Green Hills of Africa Page 8

yards.'

  'The hell with that four-seventy,' I said. 'I can't shoot it. The

  trigger's like the last turn of the key opening a sardine can.'

  'Come on,' Pop said. 'We've got God knows how many rhino scattered

  about here.'

  'What about the buff?'

  'Plenty of time for him later. We must let him stiffen up. Let him get

  sick.'

  'Suppose we'd been down there with all that stuff coming out.'

  'Yes,' said Pop.

  All this in whispers. I looked at P.O.M. She was like someone enjoying

  a good musical show.

  'Did you see where it hit him?'

  'I couldn't tell?' she whispered. 'Do you suppose there are any more in

  there?'

  'Thousands,' I said. 'What do we do, Pop?'

  'That bull may be just around the bend,' Pop said. 'Come on.'

  We went along the bank, our nerves cocked, and as we came to the narrow

  end of the reeds there was another rush of something heavy through the tall

  stalks. I had the gun up waiting for whatever it was to show. But there was

  only the waving of the reeds. M'Cola signalled with his hand not to shoot.

  'The calf,' Pop said. 'Must have been two of them. Where's the bloody

  bull?'

  'How the hell do you see them?'

  'Tell by the size.'

  Then we were standing looking down into the stream bed, into the

  shadows under the branches of the big trees, and off ahead down the stream

  when M'Cola pointed up the hill on our right.

  'Faro,' he whispered and reached me the glasses.

  There on the hillside, head-on, wide, black, looking straight towards

  us, ears twitching and head lifted, swaying as the nose searched for the

  wind, was another rhino. He looked huge in the glasses. Pop was studying him

  with his binoculars.

  'He's no better than what you have,' he said softly.

  'I can bust him right in the sticking place,' I whispered.

  'You have only one more,' Pop whispered. 'You want a good one.'

  I offered the glasses to P.O.M.

  'I can see him without,' she said. 'He's huge.'

  'He may charge,' Pop said. 'Then you'll have to take him.'

  Then, as we watched, another rhino came into sight from behind a wide

  feathery-topped tree. He was quite a bit smaller.

  'By God, it's a calf,' Pop said. 'That one's a cow. Good thing you

  didn't shoot her. She bloody well {may} charge too.'

  'Is it the same cow?' I whispered.

  'No. That other one had a hell of a horn.'

  We all had the nervous exhilaration, like a laughing drunk, that a

  sudden over-abundance, idiotic abundance of game makes. It is a feeling that

  can come from any sort of game or fish that is ordinarily rare and that,

  suddenly, you find in a ridiculously unbelievable abundance.

  'Look at her. She knows there's something wrong. But she can't see us

  or smell us.'

  'She heard the shots.'

  'She knows we're here. But she can't make it out.'

  The rhino looked so huge, so ridiculous, and so fine to see, and I

  sighted on her chest.

  'It's a nice shot.'

  'Perfect,' Pop said.

  'What are we going to do?' P.O.M. said. She was practical.

  'We'll work around her,' Pop said.

  'If we keep low I don't believe our scent will carry up there once

  we're past.'

  'You can't teil,' Pop said. 'We don't want her to charge.'

  She did not charge, but dropped her head, finally, and worked up the

  hill followed by the nearly full-grown calf.

  'Now,' said Pop, 'we'll let Droop go ahead and see if he can find the

  bull's tracks. We might as well sit down.'

  We sat in the shade and Droopy went up one side of the stream and the

  local guide the other. They came back and said the bull had gone on down.

  'Did any one ever see what son of horn he had?' I asked.

  'Droop said he was good.'

  M'Cola had gone up the hill a little way. Now he crouched and beckoned.

  'Nyati,' he said with his hand up to his face.

  'Where?' Pop asked him. He pointed, crouched down, and as we crawled up

  to him he handed me the glasses. They were a long way away on the jutting

  ridge of one of the steep hillsides on the far side of the canyon, well down

  the stream. We could see six, then eight buffalo, black, heavy necked, the

  horns shining, standing on the point of a ridge. Some were grazing and

  others stood, their heads up, watching.

  'That one's a bull, ' Pop said, looking through the glasses.

  'Which one?'

  'Second from the right.'

  'They all look like bulls to me.'

  'They're a long way away. That one's a good bull. Now we've got to

  cross the stream and work down toward them and try to get above them.'

  'Will they stay there?'

  'No. Probably they'll work down into this stream bed as soon as it's

  hot.'

  'Let's go.'

