believe I'd be able to stand it if I really had shot it. I'd be too proud.
Isn't triumph marvellous?'
'Good old Mama,' Karl said.
'I believe you did shoot him,' I said.
'Oh, let's not go into that,' P.O.M. said. 'I feel so wonderful about
just being supposed to have killed him. You know people never used to carry
me on their shoulders much at home.'
'No one knows how to behave in America,' Pop said. 'Most uncivilized.'
'We'll carry you in Key West,' Karl said. 'Poor old Mama.'
'Let's not talk about it,' P.O.M. said. 'I like it too much. Shouldn't
I maybe distribute largess?'
'They didn't do it for that,' Pop said. 'But it is all right to give
something to celebrate.'
'Oh, I want to give them all a great deal of money,' P.O.M. said.
'Isn't triumph simply marvellous?'
'Good old Mama,' I said. 'You killed him.'
'No, I didn't. Don't lie to me. Just let me enjoy my triumph.'
Anyway M'Cola did not trust me for a long time. Until P.O.M.'s licence
ran out, she was his favourite and we were simply a lot of people who
interfered and kept Mama from shooting things. Once her licence was out and
she was no longer shooting, she dropped back into non-combatant status with
him and as we began to hunt kudu and Pop stayed in camp and sent us out
alone with the trackers, Karl with Charo and M'Cola and I together, M'Cola
dropped Pop visibly in his estimation. It was only temporary of course. He
was Pop's man and I believe his working estimations were only from day to
day and required an unbroken series of events to have any meaning. But
something had happened between us.
PART II
PURSUIT REMEMBERED
CHAPTER ONE
It dated back to the time of Droopy, after I had come back from being
ill in Nairobi and we had gone on a foot safari to hunt rhino in the forest.
Droopy was a real savage with lids to his eyes that nearly covered them,
handsome, with a great deal of style, a fine hunter and a beautiful tracker.
He was about thirty-five, I should think, and wore only a piece of cloth
knotted over one shoulder, and a fez that some hunter had given him. He
always carried a spear. M'Cola wore an old U. S. Army khaki tunic, complete
with buttons, that had originally been brought out for Droopy, who had been
away somewhere and had missed getting it. Twice Pop had brought it out for
Droopy and finally M'Cola had said, 'Give it to me'.
Pop had let him have it and M'Cola had worn it ever since. It, a pair
of shorts, his fuzzy wool curler's cap, and a knitted army sweater he wore
when washing the tunic, were the only garments I ever saw on the old man
until he took my bird-shooting coat. For shoes he used sandals cut from old
motor-car tyres. He had slim, handsome legs with well-turned ankles on the
style of Babe Ruth's and I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw
him with the tunic off and noticed how old his upper body was. It had that
aged look you see in photographs of Jeffries and Sharkey posing thirty years
after, the ugly, old-man biceps and the fallen pectoral muscles.
'How old is M'Cola?' I asked Pop.
'He must be over fifty,' Pop said. 'He's got a grown-up family in the
native reserve.'
'How are his kids?'
'No good, worthless. He can't handle them. We tried one as a porter.
But he was no good.'
M'Cola was not jealous of Droopy. He simply knew that Droopy was a
better man than he was. More of a hunter, a faster and a cleaner tracker,
and a great stylist in everything he did. He admired Droopy in the same way
we did and being out with him, it made him realize that he was wearing
Droopy's tunic and that he had been a porter before he became a gun bearer
and suddenly he ceased being an old timer and we were hunting together; he
and I hunting together and Droopy in command of the show.
That had been a fine hunt. The afternoon of the day we came into the
country we walked about four miles from camp along a deep rhino trail that
graded through the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees,
as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a
foot deep in the ground and smoothly worn and we left it where it slanted
down through a divide in the hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed,
sweating, the small, steep hill on the right to sit there with our backs
against the hilltop and glass the country. It was a green, pleasant country,
with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of a mountain, and
it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the
thick timber on the mountain. Fingers of the forest came down on to the head
of some of the slopes and it was there, at the forest edge, that we watched
for rhino to come out. If you looked away from the forest and the mountain
side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down
until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away,
across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of
Lake Manyara.
