Already everyone but M'Cola  was  losing faith  in  the
bull.
     He was not there. He  had disappeared. He had vanished. Perhaps he  had
never existed.  Who could say  he was a real  bull? If I had not plucked the
grass with the blood  on it I might have held them. Growing there with blood
on  it, it was evidence.  Plucked, it  meant  nothing except  to me  and  to
M'Cola.  But  I  could  find  no  more  blood  and  they  were  all  hunting
half-heartedly  now. The only  possible way was to quarter every foot of the
high grass and trace every foot of the gullies. It was very hot now and they
were only making a pretence of hunting.
     Garrick came up. 'All  cows,' he said. 'No bull. Just biggest  cow. You
killed biggest cow. We found her. Smaller cow get away.'
     'You wind-blown  son  of a  bitch,'  I said,  then,  using my  fingers.
'Listen. Seven cows. Then fifteen cows and one bull. Bull hit. Here.'
     'All cows,' said Garrick.
     'One big cow hit. One bull hit.'
     I  was  so  sure sounding  that they agreed to this and searched for  a
while but I could see they were losing belief in the bull.
     'If I had one good dog,' I thought. 'Just one good dog.'
     Then Garrick came up. 'All cows,' he said. 'Very big cows.'
     'You're a cow,' I said. 'Very big cow.'
     This got a  laugh from the Wanderobo-Masai, who was  getting  to look a
picture of sick misery. The brother half believed in the  bull, I could see.
Husband,  by  now, did not  believe in any  of us.  I didn't think  he  even
believed in the kudu of  the night before. Well, after  this shooting, I did
not blame him.
     M'Cola came up. 'Hapana,' he said glumly. Then,  'B'wana, you shot that
bull?'
     'Yes,' I said.  For a minute I began to doubt whether there ever  was a
bull. Then I saw again his heavy, high-withered blackness and  the high rise
of his  horns before they swept back, him running with  the bunch,  shoulder
higher than them and black as hell and as I saw it, M'Cola saw  it again too
through the rising  mist  of the  savage's unbelief in what he can no longer
see.
     'Yes,' M'Cola agreed. 'I see him. You shoot him.'
     I told it again. 'Seven cows.  Shoot biggest.  Fifteen cows,  one bull.
Hit that bull.'
     They all believed it now for  a  moment and circled, searching, but the
faith died at once in the heat of the sun and the tall grass blowing.
     'All cows,' Garrick said. The Wanderobo-Masai nodded, his mouth open. I
could feel the comfortable lack of faith coming over me too. It was a damned
sight easier not to hunt in that sun in that shadeless pocket and in the sun
on that steep hillside.  I told M'Cola we would  hunt up the valley on  both
sides, finish skinning out the head, and  he and I would come down alone and
find the bull.  You could not hunt them against that unbelief. I  had had no
chance to train them; no  power  to discipline. If there had been  no  law I
would have  shot  Garrick and they would  all have hunted  or cleared out. I
think they would have hunted. Garrick was not popular. He was simply poison.
     M'Cola and I came back down the  valley, quartered  it like bird  dogs,
circled  and followed and  checked track  after  track.  I was hot  and very
thirsty. The sun was something serious by now.
     'Hapana,' M'Cola said. We could not  find him. Whatever he was,  we had
lost him.
     'Maybe he was a cow.  Maybe  it was all goofy,' I thought, letting  the
unbelief come in as a comfort. We  were going to hunt up the hillside to the
right and then we would have checked it all and would take the cow head into
camp and see what the Roman had located.
     I was dead thirsty and drained the canteen. We would get water in camp.
     We  started up the  hill and I jumped a sable  in some brush.  I almost
loosed off at it before I saw  it was a cow.  That  showed how one could  be
hidden, I thought.  We  would have to get the men and go over it all  again;
and then, from the old man, came a wild shouting.
     'Doumi! Doumi!' in a high, screaming shout.
     'Where?' I shouted, running across the hill toward him.
     'There! There!' he shouted, pointing into  the timber on the other side
of the head of the valley. 'There! There! There he goes! There!'
     We came on  a dead run but the bull  was out of sight in the  timber on
the hillside. The old man  said  he  was huge, he  was black,  he  had great
horns, and he came by him ten yards away, hit in two places,  in the gut and
high up in the rump, hard  hit but going fast, crossing the valley,  through
the boulders and going up the hillside.