  We crossed the stream on a log and then another log and on the other

  side, half way up the hillside, there was a deeply worn game trail that

  graded along the bank under the heavily leafed branches of the trees. We

  went along quite fast, but walking carefully, and below us, now, the stream

  bed was covered solidly with foliage. It was still early in the morning but

  the breeze was rising and the leaves stirred over our heads. We crossed one

  ravine that came down to the stream, going into the thick bush to be out of

  sight and stooping as we crossed behind trees in the small open place, then,

  using the shoulder of the ravine as protection, we climbed so that we might

  get high up the hillside above the buffalo and work down to them. We stopped

  in the shelter of the ridge, me sweating heavily and fixing a handkerchief

  inside the sweatband of my Stetson, and sent Droop ahead to look. He came

  back to say they were gone. From above we could see nothing of them, so we

  cut across the ravine and the hillside thinking we might intercept them on

  their way down into the river bed. The next hillside had been burned and at

  the bottom of the hill there was a burned area of bush. In the ash dust were

  the tracks of the buffalo as they came down and into the thick jungle of the

  stream bed. Here it was too overgrown and there were too many vines to

  follow them. There were no tracks going down the stream so we knew they were

  down in the part of the stream bed we had looked down on from the game

  trail. Pop said there was nothing to do about them in there. It was so thick

  that if we jumped them we could not get a shot. You could not tell one from

  another, he said. All you could see would be a rush of black. An old bull

  would be grey but a good herd bull might be as black as a cow. It wasn't any

  good to jump them like that.

  It was ten o'clock now and very hot in the open, the sun pegged and the

  breeze lifted the ashes of the burned-over ground as we walked. Everything

  would be in th
e thick cover now. We decided to find a shady place and lie

  down and read in the cool; to have lunch and kill the hot part of the day.

  Beyond the burned place we came toward the stream and stopped,

  sweating, in the shadow of some very large trees. We unpacked our leather

  coats and our raincoats and spread them on the grass at the foot of the

  trees so that we could lean back against the trunks. P.O.M. got out the

  books and M'Cola made a small fire and boiled water for tea.

  The breeze was coming up and we could hear it in the high branches. It

  was cool in the shade, but if you stirred into the sun, or as the sun

  shifted the shadow while you read so that any part of you was out of the

  shadow, the sun was heavy. Droopy had gone on down the stream to have a

  look, and as we lay there, reading, I could smell the heat of the day

  coming, the drying up of the dew, the heat on the leaves, and the heaviness

  of the sun over the stream.

  P.O.M. was reading {Spanish Gold}, by George A. Birmingham, and she

  said it was no good. I still had the Sevastopol book of Tolstoy and in the

  same volume I was reading a story called 'The Cossacks' that was very good.

  In it were the summer heat, the mosquitoes, the feel of the forest in the

  different seasons, and that river that the Tartars crossed, raiding, and I

  was living in that Russia again.

  I was thinking how real that Russia of the time of our Civil War was,

  as real as any other place, as Michigan, or the prairie north of town and

  the woods around Evan's game farm, of how, through Turgenev, I knew that I

  had lived there, as I had been in the family Buddenbrooks, and had climbed

  in and out of her window in {Le Rouge et Le Noir}, or the morning we had

  come in the gates of Paris and seen Salcede torn apart by the horses at the

  Place de Greves. I saw all that. And it was me they did not break on the

  rack that time because I had been polite to the executioner the time they

  killed Coconas and me, and I remember the Eve of St. Bartholomew's and how

  we hunted Huguenots that night, and when they trapped me at her house that

  time, and no feeling more true than finding the gate of the Louvre being

  closed, nor of looking down at his body in the water where he fell from the

  mast, and always, Italy, better than any book, lying in the chestnut woods,

  and in the fall mist behind the Duomo going across the town to the Ospedale

  Maggiore, the nails in my boots on the cobbles, and in the spring sudden

  showers in the mountains and the smell of the regiment like a copper coin in

  your mouth. So in the heat the train stopped at Dezenzano and there was Lago

  de Garda and those troops are the Czech Legion, and the next time it was

  raining, and the next time it was in the dark, and the next time you passed

  it riding in a truck, and the next time you were coming from somewhere else,

  and the next time you walked to it in the dark from Sermione. For we have

  been there in the books and out of the books -- and where we go, if we are

  any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and

  the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any

  importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now

  wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is

  not fashionable. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art

  endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not

  fashionable. People do not want to do it any more because they will be out

  of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them. Also

  it is very hard to do. So what? So I would go on reading about the river

  that the Tartars came across when raiding, and the drunken old hunter and

  the girl and how it was then in the different seasons.

  Pop was reading {Richard Carvell}. We had bought what there was to buy

  in Nairobi and we were pretty well to the end of the books.

  'I've read this before,' Pop said. 'But it's a good story.'

  'I can just remember it. But it was a good story then.'

  'It's a jolly good story, but I wish I hadn't read it before.'

  'This is terrible,' P.O.M. said. 'You couldn't read it.'

  'Do you want this one?'

  'Don't be ornamental,' she said. 'No, I'll finish this.'

  'Goon. Take it.'

  'I'll give it right back.'

  'Hey, M'Cola,' I said. 'Beer?'

  'N'Dio,' he said with great force, and from the chop box one of the

  natives had carried on his head produced, in its straw casing, a bottle of

  German beer, one of the sixty-four bottles Dan had brought from the German

  trading station. Its neck was wrapped in silver foil and on its black and

  yellow label there was a horseman in armour. It was still cool from the

  night and opened by the tin-opener it creamed into three cups, thick-foamed,

  full-bodied.

  'No,' said Pop. 'Very bad for the liver.'

  'Come on.'

  'All right.'

