‘Where did you get that fat?’ asked the hyenas. The crow answered: ‘In the sky, beyond the moon.’ ‘Take us there,’ said the hyenas, ‘and we will get some of the fat.’ ‘Very well,’ replied the crow. ‘Catch hold of my feet, and my neck, and my wings.’ The hyenas did so, and the crow took them up, up, up among the stars. ‘Can you see anything below?’ asked the crow. ‘No, we can see nothing.’ ‘Very well.’ The crow gave a big kick and flapped his wings and all the hyenas fell off, and dropped to the ground and were killed. All except one. This was a female, and her legs were broken. She gave birth, and the totos were born with broken legs, and hyenas have limped ever since that day.
Someone suggested that Mr Roos would be sure to know the best kind of trap, and to supervise its construction. Tilly had declared a week’s holiday for me, because the time had come to graft the citrus trees now standing in glossy-leaved ranks near the house. Neither she nor Robin had ever done any grafting, but she had an illustrated book on the subject and was busy most of the day in the plantation with a knife and twine; so I was allowed to take a note over to Mr Roos.
Although his farm was next to ours, to go there was like venturing into a foreign land. We seldom saw Mr Roos – he came and went unpredictably, like an elephant – and his life was full of mystery. He scarcely had what we would call a house, it was a hut like the natives’, only with a sort of veranda on one side and a fireplace made of scraps of corrugated iron on the other. A queer smell hung round his encampment, which perhaps originated from the slices of raw meat tied to a pole in a large cage to keep out flies. When this biltong was quite dry, it became as hard as timber, and did not smell unpleasant, but in its earlier stages it drenched the air with a vicious odour. It was strange to see a European’s dwelling without a garden, not even a few salvias or daisies, or an attempt at a lawn. The tawny grass of Africa straggled all round the hut, and fat-tailed sheep grazed right up to the veranda on which there stood a bare table, a camp-chair, and the white skull of an elephant. There was one touch of colour: a morning glory with its sky-blue flowers climbing up one side of the hut.
My elders considered Mr Roos a dour and uncommunicative man but he was always friendly when I saw him, which was seldom enough. Sometimes he had a black, bristly beard, sometimes a rim of stubble giving him a saturnine look. His hat was even older, dirtier, and more battered than Robin’s, and instead of boots he wore sandals that he made himself from eland or kongoni hide. His face was creased like the bark of an olive tree, and almost as dark, but he had light-blue eyes that looked odd in such a setting, and a wide smile that deepened all his crinkles and exposed a few yellow, ill-assorted teeth. Most of these had been knocked out when he had been trampled by a buffalo, and he had a deep scar up the inside of one arm where it had gored him, and no doubt other and less visible injuries as well. I thought of him as carved out of wood, he was so hard and brown.
Mr Roos was cutting skeys for his yokes with a bush-knife from branches of thorn. He put the note into his pocket without even glancing at it and said:
‘Not often you come riding this way. Neighbours and strangers, eh? How you like it now I show you the nest of –’ he added a word I have long since forgotten, which sounded something like boomklop, and of whose meaning I had no idea. I nodded nervously.
‘You come with me.’
Mr Roos led the way round to the back of his hut and I followed, wondering what a boomklop was and whether I was really to see one, or whether Mr Roos had some sinister motive in view. At home he was said to be ‘slim’, and to trade with the natives for sheep and cattle in a manner described as sailing close to the wind. Perhaps the boomklop was only an excuse and he was going to capture me and sell me to someone, though I could not imagine to whom, and for what purpose. Or perhaps he would turn me into biltong, or dry my skin for sandals, or even feed me to the boomklop, which might be a large, angry beast with horns like a rhino and jaws like a crocodile.
I hung back, and suggested to Mr Roos that he should read the note in his pocket.
‘Plenty of time for that,’ he said. ‘You know what’s down there inside, I bet?’
‘It’s about the leopard.’