     I gut-shot him, I thought. Then as he was going away I laid that one on
his  stern. He  lay down and was sick and we missed him. Then, when we  were
past, he jumped.
     'Come on,' I said. Everyone was excited and ready to go now and the old
man was chattering  about the  bull as he folded the  head skin and put  the
head  upon his own  head  and  we started  across through  the rocks and up,
quartering up on to  the hillside. There, where the old man had pointed, was
a very big sable track, the hoof marks  spread  wide, the  tracks grading up
into the timber and there was blood, plenty of it.
     We  trailed him fast, hoping  to  jump him and have  a shot, and it was
easy trailing in the shade of the trees with plenty of blood to  follow. But
he kept climbing, grading up around the hill, and he was travelling fast. We
kept the blood bright and wet  but  we could  not come up on  him. I did not
track but kept watching ahead thinking I might see him as he looked back, or
see him down, or cutting down across the hill through the timber, and M'Cola
and Garrick were tracking, aided by every one but the  old man who staggered
along with the sable skull and  head skin  held on his own grey head. M'Cola
had hung the empty  water bottle on him, and Garrick had loaded him with the
cinema camera. It was hard going for the old man.
     Once we came on a place where the bull had  rested and watched his back
track, there was a little pool of blood on a rock where he had stood, behind
some bushes, and I cursed the wind that blew our scent on ahead of us. There
was  a  big breeze  blowing  now and  I  was certain  we  had no  chance  of
surprising him, our scent would keep everything moving  out of the way ahead
of  us as  long as anything could  move. I thought of trying to circle ahead
with M'Cola and let them track but we  were moving fast, the blood was still
bright on the stones and on the  fallen leaves and grass and the hills  were
too steep for us to make a circle. I did not see how we could lose him.
     Then  he  took  us  up and into a rocky, ravine-cut  country  where the
trailing was slow and the climbing difficult. Here, I thought, we would jump
him in a gully but the spatters of blood,  not so bright now, went on around
the boulders, over the rocks and up and up and left us on a rim-rock  ledge.
He must have gone down from there.  It was too steep above for him.  to have
gone over the  top of the hill.  There was no  other way to go but down, but
how had  he  gone,  and down which ravine?  I sent them  looking down  three
possible ways and got out  on the rim to  try  to  sight him. They could not
find any  spoor, and then  the  Wanderobo-Masai called from below and to the
right that he had blood and, climbing  down, . we saw it on a rock and  then
followed it  in occasional drying splatters  down through a steep descent to
the meadow below.  I  was encouraged  when he started  down  hill and in the
knee-high,  heavy grass of the  meadow trailing was easy again, because  the
grass  brushed against his  belly and while you could not see tracks clearly
without  stooping double and parting the grass to look, yet the blood  spoor
was plain on the grass blades. But it was dry now and dully shiny and I knew
we had lost much time on him when he rim-rocked us on the hill.
     Finally his trail crossed the dry watercourse  about where we had first
come in sight of the meadow in  the morning and led  away into the  sloping,
sparsely-wooded  country on the far side.  There were no clouds and  I could
feel the sun  now, not just as heat but as  a heavy deadly weight on my head
and  I was  very  thirsty. It was very hot but  it  was  not  the  heat that
bothered. It was the weight of the sun.
     Garrick  had  given  up tracking  seriously  and was only  contributing
theatrical successes of discovering blood when M'Cola and I were checked. He
would  do no  routine tracking  any more, but would  rest and  then track in
irritating spurts.  The Wanderobo-Masai was useless as a blue-jay and I  had
M'Cola give him the big rifle to  carry so that we would get some use out of
him. The Roman's brother was obviously not a hunter  and the husband was not
very  interested. He did not seem  to  be a hunter either.  As  we  trailed,
slowly, the ground, hard now as the sun had baked it,  the blood only  black
spots and splatters on the short grass, one by one the brother, Garrick, and
the Wanderobo-Masai dropped out and sat in the shade of the scattered trees.
     The sun was terrific and as it  was necessary to track with  heads bent
down  and stooping, in spite of a handkerchief  spread  over my neck I had a
pounding ache in my head.
     M'Cola was tracking  slowly, steadily, and absolutely  absorbed in  the
problem. His bare, bald head gleamed with sweat and when it  ran down in his
eyes he would pluck a grass stem, hold it with each hand and shave the sweat
off his forehead and bald black crown with the stem.
