,  held on  the
buff's  shoulder, squeezed off and flinched without firing. Instead  of  the
sweet  clean pull of the Springfield with the smooth, unhesitant release  at
the end, this trigger came to what, in a squeeze, seemed metal stuck against
metal. It was like  when you shoot in a nightmare. I couldn't squeeze it and
I corrected  from  my flinch,  held my breath, and  pulled  the  trigger. It
pulled off with a jerk and the big gun made a rocking explosion out of which
I came, seeing the  buffalo still on his feet, and going out of sight to the
left in a  climbing run, to let off  the second barrel and  throw a burst of
rock dust and dirt over his hind quarters. He was out of shot before I could
reload the double-barrelled 470 and we  had all heard the  snorting  and the
crashing of another  rhino that had  gone out of the lower end of the  reeds
and on under the heavy trees on our side without showing more than a glimpse
of his bulk in the reeds.
     'It was the bull,' Pop said. 'He's gone down the stream.'
     'N'Dio. Doumi! Doumi!' Droopy insisted it was a bull. 'I hit the damned
buff,' I said. 'God knows where.
     To hell with those heavy guns. The trigger pull put me off.'
     'You'd have killed him with the Springfield,' Pop said.
     'I'd know where  I hit him anyway. I thought  with  the four-seven  I'd
kill him or miss him,' I said. 'Instead, now we've got him wounded.'
     'He'll keep,' Pop said. 'We want to give him plenty of time.'
     'I'm afraid I gut-shot him.'
     'You can't tell. Going off fast like that he might be dead in a hundred
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.
     'Nyati,' he said with his hand up to his face.
     '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 the 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
Place de Greves.  I  saw all  that.  And it was me they did not break on 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 way 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.'
     '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
went out of sight, I knew  I had him. Droopy and I started  to run and as we
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,
which had no blood on  them, up to the top of the hill and on our way toward
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, but 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
to the dried lake floor and everywhere, to the left and to  the right, where
the streams flowed out  into the  lake and made a reedy marsh  that ran down
toward the receded  lake,  cut  by canals of water, ducks were flying and we
could  see  big  flocks  of geese  spread over the grassy hummocks that rose
above the marsh. The dried bed was hard and firm  and we drove the car until
it commenced to look moist and soft ahead, then left the motor  car standing
there, and, Karl  taking Charo and I, M'Cola, to carry shells and  birds, we
agreed to  work one on one side and one the other of  the marsh  and try  to
shoot and keep the birds moving while  Pop and P.O.M. went into the  edge of
the high reeds on the  left shore of the lake  where  another stream  made a
thick marsh to which we thought the ducks might fly.
     We saw  them  walk  across the open,  a  big  bulky figure  in a  faded
corduroy  coat and a very small one  in  trousers, grey khaki jacket, boots,
and a big hat, and then disappear as they crouched in a point of dried reeds
before we started. But as we went out  to reach the edge  of  the  stream we
soon saw the plan was  no good.  Even watching  carefully  for  the  firmest
footing  you sunk down in the cool mud to the  knees, and, as it became less
mucky and  there were more hummocks broken by water, sometimes I went in  to
the waist. The  ducks  and  geese  flew up out of  range and after the first
flock had swung  across toward where the others were hidden in the reeds and
we heard  the sharp, small, double report of  P.O.M.'s 28-gauge  and saw the
ducks wheel off and go out  toward  the lake, the other scattered flocks and
the  geese all went toward the open water. A flock of  dark ibises, looking,
with their dipped bills, like great curlews, flew over from the marsh on the
side of the stream where Karl was and circled high above us before they went
back  into the  reeds.  All through the bog were snipe and black  and  white
godwits and finally, not  being  able to  get within  range  of the ducks, I
began to shoot snipe to M'Cola's great disgust. We  followed  the  marsh out
and then  I  crossed  another  stream, shoulder  high,  holding  my gun  and
shooting coat with shells in the pocket above my head and finally  trying to
work toward where P.O.M. and  Pop  were, found  a deep flowing  stream where
teal were  flying, and killed three. It was nearly dark now  and I found Pop
and P.O.M. on the far bank of this stream at the edge of the dried lake bed.
