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CHAPTER TWO. I do not remember going to bed nor getting up, only being by the fire

I do not remember going to bed nor getting up, only being by the fire

in the grey before daylight, with a tin cup of hot tea in my hand and my

breakfast, on the stick, not looking nearly so admirable and very over-blown

with ashes. The Roman was standing making an oration with gestures in the

direction where the light was beginning to show and I remember wondering if

the bastard had talked all night.

The head skins were all spread and neatly salted and the skulls with

the horns were leaning against the log and stick house. M'Cola was folding

the head skins. Kamau brought me the tins and I told him to open one of

fruit. It was cold from the night and the mixed fruit and the cold syrupy

juice sucked down smoothly. I drank another cup of tea, went in the tent,

dressed, put on my dry boots and we were ready to start. The Roman had said

we would be back before lunch.

We had the Roman's brother as guide. The Roman was going, as near as I

could make out, to spy on one of the herds of sable and we were going to

locate the other. We started out with the brother ahead, wearing a toga and

carrying a spear, then me with the Springfield slung and my small Zeiss

glasses in my pocket, then M'Cola with Pop's glasses, slung on one side,

water canteen on the other, skinning knife, whetstone, extra box of

cartridges, and cakes of chocolates in his pockets, and the big gun over his

shoulder, then the old man with the Graflex, Garrick with the movie camera,

and the Wanderobo-Masai with a spear and bow and arrows.

We said good-bye to the Roman and started out of the thorn-bush fence

just as the sun came through the gap in the hills and shone on the

cornfield, the huts and the blue hills beyond. It promised to be a fine

clear day.

The brother led the way through some heavy brush that soaked us all;

then through the open forest, then steeply uphill until we were well up on

the slope that rose behind the edge of the field where we were camped. Then

we were on a good smooth trail that graded back into these hills above which

the sun had not yet risen. I was enjoying the early morning, still a little

sleepy, going along a little mechanically and starting to think that we were

a very big outfit to hunt quietly, although everyone seemed to move quietly

enough, when we saw two people coming towards us.

They were a tall, good-looking man with features like the Roman's, but

slightly less noble, wearing a toga and carrying a bow and quiver of arrows,

and behind him, his wife, very pretty, very modest, very wifely, wearing a

garment of brown tanned skins and neck ornament of concentric copper wire

circles and many wire circles on her arms and ankles. We halted, said

'Jambo', and the brother talked to this seeming tribesman who had the air of

a business man on the way to his office in the city and, as they spoke in

rapid question and answer, I watched the most freshly brideful wife who

stood a little in profile so that I saw her pretty pear-shaped breasts and

the long, clean niggery legs and was studying her pleasant profile most

profitably until her husband spoke to her suddenly and sharply, then in

explanation and quiet command, and she moved around us, her eyes down, and

went on along the trail that we had come, alone, we all watching her. The

husband was going on with us, it seemed. He had seen the sable that morning

and, slightly suspicious, obviously displeased at leaving that now

out-of-sight wife of wives that we all had taken with our eyes, he led us

off and to the right along another trail, well-worn and smooth, through

woods that looked like fall at home and where you might expect to flush a

grouse and have him whirr off to the other hill or pitch down in the valley.

So, sure enough we put up partridges and, watching them fly, I was

thinking all the country in the world is the same country and all hunters

are the same people. Then we saw a fresh kudu track beside the trail and

then, as we moved through the early morning woods, no undergrowth now, the

first sun coming through the tops of the trees, we came on the ever miracle

of elephant tracks, each one as big around as the circle you make with your

arms putting your hands together, and sunk a foot deep in the loam of the

forest floor, where some bull had passed, travelling after rain. Looking at

the way the tracks graded down through the pleasant forest I thought that we

had the mammoths too, a long time ago, and when they travelled through the

hills in southern Illinois they made these same tracks. It was just that we

were an older country in America and the biggest game was gone.

We kept along the face of this hill on a pleasant sort of jutting

plateau and then came out to the edge of the hill where there was a valley

and a long open meadow with timber on the far side and a circle of hills at

its upper end where another valley went off to the left. We stood in the

edge of the timber on the face of this hill looking across the meadow valley

which extended to the open out in a steep sort of grassy basin at the upper

end where it was backed by the hills. To our left there were steep, rounded,

wooded hills, with outcroppings of limestone rock that ran, from where we

stood, up to the very head of the valley, and there formed part of the other

range of hills that headed it. Below us, to the right, the country was rough

and broken in hills and stretches of meadow and then a steep fall of timber

that ran to the blue hills we had seen to the westward beyond the huts where

the Roman and his family lived. I judged camp to be straight down below us

and about five miles to the north-west through the timber.

The husband was standing, talking to the brother and gesturing and

pointing out that he had seen the sable feeding on the opposite side of the

meadow valley and that they must have fed either up or down the valley. We

sat in the shelter of the trees and sent the Wanderobo-Masai down into the

valley to look for tracks. He came back and reported there were no tracks

leading down the valley below us and to the westward, so we knew they had

fed on up the meadow valley.

Now the problem was to so use the terrain that we might locate them,

and get up and into range of them without being seen. The sun was coming

over the hills at the head of the valley and shone on us while everything at

the head of the valley was in heavy shadow. I told the outfit to stay where

they were in the woods, except for M'Cola and the husband who would go with

me, we keeping in the timber and grading up our side of the valley until we

could be above and see into the pocket of the curve at the upper end to

glass it for the sable.