     We went  on  slowly. I  had always sworn to Pop that I could  out-track
M'Cola  but I  realized now that in the past  I  had  been giving a sort  of
Garrick  performance in picking up  the  spoor  when it was lost and that in
straight, steady trailing, now  in the heat, with the sun really  bad, truly
bad  so that you could feel what  it was doing to your  head, cooking  it to
hell, trailing in short  grass on hard  ground where a blood spot was a dry,
black blister on  a grass blade, difficult to see; that you  must  find  the
next little black spot perhaps twenty yards away, one holding the last blood
while  the  other found  the next, then  going  on, one on  each side of the
trail; pointing with a grass stem at the spots to save talking, until it ran
out again and you marked the last  bood with your eye and both made casts to
pick it up again,  signalling with a hand up,  my mouth  too dry  to talk, a
heat shimmer  over the ground now when you straightened up to  let your neck
stop aching and looked ahead, I knew M'Cola was immeasurably the better  man
and the better tracker. Have to tell Pop, I thought.
     At this point M'Cola made  a joke. My mouth was so dry that it was hard
to talk.
     'B'wana,' M'Cola said, looking at  me  when I  had straiglitened up and
was leaning my neck back to get the crick out of it.
     'Yes?'
     'Whisky?' and he offered me the flask.
     'You bastard,' I said in English, and he chuckled and shook his head.
     'Hapana whisky?'
     'You savage,' I said in Swahili.
     We started tracking again, M'Cola shaking his head and very amused, and
in a little while the grass  was longer and  it was easier again. We crossed
all that semi-open country we  had seen from the hillside in the morning and
going down  a  slope the tracks swung back into  high grass.  In this higher
grass I found that by half  shutting my eyes  I could see his trail where he
had shouldered through the grass  and  I went ahead fast without trailing by
the blood,  to M'Cola's amazement, but then  we came out on very short grass
and rock again and now the trailing was the hardest yet.
     He was not bleeding much now; the sun and the  heat must have dried the
wounds  and we found only an occasional small  starry  splatter on the rocky
ground.
     Garrick came  up and made  a couple of  brilliant  discoveries of blood
spots, then sat  down under  a tree. Under another tree I could see the poor
old  Wanderobo-Masai  holding his  first and  last job as  gun-bearer. Under
another  was  the old  man, the sable head beside  him like  some black-mass
symbol,  his  equipment hanging from his  shoulders. M'Cola  and I  went  on
trailing very  slowly and laboriously across  the long stony slope and  back
and up into another tree-scattered meadow,  and through it, and  into a long
field with piled up boulders at the end. In the middle of this field we lost
the trail completely  and circled and hunted  for nearly two hours before we
found blood again.
     The old man found it for us below the boulders and to the right half  a
mile  away. He had gone ahead down  there on  his own  idea of what the bull
would have done. The old man was a hunter.
     Then we trailed him very slowly,  on to hard stony  ground a mile away.
But we could not trail from there. The ground was  too hard to leave a track
and we never found blood again.  Then we hunted  on our  various theories of
where the bull would go, but the country was too big and we had no luck.
     'No good,' M'Cola said.
     I  straightened  up and went  over to the  shade of a big tree. It felt
cool  as water and the breeze  cooled my skin  through the wet  shirt. I was
thinking  about the bull  and wishing  to God I had never hit him. Now I had
wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out
of that  country. He never showed any  tendency to circle back.  To-night he
would die and the hyenas would eat him, or, worse, they would get him before
he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts  out while he was alive.  The
first one  that hit that blood  spoor would stay with it until he found him.
Then he would call up the others.  I  felt a son of a bitch to  have hit him
and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed
it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the
seasonal killing  that went on all  the  time  was very minute  and I had no
guilty feeling at all. We  ate the meat and  kept the hides and horns. But I
felt  rotten sick over  this sable bull. Besides, I wanted him, I wanted him
damned badly, I wanted  him more than I would admit. Well, we had played our
string out  with  him. Our chance  was at the start when he was down  and we
missed him.  We  had  lost  that.  No,  our best chance, the only  chance  a
rifleman should ever ask, was when I had a shot and shot at the whole animal
instead of calling  the shot. It was my own  lousy fault. I  was a  son of a
bitch to have gut-shot him. It came from over-confidence in being able to do
a thing and then omitting one  of the steps in how it is done. Well, we  had
lost him. I doubted  if there was a dog in the  world could trail him now in
that  heat. Still  that was the  only chance. I got  out the  dictionary and
asked the old man if there were any dogs at the Roman's place.
