at curlews, flew over from the marsh on the
side of the stream where Karl was and circled high above us before they went
back  into the  reeds.  All through the bog were snipe and black  and  white
godwits and finally, not  being  able to  get within  range  of the ducks, I
began to shoot snipe to M'Cola's great disgust. We  followed  the  marsh out
and then  I  crossed  another  stream, shoulder  high,  holding  my gun  and
shooting coat with shells in the pocket above my head and finally  trying to
work toward where P.O.M. and  Pop  were, found  a deep flowing  stream where
teal were  flying, and killed three. It was nearly dark now  and I found Pop
and P.O.M. on the far bank of this stream at the edge of the dried lake bed.
It all looked too deep to wade and the bottom was soft but finally I found a
heavily worn hippo trail that went into the stream and treading on this, the
bottom fairly  firm under foot,  I made it, the water coming just  under  my
armpits. As I came out on  the grass and stood dripping a flock of teal came
over very  fast, and,  crouching to  shoot in the dusk at the same  time Pop
did, we  cut down  three that fell hard in a  long slant ahead  in the  tall
grass. We hunted carefully and found them all. Their speed had  carried them
much  farther than we expected and then, almost dark now, we started for the
car  across  the grey dried  mud of the lake  bed,  me  soaked and my  boots
squashing water, P.O.M. pleased with the ducks, the first we'd had since the
Serengetti, we all remembering how marvellous they were to eat, and ahead we
could see the car looking very  small and beyond it a stretch of flat, baked
mud and then the grassy savannah and the forest.
     Next day we came in  from  the zebra business grey and sweat-caked with
dust  that  the car raised and the wind blew over us on the way  home across
the plain. P.O.M. and Pop had not gone out, there was nothing for them to do
and no  need for them  to eat  that dust, and Karl and I out on the plain in
the too much sun and dust had  gone  through  one of  those rows that starts
like this, 'What was the matter?'
     'They were too far.'
     'Not at the start.'
     'They were too far, I tell you.'
     'They get hard if you don't take them.'
     'You shoot them.'
     'I've got enough. We only want twelve hides altogether. You go ahead.'
     Then someone, angry, shooting too  fast  to show he was being asked  to
shoot  too fast, getting up  from  behind the ant hill and  turning  away in
disgust, walking towards his partner, who says,  smugly,  'What's the matter
with them?'
     'They're too damned far, I tell you,' desperately.
     The smug one, complacently, 'Look at them'.
     The zebra that had galloped off had seen the approaching  lorry  of the
skinners and had circled and were standing now, broadside, in easy range.
     The one looks, says nothing, too  angry now  to  shoot. Then says,  'Go
ahead. Shoot'.
     The smug  one, more righteous  now  than ever, refuses. 'Go  ahead,' he
says.
     'I'm through,' says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he
feels he has been tricked. Something is  always tricking him, the need to do
things other than  in a regular order,  or by  an inexact  command in  which
details are not specified, or to have  to do it in front of people, or to be
hurried.
     'We've got eleven,'  says smug face, sorry  now. He knows he should not
hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying
to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly  righteous bastard again. 'We
can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we'll go in.'
     'No, let's get him. You get him.'
     'No, let's go in.'
     And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness
goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.
     'What  you thinking  about now?' you ask. 'What a son  of a bitch I am,
still?'
     'About this afternoon,' he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked
dust on his face.
     'Me too,' you say.
     Finally the afternoon comes and you start.
     This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes,  light to pull out when you
sink, you work out from hummock  to hummock, picking a way across  the marsh
and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks  fly as before out to
the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake
itself and find the  bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water
get outside the big flocks, then there is  a shot and you and M'Cola crouch,
heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two
again, and then a high  one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight
and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you
can load and shoot, you  brown a bunch to get cripples for  decoys  and then
take  only fancy shots because  you know now you can get all that we can use
or  carry. You  try  the  high  one, straight  overhead and  almost  leaning
backward, the {coup de roi}, and splash a big black duck down beside M'Cola,
him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you  decide  you better
kill them  and pick  up. You have  to run in water to  your knees to  get in
range of the  last cripple and you  slip and go face  down  and are sitting,
enjoying  being  completely wet finally, water  cool  on your behind, soaked
with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting  the water out of the
gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell,
     M'Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of
ducks, crouches  and a flock of geese pass over  in easy range while you try
to pump a wet shell in. You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you
were behind, and at  the shot you see the  cloud  of flamingoes rise  in the
sun, making the whole horizon  of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after
that each time  after  you shoot  you turn and  look out into the sun on the
water and see that quick rise  of  the unbelievable  cloud and then the slow
settling.