You ask how this was discussed, worked out, and understood with the bar

of language, and I say it was as freely discussed and clearly understood as

though we were a cavalry patrol all speaking the same language. We were all

hunters except, possibly, Garrick, and the whole thing could be worked out,

understood, and agreed to without using anything but a forefinger to signal

and a hand to caution. We left them and worked very carefully ahead, well

back in the timber to get height. Then, when we were far enough up and

along, we crawled out on to a rocky place and, being behind rock, shielding

the glasses with my hat so they would not reflect the sun, M'Cola nodding

and grunting as he saw the practicability of that, we glassed the opposite

side of the meadow around the edge of the timber, and up into the pocket at

the head of the valley; and there they were. M'Cola saw them just before I

did and pulled my sleeve.

'N'Dio, ' I said. Then I held my breath to watch them. All looked very

black, big necked, and heavy. All had the back-curving horns. They were a

long way away. Some were lying down. One was standing. We could see seven.

'Where's the bull? ' I whispered.

M'Cola motioned with his left hand and counted four fingers. It was one

of those lying down in the tall grass and the animal did look much bigger

and the horns much more sweeping. But we were looking into the morning sun

and it was hard to see well. Behind them a sort of gully ran up into the

hill that blocked the end of the valley.

Now we knew what we had to do. We must go back, cross the meadow far

enough down so we were out of sight, get into the timber on the far side and

work along through the timber to get above the sable. First we must try to

make sure there were no more of them in the timber or the meadow that we

must work through before we made our stalk.

I wet my finger and put it up. From the cool side it seemed as though

the breeze came down the valley. M'Cola took some dead leaves and crumpled

them and tossed them up. They fell a little toward us. The wind was all

right and now we must glass the edge of the timber and check on it.

'Hapana, ' M'Cola said finally. I had seen nothing either and my eyes

ached from the pull of the eight-power glasses. We could take a chance on

the timber. We might jump something and spook the sable but we had to take

that chance to get around and above them.

We made our way back and down and told the others. From where they were

we could cross the valley out of sight of its upper end and bending low, me

with {my} hat off, we headed down into the high meadow grass and across the

deeply cut watercourse that ran down through the centre of the meadow,

across its rocky shelf, and up the grassy bank on the other side, keeping

under the edge of a fold of the valley into the shelter of the woods. Then

we headed up through the woods, crouched, in single file, to try to get

above the sable.

We went forward making as good time as we could and still move quietly.

I had made too many stalks on big horn sheep only to find them fed away and

out of sight when you came round the shoulder of the mountain to trust these

sable to stay where they were and, since once we were in the timber we could

no longer see them, I thought it was important that we come up above them as

fast as we could without getting me too blown and shaky for the shooting.

M'Cola's water bottle made a noise against the cartridges in his pocket

and I stopped and had him pass it to the Wanderobo-Masai. It seemed too many

people to be hunting with, but they all moved quietly as snakes, and I was

over-confident anyway. I was sure the sable could not see us in the forest,

nor wind us.

Finally I was certain we were above them and that they must be ahead of

us, and past where the sun was shining in a thinning of the forest, and

below us, under the edge of the hill, I checked on the aperture in the sight

being clean, cleaned my glasses and wiped the sweat from my forehead

remembering to put the used handkerchief in my left pocket so I would not

fog my glasses wiping them with it again. M'Cola and I and the husband

started to work our way to the edge of the timber; finally crawling almost

to the edge of the ridge. There were still some trees between us and the

open meadow below and we were behind a small bush and a fallen tree when,

raising our heads, we could see them in the grassy open, about three hundred

yards away, showing big and very dark in the shadow. Between us was

scattered open timber full of sunlight and the openness of the gulch. As we

watched two got to their feet and seemed to be standing looking at us. The

shot was possible but it was too long to be certain and as I lay, watching,

I felt somebody touch me on the arm and Garrick, who had crawled up,

whispered throatily, 'Piga! Piga, B'wana! Doumi! Doumi! ' saying to shoot,

that it was a bull. I glanced back and there were the whole outfit on their

bellies or hands and knees, the Wanderobo-Masai shaking like a bird dog. I

was furious and motioned them all down.

So that was a bull, eh, well there was a much bigger bull that M'Cola

and I had seen lying down. The two sable were watching us and I dropped my

head, I thought they might be getting a flash from my glasses. When I looked

up again, very slowly, I shaded my eyes with my hand. The two sable had

stopped looking and were feeding. But one looked up again nervously and I

saw the dark, heavy-built antelope with scimitar-like horns swung back

staring at us.

I had never seen a sable. I knew nothing about them, neither whether

their eyesight was keen, like a ram who sees you at whatever distance you

see him, or like a bull elk who cannot see you at two hundred yards unless

you move. I was not sure of their size either, but I judged the range to be

all of three hundred yards. I knew I could hit one if I shot from a sitting

position or prone, but I could not say where I would hit him.

Then Garrick again, 'Piga, B'wana, Piga! ' I turned on him as though to

slug him in the mouth. It would have been a great comfort to do it. I truly

was not nervous when I first saw the sable, but Garrick was making me

nervous.

'Far? ' I whispered to M'Cola who had crawled up and was lying by me.

'Yes.'

'Shoot? '

'No. Glasses.'

We both watched, using the glasses guardedly. I could only see four.

There had been seven. If that was a bull that Garrick pointed out, then they

were all bulls. They all looked the same colour in the shadow. Their horns

all looked big to me. I knew that with mountain sheep the rams all kept

together in bunches until late in the winter when they went with the ewes;

that in the late summer you found bull elk in bunches too, before the

rutting season, and that later they herded up together again. We had seen as

many as twenty impalla rams together upon the Serenea. All right, then, they

could all be bulls, but I wanted a good one, the best one, and I tried to

remember having read something about them, but all I could remember was a

silly story of some man seeing the same bull every morning in the same place

and never getting up on him. All I could remember was the wonderful pair of

horns we had seen in the Game Warden's office in Arusha. And here were sable

now, and I must play it right and get the best one. It never occurred to me

that Garrick had never seen a sable and that he knew no more about them than

M'Cola or I.