     'No,' said the old man. 'Hapana.'
     We  made a very wide circle and I sent  the brother and the husband out
in another circle. We found nothing, no  trace, no tracks,  no blood,  and I
told M'Cola we would start  for camp. The  Roman's brother  and  the husband
went up  the valley to get  the meat  of the  sable cow we had shot. We were
beaten.
     M'Cola and I ahead, the  other following, we went  across the long heat
haze of the open country, down to cross the dry watercourse, and up and into
the grateful  shade of  the trail through the woods. As we were going  along
through the broken  sunlight and shadow, the floor  of the forest smooth and
springy where we cut across to save distance from  the trail, we  saw,  less
than a hundred yards away, a herd of sable standing in the timber looking at
us. I pulled back the bolt and looked for the best pair of horns.
     'Doumi,' Garrick whispered. 'Doumi kubwa sana!'
     I looked  where he pointed. It was a very big cow sable, dark chestnut,
white  marks on the face,  white belly,  heavy built and with a fine curving
pair  of horns. She was standing  broadside to  us  with  her  head  turned,
looking. I looked carefully at  the whole lot. They were all cows, evidently
the bunch whose bull I had wounded and lost, and they had come over the hill
and herded up again together here.
     'We go to camp,' I said to M'Cola.
     As we started forward  the sable jumped and  ran past  us, crossing the
trail ahead. At every  good pair of cow horns,  Garrick said, 'Bull, B'wana.
Big, big bull. Shoot, B'wana. Shoot, oh shoot!'
     'All cows,' I  said to  M'Cola  when they were past, running in a panic
through the sun-splashed timber.
     'Yes,' he agreed.
     'Old man,' I said. The old man came up.
     'Let the guide carry that,' I said.
     The old man lowered the cow sable head.
     'No,' said Garrick.
     'Yes,' I said. 'Bloody well yes.'
     We went  on  through  the woods toward camp. I was feeling better, much
better.  All through  the day  I had never thought once of the  kudu. Now we
were coming home to where they were waiting.
     It seemed much  longer coming home although, usually, the return over a
new trail  is shorter. I was  tired all  the way into my bones, my head felt
cooked, and I  was thirstier than I  had ever been in my life. But suddenly,
walking through the woods,  it was  much cooler. A cloud  had come  over the
sun.
     We came out of  the timber and down on to the flat and in sight of  the
thorn fence. The  sun was behind a bank of clouds now  and then in a  little
while  the sky  was  covered completely  and  the  clouds looked  heavy  and
threatening. I thought perhaps this had been the last clear hot day; unusual
heat  before the rains. First  I thought: if it had only rained, so that the
ground would  hold a track, we  could have  stayed with  that bull for ever;
then, looking  at the heavy, woolly clouds  that  so quickly had covered all
the sky, I thought that if we were going to join the outfit, and get the car
across that ten-mile stretch  of black cotton road on the way to Handeni, we
had better start. I pointed to the sky.
     'Bad,' M'Cola agreed.
     'Go to the camp of B'wana M'Kubwa?'
     'Better.' Then, vigorously, accepting the decision, 'N'Dio. N'Dio.'
     'We go,' I said.
     Arrived at the thorn fence and the hut, we broke camp fast. There was a
runner  there  from  our last camp  who had brought a  note, written  before
P.O.M, and Pop had  left, and bringing my mosquito net. There was nothing in
the note, only good luck and that they were  starting.  I drank  some  water
from  one of our canvas  bags, sat on a petrol tin and looked at the  sky. I
could not, conscientiously, chance staying. If it rained here we  might  not
even be able to get out to  the  road. If  it rained heavily on the road, we
would never get out to the coast that season.  Both the Austrian and Pop had
said that, I had to go.
     That was settled, so. there was  no  use to think  how much I wanted to
stay. The  day's fatigue helped make the decision easy. Everything was being
loaded  into the car and they  were all gathering  up their  meat  from  the
sticks around the ashes of the fire.
     'Don't you want to eat, B'wana?' Kamau asked me.
     'No,' I said. Then in English, 'Too bloody tired.'
     'Eat. You are hungry.'