     'M'Cola,' you say and point.
     'N'Dio,' he says, watching them. 'M'uzuri!' and hands you more shells.
     We all had  good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three
days afterward, travelling, we had cold  teal,  the best  of ducks  to  eat,
fine, plump, and tender, cold  with  Pan-Yan  pickles, and  the  red wine we
bought  at  Babati, sitting by the road  waiting for the lorries to come up,
sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night
when  the lorries  finally  came in and we  were  at  the house of an absent
friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the
table, having waited so long for  the broken-down lorry to come that we  all
drank much too  much  and were unspeakably hungry,  P.O.M.  dancing with the
manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full
of  emetine  and  with  a  ringing  headache  drowning  it  successfully  in
whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark  and the wind blowing a gale, and
then those teal  coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables.
Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of
the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.
     From Babati we had driven through the hills  to the  edge  of  a plain,
wooded in a long stretch of glade  beyond a small village where  there was a
mission  station at the foot of a mountain.  Here we had made a camp to hunt
kudu which were supposed to be in the wooded hills and in the forests on the
flats that stretched out to the edge of the open plain.


        CHAPTER FIVE

     It  was a hot place to camp,  under trees that had been girdled to kill
them so that the tsetse fly would leave,  and there  was hard hunting in the
hills,  which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard  climb before
you got  up  into  them, and easy  hunting on  the  wooded flats  where  you
wandered as though  through a  deer park. But everywhere were  tsetse flies,
swarming  around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms,
and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch  and  swished away at the back
of my neck as we walked and  we hunted five days,  from daylight until dark,
coming  home after dark, dead tired  but  glad of the  coolness  and of  the
darkness that stopped  the  tsetse from  biting.  We took  turns hunting the
hills and the  flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed  a
very fine  roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal  feeling
about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it  was someone's fault, the
guides, the  choice of  beat,  the hills, these all betrayed him.  The hills
punished him and he did  not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would
get one and that  the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about
the kudu  complicated the hunting. He  was  never  a climber  and  took real
punishment  in  the hills. I tried to take the  bulk  of  the  hill beats to
relieve him  but I  could see, now that he was  tired  he felt they probably
{were} in the hills and he was missing his chance.
     In  the five days  I  saw a  dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull
with  a string  of cows. The  cows were big,  grey, striped-flanked antelope
with ridiculously small heads,  big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that
moved them  in  big-bellied panic through the trees.  The young bull had the
start of a spiral  on his horns but they were short and dumpy  and as he ran
past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he
was no  more  like  a  real  bull  than a spike  elk  is  like  a big,  old,
thick-necked,   dark-maned,  wonder-horned,  tawny-hided,   beer-horse-built
bugler of a bull-elk.
     Another time,  headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in
the hills,  the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped,  moving  animals,
against the sun  at the top of the  hill, showing only  their flanks through
the trunks of the trees and said they  were kudu bulls. We could not see the
horns and when we got  up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the
rocky ground we  could  not find  their  tracks. But from the glimpse we had
they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been
bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl
find them the next day when we sent him there.
     We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting  along a ridge with  a
steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented
us,  and  as we stood, perfectly quiet,  M'Cola holding his hand on mine, we
watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, dark, full-necked,
a dark ruff on his neck, his horns  up, trembling  all over  as his nostrils
widened searching  for the scent.  M'Cola was grinning, pressing his fingers
tight on my wrist and we watched the big buck shiver from the danger that he
could not locate. Then there was the distant, heavy boom  of a native  black
powder gun and the buck jumped and  almost ran over us as  he crashed up the
ridge.
