CHAPTER ONE

That all seemed a year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way out to the twenty-eight-mile salt-lick, the sun on our faces, just having shot the guinea fowl, having, in the last five days, failed on the lick where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big hills and the small hills, having failed on the flats, losing a shot the night before on this lick because of the Austrian's lorry, I knew there were only two days more to hunt before we must leave. M'Cola knew it too, and we were hunting together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a shortness of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.

Kamau, the driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who, with an old brown tweed coat some shooter had discarded, trousers heavily patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed always to give an impression of great elegance. Kamau was very modest, quiet, and an excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country and into an open, scrubby, desert-looking stretch, I looked at him, whose elegance, achieved with an old coat and a safety pin, whose modesty, pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would have meant nothing to me except that we would be short a driver; while now whenever or wherever he should die I would feel badly. Then abandoning the sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the look on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then, we put up another flock of guineas. M'Cola handed nie the shotgun and I shook my head. He nodded violently and said, 'Good. Very Good', and I told Kamau to go on. This confused Garrick who began an oration. Didn't we want guineas? Those were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook a bull off of it, by a shot, to frighten him in the way we had seen the lesser kudu leave the salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were in the blind.

We left the lorry under some scrubby trees about two miles from the lick and walked along the sandy road towards the first salt place which was in the open to the left of the trail. We had gone about a mile keeping absolutely quiet and walking in single file, Abdullah the educated tracker leading, then me, M'Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of us. Where the sand was thin over the clay there was a pool of water and you could see that a heavy rain had drenched it all on ahead. I did not realize what this meant but Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and bared his teeth in anger.

'It's no good,' M'Cola whispered.

Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.

'Shut up, you bastard,' I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on talking in above normal tones and I "looked up 'shut up' in the dictionary while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn't find 'shut up' so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he closed it in surprise.

"Cola,' I said.

'Yes,' said M'Cola.

'What's the matter?'

'Salt no good.'

'Ah.'

So that was it. I had thought of the rain only as something that made tracking easy.

'When the rain?' I asked.

'Last night,' M'Cola said.

Garrick started to talk and I placed the back of my hand against his mouth.

"Cola.'

'Yes.'

'Other salt,' pointing in the direction of the big lick in the woods, which I knew was a good bit higher because we went very slightly up hill through the brush to reach it. 'Other salt good?'

'Maybe.'

M'Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed deeply hurt but kept his mouth shut and we went on down the road, walking around the wet places, to where, sure enough, the deep depression of the saltlick was half filled with water. Garrick started to whisper a speech here but M'Cola shut him up again.

'Come on,' I said, and, M'Cola ahead, we started trailing up the damp, sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the trees to the upper lick.

M'Cola stopped dead, leaned over to look at the damp sand, then whispered, 'Man', to me. There was the track.

'Shenzi,' he said, which meant a wild man.

We trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and stalking the lick carefully, up and into the blind. M'Cola shook his head.

'No good,' he said. 'Come on.'

We went over to the lick. There it was all written plainly. There were the tracks of three big bull kudu in the moist bank beyond the lick where they had come to the salt. Then there were the sudden, deep, knifely-cut tracks where they made a spring when the bow twanged and the slashing heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then, far-spaced, the tracks running into the bush. We trailed them, all three, but no man's track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.

M'Cola said, 'Shenzi!' putting great hate into the word. We picked up the shenzi's tracks and saw where he had gone on back to the road. We settled down in the blind and waited there until it was dark and a light rain began to fall. Nothing came to the salt. In the rain we made our way back to the lorry. Some wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.

Kamau had rigged a tent out of a big canvas ground cloth, hung my mosquito net inside, and set up the canvas cot. M'Cola brought the food inside the shelter tent.

Garrick and Abdullah built a fire and they, Kamau and M'Cola cooked over it. They were going to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a couple of tin cups of half whisky and water.

M'Cola came in, grave, solicitous, and very awkward inside a tent and took my clothes out from where I had folded them to make a pillow and folded them again, very un-neatly, and put them under the blankets. He brought three tins to see if I did not want them. opened.

'No.'

'Chai?' he asked.

'The hell with it.'

'No chai?'

'Whisky better.'

'Yes,' he said feelingly. 'Yes.'

'Chai in the morning. Before the sun.'

'Yes, B'wana M'Kumba.'

'You sleep here. Out of the rain.' I pointed to the canvas where the rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear. It was a lovely sound, even though it was hitching us.

'Yes.'

'Go on. Eat.'

'Yes. No chai?'

'The hell with tea.'

'Whisky?' he asked hopefully.

'Whisky finish.'

'Whisky,' he said confidently.

