We came up to the yellow blossomed tree very carefully, like people walking up to a bevy of quail the dogs have pointed, and the rhino was not in sight. We went all through the edge of the forest and it was full of tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side of the mountain, hoping to see a rhino in the open glades. When it was almost too dark to shoot, I saw Droopy stop and crouch. With his head down he motioned us forward. Crawling up, we saw a large rhino and a small one standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.
‘Cow and calf,’ Pop said softly. ‘Can’t shoot her. Let me look at her horn.’ He took the glasses from M’Cola.
‘Can she see us?’ P.O.M. asked.
‘No.’
‘How far are they?’
‘Must be nearly five hundred yards.’
‘My God, she looks big,’ I whispered.
‘She’s a big cow,’ Pop said. ‘Wonder what became of the bull?’ He was pleased and excited by the sight of game. ‘Too dark to shoot unless we’re right on him.’
The rhinos had turned and were feeding. They never seemed to move slowly. They either bustled or stood still.
‘What makes them so red?’ P.O.M. asked. ‘Rolling in the mud,’ Pop answered. ‘We better get along while there’s light.’
The sun –was down when we came out of the forest and looked down the slope and across to the hill where we had watched from with our glasses. We should have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back up the trail the way we had come, but we decided, like fools, to grade straight across the mountainside below the edge of the forest. So in the dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed only as wooded patches until you were in them, slid down, clung to vines, stumbled and climbed and slid again, down and down, then steeply, impossibly, up, hearing the rustle of night things and the cough of a leopard hunting baboons, me scared of snakes, and touching each root and branch with snake fear in the dark.
To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into the moonlight and the long, too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed one foot up to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at a time, leaning forward against the grade and the altitude, dead tired and gun weary, single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the top where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into camp.
So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the canvas bath had been a quarter filled with hot water.
{‘Bathi}, B’wana.’
‘Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,’ you say.
‘I never could,’ says P.O.M. ‘You all made me.’
‘You climbed better than any of us.’
‘Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?’
‘I wonder,’ Pop said. ‘I suppose it’s merely condition.’
‘It’s riding in the damned cars that ruins us.’
‘If we did that walk every night we could come back in three nights from now and never feel it.’
‘Yes. But I’d be as scared of snakes if we did it every night for a year.’
‘You’d get over it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They scare me stiff. Do you remember that time we touched hands behind the tree?’
‘Rather,’ said Pop. ‘You jumped two yards. Are you really afraid of them, or only talking?’
‘They scare me sick,’ I said. ‘They always have.’
‘What’s the matter with you men?’ P.O.M. said. ‘Why haven’t I heard anything about the war to-night?’
‘We’re too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?’
‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Where is that boy with the whisky?’ Then calling in that feeble, clowning falsetto, ‘Kayti… Katy-ay!’