     'Later, in the car.'
     M'Cola went by with a load, his  big, flat face completely blank again.
It only {came} alive about  hunting or some joke.  I found  a tin cup by the
fire and called to him  to bring the whisky,  and the blank  face cracked at
the eyes and mouth into a smile as he took the flask out of his pocket.
     'With water better,' he said.
     'You black Chinaman.'
     They  were all working fast and the Roman's women came over and stood a
little way away watching the carrying and the packing of the car. There were
two of them, good-looking, well built, and  shy,  but interested.  The Roman
was not back yet. I felt  very badly to go off like this with no explanation
to him. I liked the Roman very much and had a high regard for him.
     I  took a drink of the whisky and water  and looked at the two pairs of
kudu horns  that leaned against the wall of the chicken coop  hut.  From the
white,  cleanly  picked skulls the horns rose in slow spirals that spreading
made a  turn, another turn,  and then  curved delicately into  those smooth,
ivory-like points. One pair was narrower and taller against  the side of the
hut.  The other was almost as tall  but wider in spread and heavier in beam.
They were the colour of black walnut meats and they were beautiful to see. I
went over and  stood  the Springfield against the hut  between  them and the
tips reached past the muzzle  of the rifle. As Kamau came back from carrying
a load  to the  car I  told him to  bring  the camera and then had him stand
beside  them while I took  a  picture.  Then he  picked them up, each head a
load, and carried them over to the car.
     Garrick was talking loudly and in  a roostery way to the Roman's women.
As near as I could make  out he was offering them the  empty petrol boxes in
exchange for a piece of something.
     'Come here,' I called to him. He came over still feeling smart.
     'Listen,' I told him in English. 'If I get through this safari  without
socking you it's  going to be a bloody  marvel. And  if I ever hit you  I'll
break your mucking jaw. That's all.'
     He did not understand the words  but the tone made it clearer than if I
had got something out of the dictionary to tell him. I stood up and motioned
to  the  women  that they could have the  petrol tins  and the  cases. I was
damned if I could not have anything to do with them  if I would let  Garrick
make any passes.
     'Get in the car,' I  told him. 'No,' as he started  to make delivery of
one of the petrol tins, 'in the car.' He went over to the car.
     We were all packed now and ready  to go. The horns were curling out the
back of the car, tied on  to the loads. I left some money for the  Roman and
one of  the kudu hides with the boy.  Then we got  in the car. I got in  the
front seat with the Wanderobo-Masai. Behind  were M'Cola,  Garrick, and  the
runner, who was a man from the  old man's  village by  the road. The old man
was crouched on top of the loads at the back, close under the roof.
     We waved  and started, passing more of the Roman's household, the older
and  uglier part,  roasting up piles of meat by a  log fire beside the trail
that came up from the  river  through the maize field.  We made the crossing
all right, the creek was down and the banks  had  dried and I looked back at
the field, the Roman's huts, and  the stockade where we had camped,  and the
blue hills, dark under the heavy sky, and I felt very badly not to have seen
the Roman and explain why we had gone off like this.
     Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to
make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and
Garrick seemed  to be  in a state of  great  hysteria, ordering people about
when we were  cutting brush and shovelling; until I was certain I would have
to hit  him. He called  for corporal punishment the  way a showing-off child
does for  a  spanking. Kamau and  M'Cola  were both laughing at  him. He was
playing  the  victorious  leader home from the  chase now.  I thought it was
really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.
     Once when  we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was  stooping over
in  a frenzy  of  advice and  command-giving, I  brought the  handle of  the
shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he  sat down,
backwards. I never looked  toward  him, and M'Cola, Kamau, and I  could  not
look --at each other for fear we would laugh.
     'I am hurt,' he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.
     'Never  get  near  a  man  shovelling,'  I  said  in  English.  'Damned
dangerous.'
     'I am hurt,' said Garrick holding his belly.
     'Rub it,' I told him and  rubbed mine to show  him how. We all got into
the car again  and  I  began  to feel  sorry for the poor,  bloody, useless,
theatrical bastard, so I  told M'Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got
one  out  from  under  the  loads in  the  back, we  were going through  the
deer-park-looking  country now,  opened it, and  I drank it slowly. I looked
around  and  saw  Garrick was  all right now, letting his mouth  run  freely
again. He rubbed his belly and  seemed to  be telling them  what a hell of a
man  he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the  old man watching
me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.
