‘You’ll see. He’ll get a kudu at this next camp and he’ll be on top of the wave.’
‘I’m just a crabby bastard,’ I said.
‘Of course you are,’ said Pop. ‘But why not have a drink?’
‘Right,’ I said.
Karl came out, quiet, friendly, gentle, and understandingly delicate.
‘It will be fine when we get to that new country,’ he said.
‘It will be swell,’ I said.
‘Tell me what it’s like, Mr. Phillips,’ he said to Pop.
‘I don’t know,’ said Pop. ‘But they say it’s very pleasant hunting. They’re supposed to feed right out in the open. That old Dutchman claims there are some remarkable heads.’
‘I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,’ Karl said to me.
‘You’ll get a sixty-incher.’
‘No,’ said Karl. ‘Don’t kid me. I’ll be happy with any kudu.’
‘You’ll probably get a hell of a one,’ Pop said.
‘Don’t kid me,’ Karl said. ‘I know how lucky I’ve been. I would be happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.’
He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you for it, and understand it.
‘Good old Karl,’ I said, warmed with whisky, understanding, and sentiment.
‘We’re having a swell time, aren’t we?’ Karl said. ‘Where’s poor old Mama?’
‘I’m here,’ said P.O.M. from the shadow. ‘I’m one of those quiet people.’
‘By God if you’re not,’ Pop said. ‘But you can puncture the old man quick enough when he gets started.’
‘That’s what makes a woman a universal favourite,’ P.O.M. told him.
‘Give me another compliment, Mr. J.’
‘By God, you’re brave as a little terrier.’ Pop and I had both been drinking, it seemed.
‘That’s lovely.’ P.O.M. sat far back in her chair, holding her hands clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her quilted blue robe in the firelight now, and the light on her black hair. ‘I love it when you all reach the little terrier stage. Then I know the war can’t be far away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?’
‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Your husband, one of the bravest bastards that ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.’
‘Now he’s drunk, we get the truth,’ I said.
‘Let’s eat,’ said P.O.M. ‘I’m really frightfully hungry.’
We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road and beyond the village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off, eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light. We stopped the car at the edge of the bush and getting out and sitting down with the glasses saw there was a herd of kongoni scattered between us and the eland and with the kongoni a single bull oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai donkey with marvellous long, black, straight, back-slanting horns that showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.
‘You want to go after him?’ I asked Karl.
‘No. You go on.’
I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot in front of people and so I said, ‘All right’. Also I wanted to shoot, selfishly, and Karl was unselfish. We wanted meat badly.
I walked along the road, not looking toward the game, trying to look casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and down from the left shoulder away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I knew that if I moved toward them they would at once move off out of range so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again, and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the top of his back and squeezed off.
You do not hear the noise of the shot on game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and to the right, the whole plain backgrounding into moving animals against the rise of the sun, the rocking-horse canter of the long-legged, grotesque kongoni, the heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx I had not seen before running with the kongoni.
This sudden life and panic all made background for the one I wanted, now trotting, three-quartering away, his horns held high now and I stood to shoot running, got on him, the whole animal miniatured in the aperture and I held above his shoulders, swung ahead and squeezed and he was down, kicking, before the crack of the bullet striking bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot that broke a hind leg.
I ran toward him, then slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be blown if he jumped and ran; but he was down for good. He had gone down so suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I saw it was cutting the lee from under him that brought him down. They all came up and Charo stuck him to make him legal meat.
‘Where did you hold on him the second time?’ Karl asked.
‘Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.’
‘It was very pretty,’ Dan said.
‘By evening,’ Pop said, ‘he’ll tell us that he broke that off leg on purpose. That’s one of his favourite shots, you know. Did you ever hear him explain it?’
While M’Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood, on one leg, watching the skinning. He spoke to me at some length, and I called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.
‘He wants to know if you are going to shoot something else,’ Pop said. ‘He would like some hides but he doesn’t care about oryx hide. It is almost worthless, he says. He wonders if you would like to shoot a couple of kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.’
‘Tell him on our way back.’
Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.
‘Tell him he can always find me around Harry’s New York Bar,’ I said.
The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.
‘He says why did you shoot him twice?’ Pop asked.
‘Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later in the day we shoot them once. In. the evening we are often half shot ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr’s.’
‘He says what do you do with the horns?’
‘Tell him in our tribe we give the horns to our wealthiest friends. Tell him it is very exciting and sometimes members of the tribe are chased across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.’
Pop told the Masai something and we shook hands again, parting on a most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see some other Masai coming along the road, earth-brown skins, and kneeing forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.
Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap sack, the meat tied inside the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road of red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to the edge of the road, we came up into some hills and through the little village of Kibaya where there was a white rest house and a general store and much farming land.
It was here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting for a kudu to feed out into the edge of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he sat and nearly gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the village of Kibaya and as it was still cool and the sun had not yet burned off the dew from the grass I suggested we drink a bottle of that silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman in armour on it in order that we might remember the place better and even appreciate it more.
This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries to follow on to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.
For a long time, while the sun rose and the day became hot we drove through what Pop had described, when I asked him what the country was like to the south, as a million miles of bloody Africa, bush close to the road that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.
‘There are very big elephant in there,’ Pop said. ‘But it’s impossible to hunt them. That’s why they’re very big. Simple, isn’t it?’
After a long stretch of the million-mile country, the country began to open out into dry, sandy, bush-bordered prairies that dried into a typical desert country with occasional patches of bush where there was water, that Pop said was like the northern frontier province of Kenya. We watched for gerenuk, that long-necked antelope that resembles a praying mantis in its way of carrying itself, and for the lesser kudu that we knew lived
