Mnogi ribari su se skupili oko čamca i gledali u ono što je bilo vezano uz njega i jedan je stojao u vodi, zavrnutih pantalona mereći kostur nekim kanapom.

Dečko ne siđe dole. Bio je tu ranije, a jedan od ribara vodio je, umesto njega, brigu o čamcu.

"Kako mu je", doviknu neki ribar.

"Spava", odgovori dečko. Nije mario što će ga videti uplakanog. "Neka ga niko ne uznemirava!"

"Ima osamnaest stopa od njuške do repa", uzviknu ribar koji je merio.

"Verujem", reče dečko.

On ode do Terase i zaiska kafu.

"Toplu i s puno mleka i šećera."

"Još nešto?"

"Ne treba. Kasnije ću videti šta ćemo jesti."

"Kakva je to riba", upita vlasnik. "Takva se riba još nikada nije videla. Obe one ribe, koje si juče upecao, bile su takođe lepe."

"Do vraga sa mojim ribama", reče dečak. I on poče ponovo da plače.

"Hoćeš li nešto da popiješ", upita vlasnik.

"Ne", reče dečak. "Reci da ne uznemiravaju starca. Vratiću se opet."

"Reci mu da mi je vrlo žao."

"Hvala", reče dečak.

Dečak ponese šolju tople kafe do starčeve kolibe i sedeo je pored njega sve dok se nije probudio. Jednom mu se učinilo da se budi, ali starac ponovo pade u težak san i dečak ode preko druma da pozajmi malo drva kako bi zagrejao starčevu sobicu.

Najzad se starac probudio.

"Ne diži se", reče dečak. "Popij ovo." On usu malo kafe u čašu.

Starac je uze i popi.

"Potukle su me, Manoline", reče on. "Istinski su me potukle."

"Riba te nije pobedila."

"Nije, zaista. To je bilo tek kasnije."

"Pedriko se stara o čamcu i alatu. Šta ćeš uraditi sa glavom?"

"Neka je Pedriko odseče i upotrebi za vrške."

"A kljun?"

"Uzmi ga ako želiš."

"Uzeću ga rado", reče dečak. "A sada moramo razmišljati o ostalom."

"Da li su me tražili?"

"Naravno. Obalske patrole i avioni."

"Okean je veliki a čamac mali i teško ga je videti", reče starac. Opazi kako je prijatno kad se može govoriti s nekim umesto sa samim sobom. "Nedostajao si mi", reče on. "Šta si ulovio?"

"Jednu prvog dana, jednu drugog dana i dve trećeg."

"Vrlo dobro."

"Sada ćemo opet ribariti zajedno."

"Ne. Nisam srećne ruke. Više nemam sreće."

"Do đavola sa srećom", reče dečak. "Poneću sobom sreću."

"Šta će reći tvoja porodica?"

"Ne tiče me se. Dve sam uhvatio juče. Odsada ćemo ribariti zajedno, jer imam još mnogo da naučim."

"Moramo nabaviti jedno dobro ubojito koplje i uvek ga nositi sobom. Sečivo možeš napraviti od blat-federa nekog starog forda. Naoštriću ga u Guanabakoji. Treba da bude oštro i nežareno jer će se inače prelomiti. Moj nož se slomio."

"Nabaviću drugi nož i izbrusiti ga. Koliko dana će duvati ovaj teški brisa?"

"Možda tri, možda više."

"Za to vreme ću sve dovesti u red", reče dečak. "Gledaj da ti ruke budu opet u redu, stari."

"Znam kako ću ih izlečiti. Noćas sam ispljuvao nešto neobično i osetio sam da se nešto prekinulo u mojim grudima."

"Gledaj da i njih dovedeš u red", reče dečak. "Lezi, stari, a ja ću ti doneti čistu košulju. I nešto za jelo."

"Donesi sve novine koje su izašle dok sam se nalazio na moru", reče starac.

"Moraš se brzo oporaviti jer ima puno stvari koje treba da naučim, a ti me možeš poučiti u svemu. Kako si se napatio!"

"Mnogo", reče starac.

"Doneću hranu i novine", reče dečko. "Odmaraj se, stari. Kupicu mast za tvoje ruke."

"Ne zaboravi da kažeš Pedriku da mu glava pripada."

"Ne. Neću zaboraviti."

Kada je dečak izašao i uputio se izgaženom stazom preko koralnih stena, ponovo zaplaka.

Toga popodneva, na Terasi se nalazilo neko društvo turista, pa posmatrajući more preko praznih kantica za pivo i mršavih barracudas, neka žena vide krupnu, dugu belu kičmu sa ogromnim repom, koji se ljuljao tamo-amo na talasima, dok je istočni vetar neprekidno dizao velike talase, pred ulazom u luku.

"Šta je ono?" upita kelnera i pokaza na dugu kičmu velike ribe koja je sada bila samo olupina što je čekala samo na to da nestane zajedno sa osekom.

"Tiburon", reče kelner "jedna ajkula." Mislio je da će time objasniti sve što se dogodilo.

"Nisam znala da ajkule imaju tako lepe i fino izrezane repove."

"Ni ja nisam znao", reče njen saputnik.

Gore u kolibi na starčeve oči ponovo se navukao san. Spavao je još uvek s licem zagnjurenim u postelju, a dečak je sedeo kraj njega, posmatrajući ga. Starac je sanjao o lavovima.

Contents

    Part I Pursuit and Conversation
    Part II Pursuit Remembered
    Part III Pursuit and Failure
    Part IV Pursuit as Happiness


     Dear Mr. J. P.
     Just tell them you are a fictional character and it is your bad luck to
have a writer put such  language in  your speeches. We all know how prettily
the best brought up people speak but there are always those not quite out of
the top drawer who have an 'orrid fear of vulgarity. You will know, too, how
to  deal with anyone who calls you Pop. Remember  you  weren't written of as
Pop. It was  all this fictional character. Anyway the book is for you and we
miss you very much.
                 E. H.