It all looked too deep to wade and the bottom was soft but finally I found a
heavily worn hippo trail that went into the stream and treading on this, the
bottom fairly  firm under foot,  I made it, the water coming just  under  my
armpits. As I came out on  the grass and stood dripping a flock of teal came
over very  fast, and,  crouching to  shoot in the dusk at the same  time Pop
did, we  cut down  three that fell hard in a  long slant ahead  in the  tall
grass. We hunted carefully and found them all. Their speed had  carried them
much  farther than we expected and then, almost dark now, we started for the
car  across  the grey dried  mud of the lake  bed,  me  soaked and my  boots
squashing water, P.O.M. pleased with the ducks, the first we'd had since the
Serengetti, we all remembering how marvellous they were to eat, and ahead we
could see the car looking very  small and beyond it a stretch of flat, baked
mud and then the grassy savannah and the forest.
     Next day we came in  from  the zebra business grey and sweat-caked with
dust  that  the car raised and the wind blew over us on the way  home across
the plain. P.O.M. and Pop had not gone out, there was nothing for them to do
and no  need for them  to eat  that dust, and Karl and I out on the plain in
the too much sun and dust had  gone  through  one of  those rows that starts
like this, 'What was the matter?'
     'They were too far.'
     'Not at the start.'
     'They were too far, I tell you.'
     'They get hard if you don't take them.'
     'You shoot them.'
     'I've got enough. We only want twelve hides altogether. You go ahead.'
     Then someone, angry, shooting too  fast  to show he was being asked  to
shoot  too fast, getting up  from  behind the ant hill and  turning  away in
disgust, walking towards his partner, who says,  smugly,  'What's the matter
with them?'
     'They're too damned far, I tell you,' desperately.
     The smug one, complacently, 'Look at them'.
     The zebra that had galloped off had seen the approaching  lorry  of the
skinners and had circled and were standing now, broadside, in easy range.
     The one looks, says nothing, too  angry now  to  shoot. Then says,  'Go
ahead. Shoot'.
     The smug  one, more righteous  now  than ever, refuses. 'Go  ahead,' he
says.
     'I'm through,' says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he
feels he has been tricked. Something is  always tricking him, the need to do
things other than  in a regular order,  or by  an inexact  command in  which
details are not specified, or to have  to do it in front of people, or to be
hurried.
     'We've got eleven,'  says smug face, sorry  now. He knows he should not
hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying
to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly  righteous bastard again. 'We
can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we'll go in.'
     'No, let's get him. You get him.'
     'No, let's go in.'
     And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness
goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.
     'What  you thinking  about now?' you ask. 'What a son  of a bitch I am,
still?'
     'About this afternoon,' he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked
dust on his face.
     'Me too,' you say.
     Finally the afternoon comes and you start.
     This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes,  light to pull out when you
sink, you work out from hummock  to hummock, picking a way across  the marsh
and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks  fly as before out to
the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake
itself and find the  bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water
get outside the big flocks, then there is  a shot and you and M'Cola crouch,
heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two
again, and then a high  one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight
and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you
can load and shoot, you  brown a bunch to get cripples for  decoys  and then
take  only fancy shots because  you know now you can get all that we can use
or  carry. You  try  the  high  one, straight  overhead and  almost  leaning
backward, the {coup de roi}, and splash a big black duck down beside M'Cola,
him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you  decide  you better
kill them  and pick  up. You have  to run in water to  your knees to  get in
range of the  last cripple and you  slip and go face  down  and are sitting,
enjoying  being  completely wet finally, water  cool  on your behind, soaked
with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting  the water out of the
gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell,
     M'Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of
ducks, crouches  and a flock of geese pass over  in easy range while you try
to pump a wet shell in. You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you
were behind, and at  the shot you see the  cloud  of flamingoes rise  in the
sun, making the whole horizon  of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after
that each time  after  you shoot  you turn and  look out into the sun on the
water and see that quick rise  of  the unbelievable  cloud and then the slow
settling.
     'M'Cola,' you say and point.
     'N'Dio,' he says, watching them. 'M'uzuri!' and hands you more shells.
     We all had  good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three
days afterward, travelling, we had cold  teal,  the best  of ducks  to  eat,
fine, plump, and tender, cold  with  Pan-Yan  pickles, and  the  red wine we
bought  at  Babati, sitting by the road  waiting for the lorries to come up,
sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night
when  the lorries  finally  came in and we  were  at  the house of an absent
friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the
table, having waited so long for  the broken-down lorry to come that we  all
drank much too  much  and were unspeakably hungry,  P.O.M.  dancing with the
manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full
of  emetine  and  with  a  ringing  headache  drowning  it  successfully  in
whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark  and the wind blowing a gale, and
then those teal  coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables.
Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of
the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.