Mr Roos stopped dead, and asked questions. His face never showed what he was thinking, but I felt that he was pleased. Now that I was close to him, I could see little streaks of grime embedded in the crevasses of his leathery neck so deeply that obviously no one could remove them by ordinary washing. The air smelt sharply of hides and alum. Skins as hard and stiff as boards, their livid, sinewy undersides exposed to the sun, were pegged out on a flat space behind his hut, and skulls with horns attached, and flesh in various stages of decomposition, lay about in the grass attracting flies. It was all rather sinister. Pointing to a pegged-out skin, Mr Roos remarked:
‘You see that, man? Ten feet from nose to tail, a beauty. And what a trek, for three days he led me and he was the one was first tired. He got four legs, you see, and I got two, but that don’t help him none.’
‘You must be good at walking,’ I said politely.
‘Man, I walked from Bulawayo, and with an ox-whip in my hand.’
‘Is that farther than Nairobi?’
He laughed in a chuckling manner, tucking in his chin, and said that it was, and started downhill towards the river where the boomklop was. This creature was growing more and more alarming, and besides, might well be miles and miles away. So I managed to stammer out, feeling dishonourably craven, that I must take back an immediate answer and leave the boomklop for another day.
‘You think I eat little girls?’ Mr Roos demanded, in a rather threatening voice.
As this appeared, in alliance with the boomklop, only too likely, I found myself tongue-tied. Mr Roos relented and turned back, saying he would find another boomklop next time I came, and that I was to say he would be over later to fix a trap for the leopard. His tone had a definite edge of contempt for us poor rooinek incompetents who could not fix a trap, nor shoot so large a lion, nor walk from Bulawayo, and whose young even showed a disposition to be afraid of the boomklop.
When he came over, he scorned Hereward’s trap. For one thing it had a live bait, whereas a hunk of high, stinking meat was what leopards really appreciated. They hoarded meat, Mr Roos told us, in the branches of trees where hyenas and jackals could not reach it. Also they were clever, and when they came upon a live, tethered goat they suspected trickery. So Mr Roos put some foetid meat in the fork of a tree, just out of reach, and concealed near the tree’s foot a wicked steel gin with jagged, rusty teeth, which Hereward regarded with deep disapproval.
‘Not at all a sporting sort of thing.’
‘You want sport, or you want your cattle alive?’ Hereward of course wanted both, but Lettice was in such a state of mind about her dead Chang and threatened Zena that above all he wanted to see the dead leopard at his feet.
The trap was cleverly laid. It was in a patch of bush that invited the animal to approach the tree from one direction only, and so well concealed that, even when you knew it was there, you could not detect it.
For two nights nothing happened. Then we heard, first thing in the morning, that a leopard had been caught, but had escaped. Robin had no love for Mr Roos, so was delighted with this proof of his fallibility.
‘Never did think the fellow knew what he was talking about. Now he’s landed us all with an infuriated wounded leopard. Well, it’ll be up to him to finish it off. Always were a boastful lot, these Dutchmen….’
It was Twinkle’s safety that worried me. If the leopard would take Chang off a veranda, Twinkle roaming about the farm and garden invited tragedy. She slept in a lean-to shed next to the store, but in the daytime she had taken to wandering off goodness knows where. (Sometimes we did know, however: once she walked to a bed of young coffee trees and nipped off all their heads, and on another occasion demolished our entire bean crop.) When Randall Swift arrived to pay a call she bounded out from behind a bush and tumbled him off his bicycle. She h
ad taken to playing hide-and-seek with the dogs, but Robin’s favourite, a spaniel growing old and fat and called Bancroft (after the actor, to whom Robin had seen a resemblance when young), refused to play and slunk off into corners in a state of mournful gloom whenever Twinkle put her black, quivering nose round the door. Twinkle teased him unmercifully, while he glared at her with a pathetic mixture of supplication and loathing. So both Robin and Tilly were against Twinkle and wanted to get rid of her, although they did not want the leopard to do it for them. No one could quite escape Twinkle’s charm, and anyway she had entrusted herself to our protection.
Chapter 18
NOW that the leopard was wounded, things were serious; knowing himself doomed, with nothing to lose, he might well try to bring a valedictory revenge down upon his enemies. So a leopard-hunt was swiftly organized.