'Too far, ' I said to M'Cola.

'Yes.'

'Come on, ' I said, then waved the others down, and we started crawling

up to reach the edge of the hill.

Finally we lay behind a tree and I looked around it. Now we could see

their horns clearly with the glasses and could see the other three. One,

lying down, was certainly much the biggest and the horns, as I caught them

in silhouette, seemed to curve much higher and farther back. I was studying

them, too excited to be happy as I watched them, when I heard M'Cola whisper

'B'wana.'

I lowered the glasses and looked and there was Garrick, taking no

advantage of the cover, crawling on his hands and knees out to join us. I

put my hand out, palm toward him, and waved him down but he paid no

attention and came crawling on, as conspicuous as a man walking down a city

street on hands and knees. I saw one sable looking toward us, toward him,

rather. Then three more got to their feet. Then the big one got up and stood

broadside with head turned toward us as Garrick came up whispering, 'Piga,

B'wana! Piga! Doumi! Doumi! Kubwa Sana.'

There was no choice now. They were definitely spooked and I lay out

flat on my belly, put my arm through the sling, got my elbows settled and my

right toe pushing the ground and squeezed off on the centre of the bull's

shoulder. But at the roar I knew it was bad. I was over him. They all jumped

and stood looking, not knowing where the noise came from. I shot again at

the bull and threw dirt all over him and they were off. I was on my feet and

hit him as he ran and he was down. Then he was up and I hit him again and he

took it and was in the bunch. They passed him and I shot and was behind him.

Then I hit him again and he was trailing slowly and I knew I had him. M'Cola

was handing me cartridges and I was shoving shells down into the

damned-to-hell, lousy, staggered, Springfield magazine watching the sable

making heavy weather of it crossing the watercourse. We had him all right. I

could see he was very sick. The others were trailing up into the timber. In

the sunlight on the other side they looked much lighter and the one I'd shot

looked lighter, too. They looked a dark chestnut and the one I had shot was

almost black. But he was not black and I felt there was something wrong. I

shoved the last shell in and Garrick was trying to grab my hand to

congratulate me when, below us across the open space where the gully that we

could not see opened on to the head of the valley, sable started to pass at

a running stampede.

'Good God, ' I thought. They all looked like the one I had shot and I

was trying to pick a big one. They all looked about the same and they were

crowding running and then came the bull. Even in the shadow he was a dead

black and shiny as he hit the sun, and his horns swept up high, then back,

huge and dark, in two great curves nearly touching the middle of his back.

He was a bull all right. God, what a bull.

'Doumi, ' said M'Cola in my ear. 'Doumi! '

I hit him and at the roar he was down. I saw him up, the others

passing, spreading out, then bunching. I missed him. Then I saw him going

almost straight away up the valley in the tall grass and I hit him again and

he went out of sight. The sable now were going up the hill at the head of

the valley, up the hill at our right, up the hill in the timber across the

valley, spread out and travelling fast. Now that I had seen a bull I knew

they all were cows including the first one I had shot. The bull never showed

and I was absolutely sure that we would find him where I had seen him go

down in the long grass.

The outfit were all up and I shook off handshaking and thumb pulling

before we started down through the trees and over the edge of the gully and

to the meadow on a dead run. My eyes, my mind, and all inside of me were

full of the blackness of that sable bull and the sweep of those horns and I

was thanking God I had the rifle reloaded before he came out. But it was

excited shooting, all of it, and I was not proud of it. I had gotten excited

and shot at the whole animal instead of the right place and I was ashamed,

but the outfit now were drunk excited. I would have walked but you could not

hold them, they were like a pack of dogs as we ran. As we crossed the meadow

opening where we had first seen the seven and went beyond where the bull had

gone out of sight, the grass suddenly was high and over our heads and every

one slowed down. There were two washed-out concealed ravines ten or twelve

feet deep that ran down to the watercourse and what had looked a smooth

grass-filled basin was very broken, tricky country with grass that was from

waist-high to well above our heads. We found blood at once and it led off to

the left, across the watercourse and up the hillside on the left toward the

head of the valley. I thought that was the first sable but it seemed a wider

swing than he had seemed to make when we watched him going from above in the

timber. I made a circle to look for the big bull but I could not pick his

track from the mass of tracks and in the high grass and the broken terrain

it was difficult to figure just where he had gone.

They were all for the blood spoor and it was like trying to make

badly-trained bird dogs hunt a dead bird when they are crazy to be off after

the rest of the covey.

'Doumi! Doumi! ' I said. 'Kubwa Sana! The bull. The big bull.'

'Yes, ' everybody agreed. 'Here! Here! ' The blood spoor that crossed the

watercourse.

Finally I took that trail thinking we must get them one at a time, and

knowing this one was hard hit and the other would keep. Then, too, I might

be wrong and this might be the big bull, he might possibly have turned in

the high grass and crossed here as we were running down. I had been wrong

before, I remembered.

We trailed fast up the hillside, into the timber, the blood was

splashed freely; made a turn toward the right, climbing steeply, and at the

head of the valley in some large rocks jumped a sable. It went scrambling

and bounding off through the rocks. I saw in an instant that it was not hit

and knew that, in spite of the back-swung dark horns, it was a cow from the

dark chestnut colour. But I saw this just in time to keep from shooting. I

had started to pull when I lowered the rifle.