Part I
Pursuit and Conversation

I

     We were sitting in  the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs
and branches  at the edge of  the salt-lick  when we heard  the  motor-lorry
coming. At first it was far  away and no one  could tell what the noise was.
Then it  was  stopped  and we hoped it had  been nothing or perhaps only the
wind. Then  it  moved slowly  nearer,  unmistakable  now,  louder and louder
until, agonizing  in  a clank of loud irregular explosions, it passed  close
behind us to go on up the road. The theatrical one of the two trackers stood
up.
     'It is finished,' he said.
     I put my hand to my mouth and motioned him down.
     'It is finished,' he said again  and spread his arms wide.  I had never
liked him and I liked him. less now.
     'After,' I whispered. M'Cola shook his head. I looked at his bald black
skull and he  turned his face a little so that I saw the thin Chinese  hairs
at the corners of his mouth.
     'No good,' he said. {'Hapana m'uzuri.'}
     'Wait  a  little,' I  told him. He bent  his head down again so that it
would not show above the dead branches and we  sat there  in the dust of the
hole until it was too  dark to see the front sight on my rifle;  but nothing
more came. The theatrical tracker was impatient and restless.
     A little before the last of the  light was gone he  whispered to M'Cola
that it was now too dark to shoot.
     'Shut up, you,' M'Cola told him. 'The  Bwana can shoot after you cannot
see.'
     The other tracker, the educated one, gave another demonstration of  his
education  by scratching his  name, Abdullah, on the black skin  of his  leg
with  a  sharp twig. I watched without admiration  and M'Cola  looked at the
word without a shadow  of  expression on his face. After a while the tracker
scratched it out.
     Finally  I made a last sight against what was left of the light and saw
it was no use, even with the large aperture.
     M'Cola was watching.
     'No good,' I said.
     'Yes,' he agreed, in Swahili. 'Go to camp?'
     'Yes.'
     We stood up  and  made  our  way out of the blind  and  out through the
trees, walking on the sandy loam, feeling our  way between  trees  and under
branches, back  to the road. A mile along the  road was the car.  As we came
alongside, Kamau, the driver, put the lights on.
     The  lorry had spoiled it. That afternoon we had left  the  car up  the
road and approached  the salt-lick very carefully.  There  had been a little
rain, the day before, though  not enough to flood the lick, which was simply
an opening in  the trees  with a patch of earth  worn into deep  circles and
grooved  at the edges with hollows where the animals had licked the dirt for
salt, and  we had seen long, heart-shaped, fresh tracks of four greater kudu
bulls that had  been on  the salt  the night before, as well as  many  newly
pressed tracks of lesser kudu.  There was also a rhino who, from the  tracks
and the kicked-up mound of strawy dung, came there each night. The blind had
been built at close arrow-shot of the lick, and sitting, leaning back, knees
high, heads  low,  in a hollow half full of ashes and dust, watching through
the dried leaves and thin branches I had seen a lesser kudu bull come out of
the brush to  the edge of  the  opening where the salt was and stand  there,
heavy-necked, grey, and handsome, the horns spiralled  against the sun while
I sighted on his  chest  and  then refused the shot, wanting not to frighten
the greater kudu that should  surely come at dusk. But before  we ever heard
the lorry the bull had heard  it and  run off into the trees, and everything
else that had been moving, in the bush on the flats, or coming down from the
small hills through the  trees, coming toward  the salt, had  halted at that
exploding, clanking sound. They would come,  later, in the dark, but then it
would be too late.
     So now, going along the sandy track of the road in the car, the  lights
picking out the eyes of night birds that squatted  close on the  sand  until
the bulk of  the car was  on them  and they rose in  soft panic; passing the
fires  of  the travellers that all moved  to the westward by day along  this
road,  abandoning the  famine country that was  ahead of us, me sitting, the
butt of my rifle on my foot, the barrel in the crook of my left arm, a flask
of whisky between my knees, pouring the whisky into a tin cup and passing it
over my  shoulder  in  the  dark for M'Cola to pour  water into it from  the
canteen, drinking this, the first one of the day, the  finest  one there is,
and looting at the thick  bush we  passed in the dark, feeling the cool wind
of the night and smelling the good smell of Africa, I was altogether happy.
     Then ahead we saw a big fire and as we came up and passed, I made out a
lorry  beside  the road. I told Kamau to  stop and go back and as  we backed
into the firelight there was a short, bandy-legged man with a Tyrolese  hat,
leather shorts, and an open  shirt standing before an  unhooded  engine in a
crowd of natives.
     'Can we help?' I asked him.
     Wo,' he said. 'Unless you are a mechanic. It has taken a dislike to me.
All engines dislike me.'
     'Do you think it could be the timer? It sounded as though it might be a
timing knock when you went past us.'
     'I  think it is much worse than  that. It sounds to  be  something very
bad.'
     'If you can get to our camp we have a mechanic.'
     'How far is it?'
     'About twenty miles.'
     'In the morning I  will try it. Now  I  am afraid to make it go farther
with that noise of death inside. It is trying to die because it dislikes me.
Well, I dislike it too. But if I die it would not annoy it.'
     'Will you have a drink?' I held out the flask. 'Hemingway is my name.'
     'Kandisky,'  he  said and  bowed.  'Hemingway is  a name I have  heard.
Where? Where have I heard it? Oh, yes. The {dichter}. You know Hemingway the
poet?'
     'Where did you read him?'
     'In the {Querschnitt.'}
     'That is  me,'  I said, very  pleased. The {Querschnitt} was  a  German
magazine I had  written some rather obscene poems for, and  published a long
story in, years before I could sell anything in America.
     'This is very  strange,'  the  man in the Tyrolese hat  said. 'Tell me,
what do you think of Ringelnatz?'
     'He is splendid.'
     'So. You like Ringelnatz. Good. What do you think of Heinrich Mann?'
     'He is no good.'
     'You believe it?'
     'All I know is that I cannot read him.'
     'He is no good at  all. I see  we have  things  in common. What are you
doing here?'
     'Shooting.'
     {'Not} ivory, I hope.'
     'No. For kudu.'
     'Why should any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent  man, a poet,  to
shoot kudu.'
     'I haven't shot any yet,' I said. 'But we've been hunting them hard now
for  ten days.  We  would have got  one to-night  if it hadn't been for your
lorry.'
     'That poor lorry. But you should hunt  for a  year. At the end of  that
time you have shot  everything and you are  sorry for  it.  To hunt for  one
special animal is nonsense. Why do you do it?'
     'I like to do it.'
     'Of course, if you  {like}  to do it. Tell me, what do you really think
of Rilke?'
     'I have read only the one thing.'
     'Which?'
     'The Cornet.'
     'You liked it?'
     'Yes.'
     'I  have  no patience with it. It  is snobbery. Valery,  yes. I see the
point of Valery,  although there is much snobbery too. Well at  least you do
not kill elephants.'
     'I'd kill a big enough one.'
     'How big?'
     'A seventy-pounder. Maybe smaller.'
     'I see there  are things we do  not  agree on. But it is a pleasure  to
meet one of the great old {Querschnitt} group. Tell me what is Joyce like? I
have not  the money to  buy it. Sinclair Lewis  is nothing. I bought it. No.
No. Tell  me to-morrow.  You  do not mind if I am camped near? You  are with
friends? You have a white hunter?'
     'With my wife. We would be delighted. Yes, a white hunter.'
     'Why is he not out with you?'
     'He believes you should hunt kudu alone.'
     'It is better not to hunt them at all. What is he? English?'
     'Yes.'
     'Bloody English?'
     'No. Very nice. You will like him.'
     'You must go. I must not keep you. Perhaps I will see you to-morrow. It
was very strange that we should meet.'
     'Yes,' I said. 'Have them look at the  lorry to-morrow. Anything we can
do?'
     'Good night,' he said. 'Good trip.'
     'Good night,' I said. We started  off and I saw him walking  toward the
fire  waving an  arm at the  natives. I had not asked him why he had  twenty
up-country  natives with him, nor where he  was  going. Looking back, I  had
asked him nothing. I do not like  to ask questions, and where I was  brought
up it  was  not polite. But here we had  not seen a white man for two weeks,
not since we had  left  Babati to go south, and then to run into one on this
road where you met only an occasional Indian trader and the steady migration
of the natives out of the famine country, to have him look like a caricature
of Benchley in Tyrolean costume, to have him know your name, to call  you  a
poet, to have read the {Querschnitt}, to be an admirer of Joachim Ringelnatz
and to  want to talk about Rilke, was too fantastic to deal  with.  So, just
then, to crown  this  fantasy,  the lights  of  the  car showed three  tall,
conical, mounds of something smoking in the road ahead. I motioned  to Kamau
to stop, and putting on the brakes we skidded just short of them.  They were
from two to three feet high and when I touched one it was quite warm.
     {'Tembo,'} M'Cola said.
     It was dung from elephants that had just crossed the  road, and  in the
cold of the evening you could see it steaming. In a  little while we were in
camp.
     Next morning I was  up and away  to another salt-lick before  daylight.
There was a kudu bull on the lick when  we approached through the trees  and
he gave a loud  "bark, like a dog's but higher in pitch and sharply throaty,
and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in  the brush  when he
was well  away; and we never  saw him. This lick had an impossible approach.
Trees grew  around its open  area so that it was as though the game  were in
the blind and you had  to come to them across the open. The only way to make
it would have been for one  man to go  alone and crawl and then it would  be
impossible to get any  sort of a close  shot  through the  interlacing trees
until you were  within twenty  yards.  Of course once you  were  inside  the
protecting  trees,  and  in  the  blind,  you  were wonderfully  placed, for
anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards
from any cover. But  though we stayed until eleven o'clock nothing came.  We
smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks
would  show when  we came  back again and walked the two  miles to the road.
Being  hunted,  the game had learned to  come only at night and leave before
daylight. One bull had stayed and our  spooking him  that morning would make
it even more difficult now.
     This was the tenth day we  had been hunting greater kudu and  I had not
seen a  mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains  were
moving north  each  day  from Rhodesia and unless we  were  prepared to stay
where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they
came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning
now  it took the  heavy,  woolly sky  an hour or so longer to  clear and you
could  feel the rains coming,  as they  moved steadily  north,  as surely as
though you watched them on a chart.
     Now it is pleasant to hunt something  that you  want very  much  over a
long period of time, being outwitted, outmanoeuvred, and failing  at the end
of  each day, but having the hunt and  knowing every time you  are out that,
sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that
you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to  have a time limit  by which  you
must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see  one. It is not the
way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to
Paris  with two  years in  which to make good as writers or  painters, after
which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers'
businesses. The way to hunt is for  as long as you live against as  long  as
there is such and such an animal; just as the  way to paint is  as  long  as
there is  you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as  you  can live
and there  is  pencil and paper  or ink  or any  machine  to do it  with, or
anything  you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and  you are a fool,
to do  it  any other  way.  But here we  were, now, caught by  time, by  the
season,  and by the running out of our money, so that  what should have been
as much fun to do each day  whether you killed or not was being  forced into
that  most  exciting  perversion of  life;  the necessity  of  accomplishing
something  in less  time  than should truly be allowed  for  its  doing. So,
coming in at noon, up  since two hours before daylight, with only three days
left, I  was starting to be nervous about  it, and there, at the table under
the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had
forgotten all about him.
     'Hello.  Hello,' he said.  'No  success?  Nothing  doing?  Where is the
kudu?'
     'He coughed once and went away,' I said. 'Hello, girl.'
     She smiled. She was  worried too. The two of  them  had  been listening
since  daylight for a shot. Listening all the time, even  when our guest had
arrived; listening while writing letters, listening while reading, listening
when Kandisky came back and talked.
     'You did not shoot him?'
     'No. Nor  see him.'  I saw  that  Pop  was worried  too,  and a  little
nervous. There had evidently been considerable talking going on.
     'Have a beer, Colonel,' he said to me.
     'We spooked  one,' I reported. 'No  chance of a shot. There were plenty
of tracks. Nothing  more came. The wind was blowing  around.  Ask  the  boys
about it.'
     'As  I  was telling Colonel  Phillips,'  Kandisky began,  shifting  his
leather-breeched behind and crossing one heavy-calved, well-haired, bare leg
over the other, 'you must not stay here too long. You must realize the rains
are  coming. There is one  stretch of twelve miles beyond here you can never
get through if it rains. It is impossible.'
     'So he's been telling me,' Pop  said. 'I'm a Mister, by the way. We use
these  military  titles  as  nicknames.  No  offence  if  you're  a  colonel
yourself.' Then  to me, 'Damn these salt-licks. If you'd  leave them.  alone
you'd get one.'
     'They ball it all  up,' I agreed. 'You're so sure  of  a shot sooner or
later on the lick.'
     'Hunt the hills too.'
     Til hunt them, Pop.'
     'What  is killing a kudu, anyway?' Kandisky asked. 'You should not take
it so seriously. It is nothing. In a year you kill twenty.'
     'Best not say anything about that  to the game department, though,' Pop
said.
     'You misunderstand,'  Kandisky said. 'I  mean in a year a man could. Of
course no man would wish to.'
     'Absolutely,' Pop said. 'If he lived in kudu country, he could. They're
the commonest big antelope  in this  bush  country. It's just that when  you
want to see them you don't.'
     'I kill  nothing, you understand,' Kandisky  told  us. 'Why are you not
more interested in the natives?'
     'We are,' my wife assured him.
     'They are really interesting. Listen...' Kandisky said, and he spoke on
to her.
     'The hell of it is,' I said to Pop, 'when I'm in the hills I'm sure the
bastards  are down there on the salt. The cows are in  the hills but I don't
believe the bulls are  with them now. Then you get there  in the evening and
there are the tracks.  They {have} been on the lousy salt. I think they come
any time.'
     'Probably they do.'
     'I'm sure  we get different bulls there. They probably only come to the
salt every couple of days. Some are certainly spooked because Karl shot that
one. If he'd only killed it clean instead of  following it through the whole
damn countryside. Christ, if he'd only  kill any damn thing clean. Other new
ones will come  in. All we have to do is to wait them out, though. Of course
they can't all know about it. But he's spooked this country to hell.'
     'He gets so  very excited,'  Pop said. 'But he's a good lad. He  made a
beautiful shot on that leopard,  you know.  You don't  want  them killed any
cleaner than that. Let it quiet down again.'
     'Sure. I don't mean anything when I curse him.'
     'What about staying in the blind all day?'
     'The  damned  wind started to go round in  a circle.  It blew our scent
every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would
hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.'
     'I saw him starting off with it.'
     'There wasn't a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just
light to shoot.  He tried  the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone
with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these
crepe-soled  boots and  it's soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked  at fifty
yards.
     'Did you ever see their ears?'
     'Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work
on him.'
     'They're bastards,' Pop said. 'I hate this salt-lick  business. They're
not  as smart as we think. The trouble is you're working on  them where they
are smart. They've been shot at there ever since there's been salt.'
     'That's what makes it fun,' I said. 'I'd be  glad to do it for a month.
I like to hunt sitting on my tail. No sweat. No nothing. Sit there and catch
flies and feed them  to the ant lions in the dust. I like it. But what about
the time?'
     'That's it. The time.'
     'So,' Kandisky was saying to my wife. 'That is what you should see. The
big {ngomas}. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.'
     'Listen,' I said to Pop. 'The other lick, the one I was at  last night,
is fool-proof except for being near that {bloody} road.'
     'The trackers say it is really  the property of the lesser kudu. It's a
long way too. It's eighty miles there and back.'
     'I know.  But there were four {big}  bull tracks. It's  certain. If  it
wasn't  for that lorry  last night. What about  staying there to-night! Then
I'd get the night and the early morning and give this lick a rest. There's a
big rhino there too. Big track, anyway.'
     'Good,'  Pop  said. 'Shoot the  rhino too.'  He hated to  have anything
killed except  what we were  after, no  killing on  the side, no  ornamental
killing, no killing to kill,  only when you wanted it more than  you  wanted
not to kill it, only when getting it was necessary to his being first in his
trade, and I saw he was offering up the rhino to please me.
     'I won't kill him unless he's good,' I promised.
     'Shoot the bastard,' Pop said, making a gift of him.
     'Ah, Pop,' I said.
     'Shoot him,'  said  Pop. 'You'll  enjoy it, being by  yourself. You can
sell the horn if you don't want it. You've still one on your licence. '
     'So,'  said Kandisky. 'You  have arranged a plan of campaign? You  have
decided on how to outwit the poor animals?'
     'Yes,' I said. 'How is the lorry?'
     'That  lorry  is finished,' the Austrian said. 'In a way I am glad.  It
was  too much of a symbol. It was  all that  remained  of  my {shamba}.  Now
everything is gone and it is much simpler.'
     'What is  a  shamba?' asked P.O.M., my  wife. 'I've  been hearing about
them for months. I'm afraid to ask about those words every one uses.'
     'A plantation,' he  said.  'It  is all gone except that lorry. With the
lorry I carry labourers to the shamba of an Indian. It is a very rich Indian
who  raises  sisal. I  am a manager  for this Indian.  An Indian  can make a
profit from a sisal shamba.'
     'From anything,' Pop said.
     'Yes. Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian
is  very  intelligent,   however.   He  values  me.   I  represent  European
organization. I  come now  from organizing recruitment of the  natives. This
takes  time.  It is impressive. I have been  away from  my family  for three
months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it
is not so impressive.'
     'And your wife?' asked mine.
     'She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.'
     'Does she love you very much?' my wife asked.
     'She must, or she would be gone long ago.'
     'How old is the daughter?'
     'She is thirteen now.'
     'It must be very nice to have a daughter.'
     'You cannot  know how nice it is.  It  is like a  second wife. My  wife
knows  now  all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I  can do, all that I
cannot  do and cannot be. I know also about my  wife --  completely. But now
there is  always someone you do  not  know, who does not know you, who loves
you in ignorance  and is strange to  you both. Some one very attractive that
is  yours and not yours and that makes  the conversation more -- how shall I
say? Yes, it is like -- what do you call -- having here with you -- with the
two of  you -- yes there  -- it  is  the  Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the  daily
food.'
     'That's very good,' I said.
     'We have books,' he said. 'I cannot buy new books now but we can always
talk. Ideas and  conversation  are very interesting. We discuss  all things.
Everything. We  have  a very interesting  mental  life. Formerly,  with  the
shamba, we had the {Querschnitt}. That  gave you a feeling  of belonging, of
being made a part of, to a  very  brilliant group  of people. The people one
would see if one  saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those  people?
You must know them.'
     'Some of them.' I said. 'Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.'
     I  did not wish to destroy anything this  man had, and so I  did not go
into those brilliant people in detail.
     'They're marvellous,' I said, lying.
     'I  envy you to know them,' he said. 'And tell me, who is the  greatest
writer in America?'
     'My husband,' said my wife.
     'No.  I  do not  mean for you to speak from  family  pride. I mean  who
really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not  Sinclair  Lewis. Who is
your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valery?'
     'We do  not have great writers,' I said. 'Something happens to our good
writers at  a certain age. I can explain but it  is  quite long and may bore
you.'
     'Please explain,' he said. 'This is what I enjoy. This is the best part
of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.'
     'You haven't heard it yet,' I said.
     'Ah, but I  can see it coming. You must take  more beer to  loosen your
tongue.'
     'It's loose,' I told him. 'It's always too loose. But {you} don't drink
anything.'
     'No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But
tell me. Please tell me.'
     'Well,'  I said, 'we have  had, in America,  skilful  writers. Poe is a
skilful  writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We
have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a
chronicle  of another man and from  voyaging, of how things, actual  things,
can be, whales for instance, and this  knowledge is wrapped  in the rhetoric
like plums in  a  pudding.  Occasionally  it  is there, alone,  unwrapped in
pudding, and it is  good. This is Melville.  But the people who  praise  it,
praise it  for  the rhetoric which is not important. They  put  a mystery in
which is not there.'
     'Yes,' he said.  'I see. But  it  is  the mind working,  its ability to
work,  which  makes the  rhetoric.  Rhetoric is  the  blue  sparks from  the
dynamo.'
     'Sometimes.  And  sometimes  it is only  blue  sparks,  and what is the
dynamo driving?'
     'So. Go on.'
     'I've forgotten.'
     'No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.'
     'Did you ever get up before daylight...'
     'Every morning,' he said. 'Go on.'
     'All right. There were others who  wrote like exiled  English colonials
from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they
were  making.  Very good men with the small, dried,  and excellent wisdom of
Unitarians; men of letters, Quakers with a sense of humour.'
     'Who were these?'
     'Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All  our early classics who
did not  know  that a new  classic  does  not  bear  any  resemblance to the
classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better
than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are
only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive
from or resemble a previous classic.  Also  all these men were gentlemen, or
wished  to be.  They were all very respectable. They did  not  use the words
that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.
     Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They  had minds, yes.  Nice,
dry, clean  minds. This is all  very dull, I would not  state it except that
you ask for it.'
     'Go on.'
     'There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau.
I cannot tell you about it because I have not  yet been able to read it. But
that  means nothing because I cannot read other  naturalists unless they are
being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone
and  some  one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should
work alone. They should see each other  only after their work  is  done, and
not too often then.  Otherwise  they  become like writers in  New  York. All
angleworms in  a bottle,  trying to  derive knowledge and  nourishment  from
their  own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle  is shaped art,
sometimes  economics, sometimes  economic-religion. But once they are in the
bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not
want to be lonesome. They  are afraid to be  alone  in  their beliefs and no
woman  would  love  any  of  them  enough so  that  they  could  kill  their
lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her
that makes the rest unimportant.'
     'But what about Thoreau?'
     'You'll have to read him.  Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly
everything later.'
     'Better have some more beer, Papa.'
     'All right.'
     'What about the good writers?'
     'The good  writers are  Henry James,  Stephen  Crane, and  Mark  Twain.
That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.'
     'Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.'
     'All  modern  American literature comes  from  one book  by  Mark Twain
called {Huckleberry Finn}. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim
is  stolen from the boys. That  is the real end. The rest is  just cheating.
But it's the best book  we've had. All  American  writing comes  from  that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.'
     'What about the others?'
     'Crane wrote two  fine stories. {The Open Boat} and {The --Blue Hotel}.
The last one is the better.'
     'And what happened to him?'
     'He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.'
     'But the other two?'
     'They both lived  to be old  men but they did not get any wiser as they
got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers
into something very strange.'
     'I do not understand.'
     'We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It
is only by hazard that a writer makes money  although good books always make
money eventually. Then our writers when  they have made some money  increase
their standard  of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up
their  establishments, their wives, and so on, and they  write  slop. It  is
slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there
is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,
once they have betrayed  themselves, they justify it  and you get more slop.
Or else they  read  the critics. If they  believe the critics when they  say
they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and
they lose  confidence. At present  we have two good writers who cannot write
because they have lost confidence  through reading  critics. If  they wrote,
sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and  sometimes it would
be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and
they must write  masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote.
They  weren't masterpieces, of  course. They were just quite good books.  So
now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.'
     'Who are these writers?'
     'Their names  would mean  nothing  to you  and  by  now  they  may have
written, become frightened, and be impotent again.'
     'But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.'
     'I was not here in the old  days so  I cannot tell you about  them, but
now there are various  things. At a certain  age the men writers change into
Old  Mother Hubbard.  The  women writers  become  Joan  of  Arc  without the
fighting.  They become leaders. It doesn't matter who they lead.  If they do
not  have followers they  invent them. It is useless for  those selected  as
followers to protest.  They  are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There  are
too many things happen to them. That is one thing.  The  others try to  save
their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined
by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first  time they
find they  cannot write,  or the first time they cannot do anything else, or
else they get  frightened and join organizations that do  their thinking for
them. Or they do  not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money.
He never did, of course.'
     'And you?'
     'I am interested in other things. I  have a good life but I must  write
because  if I do not write a certain  amount I do  not enjoy the rest of  my
life.'
     'And what do you want?'
     'To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At  the same time I
have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.'
     'Hunting kudu?'
     'Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.'
     'What other things?'
     'Plenty of other things.'
     'And you know what you want?'
     'Yes.'
     'You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?'
     'Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.'
     'One is not better than the other?'
     'One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.'
     'Naturally.  There must be. But this sort of  thing  means something to
you, really?'
     'Truly.'
     'And you know what you want?'
     'Absolutely, and I get it all the time.'
     'But it takes money.'
     'I could always make money, and besides I have been very lucky.'
     'Then you are happy?'
     'Except when I think of other people.'
     'Then you think of other people?'
     'Oh, yes.'
     'But you do nothing for them?'
     'No.'
     'Nothing?'
     'Maybe a little.'
     'Do you think your writing is worth doing -- as an end in itself?'
     'Oh, yes.'
     'You are sure?'
     'Very sure.'
     'That must be very pleasant.'
     'It is,' I said. 'It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it.'
     'This is getting awfully serious,' my wife said.
     'It's a damned serious subject.'
     'You see, he is really serious about something,'
     Kandisky said. 'I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu.'
     'The  reason  everyone  now  tries  to avoid  it, to  deny  that  it is
important,  to  make  it  seem. vain to try to do it,  is  because  it is so
difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.'
     'What is this now?'
     'The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried  if
anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension
that can be gotten.'
     'You believe it?'
     'I know it.'
     'And if a writer can get this?'
     'Then nothing else matters. It is more  important than anything he  can
do. The chances  are,  of course, that he  will  fail. But there is a chance
that he succeeds.'
     'But that is poetry you are talking about.'
     'No.  It  is much more difficult than poetry.  It  is a  prose that has
never  been written.  But  it can  be  written,  without tricks and  without
cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.'
     'And why has it not been written?'
     'Because there are too many factors. First, there must be  talent, much
talent. Talent  such  as Kipling had.  Then there  must  be  discipline. The
discipline of Flaubert. Then there must  be the conception of what it can be
and an absolute conscience as unchanging  as the standard meter in Paris, to
prevent  faking. Then the writer must  be intelligent and  disinterested and
above  all he must survive. Try  to get all these in one person and have him
come through all the influences that press on  a writer.  The hardest thing,
because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I
would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do
you say? Should we talk about something else?'
     'It  is  interesting  what  you  say.  Naturally I  do  not agree  with
everything.'
     'Naturally.'
     'What about  a gimlet?'  Pop  asked.  'Don't  you  think a gimlet might
help?'
     'Tell  me  first what are the  things, the actual, concrete things that
harm a writer?'
     I  was tired of  the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I
would make it an interview and finish it.  The  necessity to put a  thousand
intangibles into a sentence, now, before lunch, was too bloody.
     'Politics, women,  drink, money,  ambition. And the  lack of  politics,
women, drink, money and ambition,' I said profoundly.
     'He's getting much too easy now,' Pop said.
     'But drink.  I do  not  understand  about that. That has  always seemed
silly to me. I understand it as a weakness.'
     'It  is  a way  of ending a day. It has great benefits. Don't  you ever
want to change your ideas?'
     'Let's have one,' Pop said. 'M'Wendi!'
     Pop  never  drank before lunch except as  a mistake  and  I knew he was
trying to help me out.
     'Let's all have a gimlet,' I said.
     'I never drink,' Kandisky said. 'I will go to the lorry  and fetch some
fresh butter  for  lunch.  It is  fresh  from Kandoa,  unsalted. Very  good.
To-night we  will  have a  special  dish  of Viennese  dessert.  My cook has
learned to make it very well.'
     He went off  and my wife said: 'You were getting awfully profound. What
was that about all these women?'
     'What women?'
     'When you were talking about women.'
     'The hell with them,' I said. 'Those are the ones you get involved with
when you're drunk.'
     'So that's what you do.'
     'No.'
     'I don't get involved with people when I'm drunk.'
     'Come, come,' said Pop. 'We're  none of us ever drunk. My God, that man
can talk.'
     'He didn't have a chance to talk after B'wana M'Kumba started.'
     'I did have verbal dysentery,' I said.
     'What about his lorry? Can we tow it in without ruining ours?'
     'I think so,' Pop said. 'When ours comes back from Handeni.'
     At  lunch under the green fly of the dining-tent, in the shade of a big
tree, the wind  blowing,  the  fresh  butter much admired,  Grant's  gazelle
chops,  mashed  potatoes,  green corn, and  then  mixed  fruit for  dessert,
Kandisky told us why the East Indians were taking the country over.
     'You see, during the war they sent  the Indian troops to fight here. To
keep them out of India because they feared another mutiny. They promised the
Aga Khan that because they fought  in Africa, Indians could  come freely  to
settle and  for business afterwards. They cannot break that promise and  now
the  Indians have taken  the  country  over from the Europeans. They live on
nothing and they send  all  the money  back to  India. When  they have  made
enough to go home they leave, bringing out their poor relations to take over
from them and continue to exploit the country.'
     Pop said nothing. He would not argue with a guest at table.
     'It  is the  Aga  Khan,' Kandisky said. 'You are  an American. You know
nothing of these combinations.'
     'Were you with Von  Lettow?' Pop asked him.  'From the start,' Kandisky
said. 'Until the end.'
     'He was a great fighter,' Pop said. 'I have great admiration for him.'
     'You fought?' Kandisky asked.
     'Yes.'
     'I do not care for Lettow,' Kandisky said. 'He fought, yes. No one ever
better. When  we wanted quinine he would order it captured. All supplies the
same.  But afterwards  he cared nothing  for his men. After the war  I am in
Germany. I go  to see about  indemnification  for my property. "You  are  an
Austrian," they say.  "You  must go through  Austrian channels."  So I go to
Austria.  "But  why  did  you fight?"  they  ask  me. "You  cannot  hold  us
responsible. Suppose you go to fight in  China. That  is your own affair. We
cannot do anything for you."
     ' "But I went as a patriot," I say,  very foolishly. "I  fight  where I
can because I am an Austrian  and I know my duty." "Yes," they say. "That is
very  beautiful.  But  you  cannot  hold   us  responsible  for  your  noble
sentiments." So they  passed me from  one to  the other and nothing. Still I
love the country very much. I have lost everything here but I have more than
anyone has in  Europe. To  me it is always interesting.  The natives and the
language. I have many books of notes on  them. Then too,  in reality, I am a
king here. It is very pleasant. Waking in the morning I  extend one foot and
the boy places the sock  on it. When I am ready I extend  the other foot and
he  adjusts the  other  sock. I step from  under  the mosquito  bar  into my
drawers which are held for me. Don't you think that is very marvellous?'
'It's marvellous.'
     'When you  come  back another time we  must take  a safari to study the
natives. And shoot  nothing, or only  to eat. Look, I  will show you a dance
and sing a song.'
     Crouched, elbows lifting and falling, knees humping, he shuffled around
the table, singing. Undoubtedly it was very fine.
     'That is only one of  a thousand,' he said. 'Now I must go  for a time.
You will be sleeping.'
     'There's no hurry. Stay around.'
     'No. Surely you will  be sleeping.  I  also. I  will take the butter to
keep it cool.'
     'We'll see you at supper,' Pop said.
     'Now you must sleep. Good-bye.'
     After he was gone, Pop said: 'I wouldn't believe all that about the Aga
Khan, you know.'
     'It sounded pretty good.'
     'Of course he feels  badly,' Pop said. 'Who  wouldn't. Von Lettow was a
hell of a man.'
     'He's very intelligent,'  my wife said. 'He talks wonderfully about the
natives. But he's bitter about American women.'
     'So am I,'  said Pop. 'He's a good man. You better  get  some shut-eye.
You'll need to start about three-thirty.'
     'Have them call me.'
     Molo raised  the back of the tent, propping it with sticks, so the wind
blew through  and I went to sleep reading, the wind coming in cool and fresh
under the heated canvas.
     When I woke it was time to go. There were rain clouds in the sky and it
was very hot. They had packed some tinned fruit, a five-pound piece of roast
meat, bread, tea, a tea pot,  and some tinned milk in a whisky box with four
bottles of beer. There was a canvas water bag and a ground cloth to use as a
tent. M'Cola was taking the big gun out to the car.
     'There's no  hurry about getting back,'  Pop  said. 'We'll look for you
when we see you.'
     'All right.'
     'We'll send the lorry to haul that sportsman into Handeni. He's sending
his men ahead walking.'
     'You're sure the lorry can stand it? Don't do it  because he's a friend
of mine.'
     'Have to get him out. The lorry will be in to-night.'
     'The Memsahib's still  asleep,' I said.  'Maybe she  can get out  for a
walk and shoot some guineas?'
     'I'm here,'  she said.  'Don't  worry about  us. {Oh},  I hope  you get
them.'
     'Don't  send  out  to  look for  us  along the  road  until  day  after
to-morrow,' I said. 'If there's a good chance we'll stay.'
     'Good luck.'
     'Good luck, sweet. Good-bye, Mr. J. P.'

