‘We heard you shoot. Where did you hit him?’
‘In the leg first, I think. Then we trailed him and finally I hit him a couple of more times and we got him.’
‘I heard only one shot.’
‘There were three or four,’ Karl said.
‘I guess the mountain shut off some if you were gone the other way trailing him. He’s got a heavy beam and a big spread.’
‘Thanks,’ Karl said. ‘I hope you get a lot better one. They said there was another one but I didn’t see him.’
I went back to the dining tent where Pop and P.O.M. were. They did not seem very elated about the kudu.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.
‘Did you see the head?’ P.O.M. asked.
‘Sure.’
‘It’s ‘awful’ looking,’ she said.
‘It’s a kudu. He’s got another one still to go.’
‘Charo and the trackers said there was another bull with this one. A big bull with a wonderful head.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll shoot him.’
‘If he ever comes back.’
‘It’s fine he has one,’ P.O.M. said.
‘I’ll bet he’ll get the biggest one ever known, now,’ I said.
‘I’m sending him down with Dan to the sable country,’ Pop said. ‘That was the agreement. The first to kill a kudu to get first crack at the sable.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Then as soon as you get your kudu we’ll move down there too.’
”Good.”
PART III PURSUIT AND FAILURE
CHAPTER ONE
That all seemed a year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way out to the twenty-eight-mile salt-lick, the sun on our faces, just having shot the guinea fowl, having, in the last five days, failed on the lick where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big hills and the small hills, having failed on the flats, losing a shot the night before on this lick because of the Austrian’s lorry, I knew there were only two days more to hunt before we must leave. M’Cola knew it too, and we were hunting together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a shortness of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.
Kamau, the driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who, with an old brown tweed coat some shooter had discarded, trousers heavily patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed always to give an impression of great elegance. Kamau was very modest, quiet, and an excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country and into an open, scrubby, desert-looking stretch, I looked at him, whose elegance, achieved with an old coat and a safety pin, whose modesty, pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would have meant nothing to me except that we would be short a driver; while now whenever or wherever he should die I would feel badly.
Then abandoning the sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the look on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then, we put up another flock of guineas. M’Cola handed nie the shotgun and I shook my head.
He nodded violently and said, ‘Good. Very Good’, and I told Kamau to go on. This confused Garrick who began an oration. Didn’t we want guineas? Those were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook a bull off of it, by a shot, to frighten him in the way we had seen the lesser kudu leave the salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were in the blind.
We left the lorry under some scrubby trees about two miles from the lick and walked along the sandy road towards the first salt place which was in the open to the left of the trail. We had gone about a mile keeping absolutely quiet and walking in single file, Abdullah the educated tracker leading, then me, M’Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of us. Where the sand was thin over the clay there was a pool of water and you could see that a heavy rain had drenched it all on ahead. I did not realize what this meant but Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and bared his teeth in anger.
‘It’s no good,’ M’Cola whispered.
Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.
‘Shut up, you bastard,’ I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on talking in above normal tones and I “looked up ‘shut up’ in the dictionary while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn’t find ‘shut up’ so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he closed it in surprise.
“Cola,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said M’Cola.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Salt no good.’
‘Ah.’
So that was it. I had thought of the rain only as something that made tracking easy.
‘When the rain?’ I asked.
‘Last night,’ M’Cola said.
Garrick started to talk and I placed the back of my hand against his mouth.
“Cola.’
‘Yes.’
‘Other salt,’ pointing in the direction of the big lick in the woods, which I knew was a good bit higher because we went very slightly up hill through the brush to reach it. ‘Other salt good?’
‘Maybe.’
M’Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed deeply hurt but kept his mouth shut and we went on down the road, walking around the wet places, to where, sure enough, the deep depression of the saltlick was half filled with water. Garrick started to whisper a speech here but M’Cola shut him up again.
‘Come on,’ I said, and, M’Cola ahead, we started trailing up the damp, sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the trees to the upper lick.
M’Cola stopped dead, leaned over to look at the damp sand, then whispered, ‘Man’, to me. There was the track.
‘Shenzi,’ he said, which meant a wild man.
We trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and stalking the lick carefully, up and into the blind. M’Cola shook his head.
‘No good,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
We went over to the lick. There it was all written plainly. There were the tracks of three big bull kudu in the moist bank beyond the lick where they had come to the salt. Then there were the sudden, deep, knifely-cut tracks where they made a spring when the bow twanged and the slashing heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then, far-spaced, the tracks running into the bush. We trailed them, all three, but no man’s track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.
M’Cola said, ‘Shenzi!’ putting great hate into the word. We picked up the shenzi’s tracks and saw where he had gone on back to the road. We settled down in the blind and waited there until it was dark and a light rain began to fall. Nothing came to the salt. In the rain we made our way back to the lorry. Some wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.
Kamau had rigged a tent out of a big canvas ground cloth, hung my mosquito net inside, and set up the canvas cot. M’Cola brought the food inside the shelter tent.
Garrick and Abdullah built a fire and they, Kamau and M’Cola cooked over it. They were going to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a couple of tin cups of half whisky and water.
M’Cola came in, grave, solicitous, and very awkward inside a tent and took my clothes out from where I had folded them to make a pillow and folded them again, very un-neatly, and put them under the blankets. He brought three tins to see if I did not want them. opened.
‘No.’
‘Chai?’ he asked.
‘The hell with it.’
‘No chai?’
‘Whisky better.’
‘Yes,’ he said feelingly. ‘Yes.’
‘Chai in the morning. Before the sun.’
‘Yes, B’wana M’Kumba.’
‘You sleep here. Out of the rain.’ I pointed to the canvas where the rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear. It was a lovely sound, even though it was hitching us.
‘Yes.’
‘Go on. Eat.’
‘Yes. No chai?’
‘The hell with tea.’
‘Whisky?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Whisky finish.’
‘Whisky,’ he said confidently.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Go eat,’ and pouring the cup half and half with water got in under the mosquito bar, found my clothes and again made them into a pillow, and lying on my side drank the whisky very slowly, resting on one elbow, then dropped the cup down under the bar on to the ground, felt under the cot for the Springfield, put the searchlight beside me in the bed under the blanket, and went to sleep listening to the rain. I woke when I heard M’Cola come in, make his bed and go to sleep, and I woke once in the night and heard him sleeping by me; but in the morning he was up and had made the tea before I was awake.
‘Chai,’ he said, pulling on my blanket.
‘Bloody chai,’ I said, sitting up still asleep.
It was a grey, wet morning. The rain had stopped but