'Manamouki, ' I said. 'It's a cow.'

M'Cola and the two Roman guides agreed. I had very nearly shot. We went

on perhaps five yards and another sable jumped. But this one was swaying its

head wildly and could not clear the rocks. It was hard hit and I took my

time, shot carefully, and broke its neck.

We came up to it, lying in the rocks, a large, deep chestnut-brown

animal, almost black, the horns black and curving handsomely back, there was

a white patch on the muzzle and back from the eye, there was a white belly;

but it was no bull.

M'Cola, still in doubt, verified this and feeling the short,

rudimentary teats said 'Manamouki', and shook his head sadly.

It was the first big bull that Garrick had pointed out.

'Bull down there, ' I pointed.

'Yes, ' said M'Cola.

I thought that we would give him time to get sick, if he were only

wounded, and then go down and find him. So I had M'Cola make the cuts for

taking off the head skin and we would leave the old man to skin out the head

while we went down after the bull.

I drank some water from the canteen. I was thirsty after the run and

the climb, and the sun was up now and it was getting hot. Then we went down

the opposite side of the valley from that we had just come up trailing the

wounded cow, and below, in the tall grass, casting in circles, commenced to

hunt for the trail of the bull. We could not find it.

The sable had been running in a bunch as they came out and any

individual track was confused or obliterated. We found some blood on the

grass stems where I had first hit him, then lost it, then found it again

where the other blood spoor turned off. Then the tracks had all split up as

they had gone, fan-wise, up the valley and the hills and we could not find

it again. Finally I found blood on a grass blade about fifty yards up the

valley and I plucked it and held it up. This was a mistake. I should have

brought them to it. Already everyone but M'Cola was losing faith in the

bull.

He was not there. He had disappeared. He had vanished. Perhaps he had

never existed. Who could say he was a real bull? If I had not plucked the

grass with the blood on it I might have held them. Growing there with blood

on it, it was evidence. Plucked, it meant nothing except to me and to

M'Cola. But I could find no more blood and they were all hunting

half-heartedly now. The only possible way was to quarter every foot of the

high grass and trace every foot of the gullies. It was very hot now and they

were only making a pretence of hunting.

Garrick came up. 'All cows, ' he said. 'No bull. Just biggest cow. You

killed biggest cow. We found her. Smaller cow get away.'

'You wind-blown son of a bitch, ' I said, then, using my fingers.

'Listen. Seven cows. Then fifteen cows and one bull. Bull hit. Here.'

'All cows, ' said Garrick.

'One big cow hit. One bull hit.'

I was so sure sounding that they agreed to this and searched for a

while but I could see they were losing belief in the bull.

'If I had one good dog, ' I thought. 'Just one good dog.'

Then Garrick came up. 'All cows, ' he said. 'Very big cows.'

'You're a cow, ' I said. 'Very big cow.'

This got a laugh from the Wanderobo-Masai, who was getting to look a

picture of sick misery. The brother half believed in the bull, I could see.

Husband, by now, did not believe in any of us. I didn't think he even

believed in the kudu of the night before. Well, after this shooting, I did

not blame him.

M'Cola came up. 'Hapana, ' he said glumly. Then, 'B'wana, you shot that

bull? '

'Yes, ' I said. For a minute I began to doubt whether there ever was a

bull. Then I saw again his heavy, high-withered blackness and the high rise

of his horns before they swept back, him running with the bunch, shoulder

higher than them and black as hell and as I saw it, M'Cola saw it again too

through the rising mist of the savage's unbelief in what he can no longer

see.

'Yes, ' M'Cola agreed. 'I see him. You shoot him.'

I told it again. 'Seven cows. Shoot biggest. Fifteen cows, one bull.

Hit that bull.'

They all believed it now for a moment and circled, searching, but the

faith died at once in the heat of the sun and the tall grass blowing.

'All cows, ' Garrick said. The Wanderobo-Masai nodded, his mouth open. I

could feel the comfortable lack of faith coming over me too. It was a damned

sight easier not to hunt in that sun in that shadeless pocket and in the sun

on that steep hillside. I told M'Cola we would hunt up the valley on both

sides, finish skinning out the head, and he and I would come down alone and

find the bull. You could not hunt them against that unbelief. I had had no

chance to train them; no power to discipline. If there had been no law I

would have shot Garrick and they would all have hunted or cleared out. I

think they would have hunted. Garrick was not popular. He was simply poison.

M'Cola and I came back down the valley, quartered it like bird dogs,

circled and followed and checked track after track. I was hot and very

thirsty. The sun was something serious by now.

'Hapana, ' M'Cola said. We could not find him. Whatever he was, we had

lost him.

'Maybe he was a cow. Maybe it was all goofy, ' I thought, letting the

unbelief come in as a comfort. We were going to hunt up the hillside to the

right and then we would have checked it all and would take the cow head into

camp and see what the Roman had located.

I was dead thirsty and drained the canteen. We would get water in camp.

We started up the hill and I jumped a sable in some brush. I almost

loosed off at it before I saw it was a cow. That showed how one could be

hidden, I thought. We would have to get the men and go over it all again;

and then, from the old man, came a wild shouting.

'Doumi! Doumi! ' in a high, screaming shout.

'Where? ' I shouted, running across the hill toward him.

'There! There! ' he shouted, pointing into the timber on the other side

of the head of the valley. 'There! There! There he goes! There! '

We came on a dead run but the bull was out of sight in the timber on

the hillside. The old man said he was huge, he was black, he had great

horns, and he came by him ten yards away, hit in two places, in the gut and

high up in the rump, hard hit but going fast, crossing the valley, through

the boulders and going up the hillside.

