The only shot is straight into the nose. The only other shot is into his chest or, if you’re to one side, into the neck or the shoulders. After they’ve been hit once they take a hell of a lot of killing. Don’t try anything fancy. Take the easiest shot there is. They’ve finished skinning out that head now. Should we get started?’
He called to the gun-bearers, who came up wiping their hands, and the older one got into the back.
‘I’ll only take Kongoni,’ Wilson said. ‘The other can watch to keep the birds away.’
As the car moved slowly across the open space toward the island of brushy trees that ran in a tongue of foliage along a dry water course that cut the open swale, Macomber felt his heart pounding and his mouth was dry again, but it was excitement, not fear.
‘Here’s where he went in,’ Wilson said. Then to the gun-bearer in Swahili, ‘Take the blood spoor.’
The car was parallel to the patch of bush. Macomber, Wilson and the gun-bearer got down. Macomber, looking back, saw his wife, with the rifle by her side, looking at him. He waved to her and she did not wave back.
The brush was very thick ahead and the ground was dry. The middle-aged gun-bearer was sweating heavily and Wilson had his hat down over his eyes and his red neck showed just ahead of Macomber. Suddenly the gun-bearer said something in Swahili to Wilson and ran forward.
‘He’s dead in there,’ Wilson said. ‘Good work,’ and he turned to grip Macomber’s hand and as they shook hands, grinning at each other, the gun-bearer shouted wildly and they saw him coming out of the bush sideways, fast as a crab, and the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping, massive head straight out, coming in a charge, his little pig eyes bloodshot as he looked at them.
Wilson, who was ahead, was kneeling shooting, and Macomber, as he fired, unhearing his shot in the roaring of Wilson’s gun, saw fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, and the head jerked, he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragments fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo’s huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the oncoming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower and he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.
Wilson had ducked to one side to get in a shoulder shot. Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof, and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull.
Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not two yards from where the buffalo lay on his side and his wife knelt over him with Wilson beside her.
‘I wouldn’t turn him over,’ Wilson said.
The woman was crying hysterically.
‘I’d get back in the car,’ Wilson said. ‘Where’s the rifle?’
She shook her head, her face contorted. The gun-bearer picked up the rifle.
‘Leave it as it is,’ said Wilson. Then, ‘Go get Abdulla so that he may witness the manner of the accident.’
He knelt down, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and spread it over Francis Macomber’s crew-cropped head where it lay. The blood sank into the dry, loose earth.
Wilson stood up and saw the buffalo on his side, his legs out, his thinly-haired belly crawling with ticks. ‘Hell of a good bull,’ his brain registered automatically. ‘A good fifty inches, or better. Better.’ He called to the driver and told him to spread a blanket over the body and stay by it. Then he walked over to the motor car where the woman sat crying in the corner.
‘That was a pretty thing to do,’ he said in a toneless voice. ‘He would have left you too.’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘Of course it’s an accident,’ he said. ‘I know that.’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There will be a certain amount of unpleasantness but I will have some photographs taken that will be very useful at the inquest. There’s the testimony of the gun-bearers and the driver too. You’re perfectly all right.’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘There’s a hell of a lot to be done,’ he said. ‘And I’ll have to send a truck off to the lake to wireless for a plane to take the three of us into Nairobi. Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.’
‘Stop it. Stop it. Stop it,’ the woman cried.
Wilson looked at her with his flat blue eyes.
‘I’m through now,’ he said. ‘I was a little angry. I’d begun to like your husband.’
‘Oh, please stop it,’ she said. ‘Please, please stop it.’
‘That’s better,’ Wilson said. ‘Please is much better. Now I’ll stop.’
THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO
Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngàje Ngài’, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
‘The marvellous thing is that it’s painless,’ he said. ‘That’s how you know when it starts.’
‘Is it really?’
‘Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odour, though. That must bother you.’
‘Don’t! Please don’t.’
‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?’
The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade on to the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.
‘They’ve been there since the day the truck broke down,’ he said. ‘To-day’s the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ she said.
‘I’m only talking,’ he said. ‘It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t want to bother you.’
‘You know it doesn’t bother me,’ she said. ‘It’s that I’ve gotten so very nervous not being able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes.’
‘Or until the plane doesn’t come.’
‘Please tell me what I can do. There must be something I can do.’
‘You can take the leg off and that might stop it, though I doubt it. Or you can shoot me. You’re a good shot now. I taught you to shoot, didn’t I?’
‘Please don’t talk that way. Couldn’t I read to you?’
‘Read what?’
‘Anything in the book bag that we haven’t read.’
‘I can’t listen to it,’ he said. ‘Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and that makes the time pass.’
‘I don’t quarrel. I never want to quarrel. Let’s not quarrel any more. No matter how nervous we get. Maybe they will be back with another truck to-day. Maybe the plane will come.’
‘I don’t want to move,’ the man said. ‘There is no sense in moving now except to make it easier for you.’
‘That’s cowardly.’
‘Can’t you let a man die as comfortably as he can without calling him names? What’s the use of slanging me?’
‘You’re not going to die.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m dying now. Ask those bastards.’ He looked over to where the huge, filthy birds sat, their naked head sunk in the hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to run quick-legged and then waddle slowly toward the others.
‘They are around every camp. You never notice them. You can’t die if you don’t give up.’
‘Where did you read that? You’re such a bloody fool.’
‘You might think about someone else.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘that’s been my trade.’
He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
‘Wouldn’t you like me to read?’ she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his cot. ‘There’s a breeze coming up.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Maybe the truck will come.’
‘I don’t give a damn about the truck.’
‘I do.’
‘You give a damn about so many things that I don’t.’
‘Not so many, Harry.’
‘What about a drink?’
‘It’s supposed to be bad for you. It said in Black’s to avoid all alcohol. You shouldn’t drink.’
‘Molo!’ he shouted.
‘Yes, Bwana.’
‘Bring whisky-soda.’
‘Yes, Bwana.’
‘You shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘That’s what I mean by giving up. It says it’s bad for you. I know it’s bad for you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good for me.’
So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance to finish it. So this was the way it