     From Babati we had driven through the hills  to the  edge  of  a plain,
wooded in a long stretch of glade  beyond a small village where  there was a
mission  station at the foot of a mountain.  Here we had made a camp to hunt
kudu which were supposed to be in the wooded hills and in the forests on the
flats that stretched out to the edge of the open plain.


        CHAPTER FIVE

     It  was a hot place to camp,  under trees that had been girdled to kill
them so that the tsetse fly would leave,  and there  was hard hunting in the
hills,  which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard  climb before
you got  up  into  them, and easy  hunting on  the  wooded flats  where  you
wandered as though  through a  deer park. But everywhere were  tsetse flies,
swarming  around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms,
and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch  and  swished away at the back
of my neck as we walked and  we hunted five days,  from daylight until dark,
coming  home after dark, dead tired  but  glad of the  coolness  and of  the
darkness that stopped  the  tsetse from  biting.  We took  turns hunting the
hills and the  flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed  a
very fine  roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal  feeling
about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it  was someone's fault, the
guides, the  choice of  beat,  the hills, these all betrayed him.  The hills
punished him and he did  not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would
get one and that  the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about
the kudu  complicated the hunting. He  was  never  a climber  and  took real
punishment  in  the hills. I tried to take the  bulk  of  the  hill beats to
relieve him  but I  could see, now that he was  tired  he felt they probably
{were} in the hills and he was missing his chance.
     In  the five days  I  saw a  dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull
with  a string  of cows. The  cows were big,  grey, striped-flanked antelope
with ridiculously small heads,  big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that
moved them  in  big-bellied panic through the trees.  The young bull had the
start of a spiral  on his horns but they were short and dumpy  and as he ran
past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he
was no  more  like  a  real  bull  than a spike  elk  is  like  a big,  old,
thick-necked,   dark-maned,  wonder-horned,  tawny-hided,   beer-horse-built
bugler of a bull-elk.
     Another time,  headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in
the hills,  the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped,  moving  animals,
against the sun  at the top of the  hill, showing only  their flanks through
the trunks of the trees and said they  were kudu bulls. We could not see the
horns and when we got  up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the
rocky ground we  could  not find  their  tracks. But from the glimpse we had
they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been
bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl
find them the next day when we sent him there.
     We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting  along a ridge with  a
steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented
us,  and  as we stood, perfectly quiet,  M'Cola holding his hand on mine, we
watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, dark, full-necked,
a dark ruff on his neck, his horns  up, trembling  all over  as his nostrils
widened searching  for the scent.  M'Cola was grinning, pressing his fingers
tight on my wrist and we watched the big buck shiver from the danger that he
could not locate. Then there was the distant, heavy boom  of a native  black
powder gun and the buck jumped and  almost ran over us as  he crashed up the
ridge.
     Another day, with P.O.M. along,  we had hunted all through the timbered
flat and come  out to the edge of the plain where there were only clumps  of
bush  and  san-seviera when  we  heard a deep, throaty, cough.  I  looked at
M'Cola.
     'Simba,' he said, and did not look pleased.
     'Wapi?' I whispered. 'Where?'
     He pointed.
     I  whispered to P.O.M.,  'It's a lion. Probably the one we heard  early
this morning. You go back to those trees.'
     We had heard  a lion  roaring just before daylight when we were getting
up.
     'I'd rather stay with you.'
     'It wouldn't be fair to Pop,' I said. 'You wait back there.'
     'All right. But you {will} be careful.'
     'I won't take anything but a standing shot and I won't shoot unless I'm
sure of him.'
     'All right.'
     'Come on,' I said to M'Cola.
     He looked very grave and did not like it at all.
     'Wapi Simba?' I whispered.
     'Here,' he  said dismally and pointed at the  broken  islands of thick,
green spiky cover. I motioned to one  of  the guides  to go back with P.O.M.
and we  watched them  go back  a couple of hundred yards to the edge  of the
forest.
     'Come on,' I said. M'Cola  shook his head without smiling but followed.
We went forward  very slowly,  looking  into  and trying  to see through the
senseviera. We  could see nothing. Then  we heard the  cough again, a little
ahead and to the right.
     '{No}!' M'Cola whispered. {'Hapana}, B'wana!'
     'Come  on,' I said. I pointed my  forefinger  into my neck and wriggled
the thumb down. 'Kufa,' I whispered, meaning  that I would shoot the lion in
the  neck  and kill  him  dead.  M'Cola shook  his head,  his face grave and
sweating. 'Hapana!' he whispered.
