Next day we came in from the zebra business grey and sweat-caked with dust that the car raised and the wind blew over us on the way home across the plain. P.O.M. and Pop had not gone out, there was nothing for them to do and no need for them to eat that dust, and Karl and I out on the plain in the too much sun and dust had gone through one of those rows that starts like this, ‘What was the matter?’
‘They were too far.’
‘Not at the start.’
‘They were too far, I tell you.’
‘They get hard if you don’t take them.’
‘You shoot them.’
‘I’ve got enough. We only want twelve hides altogether. You go ahead.’
Then someone, angry, shooting too fast to show he was being asked to shoot too fast, getting up from behind the ant hill and turning away in disgust, walking towards his partner, who says, smugly, ‘What’s the matter with them?’
‘They’re too damned far, I tell you,’ desperately.
The smug one, complacently, ‘Look at them’.
The zebra that had galloped off had seen the approaching lorry of the skinners and had circled and were standing now, broadside, in easy range.
The one looks, says nothing, too angry now to shoot. Then says, ‘Go ahead. Shoot’.
The smug one, more righteous now than ever, refuses. ‘Go ahead,’ he says.
‘I’m through,’ says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he feels he has been tricked. Something is always tricking him, the need to do things other than in a regular order, or by an inexact command in which details are not specified, or to have to do it in front of people, or to be hurried.
‘We’ve got eleven,’ says smug face, sorry now. He knows he should not hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly righteous bastard again. ‘We can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we’ll go in.’
‘No, let’s get him. You get him.’
‘No, let’s go in.’
And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.
‘What you thinking about now?’ you ask. ‘What a son of a bitch I am, still?’
‘About this afternoon,’ he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked dust on his face.
‘Me too,’ you say.
Finally the afternoon comes and you start.
This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes, light to pull out when you sink, you work out from hummock to hummock, picking a way across the marsh and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks fly as before out to the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake itself and find the bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water get outside the big flocks, then there is a shot and you and M’Cola crouch, heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two again, and then a high one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you can load and shoot, you brown a bunch to get cripples for decoys and then take only fancy shots because you know now you can get all that we can use or carry.
You try the high one, straight overhead and almost leaning backward, the ‘coup de roi’, and splash a big black duck down beside M’Cola, him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you decide you better kill them and pick up. You have to run in water to your knees to get in range of the last cripple and you slip and go face down and are sitting, enjoying being completely wet finally, water cool on your behind, soaked with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting the water out of the gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell, M’Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of ducks, crouches and a flock of geese pass over in easy range while you try to pump a wet shell in.
You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you were behind, and at the shot you see the cloud of flamingoes rise in the sun, making the whole horizon of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after that each time after you shoot you turn and look out into the sun on the water and see that quick rise of the unbelievable cloud and then the slow settling.
‘M’Cola,’ you say and point.
‘N’Dio,’ he says, watching them. ‘M’uzuri!’ and hands you more shells.
We all had good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three days afterward, travelling, we had cold teal, the best of ducks to eat, fine, plump, and tender, cold with Pan-Yan pickles, and the red wine we bought at Babati, sitting by the road waiting for the lorries to come up, sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night when the lorries finally came in and we were at the house of an absent friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the table, having waited so long for the broken-down lorry to come that we all drank much too much and were unspeakably hungry, P.O.M. dancing with the manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full of emetine and with a ringing headache drowning it successfully in whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark and the wind blowing a gale, and then those teal coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables.
Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.
From Babati we had driven through the hills to the edge of a plain, wooded in a long stretch of glade beyond a small village where there was a mission station at the foot of a mountain. Here we had made a camp to hunt kudu which were supposed to be in the wooded hills and in the forests on the flats that stretched out to the edge of the open plain.
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,