I rode with Robin and Tilly to the scene of the escape, where a lot of people had already assembled. The leopard had not dragged the trap away, as we had supposed. There it was, on the end of its chain, with a lot of fur and blood on it. Where it had been concealed, the bush was trampled and uprooted, grass carried the rusty stains of blood, and bits of yellow fur clung to thorns. There had been a terrific lashing about, a scene of turmoil, rage, and agony, until the beast had freed himself by the most desperate expedient imaginable. He had evidently bitten off his own torn, bleeding foot to gain his freedom.
Even Mr Roos shook his head. ‘Never known it happen before. Man, he’s a kali one, this is.’ Kali was another word we made much use of, it meant fierce or bold, savage or bad-tempered, and on the whole it was a term of respect.
Most of the Palmers’ Kikuyu labour had turned back into warriors, simply by abandoning their pangas, bringing out their long-bladed spears, and wearing their vermilion-sheathed swords, and they were standing about excitedly talking, or else without words, as tense as coiled springs, staring into the bush with eyes brightened by anticipation, and all the old dreams of warriors’ glory flooding back into their hearts.
Hereward and Alec Wilson, also, had a new urgency and vigour about their movements and voices, and looked pleased and purposeful. Even Robin was thoroughly awake, and grinning broadly. Only Mr Roos seemed quite unaltered, but then the hunt was his normal element. The leopard had been tracked to a patch of thick bush and boulders on the bank of the river a mile or two upstream, and there he was no doubt angrily lying.
‘I don’t know what you fellows think,’ Hereward remarked, indicating that he had at any rate decided what they were to do. ‘Country’s too thick to beat through – wouldn’t be fair on the beaters. I’ll go in and walk him up with the four-fifty; that’ll settle the beggar’s hash if he tries any nonsense. You three go ahead to cut off his retreat and bag him if he breaks back towards the reserve. Alec, you see that bluff above the bit of bush he’s lying up in? That’s your stand. Robin, will you go down by the river near that patch of reeds? And Roos, will you cross the river and get up by that big tree where you’ll be able to command the bank opposite, and pick him off if he gets past the others?’
Although Hereward put his orders in the form of questions, these were not intended to be answered; the hunt was taking place on his land, so he had the right to direct it. But Mr Roos was not a directable man. When Robin and Alec strode off obediently to take up their allotted places, Mr Roos, squatting on his heels like a Kikuyu (a most useful position to master), continued to unravel the trap and its chain without paying any attention to the plan of campaign.
Hereward slid back his forehead in his peculiar manner, which could presage a smile or a display of icy displeasure, and pointed out that he could not proceed until Mr Roos had taken up his forward position.
‘You go ahead, man, finish him, the skin is yours.’
‘Good God! Is that all you’re thinking of, ‘he brute’s hide?’
Hereward glared at Mr Roos’s back as if at some robber of the poor-box caught in the act, and walked off without another word. When he spoke to Tilly his tone was usually mellow and ingratiating, but now he was so offended that he positively barked at her, telling her to take me back at once to the safety of the house, and to succour Lettice.
‘If you’ll lend me a rifle I’ll take Mr Roos’s place,’ Tilly suggested. Nothing caused her more distress than to be left out of anything that promised interest and novelty. As for fear, she was without it, at least so far as it concerned the animal kingdom; she was sometimes nervous in the presence of machinery.
‘Have you gone out of your mind?’ Hereward demanded, quite unkindly. ‘I’m not going to have a woman under my protection exposed to danger from a wounded beast.’
‘It seems to be very much outnumbered,’ Tilly remarked. ‘At any rate I shall watch the hunt, and you can’t say I’m not protected here, with all these heavily armed warriors.’
Hereward visibly disapproved, but did not like to order her away in case, like Mr Roos, she should reveal herself as a rebel.
‘And then they say these Dutchmen are all born hunters,’ he muttered. ‘Hunters my foot! Damned box-wallahs, that’s all. Only interested in what they get for the pelt. Not an atom of sportsmanship in ’em….’
The Kikuyu were not avid hunters like the Masai, who made a martial exercise of it, and dressed up in splendid finery to ring a lion with spears, goad him to the charge, and then impale him. Nevertheless they enjoyed a hunt, and their spears had been lying a long time unused, thrust into the thatch of their huts; now they had brought them out in high spirits, and hoped perhaps to be brushed by the golden wings of glory and fanned by the hot breath of danger, and to have a topic for the harvest songs, and for lighting in the hearts of the young women a little flame of worship for the splendour and courage of the young men.