     There was an  ant-hill ahead and we climbed the furrowed  clay and from
the  top  looked all  around. We could not make out  anything  in  the green
cactus-like cover. I  had believed  we might  see him  from the anthill  and
after  we came down we went  on for about two hundred yards into  the broken
cactus. Once again we heard him cough ahead of us and once, a little farther
on, we heard  a growl. It was  very  deep and very impressive. Since the ant
heap  my heart had not been in  it.  Until that had failed I  had believed I
might have a close and good shot and I knew that if I could kill one  alone,
without Pop along, I would feel good about it for a long time. I had made up
my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him, I had killed
three and  knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from
this one than the whole trip. I felt it was perfectly fair to Pop to take it
on as long as I had a chance to call  the shot but what we were getting into
now was bad. He kept moving away as we came on, but slowly. Evidently he did
not want to move, having fed, probably, when we had heard him roaring in the
early morning, and he wanted to settle  down  now. M'Cola hated it. How much
of it was the responsibility he felt for me to Pop and how much was his  own
acute feeling of misery about the dangerous game I did not know. But he felt
very miserable. Finally he put his hand on my shoulder, put his face  almost
into mine and shook his head violently three times.
     'Hapana! Hapana! Hapana! B'wana!' he protested, sorrowed, and pleaded.
     After all, I had no business taking him where I could not call the shot
and it was a profound personal relief to turn back.
     'All right,' I said. We turned around and came back out the same way we
had  gone in, then crossed the open prairie to  the trees  where P.O.M.  was
waiting.
     'Did you see him?'
     'No,' I told her. 'We heard him three or four times.'
     'Weren't you frightened?'
     'Pea-less,' I said, 'at the last. But I'd rather have shot him in there
than any damned thing in the world.'
     'My, I'm glad you're  back,' she said.  I got the dictionary out of  my
pocket and made a sentence in pigeon Swahili. 'Like' was the word I wanted.
     'M'Cola like Simba?'
     M'Cola could  grin again now and the smile  moved the Chinese  hairs at
the corner of his mouth.
     'Hapana,' he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. 'Hapana!'
     'Hapana' is a negative.
     'Shoot a kudu?' I suggested.
     'Good,' said M'Cola feelingly in Swahili. 'Better. Best. Tendalla, yes.
Tendalla.'
     But  we never saw a kudu bull out of that  camp and  we  left  two days
later to go into  Babati  and then down to Kondoa  and strike across country
toward Handeni and the coast.
     I never liked that camp, nor the  guides, nor the country. It had  that
picked-over, shot-out feeling. We  knew there were kudu there and the Prince
of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been  three other
parties  in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly  defending
their  crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket
it seemed odd  that he should follow  the  baboons  ten miles  away from his
shamba up into the kudu  hills  to  have a shot  at them,  and I was all for
pulling out and trying the new  country toward Handeni  where none of us had
ever been.
     'Let's go then,' Pop said.
     It seemed this new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the  open and
you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head,
blasted him  over. Then there  were sable and we agreed that whoever  killed
the first kudu should move on in the sable country.
     I was beginning to feel  awfully good and Karl was very cheerful at the
prospect of this new miraculous  country where they were  so unsophisticated
that it was really a shame to topple them over.
     We  left, soon after daylight,  ahead of the outfit, who were to strike
camp and follow in the two lorries. We stopped in Babati at the little hotel
overlooking the lake and  bought some more Pan-Yan pickles and had some cold
beer. Then  we  started south on the Cape to  Cairo road,  here well graded,
smooth,  and carefully cut through wooded hills  overlooking the long yellow
stretch of plains of the Masai  Steppes, down  and  through farming country,
where  the dried-breasted  old women and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed
old men hoed in the cornfields, through miles and dusty miles of  this,  and
then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land where the soil was blowing away
in clouds as you looked, into the  tree-shaded,  pretty, whitewashed, German
model-garrison town of Kandoa-Irangi.
     We left M'Cola at the crossroads to hold up our lorries when they came,
put the car into some  shade and visited the  military cemetery. We intended
to call on  the D.O. but they were at lunch, and we  did not want to  bother
them, so after the military cemetery, which was a pleasant, clean, well-kept
place and as good as another to be dead in, we had some beer under a tree in
shade that seemed liquid  cool after the white glare of a sun that you could
feel the weight of on your neck and shoulders, started the car  and went out
to the  crossroads to pick up the lorries and head  to the east into the new
country.


