{‘Bathi,’} said Molo again softly, but insistently.
‘Too tired.’
‘Memsahib {bathi,’} Molo said hopefully.
‘I’ll go,’ said P.O.M. ‘But you two hurry up with your drinking. I’m hungry.’
‘{Bathi,’} said Kayti severely to Pop.
{‘Bathi} yourself,’ said Pop. ‘Don’t bully me.’
Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.
‘All right. All right,’ said Pop. ‘Going to have one?’ he asked.
‘We’ll have just one,’ I said, ‘and then we’ll {bathi.’}
{‘Bathi}, B’wana M’Kumba,’ Molo said. P.O.M. came toward the fire wearing her blue dressing-gown and mosquito boots.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You can have another when you come out. There’s nice, warm, muddy water.’
‘They bully us,’ Pop said.
‘Do you remember the time we were sheep hunting and your hat blew off and nearly fell on to the ram?’ I asked her, the whisky racing my mind back to Wyoming.
‘Go take your {bathi,’} P.O.M. said. ‘I’m going to have a gimlet.’
In the morning we were dressed before daylight, ate breakfast, and were hunting the forest edge and the sunken valleys where Droop had seen the buffalo before the sun was up. But they were not there. It was a long hunt and we came back to camp and decided to send the lorries for porters and move with a foot safari to where there was supposed to be water in a stream that came down out of the mountain beyond where we had seen the rhinos the night before. Being camped there we could hunt a new country along the forest edge and we would be much closer to the mountain.
The trucks were to bring in Karl from his kudu camp where he seemed to be getting disgusted, or discouraged, or both, and he could go down to the Rift Valley the next day and kill some meat and try for an oryx. If we found good rhino we would send for him. We did not want to fire any shots where we were going except at rhino in order not to scare them, and we needed meat. The rhino seemed very shy and I knew from Wyoming how the shy game will all shift out of a small country, a country being an area, a valley or range of hills, a man can hunt in, after a shot or two. We planned this all out, Pop consulting with Droopy, and then sent the lorries off with Dan to recruit porters.
Late in the afternoon they were back with Karl, his outfit, and forty M’Bulus, good-looking savages with a pompous headman who wore the only pair of shorts among them. Karl was thin now, his skin sallow, his eyes very tired looking and he seemed a little desperate. He had been eight days in the kudu camp in the hills, hunting hard, with no one with him who spoke any English, and they had only seen two cows and jumped a bull out of range. The guides claimed they had seen another bull but Karl had thought it was kongoni, or that they said it was a kongoni, and had not shot. He was bitter about this and it was not a happy outfit.
‘I never saw his horns. I don’t believe it was a bull,’ he said. Kudu hunting was a touchy subject with him now and we let it alone.
‘He’ll get an oryx down there and he’ll feel better,’ Pop said. ‘It’s gotten on his nerves a little.’
Karl agreed to the plan for us to move ahead into the new country, and for him to go down for meat.
‘Whatever you say,’ he said. ‘Absolutely whatever you say.’
‘It will give him some shooting,’ Pop said. ‘Then he’ll feel better.’
‘We’ll get one. Then you get one. Whoever gets his first can go on down after oryx. You’ll probably get an oryx to-morrow anyway when you’re hunting meat.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Karl said. His mind was bitterly revolving eight blank days of hill climbing in the heat, out before daybreak, back at dark, hunting an animal whose Swahili name he could not then remember, with trackers in whom he had no confidence, coming back to eat alone, no one to whom he could talk, his wife nine thousand miles and three months away, and how was his dog and how was his job, and god-damn it where were they and what if he missed one when he got a shot, he wouldn’t, you never missed when it was really important, he was sure of that, that was one of the tenets of his faith, but what if he got excited and missed, and why didn’t he get any letters, what did the guide say kongoni for that time, they did, he knew they did, but he said nothing of all that, only, ‘Whatever you say’, a little desperately.