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Chapter five

It was a hot place to camp, under trees that had been girdled to kill

them so that the tsetse fly would leave, and there was hard hunting in the

hills, which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard climb before

you got up into them, and easy hunting on the wooded flats where you

wandered as though through a deer park. But everywhere were tsetse flies,

swarming around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms,

and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch and swished away at the back

of my neck as we walked and we hunted five days, from daylight until dark,

coming home after dark, dead tired but glad of the coolness and of the

darkness that stopped the tsetse from biting. We took turns hunting the

hills and the flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed a

very fine roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal feeling

about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it was someone's fault, the

guides, the choice of beat, the hills, these all betrayed him. The hills

punished him and he did not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would

get one and that the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about

the kudu complicated the hunting. He was never a climber and took real

punishment in the hills. I tried to take the bulk of the hill beats to

relieve him but I could see, now that he was tired he felt they probably

{were} in the hills and he was missing his chance.

In the five days I saw a dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull

with a string of cows. The cows were big, grey, striped-flanked antelope

with ridiculously small heads, big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that

moved them in big-bellied panic through the trees. The young bull had the

start of a spiral on his horns but they were short and dumpy and as he ran

past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he

was no more like a real bull than a spike elk is like a big, old,

thick-necked, dark-maned, wonder-horned, tawny-hided, beer-horse-built

bugler of a bull-elk.

Another time, headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in

the hills, the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped, moving animals,

against the sun at the top of the hill, showing only their flanks through

the trunks of the trees and said they were kudu bulls. We could not see the

horns and when we got up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the

rocky ground we could not find their tracks. But from the glimpse we had

they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been

bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl

find them the next day when we sent him there.

We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting along a ridge with a

steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented

us, and as we stood, perfectly quiet, M'Cola holding his hand on mine, we

watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, dark, full-necked,

a dark ruff on his neck, his horns up, trembling all over as his nostrils

widened searching for the scent. M'Cola was grinning, pressing his fingers

tight on my wrist and we watched the big buck shiver from the danger that he

could not locate. Then there was the distant, heavy boom of a native black

powder gun and the buck jumped and almost ran over us as he crashed up the

ridge.

Another day, with P.O.M. along, we had hunted all through the timbered

flat and come out to the edge of the plain where there were only clumps of

bush and san-seviera when we heard a deep, throaty, cough. I looked at

M'Cola.

'Simba, ' he said, and did not look pleased.

'Wapi? ' I whispered. 'Where? '

He pointed.

I whispered to P.O.M., 'It's a lion. Probably the one we heard early

this morning. You go back to those trees.'

We had heard a lion roaring just before daylight when we were getting

up.

'I'd rather stay with you.'

'It wouldn't be fair to Pop, ' I said. 'You wait back there.'

'All right. But you {will} be careful.'

'I won't take anything but a standing shot and I won't shoot unless I'm

sure of him.'

'All right.'

'Come on, ' I said to M'Cola.

He looked very grave and did not like it at all.

'Wapi Simba? ' I whispered.

'Here, ' he said dismally and pointed at the broken islands of thick,

green spiky cover. I motioned to one of the guides to go back with P.O.M.

and we watched them go back a couple of hundred yards to the edge of the

forest.

'Come on, ' I said. M'Cola shook his head without smiling but followed.

We went forward very slowly, looking into and trying to see through the

senseviera. We could see nothing. Then we heard the cough again, a little

ahead and to the right.

'{No}! ' M'Cola whispered. {'Hapana}, B'wana! '

'Come on, ' I said. I pointed my forefinger into my neck and wriggled

the thumb down. 'Kufa, ' I whispered, meaning that I would shoot the lion in

the neck and kill him dead. M'Cola shook his head, his face grave and

sweating. 'Hapana! ' he whispered.