I gut-shot him, I thought. Then as he was going away I laid that one on

his stern. He lay down and was sick and we missed him. Then, when we were

past, he jumped.

'Come on, ' I said. Everyone was excited and ready to go now and the old

man was chattering about the bull as he folded the head skin and put the

head upon his own head and we started across through the rocks and up,

quartering up on to the hillside. There, where the old man had pointed, was

a very big sable track, the hoof marks spread wide, the tracks grading up

into the timber and there was blood, plenty of it.

We trailed him fast, hoping to jump him and have a shot, and it was

easy trailing in the shade of the trees with plenty of blood to follow. But

he kept climbing, grading up around the hill, and he was travelling fast. We

kept the blood bright and wet but we could not come up on him. I did not

track but kept watching ahead thinking I might see him as he looked back, or

see him down, or cutting down across the hill through the timber, and M'Cola

and Garrick were tracking, aided by every one but the old man who staggered

along with the sable skull and head skin held on his own grey head. M'Cola

had hung the empty water bottle on him, and Garrick had loaded him with the

cinema camera. It was hard going for the old man.

Once we came on a place where the bull had rested and watched his back

track, there was a little pool of blood on a rock where he had stood, behind

some bushes, and I cursed the wind that blew our scent on ahead of us. There

was a big breeze blowing now and I was certain we had no chance of

surprising him, our scent would keep everything moving out of the way ahead

of us as long as anything could move. I thought of trying to circle ahead

with M'Cola and let them track but we were moving fast, the blood was still

bright on the stones and on the fallen leaves and grass and the hills were

too steep for us to make a circle. I did not see how we could lose him.

Then he took us up and into a rocky, ravine-cut country where the

trailing was slow and the climbing difficult. Here, I thought, we would jump

him in a gully but the spatters of blood, not so bright now, went on around

the boulders, over the rocks and up and up and left us on a rim-rock ledge.

He must have gone down from there. It was too steep above for him. to have

gone over the top of the hill. There was no other way to go but down, but

how had he gone, and down which ravine? I sent them looking down three

possible ways and got out on the rim to try to sight him. They could not

find any spoor, and then the Wanderobo-Masai called from below and to the

right that he had blood and, climbing down,. we saw it on a rock and then

followed it in occasional drying splatters down through a steep descent to

the meadow below. I was encouraged when he started down hill and in the

knee-high, heavy grass of the meadow trailing was easy again, because the

grass brushed against his belly and while you could not see tracks clearly

without stooping double and parting the grass to look, yet the blood spoor

was plain on the grass blades. But it was dry now and dully shiny and I knew

we had lost much time on him when he rim-rocked us on the hill.

Finally his trail crossed the dry watercourse about where we had first

come in sight of the meadow in the morning and led away into the sloping,

sparsely-wooded country on the far side. There were no clouds and I could

feel the sun now, not just as heat but as a heavy deadly weight on my head

and I was very thirsty. It was very hot but it was not the heat that

bothered. It was the weight of the sun.

Garrick had given up tracking seriously and was only contributing

theatrical successes of discovering blood when M'Cola and I were checked. He

would do no routine tracking any more, but would rest and then track in

irritating spurts. The Wanderobo-Masai was useless as a blue-jay and I had

M'Cola give him the big rifle to carry so that we would get some use out of

him. The Roman's brother was obviously not a hunter and the husband was not

very interested. He did not seem to be a hunter either. As we trailed,

slowly, the ground, hard now as the sun had baked it, the blood only black

spots and splatters on the short grass, one by one the brother, Garrick, and

the Wanderobo-Masai dropped out and sat in the shade of the scattered trees.

The sun was terrific and as it was necessary to track with heads bent

down and stooping, in spite of a handkerchief spread over my neck I had a

pounding ache in my head.

M'Cola was tracking slowly, steadily, and absolutely absorbed in the

problem. His bare, bald head gleamed with sweat and when it ran down in his

eyes he would pluck a grass stem, hold it with each hand and shave the sweat

off his forehead and bald black crown with the stem.

We went on slowly. I had always sworn to Pop that I could out-track

M'Cola but I realized now that in the past I had been giving a sort of

Garrick performance in picking up the spoor when it was lost and that in

straight, steady trailing, now in the heat, with the sun really bad, truly

bad so that you could feel what it was doing to your head, cooking it to

hell, trailing in short grass on hard ground where a blood spot was a dry,

black blister on a grass blade, difficult to see; that you must find the

next little black spot perhaps twenty yards away, one holding the last blood

while the other found the next, then going on, one on each side of the

trail; pointing with a grass stem at the spots to save talking, until it ran

out again and you marked the last bood with your eye and both made casts to

pick it up again, signalling with a hand up, my mouth too dry to talk, a

heat shimmer over the ground now when you straightened up to let your neck

stop aching and looked ahead, I knew M'Cola was immeasurably the better man

and the better tracker. Have to tell Pop, I thought.

At this point M'Cola made a joke. My mouth was so dry that it was hard

to talk.

'B'wana, ' M'Cola said, looking at me when I had straiglitened up and

was leaning my neck back to get the crick out of it.

'Yes? '

'Whisky? ' and he offered me the flask.

'You bastard, ' I said in English, and he chuckled and shook his head.

'Hapana whisky? '

'You savage, ' I said in Swahili.

We started tracking again, M'Cola shaking his head and very amused, and

in a little while the grass was longer and it was easier again. We crossed

all that semi-open country we had seen from the hillside in the morning and

going down a slope the tracks swung back into high grass. In this higher

grass I found that by half shutting my eyes I could see his trail where he

had shouldered through the grass and I went ahead fast without trailing by

the blood, to M'Cola's amazement, but then we came out on very short grass

and rock again and now the trailing was the hardest yet.