     'Old man,' I said.
     'Yes, B'wana.'
     'A  present,' and  I handed what was  left in  the  bottle  back. There
wasn't much left but the foam and a very little beer.
     'Beer?' asked M'Cola.
     'By  God, yes,' I  said. I was thinking about beer  and in my  mind was
back to  that year in the spring  when we walked on the mountain road to the
Bains  de Alliez and the  beer-drinking  contest where we  failed to win the
calf and came home that niglit around the mountain with the moonlight on the
fields of  narcissi that  grew  on the meadows,  and  how  we were drunk and
talked about how you would  describe that light  on  that paleness, and  the
brown beer  sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when
we came  in across  the Rhone  Valley from fishing the  Stockalper with  the
horse chestnut trees in bloom, and  Chink and I again discussing writing and
whether you  could call them waxen candela-bras. God,  what  bloody literary
discussions we  had; we were  literary as hell then just after the war,  and
later  there was the good beer at Lipp's at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at
the Cirque  de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or  after any other great fight where
you lost  your  voice  and were still too excited  to turn in; but beer  was
mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags
for the Fusilier, crags  for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong
beer for me.  That was  Chink then, quoting Robert  Graves, then. We outgrew
some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The
old man knew it too. I had seen  it in his eye the first time he saw me take
a drink.
     'Beer,' said M'Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like
country,  the engine hot  under  my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai  as strong as
ever beside me, Kamau  watching the  grooves of the tyre tracks in the green
turf, and I hung my booted legs over  the side to let my feet cool and drank
the beer  and wished old Chink was  along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith,
M.C., of His Majesty's Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss
how to describe this deer-park country  and whether deer-park was  enough to
call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant  for
his  years  and  the same sort of company. I was  learning  under Pop, while
Chink  and  I had discovered a big part  of the  world together and then our
ways had gone a long way apart.
     But that damned sable  bull.  I should have killed him,  but  it was  a
running shot. To hit him at  all I had to use  him all as a target. Yes, you
bastard, but what about the cow you missed twice, prone, standing broadside?
Was that a running shot?  No. If I'd gone to bed last night I would not have
done  that. Or if I'd  wiped out the bore to get the oil out she  would  not
have thrown high the  first time. Then I would not have pulled down and shot
under her the  second shot.  Every damned thing  is your own fault if you're
any  good. I thought I could shoot a shot-gun  better than I could and I had
lost plenty of money  backing my  opinion, but  I knew, coldly, and  outside
myself,  that I could shoot a rifle  on game as  well  as any son of a bitch
that ever lived.  Like hell I could. So what? So I gut-shot a sable bull and
let him get away. Could I shoot as well as I thought I could? Sure. Then why
did I  miss on  that cow? Hell,  everybody  is off sometime. You've  got  no
bloody  business to be off. Who the hell are you? My conscience? Listen, I'm
all right with my conscience. I know just what kind of a son of a bitch I am
and I know what I can do well. If I hadn't had to leave and pull out I would
have got  a sable bull. You know the Roman was  a  hunter. There was another
herd.  Why did I have to make a  one-night stand? Was that any way to  hunt?
Hell,  no. I'd make  some money some way and when we came back we would come
to  the old man's village in  lorries,  then pack in with  porters  so there
wouldn't be any damned car to worry about, send the porters --back, and make
a camp in the timber up the  stream above the Roman's and hunt  that country
slowly, living there  and hunting out  each day,  sometimes laying  off  and
writing for a week, or writing  half the day, or every other day, and get to
know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were  brought up. I'd
see the  buffalo  feeding where  they lived, and  when  the  elephants  came
through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not
have to shoot, and  I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed
out and never fire a shot unless  I saw  a better  head than this one in the
back,  and instead of trailing that sable  bull, gut-shot to hell, all  day,
I'd  lie  behind  a  rock and watch them on the  hillside and  see them long
enough  so they belonged to me for  ever. Sure, if Garrick  didn't take  his
B'wana Simba car in there and shoot the country out. But if he did I'd go on
down beyond those hills and there would be another country where a man could
live and hunt if he had time to live and hunt. They'd gone in wherever a car
could go. But there  must be pockets  like this  all over, that no one knows
of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places.
     'Beer?' asked M'Cola.
     'Yes,' I said.
