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
