‘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.’
‘Go on. 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
