to the dried lake floor and everywhere, to the left and to the right, where
the streams flowed out into the lake and made a reedy marsh that ran down
toward the receded lake, cut by canals of water, ducks were flying and we
could see big flocks of geese spread over the grassy hummocks that rose
above the marsh. The dried bed was hard and firm and we drove the car until
it commenced to look moist and soft ahead, then left the motor car standing
there, and, Karl taking Charo and I, M'Cola, to carry shells and birds, we
agreed to work one on one side and one the other of the marsh and try to
shoot and keep the birds moving while Pop and P.O.M. went into the edge of
the high reeds on the left shore of the lake where another stream made a
thick marsh to which we thought the ducks might fly.
We saw them walk across the open, a big bulky figure in a faded
corduroy coat and a very small one in trousers, grey khaki jacket, boots,
and a big hat, and then disappear as they crouched in a point of dried reeds
before we started. But as we went out to reach the edge of the stream we
soon saw the plan was no good. Even watching carefully for the firmest
footing you sunk down in the cool mud to the knees, and, as it became less
mucky and there were more hummocks broken by water, sometimes I went in to
the waist. The ducks and geese flew up out of range and after the first
flock had swung across toward where the others were hidden in the reeds and
we heard the sharp, small, double report of P.O.M.'s 28-gauge and saw the
ducks wheel off and go out toward the lake, the other scattered flocks and
the geese all went toward the open water. A flock of dark ibises, looking,
with their dipped bills, like great 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
br /> 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 cove
r. 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