II

     We were out from under the shade of camp and along the sandy river of a
road, driving into the western sun, the bush thick  to the edge of the sand,
solid as a thicket, the little hills rising above it, and all along the road
we passed groups of people making their way to the westward. Some were naked
except  for a greasy  cloth knotted over one shoulder, and carried  bows and
sealed  quivers  of  arrows.  Others carried  spears.  The  wealthy  carried
umbrellas and wore draped  white cloth and  their  women walked behind them,
with their pots and pans.  Bundles and  loads of  skins were scattered along
ahead  on  the heads  of  other natives. All  were  travelling away from the
famine. And in  the heat, my  feet out over the side of the car to keep them
away from the  heat of  the engine,  hat low over the eyes against the  sun,
watching the road, the  people,  and all clearings in the  bush for game, we
drove to the westward.
     Once  we saw  three lesser  kudu cows in an open place of  broken bush.
Grey, big bellied,  long necked, small headed, and with big ears, they moved
quickly into the woods and were gone. We left  the car and tracked  them but
there was no bull track.
     A little beyond there a flock  of guineas quick-legged across  the road
running  steady-headed with the motion of trotters. As I jumped from the car
and sprinted after  them they rocketed up, their legs  tucked  close beneath
them,  heavy-bodied, short  wings drumming, cackling, to go  over the  trees
ahead. I dropped two that thumped hard when they fell and as they lay, wings
beating, Abdullah cut their heads off so they would be legal eating.  He put
them in the car where M'Cola sat laughing; his old  man's healthy laugh, his
making-fun-of-me laugh, his bird-shooting laugh that dated from a streak  of
raging misses one time that had delighted him. Now when  I killed,  it was a
joke, as  when we shot a hyena, the funniest joke of all. He laughed  always
to see the birds tumble and when I missed he roared and shook his head again
and again.
     'Ask him what the hell he's laughing about?' I asked Pop once.
     'At B'wana,' M'Cola said, and shook his head, 'at the little birds.'
     'He thinks you're funny,' Pop said.
     'Goddam it. I am funny. But the hell with him.'
     'He thinks you're very funny,' Pop said.  'Now the Memsahib and I would
never laugh.'
     'Shoot them. yourself.'
     'No, you're the bird shot. The self-confessed bird shot,' she said.
     So bird shooting became this marvellous joke. If I killed, the joke was
on. the birds and M'Cola would shake  his head and laugh  and make his hands
go round and round  to show  how the  bird turned over in  the air. And if I
missed, I  was the clown of the piece and he would look at me and shake with
laughing. Only the hyenas were funnier.
     Highly humorous was the hyena obscenely loping, full belly dragging, at
daylight on the plain, who, shot  from the stern, skittered on into speed to
tumble end over end. Mirth provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range
by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back,
his  four feet and his full belly in  the air. Nothing could be  more  jolly
than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking  out of  high grass
by  a {donga},  hit at ten  yards,  who raced  his tail in three  narrowing,
scampering circles until he died.
     It was funny to M'Cola to see a hyena shot  at close  range. There  was
that  comic slap of the  bullet and the hyena's  agitated  surprise  to find
death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance,
in the heat shimmer of  the plain, to see him  go over backwards, to see him
start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant that he was
racing the  little nickeled death inside him. But the great joke of all, the
thing  M'Cola  waved  his hands across  his face  about, and turned away and
shook  his head and  laughed, ashamed even of  the  hyena, the  pinnacle  of
hyenic humour, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while
running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled
his  own intestines out, and then  stood there, jerking them  out and eating
them with relish.
     {'Fisi,'}  M'Cola would say  and shake his head in delighted sorrow  at
there  being  such   an  awful  beast.  Fisi,  the   hyena,  hermaphroditic,
self-eating  devourer  of the dead, trailer of  calving  cows, ham-stringer,
potential  biter-off of your  face  at night  while you slept,  sad  yowler,
camp-follower,  stinking, foul, with jaws  that  crack  the  bones  the lion
leaves,  belly  dragging, loping  away  on the brown  plain,  looking  back,
mongrel dog-smart in the face; whack from the little Mannlicher and then the
horrid circle  starting. 'Fisi,' M'Cola laughed, ashamed of him, shaking his
bald black head. 'Fisi. Eats himself. Fisi.'
     The hyena  was a  dirty joke but  bird  shooting was  a clean  joke. My
whisky was  a  clean joke. There were many variations of that joke. Some  we
come to later. The Mohammedans and all religions were a joke.  A joke on all
the people who  had  them.  Charo,  the other  gun bearer,  was  short, very
serious and  highly  religious.  All  Ramadan  he never swallowed his saliva
until  sunset  and  when the  sun  was  almost  down I'd  see  him  watching
nervously. He had a bottle with him of some sort of tea and  he would finger
it and watch the  sun and I would see M'Cola watching him and pretending not
to  see.  This  was not outrightly funny  to him. This was something that he
could not laugh about openly but that he felt  superior  to and  wondered at
the  silliness of  it. The Mohammedan religion  was very fashionable and all
the higher social grades  among the  boys were Mohammedans. It was something
that  gave  caste,  something  to  believe  in,  something  fashionable  and
god-giving  to  suffer  a  little for  each  year, something  that made  you
superior to other people, something that gave you more complicated habits of
eating, something that I understood and M'Cola did not understand,  nor care
about, and he watched Charo watch for the sun to set with that blank look on
his  face that it put  on about all things  that he was not a part of. Charo
was deadly thirsty and truly devout and the sun set very slowly. I looked at
it,  red  over the trees, nudged him and he grinned. M'Cola  offered me  the
water  bottle solemnly. I  shook my  head  and Charo  grinned again.  M'Cola
looked blank. Then the  sun was down and Charo had the bottle tilted up, his
Adam's  apple rising and falling greedily and M'Cola looking at him and then
looking away.
     In the  early days, before we became good  friends, he did not trust me
at all. When anything came  up  he went  into this  blankness. I liked Charo
much better then. We  understood each other  on the question of religion and
Charo admired my shooting  and always  shook  hands  and smiled when  we had
killed  anything particularly good. This was flattering and pleasing. M'Cola
looked on all this early shooting  as a series of  lucky accidents. We  were
supposed  to shoot.  We  had not yet shot anything that amounted to anything
and he was not really my gun bearer. He was Mr. Jackson Phillip's gun bearer
and he had been loaned to me. I meant nothing to him. He did not like me nor
dislike me. He was politely contemptuous of Karl. Who he liked was Mama.
     The evening we killed the first  lion it was dark when we came in sight
of  camp.  The killing  of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory. It
was agreed beforehand that P.O.M. should have the first  shot  but since  it
was the  first lion any of  us had ever shot at, and it was very late in the
day, really  too late to take the lion on, once he was hit we were to make a
dogfight  of it  and anyone was free to get him. This was a good plan  as it
was  nearly sundown and if the lion got into cover, wounded, it would be too
dark to  do  anything about it without  a mess.  I remember  seeing the lion
looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against  a scrubby looking tree
in a patch of orchard bush and P.O.M. kneeling  to shoot and wanting to tell
her  to sit down and  make sure of him. Then there was  the  short-barrelled
explosion  of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a  run, a
strange,  heavy-shouldered,  foot-swinging,  cat  run.  I hit him  with  the
Springfield and he went down and  spun over and  I shot again,  too quickly,
and threw a cloud of dirt  over him. But there he was, stretched out, on his
belly, and, with the sun  just over the top of the trees, and the grass very
green, we walked up  on him like  a posse, or a gang of Black and Tans, guns
ready and cocked, not knowing whether he was stunned  or dead. When  we were
close M'Cola threw a stone at him. It hit him in  the flank and from the way
it  hit  you could tell he was  a dead animal. I was sure P.O.M. had hit him
but there  was  only one bullet hole, well  back, just  below  the spine and
ranging forward  to come to  the  surface under  the skin of the chest.  You
could feel the bullet under the skin  and M'Cola made a slit and cut it out.
It  was a 220-grain solid bullet from the Springfield and  it had raked him,
going through lungs and heart.
     I was  so surprised  by the way he  had rolled  over dead from the shot
after we had been prepared for  a charge, for heroics, and for drama, that I
felt more  let down  than  pleased.  It was  our first lion and we were very
ignorant and this was not what  we  had paid to see.  Charo  and M'Cola both
shook P.O.M.'s hand and then Charo came over and shook hands with me.
     'Good shot, B'wana,' he said in Swahili. {'Piga m'uzuri.'}
     'Did you shoot, Karl?' I asked.
     'No. I was just going to when you shot.'
     'You didn't shoot him, Pop?'
     'No. You'd have  heard it.' He opened the breech  and took  out the two
big 450 No. 2's.
     'I'm sure I missed him,' P.O.M. said.
     'I was sure you hit him.. I still think you hit him,' I said.
     'Mama hit,' M'Cola said.
     'Where?' Charo asked.
     'Hit,' said M'Cola. 'Hit.'
     'You  rolled  him  over,' Pop said to  me.  'God,  he went over  like a
rabbit.'
     'I couldn't believe it.'
     'Mama {piga,'} M'Cola said. {''Piga Simba.'}
     As we saw the camp fire in the dark ahead of us, coming in  that night,
M'Cola suddenly commenced to shout a stream of  high-pitched, rapid, singing
words in Wakamba ending in the word {'Simb}a{'}. Someone at the camp shouted
back one word. D 47
     'Mama!' M'Cola shouted. Then another long stream. Then 'Mama! Mama!'
     Through the dark came all the porters, the cook, the skinner, the boys,
and the headman.
     'Mama!' M'Cola shouted. 'Mama {piga Simba.'}
     The boys came dancing, crowing, and beating time and chanting something
from  down in their chests that started like a cough  and sounded like {'Hey
la Mama! Hay la Mama! Hey la Mama!'}
     The  rolling-eyed skinner picked P.O.M. up, the big  cook  and the boys
held her,  and the others pressing forward to lift  and  if not to  lift  to
touch and hold, they danced and sang through the dark around the fire and to
our tent.
     {'Hey la Mama! huh!  huh! huh!  Hay la Mama! huh! huh! huh!'} they sang
the lion dance  with that deep, lion asthmatic cough in it. Then at the tent
they put  her  down and everyone, very shyly, shook  hands,  the boys saying
{'m'uzuri, Memsahib,''} and M'Cola and the  porters all saying  {''m'uzuri},
Mama' with much feeling in the accenting of the word 'Mama'.
     Afterwards in the chairs in front of the fire, sitting with the drinks,
Pop said, 'You shot it. M'Cola would kill anyone who said you didn't.'
     'You know,  I  feel as though  I  did shoot it,' P.O.M. said.  'I don't
believe I'd be able to stand it if I really had  shot  it. I'd be too proud.
Isn't triumph marvellous?'
     'Good old Mama,' Karl said.
     'I believe you did shoot him,' I said.
     'Oh, let's not go into that,' P.O.M.  said. 'I feel so  wonderful about
just being supposed to have killed him. You know people  never used to carry
me on their shoulders much at home.'
     'No one knows how to behave in America,' Pop said. 'Most uncivilized.'
     'We'll carry you in Key West,' Karl said. 'Poor old Mama.'
     'Let's not talk about it,'  P.O.M. said. 'I like it too much. Shouldn't
I maybe distribute largess?'
     'They didn't do it for  that,' Pop  said. 'But it  is all right to give
something to celebrate.'
     'Oh, I want  to  give them  all  a  great  deal of money,' P.O.M. said.
'Isn't triumph simply marvellous?'
     'Good old Mama,' I said. 'You killed him.'
     'No, I didn't. Don't lie to me. Just let me enjoy my triumph.'
     Anyway M'Cola did not trust me for a long  time. Until P.O.M.'s licence
ran out,  she was  his favourite and we  were  simply a lot  of  people  who
interfered and kept Mama from shooting things. Once her  licence was out and
she was no longer  shooting, she dropped back into non-combatant status with
him  and as  we began to hunt kudu and Pop  stayed  in  camp and sent us out
alone with  the trackers, Karl with Charo and M'Cola and I  together, M'Cola
dropped Pop  visibly in his estimation. It was only temporary  of course. He
was Pop's man and I  believe  his  working estimations were only from day to
day  and  required  an unbroken  series of events  to have any  meaning. But
something had happened between us.