        CHAPTER SIX

     It was a new country to us but it had the marks of the oldest countries
The road was a track  over  shelves  of solid rock, worn by the feet of  the
caravans  and  the cattle, and  it  rose in the boulder-strewn  un-roadhness
through a double  line of trees and into  the hills. The country was so much
like Aragon  that  I could  not  believe that we  were not  in  Spain until,
instead of mules with saddle bags, we met  a  dozen  natives bare-legged and
bareheaded dressed  in  white  cotton  cloth  they  wore  gathered over  the
shoulder like a toga, but when  they  had passed,  the high trees beside the
track over those rocks was Spam and I had followed this same route forged on
ahead and following close behind a horse one time watching the horror of the
flies scuttling around his crupper They were  the same camel flies we  found
here on the lions.  In Spain if one got inside your shirt you had to get the
shirt off to kill him. He'd  go  inside the neckband, down the  back, around
and under one arm, make for the navel and the belly band, and if you did not
get him  he would move with such intelligence and speed that, scuttling flat
and uncrushable he would make you undress completely to kill him That day of
watching  the  camel flies working under  the horse's  tail, having had them
myself, gave me  more horror than  anything I could remember except one time
in a  hospital with my right arm broken off short between the  elbow and the
shoulder, the back of  the hand having hung down against my back, the points
of the bone having cut up  the flesh of the  biceps until it finally rotted,
swelled, burst, and sloughed off in pus. Alone with the pain in the night in
the fifth week of not sleeping  I thought suddenly how a  bull elk must feel
if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it
all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of  the bullet to the
end of the business and, being a little out of my head, thought perhaps what
I was going  through was  a punishment for all hunters.  Then, getting well,
decided if it was a punishment  I had paid it and at least I knew what I was
doing. I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had
been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing
or another and I, truly, did not mind that any  more. Since I still loved to
hunt I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could  kill cleanly and
as soon as I lost that ability I would stop.
     If you  serve time for  society, democracy,  and the other things quite
young,  and declining any further enlistment make yourself  responsible only
to yourself, you exchange the  pleasant,  comforting  stench of comrades for
something  you can  never  feel  in  any  other  way than by  yourself. That
something  I cannot yet define  completely but the  feeling  comes  when you
write well and truly of something and  know impersonally you have written in
that way and those who are  paid to read it and report on it do not like the
subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value  absolutely, or
when you do something which people do not consider a  serious occupation and
yet  you  know, truly,  that it is  as  important  and has  always  been  as
important  as all  the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you
are alone  with it  and  know  that this Gulf Stream  you  are living  with,
knowing, learning  about, and loving, has  moved, as it moves, since  before
man, and that it has gone by  the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy
island since  before Columbus  sighted it and that the  things you find  out
about it, and those  that have always lived in it are permanent and of value
because that stream will  flow, as it  has  flowed, after the Indians, after
the Spaniards, after  the British, after  the  Americans and  after  all the
Cubans and  all the systems of governments, the  richness, the  poverty, the
martyrdom,  the  sacrifice and the venality and  the cruelty are all gone as
the   high-piled    scow   of   garbage,   bright-coloured,   white-flecked,
ill-smelling, now  tilted  on its  side, spills off its  load into the  blue
water, turning it a pale green to  a  depth of four or five  fathoms as  the
load spreads  across  the  surface, the  sinkable  part  going  down and the
flotsam  of  palm  fronds,  corks, bottles,  and used electric light globes,
seasoned  with an  occasional condom  or a deep  floating  corset, the  torn
leaves of a  student's exercise  book,  a  well-inflated dog, the occasional
rat, the no-longer-distinguished  cat, all this well shepherded by the boats
of  the  garbage  pickers  who  pluck  their  prizes  with  long  poles,  as
interested,  as  intelligent,  and as accurate  as historians, they have the
viewpoint; the stream, with no  visible flow, takes five loads of this a day
when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast  it
is  as clear  and blue  and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled
out the scow; and the palm. fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of
our discoveries and  the empty  condoms of  our great  loves  float  with no
significance against one single, lasting thing -- the stream.
     So, in the  front  seat, thinking of the sea and of  the  country, in a
little while we ran out of Aragon and down to the bank of a sand river, half
a  mile  wide, of  golden-coloured sand, shored by green trees and broken by
islands of timber and in this river the water is underneath the sand and the
game  comes down at night and digs in the sand with sharp-pointed  hoofs and
water flows in and they drink. We cross this river and by now it was getting
to  be afternoon and we passed many people  on the road who were leaving the
country  ahead where there was a famine and there were small trees and close
brush now beside the road, and then it  commenced  to climb and we came into
some  blue  hills,  old, worn, wooded  hills  with trees  like  beeches  and
clusters of huts  with fire smoking and  cattle home driven, flocks of sheep
and goats and patches of corn and I said to P.O.M., 'It's like Galicia'.