     Sure, you  couldn't  make a living.  Everyone had  explained  that. The
locusts came  and ate your crops  and the monsoon failed, and the  rains did
not come, and everything dried up and died. There were ticks and fly to kill
the stock, and the mosquitoes  gave you fever  and maybe you got blackwater.
Your cattle would die and you would get no price for your coffee. It took an
Indian  to  make money  from sisal and on the coast every coconut plantation
meant  a  man ruined by the idea of making money  from copra. A white hunter
worked three months  out of the year and drank for twelve and the Government
was ruining  the country for the benefit of the  Hindu and the natives. That
was what they told you. Sure. But I did not want to make money. All I wanted
was  to  live  in it and have  time to hunt. Already I  had  had one  of the
diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my
large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an
unnumbered  amount  of times a day. There were remedies which cured this and
it was well worth  going through for what I had  seen  and where I had been.
Besides I caught that  on the dirty  boat out from Marseilles. P.O.M, hadn't
been ill  a day.  Neither had Karl. I loved this country and I  felt at home
and where a man feels  at home, outside of where  he's born, is  where  he's
meant to go. Then, in my grandfather's time, Michigan was  a  malaria ridden
state.  They  called  it  fever  and ague. And in  Tortugas, where I'd spent
months, a thousand men once died of yellow fever. New continents and islands
try to  frighten  you  with  disease  as  a snake hisses. The  snake  may be
poisonous too. You kill them off. Hell,  what I  had a month ago would  have
killed me in the old days before they invented the remedies.  Maybe it would
and maybe I would have got well.
     It  is  easier  to  keep  well in  a  good  country  by  taking  simple
precautions than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good.
     A continent ages quickly once we  come. The  natives I live in  harmony
with it. But the  foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water,
so that the water supply  is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the
sod is turned under, is  cropped out, and next it starts to  blow away as it
has blown  away in every old country and  as  I had seen it start to blow in
Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly
unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his  beasts. When
he quits using beasts and  uses machines the earth defeats him quickly.  The
machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he
cannot raise. A country was made to  be as we found it. We are the intruders
and  after we are dead we may  have ruined it but it will still be there and
we don't  know what the next changes  are. I  suppose they all  end  up like
Mongolia.
     I would come back  to  Africa but not to make a living from it. I could
do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But
I would come back to  where it pleased me  to live, to really live. Not just
to let my life pass. Our people went  to America because  that was the place
to go  then. It had been a good country and we had made a mess of  it and  I
would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere
else and as  we had always gone.  You could always come back. Let the others
come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had
seen it at its best and  fought for it when it was  well worth fighting for.
Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were
still good places to go.
     I  knew a good country when I saw  one. Here there  was game, plenty of
birds,  and  I  liked  the natives. Here I could  shoot and fish.  That, and
writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I
could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were
what  I liked to do. That and ski-ing. But my legs were  bad now and  it was
not worth the time you spent  hunting good snow any more.  You saw too  many
people ski-ing now.
     Now, the car  making a turn around a bank  and crossing a green, grassy
field, we came in sight of the Masai village.
     When the Masai  saw us they started running and we stopped,  surrounded
by  them, just below the stockade. There were the young warriors who had run
with  us, and now their women and the children all  came out to see us.  The
children were all quite young and the men and women all seemed the same age.
There were  no old  people. They all seemed  to be our  great friends and we
gave a  very successful party with refreshments  in the  shape of our  bread
which they all ate with much laughing, the men first, then the women. Then I
had  M'Cola open  the  two cans of mincemeat and the plum pudding and I  cut
these into rations and passed them out. I had heard and  read that the Masai
subsisted only on the  blood  of their cattle  mixed with  milk, drawing the
blood {off} from a wound in a vein of the  neck made by shooting an arrow at
close  range.  These Masai,  however,  ate bread,  cold  mincemeat, and plum
pudding with  great  relish and much  laughter and joking. One very tall and
handsome one kept asking me something  that  I  did not understand  and then
five  or six more joined in. Whatever this was they wanted  it  very  badly.
Finally the tallest one  made a very strange face and emitted a sound like a
dying pig. I understood finally: he was asking if we had one of those, and I
pressed  the button of the klaxon. The children ran screaming, the  warriors
laughed  and laughed, and then as  Kamau,  in  response to  popular  demand,
pressed the klaxon again and  again, I watched the look of utter rapture and
ecstasy on the women's faces  and knew  that with that klaxon he could  have
had any woman in the tribe.