  We all drank and when M'Cola opened the second bottle Pop refused,

  firmly.

  'Go on. It means more to you. I'm going to take a nap.'

  'Poor old Mama?'

  'Just a little.'

  'All for me,' I said. M'Cola smiled and shook his head at this

  drinking. I lay back against the tree and watched the wind bringing the

  clouds and drank the beer slowly out of the bottle. It was cooler that way

  and it was excellent beer. After a while Pop and P.O.M. were both asleep and

  I got back the Sevastopol book and read in 'The Cossacks' again. It was a

  good story.

  When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and

  mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer.

  Then we read again and all went to sleep. I woke thirsty and was unscrewing

  the top from a water bottle when I heard a rhino snort and crash in the

  brush of the river bed. Pop was awake and heard it too and we took our guns,

  without speaking, and started toward where the noise had come from. M'Cola

  found the tracks. The rhino had come up the stream, evidently he had winded

  us when he was only about thirty yards away, and had gone on up. We could

  not follow the tracks the way the wind was blowing so we circled away from

  the stream and back to the edge of the burned place to get above him and

  then hunted very carefully against the wind along the stream through very

  thick bush, but we did not find him. Finally Droopy found where he had gone

  up the other side and on into the hills. From the tracks it did not seem a

  particularly large one.

  We were a long way from camp, at least four hours as we had come, and

  much of it up-hill going back, certainly there would be that long climb out

  of the canyon; we had a wounded buffalo to deal with, and when we came out

  on the edge of the burned country again, we agreed that we should get P.O.M.

  and get started. It was still hot, but the sun was on its wa
y down and for a

  good way we would be on the heavily shaded game trail on the high bank above

  the stream. When we found P.O.M. she pretended to be indignant at our going

  off and leaving her alone but she was only teasing us.

  We started off, Droop and his spearsman in the lead, walking along the

  shadow of the trail that was broken by the sun through the leaves. Instead

  of the cool early morning smell of the forest there was a nasty stink like

  the mess cats make.

  'What makes the stink?' I whispered to Pop.

  'Baboons,' he said.

  A whole tribe of them had gone on just ahead of us and their droppings

  were everywhere. We came up to the place where the rhinos and the buff had

  come out of the reeds and I located where I thought the buff had been when I

  shot. M'Cola and Droopy were casting about like hounds and I thought they

  were at least fifty yards too high up the bank when Droop held up a leaf.

  'He's got blood,' Pop said. We went up to them. There was a great

  quantity of blood, black now on the grass, and the trail was easy to follow.

  Droop and M'Cola trailed one on each side, leaving the trail between them,

  pointing to each blood spot formally with a long stem of grass. I always

  thought it would be better for one to trail slowly and the other cast ahead

  but this was the way they trailed, stooped heads, pointing each dried splash

  with their grass stems and occasionally, when they picked up the tracks

  after losing them, stooping to pluck a grass blade or a leaf that had the

  black stain on it. I followed them with the Springfield, then came Pop, with

  P.O.M. behind him. Droop carried my big gun and Pop had his. M'Cola had

  P.O.M.'s Mannlicher slung over his shoulder. None of us spoke and everyone

  seemed to regard it as a pretty serious business. In some high grass we

  found blood, at a pretty good height on the grass leaves on both sides of

  the trail where the buff had gone through the grass. That meant he was shot

  clean through. You could not tell the original colour of the blood now, but

  I had a moment of hoping he might be shot through the lungs. But farther on

  we came on some droppings in the rocks with blood in them and then for a

  while he had dropped dung wherever he climbed and all of it was

  blood-spotted. It looked, now, like a gut shot or one through the paunch. I

  was more ashamed of it all the time.

  'If he comes don't worry about Droopy or the others,' Pop whispered.

  'They'll get out of his way. Stop him.'

  'Right up the nose,' I said.

  'Don't try anything fancy,' Pop said. The trail climbed steadily, then

  twice looped back on itself and for a time seemed to wander, without plan,

  among some rocks. Once it lead down to the stream, crossed a rivulet of it

  and then came back up on the same bank, grading up through the trees.

  'I think we'll find him dead,' I whispered to Pop. That aimless turn

  had made me see him, slow and hard hit, getting ready to go down.

  'I hope so,' Pop said.

  But the trail went on, where there was little grass now, and trailing

  was much slower and more difficult. There were no tracks now that I could

  see, only the probable line he would take, verified by a shiny dark splatter

  of dried blood on a stone. Several times we lost it entirely and, the three

  of us making casts, one would find it, point and whisper 'Damu', and we

  would go on again. Finally it led down from a rocky hillside with the last

  of the sun on it, down into the stream bed where there was a long, wide

  patch of the highest dead reeds that we had seen. These were higher and

  thicker even than the slough the buff had come out of in the morning and

  there were several game trails that went into them.

  'Not good enough to take the little Memsahib in there,' Pop said.

  'Let her stay here with M'Cola,' I said.

  'It's not good enough for the little Memsahib,' Pop repeated. 'I don't

  know why we let her come.'

  'She can wait here. Droop wants to go on.'

  'Right you are. We'll have a look.'