     'Exactly,'  she  said.  'We've been  through  three provinces  of Spain
to-day.'
     'Is it really?' Pop asked.
     'There's  no  difference,' I  said.  'Only the buildings.  It  was like
Navarre in Droopy's country  too. The limestone outcropping in the same way,
the way the land lies, the trees along the watercourses and the springs.'
     'It's damned strange how you can love a country' Pop said.
     'You  two are  very profound fellows,' P.O.M.  said.  'But where are we
going to camp?'
     'Here,' said Pop. 'As well as any place. We'll just find some water.'
     We camped under some trees near three big wells where native women came
for water and,  after  drawing  lots  for location, Karl and I hunted in the
dusk around two of the hills across the road above the native village.
     'It's  all  kudu  country,'  Pop  said.  'You're  liable  to  jump  one
anywhere.'
     But we saw nothing but some Masai cattle  in  the timber and came home,
in the dark, glad of  the  walk after a day in the car, to find camp up, Pop
and P.O.M. in pyjamas by the fire, and Karl not yet in.
     He came in, furious  for some reason, no kudu possibly, pale, and gaunt
looking and speaking to nobody.
     Later, at the  fire,  he asked me where we had  gone  and I said we had
hunted  around our hill until  our guide  had heard them; then cut up to the
top of the hill, down, and across country to camp.
     'What do you mean, heard us?'
     'He said he heard you. So did M'Cola.'
     'I thought we drew lots for where we would hunt.'
     'We did,' I said. 'But we didn't know we had gotten around to your side
until we heard you.'
     'Did {you} hear us?'
     'I heard  something,' I said. 'And when I put my hand up  to  my ear to
listen the guide said something to M'Cola and M'Cola said, "B'wana". I said,
"What  B'wana?" and he said, "B'wana Kabor". That's you. So  we figured we'd
come to our limit and went up to the top and came back.'
     He said nothing and looked very angry.
     'Don't get sore about it,' I said.
     'I'm not sore. I'm tired,' he said. I could  believe it  because of all
people  no one  can be gentler, more  understanding,  more self-sacrificing,
than  Karl,  but the  kudu had  become an obsession to him  and he  was  not
himself, nor anything like himself.
     'He better get one pretty quick,' P.O.M. said when he had gone into his
tent to bathe.
     'Did you cut in on his country?' Pop asked me.
     'Hell, no,' I said.
     'He'll  get one where  we're  going,' Pop said. 'He'll  probably get  a
fifty-incher. '
     'All the better,' I said. 'But by God, I want to get one too.'
     'You  will, Old Timer,' Pop  said. 'I  haven't a thought  but what  you
will.'
     'What the hell! We've got ten days.'
     'We'll get sable too, you'll see. Once our luck starts to run.'
     'How long have you ever had them hunt them in a good country?'
     'Three weeks and  leave without seeing one. And I've  had them get them
the first  half  day.  It's still hunting, the  way you hunt a big  buck  at
home.'
     'I love it,' I said. 'But  I don't want  that guy to beat me. Pop, he's
got the best buff, the best rhino, the best water-buck . . .'
     'You beat him on oryx,' Pop said.
     'What's an oryx?'
     'He'll look damned handsome when you get him home.'
     'I'm just kidding.'
     'You beat him  on impalla, on eland. You've got  a first-rate bushbuck.
Your leopard's as good as his. But he'll  beat you on anything where there's
luck. He's got damned wonderful luck and he's  a good lad.  I think he's off
his feed a little.'
     'You  know how fond I am of him. I like him as  well as I like  anyone.
But I want to  see him have a good time.  It's no fun to hunt if we get that
way about it.'
     'You'll see.  He'll get a kudu at this next camp and he'll be on top of
the wave.'
     'I'm just a crabby bastard,' I said.
     'Of course you are,' said Pop. 'But why not have a drink?'
     'Right,' I said.
     Karl came out, quiet, friendly, gentle, and understandingly delicate.
     'It will be fine when we get to that new country,' he said.
     'It will be swell,' I said.
     'Tell me what it's like, Mr. Phillips,' he said to Pop.
     'I  don't  know,' said  Pop. 'But they say it's very  pleasant hunting.
