We waved and started, passing more of the Roman’s household, the older and uglier part, roasting up piles of meat by a log fire beside the trail that came up from the river through the maize field. We made the crossing all right, the creek was down and the banks had dried and I looked back at the field, the Roman’s huts, and the stockade where we had camped, and the blue hills, dark under the heavy sky, and I felt very badly not to have seen the Roman and explain why we had gone off like this.
Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about when we were cutting brush and shovelling; until I was certain I would have to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child does for a spanking. Kamau and M’Cola were both laughing at him. He was playing the victorious leader home from the chase now. I thought it was really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.
Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he sat down, backwards. I never looked toward him, and M’Cola, Kamau, and I could not look —at each other for fear we would laugh.
‘I am hurt,’ he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.
‘Never get near a man shovelling,’ I said in English. ‘Damned dangerous.’
‘I am hurt,’ said Garrick holding his belly.
‘Rub it,’ I told him and rubbed mine to show him how. We all got into the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless, theatrical bastard, so I told M’Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got one out from under the loads in the back, we were going through the deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely again. He rubbed his belly and seemed to be telling them what a hell of a man he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the old man watching me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.
‘Old man,’ I said.
‘Yes, B’wana.’
‘A present,’ and I handed what was left in the bottle back. There wasn’t much left but the foam and a very little beer.
‘Beer?’ asked M’Cola.
‘By God, yes,’ I said. I was thinking about beer and in my mind was back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the calf and came home that niglit around the mountain with the moonlight on the fields of narcissi that grew on the meadows, and how we were drunk and talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the horse chestnut trees in bloom, and Chink and I again discussing writing and whether you could call them waxen candela-bras.
God, what bloody literary discussions we had; we were literary as hell then just after the war, and later there was the good beer at Lipp’s at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at the Cirque de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or after any other great fight where you lost your voice and were still too excited to turn in; but beer was mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags for the Fusilier, crags for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong beer for me. That was Chink then, quoting Robert Graves, then. We outgrew some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The old man knew it too. I had seen it in his eye the first time he saw me take a drink.
‘Beer,’ said M’Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like country, the engine hot under my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai as strong as ever beside me, Kamau watching the grooves of the tyre tracks in the green turf, and I hung my booted legs over the side to let my feet cool and drank the beer and wished old Chink was along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith, M.C., of His Majesty’s Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss how to describe this deer-park country and whether deer-park was enough to call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant for his years and the same sort of company. I was learning under Pop, while Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our ways had gone a long way apart.
But that damned sable bull. I should have killed him, but it was a running shot. To hit him at all I had to use him all as a target. Yes, you bastard, but what about the cow you missed twice, prone, standing broadside?
Was that a running shot? No. If I’d gone to bed last night I would not have done that. Or if I’d wiped out the bore to get the oil out she would not have thrown high the first time. Then I would not have pulled down and shot under her the second shot. Every damned thing is your own fault if you’re any good. I thought I could shoot a shot-gun better than I could and I had lost plenty of money backing my opinion, but I knew, coldly, and outside myself, that I could shoot a rifle on game as well as any son of a bitch that ever lived. Like hell I could. So what? So I gut-shot a sable bull and let him get away. Could I shoot as well as I thought I could? Sure. Then why did I miss on that cow? Hell, everybody is off sometime.
You’ve got no bloody business to be off. Who the hell are you? My conscience? Listen, I’m all right with my conscience. I know just what kind of a son of a bitch I am and I know what I can do well. If I hadn’t had to leave and pull out I would have got a sable bull. You know the Roman was a hunter. There was another herd. Why did I have to make a one-night stand? Was that any way to hunt?
Hell, no. I’d make some money some way and when we came back we would come to the old man’s village in lorries, then pack in with porters so there wouldn’t be any damned car to worry about, send the porters —back, and make a camp in the timber up the stream above the Roman’s and hunt that country slowly, living there and hunting out each day, sometimes laying off and writing for a week, or writing half the day, or every other day, and get to know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were brought up.
I’d see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in the back, and instead of trailing that sable bull, gut-shot to hell, all day, I’d lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long enough so they belonged to me for ever.
Sure, if Garrick didn’t take his B’wana Simba car in there and shoot the country out. But if he did I’d go on down beyond those hills and there would be another country where a man could live and hunt if he had time to live and hunt. They’d gone in wherever a car could go. But there must be pockets like this all over, that no one knows of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places.
‘Beer?’ asked M’Cola.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Sure, you couldn’t make a living. Everyone had explained that. The locusts came and ate your crops and the monsoon failed, and the rains did not come, and everything dried up and died. There were ticks and fly to kill the stock, and the mosquitoes gave you fever and maybe you got blackwater.
Your cattle would die and you would get no price for your coffee. It took an Indian to make money from sisal and on the coast every coconut plantation meant a man ruined by the idea of making money from copra. A white hunter worked three months out of the year and drank for twelve and the Government was ruining the country for the benefit of the Hindu and the natives. That was what they told you. Sure.
But I did not want to make money. All I wanted was to live in it and have time to hunt. Already I had had one of the diseases and had experienced