     Another day, with P.O.M. along,  we had hunted all through the timbered
flat and come  out to the edge of the plain where there were only clumps  of
bush  and  san-seviera when  we  heard a deep, throaty, cough.  I  looked at
M'Cola.
     'Simba,' he said, and did not look pleased.
     'Wapi?' I whispered. 'Where?'
     He pointed.
     I  whispered to P.O.M.,  'It's a lion. Probably the one we heard  early
this morning. You go back to those trees.'
     We had heard  a lion  roaring just before daylight when we were getting
up.
     'I'd rather stay with you.'
     'It wouldn't be fair to Pop,' I said. 'You wait back there.'
     'All right. But you {will} be careful.'
     'I won't take anything but a standing shot and I won't shoot unless I'm
sure of him.'
     'All right.'
     'Come on,' I said to M'Cola.
     He looked very grave and did not like it at all.
     'Wapi Simba?' I whispered.
     'Here,' he  said dismally and pointed at the  broken  islands of thick,
green spiky cover. I motioned to one  of  the guides  to go back with P.O.M.
and we  watched them  go back  a couple of hundred yards to the edge  of the
forest.
     'Come on,' I said. M'Cola  shook his head without smiling but followed.
We went forward  very slowly,  looking  into  and trying  to see through the
senseviera. We  could see nothing. Then  we heard the  cough again, a little
ahead and to the right.
     '{No}!' M'Cola whispered. {'Hapana}, B'wana!'
     'Come  on,' I said. I pointed my  forefinger  into my neck and wriggled
the thumb down. 'Kufa,' I whispered, meaning  that I would shoot the lion in
the  neck  and kill  him  dead.  M'Cola shook  his head,  his face grave and
sweating. 'Hapana!' he whispered.
     There was an  ant-hill ahead and we climbed the furrowed  clay and from
the  top  looked all  around. We could not make out  anything  in  the green
cactus-like cover. I  had believed  we might  see him  from the anthill  and
after  we came down we went  on for about two hundred yards into  the broken
cactus. Once again we heard him cough ahead of us and once, a little farther
on, we heard  a growl. It was  very  deep and very impressive. Since the ant
heap  my heart had not been in  it.  Until that had failed I  had believed I
might have a close and good shot and I knew that if I could kill one  alone,
without Pop along, I would feel good about it for a long time. I had made up
my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him, I had killed
three and  knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from
this one than the whole trip. I felt it was perfectly fair to Pop to take it
on as long as I had a chance to call  the shot but what we were getting into
now was bad. He kept moving away as we came on, but slowly. Evidently he did
not want to move, having fed, probably, when we had heard him roaring in the
early morning, and he wanted to settle  down  now. M'Cola hated it. How much
of it was the responsibility he felt for me to Pop and how much was his  own
acute feeling of misery about the dangerous game I did not know. But he felt
very miserable. Finally he put his hand on my shoulder, put his face  almost
into mine and shook his head violently three times.
     'Hapana! Hapana! Hapana! B'wana!' he protested, sorrowed, and pleaded.
     After all, I had no business taking him where I could not call the shot
and it was a profound personal relief to turn back.
     'All right,' I said. We turned around and came back out the same way we
had  gone in, then crossed the open prairie to  the trees  where P.O.M.  was
waiting.
     'Did you see him?'
     'No,' I told her. 'We heard him three or four times.'
     'Weren't you frightened?'
     'Pea-less,' I said, 'at the last. But I'd rather have shot him in there
than any damned thing in the world.'
     'My, I'm glad you're  back,' she said.  I got the dictionary out of  my
pocket and made a sentence in pigeon Swahili. 'Like' was the word I wanted.
     'M'Cola like Simba?'
     M'Cola could  grin again now and the smile  moved the Chinese  hairs at
the corner of his mouth.
     'Hapana,' he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. 'Hapana!'
     'Hapana' is a negative.
     'Shoot a kudu?' I suggested.
