Then we hunted through the wet scrub on the flat hoping to find a track in the soaked earth and trail a bull until we could see him. There were no tracks. We crossed the road and followed the edge of the scrub around a moor-like open stretch. I hoped we might find the rhino but while we came on much fresh rhino dung there were no tracks since the rain. Once we heard tick birds and looking up saw them in jerky flight above us headed to the northward over the heavy scrub.
We made a long circle through there but found nothing but a fresh hyena track and a cow kudu track. In a tree M’Cola pointed out a lesser kudu skull with one beautiful, long, curling horn. We found the other horn below in the grass and I screwed it back on to its bone base.
‘Shenzi,’ M’Cola said and imitated a man pulling a bow. The skull was quite clean but the hollow horns had some damp residue in them, smelled unbearably foul and, giving no sign of having noticed the stench, I handed them to Garrick who promptly, without sign gave them to Abdullah. Abdullah wrinkled the edge of his flat nose and shook his head. They really smelled abominably. M’Cola and I grinned and Garrick looked virtuous.
I decided a good idea might be to drive along the road in the car, watching for kudu, and hunt any likely-looking clearings. We went back to the car and did this, working several clearings with no luck. By then the sun was up and the road was becoming populous with travellers, both white-clothed and naked, and we decided to head for camp. On our way in, we stopped and stalked the other salt-lick.
There was an impalla on it looking very red where the sun struck his hide in the patches between the grey trees and there were many kudu tracks. We smoothed them over and drove on into camp to find a sky full of locusts passing over, going to the westward, making the sky, as you looked up, seem a pink dither of flickering passage, flickering like an old cinema film, but pink instead of grey. P.O.M. and Pop came out and were very disappointed. No rain had fallen in camp and they had been sure we would have something when we came in.
‘Did my literary pal get off?’
‘Yes,’ Pop said. ‘He’s gone into Handeni.’
‘He told me all about American women,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Poor old Poppa, I was sure you’d get one. Danin the rain.’
‘How are American women?’
‘He thinks they’re terrible.’
‘Very sound fellow,’ said Pop. ‘Tell me just what happened to-day.’
We sat in the shade of the dining tent and I told them.
‘A Wanderobo,’ Pop said. ‘They’re frightful shots. Bad luck.’
‘I thought it might be one of those travelling sportsmen you see with their bows slung going along the road. He saw the lick by the road and trailed up to the other one.’
‘Not very likely. They carry those bows and arrows as protection. They’re not hunters.’
‘Well, whoever it was put it on us. ‘
‘Bad luck. That, and the rain. I’ve had scouts out here on both the hills but they’ve seen nothing.’
‘Well, we’re not hitched until to-morrow night. When do we have to leave?’
‘After to-morrow.’
‘That bloody savage.’
‘I suppose Karl is blasting up the sable down there.’
‘We won’t be able to get into camp for the horns. Have you heard anything?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to give up smoking for six months for you to get one,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I’ve started already.’
We had lunch and afterwards I went into the tent and lay down and read.
I knew we still had a chance on the lick in the morning and I was not going to worry about it. But I ‘was’ worried and I did not want to go to sleep and wake up feeling dopey so I came out and sat in one of the canvas chairs under the open dining tent and read somebody’s life of Charles the Second and looked up every once in a while to watch the locusts. The locusts were exciting to see and it was difficult for me to take them as a matter of course.
Finally I went to sleep in the chair with my feet on a chop-box and when I woke there was Garrick, the bastard, wearing a large, very floppy, black and white ostrich-plume head-dress.
‘Go away,’ I said in English.
He stood smirking proudly, then turned so I could see the head-dress from the side.
I saw Pop coming out of his tent with a pipe in his mouth. ‘Look what we have,’ I called to him.
He looked, said, ‘Christ’, and went back into the tent.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll just ignore it.’
Pop came out, finally, with a book and we took no notice of Garrick’s head-dress at all, sitting and talking, while he posed with it.
‘Bastard’s been drinking, too,’ I said.
