could feel that I was getting the evening braggies but Pop and P.O.M,
weren't here to listen. It was not nearly so satisfactory to brag when you
could not be understood, still it was better than nothing. I definitely had
the braggies, on beer, too.
'Amazing,' I told the Roman. He went on with his own story. There was a
little beer in the bottom of the bottle.
'Old Man,' I said. 'Mzee.'
'Yes, B'wana,' said the old man.
'Here's some beer for you. You're old enough, so it can't hurt you.'
I had seen the old man's eyes while he watched me drink and I knew he
was another of the same. He took the bottle, drained it to the last bit of
froth and crouched by his meat sticks holding the bottle lovingly.
'More beer?' asked M'Cola.
'Yes,' I said. 'And my cartridges.'
The Roman had gone on steadily talking. He could tell a longer story
even than Carlos in Cuba.
'That's mighty interesting,' I told him. 'You're a hell of a fellow,
too. We're both good. Listen.' M'Cola had brought the beer and my khaki coat
with the cartridges in the pocket. I drank a little beer, noted the old man
watching and spread out six cartridges. 'I've got the braggies,' I said.
'You have to stand for this, look!' I touched each of the cartridges in
turn, 'Simba, Simba, Faro, Nyati, Tendalla, Tendalla. What do you think of
that? You don't have to believe it. Look, M'Cola!' and I named the six
cartridges again. 'Lion, lion, rhino, buffalo, kudu, kudu.'
'Ayee!' said the Roman excitedly.
'N'Dio,' said M'Cola solemnly. 'Yes, it is true.'
'Ayee!' said the Roman and grabbed me by the thumb.
'God's truth,' I said. 'Highly improbable, isn't it?'
'N'Dio,' said M'Cola, counting them over himself. 'Simba, Simba, Faro,
Nyati, Tendalla, Tendalla!'
'You can tell the others,' I said in English. 'That's a hell of a big
piece of bragging. That'll hold me for to-night.'
The Roman went on talking to me again and I listened carefully and ate
another piece of the broiled liver. M'Cola was working on the heads now,
skinning out one skull and showing Kamau how to skin out the easy part of
the other. It was a big job to do for the two of them, working carefully
around the eyes and the muzzle and the cartilage of the ears, and afterwards
flesh all of the head skins so they would not spoil, and they were working
at it very delicately and carefully in the firelight. I do not remember
going to bed, nor if we went to bed.
I remember getting the dictionary and asking M'Cola to ask the boy if
he had a sister and M'Cola saying, 'No, No', to me very firmly and solemnly.
'Nothing tendacious, you understand. Curiosity.'
M'Cola was firm. 'No,' he said and shook his head. 'Hapana,' in the
same tone he used when we followed the lion into the sanseviera that time.
That disposed of the opportunities for social life and I looked up
kidneys and the Roman's brother produced some from his lot and I put a piece
between two pieces of liver on a stick and started it broiling.
'Make an admirable breakfast,' I said out loud. 'Much better than
mincemeat.'
Then we had a long talk about sable. The Roman did not call them
Tarahalla and that name meant nothing to him. There was some confusion about
buffalo because the Roman kept saying 'nyati', but he meant they were black
like the buff. Then we drew pictures in the dust of ashes from the fire and
what he meant were sable all right. The horns curved back like scimitars,
way back over their withers.
'Bulls?' I said.
'Bulls and cows.'
With the old man and Garrick interpreting, I believed I made out that
there were two herds.
'To-morrow.'
'Yes,' the Roman said. 'To-morrow.'
' 'Cola,' I said. 'To-day, kudu. To-morrow, sable, buffalo, Simba.'
'Hapana, buffalo!' he said and shook his head. 'Hapana, Simba!'
'Me and the Wanderobo-Masai buffalo,' I said. 'Yes,' said the
Wanderobo-Masai excitedly. 'Yes.'
'There are very big elephants near here,' Garrick said. 'To-morrow,
elephants,' I said, teasing M'Cola. 'Hapana elephants!' He knew it was
teasing but he did not even want to hear it said.
'Elephants,' I said. 'Buffalo, Simba, leopard.'
The Wanderobo-Masai was nodding excitedly. 'Rhino,' he put in.
'Hapana!' M'Cola said shaking his head. He was beginning to suffer.
'In those hills many buffalo,' the old man interpreted for the now very
excited Roman who was standing and pointing beyond where the huts were.
'Hapana! Hapana! Hapana!' M'Cola said definitely and finally. 'More
beer?' putting down his knife.
'All right,' I said. 'I'm just kidding you.' M'Cola was crouched close
talking, making an explanation. I heard Pop's title and I thought it was
that Pop would not like it. That Pop would not want it.
'I was just kidding you,' I said in English. Then in Swahili,
'To-morrow, sable?'
'Yes,' he said feelingly. 'Yes.'
After that the Roman and I had a long talk in which I spoke Spanish and
he spoke whatever it was he spoke and I believe we planned the entire
campaign for the next day.