     'Good,' said M'Cola feelingly in Swahili. 'Better. Best. Tendalla, yes.
Tendalla.'
     But  we never saw a kudu bull out of that  camp and  we  left  two days
later to go into  Babati  and then down to Kondoa  and strike across country
toward Handeni and the coast.
     I never liked that camp, nor the  guides, nor the country. It had  that
picked-over, shot-out feeling. We  knew there were kudu there and the Prince
of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been  three other
parties  in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly  defending
their  crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket
it seemed odd  that he should follow  the  baboons  ten miles  away from his
shamba up into the kudu  hills  to  have a shot  at them,  and I was all for
pulling out and trying the new  country toward Handeni  where none of us had
ever been.
     'Let's go then,' Pop said.
     It seemed this new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the  open and
you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head,
blasted him  over. Then there  were sable and we agreed that whoever  killed
the first kudu should move on in the sable country.
     I was beginning to feel  awfully good and Karl was very cheerful at the
prospect of this new miraculous  country where they were  so unsophisticated
that it was really a shame to topple them over.
     We  left, soon after daylight,  ahead of the outfit, who were to strike
camp and follow in the two lorries. We stopped in Babati at the little hotel
overlooking the lake and  bought some more Pan-Yan pickles and had some cold
beer. Then  we  started south on the Cape to  Cairo road,  here well graded,
smooth,  and carefully cut through wooded hills  overlooking the long yellow
stretch of plains of the Masai  Steppes, down  and  through farming country,
where  the dried-breasted  old women and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed
old men hoed in the cornfields, through miles and dusty miles of  this,  and
then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land where the soil was blowing away
in clouds as you looked, into the  tree-shaded,  pretty, whitewashed, German
model-garrison town of Kandoa-Irangi.
     We left M'Cola at the crossroads to hold up our lorries when they came,
put the car into some  shade and visited the  military cemetery. We intended
to call on  the D.O. but they were at lunch, and we  did not want to  bother
them, so after the military cemetery, which was a pleasant, clean, well-kept
place and as good as another to be dead in, we had some beer under a tree in
shade that seemed liquid  cool after the white glare of a sun that you could
feel the weight of on your neck and shoulders, started the car  and went out
to the  crossroads to pick up the lorries and head  to the east into the new
country.


        CHAPTER SIX

     It was a new country to us but it had the marks of the oldest countries
The road was a track  over  shelves  of solid rock, worn by the feet of  the
caravans  and  the cattle, and  it  rose in the boulder-strewn  un-roadhness
through a double  line of trees and into  the hills. The country was so much
like Aragon  that  I could  not  believe that we  were not  in  Spain until,
instead of mules with saddle bags, we met  a  dozen  natives bare-legged and
bareheaded dressed  in  white  cotton  cloth  they  wore  gathered over  the
shoulder like a toga, but when  they  had passed,  the high trees beside the
track over those rocks was Spam and I had followed this same route forged on
ahead and following close behind a horse one time watching the horror of the
flies scuttling around his crupper They were  the same camel flies we  found
here on the lions.  In Spain if one got inside your shirt you had to get the
shirt off to kill him. He'd  go  inside the neckband, down the  back, around
and under one arm, make for the navel and the belly band, and if you did not
get him  he would move with such intelligence and speed that, scuttling flat
and uncrushable he would make you undress completely to kill him That day of
watching  the  camel flies working under  the horse's  tail, having had them
myself, gave me  more horror than  anything I could remember except one time
in a  hospital with my right arm broken off short between the  elbow and the
shoulder, the back of  the hand having hung down against my back, the points
of the bone having cut up  the flesh of the  biceps until it finally rotted,
swelled, burst, and sloughed off in pus. Alone with the pain in the night in
the fifth week of not sleeping  I thought suddenly how a  bull elk must feel
if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it
all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of  the bullet to the
end of the business and, being a little out of my head, thought perhaps what
I was going  through was  a punishment for all hunters.  Then, getting well,
decided if it was a punishment  I had paid it and at least I knew what I was
doing. I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had
been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing
or another and I, truly, did not mind that any  more. Since I still loved to
hunt I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could  kill cleanly and
as soon as I lost that ability I would stop.