'All right,' I said. 'Go eat,' and pouring the cup half and half with water got in under the mosquito bar, found my clothes and again made them into a pillow, and lying on my side drank the whisky very slowly, resting on one elbow, then dropped the cup down under the bar on to the ground, felt under the cot for the Springfield, put the searchlight beside me in the bed under the blanket, and went to sleep listening to the rain. I woke when I heard M'Cola come in, make his bed and go to sleep, and I woke once in the night and heard him sleeping by me; but in the morning he was up and had made the tea before I was awake.

'Chai,' he said, pulling on my blanket.

'Bloody chai,' I said, sitting up still asleep.

It was a grey, wet morning. The rain had stopped but the mist hung over the ground and we found the salt-lick rained out and not a track near it.

Then we hunted through the wet scrub on the flat hoping to find a track in the soaked earth and trail a bull until we could see him. There were no tracks. We crossed the road and followed the edge of the scrub around a moor-like open stretch. I hoped we might find the rhino but while we came on much fresh rhino dung there were no tracks since the rain. Once we heard tick birds and looking up saw them in jerky flight above us headed to the northward over the heavy scrub. We made a long circle through there but found nothing but a fresh hyena track and a cow kudu track. In a tree M'Cola pointed out a lesser kudu skull with one beautiful, long, curling horn. We found the other horn below in the grass and I screwed it back on to its bone base.

'Shenzi,' M'Cola said and imitated a man pulling a bow. The skull was quite clean but the hollow horns had some damp residue in them, smelled unbearably foul and, giving no sign of having noticed the stench, I handed them to Garrick who promptly, without sign gave them to Abdullah. Abdullah wrinkled the edge of his flat nose and shook his head. They really smelled abominably. M'Cola and I grinned and Garrick looked virtuous.

I decided a good idea might be to drive along the road in the car, watching for kudu, and hunt any likely-looking clearings. We went back to the car and did this, working several clearings with no luck. By then the sun was up and the road was becoming populous with travellers, both white-clothed and naked, and we decided to head for camp. On our way in, we stopped and stalked the other salt-lick. There was an impalla on it looking very red where the sun struck his hide in the patches between the grey trees and there were many kudu tracks. We smoothed them over and drove on into camp to find a sky full of locusts passing over, going to the westward, making the sky, as you looked up, seem a pink dither of flickering passage, flickering like an old cinema film, but pink instead of grey. P.O.M. and Pop came out and were very disappointed. No rain had fallen in camp and they had been sure we would have something when we came in.

'Did my literary pal get off?'

'Yes,' Pop said. 'He's gone into Handeni.'

'He told me all about American women,' P.O.M. said. 'Poor old Poppa, I was sure you'd get one. Danin the rain.'

'How are American women?'

'He thinks they're terrible.'

'Very sound fellow,' said Pop. 'Tell me just what happened to-day.'

We sat in the shade of the dining tent and I told them.

'A Wanderobo,' Pop said. 'They're frightful shots. Bad luck.'

'I thought it might be one of those travelling sportsmen you see with their bows slung going along the road. He saw the lick by the road and trailed up to the other one.'

'Not very likely. They carry those bows and arrows as protection. They're not hunters.'

'Well, whoever it was put it on us. '

'Bad luck. That, and the rain. I've had scouts out here on both the hills but they've seen nothing.'

'Well, we're not hitched until to-morrow night. When do we have to leave?'

'After to-morrow.'

'That bloody savage.'

'I suppose Karl is blasting up the sable down there.'

'We won't be able to get into camp for the horns. Have you heard anything?'

'No.'

'I'm going to give up smoking for six months for you to get one,' P.O.M. said. 'I've started already.'

We had lunch and afterwards I went into the tent and lay down and read.

I knew we still had a chance on the lick in the morning and I was not going to worry about it. But I 'was' worried and I did not want to go to sleep and wake up feeling dopey so I came out and sat in one of the canvas chairs under the open dining tent and read somebody's life of Charles the Second and looked up every once in a while to watch the locusts. The locusts were exciting to see and it was difficult for me to take them as a matter of course.

Finally I went to sleep in the chair with my feet on a chop-box and when I woke there was Garrick, the bastard, wearing a large, very floppy, black and white ostrich-plume head-dress.

'Go away,' I said in English.

He stood smirking proudly, then turned so I could see the head-dress from the side.

I saw Pop coming out of his tent with a pipe in his mouth. 'Look what we have,' I called to him.

He looked, said, 'Christ', and went back into the tent.

'Come on,' I said. 'We'll just ignore it.'

Pop came out, finally, with a book and we took no notice of Garrick's head-dress at all, sitting and talking, while he posed with it.

'Bastard's been drinking, too,' I said.

'Probably.'

'I can smell it.'

Pop, without looking at him, spoke a few words to Garrick in a very soft voice.

'What did you tell him?'