‘Probably.’
‘I can smell it.’
Pop, without looking at him, spoke a few words to Garrick in a very soft voice.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘To go and get dressed properly and be ready to start.’
Garrick walked off, his plums waving.
‘Not the moment for his ostrich plumes,’ Pop said.
‘Some people probably like them.’
‘That’s it. Start photographing them.’
‘Awful,’ I said.
‘Frightful,’ Pop agreed.
‘On the last day if we don’t get anything, I’m going to shoot Garrick in the behind. What would that cost me?’
‘Might make lots of trouble. If you shoot one, you have to shoot the other, too.’
‘Only Garrick.’
‘Better not shoot then. Remember it’s me you get into trouble.’
‘Joking, Pop.’
Garrick, un-head-dressed and with Abdullah, appeared and Pop spoke with them.
‘They want to hunt around the hill a new way.’
‘Splendid. When?’
‘Any time now. It looks like rain. You might get going.’
I sent Molo for my boots and a raincoat, M’Cola came out with the Springfield, and we walked down to the car. It had been heavily cloudy all day although the sun had come through the clouds in the forenoon for a time and again at noon. The rains were moving up on us. Now it was starting to rain and the locusts were no longer flying.
‘I’m dopey with sleep,’ I told Pop. ‘I’m going to have a drink.’
We were standing under the big tree by the cooking fire with the light rain pattering in the leaves. M’Cola brought the whisky flask and handed it to me very solemnly.
‘Have one?’
‘I don’t see what harm it can do.’
We both drank and Pop said, ‘The hell with them’.
‘The hell with them.’
‘You may find some tracks.’
‘We’ll run them out of the country.’
In the car we turned to the right on the road, drove on up past the mud village and turned off the road to the left on to a red, hard, clay track that circled the edge of the hills and was close bordered on either side with trees. It was raining fairly hard now and we drove slowly. There seemed to be enough sand in the clay to keep the car from slipping. Suddenly, from the back seat, Abdullah, very excited, told Kamau to stop. We stopped with a skid, all got out, and walked back. There was a freshly cut kudu track in the wet clay. It could not have been made more than five minutes before as it was sharp-edged and the dirt, that had been picked up by the inside of the hoof, was not yet softened by the rain.
‘Doumi,’ Garrick said and threw back his head and spread his arms wide to show horns that hung back over his withers. ‘Kubwa Sana!’ Abdullah agreed it was a bull; a huge bull.
‘Come on,’ I said.
It was easy tracking and we knew we were close. In rain or snow it is much easier to come up close to animals and I was sure we were going to get a shot. We followed the tracks through thick brush and then out into an open patch. I stopped to wipe the rain off my glasses and blew through the aperture in the rear sight of the Springfield. It was raining hard now, and I pulled my hat low down over my eyes to keep my glasses dry. We skirted the edge of the open patch and then, ahead, there was a crash and I saw a grey, white-striped animal making off through the brush.
I threw the gun up and M’Cola grabbed my arm, ‘Manamouki!’ he whispered. It was a cow kudu. But when we came up to where it had jumped there were no other tracks. The same tracks we had followed led, logically and with no possibility of doubt, from the road to that cow.
‘Doumi Kubwa Sana!’ I said, full of sarcasm and disgust to Garrick and made a gesture of giant horns flowing back from behind his ears.
‘Manamouki Kubwa Sana,’ he said very sorrowfully and patiently. ‘What an enormous cow.’
‘You lousy ostrich-plumed punk,’ I told him in English. ‘Manamouki!
Manamouki! Manamouki!’
‘Manamouki,’ said M’Cola and nodded his head.
I got out the dictionary, couldn’t find the words, and made it clear to M’Cola with signs that we would circle back in a long swing to the road and see if we could find another track. We circled back in the rain, getting thoroughly soaked, saw nothing, found the car, and as the rain lessened and the roads still seemed firm decided to go on until it was dark. Puffs of cloud hung on the hillside after the rain and the trees dripped but we saw nothing. Not in the open glades, not