     If you  serve time for  society, democracy,  and the other things quite
young,  and declining any further enlistment make yourself  responsible only
to yourself, you exchange the  pleasant,  comforting  stench of comrades for
something  you can  never  feel  in  any  other  way than by  yourself. That
something  I cannot yet define  completely but the  feeling  comes  when you
write well and truly of something and  know impersonally you have written in
that way and those who are  paid to read it and report on it do not like the
subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value  absolutely, or
when you do something which people do not consider a  serious occupation and
yet  you  know, truly,  that it is  as  important  and has  always  been  as
important  as all  the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you
are alone  with it  and  know  that this Gulf Stream  you  are living  with,
knowing, learning  about, and loving, has  moved, as it moves, since  before
man, and that it has gone by  the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy
island since  before Columbus  sighted it and that the  things you find  out
about it, and those  that have always lived in it are permanent and of value
because that stream will  flow, as it  has  flowed, after the Indians, after
the Spaniards, after  the British, after  the  Americans and  after  all the
Cubans and  all the systems of governments, the  richness, the  poverty, the
martyrdom,  the  sacrifice and the venality and  the cruelty are all gone as
the   high-piled    scow   of   garbage,   bright-coloured,   white-flecked,
ill-smelling, now  tilted  on its  side, spills off its  load into the  blue
water, turning it a pale green to  a  depth of four or five  fathoms as  the
load spreads  across  the  surface, the  sinkable  part  going  down and the
flotsam  of  palm  fronds,  corks, bottles,  and used electric light globes,
seasoned  with an  occasional condom  or a deep  floating  corset, the  torn
leaves of a  student's exercise  book,  a  well-inflated dog, the occasional
rat, the no-longer-distinguished  cat, all this well shepherded by the boats
of  the  garbage  pickers  who  pluck  their  prizes  with  long  poles,  as
interested,  as  intelligent,  and as accurate  as historians, they have the
viewpoint; the stream, with no  visible flow, takes five loads of this a day
when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast  it
is  as clear  and blue  and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled
out the scow; and the palm. fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of
our discoveries and  the empty  condoms of  our great  loves  float  with no
significance against one single, lasting thing -- the stream.
     So, in the  front  seat, thinking of the sea and of  the  country, in a
little while we ran out of Aragon and down to the bank of a sand river, half
a  mile  wide, of  golden-coloured sand, shored by green trees and broken by
islands of timber and in this river the water is underneath the sand and the
game  comes down at night and digs in the sand with sharp-pointed  hoofs and
water flows in and they drink. We cross this river and by now it was getting
to  be afternoon and we passed many people  on the road who were leaving the
country  ahead where there was a famine and there were small trees and close
brush now beside the road, and then it  commenced  to climb and we came into
some  blue  hills,  old, worn, wooded  hills  with trees  like  beeches  and
clusters of huts  with fire smoking and  cattle home driven, flocks of sheep
and goats and patches of corn and I said to P.O.M., 'It's like Galicia'.
     'Exactly,'  she  said.  'We've been  through  three provinces  of Spain
to-day.'
     'Is it really?' Pop asked.
     'There's  no  difference,' I  said.  'Only the buildings.  It  was like
Navarre in Droopy's country  too. The limestone outcropping in the same way,
the way the land lies, the trees along the watercourses and the springs.'
     'It's damned strange how you can love a country' Pop said.
     'You  two are  very profound fellows,' P.O.M.  said.  'But where are we
going to camp?'
     'Here,' said Pop. 'As well as any place. We'll just find some water.'
     We camped under some trees near three big wells where native women came
for water and,  after  drawing  lots  for location, Karl and I hunted in the
dusk around two of the hills across the road above the native village.
     'It's  all  kudu  country,'  Pop  said.  'You're  liable  to  jump  one
anywhere.'
     But we saw nothing but some Masai cattle  in  the timber and came home,
in the dark, glad of  the  walk after a day in the car, to find camp up, Pop
and P.O.M. in pyjamas by the fire, and Karl not yet in.