It was sad for them to stand about on the hillside, all dressed up and nowhere to go, because of Hereward’s edict. Of course Hereward was only acting like a good officer who does not risk the lives of his men if it can be avoided, and puts himself in the position of greatest danger. A wounded leopard is (as he would have put it) a nasty customer, and a spearman no match for him. No doubt Hereward was acting correctly, but the young men were left baulked and silent on the hillside, like guests asked to a banquet, and anticipating golden wine in crystal goblets, stuffed quails and peacocks’ tongues and perhaps rosebud-breasted dancing girls, only to be offered ham sandwiches and weak, lukewarm tea on the trestle-tables and hard benches of an institute hall.
When you read descriptions of hunts, it all seems very clear and sensible, everyone concerned knows what he is about; but when you watch one there is little to be seen, and events do not follow one another with logical coherence.
On this occasion nothing happened for a long time and I soon grew bored: even Moyale had cropped all the grass he wanted and stood half asleep, swishing his tail and twitching his ears to keep in circulation some of the innumerable flies. I fell into a conversation with Njombo but Tilly hushed me, in case our voices should disturb the hunt. Mr Roos had disappeared. We did not see him go; the bush, or long brown grass, or reedy river-bed, had swallowed him. In his nondescript, untidy, and unmended khaki clothing he blended immediately into his surroundings like an antelope or lion. Somehow I did not think that he intended to be left out of the hunt. We could not see Alec, but in the distance Robin’s hat could be discerned protruding from behind a rock.
Once or twice we caught a glimpse of Hereward’s head and shoulders advancing at a slow pace through the green patch of bush about half-way up the bank. He was following the leopard’s spoor, and it must have been a jumpy business, for he could see ahead no more than two or three yards, and might well find himself upon it before he had the time to raise his rifle. His gun-bearer, who carried a second weapon, was said to have been in his youth an askari attached to one of the trading expeditions that used to trudge from the coast to Uganda and back again, and therefore to be reliable and iron-nerved, but no one had seen him in action, or knew whether his claim was true. Alec and Ro
bin were too far off to be of any help to Hereward if the wounded leopard were to pounce.
When the silence was at last broken, everything was confused. There was a very loud shot, no doubt from Hereward’s enormous 450 (which kicked like an ostrich), and then another almost at once, and a sound like the sudden rip of calico, and a shout, all mixed up. The warriors beside us emitted short, sharp sounds like barks, and in the distance Robin’s hat appeared above the rocks, waving in the air. Then came an outbreak of other sounds: a shout, a rifle shot but not so loud, a crashing in the bush, a hubbub from the warriors. Tilly had a pair of binoculars and I heard her cry suddenly in a stiff voice: ‘Look out!’ and then expel her breath in a moaning gasp. The control that had held back the Kikuyu snapped: they poured down the slope shouting and waving their spears, too late to use them, but taut as violin strings, musky with excitement, and leaping with long strides like reedbuck from hummock to boulder and through the tufted grass. I tried to follow on Moyale, but Tilly seized the reins.
‘Wait,’ she ordered. ‘Something went wrong, there was another leopard, I don’t know…’
But she caught sight of Hereward’s hat just before the warriors closed in, and we picked our way down the hill.
The tension in the air had affected our ponies and even Moyale jiggled and pranced, perhaps reminded by the shots and by smells whose impact was too light for our blunted senses to record – smells of cordite and blood and exhalations of fear and anxiety – of his youth upon the plains of Ogaden where he had chased giraffe or even lions, stung by the long spurs of his hard-sinewed, spear-hurling riders. The warriors had already started their thumping step around a circle, knees bent, buttocks out, swaying from side to side like running ostriches. They were chanting in short, sharp, open-throated bursts which would soon coalesce into an almost endless paean, links in a chain of throbbing sound. They made way for our ponies and we pushed through to the group in the centre where Hereward, like a stork, over-topped the others and glowed with gratified pride.