They're  supposed to  feed right out in  the open. That old  Dutchman claims
there are some remarkable heads.'
     'I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,' Karl said to me.
     'You'll get a sixty-incher.'
     'No,' said Karl. 'Don't kid me. I'll be happy with any kudu.'
     'You'll probably get a hell of a one,' Pop said.
     'Don't kid me,'  Karl  said. 'I know  how lucky  I've been.  I would be
happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.'
     He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you
for it, and understand it.
     'Good  old  Karl,'  I  said,  warmed  with  whisky,  understanding, and
sentiment.
     'We're  having  a swell time, aren't we?' Karl said. 'Where's poor  old
Mama?'
     'I'm  here,'  said P.O.M.  from  the  shadow. 'I'm  one  of those quiet
people.'
     'By God if  you're not,'  Pop said. 'But  you can puncture the  old man
quick enough when he gets started.'
     'That's what  makes  a woman a universal favourite,'  P.O.M.  told him.
'Give me another compliment, Mr. J.'
     'By God, you're brave  as  a little terrier.'  Pop and I had both  been
drinking, it seemed.
     'That's lovely.'  P.O.M. sat far back in her  chair, holding  her hands
clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her  quilted blue
robe in the firelight now, and the light on  her black hair. 'I love it when
you all  reach the little  terrier stage. Then I  know the war can't be  far
away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?'
     'Not me,'  said Pop.  'Your husband, one  of the bravest bastards  that
ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.'
     'Now he's drunk, we get the truth,' I said.
     'Let's eat,' said P.O.M. 'I'm really frightfully hungry.'
     We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road  and  beyond the
village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of
a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off,
eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light.  We stopped
the car  at the edge of  the bush and getting out and  sitting down with the
glasses saw there was a  herd of kongoni scattered between  us and the eland
and with the kongoni  a  single bull  oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai
donkey  with  marvellous  long,  black, straight,  back-slanting  horns that
showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.
     'You want to go after him?' I asked Karl.
     'No. You go on.'
     I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot  in front of people and so
I  said,  'All right'.  Also I wanted  to shoot,  selfishly,  and  Karl  was
unselfish. We wanted meat badly.
     I  walked  along the  road, not looking toward the game, trying to look
casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and  down from the left shoulder
away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I
knew that if I moved toward  them  they would  at once move off out of range
so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again,
and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling
and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the
top of his back and squeezed off. You do  not hear the noise  of the shot on
game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and  to
the  right,  the whole plain backgrounding into moving  animals  against the
rise of  the  sun,  the  rocking-horse canter of the  long-legged, grotesque
kongoni, the  heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx
I had not seen before running with the kongoni. This sudden  life  and panic
all  made background  for the one I  wanted, now  trotting, three-quartering
away, his horns held high now and  I stood to shoot running, got on him, the
whole animal miniatured  in the  aperture  and  I held above  his shoulders,
swung  ahead and squeezed and he was down,  kicking, before the crack of the
bullet striking  bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot
that broke a hind leg.
     I ran toward him, then  slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be
blown if he jumped and ran; but he was  down for good. He had gone  down  so
suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid
I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first
shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I  saw it  was cutting the
lee from under him that brought him down. They  all came up and  Charo stuck
him to make him legal meat.
     'Where did you hold on him the second time?' Karl asked.
     'Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.'
     'It was very pretty,' Dan said.
     'By  evening,'  Pop  said, 'he'll tell us that he broke that off leg on
purpose. That's one of his favourite shots, you know. Did  you ever hear him
explain it?'
     While M'Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the
meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood,
on  one leg,  watching  the skinning. He spoke to me  at some  length, and I
called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.
     'He wants to know if  you are going to shoot something else,' Pop said.
'He  would like some hides but he doesn't care about oryx hide. It is almost
worthless,  he says.  He wonders if  you  would like  to shoot  a couple  of
kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.'
     'Tell him on our way back.'
     Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.
     'Tell him he can always find me around Harry's New York Bar,' I said.
     The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.
     'He says why did you shoot him twice?' Pop asked.
     'Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later
in the  day  we  shoot  them  once. In. the evening we are  often  half shot
ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr's.'
     'He says what do you do with the horns?'
     'Tell him in our tribe we give  the  horns  to  our wealthiest friends.
Tell him it is very  exciting  and sometimes members of the tribe are chased
across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.'
     Pop told the Masai something  and we shook  hands  again, parting on  a
most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see
some other  Masai  coming along  the  road,  earth-brown skins, and  kneeing
forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.
     Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap  sack, the meat tied
inside  the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road  of
red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to  the edge of the road,
we  came up into  some hills  and through the little village of Kibaya where
there was a white rest  house and a general store and much farming land.  It
was  here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting  for a kudu to feed out
into  the edge  of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he
sat and nearly  gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the
village of Kibaya and as it was  still cool and the  sun  had not yet burned
off  the  dew  from the  grass  I  suggested  we  drink  a  bottle  of  that
silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman
in  armour on  it in  order that we might remember the place better and even
appreciate it more.  This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we
learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries  to follow on
to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.
     For  a long time, while the sun rose  and the day  became hot we  drove
through what Pop  had described, when I asked him what the country was  like
to the  south, as a million miles of  bloody Africa, bush close to  the road
that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.
     'There are very big elephant in there,' Pop said. 'But  it's impossible
to hunt them. That's why they're very big. Simple, isn't it?'
     After a long stretch of the  million-mile country, the country began to
open out into dry, sandy, bush-bordered  prairies that dried  into a typical
desert  country with occasional patches  of bush where there was water, that
Pop said was like the northern  frontier  province of Kenya. We  watched for
gerenuk,  that long-necked antelope that  resembles a praying  mantis in its
way  of carrying itself, and for the lesser kudu that we  knew lived in this
desert bush, but the sun was high now and we saw  nothing. Finally the  road
began to  lift gradually into the hills  again, low, blue, wooded hills now,
with miles of sparse bush, a  little thicker than orchard bush, between, and
ahead  a pair of high,  heavy,  timbered hills that  were  big enough  to be
mountains. These were on each side of the road and as  we climbed in the car
where the red  road narrowed there was  a herd of  hundreds of  cattle ahead
being driven down to the coast by  Somali cattle buyers; the principal buyer
walked  ahead,  tall,  good-looking  in  white turban  and  coast  clothing,
carrying an umbrella as a symbol of authority. We worked the car through the
herd, finally,  and coming out  wound our way through pleasant looking bush,
up and out into the open between the two mountains and on, half a mile, to a
mud and thatched village in the open clearing on a little low plateau beyond
the  two  mountains. Looking back, the  mountains looked very fine and  with
timber  up their  slopes,  outcroppings of  limestone and  open  glades  and
meadows above the timber.
     'Is this the place?'
     'Yes,' said Dan. 'We will find where the camping place is.'
     A very old, worn, and faded black man, with a stubble of white beard, a
farmer, dressed in a dirty once-white cloth gathered  at the shoulder in the
manner of a Roman toga, came out from behind one of the mud and wattle huts,
and guided us back down the road and  off it to the left to a very good camp
site. He was a very  discouraged-looking old  man and after Pop  and Dan had
talked with him he went off, seeming more discouraged  than before, to bring
some  guides  whose  names Dan  had written  on a piece  of paper  as  being
recommended by a Dutch hunter who had been here a year ago and who was Dan's
great friend.
     We took the seats out  of the car to use  as a table  and  benches, and
spreading our coats to sit  on had  a lunch in the deep shade of a big tree,
drank some beer,  and slept or read while we waited for the  lorries to come
up.  Before the lorries arrived the  old man  came  back with the skinniest,
hungriest,  most unsuccessful looking  of Wanderobos  who stood  on one leg,
scratched the back of his neck and carried a  bow and quiver of arrows and a
spear. Queried as to whether this was the  guide whose name  we had, the old
man admitted he was not and went off more discouraged than ever, to  get the
official guides.
     When we woke next the old man was  standing with the  two  official and
highly-clothed-in-khaki  guides  and  two  others,  quite  naked,  from  the
village. There was a long palaver and the head one  of  the two khaki-panted
guides showed his credentials,  a To Whom It May Concern, stating the bearer
knew the country well and  was a reliable  boy and capable tracker. This was
signed by so  and so, professional  hunter. The khaki-clothed guide referred
to this professional hunter as B'wana Simba and the name infuriated us all.
     'Some bloke that killed a lion once,' Pop said.
     'Tell him I am B'wana Fisi, the hyena slaughterer,' I told Dan. 'B'wana
Fisi chokes them with his naked hands.'
     Dan was telling them something else.
     'Ask them  if they would like to meet B'wana Hop-Toad, the  inventor of
the hoptoads and Mama Tziggi, who owns all these locusts.'
     Dan  ignored  this.   It  seemed  they  were  discussing  money.  After
ascertaining their  customary  daily wage,  Pop told  them  if either  of