He was not bleeding much now; the sun and the heat must have dried the

wounds and we found only an occasional small starry splatter on the rocky

ground.

Garrick came up and made a couple of brilliant discoveries of blood

spots, then sat down under a tree. Under another tree I could see the poor

old Wanderobo-Masai holding his first and last job as gun-bearer. Under

another was the old man, the sable head beside him like some black-mass

symbol, his equipment hanging from his shoulders. M'Cola and I went on

trailing very slowly and laboriously across the long stony slope and back

and up into another tree-scattered meadow, and through it, and into a long

field with piled up boulders at the end. In the middle of this field we lost

the trail completely and circled and hunted for nearly two hours before we

found blood again.

The old man found it for us below the boulders and to the right half a

mile away. He had gone ahead down there on his own idea of what the bull

would have done. The old man was a hunter.

Then we trailed him very slowly, on to hard stony ground a mile away.

But we could not trail from there. The ground was too hard to leave a track

and we never found blood again. Then we hunted on our various theories of

where the bull would go, but the country was too big and we had no luck.

'No good, ' M'Cola said.

I straightened up and went over to the shade of a big tree. It felt

cool as water and the breeze cooled my skin through the wet shirt. I was

thinking about the bull and wishing to God I had never hit him. Now I had

wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out

of that country. He never showed any tendency to circle back. To-night he

would die and the hyenas would eat him, or, worse, they would get him before

he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive. The

first one that hit that blood spoor would stay with it until he found him.

Then he would call up the others. I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him

and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed

it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the

seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no

guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. But I

felt rotten sick over this sable bull. Besides, I wanted him, I wanted him

damned badly, I wanted him more than I would admit. Well, we had played our

string out with him. Our chance was at the start when he was down and we

missed him. We had lost that. No, our best chance, the only chance a

rifleman should ever ask, was when I had a shot and shot at the whole animal

instead of calling the shot. It was my own lousy fault. I was a son of a

bitch to have gut-shot him. It came from over-confidence in being able to do

a thing and then omitting one of the steps in how it is done. Well, we had

lost him. I doubted if there was a dog in the world could trail him now in

that heat. Still that was the only chance. I got out the dictionary and

asked the old man if there were any dogs at the Roman's place.

'No, ' said the old man. 'Hapana.'

We made a very wide circle and I sent the brother and the husband out

in another circle. We found nothing, no trace, no tracks, no blood, and I

told M'Cola we would start for camp. The Roman's brother and the husband

went up the valley to get the meat of the sable cow we had shot. We were

beaten.

M'Cola and I ahead, the other following, we went across the long heat

haze of the open country, down to cross the dry watercourse, and up and into

the grateful shade of the trail through the woods. As we were going along

through the broken sunlight and shadow, the floor of the forest smooth and

springy where we cut across to save distance from the trail, we saw, less

than a hundred yards away, a herd of sable standing in the timber looking at

us. I pulled back the bolt and looked for the best pair of horns.

'Doumi, ' Garrick whispered. 'Doumi kubwa sana! '

I looked where he pointed. It was a very big cow sable, dark chestnut,

white marks on the face, white belly, heavy built and with a fine curving

pair of horns. She was standing broadside to us with her head turned,

looking. I looked carefully at the whole lot. They were all cows, evidently

the bunch whose bull I had wounded and lost, and they had come over the hill

and herded up again together here.

'We go to camp, ' I said to M'Cola.

As we started forward the sable jumped and ran past us, crossing the

trail ahead. At every good pair of cow horns, Garrick said, 'Bull, B'wana.

Big, big bull. Shoot, B'wana. Shoot, oh shoot! '

'All cows, ' I said to M'Cola when they were past, running in a panic

through the sun-splashed timber.

'Yes, ' he agreed.

'Old man, ' I said. The old man came up.

'Let the guide carry that, ' I said.

The old man lowered the cow sable head.

'No, ' said Garrick.

'Yes, ' I said. 'Bloody well yes.'

We went on through the woods toward camp. I was feeling better, much

better. All through the day I had never thought once of the kudu. Now we

were coming home to where they were waiting.

It seemed much longer coming home although, usually, the return over a

new trail is shorter. I was tired all the way into my bones, my head felt

cooked, and I was thirstier than I had ever been in my life. But suddenly,

walking through the woods, it was much cooler. A cloud had come over the

sun.

We came out of the timber and down on to the flat and in sight of the

thorn fence. The sun was behind a bank of clouds now and then in a little

while the sky was covered completely and the clouds looked heavy and

threatening. I thought perhaps this had been the last clear hot day; unusual

heat before the rains. First I thought: if it had only rained, so that the

ground would hold a track, we could have stayed with that bull for ever;

then, looking at the heavy, woolly clouds that so quickly had covered all

the sky, I thought that if we were going to join the outfit, and get the car

across that ten-mile stretch of black cotton road on the way to Handeni, we

had better start. I pointed to the sky.

'Bad, ' M'Cola agreed.

'Go to the camp of B'wana M'Kubwa? '

'Better.' Then, vigorously, accepting the decision, 'N'Dio. N'Dio.'

'We go, ' I said.

Arrived at the thorn fence and the hut, we broke camp fast. There was a

runner there from our last camp who had brought a note, written before

P.O.M, and Pop had left, and bringing my mosquito net. There was nothing in

the note, only good luck and that they were starting. I drank some water

from one of our canvas bags, sat on a petrol tin and looked at the sky. I

could not, conscientiously, chance staying. If it rained here we might not

even be able to get out to the road. If it rained heavily on the road, we

would never get out to the coast that season. Both the Austrian and Pop had

said that, I had to go.