We all lay there on the hillside and watched the country carefully for
rhino. Droopy was on the other side of the hilltop, squatted on his heels,
looking, and M'Cola sat below us. There was a cool breeze from the east and
it blew the grass in waves on the hillsides. There were many large white
clouds and the tall trees of the forest on the mountain side grew so closely
and were so foliaged that it looked as though you could walk on their tops.
Behind this mountain there was a gap and then another mountain and the far
mountain was dark blue with forest in the distance.
Until five o'clock we did not see anything. Then, without the glasses,
I saw something moving over the shoulder of one of the valleys toward a
strip of the timber. In the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and
minute at the distance, red-coloured in the sun, moving with a quick
waterbug-like motion across the hill. Then there were three more of them
that came out of the forest, dark in the shadow, and two that fought,
tinily, in the glasses, pushing head-on, fighting in front of a clump of
bushes while we watched them and the light failed. It was too dark to get
down the hill, across the valley and up the narrow slope of mountain side to
them in time for a shot. So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the
dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot,
walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we
saw the firelight in the trees.
We were excited that night because we had seen the three rhino and
early the next morning while we were eating breakfast before starting out,
Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo he had found feeding at the edge
of the forest not two miles from camp. We went there, still tasting coffee
and k
ippers in the early morning heart-pounding of excitement, and the
native Droopy had left watching them pointed where they had crossed a deep
gulch and gone into an open patch of forest. He said there were two big
bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly
on the game trails, pushing the vines aside and seeing the tracks and the
quantities of fresh dung, but though we went on into the forest, where it
was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see or hear them.
Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but that was all. There
were numbers of rhino trails there in the woods and may strawy piles of
dung, but we saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some monkeys, and
when we came out we were wet to our waists from the dew, and the sun was
quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up, and we
knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out would have gone back deep into
the forest to rest out of the heat.
The others started back to camp with Pop and M'Cola. There was no meat
in camp, and I wanted to hunt back in a circle with Droopy to see if we
could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery
and it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk,
and to be able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for
the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked Droopy and liked to watch him walk.
He strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and
to feel the grass under my soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the
rifle, held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and
the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass;
with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England
orchard to walk through. I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted
to make a shot to impress Droopy.
From the top of one rise we saw two kongoni showing yellow on a
them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and two cows.
Waterbuck was the one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat
and I had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the
buck as he tore away, remembered about the worthless meat, and having the
head, and did not shoot.
'No shoot kuro?' Droopy asked in Swahili. {'Doumi sana}. A good bull.'
I tried to tell him that I had a better one and that it was no good to
eat.
He grinned.
{'Piga kongoni m'uzuri.'}
Piga' was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should
sound or the announcement of a hit. 'M'uzuri', meaning good, well, better,
had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I
used to make up sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M'usuri in them, but
now it seemed natural, no longer to be italicized, just as all the words
came to seem the proper and natural words and there was nothing odd or
unseemly in the stretching of the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a man
carrying a spear. The tribal marks and the tattooed places seemed natural
and handsome adornments and I regretted not having any of my own. My own
scars were all informal, some irregular and sprawling, others simply puffy
welts. I had one on my forehead that people still commented on, asking if I
had bumped my head, but Droop had handsome ones beside his cheekbones and
others, symmetrical and decorative, on his chest and belly. I was thinking
that I had one good one, a sort of embossed Christmas tree, on the bottom of
my right foot that only served to wear out socks, when we jumped two
reedbuck. They went off through the trees and then stood at sixty yards, the
thin, graceful buck looking back, and I shot him high and a touch behind the
shoulder. He gave a jump and went off very fast.
'Piga.' Droopy smiled. We had both heard the whunk of the bullet.
'Kufa,' I told him. 'Dead.'
But when we came up to him, lying on his side, his heart was still
beating strongly, although to all appearances he was dead. Droopy had no
skinning knife and I had only a penknife to stick him with. I felt for the
heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under the
hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I
could feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push
it, but I felt around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against
my fingers. Once bled, I started to open him, with the little knife, still
showing off to Droopy, and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut away
the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside
it.
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
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 wha
tever 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,