Part II
Pursuit Remembered

I

     It dated back to the time  of Droopy, after I had come  back from being
ill in Nairobi and we had gone on a foot safari to hunt rhino in the forest.
Droopy  was a real savage  with lids  to  his eyes that nearly covered them,
handsome, with a great deal of style, a fine hunter and a beautiful tracker.
He was about thirty-five, I should  think,  and  wore only  a piece of cloth
knotted over  one shoulder, and  a  fez that some hunter  had given  him. He
always  carried a spear. M'Cola wore an old U. S. Army khaki tunic, complete
with buttons, that had originally been  brought out for Droopy, who had been
away somewhere and had missed getting it.  Twice  Pop had brought it out for
Droopy and finally M'Cola had said, 'Give it to me'.
     Pop  had let him have it and M'Cola had  worn it ever since. It, a pair
of shorts, his fuzzy wool curler's cap, and  a knitted army sweater he  wore
when washing  the tunic, were  the only garments I ever saw  on  the old man
until he took my bird-shooting coat. For shoes  he used sandals cut from old
motor-car tyres.  He had  slim, handsome legs with well-turned ankles on the
style of Babe Ruth's and I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw
him with the  tunic  off and noticed how old his upper body was. It had that
aged look you see in photographs of Jeffries and Sharkey posing thirty years
after, the ugly, old-man biceps and the fallen pectoral muscles.
     'How old is M'Cola?' I asked Pop.
     'He must be over fifty,' Pop  said.  'He's got a grown-up family in the
native reserve.'
     'How are his kids?'
     'No good, worthless. He can't  handle them. We  tried  one as a porter.
But he was no good.'
     M'Cola was not jealous  of  Droopy. He simply  knew  that  Droopy was a
better man than  he was.  More of a hunter, a  faster and a cleaner tracker,
and a great  stylist in everything he did. He admired Droopy in the same way
we did  and being out with  him, it made  him  realize that  he  was wearing
Droopy's tunic and  that he had been a  porter before he became a gun bearer
and suddenly he ceased being an old timer  and we  were hunting together; he
and I hunting together and Droopy in command of the show.
     That had been a  fine hunt. The afternoon of the day  we came  into the
country we walked about four miles from camp along a  deep rhino trail  that
graded through  the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees,
as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a
foot  deep in the ground and smoothly worn and  we left it  where it slanted
down through a divide in the  hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed,
sweating, the small, steep hill on the  right to  sit there  with our  backs
against the hilltop and glass the country. It was a green, pleasant country,
with hills  below the forest that grew  thick on the side of a mountain, and
it  was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the
thick timber on the mountain. Fingers of the forest came down on to the head
of some of the slopes and it was there, at the  forest edge, that we watched
for rhino to  come out. If you looked  away from the forest and the mountain
side you  could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down
until  the land flattened  and the  grass was brown and  burned  and,  away,
across  a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and  the shine of
Lake Manyara.
     We all lay there on the hillside  and watched the country carefully for
rhino. Droopy was on the other side of  the hilltop, squatted on his  heels,
looking, and M'Cola sat below us. There was a cool breeze from the  east and
it blew the grass in  waves  on the hillsides. There  were  many large white
clouds and the tall trees of the forest on the mountain side grew so closely
and were so  foliaged that it looked as though you could walk on their tops.
Behind this  mountain there was a gap and then another mountain and the  far
mountain was dark blue with forest in the distance.
     Until five o'clock we did not  see anything. Then, without the glasses,
I  saw something  moving  over the shoulder of one of  the valleys  toward a
strip of the timber. In  the glasses  it was a rhino, showing very clear and
minute at  the  distance,  red-coloured  in  the sun,  moving with  a  quick
waterbug-like  motion across  the hill. Then there were  three  more of them
that  came out  of the forest,  dark in the  shadow,  and  two  that fought,
tinily,  in the glasses,  pushing head-on, fighting in front  of a  clump of
bushes  while  we watched them and the light failed.  It was too dark to get
down the hill, across the valley and up the narrow slope of mountain side to
them in time for a  shot. So we went back  to the camp, down the hill in the
dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot,
walking along that  deep trail, that  wound through the dark hills, until we
saw the firelight in the trees.
     We  were excited  that  night because  we  had seen the three rhino and
early  the next  morning while we were eating breakfast before starting out,
Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo  he had found feeding at the edge
of the forest not  two miles from camp. We went there, still  tasting coffee
and kippers  in  the  early  morning heart-pounding of  excitement,  and the
native Droopy had left watching them  pointed where  they had crossed a deep
gulch and gone into  an open  patch  of forest.  He said there were two  big
bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly
on the game trails,  pushing the vines aside and seeing  the tracks and  the
quantities of fresh dung, but though  we went on into the  forest, where  it
was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see  or hear them.
Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but  that  was all.  There
were numbers of rhino  trails there in the  woods and  may strawy  piles  of
dung, but  we  saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some  monkeys, and
when  we  came  out we were wet to our waists from  the dew, and the sun was
quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up,  and we
knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out  would have gone back deep into
the forest to rest out of the heat.
     The others started back to camp with Pop and M'Cola.  There was no meat
in camp, and I wanted to  hunt back in a circle  with Droopy  to  see  if we
could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery
and  it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling  country, simply to walk,
and to be  able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for
the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked  Droopy and liked to watch  him walk.
He  strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and
to feel  the grass under my  soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the
rifle,  held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and
the sun hot enough  to sweat you  well as  it burned the dew from the grass;
with the breeze  starting and the country  like  an  abandoned  New  England
orchard to walk through.  I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted
to make a shot to impress Droopy.
     From the  top  of  one rise we  saw two  kongoni showing  yellow  on  a
hillside about a  mile away and I  motioned to Droop that we would  go after
them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and  two cows.
Waterbuck was the  one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat
and I  had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the
buck as he tore away, remembered about the  worthless  meat,  and having the
head, and did not shoot.
     'No shoot kuro?' Droopy asked in Swahili. {'Doumi sana}. A good bull.'
     I tried to tell him that I had  a better one and that it was no good to
eat.
     He grinned.
     {'Piga kongoni m'uzuri.'}
     Piga' was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should
sound or the announcement of a hit. 'M'uzuri', meaning  good,  well, better,
had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I
used to make up  sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M'usuri in them, but
now it  seemed  natural, no longer to  be italicized, just  as all the words
came  to  seem  the  proper and natural  words and there  was nothing odd or
unseemly in  the  stretching of  the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a  man
carrying a spear.  The  tribal marks and  the tattooed places seemed natural
and handsome  adornments and I regretted not having  any  of my own. My  own
scars were  all informal, some  irregular and sprawling, others simply puffy
welts.  I had one on my forehead that people still commented on, asking if I
had bumped my head, but  Droop had handsome ones  beside  his cheekbones and
others, symmetrical and  decorative, on his chest and belly.  I was thinking
that I had one good one, a sort of embossed Christmas tree, on the bottom of
my  right foot  that  only served  to  wear out socks,  when  we jumped  two
reedbuck. They went off through the trees and then stood at sixty yards, the
thin, graceful buck looking back, and I shot him high and a touch behind the
shoulder. He gave a jump and went off very fast.
     'Piga.' Droopy smiled. We had both heard the whunk of the bullet.
     'Kufa,' I told him. 'Dead.'
     But when we  came up  to  him,  lying on his  side, his heart was still
beating  strongly, although to all appearances he  was  dead.  Droopy had no
skinning knife and I  had only a penknife to stick him with. I felt  for the
heart behind  the  foreleg  with my fingers and feeling it beating under the
hide slipped  the knife  in but  it was short and pushed the heart  away.  I
could feel  it, hot and rubbery against my  fingers, and feel the knife push
it, but I felt around  and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against
my fingers. Once bled,  I started to open  him, with the little knife, still
showing off to Droopy, and emptying him neatly took out the liver,  cut away
the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside
it.
     Droopy  asked for the  knife.  Now he  was going to show  me something.
Skilfully  he  slit open the stomach  and turned it inside, tripe side, out,
emptying the  grass  in it on the  ground, shook it, then put the liver  and
kidneys inside it and with the knife cut a switch from the tree the buck lay
under and sewed the stomach together with the withe so that the tripe made a
bag to carry the other delicacies in. Then he  cut a pole and put the bag on
the end of it, running it through the flaps, and put it over his shoulder in
the  way  tramps carried their property  in a handkerchief on the end  of  a
stick in  Blue Jay corn plaster advertisements when we were children. It was
a good trick and I thought how I would show it to John Staib in Wyoming some
time  and he would smile  his deaf man's smile (you had to throw  pebbles at
him to make  him  stop when you heard a bull bugle),  and  I knew what  John
would say. He would say, 'By Godd, Urnust, dot's smardt'.
     Droop handed  me the  stick, then took off his single garment,  made  a
sung and  got the buck up on his back. I tried to help him  and suggested by
signs  that  we cut a  pole and sling him, carrying him between  us, but  he
wanted to carry him  alone. So we started for camp, me with the tripe bag on
the end  of a stick over  my shoulder, my rifle slung, and Droopy staggering
steadily ahead, sweating heavily, under the buck. I tried to get him to hang
him in a tree and leave him until we could send out a couple of porters, and
to that end we  put him in the crotch of a tree. But when Droopy saw that  I
meant to go off and leave him there rather than simply allow him to drain he
got  him down on to  his shoulders again and we went on into camp, the boys,
around the cooking fire,  all laughing at the tripe bag over my shoulder  as
we came in.
     This  was the kind  of  hunting  that I liked. No riding  in  cars, the
country broken  up instead of the plains, and I was completely  happy. I had
been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I
was underweight, had a great  appetite for meat,  and could eat all I wanted
without feeling stuffy. Each  day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at
the fire at night, and in  the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with
a breeze  in the  trees  and read with no  obligation  and  no compulsion to
write, happy  in knowing that at four o'clock  we  would be starting out  to
hunt again. I would not even write a letter. The only person  I really cared
about, except the children, was  with nie,  and I had no wish to  share this
life with anyone who was not there, only to live it, being completely  happy
and quite  tired. I  knew that I was shooting well and I had that feeling of
well-being and confidence that is so much more pleasant to have than to hear
about.
     As  it  turned out,  we started soon after three  to be on the  hill by
four.  But it  was nearly  five before we saw  the first rhino come bustling
short-leggedly across the ridge of hill in almost the same place we had seen
the rhino the night before. We sat where he went into the edge of the forest
near where  we had seen the  two fighting and then  took a course that would
lead us down the hill, across the grown-over gully at the bottom, and up the
steep slope to where there was a thorn tree with yellow blossoms that marked
the place where we had seen the rhino go in.
     Coming  straight up  the slope in  sight of the  thorn  tree,  the wind
blowing  across  the hill, I  tried to  walk as  slowly as I could and put a
handkerchief inside the sweatband  of my hat to keep the perspiration out of
my glasses. I expected to shoot at any minute and I wanted to slow up enough
so my  heart  would not be pounding. In shooting large  animals there  is no
reason ever to miss if you have a clear shot and can shoot and know where to
shoot,  unless you are unsteady from  a run or a climb or  fog your glasses,
break them or run out of cloth or paper to wipe them clean. The glasses were
the biggest hazard  and I used to carry  four handkerchiefs and  change them
from the left to the right pocket when they were wet.
     We  came  up  to  the yellow blossomed tree very carefully, like people
walking up  to a bevy of quail the dogs have pointed, and the rhino was  not
in sight.  We  went  all through  the edge of the forest  and it was full of
tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and
it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side
of  the mountain,  hoping  to see  a rhino  in  the open glades. When it was
almost too dark to shoot, I saw  Droopy stop and crouch. With  his head down
he motioned us forward. Crawling up,  we saw  a  large rhino and a small one
standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.
     'Cow and calf,' Pop said softly. 'Can't  shoot her. Let me  look at her
horn.' He took the glasses from M'Cola.
     'Can she see us?' P.O.M. asked.
     'No.'
     'How far are they?'
     'Must be nearly five hundred yards.'
     'My God, she looks big,' I whispered.
     'She's a big cow,'  Pop said. 'Wonder what became of the bull?'  He was
pleased and  excited by the sight of game. 'Too dark  to shoot  unless we're
right on him.'
     The  rhinos  had  turned  and were  feeding. They never seemed  to move
slowly. They either bustled or stood still.
     'What  makes  them so red?'  P.O.M. asked.  'Rolling  in the  mud,' Pop
answered. 'We better get along while there's light.'
     The sun --was down when  we  came out of the forest and looked down the
slope and across to the hill where we had  watched from with our glasses. We
should  have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back
up the trail  the  way  we  had come, but  we decided, like fools,  to grade
straight across  the mountainside below  the edge of  the forest. So  in the
dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed
only as wooded  patches  until you were in them, slid down, clung  to vines,
stumbled  and  climbed  and  slid  again,  down  and  down,  then   steeply,
impossibly,  up,  hearing  the rustle of night  things  and  the cough of  a
leopard hunting baboons,  me scared  of snakes, and  touching  each root and
branch with snake fear in the dark.
     To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into
the moonlight and the long,  too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed
one  foot up  to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at  a time,
leaning  forward against  the grade  and the  altitude,  dead  tired and gun
weary,  single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the  top
where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and
on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into
camp.
     So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a
whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the  canvas bath had been
a quarter filled with hot water.
     {'Bathi}, B'wana.'
     'Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,' you say.
     'I never could,' says P.O.M. 'You all made me.'
     'You climbed better than any of us.'
     'Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?'
     'I wonder,' Pop said. 'I suppose it's merely condition.'
     'It's riding in the damned cars that ruins us.'
     'If we  did  that walk every  night we could come back in  three nights
from now and never feel it.'
     'Yes. But I'd be as scared  of snakes if  we  did it every night for  a
year.'
     'You'd get over it.'
     'No,'  I said.  'They  scare me  stiff. Do  you remember  that  time we
touched hands behind the tree?'
     'Rather,' said  Pop.  'You jumped two  yards. Are you really afraid  of
them, or only talking?'
     'They scare me sick,' I said. 'They always have.'
     'What's the matter  with you men?'  P.O.M. said.  'Why haven't I  heard
anything about the war to-night?'
     'We're too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?'
     'Not me,' said Pop. 'Where  is that boy  with the whisky?' Then calling
in that feeble, clowning falsetto, 'Kayti... Katy-ay!'
     {'Bathi,'} said Molo again softly, but insistently.
     'Too tired.'
     'Memsahib {bathi,'} Molo said hopefully.
     'I'll  go,' said P.O.M.  'But you two hurry up  with your drinking. I'm
hungry.'
     '{Bathi,'} said Kayti severely to Pop.
     {'Bathi} yourself,' said Pop. 'Don't bully me.'
     Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.
     'All right. All right,' said Pop. 'Going to have one?' he asked.
     'We'll have just one,' I said, 'and then we'll {bathi.'}
     {'Bathi},  B'wana M'Kumba,' Molo  said.  P.O.M.  came  toward the  fire
wearing her blue dressing-gown and mosquito boots.
     'Go on,'  she said. 'You  can have another  when you  come out. There's
nice, warm, muddy water.'
     'They bully us,' Pop said.
     'Do you remember the time we were  sheep hunting and your hat blew  off
and nearly fell  on to the ram?' I asked her, the whisky racing my mind back
to Wyoming.
     'Go take your {bathi,'} P.O.M. said. 'I'm going to have a gimlet.'
     In the morning we were dressed before daylight, ate breakfast, and were
hunting  the  forest edge  and the sunken valleys  where Droop had  seen the
buffalo before  the sun was up. But they were not there.  It was a long hunt
and we came back to camp  and  decided  to  send the lorries for porters and
move with a foot safari to where there was supposed  to be water in a stream
that came down out of the mountain beyond where we  had seen  the rhinos the
night  before. Being  camped  there  we could hunt a  new  country along the
forest edge and we would be much closer to the mountain.
     The trucks were to bring in Karl  from his kudu camp where he seemed to
be getting disgusted, or discouraged, or both, and  he could go down  to the
Rift Valley the next day and kill some meat and try for an oryx. If we found
good rhino we would send for him. We did not want to fire any shots where we
were going  except at rhino in order  not to scare them, and we needed meat.
The rhino seemed very shy and I knew from  Wyoming how the shy game will all
shift out of a small country, a country being an area,  a valley or range of
hills, a man can hunt in, after a  shot or two. We planned this all out, Pop
consulting with Droopy, and then sent the  lorries off  with Dan to  recruit
porters.
     Late in the afternoon they  were back with Karl, his outfit, and  forty
M'Bulus, good-looking savages with a pompous headman who wore  the only pair
of  shorts among them. Karl was  thin now, his  skin  sallow, his  eyes very
tired  looking and he seemed a little  desperate. He had been eight days  in
the kudu camp in the hills, hunting hard, with no one with him who spoke any
English, and they had only seen two cows and jumped a bull out of range. The
guides claimed  they  had  seen  another  bull but  Karl had  thought it was
kongoni, or that they said it was a kongoni, and had not shot. He was bitter
about this and it was not a happy outfit.
     'I never saw his horns. I don't believe it was  a bull,' he  said. Kudu
hunting was a touchy subject with him now and we let it alone.
     'He'll  get an oryx down  there and he'll feel better,' Pop said. 'It's
gotten on his nerves a little.'
     Karl agreed to the plan for us to move ahead  into the new country, and
for him to go down for meat.
     'Whatever you say,' he said. 'Absolutely whatever you say.'
     'It will give him some shooting,' Pop said. 'Then he'll feel better.'
     'We'll get one. Then you get one. Whoever gets his first can go on down
after oryx. You'll probably get an oryx to-morrow anyway when you're hunting
meat.'
     'Whatever you  say,'  Karl said. His mind was bitterly  revolving eight
blank days of hill climbing  in the heat, out before daybreak, back at dark,
hunting an animal  whose  Swahili name  he  could not  then  remember,  with
trackers in whom he had no confidence, coming back  to eat alone, no one  to
whom he could talk, his  wife nine thousand miles and three months away, and
how was  his dog and how  was  his job, and  god-damn it where were they and
what if he missed one when he got a shot, he wouldn't, you never missed when
it was really important, he was  sure of that, that was one of the tenets of
his faith, but what if he got excited and  missed, and why didn't he get any
letters, what did the guide  say kongoni for that  time, they  did, he  knew
they did,  but  he  said nothing  of  all  that, only, 'Whatever you say', a
little desperately.
     'Come on, cheer up, you bastard,' I said.
     'I'm cheerful. What's the matter with you?'
     'Have a drink.'
     'I don't want a drink. I want a kudu.'
     Later Pop said, 'I thought he'd do well off by himself  with no one  to
hurry him or rattle him. He'll be all right. He's a good lad.'
     'He wants  someone to  tell him  exactly what to do and still leave him
alone and not rattle  him,' I said. 'It's hell  for him to shoot in front of
everybody. He's not a damned show-off like me.'
     'He made a damned fine shot at that leopard,' Pop said.
     'Two  of  them,' I said. 'The second was as good as the first. Hell, he
can shoot. On the range he'll shoot  the pants  off of  any  of us.  But  he
worries about it and I rattle him trying to get him to speed up.'
     'You're a little hard on him sometimes,' Pop said.
     'Hell, he knows me. He knows what I think of him. He doesn't mind.'
     'I still think he'll find himself off by himself,' Pop said. 'It's just
a question of confidence. He's really a good shot.'
     'He's got the best buff, the best waterbuck, and the best lion, now,' I
said. 'He's got nothing to worry about.'
     'The Memsahib has the best  lion, brother. Don't make any mistake about
that.'
     'I'm glad of that. But he's got a damned fine lion  and  a big leopard.
Everything he has is good. We've got  plenty of  time.  He's got nothing  to
worry about. What the hell is he so gloomy about?'
     'We'll get an early start in the morning so we can finish it off before
it gets too hot for the little Memsahib.'
     'She's in the best shape of any one.'
     'She's marvellous. She's like a little terrier.'
     We  went out  that afternoon and glassed the country from the hills and
never  saw a  thing.  That night after  supper  we were in the  tent. P.O.M.
disliked intensely being  compared to a little  terrier. If she must be like
any dog, and she did not wish to be, she would prefer a wolfhound, something
lean, racy, long-legged and ornamental.  Her courage was so automatic and so
much  a simple state  of being  that she never thought of danger; then, too,
danger was in the hands of Pop and for Pop she had a complete, clear-seeing,
absolutely trusting adoration. Pop was her ideal  of how a  man  should  be,
brave,  gentle,  comic,  never losing  his  temper,  never  bragging,  never
complaining except in a joke, tolerant, understanding, intelligent, drinking
a little too much as a good man should, and, to her eyes, very handsome.
     'Don't you think Pop's handsome?'
     'No,' I said. 'Droopy's handsome.'
     'Droopy's {beautiful}. But don't you {really} think Pop's handsome?'
     'Hell,  no.  I  like  him  as well as any man I've ever known, but  I'm
damned if he's handsome.'
     'I think he's lovely looking. But you understand about how I feel about
him, don't you?'
     'Sure. I'm as fond of the bastard myself.'
     'But {don't} you think he's handsome, really?'
     'Nope.'
     Then, a little later:
     'Well, who's handsome to you?'
     'Belmonte and Pop. And you.'
     'Don't be patriotic,' I said. 'Who's a beautiful woman?'
     'Garbo.'
     'Not any more. Josie is. Margot is.'
     'Yes, they are. I know I'm not.'
     'You're lovely.'
     'Let's talk about Mr. J. P. I don't like you to call him  Pop. It's not
dignified.'
     'He and I aren't dignified together.'
     'Yes, but I'm dignified with him. Don't you think he's wonderful?'
     'Yes,  and  he doesn't  have to read  books written by some female he's
tried to help get published saying how he's yellow.'
     'She's just  jealous and malicious. You never should  have helped  her.
Some people never forgive that.'
     'It's a shame, though, with all that talent gone to malice and nonsense
and self-praise. It's a goddamned shame, really. It's a shame you never knew
her before she went to pot.  You know a  funny thing; she  never could write
dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do  it  from my stuff and used
it  in  that book.  She had never written like that before. She never  could
forgive learning that and she was afraid people would notice it, where she'd
learned it,  so  she had to attack me.  It's a funny  racket,  really. But I
swear she was  nice before she got ambitious. You would have liked her then,
really.'
     'Maybe, but I don't think  so,' said P.O.M.  'We have fun though, don't
we? Without all those people.'
     'God damn it if we don't. I've had a better time every year since I can
remember.'
     'But isn't Mr. J. P. wonderful? Really?'
     'Yes. He's wonderful.'
     'Oh, you're nice to say it. Poor Karl.'
     'Why?'
     'Without his wife.'
     'Yes,' I said. 'Poor Karl.'