     Finally we had to go and after distributing the empty beer bottles, the
labels  from the bottles, and  finally the bottle  caps, picked up by M'Cola
from the floor, we left, klaxoning the women into ecstasy, the children into
panic, and the warriors  into delight. The warriors ran with  us for  a good
way but  we  had to make  time,  the  going was  good through the  park-like
country and,  in a  little while,  we  waved  to the  last of them  standing
straight  and  tall, in  their  brown skin garments, their clubbed  pigtails
hanging, their faces  stained a red-brown, leaning on  their spears, looking
after us and smiling.
     The sun was almost down and as I did not know the road I had the runner
get up in front to sit with the Wanderobo-Masai and help direct  Kamau and I
sat in the back with M'Cola and Garrick. We were out of the park country and
on to the  dry  bush-spattered plain before the  sun went  down  and  I  had
another bottle of the  German beer and, watching the country, saw, suddenly,
that all the  trees were full of white storks. I  did not  know whether they
were there in migration or were following the  locusts but, in the twilight,
they were lovely to see and, deeply moved by them, I gave the old man a good
two fingers of beer that was left in the bottom of the bottle.
     On the  next bottle I forgot and drank it all  before I  remembered the
old man.  (There  were still  storks  in the trees and we  saw  some Grant's
gazelles feeding off to the right. A jackal, like a grey fox, trotted across
the road.) So I told M'Cola  to  open another bottle and we were through the
plain and climbing the long  slope toward the road and  the village, the two
mountains in sight now, and it almost dark and  quite cold when I handed the
bottle to the old man, who took it where  he was crouched up under the roof,
and nursed it tenderly.
     At the  village we  stopped  in the  road in the dark,  and  I paid the
runner the amount it said to give him in the note he had brought. I paid the
old  man the  amount Pop said to pay him and  a  bonus. Then there was a big
dispute among them all. Garrick was to go to the main camp to get his money.
Abdullah  insisted  upon  going  along.   He  did  not  trust  Garrick.  The
Wanderobo-Masai  insisted pitifully that he go. He was sure the others would
cheat him out of his share and I was fairly sure they would, too.  There was
petrol that had been left for us to use in case we were short and  for us to
bring  in any event. We were overloaded and I did not know how the  road was
ahead. But I thought  we might carry Abdullah and Garrick and squeeze in the
Wanderobo-Masai.  There was no question of  the old  man  going. He had been
paid off and had  agreed to the  amount, but now he would not leave the car.
He crouched on top of the load and hung on to the  ropes saying, 'I am going
with B'wana'.
     M'Cola  and  Kamau had to  break his  handholds and  pull" him  off  to
re-load, him shouting, 'I want to go with B'wana!'
     While they were loading in  the dark he held  on to  my arm and  talked
very quietly in a language that I could not understand.
     'You have the shillings,' I said.
     'Yes, B'wana,' he said. That was not what it was  about. The money  was
all right.
     Then, when  we started to get  in the car  he broke away and started to
climb up through the back and on  to the loads. Garrick and Abdullah  pulled
him down.
     'You can't go. There isn't room.'
     He talked to me softly again, begging and pleading.
     'No, there is no room.'
     I remembered I had a small penknife and I got it  out of my  pocket and
put it in his hand. He pushed it back in my hand.
     'No,' he said. 'No.'
     He was  quiet  then  and  stood by  the  road. But  when we started, he
started to  run  after the  car  and I could hear him in the dark screaming,
'B'wana! I want to go with B'wana!'
     We went on up the road, the headlights making it seem like  a boulevard
after where we had been. We drove fifty-five  miles on that road in the dark
night without incident. I stayed awake until  after we  were through the bad
part, a long plain of deeply rutted black cotton where the headlights picked
out the trail through bushes and  then, when the road was  better, I went to
sleep, waking occasionally  to see the  headlights shining on a wall of tall
trees, or a naked bank, or when we ground in low  gear up a steep place, the
light slanting up ahead.
     Finally, when the speedometer showed fifty miles, we stopped and woke a
native in his hut  and M'Cola asked about the camp.  I slept again and  then
woke  as we were turning off the road and on a track through trees with  the
fires of  the camp showing ahead. Then as we came to where  our lights shone
on the  green  tents I shouted and we all commenced  to shout  and blew  the
klaxon  and  I