The brother led the way through some heavy brush that soaked us all; then through the open forest, then steeply uphill until we were well up on the slope that rose behind the edge of the field where we were camped. Then we were on a good smooth trail that graded back into these hills above which the sun had not yet risen. I was enjoying the early morning, still a little sleepy, going along a little mechanically and starting to think that we were a very big outfit to hunt quietly, although everyone seemed to move quietly enough, when we saw two people coming towards us.
They were a tall, good-looking man with features like the Roman’s, but slightly less noble, wearing a toga and carrying a bow and quiver of arrows, and behind him, his wife, very pretty, very modest, very wifely, wearing a garment of brown tanned skins and neck ornament of concentric copper wire circles and many wire circles on her arms and ankles. We halted, said ‘Jambo’, and the brother talked to this seeming tribesman who had the air of a business man on the way to his office in the city and, as they spoke in rapid question and answer, I watched the most freshly brideful wife who stood a little in profile so that I saw her pretty pear-shaped breasts and the long, clean niggery legs and was studying her pleasant profile most profitably until her husband spoke to her suddenly and sharply, then in explanation and quiet command, and she moved around us, her eyes down, and went on along the trail that we had come, alone, we all watching her. The husband was going on with us, it seemed. He had seen the sable that morning and, slightly suspicious, obviously displeased at leaving that now out-of-sight wife of wives that we all had taken with our eyes, he led us off and to the right along another trail, well-worn and smooth, through woods that looked like fall at home and where you might expect to flush a grouse and have him whirr off to the other hill or pitch down in the valley.
So, sure enough we put up partridges and, watching them fly, I was thinking all the country in the world is the same country and all hunters are the same people. Then we saw a fresh kudu track beside the trail and then, as we moved through the early morning woods, no undergrowth now, the first sun coming through the tops of the trees, we came on the ever miracle of elephant tracks, each one as big around as the circle you make with your arms putting your hands together, and sunk a foot deep in the loam of the forest floor, where some bull had passed, travelling after rain. Looking at the way the tracks graded down through the pleasant forest I thought that we had the mammoths too, a long time ago, and when they travelled through the hills in southern Illinois they made these same tracks. It was just that we were an older country in America and the biggest game was gone.
We kept along the face of this hill on a pleasant sort of jutting plateau and then came out to the edge of the hill where there was a valley and a long open meadow with timber on the far side and a circle of hills at its upper end where another valley went off to the left. We stood in the edge of the timber on the face of this hill looking across the meadow valley which extended to the open out in a steep sort of grassy basin at the upper end where it was backed by the hills.
To our left there were steep, rounded, wooded hills, with outcroppings of limestone rock that ran, from where we stood, up to the very head of the valley, and there formed part of the other range of hills that headed it. Below us, to the right, the country was rough and broken in hills and stretches of meadow and then a steep fall of timber that ran to the blue hills we had seen to the westward beyond the huts where the Roman and his family lived. I judged camp to be straight down below us and about five miles to the north-west through the timber.
The husband was standing, talking to the brother and gesturing and pointing out that he had seen the sable feeding on the opposite side of the meadow valley and that they must have fed either up or down the valley. We sat in the shelter of the trees and sent the Wanderobo-Masai down into the valley to look for tracks. He came back and reported there were no tracks leading down the valley below us and to the westward, so we knew they had fed on up the meadow valley.
Now the problem was to so use the terrain that we might locate them, and get up and into range of them without being seen. The sun was coming over the hills at the head of the valley and shone on us while everything at the head of the valley was in heavy shadow. I told the outfit to stay where they were in the woods, except for M’Cola and the husband who would go with me, we keeping in the timber and grading up our side of the valley until we could be above and see into the pocket of the curve at the upper end to glass it for the sable.
You ask how this was discussed, worked out, and understood with the bar of language, and I say it was as freely discussed and clearly understood as though we were a cavalry patrol all speaking the same language. We were all hunters except, possibly, Garrick, and the whole thing could be worked out, understood, and agreed to without using anything but a forefinger to signal and a hand to caution. We left them and worked very carefully ahead, well back in the timber to get height.
Then, when we were far enough up and along, we crawled out on to a rocky place and, being behind rock, shielding the glasses with my hat so they would not reflect the sun, M’Cola nodding and grunting as he saw the practicability of that, we glassed the opposite side of the meadow around the edge of the timber, and up into the pocket at the head of the valley; and there they were. M’Cola saw them just before I did and pulled my sleeve.
‘N’Dio,’ I said. Then I held my breath to watch them. All looked very black, big necked, and heavy. All had the back-curving horns. They were a long way away. Some were lying down. One was standing. We could see seven.
‘Where’s the bull?’ I whispered.
M’Cola motioned with his left hand and counted four fingers. It was one of those lying down in the tall grass and the animal did look much bigger and the horns much more sweeping. But we were looking into the morning sun and it was hard to see well. Behind them a sort of gully ran up into the hill that blocked the end of the valley.
Now we knew what we had to do. We must go back, cross the meadow far enough down so we were out of sight, get into the timber on the far side and work along through the timber to get above the sable. First we must try to make sure there were no more of them in the timber or the meadow that we must work through before we made our stalk.
I wet my finger and put it up. From the cool side it seemed as though the breeze came down the valley. M’Cola took some dead leaves and crumpled them and tossed them up. They fell a little toward us. The wind was all right and now we must glass the edge of the timber and check on it.
‘Hapana,’ M’Cola said finally. I had seen nothing either and my eyes ached from the pull of the eight-power glasses. We could take a chance on the timber. We might jump something and spook the sable but we had to take that chance to get around and above them.
We made our way back and down and told the others. From where they were we could cross the valley out of sight of its upper end and bending low, me with ‘my’ hat off, we headed down into the high meadow grass and across the deeply cut watercourse that ran down through the centre of the meadow, across its rocky shelf, and up the grassy bank on the other side, keeping under the edge of a fold of the valley into the shelter of the woods. Then we headed up through the woods, crouched, in single file, to try to get above the sable.
We went forward making as good time as we could and still move quietly.
I had made too many stalks on big horn sheep only to find them fed away and out of sight when you came round the shoulder of the mountain to trust these sable to stay where they were and, since once we were in the timber we could no longer see them, I thought it was important that we come up above them as fast as we could without getting