II

     So in the morning, again, we started ahead of the porters and went down
and across the  hills and through  a deeply forested valley and then up  and
across  a  long  rise  of  country  with  high grass that made  the  walking
difficult, and  on and  up and  across, resting  sometimes in the shade of a
tree, and then on and  up and down  and across, all in high grass  now, that
you  had to break  a  trail in, and the  sun was very hot. The five of us in
single file,  Droop and M'Cola with a big gun apiece, hung with musettes and
water bottles and the cameras, we all  sweating in the sun, Pop and  I  with
guns and the Memsahib trying to walk like Droopy,  her Stetson tilted on one
side, happy to be on  a trip,  pleased about how comfortable her boots were,
we came finally to a thicket of thorn trees over a ravine that ran down from
the side of  a ridge to the water and we leaned the guns  against the  trees
and went in under the close shade and lay on the ground P O M. got the books
out of one of the musettes and she  and Pop read while I followed the ravine
down to the little stream  that came out  of  the mountainside, and  found a
fresh lion track and many rhino tunnels  in the tall grass that  came higher
than your head. It was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine  and I was
glad  to lean  my  back  against  the  tree  trunk  and  read  in  Tolstoy's
{Sevastopol}.  It  was a  very  young book and  had one fine description  of
fighting  in  it,  where  the French take the redoubt,  and I  thought about
Tolstoy and  about  what a  great  advantage  an experience of war was to  a
writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to
write  truly of, and  those writers  who  had  not seen it were always  very
jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal,  or a disease as
a subject, while, really,  it was just  something quite  irreplaceable  that
they had missed. Then Sevastopol made me think  of the  Boulevard Sevastopol
in  Paris, about riding  a bicycle down it in the rain on  the way home from
Strassburg  and  the  slipperiness  of  the rails  of the tram cars and  the
feeling  of riding on greasy,  slippery asphalt and cobble stones in traffic
in the  rain, and how we had  nearly lived on  the Boulevard du  Temple that
time, and I remembered  the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and
the wall paper,  and instead  we  had taken the upstairs of  the pavilion in
Notre Dame des  Champs in  the  courtyard with the  sawmill {(and the sudden
whine of the saw, the smell of  sawdust and the chestnut tree over  the roof
with a mad woman  downstairs)},  and the year worrying about  money {(all of
the stories back in the  post  that came  in through a  slit in the saw-mill
door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always
anecdotes,  sketches,  conies, etc. They did not want  them, and we lived on
poireaux  and  drank cahors and water)}, and how fine  the fountains were at
the Place  de L'Observatoire ({water sheen rippling on the bronze of horses'
manes, bronze breasts and shoulders, green under thin-flowing} {water)}, and
when they  put  up the bust of  Flaubert in the Luxembourg on the  short cut
through  the gardens on the way to the  rue Soufflot  {(one that we believed
in, loved without  criticism, heavy now in stone  as an idol should be)}. He
had  not seen  war but he  had  seen a  revolution  and the  Commune,  and a
revolution is much the best if you  do  not become bigoted because every one
speaks  the same language.  Just as civil war is the best war for  a writer,
the most complete. Stendhal had seen a war and Napoleon taught him to write.
He was teaching everybody then; but no one else learned. Dostoevski was made
by being sent to  Siberia.  Writers  are  forged in injustice as  a sword is
forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him  the necessary
shock to cut the  over-flow  of words and give him a sense of proportion, if
they  sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to  the  Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and
maybe it wouldn't. He seemed  sad, really, like Camera. Tolstoy  was a small
man. Joyce was of  medium height and  he wore  his eyes out. And  that  last
night,  drunk, with Joyce and the  thing  he kept quoting from Edgar Quinet,
'Fraiche  et rose comme au jour  de  la bataille'. I didn't have  it right I
knew. And when you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three
years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.
     What  I  had  to do was work. I did not care, particularly,  how it all
came out. I  did not take  my  own  life seriously any more, any  one else's
life, yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I
would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing, it
was the one thing that always made you feel good, and in the meantime it was
my own damned life and I would lead  it where and how I pleased. And where I
had led it now pleased  me very  much. This was a better sky than Italy. The
hell it was.  The best sky was  in Italy and Spain and  Northern Michigan in
the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat  this sky; but
not the country.
     All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet,
but when I would wake in the  night  I would lie, listening, homesick for it
already.
     Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over  the  ravine at the  sky with
white  clouds moving across in the wind, I loved  the  country so that I was
happy as you are after  you have  been with a  woman that  you really  love,
when, empty, you feel  it welling up again and there it is and you can never
have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you  want more and
more, to have,  and be, and  live in,  to possess now again for always,  for
that long, sudden-ended always, making  time stand  still, sometime  so very
still  that  afterwards  you  wait to  hear it  move,  and,< it  is  slow in
starting. But you are not alone, because if you  have  ever really loved her
happy and untragic, she loves you always, no matter whom she loves nor where
she goes  she loves  you  more. So if  you  have loved some  woman and  some
country  you are very  fortunate  and,  if you  die afterwards, it  makes no
difference.  Now,  being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes
of the seasons, the rains  with no need to travel, the  discomforts that you
paid to make it real, the names of the trees,  of the small animals, and all
the birds,  to know the  language and  have  time to be  in  it  and to move
slowly. I have loved country all my life, the country was always better than
the people. I could only care about people a very few at a time.
     P.O.M. was sleeping. She was always lovely to  look at asleep, sleeping
quietly, close  curled like an animal, with  nothing of the being  dead look
that  Karl  had  asleep. Pop slept quietly too,  you could see his soul  was
close in his body. His body no longer  housed him fittingly. It  had gone on
and changed, thickening here, losing its lines, bloating a little there, but
inside he was young and lean and tall  and hard  as when he galloped lion on
the  plain below  Wami, and the pouches under  his eyes were all outside, so
that now I  saw him asleep the way P.O.M.  saw him always. M'Cola was an old
man  asleep, without history and without mystery. Droopy  did  not sleep. He
sat on his heels and watched for the safari.
     We saw them coming a long way off. At first the boxes just showed above
the high grass, then a line of heads,  then they were in a hollow, and there
was only the point of a spear in the sun, then they came up a rise of ground
and I could see  the strung out line  coming  towards us. They  had  gone  a
little too far to the  left and Droopy waved to signal them  toward us. They
made camp, Pop warning  them to be quiet, and we  sat under the dining  tent
and were comfortable in  the chairs and talked. That night we hunted and saw
nothing. The next morning we hunted and saw nothing and the next evening the
same. It was very interesting but there were no results. The  wind blew hard
from the east and the ground was broken in short ridges of hills coming down
close {from} the forest so you could not get above  it without sending  your
scent on ahead of you on the wind to warn everything. You could not see into
the sun  in  the evening, nor on  the heavy shadowed hillsides to the  west,
beyond which the sun was setting at  the time  the rhino would be coming out
of the forest, so all the country to the westward was  a loss in the evening
and in the country we could  hunt we found nothing. Meat came in from Karl's
camp by some porters we sent  back. They came in carrying quarters of tommy,
grant,  and  wildebeeste,  dusty, the  meat seared  dry by the sun, and  the
porters were happy, crouched around their fires roasting the meat on sticks.
Pop was puzzled why the rhino were all gone.  Each day we had seen  less and
we discussed whether  it  could be the full moon, that they fed out at night
and were back in the forest in the morning before it was light, or that they
winded us, or heard the men, and were simply shy  and kept in the forest, or
what was it?  ' Me putting out the theories, Pop pricking them with his wit,
sometimes considering them  from politeness, sometimes  with  interest, like
the one about the moon.
     We went  to bed early and  in the night it rained a little, not a  real
rain  but a shower from the mountains, and in the morning we  were up before
daylight and had climbed up to the top of the steep grassy ridge that looked
down on to the camp, on  to the  ravine of the river bed,  and across to the
steep opposite bank of the stream, and from where we could see all the hilly
slopes and the edge of the forest. It was not yet light when some geese flew
overhead and the light was still too grey to be able to see the  edge of the
forest clearly in  the  glasses. We  had scouts out on three  different hill
tops and we were waiting  for it  to be light enough  for us to see  them if
they signalled.
     Then Pop  said, 'Look at that son of a bitch', and shouted at M'Cola to
bring the rifles. M'Cola  went jumping down the hill, and across the stream,
directly opposite us, a rhino was running with a quick trot along the top of
the bank.  As we watched he speeded up and came, fast trotting, angling down
across the face of the bank. He was a  muddy red, his  horn showed  clearly,
and there  was  nothing ponderous in his quick,  purposeful movement. I  was
very excited at seeing him.
     'He'll cross the stream,' Pop said. 'He's shootable.'
     M'Cola put  the Springfield in my hand and I opened it  to  make sure I
had solids. The Rhino was out of  sight now but I could  see the  shaking of
the high grass.
     'How far would you call it?'
     'All of three hundred.'
     'I'll bust the son of a bitch.'
     I was  watching,  freezing  myself deliberately  inside,  stopping  the
excitement as you close a  valve, going into that impersonal state you shoot
from.
     He showed, trotting into the  shallow, boulder-filled  stream. Thinking
of one thing, that the shot was perfectly possible, but that I must lead him
enough, must get ahead, I got on  him, then well ahead of  him, and squeezed
off. I heard  the {whonk}  of the  bullet and, from his trot,  he seemed  to
explode forward. With  a whooshing snort he  smashed ahead, splashing  water
and snorting. I shot again and  raised a  little column of water behind him,
and shot again as he went into the grass; behind him again.
     'Piga,' M'Cola said. 'Piga!'
     Droopy agreed.
     'Did you. hit him?' Pop said.
     'Absolutely,' I said. 'I think I've got him.'
     Droopy was running and I re-loaded and ran off after him. Half the camp
was  strung  out across the  hills waving and yelling. The rhino had come in
right  below  where  they  were and gone on up the valley towards  where the
forest came close down into the head of the valley.
     Pop and P.O.M. came up. Pop with his big gun and M'Cola carrying mine.
     'Droopy will get the tracks,' Pop said. 'M'Cola swears you hit him.'
     'Piga!' M'Cola said.
     'He  snorted  like  a  steam engine,'  P.O.M.  said.  'Didn't  he  look
wonderful going along there?'
     'He was late getting home with the milk,' Pop said. 'Are you {sure} you
hit him? It was a godawful long shot.'
     'I {know} I hit him. I'm {pretty} sure I've killed him.'
     'Don't tell any one if you did,' Pop said. 'They'll never  believe you.
Look! Droopy's got blood.'
     Below,  in the high grass,  Droop was holding up a grass  blade towards
us. Then, stooped, he went on trailing fast by the blood spoor.
     'Piga,' M'Cola said. 'M'uzuri!'
     'We'll keep up above where we can see  if he makes a break,'  Pop said.
'Look at Droopy.'
     Droop had removed his fez and held it in his hand.
     'That's all the  precautions he needs,' Pop said. 'We bring up a couple
of  heavy  guns  and  Droopy goes in  after  him  with  one article less  of
clothing.'
     Below us  Droopy and his partner who was trailing with him had stopped.
Droopy held up his hand.
     'They hear him,' Pop said. 'Come on.'
     We started toward them. Droopy came toward us and spoke to Pop.
     'He's in there,'  Pop whispered. 'They can hear the tick birds.  One of
the boys says  he heard the faro, too. We'll go  in against the wind. You go
ahead with Droopy. Let the  Memsahib stay behind me.  Take the  big gun. All
right.'
     The  rhino was in high grass, somewhere in there behind some bushes. As
we went forward we heard a deep, moaning sort of groan. Droopy looked around
at  me  and  grinned.  The  noise  came  again,  ending  this  time  like  a
blood-choked  sigh. Droopy was laughing. 'Faro,' he  whispered  and  put his
hand palm  open on  the side of his head in the gesture that means to  go to
sleep. Then in a jerky-flighted, sharp-beaked  little flock we  saw the tick
birds  rise  and  fly away.  We knew where  he  was and, as  we  went slowly
forward, parting the high grass, we saw him. He was on his side, dead.
     'Better shoot him once to make  sure,' Pop  said. M'Cola handed me  the
Springfield he had been carrying. I noticed it was cocked, looked at M'Cola,
furious with him, kneeled down and shot the rhino in  the sticking place. He
never moved. Droopy shook my hand and so did M'Cola.
     'He had that damned Springfield cocked,' I said to Pop. The cocked gun,
behind my back, made me black angry.
     That  meant nothing to  M'Cola. He was very happy, stroking the rhino's
horn, measuring it with his fingers spread, looking for the bullet hole.
     'It's on the side he's lying on,' I said.
     'You  should  have  seen him when  he  was protecting Mama,'  Pop said.
'That's why he had the gun cocked.'
     'Can he shoot?'
     'No,' Pop said. 'But he would.'
     'Shoot me in the  pants,' I said.  'Romantic  bastard.' When the  whole
outfit came up, we rolled the rhino into a sort of kneeling position and cut
away the grass to take some pictures. The bullet hole was fairly high in the
back, a little behind the lungs.
     'That was a  hell of  a shot,' Pop said. 'A hell of a shot.  Don't ever
tell any one you made that one.'
     'You'll have to give me a certificate.'
     'That  would  just  make us both liars. They're a strange beast, aren't
they?'
     There he was, long-hulked,  heavy-sided, prehistoric looking, the  hide
like vulcanized rubber and faintly transparent looking, scarred with a badly
healed  horn wound that the birds  had pecked at, his tail thick, round, and
pointed, flat many-legged ticks crawling on him, his ears fringed with hair,
tiny pig  eyes, moss growing on  the  base of his horn that grew out forward
from his  nose. M'Cola looked at him and shook his head. I agreed with  him.
This was the hell of an animal.
     'How is his horn?'
     'It  isn't bad,' Pop  said. 'It's nothing  extra. That was a hell of  a
shot you made on him though, brother.'
     'M'Cola's pleased with it,' I said.
     'You're pretty pleased with it yourself,' P.O.M. said.
     'I'm  crazy  about  it,' I  said. 'But don't let me start on  it. Don't
worry  about  how I feel about it. I  can wake up and think about  that  any
night.'
     'And you're a good tracker, and a hell of  a fine bird shot, too,'  Pop
said. 'Tell us the rest of that.'
     'Lay off me. I only said that once when I was drunk.'
     'Once,' said P.O.M. 'Doesn't he tell us that every night?'
     'By God, I {am} a good bird shot.'
     'Amazing,' said Pop. 'I never would have  thought  it. What else is  it
you do?'
     'Oh, go to hell.'
     'Mustn't  ever let  him  realize what  a shot  that  was or  he'll  get
unbearable,' Pop said to P.O.M.
     'M'Cola and I know,' I said.
     M'Cola came up. 'M'uzuri, B'wana,' he said. 'M'uzuri sana.'
     'He thinks you did it on purpose,' Pop said.
     'Don't you ever tell him different.'
     'Piga m'uzuri,' M'Cola said. 'M'uzuri.'
     'I believe he feels just the way you do about it,' Pop said.
     'He's my pal.'
     'I believe he is, you know,' Pop said.
     On our way back across country to our main camp  I made a fancy shot on
a reedbuck at about  two hundred  yards, offhand, breaking  his neck  at the
base of the skull. M'Cola was very pleased and Droopy was delighted.
     'We've got  to put  a stop to him,' Pop  said to P.O.M. 'Where did  you
shoot for, really?'
     'In the neck,' I lied. I had held full on the centre of the shoulder.
     'It was awfully pretty,' P.O.M. said. The bullet had  made a crack when
it hit like  a bat swung against a  fast  ball  and  the  buck had collapsed
without a move.
     'I think he's a damned liar,' Pop said.
     'None of us great shots is appreciated. Wait till we're gone.'
     'His idea  of  being  appreciated  is  for  us  to  carry  him  on  our
shoulders,' Pop said. 'That rhino shot has ruined him.'
     'All right. You  watch from  now  on. Hell, I've  shot  well the  whole
time.'
     'I seem to remember  a grant of some sort,' Pop  was teasing.  So did I
remember him. I'd followed a fine one out  of the country missing shot after
shot all morning after a series of stalks in the heat, then crawled up to an
ant hill to shoot one that was not nearly as  good, taken a rest on the  ant
hill,  missed the buck at fifty yards, seen him  stand facing me, absolutely
still, his nose up, and shot him in the chest. He went over backwards and as
I went up to him he jumped up and went off, staggering.
     I sat  down and waited  for  him to  stop  and  when he did,  obviously
anchored,  I sat there, using the sling,  and shot  for his neck, slowly and
carefully, missing  him eight  times  straight in a mounting, stubborn rage,
not making  a correction but shooting exactly for the same place in the same
way each time, the gun bearers all laughing, the truck that had come up with
the outfit holding more amused  niggers,  P.O.M.  and Pop saying nothing, me
sitting  there  cold, crazy-stubborn-furious, determined to  break  his neck
rather  than walk up and  perhaps start him off over that heat-hazy, 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.