There was an ant-hill ahead and we climbed the furrowed clay and from

the top looked all around. We could not make out anything in the green

cactus-like cover. I had believed we might see him from the anthill and

after we came down we went on for about two hundred yards into the broken

cactus. Once again we heard him cough ahead of us and once, a little farther

on, we heard a growl. It was very deep and very impressive. Since the ant

heap my heart had not been in it. Until that had failed I had believed I

might have a close and good shot and I knew that if I could kill one alone,

without Pop along, I would feel good about it for a long time. I had made up

my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him, I had killed

three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from

this one than the whole trip. I felt it was perfectly fair to Pop to take it

on as long as I had a chance to call the shot but what we were getting into

now was bad. He kept moving away as we came on, but slowly. Evidently he did

not want to move, having fed, probably, when we had heard him roaring in the

early morning, and he wanted to settle down now. M'Cola hated it. How much

of it was the responsibility he felt for me to Pop and how much was his own

acute feeling of misery about the dangerous game I did not know. But he felt

very miserable. Finally he put his hand on my shoulder, put his face almost

into mine and shook his head violently three times.

'Hapana! Hapana! Hapana! B'wana! ' he protested, sorrowed, and pleaded.

After all, I had no business taking him where I could not call the shot

and it was a profound personal relief to turn back.

'All right, ' I said. We turned around and came back out the same way we

had gone in, then crossed the open prairie to the trees where P.O.M. was

waiting.

'Did you see him? '

'No, ' I told her. 'We heard him three or four times.'

'Weren't you frightened? '

'Pea-less, ' I said, 'at the last. But I'd rather have shot him in there

than any damned thing in the world.'

'My, I'm glad you're back, ' she said. I got the dictionary out of my

pocket and made a sentence in pigeon Swahili. 'Like' was the word I wanted.

'M'Cola like Simba? '

M'Cola could grin again now and the smile moved the Chinese hairs at

the corner of his mouth.

'Hapana, ' he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. 'Hapana! '

'Hapana' is a negative.

'Shoot a kudu? ' I suggested.

'Good, ' said M'Cola feelingly in Swahili. 'Better. Best. Tendalla, yes.

Tendalla.'

But we never saw a kudu bull out of that camp and we left two days

later to go into Babati and then down to Kondoa and strike across country

toward Handeni and the coast.

I never liked that camp, nor the guides, nor the country. It had that

picked-over, shot-out feeling. We knew there were kudu there and the Prince

of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been three other

parties in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly defending

their crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket

it seemed odd that he should follow the baboons ten miles away from his

shamba up into the kudu hills to have a shot at them, and I was all for

pulling out and trying the new country toward Handeni where none of us had

ever been.

'Let's go then, ' Pop said.

It seemed this new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the open and

you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head,

blasted him over. Then there were sable and we agreed that whoever killed

the first kudu should move on in the sable country.

I was beginning to feel awfully good and Karl was very cheerful at the

prospect of this new miraculous country where they were so unsophisticated

that it was really a shame to topple them over.

We left, soon after daylight, ahead of the outfit, who were to strike

camp and follow in the two lorries. We stopped in Babati at the little hotel

overlooking the lake and bought some more Pan-Yan pickles and had some cold

beer. Then we started south on the Cape to Cairo road, here well graded,

smooth, and carefully cut through wooded hills overlooking the long yellow

stretch of plains of the Masai Steppes, down and through farming country,

where the dried-breasted old women and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed

old men hoed in the cornfields, through miles and dusty miles of this, and

then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land where the soil was blowing away

in clouds as you looked, into the tree-shaded, pretty, whitewashed, German

model-garrison town of Kandoa-Irangi.

We left M'Cola at the crossroads to hold up our lorries when they came,

put the car into some shade and visited the military cemetery. We intended

to call on the D.O. but they were at lunch, and we did not want to bother

them, so after the military cemetery, which was a pleasant, clean, well-kept

place and as good as another to be dead in, we had some beer under a tree in

shade that seemed liquid cool after the white glare of a sun that you could

feel the weight of on your neck and shoulders, started the car and went out

to the crossroads to pick up the lorries and head to the east into the new

country.