CHAPTER TWO
I do not remember going to bed nor getting up, only being by the fire
in the grey before daylight, with a tin cup of hot tea in my hand and my
breakfast, on the stick, not looking nearly so admirable and very over-blown
with ashes. The Roman was standing making an oration with gestures in the
direction where the light was beginning to show and I remember wondering if
the bastard had talked all night.
The head skins were all spread and neatly salted and the skulls with
the horns were leaning against the log and stick house. M'Cola was folding
the head skins. Kamau brought me the tins and I told him to open one of
fruit. It was cold from the night and the mixed fruit and the cold syrupy
juice sucked down smoothly. I drank another cup of tea, went in the tent,
dressed, put on my dry boots and we were ready to start. The Roman had said
we would be back before lunch.
We had the Roman's brother as guide. The Roman was going, as near as I
could make out, to spy on one of the herds of sable and we were going to
locate the other. We started out with the brother ahead, wearing a toga and
carrying a spear, then me with the Springfield slung and my small Zeiss
glasses in my pocket, then M'Cola with Pop's glasses, slung on one side,
water canteen on the other, skinning knife, whetstone, extra box of
cartridges, and cakes of chocolates in his pockets, and the big gun over his
shoulder, then the old man with the Graflex, Garrick with the movie camera,
and the Wanderobo-Masai with a spear and bow and arrows.
We said good-bye to the Roman and started out of the thorn-bush fence
ju
st as the sun came through the gap in the hills and shone on the
cornfield, the huts and the blue hills beyond. It promised to be a fine
clear day.
The brother led the way through some heavy brush that soaked us all;
then through the open forest, then steeply uphill until we were well up on
the slope that rose behind the edge of the field where we were camped. Then
we were on a good smooth trail that graded back into these hills above which
the sun had not yet risen. I was enjoying the early morning, still a little
sleepy, going along a little mechanically and starting to think that we were
a very big outfit to hunt quietly, although everyone seemed to move quietly
enough, when we saw two people coming towards us.
They were a tall, good-looking man with features like the Roman's, but
slightly less noble, wearing a toga and carrying a bow and quiver of arrows,
and behind him, his wife, very pretty, very modest, very wifely, wearing a
garment of brown tanned skins and neck ornament of concentric copper wire
circles and many wire circles on her arms and ankles. We halted, said
'Jambo', and the brother talked to this seeming tribesman who had the air of
a business man on the way to his office in the city and, as they spoke in
rapid question and answer, I watched the most freshly brideful wife who
stood a little in profile so that I saw her pretty pear-shaped breasts and
the long, clean niggery legs and was studying her pleasant profile most
profitably until her husband spoke to her suddenly and sharply, then in
explanation and quiet command, and she moved around us, her eyes down, and
went on along the trail that we had come, alone, we all watching her. The
husband was going on with us, it seemed. He had seen the sable that morning
and, slightly suspicious, obviously displeased at leaving that now
out-of-sight wife of wives that we all had taken with our eyes, he led us
off and to the right along another trail, well-worn and smooth, through
woods that looked like fall at home and where you might expect to flush a
grouse and have him whirr off to the other hill or pitch down in the valley.
So, sure enough we put up partridges and, watching them fly, I was
thinking all the country in the world is the same country and all hunters
are the same people. Then we saw a fresh kudu track beside the trail and
then, as we moved through the early morning woods, no undergrowth now, the
first sun coming through the tops of the trees, we came on the ever miracle
of elephant tracks, each one as big around as the circle you make with your
arms putting your hands together, and sunk a foot deep in the loam of the
forest floor, where some bull had passed, travelling after rain. Looking at
the way the tracks graded down through the pleasant forest I thought that we
had the mammoths too, a long time ago, and when they travelled through the
hills in southern Illinois they made these same tracks. It was just that we
were an older country in America and the biggest game was gone.
We kept along the face of this hill on a pleasant sort of jutting
plateau and then came out to the edge of the hill where there was a valley
and a long open meadow with timber on the far side and a circle of hills at
its upper end where another valley went off to the left. We stood in the
edge of the timber on the face of this hill looking across the meadow valley
which extended to the open out in a steep sort of grassy basin at the upper
end where it was backed by the hills. To our left there were steep, rounded,
wooded hills, with outcroppings of limestone rock that ran, from where we
stood, up to the very head of the valley, and there formed part of the other
range of hills that headed it. Below us, to the right, the country was rough
and broken in hills and stretches of meadow and then a steep fall of timber
that ran to the blue hills we had seen to the westward beyond the huts where
the Roman and his family lived. I judged camp to be straight down below us
and about five miles to the north-west through the timber.
The husband was standing, talking to the brother and gesturing and
pointing out that he had seen the sable feeding on the opposite side of the
meadow valley and that they must have fed either up or down the valley. We
sat in the shelter of the trees and sent the Wanderobo-Masai down into the
valley to look for tracks. He came back and reported there were no tracks
leading down the valley below us and to the westward, so we knew they had
fed on up the meadow valley.