     He came in, furious  for some reason, no kudu possibly, pale, and gaunt
looking and speaking to nobody.
     Later, at the  fire,  he asked me where we had  gone  and I said we had
hunted  around our hill until  our guide  had heard them; then cut up to the
top of the hill, down, and across country to camp.
     'What do you mean, heard us?'
     'He said he heard you. So did M'Cola.'
     'I thought we drew lots for where we would hunt.'
     'We did,' I said. 'But we didn't know we had gotten around to your side
until we heard you.'
     'Did {you} hear us?'
     'I heard  something,' I said. 'And when I put my hand up  to  my ear to
listen the guide said something to M'Cola and M'Cola said, "B'wana". I said,
"What  B'wana?" and he said, "B'wana Kabor". That's you. So  we figured we'd
come to our limit and went up to the top and came back.'
     He said nothing and looked very angry.
     'Don't get sore about it,' I said.
     'I'm not sore. I'm tired,' he said. I could  believe it  because of all
people  no one  can be gentler, more  understanding,  more self-sacrificing,
than  Karl,  but the  kudu had  become an obsession to him  and he  was  not
himself, nor anything like himself.
     'He better get one pretty quick,' P.O.M. said when he had gone into his
tent to bathe.
     'Did you cut in on his country?' Pop asked me.
     'Hell, no,' I said.
     'He'll  get one where  we're  going,' Pop said. 'He'll  probably get  a
fifty-incher. '
     'All the better,' I said. 'But by God, I want to get one too.'
     'You  will, Old Timer,' Pop  said. 'I  haven't a thought  but what  you
will.'
     'What the hell! We've got ten days.'
     'We'll get sable too, you'll see. Once our luck starts to run.'
     'How long have you ever had them hunt them in a good country?'
     'Three weeks and  leave without seeing one. And I've  had them get them
the first  half  day.  It's still hunting, the  way you hunt a big  buck  at
home.'
     'I love it,' I said. 'But  I don't want  that guy to beat me. Pop, he's
got the best buff, the best rhino, the best water-buck . . .'
     'You beat him on oryx,' Pop said.
     'What's an oryx?'
     'He'll look damned handsome when you get him home.'
     'I'm just kidding.'
     'You beat him  on impalla, on eland. You've got  a first-rate bushbuck.
Your leopard's as good as his. But he'll  beat you on anything where there's
luck. He's got damned wonderful luck and he's  a good lad.  I think he's off
his feed a little.'
     'You  know how fond I am of him. I like him as  well as I like  anyone.
But I want to  see him have a good time.  It's no fun to hunt if we get that
way about it.'
     'You'll see.  He'll get a kudu at this next camp and he'll be on top of
the wave.'
     'I'm just a crabby bastard,' I said.
     'Of course you are,' said Pop. 'But why not have a drink?'
     'Right,' I said.
     Karl came out, quiet, friendly, gentle, and understandingly delicate.
     'It will be fine when we get to that new country,' he said.
     'It will be swell,' I said.
     'Tell me what it's like, Mr. Phillips,' he said to Pop.
     'I  don't  know,' said  Pop. 'But they say it's very  pleasant hunting.
They're  supposed to  feed right out in  the open. That old  Dutchman claims
there are some remarkable heads.'
     'I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,' Karl said to me.
     'You'll get a sixty-incher.'
     'No,' said Karl. 'Don't kid me. I'll be happy with any kudu.'
     'You'll probably get a hell of a one,' Pop said.
     'Don't kid me,'  Karl  said. 'I know  how lucky  I've been.  I would be
happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.'
     He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you
for it, and understand it.
     'Good  old  Karl,'  I  said,  warmed  with  whisky,  understanding, and
sentiment.
     'We're  having  a swell time, aren't we?' Karl said. 'Where's poor  old
Mama?'
     'I'm  here,'  said P.O.M.  from  the  shadow. 'I'm  one  of those quiet
people.'
     'By God if  you're not,'  Pop said. 'But  you can puncture the  old man
quick enough when he gets started.'
