Droopy asked for the knife. Now he was going to show me something.
Skilfully he slit open the stomach and turned it inside, tripe side, out, emptying the grass in it on the ground, shook it, then put the liver and kidneys inside it and with the knife cut a switch from the tree the buck lay under and sewed the stomach together with the withe so that the tripe made a bag to carry the other delicacies in. Then he cut a pole and put the bag on the end of it, running it through the flaps, and put it over his shoulder in the way tramps carried their property in a handkerchief on the end of a stick in Blue Jay corn plaster advertisements when we were children. It was a good trick and I thought how I would show it to John Staib in Wyoming some time and he would smile his deaf man’s smile (you had to throw pebbles at him to make him stop when you heard a bull bugle), and I knew what John would say. He would say, ‘By Godd, Urnust, dot’s smardt’.
Droop handed me the stick, then took off his single garment, made a sung and got the buck up on his back. I tried to help him and suggested by signs that we cut a pole and sling him, carrying him between us, but he wanted to carry him alone. So we started for camp, me with the tripe bag on the end of a stick over my shoulder, my rifle slung, and Droopy staggering steadily ahead, sweating heavily, under the buck. I tried to get him to hang him in a tree and leave him until we could send out a couple of porters, and to that end we put him in the crotch of a tree. But when Droopy saw that I meant to go off and leave him there rather than simply allow him to drain he got him down on to his shoulders again and we went on into camp, the boys, around the cooking fire, all laughing at the tripe bag over my shoulder as we came in.
This was the kind of hunting that I liked. No riding in cars, the country broken up instead of the plains, and I was completely happy. I had been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again. I would not even write a letter. The only person I really cared about, except the children, was with nie, and I had no wish to share this life with anyone who was not there, only to live it, being completely happy and quite tired. I knew that I was shooting well and I had that feeling of well-being and confidence that is so much more pleasant to have than to hear about.
As it turned out, we started soon after three to be on the hill by four. But it was nearly five before we saw the first rhino come bustling short-leggedly across the ridge of hill in almost the same place we had seen the rhino the night before. We sat where he went into the edge of the forest near where we had seen the two fighting and then took a course that would lead us down the hill, across the grown-over gully at the bottom, and up the steep slope to where there was a thorn tree with yellow blossoms that marked the place where we had seen the rhino go in.
Coming straight up the slope in sight of the thorn tree, the wind blowing across the hill, I tried to walk as slowly as I could and put a handkerchief inside the sweatband of my hat to keep the perspiration out of my glasses. I expected to shoot at any minute and I wanted to slow up enough so my heart would not be pounding. In shooting large animals there is no reason ever to miss if you have a clear shot and can shoot and know where to shoot, unless you are unsteady from a run or a climb or fog your glasses, break them or run out of cloth or paper to wipe them clean. The glasses were the biggest hazard and I used to carry four handkerchiefs and change them from the left to the right pocket when they were wet.
We came up to the yellow blossomed tree very carefully, like people walking up to a bevy of quail the dogs have pointed, and the rhino was not in sight. We went all through the edge of the forest and it was full of tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side of the mountain, hoping to see a rhino in the open glades. When it was almost too dark to shoot, I saw Droopy stop and crouch. With his head down he motioned us forward. Crawling up, we saw a large rhino and a small one standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.
‘Cow and calf,’ Pop said softly. ‘Can’t shoot her. Let me look at her horn.’ He took the glasses from M’Cola.
‘Can she see us?’ P.O.M. asked.
‘No.’
‘How far are they?’
‘Must be nearly five hundred yards.’
‘My God, she looks big,’ I whispered.
‘She’s a big cow,’ Pop said. ‘Wonder what became of the bull?’ He was pleased and excited by the sight of game. ‘Too dark to shoot unless we’re right on him.’
The rhinos had turned and were feeding. They never seemed to move slowly. They either bustled or stood still.
‘What makes them so red?’ P.O.M. asked. ‘Rolling in the mud,’ Pop answered. ‘We better get along while there’s light.’
The sun —was down when we came out of the forest and looked down the slope and across to the hill where we had watched from with our glasses. We should have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back up the trail the way we had come, but we decided, like fools, to grade straight across the mountainside below the edge of the forest. So in the dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed only as wooded patches until you were in them, slid down, clung to vines, stumbled and climbed and slid again, down and down, then steeply, impossibly, up, hearing the rustle of night things and the cough of a leopard hunting baboons, me scared of snakes, and touching each root and branch with snake fear in the dark.
To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into the moonlight and the long, too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed one foot up to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at a time, leaning forward against the grade and the altitude, dead tired and gun weary, single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the top where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into camp.
So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the canvas bath had been a quarter filled with hot water.
»Bathi’, B’wana.’
‘Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,’ you say.
‘I never could,’ says P.O.M. ‘You all made me.’
‘You climbed better than any of us.’
‘Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?’
‘I wonder,’ Pop said. ‘I suppose it’s merely condition.’
‘It’s riding in the damned cars that ruins us.’
‘If we did that walk every night we could come back in three nights from now and never feel it.’
‘Yes. But I’d be as scared of snakes if we did it every night for a year.’
‘You’d get over it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They scare me stiff. Do you remember that time we touched hands behind the tree?’
‘Rather,’ said Pop. ‘You jumped two yards. Are you really afraid of them, or only talking?’
‘They scare me sick,’ I said. ‘They always have.’
‘What’s the matter with you men?’ P.O.M. said. ‘Why haven’t I heard anything about the war to-night?’
‘We’re too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?’
‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Where is that boy with the whisky?’ Then calling in that feeble, clowning falsetto, ‘Kayti… Katy-ay!’
»Bathi,» said Molo again softly, but insistently.
‘Too tired.’
‘Memsahib ‘bathi,» Molo said hopefully.
‘I’ll go,’ said P.O.M. ‘But you two hurry up with your drinking. I’m hungry.’
»Bathi,» said Kayti severely to Pop.
»Bathi’ yourself,’ said Pop. ‘Don’t bully me.’
Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.
‘All right. All right,’ said Pop. ‘Going to have
