Under the dining tent fly Pop and I talked over what we had better do.
‘He’s got his rhino anyway,’ Pop said. ‘That saves us time. Now you can’t stand on that one.’
‘No.’
‘But this country is washed out. Something wrong with it. Droopy claims to know a good country about three hours from here in the lorries and another hour or so on with the porters. We can head for there this afternoon with a light outfit, send the lorries back, and Karl and Dan can move on down to M’uto Umbu and he can get his oryx.’
‘Fine.’
‘He has a chance to get a leopard on that rhino carcass this evening, too, or in the morning. Dan said they heard one. We’ll try to get a rhino out of this country of Droopy’s and then you join up with them and go on for kudu. We want to leave plenty of time for them. ‘
‘Fine.’
‘Even if you don’t get an oryx. You’ll pick one up somewhere.’
‘Even if I don’t get one at all, it’s all right. We’ll get one another time. I want a kudu, though. ‘
‘You’ll get one. You’re sure to.’
‘I’d rather get one, a good one, than all the rest. I don’t give a damn about these rhino outside of the fun of hunting them. But I’d like to get one that wouldn’t look silly beside that dream rhino of his.’
‘Absolutely.’
So we told Karl and he said: ‘Whatever you say. Sure. I hope you get one twice as big. ‘ He really meant it. He was feeling better now and so were we all.
CHAPTER THREE
Droopy’s country, when we reached it that evening, after a hot ride through red-soiled, bush-scrubby hills, looked awful. It was at the edge of a belt where all the trees had been girdled to kill the tsetse flies. And across from camp was a dusty, dirty native village. The soil was red and eroded and seemed to be blowing away, and camp was pitched in a high wind under the sketchy shade of some dead trees on a hillside overlooking a little stream and the mud village beyond. Before dark we followed Droopy and two local guides up past the village and in a long climb to the top of a rock-strewn ridge that overlooked a deep valley that was almost a canyon. Across on the other side, were broken valleys that sloped steeply down into the canyon. There were heavy growths of trees in the valleys and grassy slopes on the ridges between, and above there was the thick bamboo forest of the mountain. The canyon ran down to the Rift Valley, seeming to narrow at the far end where it cut through the wall of the rift. Beyond, above the grassy ridges and slopes, were heavily forested hills. It looked a hell of a country to hunt.
‘If you. see one across there you have to go straight down to the bottom of the canyon. Then up one of those timber patches and across those damned gullies. You can’t keep him in sight and you’ll kill yourself climbing. It’s too steep. Those are the kind of innocent-looking gullies we got into that night coming home.’
‘It looks very bad,’ Pop agreed.
‘I’ve hunted a country just like this for deer. The south slope of Timber Creek in Wyoming. The slopes are all too steep. It’s hell. It’s too broken. We’ll take some punishment to-morrow.’
P.O.M. said nothing. Pop had brought us here and Pop would bring us out. All she had to do was see her boots did not hurt her feet. They hurt just a little now, and that was her only worry.
I went on to dilate on the difficulties the country showed and we went home to camp in the dark all very gloomy and full of prejudice against Droopy. The fire flamed brightly in the wind and we sat and watched the moon rise and listened to the hyenas. After we had a few drinks we did not feel so badly about the country.
‘Droopy swears it’s good,’ Pop said. ‘This isn’t where he wanted to go though, he says. It was another place farther on. But he swears this is good.’