‘Ask him what the hell he’s laughing about?’ I asked Pop once.
‘At B’wana,’ M’Cola said, and shook his head, ‘at the little birds.’
‘He thinks you’re funny,’ Pop said.
‘Goddam it. I am funny. But the hell with him.’
‘He thinks you’re very funny,’ Pop said. ‘Now the Memsahib and I would never laugh.’
‘Shoot them. yourself.’
‘No, you’re the bird shot. The self-confessed bird shot,’ she said.
So bird shooting became this marvellous joke. If I killed, the joke was on. the birds and M’Cola would shake his head and laugh and make his hands go round and round to show how the bird turned over in the air. And if I missed, I was the clown of the piece and he would look at me and shake with laughing. Only the hyenas were funnier.
Highly humorous was the hyena obscenely loping, full belly dragging, at daylight on the plain, who, shot from the stern, skittered on into speed to tumble end over end. Mirth provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back, his four feet and his full belly in the air. Nothing could be more jolly than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking out of high grass by a {donga}, hit at ten yards, who raced his tail in three narrowing, scampering circles until he died.
It was funny to M’Cola to see a hyena shot at close range. There was that comic slap of the bullet and the hyena’s agitated surprise to find death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance, in the heat shimmer of the plain, to see him go over backwards, to see him start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant that he was racing the little nickeled death inside him. But the great joke of all, the thing M’Cola waved his hands across his face about, and turned away and shook his head and laughed, ashamed even of the hyena, the pinnacle of hyenic humour, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating them with relish.
{‘Fisi,’} M’Cola would say and shake his head in delighted sorrow at there being such an awful beast. Fisi, the hyena, hermaphroditic, self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back, mongrel dog-smart in the face; whack from the little Mannlicher and then the horrid circle starting. ‘Fisi,’ M’Cola laughed, ashamed of him, shaking his bald black head. ‘Fisi. Eats himself. Fisi.’
The hyena was a dirty joke but bird shooting was a clean joke. My whisky was a clean joke. There were many variations of that joke. Some we come to later. The Mohammedans and all religions were a joke. A joke on all the people who had them. Charo, the other gun bearer, was short, very serious and highly religious. All Ramadan he never swallowed his saliva until sunset and when the sun was almost down I’d see him watching nervously. He had a bottle with him of some sort of tea and he would finger it and watch the sun and I would see M’Cola watching him and pretending not to see. This was not outrightly funny to him. This was something that he could not laugh about openly but that he felt superior to and wondered at the silliness of it. The Mohammedan religion was very fashionable and all the higher social grades among the boys were Mohammedans. It was something that gave caste, something to believe in, something fashionable and god-giving to suffer a little for each year, something that made you superior to other people, something that gave you more complicated habits of eating, something that I understood and M’Cola did not understand, nor care about, and he watched Charo watch for the sun to set with that blank look on his face that it put on about all things that he was not a part of. Charo was deadly thirsty and truly devout and the sun set very slowly. I looked at it, red over the trees, nudged him and he grinned. M’Cola offered me the water bottle solemnly. I shook my head and Charo grinned again. M’Cola looked blank. Then the sun was down and Charo had the bottle tilted up, his Adam’s apple rising and falling greedily and M’Cola looking at him and then looking away.