III

     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.

IV

     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.

V

     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.

VI

     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 us
killed a kudu the guide would receive fifteen shillings.
     'You mean a pound,' said the leading guide.
     'They seem to know  what they're  up to,' Pop said. 'I must say I don't
care for this sportsman in spite of what B'wana Simba says.'
     B'wana Simba, by  the way, we later found out to be an excellent hunter
with a wonderful reputation on the coast.
     'We'll  put them into two  lots and you draw from them,' Pop suggested,
'one naked  one  and one with breeches in each lot.  I'm all  for the  naked
savage, myself, as a guide.'
     On suggesting  to  the  two testimonial-equipped, breeched  guides that
they select an  unclothed  partner, we found this  would not  work out. Loud
Mouth,  the  financial  and,  now,  theatrical,  genius  who  was  giving  a
gesture-by-gesture reproduction  of How B'wana  Simba  Killed His  Last Kudu
interrupted it long  enough  to  state  he would  only  hunt with  Abdullah.
Abdullah, the short, thick-nosed, educated one, was His Tracker. They always
hunted  together.  He himself  did  not track. He resumed the  pantomime  of
B'wana  Simba and another character known as  B'wana Doktor  and  the horned
beasts.
     'We'll take the  two savages as one lot and  these two Oxonians  as the
other,' Pop said.
     CHAPTER SEVEN

     In  the  morning  Karl and  his outfit  started  for the  saltlick  and
Garrick, Abdullah, M'Cola and I crossed the road, angled  behind the village
up a dry watercourse and started climbing the mountains in a mist. We headed
up  a pebbly, boulder-filled, dry stream bed  overgrown with vines and brush
so that,  climbing,  you walked, stooping, in  a steep tunnel of  vines  and
foliage. I  sweated  so that I was soaked through my shirt and undergarments
and when we came out on the shoulder of the mountain and stood, looking down
at the bank of clouds quilting  over the entire valley below us, the morning
breeze  chilled  me and I  had  to put on my  raincoat while we glassed  the
country. I  was too  wet with sweat to sit down and I signed Garrick to keep
on going. We went around one  side of the mountain, doubled back on a higher
grade and crossed over,  out  of  the sun  that was drying  my wet shirt and
along  the  top of a series of grassy  valleys, stopping to  search each one
thoroughly  with  the  field  glasses.  Finally  we   came  to  a   sort  of
amphitheatre,  a bowl-like valley of  very green grass  with a small  stream
down the middle and timber along the far side and all the lower edge. We sat
in the shadow against  some  rocks,  out  of  any breeze,  watching with the
glasses as  the sun  rose and  lighted the opposite slopes,  seeing two kudu
cows and a  calf feed out from the timber, moving with the quickly browsing,
then  head  lifted,  long-staring  vigilance of  all  browsing animals in  a
forest. Animals on a plain can see so far that they have confidence and feed
very differently from animals  in the woods. We could see the vertical white
stripes on their grey flanks and it was very satisfying to watch them and to
be high in the mountain that early in the morning.  Then,  while we watched,
there was a  boom,  like a  rockslide. I  thought at  first it was a boulder
falling, but M'Cola whispered.
     'B'wana Kibor! Piga!' We listened for another shot but we  did not hear
one and I {was}  sure Karl had his kudu. The cows we were watching had heard
the shot and stood, listening, then went  on  feeding. But they fed into the
timber. I remembered the old saying of  the Indian in camp, 'One shot, meat.
Two shots, maybe. Three shots, heap s -- t,' and I got out the dictionary to
translate  it for M'Cola.  However it  came out seemed to amuse him  and  he
laughed and shook his head.  We glassed that valley until the sun came on to
us,  then hunted around the other  side of the mountain and in another  fine
valley saw the place where the other B'wana, B'wana  Doktor he still sounded
like, had shot a  fine bull kudu, but a Masai walked  down the centre of the
valley while we were glassing it  and  when I pretended I was going to shoot
him Garrick became very dramatic insisting it was a man, a man, a man!
     'Don't shoot men?' I asked him.
     'No! No! No!' he said putting his hand to his head. I took the gun down
with great reluctance, clowning for M'Cola who was grinning, and it very hot
now, we walked across a  meadow  where the  grass was  knee  high  and truly
swarming with long, rose-coloured,  gauze-winged locusts that rose in clouds
about us, making a whirring like a mowing machine,  and climbing small hills
and going down a long steep slope, we made our  way back to camp to find the
air of the valley drifting with flying locusts and Karl already in camp with
Us kudu.
     Passing  the  skinner's  tent  he  showed  me  the  head which  looked,
body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and  heavy from
where the base of the  skull had been severed  from the  vertebral column, a
very strange and unfortunate kudu. Only the skin  running from the eyes down
to the nostrils, smooth grey and  delicately marked with white, and the big,
graceful  ears  were beautiful. The eyes were  already dusty and there  were
flies  around  them  and  the  horns  were  heavy, coarse,  and  instead  of
spiralling high they made  a heavy turn  and slanted  straight out. It was a
freak head, heavy and ugly.
     Pop was sitting under the dining tent smoking and reading.
     'Where's Karl?' I asked him.
     'In his tent, I think. What did you do?'
     'Worked around the hill. Saw a couple of cows.'
     'I'm awfully glad  you got him,'  I told Karl at the mouth of his tent.
'How was it?'
     'We  were in the blind and they  motioned  me  to keep my head down and
then when I looked up there he was right beside us. He looked huge.'
     'We heard you shoot. Where did you hit him?'
     'In the leg first, I think. Then we trailed him and finally I hit him a
couple of more times and we got him.'
     'I heard only one shot.'
     'There were three or four,' Karl said.
     'I guess the  mountain shut off some if  you were  gone  the other  way
trailing him. He's got a heavy beam and a big spread.'
     'Thanks,' Karl said.  'I hope you get a lot better one. They said there
was another one but I didn't see him.'
     I went back to the dining tent  where Pop and P.O.M. were. They did not
seem very elated about the kudu.
     'What's the matter with you?' I asked.
     'Did you see the head?' P.O.M. asked.
     'Sure.'
     'It's {awful} looking,' she said.
     'It's a kudu. He's got another one still to go.'
     'Charo and the trackers said  there was another  bull  with this one. A
big bull with a wonderful head.'
     'That's all right. I'll shoot him.'
     'If he ever comes back.'
     'It's fine he has one,' P.O.M. said.
     'I'll bet he'll get the biggest one ever known, now,' I said.
     'I'm sending him down with  Dan to the sable country,'  Pop said. 'That
was the  agreement. The  first to  kill a kudu to  get  first  crack  at the
sable.'
     'That's fine.'
     'Then as soon as you get your kudu we'll move down there too.'
     {'Good.'}

