Pop was reading {Richard Carvell}. We had bought what there was to buy in Nairobi and we were pretty well to the end of the books.
‘I’ve read this before,’ Pop said. ‘But it’s a good story.’
‘I can just remember it. But it was a good story then.’
‘It’s a jolly good story, but I wish I hadn’t read it before.’
‘This is terrible,’ P.O.M. said. ‘You couldn’t read it.’
‘Do you want this one?’
‘Don’t be ornamental,’ she said. ‘No, I’ll finish this.’
‘Goon. Take it.’
‘I’ll give it right back.’
‘Hey, M’Cola,’ I said. ‘Beer?’
‘N’Dio,’ he said with great force, and from the chop box one of the natives had carried on his head produced, in its straw casing, a bottle of German beer, one of the sixty-four bottles Dan had brought from the German trading station. Its neck was wrapped in silver foil and on its black and yellow label there was a horseman in armour. It was still cool from the night and opened by the tin-opener it creamed into three cups, thick-foamed, full-bodied.
‘No,’ said Pop. ‘Very bad for the liver.’
‘Come on.’
‘All right.’
We all drank and when M’Cola opened the second bottle Pop refused, firmly.
‘Go on. It means more to you. I’m going to take a nap.’
‘Poor old Mama?’
‘Just a little.’
‘All for me,’ I said. M’Cola smiled and shook his head at this drinking. I lay back against the tree and watched the wind bringing the clouds and drank the beer slowly out of the bottle. It was cooler that way and it was excellent beer. After a while Pop and P.O.M. were both asleep and I got back the Sevastopol book and read in ‘The Cossacks’ again. It was a good story.
When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer. Then we read again and all went to sleep. I woke thirsty and was unscrewing the top from a water bottle when I heard a rhino snort and crash in the brush of the river bed. Pop was awake and heard it too and we took our guns, without speaking, and started toward where the noise had come from. M’Cola found the tracks. The rhino had come up the stream, evidently he had winded us when he was only about thirty yards away, and had gone on up. We could not follow the tracks the way the wind was blowing so we circled away from the stream and back to the edge of the burned place to get above him and then hunted very carefully against the wind along the stream through very thick bush, but we did not find him. Finally Droopy found where he had gone up the other side and on into the hills. From the tracks it did not seem a particularly large one.
We were a long way from camp, at least four hours as we had come, and much of it up-hill going back, certainly there would be that long climb out of the canyon; we had a wounded buffalo to deal with, and when we came out on the edge of the burned country again, we agreed that we should get P.O.M. and get started. It was still hot, but the sun was on its way down and for a good way we would be on the heavily shaded game trail on the high bank above the stream. When we found P.O.M. she pretended to be indignant at our going off and leaving her alone but she was only teasing us.
We started off, Droop and his spearsman in the lead, walking along the shadow of the trail that was broken by the sun through the leaves. Instead of the cool early morning smell of the forest there was a nasty stink like the mess cats make.
‘What makes the stink?’ I whispered to Pop.
‘Baboons,’ he said.
A whole tribe of them had gone on just ahead of us and their droppings were everywhere. We came up to the place where the rhinos and the buff had come out of the reeds and I located where I thought the buff had been when I shot. M’Cola and Droopy were casting about like hounds and I thought they were at least fifty yards too high up the bank when Droop held up a leaf.