‘Come on,’ I said. Everyone was excited and ready to go now and the old man was chattering about the bull as he folded the head skin and put the head upon his own head and we started across through the rocks and up, quartering up on to the hillside. There, where the old man had pointed, was a very big sable track, the hoof marks spread wide, the tracks grading up into the timber and there was blood, plenty of it.
We trailed him fast, hoping to jump him and have a shot, and it was easy trailing in the shade of the trees with plenty of blood to follow. But he kept climbing, grading up around the hill, and he was travelling fast. We kept the blood bright and wet but we could not come up on him. I did not track but kept watching ahead thinking I might see him as he looked back, or see him down, or cutting down across the hill through the timber, and M’Cola and Garrick were tracking, aided by every one but the old man who staggered along with the sable skull and head skin held on his own grey head. M’Cola had hung the empty water bottle on him, and Garrick had loaded him with the cinema camera. It was hard going for the old man.
Once we came on a place where the bull had rested and watched his back track, there was a little pool of blood on a rock where he had stood, behind some bushes, and I cursed the wind that blew our scent on ahead of us. There was a big breeze blowing now and I was certain we had no chance of surprising him, our scent would keep everything moving out of the way ahead of us as long as anything could move. I thought of trying to circle ahead with M’Cola and let them track but we were moving fast, the blood was still bright on the stones and on the fallen leaves and grass and the hills were too steep for us to make a circle. I did not see how we could lose him.
Then he took us up and into a rocky, ravine-cut country where the trailing was slow and the climbing difficult. Here, I thought, we would jump him in a gully but the spatters of blood, not so bright now, went on around the boulders, over the rocks and up and up and left us on a rim-rock ledge.
He must have gone down from there. It was too steep above for him. to have gone over the top of the hill. There was no other way to go but down, but how had he gone, and down which ravine? I sent them looking down three possible ways and got out on the rim to try to sight him. They could not find any spoor, and then the Wanderobo-Masai called from below and to the right that he had blood and, climbing down, . we saw it on a rock and then followed it in occasional drying splatters down through a steep descent to the meadow below. I was encouraged when he started down hill and in the knee-high, heavy grass of the meadow trailing was easy again, because the grass brushed against his belly and while you could not see tracks clearly without stooping double and parting the grass to look, yet the blood spoor was plain on the grass blades. But it was dry now and dully shiny and I knew we had lost much time on him when he rim-rocked us on the hill.
Finally his trail crossed the dry watercourse about where we had first come in sight of the meadow in the morning and led away into the sloping, sparsely-wooded country on the far side. There were no clouds and I could feel the sun now, not just as heat but as a heavy deadly weight on my head and I was very thirsty. It was very hot but it was not the heat that bothered. It was the weight of the sun.
Garrick had given up tracking seriously and was only contributing theatrical successes of discovering blood when M’Cola and I were checked. He would do no routine tracking any more, but would rest and then track in irritating spurts. The Wanderobo-Masai was useless as a blue-jay and I had M’Cola give him the big rifle to carry so that we would get some use out of him. The Roman’s brother was obviously not a hunter and the husband was not very interested. He did not seem to be a hunter either. As we trailed, slowly, the ground, hard now as the sun had baked it, the blood only black spots and splatters on the short grass, one by one the brother, Garrick, and the Wanderobo-Masai dropped out and sat in the shade of the scattered trees.
The sun was terrific and as it was necessary to track with heads bent down and stooping, in spite of a handkerchief spread over my neck I had a pounding ache in my head.
M’Cola was tracking slowly, steadily, and absolutely absorbed in the problem. His bare, bald head gleamed with sweat and when it ran down in his eyes he would pluck a grass stem, hold it with each hand and shave the sweat off his forehead and bald black crown with the stem.
We went on slowly. I had always sworn to Pop that I could out-track M’Cola but I realized now that in the past I had been giving a sort of Garrick performance in picking up the spoor when it was lost and that in straight, steady trailing, now in the heat, with the sun really bad, truly bad so that you could feel what it was doing to your head, cooking it to hell, trailing in short grass on hard ground where a blood spot was a dry, black blister on a grass blade, difficult to see; that you must find the next little black spot perhaps twenty yards away, one holding the last blood while the other found the next, then going on, one on each side of the trail; pointing with a grass stem at the spots to save talking, until it ran out again and you marked the last bood with your eye and both made casts to pick it up again, signalling with a hand up, my mouth too dry to talk, a heat shimmer over the ground now when you straightened up to let your neck stop aching and looked ahead, I knew M’Cola was immeasurably the better man and the better tracker. Have to tell Pop, I thought.
At this point M’Cola made a joke. My mouth was so dry that it was hard to talk.
‘B’wana,’ M’Cola said, looking at me when I had straiglitened up and was leaning my neck back to get the crick out of it.
‘Yes?’
‘Whisky?’ and he offered me the flask.
‘You bastard,’ I said in English, and he chuckled and shook his head.
‘Hapana whisky?’
‘You savage,’ I said in Swahili.
We started tracking again, M’Cola shaking his head and very amused, and in a little while the grass was longer and it was easier again. We crossed all that semi-open country we had seen from the hillside in the morning and going down a slope the tracks swung back into high grass. In this higher grass I found that by half shutting my eyes I could see his trail where he had shouldered through the grass and I went ahead fast without trailing by the blood, to M’Cola’s amazement, but then we came out on very short grass and rock again and now the trailing was the hardest yet.
He was not bleeding much now; the sun and the heat must have dried the wounds and we found only an occasional small starry splatter on the rocky ground.
Garrick came up and made a couple of brilliant discoveries of blood spots, then sat down under a tree. Under another tree I could see the poor old Wanderobo-Masai holding his first and last job as gun-bearer.
Under another was the old man, the sable head beside him like some black-mass symbol, his equipment hanging from his shoulders. M’Cola and I went on trailing very slowly and laboriously across the long stony slope and back and up into another tree-scattered meadow, and through it, and into a long field with piled up boulders at the end. In the middle of this field we lost the trail completely and circled and hunted for nearly two hours before we found blood again.
The old man found it for us below the boulders and to the right half a mile away. He had gone ahead down there on his own idea of what the bull would have done. The old man was a hunter.
Then we trailed him very slowly, on to hard stony ground a mile away.
But we could not trail from there. The ground was too hard to leave a track and we never found blood again. Then we hunted on our various theories of where the bull would go, but the country was too big and we had no luck.
‘No good,’ M’Cola said.
I straightened up and went over to the shade of a big tree. It felt cool as water and the breeze cooled my skin through the wet shirt. I was thinking about the bull and wishing to God I had never hit him. Now I had wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out