Part III
Pursuit and Failure

I

     That all seemed a  year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way
out to the  twenty-eight-mile  salt-lick, the sun on our faces,  just having
shot the guinea  fowl, having, in the last five days,  failed  on  the  lick
where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big  hills and the
small  hills, having failed on  the flats, losing a shot the night before on
this lick because of the Austrian's lorry, I  knew there were  only two days
more to hunt before we must leave. M'Cola knew it  too, and we were  hunting
together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a
shortness  of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were
saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.
     Kamau, the  driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who,
with an  old brown tweed coat some shooter had  discarded, trousers  heavily
patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed
always  to give an impression  of great  elegance. Kamau  was  very  modest,
quiet, and an  excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country
and into an open,  scrubby, desert-looking  stretch, I looked  at him, whose
elegance,  achieved  with an  old coat  and  a  safety pin,  whose  modesty,
pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first
were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would
have meant  nothing to me except that we would be  short a driver; while now
whenever or wherever  he should die I would feel badly. Then abandoning  the
sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what
a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the
look  on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then,
we put up another  flock of  guineas.  M'Cola handed nie  the shotgun and  I
shook my  head. He nodded violently and said, 'Good. Very Good', and I  told
Kamau  to go on. This confused Garrick  who began an oration. Didn't we want
guineas? Those  were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer
that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook
a bull off of it, by  a  shot, to  frighten him  in the way we  had seen the
lesser kudu  leave the  salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were  in
the blind.
     We  left  the lorry  under some scrubby trees about two miles from  the
lick and walked along the  sandy road towards the first salt place which was
in the open to the  left  of the  trail.  We had gone about a  mile  keeping
absolutely quiet and  walking in single file, Abdullah the educated  tracker
leading, then me, M'Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of
us. Where the sand was thin over the  clay there was a pool of water and you
could see that a heavy rain had drenched it  all on ahead. I did not realize
what  this meant  but  Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and
bared his teeth in anger.
     'It's no good,' M'Cola whispered.
     Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.
     'Shut up, you bastard,' I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on
talking in above normal tones  and I "looked up  'shut up' in the dictionary
while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn't  find  'shut
up' so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he
closed it in surprise.
     "Cola,' I said.
     'Yes,' said M'Cola.
     'What's the matter?'
     'Salt no good.'
     'Ah.'
     So that  was it. I had  thought of the rain only as something that made
tracking easy.
     'When the rain?' I asked.
     'Last night,' M'Cola said.
     Garrick  started to talk and I placed the  back of my  hand against his
mouth.
     "Cola.'
     'Yes.'
     'Other salt,' pointing  in the direction of the big  lick in the woods,
which I  knew was a good bit higher because  we  went  very slightly up hill
through the brush to reach it. 'Other salt good?'
     'Maybe.'
     M'Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed  deeply
hurt  but kept his mouth  shut and we went on down the  road, walking around
the wet places, to where, sure enough,  the deep depression of  the saltlick
was  half filled with  water. Garrick started to  whisper a  speech here but
M'Cola shut him up again.
     'Come on,' I said, and, M'Cola ahead, we started  trailing up the damp,
sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the  trees  to  the upper
lick.
     M'Cola  stopped  dead,  leaned  over  to look at  the  damp  sand, then
whispered, 'Man', to me. There was the track.
     'Shenzi,' he said, which meant a wild man.
     We  trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and  stalking  the
lick carefully, up and into the blind. M'Cola shook his head.
     'No good,' he said. 'Come on.'
     We went over to the lick. There  it was all written plainly. There were
the tracks  of three big bull kudu in  the moist bank beyond the  lick where
they had  come to the  salt. Then there were the  sudden, deep,  knifely-cut
tracks  where  they  made  a  spring when the bow  twanged and  the slashing
heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then,
far-spaced,  the tracks running into  the bush. We trailed them,  all three,
but no man's track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.
     M'Cola  said, 'Shenzi!' putting great hate  into the word. We picked up
the  shenzi's  tracks and  saw where he had gone  on  back  to the road.  We
settled down in the  blind and waited there  until it was  dark  and a light
rain  began to fall. Nothing came to  the salt. In the  rain we made our way
back to the lorry. Some  wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away
from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.
     Kamau had  rigged a tent out  of  a big canvas  ground cloth,  hung  my
mosquito  net inside,  and set up  the canvas cot.  M'Cola  brought the food
inside the shelter tent.
     Garrick and Abdullah built  a  fire and they, Kamau  and  M'Cola cooked
over it. They were going  to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I
undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate
a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a  couple of tin cups of  half whisky
and water.
     M'Cola came in, grave,  solicitous, and very awkward inside  a tent and
took my clothes out from where I had folded them to make a pillow and folded
them again, very  un-neatly, and  put  them under  the  blankets. He brought
three tins to see if I did not want them. opened.
     'No.'
     'Chai?' he asked.
     'The hell with it.'
     'No chai?'
     'Whisky better.'
     'Yes,' he said feelingly. 'Yes.'
     'Chai in the morning. Before the sun.'
     'Yes, B'wana M'Kumba.'
     'You sleep here. Out  of the rain.'  I pointed to the canvas  where the
rain  was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside  of houses,
ever hear. It was a lovely sound, even though it was hitching us.
     'Yes.'
     'Go on. Eat.'
     'Yes. No chai?'
     'The hell with tea.'
     'Whisky?' he asked hopefully.
     'Whisky finish.'
     'Whisky,' he said confidently.
     'All right,'  I said. 'Go eat,' and pouring  the cup half and half with
water got in under  the  mosquito bar,  found my clothes and again made them
into a pillow, and lying on my side drank the whisky very slowly, resting on
one elbow, then  dropped the  cup down under the bar on to  the ground, felt
under the cot for the Springfield, put the searchlight beside me in  the bed
under the  blanket,  and went to sleep listening to the rain.  I woke when I
heard M'Cola come in, make his bed  and go to sleep,  and I woke once in the
night and heard him  sleeping by me;  but  in the morning he  was up and had
made the tea before I was awake.
     'Chai,' he said, pulling on my blanket.
     'Bloody chai,' I said, sitting up still asleep.
     It was a grey, wet morning. The rain had stopped but the mist hung over
the ground  and we found the salt-lick  rained out and  not a track near it.
Then we hunted through  the wet scrub on the  flat hoping to find a track in
the soaked  earth and  trail a bull until  we could see him. There  were  no
tracks.  We  crossed the road and followed the edge  of the scrub  around  a
moor-like open stretch. I hoped we might find the rhino but while we came on
much  fresh  rhino dung  there  were no tracks since the rain. Once we heard
tick birds and looking up saw them  in jerky  flight above us headed  to the
northward over  the heavy scrub. We made  a  long  circle through there  but
found nothing but a fresh hyena track and a cow kudu track. In a tree M'Cola
pointed out a lesser kudu skull with one  beautiful, long, curling horn.  We
found the other horn below in the grass and I screwed it back on to its bone
base.
     'Shenzi,' M'Cola  said and imitated a man pulling a bow. The skull  was
quite  clean but the hollow horns  had  some  damp residue in them,  smelled
unbearably foul  and, giving no sign of having noticed  the stench, I handed
them to Garrick who promptly, without  sign gave them to  Abdullah. Abdullah
wrinkled  the  edge of his flat nose and shook his head. They really smelled
abominably. M'Cola and I grinned and Garrick looked virtuous.
     I  decided a  good idea might  be to drive along  the  road in the car,
watching for  kudu, and hunt any  likely-looking clearings. We  went back to
the car  and did this, working several clearings with  no luck. By then  the
sun  was  up  and  the  road  was  becoming  populous with travellers,  both
white-clothed and naked, and we decided to head for camp. On our way in,  we
stopped and stalked the other salt-lick. There was an  impalla on it looking
very red where the sun struck his hide in the patches between the grey trees
and there  were  many kudu tracks. We smoothed  them over  and drove on into
camp  to find a sky full  of locusts  passing over,  going to the  westward,
making the sky, as  you looked up, seem a pink dither of flickering passage,
flickering like an old cinema film, but pink instead of grey. P.O.M. and Pop
came out and were very disappointed. No rain had fallen in camp and they had
been sure we would have something when we came in.
     'Did my literary pal get off?'
     'Yes,' Pop said. 'He's gone into Handeni.'
     'He told me all about American women,' P.O.M. said. 'Poor old Poppa,  I
was sure you'd get one. Danin the rain.'
     'How are American women?'
     'He thinks they're terrible.'
     'Very sound fellow,' said Pop. 'Tell me just what happened to-day.'
     We sat in the shade of the dining tent and I told them.
     'A Wanderobo,' Pop said. 'They're frightful shots. Bad luck.'
     'I thought it might be one  of those travelling sportsmen you see  with
their bows  slung  going along  the road. He  saw the  lick  by the road and
trailed up to the other one.'
     'Not  very  likely.  They  carry  those  bows and arrows as protection.
They're not hunters.'
     'Well, whoever it was put it on us. '
     'Bad luck. That, and the  rain. I've had  scouts out  here on both  the
hills but they've seen nothing.'
     'Well, we're  not hitched  until  to-morrow  night. When  do we have to
leave?'
     'After to-morrow.'
     'That bloody savage.'
     'I suppose Karl is blasting up the sable down there.'
     'We  won't  be able  to get into  camp for  the horns.  Have you  heard
anything?'
     'No.'
     'I'm  going to  give up  smoking for  six months for  you to get  one,'
P.O.M. said. 'I've started already.'
     We had lunch and afterwards I went into the tent and lay down and read.
I knew we still had a chance on the lick in the  morning and I was not going
to worry about it. But I {was} worried and I did not want to go to sleep and
wake up feeling  dopey so I  came out  and sat  in one of the  canvas chairs
under the open dining tent  and read  somebody's life of Charles  the Second
and  looked up every once in a while to watch the locusts. The  locusts were
exciting to  see and it was difficult for me  to  take  them as a matter  of
course.
     Finally I  went  to sleep in the chair with my  feet on a  chop-box and
when  I woke  there was Garrick, the bastard, wearing a  large, very floppy,
black and white ostrich-plume head-dress.
     'Go away,' I said in English.
     He stood smirking proudly, then turned  so  I could see  the head-dress
from the side.
     I  saw Pop coming out of his tent with a pipe in his mouth.  'Look what
we have,' I called to him.
     He looked, said, 'Christ', and went back into the tent.
     'Come on,' I said. 'We'll just ignore it.'
     Pop came out,  finally, with  a book and we took no notice of Garrick's
head-dress at all, sitting and talking, while he posed with it.
     'Bastard's been drinking, too,' I said.
     'Probably.'
     'I can smell it.'
     Pop, without looking  at him, spoke a few words  to  Garrick in  a very
soft voice.
     'What did you tell him?'
     'To go and get dressed properly and be ready to start.'
     Garrick walked off, his plums waving.
     'Not the moment for his ostrich plumes,' Pop said.
     'Some people probably like them.'
     'That's it. Start photographing them.'
     'Awful,' I said.
     'Frightful,' Pop agreed.
     'On the last day if we  don't  get anything, I'm going to shoot Garrick
in the behind. What would that cost me?'
     'Might  make lots  of trouble. If you  shoot one, you have to shoot the
other, too.'
     'Only Garrick.'
     'Better not shoot then. Remember it's me you get into trouble.'
     'Joking, Pop.'
     Garrick, un-head-dressed and with Abdullah, appeared and Pop spoke with
them.
     'They want to hunt around the hill a new way.'
     'Splendid. When?'
     'Any time now. It looks like rain. You might get going.'
     I sent  Molo  for my  boots and a raincoat,  M'Cola  came out with  the
Springfield, and we  walked down to the  car. It had been heavily cloudy all
day although the sun had come through the clouds in the  forenoon for a time
and  again  at noon. The rains were moving up on us.  Now it was starting to
rain and the locusts were no longer flying.
     'I'm dopey with sleep,' I told Pop. 'I'm going to have a drink.'
     We were standing under the  big tree by the cooking fire with the light
rain pattering in the leaves. M'Cola brought the whisky flask and handed  it
to me very solemnly.
     'Have one?'
     'I don't see what harm it can do.'
     We both drank and Pop said, 'The hell with them'.
     'The hell with them.'
     'You may find some tracks.'
     'We'll run them out of the country.'
     In the car we turned to the right on the road, drove on up past the mud
village and turned off  the road to the left on to  a red, hard,  clay track
that circled  the edge of  the hills and was  close bordered on either  side
with trees. It was raining fairly hard now and we drove slowly. There seemed
to  be enough sand in the clay to keep the car from slipping. Suddenly, from
the back seat, Abdullah, very excited, told Kamau to stop. We stopped with a
skid, all got out, and  walked back.  There was a  freshly cut kudu track in
the wet clay. It could  not have been made more than five minutes  before as
it was sharp-edged and  the dirt,  that had been picked up by the inside  of
the hoof, was not yet softened by the rain.
     'Doumi,' Garrick said  and threw back his head and spread his arms wide
to show horns that hung back over his withers. 'Kubwa Sana!' Abdullah agreed
it was a bull; a huge bull.
     'Come on,' I said.
     It was easy tracking and  we knew we were close. In rain or snow it  is
much easier to come up close  to animals and I was sure we were going to get
a shot. We followed the tracks through thick brush and then out into an open
patch.  I  stopped  to wipe  the  rain off  my glasses  and blew through the
aperture in the rear sight of the Springfield. It was  raining hard now, and
I pulled my hat low down over my eyes to keep my glasses dry. We skirted the
edge of the open patch and then, ahead, there  was a crash and I saw a grey,
white-striped animal making  off  through  the brush. I threw the gun up and
M'Cola  grabbed  my arm, 'Manamouki!'  he  whispered. It was a cow kudu. But
when we came up  to where it had jumped there were no other tracks. The same
tracks we had followed led, logically and with no possibility of doubt, from
the road to that cow.
     'Doumi Kubwa Sana!' I said, full of sarcasm and disgust  to Garrick and
made a gesture of giant horns flowing back from behind his ears.
     'Manamouki Kubwa Sana,' he said very  sorrowfully and patiently.  'What
an enormous cow.'
     'You lousy  ostrich-plumed punk,' I  told  him  in English. 'Manamouki!
Manamouki! Manamouki!'
     'Manamouki,' said M'Cola and nodded his head.
     I got out the dictionary, couldn't find the words, and made it clear to
M'Cola with  signs that we would circle back in a long swing to the road and
see  if  we could find another track. We  circled back in the  rain, getting
thoroughly soaked,  saw nothing, found the car, and as the rain lessened and
the  roads  still  seemed firm decided to  go on until it was dark. Puffs of
cloud hung  on the hillside after the  rain and the trees dripped but we saw
nothing. Not in the open glades, not  in  the fields where the bush thinned,
not on the green hillsides.  Finally it was dark  and we went back  to camp.
.The Springfield was very  wet when we  got out of the car and I told M'Cola
to clean it carefully  and oil it  well. He said he would  and I went on and
into the tent  where a lantern was burning,  took off my clothes, had a bath
in  the  canvas tub and  came out to  the  fire comfortable and  relaxed  in
pyjamas, dressing-gown and mosquito boots.
     P.O.M.  and Pop were sitting in their chairs by the fire and P.O.M. got
up to make me a whisky and soda.
     'M'Cola told me,' Pop said from his chair by the fire.
     'A damned big cow,' I told him. 'I nearly busted her. What do you think
about the morning?'
     'The lick I suppose. We've scouts out to watch both of these hills. You
remember that  old man  from  the village? He's on a wild-goose  chase after
them in some country over beyond  the  hills.  He and the Wanderobo. They've
been gone three days.'
     'There's no reason why we shouldn't get one on the lick where Karl shot
his. One day is as good as another.'
     'Quite.'
     'It's the  last damned day though and the lick may  be rained  out.  As
soon as it's wet there's no salt. Just mud.'
     'That's it.'
     'I'd like to see one.'
     'When you  do,  take your time and make sure of him. Take your time and
kill him.'
     'I don't worry about that.'
     'Let's talk  about something  else,' P.O.M.  said. 'This  makes  me too
nervous.'
     'I wish we had old  Leather Pants,' Pop said. 'God, he was a talker. He
made the old man here talk too. Give us that spiel on modern writers again.'
     'Go to hell.'
     'Why don't  we have some  intellectual life?' P.O.M. asked.  'Why don't
you men ever discuss world topics? Why  am I kept in ignorance of everything
that goes on?'
     'World's in a hell of a shape,' Pop stated.
     'Awful.'
     'What's going on in America?'
     'Damned  if I know!  Some sort of Y.M.C.A. show.  Starry  eyed bastards
spending  money  that somebody will have to  pay. Everybody in our town quit
work  to  go on  relief. Fishermen  all turned  carpenters. Reverse  of  the
Bible.'
     'How are things in Turkey?'
     'Frightful.  Took  the  fezzes  away.  Hanged  any  amount of old pals.
Ismet's still around though.'
     'Been in France lately?'
     'Didn't like it. Gloomy as hell. Been a bad show there just now.'
     'By God,' said Pop, 'it must have been if you can believe the papers.'
     'When they riot they really riot. Hell, they've got a tradition.'
     'Were you in Spain for the revolution?'
     'I  got  there late.  Then we waited for two that didn't come. Then  we
missed another.'
     'Did you see the one in Cuba?'
     'From the start.'
     'How was it?'
     'Beautiful. Then lousy. You couldn't believe how lousy.'
     'Stop it,' P.O.M. said. 'I know about those things. I was crouched down
behind a marble-topped table while  they  were shooting in Havana. They came
by in cars shooting at everybody they saw. I took my drink with me and I was
very  proud  not  to have  spilled  it or forgotten  it. The  children said,
"Mother,  can we go out in the afternoon to see the shooting?"  They  got so
worked  up about  revolution  we  had  to  stop  mentioning it. Bumby got so
bloodthirsty about Mr. M. he had terrible dreams.'
     'Extraordinary,' Pop said.
     'Don't make  fun  of nie. I don't want to just  hear about revolutions.
All we see or hear is revolutions. I'm sick of them. '
     'The old man must like them.'
     'I'm sick of them.'
     'You know, I've never seen one,' Pop said.
     'They're beautiful. Really. For quite a while. Then they go bad.'
     'They're very exciting,' P.O.M. said. 'I'll admit that. But I'm sick of
them. Really, I don't care anything about them.'
     'I've been studying them a little.'
     'What did you find out?' Pop asked.
     'They  were all  very  different but  there  were some things you could
co-ordinate. I'm going to try to write a study of them.'
     'It could be damned interesting.'
     'If  you  have   enough  material.  You  need  an  awful  lot  of  past
performances. It's very hard to get  anything true  on anything  you haven't
seen  yourself because the ones  that fail  have  such  a bad press  and the
winners always  lie so. Then you can only  really follow anything  in places
where you speak the language.  That limits you of course. That's why I would
never go  to Russia.  When you can't overhear it's no  good. All you get are
handouts and sight-seeing. Any  one  who  knows  a  foreign language  in any
country is damned liable to lie to  you. You get your good dope  always from
the people and when you can't talk  with people and can't overhear you don't
get anything that's of anything but journalistic value.'
     'You want to knuckle down on your Swahili then.'
     'I'm trying to.'
     'Even then you  can't overhear because they're always talking their own
language.'
     'But  if  I ever write  anything about this  it  will just be landscape
painting until I know something about it. Your first seeing  of a country is
a very valuable one. Probably more valuable to yourself than to anyone else,
is the hell of it. But you ought to always write it to try to get it stated.
No matter what you do with it.'
     'Most of the damned Safari books are most awful bloody bores.'
     'They're terrible.'
     'The  only  one  I  ever liked  was  Streeter's.  What did he call  it?
{Denatured Africa}. He made you feel what it was like. That's the best.'
     'I liked  Charlie  Curtis's. It  was  very honest  and it  made  a fine
picture.'
     'That man  Streeter was  damned  funny though. Do  you remember when he
shot the kongoni?'
     'It was very funny.'
     'I've  never read anything, though, that  could make you feel about the
country  the way we feel about  it. They all  have Nairobi fast life or else
rot about shooting  beasts with horns half an inch longer than  someone else
shot. Or muck about danger.'
     'I'd like to try  to write  something about the country and the animals
and what it's like to someone who knows nothing about it.'
     'Have a try at it. Can't do any harm. You know I wrote a  diary of that
Alaskan trip.'
     'I'd love  to read it,' P.O.M. said. 'I  didn't know you were a writer,
Mr. J. P.'
     'No  bloody  fear,' said Pop. 'If you'd read it, though,  I'll send for
it.  You know it's just  what we did each day  and  how Alaska looked  to an
Englishman from Africa. It'd bore you.'
     'Not if you wrote it,' P.O.M. said.
     'Little woman's giving us compliments,' Pop said.
     'Not me. You.'
     'I've  read  things by him,' she said. 'I want to  read what Mr.  J. P.
writes.'
     'Is  the  old man really  a writer?' Pop  asked her.  CHAPTER TWO