'To go and get dressed properly and be ready to start.'

Garrick walked off, his plums waving.

'Not the moment for his ostrich plumes,' Pop said.

'Some people probably like them.'

'That's it. Start photographing them.'

'Awful,' I said.

'Frightful,' Pop agreed.

'On the last day if we don't get anything, I'm going to shoot Garrick in the behind. What would that cost me?'

'Might make lots of trouble. If you shoot one, you have to shoot the other, too.'

'Only Garrick.'

'Better not shoot then. Remember it's me you get into trouble.'

'Joking, Pop.'

Garrick, un-head-dressed and with Abdullah, appeared and Pop spoke with them.

'They want to hunt around the hill a new way.'

'Splendid. When?'

'Any time now. It looks like rain. You might get going.'

I sent Molo for my boots and a raincoat, M'Cola came out with the Springfield, and we walked down to the car. It had been heavily cloudy all day although the sun had come through the clouds in the forenoon for a time and again at noon. The rains were moving up on us. Now it was starting to rain and the locusts were no longer flying.

'I'm dopey with sleep,' I told Pop. 'I'm going to have a drink.'

We were standing under the big tree by the cooking fire with the light rain pattering in the leaves. M'Cola brought the whisky flask and handed it to me very solemnly.

'Have one?'

'I don't see what harm it can do.'

We both drank and Pop said, 'The hell with them'.

'The hell with them.'

'You may find some tracks.'

'We'll run them out of the country.'

In the car we turned to the right on the road, drove on up past the mud village and turned off the road to the left on to a red, hard, clay track that circled the edge of the hills and was close bordered on either side with trees. It was raining fairly hard now and we drove slowly. There seemed to be enough sand in the clay to keep the car from slipping. Suddenly, from the back seat, Abdullah, very excited, told Kamau to stop. We stopped with a skid, all got out, and walked back. There was a freshly cut kudu track in the wet clay. It could not have been made more than five minutes before as it was sharp-edged and the dirt, that had been picked up by the inside of the hoof, was not yet softened by the rain.

'Doumi,' Garrick said and threw back his head and spread his arms wide to show horns that hung back over his withers. 'Kubwa Sana!' Abdullah agreed it was a bull; a huge bull.

'Come on,' I said.

It was easy tracking and we knew we were close. In rain or snow it is much easier to come up close to animals and I was sure we were going to get a shot. We followed the tracks through thick brush and then out into an open patch. I stopped to wipe the rain off my glasses and blew through the aperture in the rear sight of the Springfield. It was raining hard now, and I pulled my hat low down over my eyes to keep my glasses dry. We skirted the edge of the open patch and then, ahead, there was a crash and I saw a grey, white-striped animal making off through the brush. I threw the gun up and M'Cola grabbed my arm, 'Manamouki!' he whispered. It was a cow kudu. But when we came up to where it had jumped there were no other tracks. The same tracks we had followed led, logically and with no possibility of doubt, from the road to that cow.

'Doumi Kubwa Sana!' I said, full of sarcasm and disgust to Garrick and made a gesture of giant horns flowing back from behind his ears.

'Manamouki Kubwa Sana,' he said very sorrowfully and patiently. 'What an enormous cow.'

'You lousy ostrich-plumed punk,' I told him in English. 'Manamouki!

Manamouki! Manamouki!'

'Manamouki,' said M'Cola and nodded his head.

I got out the dictionary, couldn't find the words, and made it clear to M'Cola with signs that we would circle back in a long swing to the road and see if we could find another track. We circled back in the rain, getting thoroughly soaked, saw nothing, found the car, and as the rain lessened and the roads still seemed firm decided to go on until it was dark. Puffs of cloud hung on the hillside after the rain and the trees dripped but we saw nothing. Not in the open glades, not in the fields where the bush thinned, not on the green hillsides. Finally it was dark and we went back to camp.

.The Springfield was very wet when we got out of the car and I told M'Cola to clean it carefully and oil it well. He said he would and I went on and into the tent where a lantern was burning, took off my clothes, had a bath in the canvas tub and came out to the fire comfortable and relaxed in pyjamas, dressing-gown and mosquito boots.

P.O.M. and Pop were sitting in their chairs by the fire and P.O.M. got up to make me a whisky and soda.

'M'Cola told me,' Pop said from his chair by the fire.

'A damned big cow,' I told him. 'I nearly busted her. What do you think about the morning?'

'The lick I suppose. We've scouts out to watch both of these hills. You remember that old man from the village? He's on a wild-goose chase after them in some country over beyond the hills. He and the Wanderobo. They've been gone three days.'

'There's no reason why we shouldn't get one on the lick where Karl shot his. One day is as good as another.'

'Quite.'