     'That's what  makes  a woman a universal favourite,'  P.O.M.  told him.
'Give me another compliment, Mr. J.'
     'By God, you're brave  as  a little terrier.'  Pop and I had both  been
drinking, it seemed.
     'That's lovely.'  P.O.M. sat far back in her  chair, holding  her hands
clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her  quilted blue
robe in the firelight now, and the light on  her black hair. 'I love it when
you all  reach the little  terrier stage. Then I  know the war can't be  far
away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?'
     'Not me,'  said Pop.  'Your husband, one  of the bravest bastards  that
ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.'
     'Now he's drunk, we get the truth,' I said.
     'Let's eat,' said P.O.M. 'I'm really frightfully hungry.'
     We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road  and  beyond the
village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of
a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off,
eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light.  We stopped
the car  at the edge of  the bush and getting out and  sitting down with the
glasses saw there was a  herd of kongoni scattered between  us and the eland
and with the kongoni  a  single bull  oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai
donkey  with  marvellous  long,  black, straight,  back-slanting  horns that
showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.
     'You want to go after him?' I asked Karl.
     'No. You go on.'
     I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot  in front of people and so
I  said,  'All right'.  Also I wanted  to shoot,  selfishly,  and  Karl  was
unselfish. We wanted meat badly.
     I  walked  along the  road, not looking toward the game, trying to look
casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and  down from the left shoulder
away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I
knew that if I moved toward  them  they would  at once move off out of range
so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again,
and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling
and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the
top of his back and squeezed off. You do  not hear the noise  of the shot on
game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and  to
the  right,  the whole plain backgrounding into moving  animals  against the
rise of  the  sun,  the  rocking-horse canter of the  long-legged, grotesque
kongoni, the  heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx
I had not seen before running with the kongoni. This sudden  life  and panic
all  made background  for the one I  wanted, now  trotting, three-quartering
away, his horns held high now and  I stood to shoot running, got on him, the
whole animal miniatured  in the  aperture  and  I held above  his shoulders,
swung  ahead and squeezed and he was down,  kicking, before the crack of the
bullet striking  bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot
that broke a hind leg.
     I ran toward him, then  slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be
blown if he jumped and ran; but he was  down for good. He had gone  down  so
suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid
I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first
shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I  saw it  was cutting the
lee from under him that brought him down. They  all came up and  Charo stuck
him to make him legal meat.
     'Where did you hold on him the second time?' Karl asked.
     'Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.'
     'It was very pretty,' Dan said.
     'By  evening,'  Pop  said, 'he'll tell us that he broke that off leg on
purpose. That's one of his favourite shots, you know. Did  you ever hear him
explain it?'
     While M'Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the
meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood,
on  one leg,  watching  the skinning. He spoke to me  at some  length, and I
called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.
     'He wants to know if  you are going to shoot something else,' Pop said.
'He  would like some hides but he doesn't care about oryx hide. It is almost
worthless,  he says.  He wonders if  you  would like  to shoot  a couple  of
kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.'
     'Tell him on our way back.'
     Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.
     'Tell him he can always find me around Harry's New York Bar,' I said.
     The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.
     'He says why did you shoot him twice?' Pop asked.
     'Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later
in the  day  we  shoot  them  once. In. the evening we are  often  half shot
ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr's.'
     'He says what do you do with the horns?'
     'Tell him in our tribe we give  the  horns  to  our wealthiest friends.
Tell him it is very  exciting  and sometimes members of the tribe are chased
across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.'
     Pop told the Masai something  and we shook  hands  again, parting on  a
most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see
some other  Masai  coming along  the  road,  earth-brown skins, and  kneeing
forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.
     Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap  sack, the meat tied
inside  the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road  of
red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to  the edge of the road,
we  came up into  some hills  and through the little village of Kibaya where
there was a white rest  house and a general store and much farming land.  It
was  here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting  for a kudu to feed out
into  the edge  of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he
sat and nearly  gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the
village of Kibaya and as it was  still cool and the  sun  had not yet burned
off  the  dew  from the  grass  I  suggested  we  drink  a  bottle  of  that
silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman
in  armour on  it in  order that we might remember the place better and even
appreciate it more.  This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we
learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries  to follow on
to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.
