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CHAPTER TWO. We were out from under the shade of camp and along the sandy river of a
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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.
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