'It's the last damned day though and the lick may be rained out. As soon as it's wet there's no salt. Just mud.'

'That's it.'

'I'd like to see one.'

'When you do, take your time and make sure of him. Take your time and kill him.'

'I don't worry about that.'

'Let's talk about something else,' P.O.M. said. 'This makes me too nervous.'

'I wish we had old Leather Pants,' Pop said. 'God, he was a talker. He made the old man here talk too. Give us that spiel on modern writers again.'

'Go to hell.'

'Why don't we have some intellectual life?' P.O.M. asked. 'Why don't you men ever discuss world topics? Why am I kept in ignorance of everything that goes on?'

'World's in a hell of a shape,' Pop stated.

'Awful.'

'What's going on in America?'

'Damned if I know! Some sort of Y.M.C.A. show. Starry eyed bastards spending money that somebody will have to pay. Everybody in our town quit work to go on relief. Fishermen all turned carpenters. Reverse of the Bible.'

'How are things in Turkey?'

'Frightful. Took the fezzes away. Hanged any amount of old pals. Ismet's still around though.'

'Been in France lately?'

'Didn't like it. Gloomy as hell. Been a bad show there just now.'

'By God,' said Pop, 'it must have been if you can believe the papers.'

'When they riot they really riot. Hell, they've got a tradition.'

'Were you in Spain for the revolution?'

'I got there late. Then we waited for two that didn't come. Then we missed another.'

'Did you see the one in Cuba?'

'From the start.'

'How was it?'

'Beautiful. Then lousy. You couldn't believe how lousy.'

'Stop it,' P.O.M. said. 'I know about those things. I was crouched down behind a marble-topped table while they were shooting in Havana. They came by in cars shooting at everybody they saw. I took my drink with me and I was very proud not to have spilled it or forgotten it. The children said, "Mother, can we go out in the afternoon to see the shooting?" They got so worked up about revolution we had to stop mentioning it. Bumby got so bloodthirsty about Mr. M. he had terrible dreams.'

'Extraordinary,' Pop said.

'Don't make fun of me. I don't want to just hear about revolutions. All we see or hear is revolutions. I'm sick of them. '

'The old man must like them.'

'I'm sick of them.'

'You know, I've never seen one,' Pop said.

'They're beautiful. Really. For quite a while. Then they go bad.'

'They're very exciting,' P.O.M. said. 'I'll admit that. But I'm sick of them. Really, I don't care anything about them.'

'I've been studying them a little.'

'What did you find out?' Pop asked.

'They were all very different but there were some things you could co-ordinate. I'm going to try to write a study of them.'

'It could be damned interesting.'

'If you have enough material. You need an awful lot of past performances. It's very hard to get anything true on anything you haven't seen yourself because the ones that fail have such a bad press and the winners always lie so. Then you can only really follow anything in places where you speak the language. That limits you of course. That's why I would never go to Russia. When you can't overhear it's no good. All you get are handouts and sight-seeing. Any one who knows a foreign language in any country is damned liable to lie to you. You get your good dope always from the people and when you can't talk with people and can't overhear you don't get anything that's of anything but journalistic value.'

'You want to knuckle down on your Swahili then.'

'I'm trying to.'

'Even then you can't overhear because they're always talking their own language.'

'But if I ever write anything about this it will just be landscape painting until I know something about it. Your first seeing of a country is a very valuable one. Probably more valuable to yourself than to anyone else, is the hell of it. But you ought to always write it to try to get it stated. No matter what you do with it.'

'Most of the damned Safari books are most awful bloody bores.'

'They're terrible.'

'The only one I ever liked was Streeter's. What did he call it?

'Denatured Africa'. He made you feel what it was like. That's the best.'

'I liked Charlie Curtis's. It was very honest and it made a fine picture.'

'That man Streeter was damned funny though. Do you remember when he shot the kongoni?'

'It was very funny.'

'I've never read anything, though, that could make you feel about the country the way we feel about it. They all have Nairobi fast life or else rot about shooting beasts with horns half an inch longer than someone else shot. Or muck about danger.'

'I'd like to try to write something about the country and the animals and what it's like to someone who knows nothing about it.'

'Have a try at it. Can't do any harm. You know I wrote a diary of that Alaskan trip.'

'I'd love to read it,' P.O.M. said. 'I didn't know you were a writer, Mr. J. P.'

'No bloody fear,' said Pop. 'If you'd read it, though, I'll send for it. You know it's just what we did each day and how Alaska looked to an Englishman from Africa. It'd bore you.'

'Not if you wrote it,' P.O.M. said.

'Little woman's giving us compliments,' Pop said.

'Not me. You.'

'I've read things by him,' she said. 'I want to read what Mr. J. P. writes.'

'Is the old man really a writer?' Pop asked her.