     For  a long time, while the sun rose  and the day  became hot we  drove
through what Pop  had described, when I asked him what the country was  like
to the  south, as a million miles of  bloody Africa, bush close to  the road
that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.
     'There are very big elephant in there,' Pop said. 'But  it's impossible
to hunt them. That's why they're very big. Simple, isn't it?'
     After a long stretch of the  million-mile country, the country began to
open out into dry, sandy, bush-bordered  prairies that dried  into a typical
desert  country with occasional patches  of bush where there was water, that
Pop said was like the northern  frontier  province of Kenya. We  watched for
gerenuk,  that long-necked antelope that  resembles a praying  mantis in its
way  of carrying itself, and for the lesser kudu that we  knew lived in this
desert bush, but the sun was high now and we saw  nothing. Finally the  road
began to  lift gradually into the hills  again, low, blue, wooded hills now,
with miles of sparse bush, a  little thicker than orchard bush, between, and
ahead  a pair of high,  heavy,  timbered hills that  were  big enough  to be
mountains. These were on each side of the road and as  we climbed in the car
where the red  road narrowed there was  a herd of  hundreds of  cattle ahead
being driven down to the coast by  Somali cattle buyers; the principal buyer
walked  ahead,  tall,  good-looking  in  white turban  and  coast  clothing,
carrying an umbrella as a symbol of authority. We worked the car through the
herd, finally,  and coming out  wound our way through pleasant looking bush,
up and out into the open between the two mountains and on, half a mile, to a
mud and thatched village in the open clearing on a little low plateau beyond
the  two  mountains. Looking back, the  mountains looked very fine and  with
timber  up their  slopes,  outcroppings of  limestone and  open  glades  and
meadows above the timber.
     'Is this the place?'
     'Yes,' said Dan. 'We will find where the camping place is.'
     A very old, worn, and faded black man, with a stubble of white beard, a
farmer, dressed in a dirty once-white cloth gathered  at the shoulder in the
manner of a Roman toga, came out from behind one of the mud and wattle huts,
and guided us back down the road and  off it to the left to a very good camp
site. He was a very  discouraged-looking old  man and after Pop  and Dan had
talked with him he went off, seeming more discouraged  than before, to bring
some  guides  whose  names Dan  had written  on a piece  of paper  as  being
recommended by a Dutch hunter who had been here a year ago and who was Dan's
great friend.
     We took the seats out  of the car to use  as a table  and  benches, and
spreading our coats to sit  on had  a lunch in the deep shade of a big tree,
drank some beer,  and slept or read while we waited for the  lorries to come
up.  Before the lorries arrived the  old man  came  back with the skinniest,
hungriest,  most unsuccessful looking  of Wanderobos  who stood  on one leg,
scratched the back of his neck and carried a  bow and quiver of arrows and a
spear. Queried as to whether this was the  guide whose name  we had, the old
man admitted he was not and went off more discouraged than ever, to  get the
official guides.
     When we woke next the old man was  standing with the  two  official and
highly-clothed-in-khaki  guides  and  two  others,  quite  naked,  from  the
village. There was a long palaver and the head one  of  the two khaki-panted
guides showed his credentials,  a To Whom It May Concern, stating the bearer
knew the country well and  was a reliable  boy and capable tracker. This was
signed by so  and so, professional  hunter. The khaki-clothed guide referred
to this professional hunter as B'wana Simba and the name infuriated us all.
     'Some bloke that killed a lion once,' Pop said.
     'Tell him I am B'wana Fisi, the hyena slaughterer,' I told Dan. 'B'wana
Fisi chokes them with his naked hands.'
     Dan was telling them something else.
     'Ask them  if they would like to meet B'wana Hop-Toad, the  inventor of
the hoptoads and Mama Tziggi, who owns all these locusts.'
     Dan  ignored  this.   It  seemed  they  were  discussing  money.  After
ascertaining their  customary  daily wage,  Pop told  them  if either  of