That was settled, so. there was no use to think how much I wanted to

stay. The day's fatigue helped make the decision easy. Everything was being

loaded into the car and they were all gathering up their meat from the

sticks around the ashes of the fire.

'Don't you want to eat, B'wana? ' Kamau asked me.

'No, ' I said. Then in English, 'Too bloody tired.'

'Eat. You are hungry.'

'Later, in the car.'

M'Cola went by with a load, his big, flat face completely blank again.

It only {came} alive about hunting or some joke. I found a tin cup by the

fire and called to him to bring the whisky, and the blank face cracked at

the eyes and mouth into a smile as he took the flask out of his pocket.

'With water better, ' he said.

'You black Chinaman.'

They were all working fast and the Roman's women came over and stood a

little way away watching the carrying and the packing of the car. There were

two of them, good-looking, well built, and shy, but interested. The Roman

was not back yet. I felt very badly to go off like this with no explanation

to him. I liked the Roman very much and had a high regard for him.

I took a drink of the whisky and water and looked at the two pairs of

kudu horns that leaned against the wall of the chicken coop hut. From the

white, cleanly picked skulls the horns rose in slow spirals that spreading

made a turn, another turn, and then curved delicately into those smooth,

ivory-like points. One pair was narrower and taller against the side of the

hut. The other was almost as tall but wider in spread and heavier in beam.

They were the colour of black walnut meats and they were beautiful to see. I

went over and stood the Springfield against the hut between them and the

tips reached past the muzzle of the rifle. As Kamau came back from carrying

a load to the car I told him to bring the camera and then had him stand

beside them while I took a picture. Then he picked them up, each head a

load, and carried them over to the car.

Garrick was talking loudly and in a roostery way to the Roman's women.

As near as I could make out he was offering them the empty petrol boxes in

exchange for a piece of something.

'Come here, ' I called to him. He came over still feeling smart.

'Listen, ' I told him in English. 'If I get through this safari without

socking you it's going to be a bloody marvel. And if I ever hit you I'll

break your mucking jaw. That's all.'

He did not understand the words but the tone made it clearer than if I

had got something out of the dictionary to tell him. I stood up and motioned

to the women that they could have the petrol tins and the cases. I was

damned if I could not have anything to do with them if I would let Garrick

make any passes.

'Get in the car, ' I told him. 'No, ' as he started to make delivery of

one of the petrol tins, 'in the car.' He went over to the car.

We were all packed now and ready to go. The horns were curling out the

back of the car, tied on to the loads. I left some money for the Roman and

one of the kudu hides with the boy. Then we got in the car. I got in the

front seat with the Wanderobo-Masai. Behind were M'Cola, Garrick, and the

runner, who was a man from the old man's village by the road. The old man

was crouched on top of the loads at the back, close under the roof.

We waved and started, passing more of the Roman's household, the older

and uglier part, roasting up piles of meat by a log fire beside the trail

that came up from the river through the maize field. We made the crossing

all right, the creek was down and the banks had dried and I looked back at

the field, the Roman's huts, and the stockade where we had camped, and the

blue hills, dark under the heavy sky, and I felt very badly not to have seen

the Roman and explain why we had gone off like this.

Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to

make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and

Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about

when we were cutting brush and shovelling; until I was certain I would have

to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child

does for a spanking. Kamau and M'Cola were both laughing at him. He was

playing the victorious leader home from the chase now. I thought it was

really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.

Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over

in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the

shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he sat down,

backwards. I never looked toward him, and M'Cola, Kamau, and I could not

look --at each other for fear we would laugh.

'I am hurt, ' he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.

'Never get near a man shovelling, ' I said in English. 'Damned

dangerous.'

'I am hurt, ' said Garrick holding his belly.

'Rub it, ' I told him and rubbed mine to show him how. We all got into

the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless,

theatrical bastard, so I told M'Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got

one out from under the loads in the back, we were going through the

deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked

around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely

again. He rubbed his belly and seemed to be telling them what a hell of a

man he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the old man watching

me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.

'Old man, ' I said.

'Yes, B'wana.'

'A present, ' and I handed what was left in the bottle back. There

wasn't much left but the foam and a very little beer.

'Beer? ' asked M'Cola.

'By God, yes, ' I said. I was thinking about beer and in my mind was

back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the

Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the

calf and came home that niglit around the mountain with the moonlight on the

fields of narcissi that grew on the meadows, and how we were drunk and

talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the

brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when

we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the

horse chestnut trees in bloom, and Chink and I again discussing writing and

whether you could call them waxen candela-bras. God, what bloody literary

discussions we had; we were literary as hell then just after the war, and

later there was the good beer at Lipp's at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at

the Cirque de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or after any other great fight where

you lost your voice and were still too excited to turn in; but beer was

mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags

for the Fusilier, crags for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong

beer for me. That was Chink then, quoting Robert Graves, then. We outgrew

some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The

old man knew it too. I had seen it in his eye the first time he saw me take

a drink.

'Beer, ' said M'Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like

country, the engine hot under my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai as strong as

ever beside me, Kamau watching the grooves of the tyre tracks in the green

turf, and I hung my booted legs over the side to let my feet cool and drank

the beer and wished old Chink was along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith,

M.C., of His Majesty's Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss

how to describe this deer-park country and whether deer-park was enough to

call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant for

his years and the same sort of company. I was learning under Pop, while

Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our

ways had gone a long way apart.

But that damned sable bull. I should have killed him, but it was a

running shot. To hit him at all I had to use him all as a target. Yes, you

bastard, but what about the cow you missed twice, prone, standing broadside?