     Molo waked  me  by  pulling  on  the blanket in the  morning and I  was
dressing, dressed, and out washing the  sleep  out of my eyes  before  I was
really awake. It was still  very  dark and  I could see Pop's back  shadowed
against the fire. I walked over holding the early morning cup of hot tea and
milk in my hand waiting for it to be cool enough to drink.
     'Morning,' I said.
     'Morning,' he answered in that husky whisper.
     'Sleep?'
     'Very well. Feeling fit?'
     'Sleepy is all.'
     I drank the tea and spat the leaves into the fire.
     'Tell your bloody fortune with those,' Pop said.
     'No fear.'
     Breakfast in the dark with  a lantern,  cool  juice-slippery  apricots,
hash, hot-centred, brown, and catsup  spread,  two  fried  eggs and the warm
promise-keeping coffee. On the third cup Pop, watching,  smoking  his  pipe,
said, 'Too early for me to face it yet.'
     'Get you?'
     'A little.'
     'I'm getting exercise,' I said. 'It doesn't bother me.'
     'Bloody  anecdotes,'  Pop  said.  'Memsahib  must   think  we're  silly
beggars.'
     'I'll think up some more.'
     'Nothing  better than drinking.  Don't know why it should make you feel
bad.'
     'Are you bad?'
     'Not too.'
     'Take a spot of Eno's?'
     'It's this damned riding in cars.'
     'Well, to-day's the day.'
     'Remember to take it very easy.'
     'You're not worried about that, are you?'
     'Just a touch.'
     'Don't. It never worries me a minute. Truly.'
     'Good. Better get going.'
     'Have to make a trip first.'
     Standing in front of the canvas circle of the latrine I looked, as each
morning, at that fuzzy blur of stars  that  the romanticists of  astronomers
called  the  Southern  Cross.  Each morning  at this  moment I observed  the
Southern Cross in solemn ceremony.
     Pop was at the car. M'Cola handed me the Springfield  and I got in  the
front. The  tragedian and  his tracker were in  the back. M'Cola  climbed in
with them.
     'Good  luck,' Pop  said. Someone  was coming from towards the tents. It
was P.O.M. in her blue robe and mosquito boots. '{Oh}, good luck,' she said.
{Please}, good luck.'
     I waved and we started, the headlights showing the way to the road.
     There was nothing on the salt when we  came up to it after leaving  the
car about three miles away and making a very careful stalk. Nothing came all
morning. We sat with our heads down in  the blind, each covering a different
direction through openings in the thatched withes, and always I expected the
miracle of a bull kudu coming majestic and beautiful  through the open scrub
to the grey, dusty  opening in  the trees where  the  salt  lick  was  worn,
grooved, and trampled. There were many trails to it through the trees and on
any one a bull  might come silently. But nothing came. When  the sun was  up
and we  were warmed after the misty  cold of  the morning I settled  my rump
deeper in  the  dust  and lay  back  against the wall  of  the hole, resting
against the small of my back  and my shoulders,  and still able to  see  out
through  the  slit  in the  blind. Putting the Springfield across my knees I
noticed that  there  was rust on the  barrel.  Slowly I pulled it along  and
looked at the muzzle. It was freshly brown with rust.
     'The bastard never cleaned it last night  after  that rain,' I thought,
and,  very  angry, I lifted the lug and  slipped  the bolt  out. M'Cola  was
watching me  with his head down. The  other two were looking out through the
blind. I held the rifle in one  hand for  him to look through the breech and
then put the  bolt back in and shoved it forward softly, lowering it with my
finger on the trigger so that it was ready to cock rather than keeping it on
the safety.
     M'Cola had seen the rusty bore. His face had not changed and I had said
nothing  but I was full of contempt and there had been indictment, evidence,
and condemnation without  a word  being spoken. So we sat there, he with his
head  bent so only  the bald top showed,  me leaning back  and  looking  out
through  the slit, and we were no longer  partners, no  longer good friends,
and nothing came to the salt.
     At  ten  o'clock the breeze, which had come  up  in the  east, began to
shift around and we knew it was no use. Our scent was being scattered in all
directions  around the blind as  sure  to frighten  any animals as though we
were revolving a searchlight in the dark. We  got up out  of the  blind  and
went over to look in the dust of the lick for tracks. The rain had moistened
it but it was not soaked and we saw several kudu tracks, probably made early
in  the night and  one big bull track, long,  narrow, heart-shaped, clearly,
deeply cut.
     We took  the  track  and followed it on the damp reddish earth for  two
hours  in thick  bush that was like second-growth timber at home. Finally we
had to  leave it  in stuff we could  not move  through. All this time  I was
angry  about the uncleaned rifle and yet happy  and  eager with anticipation
that we might jump the bull and  get a snap at him in the brush. But  we did
not  see him and now, in the big  heat of noon, we made three  long  circles
around some hills and finally came out into a meadow  full of little,  humpy
Masai  cattle  and, leaving  all shade behind, trailed back across  the open
country under the noon sun to the car.
     Kamau,  sitting in the car, had  seen  a kudu bull pass a hundred yards
away. He  was headed toward the saltlick at about nine o'clock when the wind
began  to  be tricky,  had evidently caught our scent and gone back into the
hills. Tired,  sweating,  and feeling  more  sunk than angry  now, I got  in
beside Kamau and we headed the car toward camp.  There  was only one evening
left now, and no reason to expect we would have any better luck than we were
having. As we came to  camp,  and the shade  of the heavy trees, cool  as  a
pool, I took the bolt out of the Springfield and handed the rifle, boltless,
to M'Cola without speaking or  looking at him. The bolt I  tossed inside the
opening of our tent on to my cot.
     Pop and P.O.M. were sitting under the dining tent.
     'No luck?' Pop asked gently.
     'Not a damn bit. Bull went by the car headed toward the salt. Must have
spooked off. We hunted all over hell.'
     'Didn't you see anything?' P.O.M. asked. 'Once we thought we heard  you
shoot.'
     'That was Garrick shooting his mouth off. Did the scouts get anything?'
     'Not a thing. We've been watching both hills.'
     'Hear from Karl?'
     'Not a word.'
     'I'd like to  have seen one,' I said. I was tired out and slipping into
bitterness fast. 'God damn them. What the hell did he have to blow that lick
to hell for  the first morning and gut-shoot a lousy bull and chase him  all
over the son-of-a-bitching country spooking it to holy bloody hell?'
     'Bastards,' said  P.O.M.,  staying with  me  in.  my  unreasonableness.
'Sonsabitches.'
     'You're a good girl,' I said. 'I'm all right. Or I will be.'
     'It's been. awful,' she said. 'Poor old Poppa.'
     'You have a drink,' Pop said. 'That's what you need.'
     'I've hunted them hard, Pop. I swear to God I have. I've enjoyed it and
I haven't worried up until to-day. I was so damned sure. Those damned tracks
all the time  -- what if I never see one? How do I know we can ever get back
here again?'
     'You'll  be back,' Pop  said. 'You don't have to  worry  about that. Go
ahead. Drink it.'
     'I'm just a lousy belly-aching bastard  but I swear they haven't gotten
on my nerves until to-day.'
     'Belly-ache,' said Pop. 'Better to get it out.'
     'What about lunch?' asked P.O.M. 'Aren't you frightfully hungry?'
     'The  hell with lunch. The thing is, Pop, we've  never seen them on the
salt in the evening and we've never seen  a bull in the hills. I've only got
to-night. It looks washed up. Three times  I've had them cold  and Karl  and
the Austrian and the Wanderobo beat us.'
     'We're not beaten,' said Pop. 'Drink another one of those.'
     We had lunch, a  very good lunch,  and it was just over when  Kati came
and said there  was someone  to  see Pop. We could see their shadows on  the
tent fly, then they came around to the front of the tent. It was the old man
of  the first day, the old farmer, but now he was gotten up as a  hunter and
carried a long bow and a sealed quiver of arrows.
     He looked older, more disreputable and tireder than ever and his get-up
was obviously a disguise. With him was the skinny, dirty, Wanderobo with the
slit and  curled up ears who stood  on one leg and scratched the back of his
knee with his toes. His head  was on one side and he had a  narrow, foolish,
and depraved-looking face.
     The old man was talking earnestly to Pop,  looking him in  the  eye and
speaking slowly, without gestures.
     'What's he done? Gotten himself up  like that  to get some of the scout
money?' I asked.
     'Wait,' Pop said.
     'Look at the pair  of  them,'  I said. 'That's goofy Wanderobo and that
lousy old fake. What's he say, Pop?'
     'He hasn't finished,' Pop said.
     Finally  the old man was  finished  and he  stood there leaning on  his
property bow.  They both looked  very  tired but  I  remember thinking  they
looked a couple of disgusting fakes.
     'He says,' Pop began, 'they have found a  country where there  are kudu
and sable. He has been there three days. They know where there is a big kudu
bull and he has a man watching him now.'
     'Do you believe it?' I could feel  the liquor and the fatigue drain out
of me and the excitement come in.
     'God knows,' said Pop.
     'How far away is the country?'
     'One  day's march. I suppose that's three  or four hours  in the car if
the car can go.'
     'Does he think the car can get in?'
     'None ever has been in but he thinks you can make it. '
     'When did they leave the man watching the kudu?'
     'This morning.'
     'Where are the sable?'
     'There in the hills.'
     'How do we get in?'
     'I can't  make  out  except that  you cross the  plain,  go around that
mountain and then  south. He says no one has  ever hunted there.  He  hunted
there when he was young. '
     'Do you believe it?'
     'Of course natives lie like hell, but he tells it very straight.'
     'Let's go.'
     'You'd  better start right away. Go as far  as  you  can in the car and
then use it for a base and hunt on from there. The Memsahib and I will break
camp in the morning, move the outfit and  go on to where Dan and Mr. T. are.
Once  the  outfit is over that  black  cotton stretch we're all right if the
rain  catches us. You come  on and join us. If  you're caught  we can always
send the  car back by Kandoa, if worst comes, and the  lorries down to Tanga
and around.'
     'Don't you want to come?'
     'No. You're better off alone on a show like this.  The  more people the
less game you'll see. You should hunt  kudu alone. I'll move the outfit  and
look after the little Memsahib.'
     'All right,' I said. 'And I don't have to take Garrick or Abdullah?'
     'Hell, no.  Take M'Cola, Kamau  and these two. I'll  teil Molo  to pack
your things. Go light as hell.'
     'God damn it, Pop. Do you think it could be true?'
     'Maybe,' said Pop. 'We have to play it.'
     'How do you say sable?'
     'Tarahalla.'
     'Valhalla, I can remember. Do the females have horns?'
     'Sure,  but you  can't make a mistake. The  bull  is black  and they're
brown. You can't go wrong.'
     'Has M'Cola ever seen one?'
     'I  don't  think so. You've got  four on your licence. Any time you can
better one, go ahead.'
     'Are they hard to kill?'
     'They're tough. They're  not like a kudu.  If you've  got one  down  be
careful how you walk up to him.'
     'What about time?'
     'We've got to get  out. Make  it back  to-morrow night if you  can. Use
your own judgment. I think this is the turning point. You'll get a kudu.'
     'Do you know what it's like?' I said. 'It's just like when we were kids
and we heard about a  river no one  had ever  fished out on the  huckleberry
plain beyond the Sturgeon and the Pigeon.'
     'How did the river turn out?'
     'Listen. We had a hell of a time to  get in and the night we got there,
just  before  dark, and saw it,  there was a deep  pool  and a long straight
stretch and the water so cold you couldn't keep your hand in it  and I threw
a cigarette butt in and a big trout hit it  and they kept snapping it up and
spitting it out as it floated until it went to pieces.'
     'Big trout?'
     'The biggest kind.'
     'God save us,' said Pop. 'What did you do then?'
     'Rigged up my rod  and made  a cast and it was dark,  and  there  was a
nighthawk  swooping around  and it was cold as a bastard and then I was fast
to three fish the second the flies hit the water.'
     'Did you land them?'
     'The three of them.'
     'You damned liar.'
     'I swear to God.'
     'I believe you. Tell  me  the  rest when you come back.  Were  they big
trout?'
     'The biggest bloody kind.'
     'God save us,' said Pop. 'You're going to get a kudu. Get started.'
     In the tent I found P.O.M. and told her.
     'Not really?'
     'Yes.'
     'Hurry up,' she said. 'Don't talk. Get started.'
     I  found  raincoat,  extra boots,  socks, bathrobe, bottle  of  quinine
tablets, citronella,  note  book,  a pencil,  my  solids, the  cameras,  the
emergency kit,  knife, matches,  extra  shirt and  undershirt, a  book,  two
candles, money, the flask . . .
     'What else?'
     'Have you got soap? Take a comb and a towel. Got handkerchiefs?'
     'All right.'
     Molo had  everything packed in a rucksack and I found my field glasses,
M'Cola taking Pop's big field glasses, a canteen with water and Kati sending
a chop-box with food. 'Take plenty of beer,' Pop said. 'You  can leave it in
the car. We're short on whisky but there's a bottle.'
     'How will that leave you?'
     'All right. There's more at the other camp. We sent two bottles on with
Mr. K.'
     'I'll only need the flask,' I said. 'We'll split the bottle.'
     'Take plenty of beer then. There's any amount of it.'
     'What's the bastard doing?' I said, pointing at Garrick who was getting
into the car.
     'He says you  and M'Cola wont be able  to talk  with the natives there.
You'll have to have some one to interpret.'
     'He's poison.'
     'You  {will}  need  someone  to  interpret  whatever  they  speak  into
Swahili.'
     'All  right. But  tell him he's not running the show  and to  keep  his
bloody mouth shut.'
     'We'll go to the  top of the hill  with you,' Pop said and  we  started
off,  the Wanderobo hanging to the side of the car.  'Going to pick  the old
man up in the village.'
     Everyone in camp was out to watch us go.
     'Have we plenty of salt?'
     'Yes.'
     Now we were standing by the  car on the road in the village waiting for
the old man and Garrick to come back from their huts. It was early afternoon
and the sky was  clouding over and I  was looking at P.O.M., very desirable,
cool, and  neat-looking in her khaki and her boots, her Stetson  on one side
of her head, and at Pop, big, thick, in the faded corduroy sleeveless jacket
that was almost white now from washing and the sun.
     'You be a good girl.'
     'Don't ever worry. I wish I could go.'
     'It's a one-man show,'  Pop said. 'You want to get in  fast  and do the
dirty and get out fast. You've a big load as it is.'
     The old man appeared and  got into the back of the car with M'Cola  who
was wearing my old khaki sleeveless, quail-shooting coat.
     'M'Cola's got the old man's coat,' Pop said.
     'He likes to carry things in the game pockets,' I said.
     M'Cola  saw  we  were  talking  about  him. I had forgotten  about  the
uncleaned rifle. Now I remembered it and said  to Pop, 'Ask him where he got
the new coat'.
     M'Cola grinned and said something.
     'He says it is his property.'
     I grinned at him  and he shook his old bald  head and it was understood
that I had said nothing about the rifle.
     'Where's that bastard Garrick?' I asked.
     Finally he came with his blanket and got in with M'Cola and the old man
behind. The Wanderobo sat with me in front beside Kamau.
     'That's  a lovely-looking friend  you have,'  P.O.M. said. 'You be good
too.'
     I kissed her good-bye and we whispered something.
     'Billing and cooing,' Pop said. 'Disgusting.'
     'Good-bye, you old bastard.'
     'Good-bye, you damned bullfighter.'
     'Good-bye, sweet.'
     'Good-bye and good luck.'
     'You've plenty of petrol and we'll leave some here,' Pop called.
     I waved and we were starting down hill through the village on  a narrow
track  that led  down and on to the  scrubby dry plain that spread out below
the two great blue hills.
     I looked  back as we went  down the hill  and saw the  two figures, the
tall thick  one and  the  small neat  one, each  wearing  big  Stetson hats,
silhouetted on the road as they walked back toward camp, then I looked ahead
at the dried-up, scrubby plain.