Now the problem was to so use the terrain that we might locate them,
and get up and into range of them without being seen. The sun was coming
over the hills at the head of the valley and shone on us while everything at
the head of the valley was in heavy shadow. I told the outfit to stay where
they were in the woods, except for M'Cola and the husband who would go with
me, we keeping in the timber and grading up our side of the valley until we
could be above and see into the pocket of the curve at the upper end to
glass it for the sable.
You ask how this was discussed, worked out, and understood with the bar
of language, and I say it was as freely discussed and clearly understood as
though we were a cavalry patrol all speaking the same language. We were all
hunters except, possibly, Garrick, and the whole thing could be worked out,
understood, and agreed to without using anything but a forefinger to signal
and a hand to caution. We left them and worked very carefully ahead, well
back in the timber to get height. Then, when we were far enough up and
along, we crawled out on to a rocky place and, being behind rock, shielding
the glasses with my hat so they would not reflect the sun, M'Cola nodding
and grunting as he saw the practicability of that, we glassed the opposite
side of the meadow around the edge of the timber, and up into the pocket at
the head of the valley; and there they were. M'Cola saw them just before I
did and pulled my sleeve.
'N'Dio,' I said. Then I held my breath to watch them. All looked very
black, big necked, and heavy. All had the back-curving horns. They were a
long way away. Some were lying down. One was standing. We could see seven.
'Where's the bull?' I whispered.
M'Cola motioned with his left hand and counted four fingers. It was one
of those lying down in the tall grass and the animal did look much bigger
and the horns much more sweeping. But we were looking into the morning sun
and it was hard to see well. Behind them a sort of gully ran up into the
hill that blocked the end of the valley.
Now we knew what we had to do. We must go back, cross the meadow far
enough down so we were out of sight, get into the timber on the far side and
work along through the timber to get above the sable. First we must try to
make sure there were no more of them in the timber or the meadow that we
must work through before we made our stalk.
I wet my finger and put it up. From the cool side it seemed as though
the breeze came down the valley. M'Cola took some dead leaves and crumpled
them and tossed them up. They fell a little toward us. The wind was all
right and now we must glass the edge of the timber and check on it.
'Hapana,' M'Cola said finally. I had seen nothing either and my eyes
ached from the pull of the eight-power glasses. We could take a chance on
the timber. We might jump something and spook the sable but we had to take
that chance to get around and above them.
We made our way back and down and told the others. From where they were
we could cross the valley out of sight of its upper end and bending low, me
with {my} hat off, we headed down into the high meadow grass and across the
deeply cut watercourse that ran down through the centre of the meadow,
across its rocky shelf, and up the grassy bank on the other side, keeping
under the edge of a fold of the valley into the shelter of the woods. Then
we headed up through the woods, crouched, in single file, to try to get
above the sable.
We went forward making as good time as we could and still move quietly.
I had made too many stalks on big horn sheep only to find them fed away and
out of sight when you came round the shoulder of the mountain to trust these
sable to stay where they were and, since once we were in the timber we could
no longer see them, I thought it was important that we come up above them as
fast as we could without getting me too blown and shaky for the shooting.
M'Cola's water bottle made a noise against the cartridges in his pocket
and I stopped and had him pass it to the Wanderobo-Masai. It seemed too many
people to be hunting with, but they all moved quietly as snakes, and I was
over-confident anyway. I was sure the sable could not see us in the forest,
nor wind us.
Finally I was certain we were above them and that they must be ahead of
us, and past where the sun was shining in a thinning of the forest, and
below us, under the edge of the hill, I checked on the aperture in the sight
being clean, cleaned my glasses and wiped the sweat from my forehead
remembering to put the used handkerchief in my left pocket so I would not
fog my glasses wiping them with it again. M'Cola and I and the husband
started to work our way to the edge of the timber; finally crawling almost
to the edge of the ridge. There were still some trees between us and the
open meadow below and we were behind a small bush and a fallen tree when,
raising our heads, we could see them in the grassy open, about three hundred
yards away, showing big and very dark in the shadow. Between us was
scattered open timber full of sunlight and the openness of the gulch. As we
watched two got to their feet and seemed to be standing looking at us. The
shot was possible but it was too long to be certain and as I lay, watching,
I felt somebody touch me on the arm and Garrick, who had crawled up,
whispered throatily, 'Piga! Piga, B'wana! Doumi! Doumi!' saying to shoot,
that it was a bull. I glanced back and there were the whole outfit on their
bellies or hands and knees, the Wanderobo-Masai shaking like a bird dog. I
was furious and motioned them all down.
So that was a bull, eh, well there was a much bigger bull that M'Cola
and I had seen lying down. The two sable were watching us and I dropped my
head, I thought they might be getting a flash from my glasses. When I looked
up again, very slowly, I shaded my eyes with my hand. The two sable had
stopped looking and were feeding. But one looked up again nervously and I
saw the dark, heavy-built antelope with scimitar-like horns swung back
staring at us.
I had never seen a sable. I knew nothing about them, neither whether
their eyesight was keen, like a ram who sees you at whatever distance you
see him, or like a bull elk who cannot see you at two hundred yards unless