Was that a running shot? No. If I'd gone to bed last night I would not have

done that. Or if I'd wiped out the bore to get the oil out she would not

have thrown high the first time. Then I would not have pulled down and shot

under her the second shot. Every damned thing is your own fault if you're

any good. I thought I could shoot a shot-gun better than I could and I had

lost plenty of money backing my opinion, but I knew, coldly, and outside

myself, that I could shoot a rifle on game as well as any son of a bitch

that ever lived. Like hell I could. So what? So I gut-shot a sable bull and

let him get away. Could I shoot as well as I thought I could? Sure. Then why

did I miss on that cow? Hell, everybody is off sometime. You've got no

bloody business to be off. Who the hell are you? My conscience? Listen, I'm

all right with my conscience. I know just what kind of a son of a bitch I am

and I know what I can do well. If I hadn't had to leave and pull out I would

have got a sable bull. You know the Roman was a hunter. There was another

herd. Why did I have to make a one-night stand? Was that any way to hunt?

Hell, no. I'd make some money some way and when we came back we would come

to the old man's village in lorries, then pack in with porters so there

wouldn't be any damned car to worry about, send the porters --back, and make

a camp in the timber up the stream above the Roman's and hunt that country

slowly, living there and hunting out each day, sometimes laying off and

writing for a week, or writing half the day, or every other day, and get to

know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were brought up. I'd

see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came

through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not

have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed

out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in the

back, and instead of trailing that sable bull, gut-shot to hell, all day,

I'd lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long

enough so they belonged to me for ever. Sure, if Garrick didn't take his

B'wana Simba car in there and shoot the country out. But if he did I'd go on

down beyond those hills and there would be another country where a man could

live and hunt if he had time to live and hunt. They'd gone in wherever a car

could go. But there must be pockets like this all over, that no one knows

of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places.

'Beer? ' asked M'Cola.

'Yes, ' I said.

Sure, you couldn't make a living. Everyone had explained that. The

locusts came and ate your crops and the monsoon failed, and the rains did

not come, and everything dried up and died. There were ticks and fly to kill

the stock, and the mosquitoes gave you fever and maybe you got blackwater.

Your cattle would die and you would get no price for your coffee. It took an

Indian to make money from sisal and on the coast every coconut plantation

meant a man ruined by the idea of making money from copra. A white hunter

worked three months out of the year and drank for twelve and the Government

was ruining the country for the benefit of the Hindu and the natives. That

was what they told you. Sure. But I did not want to make money. All I wanted

was to live in it and have time to hunt. Already I had had one of the

diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my

large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an

unnumbered amount of times a day. There were remedies which cured this and

it was well worth going through for what I had seen and where I had been.

Besides I caught that on the dirty boat out from Marseilles. P.O.M, hadn't

been ill a day. Neither had Karl. I loved this country and I felt at home

and where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's

meant to go. Then, in my grandfather's time, Michigan was a malaria ridden

state. They called it fever and ague. And in Tortugas, where I'd spent

months, a thousand men once died of yellow fever. New continents and islands

try to frighten you with disease as a snake hisses. The snake may be

poisonous too. You kill them off. Hell, what I had a month ago would have

killed me in the old days before they invented the remedies. Maybe it would

and maybe I would have got well.

It is easier to keep well in a good country by taking simple

precautions than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good.

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives I live in harmony

with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water,

so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the

sod is turned under, is cropped out, and next it starts to blow away as it

has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in

Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly

unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When

he quits using beasts and uses machines the earth defeats him quickly. The

machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he

cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders

and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and

we don't know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like

Mongolia.

I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it. I could

do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But

I would come back to where it pleased me to live, to really live. Not just

to let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place

to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a mess of it and I

would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere

else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others

come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had

seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for.

Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were

still good places to go.

I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of

birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and

writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I

could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were

what I liked to do. That and ski-ing. But my legs were bad now and it was

not worth the time you spent hunting good snow any more. You saw too many

people ski-ing now.

Now, the car making a turn around a bank and crossing a green, grassy

field, we came in sight of the Masai village.

When the Masai saw us they started running and we stopped, surrounded

by them, just below the stockade. There were the young warriors who had run

with us, and now their women and the children all came out to see us. The

children were all quite young and the men and women all seemed the same age.

There were no old people. They all seemed to be our great friends and we

gave a very successful party with refreshments in the shape of our bread

which they all ate with much laughing, the men first, then the women. Then I

had M'Cola open the two cans of mincemeat and the plum pudding and I cut

these into rations and passed them out. I had heard and read that the Masai

subsisted only on the blood of their cattle mixed with milk, drawing the

blood {off} from a wound in a vein of the neck made by shooting an arrow at

close range. These Masai, however, ate bread, cold mincemeat, and plum

pudding with great relish and much laughter and joking. One very tall and

handsome one kept asking me something that I did not understand and then

five or six more joined in. Whatever this was they wanted it very badly.

Finally the tallest one made a very strange face and emitted a sound like a

dying pig. I understood finally: he was asking if we had one of those, and I

pressed the button of the klaxon. The children ran screaming, the warriors

laughed and laughed, and then as Kamau, in response to popular demand,

pressed the klaxon again and again, I watched the look of utter rapture and

ecstasy on the women's faces and knew that with that klaxon he could have

had any woman in the tribe.

Finally we had to go and after distributing the empty beer bottles, the

labels from the bottles, and finally the bottle caps, picked up by M'Cola

from the floor, we left, klaxoning the women into ecstasy, the children into

panic, and the warriors into delight. The warriors ran with us for a good