Pop and P.O.M. came up, followed by the porters.
‘By God, he’s a better bull than we thought,’ I said.
‘He’s not the same bull. This is a real bull. That must have been our bull with him.’
‘I thought he was with a cow. It was so far away I couldn’t tell.’
‘It must have been four hundred yards. By God, you {can} shoot that little pipsqueak. ‘
‘When I saw him put his head down between his legs and buck I knew we had him. The light was wonderful on him.’
‘I knew you had hit him, and I knew he wasn’t the same bull. So I thought we had two wounded buffalo to deal with. I didn’t hear the first bellow.’
‘It was wonderful when we heard him bellow,’ P.O.M. said. ‘It’s such a sad sound. It’s like hearing a horn in the woods.’
‘It sounded awfully jolly to me,’ Pop said. ‘By God, we deserve a drink on this. That was a shot. Why didn’t you ever tell us you could shoot?’
‘Go to hell.’
‘You know he’s a damned good tracker, too, and what kind of a bird shot?’ he asked P.O.M.
‘Isn’t he a beautiful bull?’ P.O.M. asked. ‘He’s a fine one. He’s not old but it’s a fine head.’
We tried to take pictures but there was only the little box camera and the shutter stuck, and there was a bitter argument about the shutter while the light failed, and I was nervous now, irritable, righteous, pompous about the shutter and inclined to be abusive because we could get no picture. You cannot live on a plane of the sort of elation I had felt in the reeds and having killed, even when it is only a buffalo, you feel a little quiet inside. Killing is not a feeling that you share and I took a drink of water and told P.O.M. I was sorry I was such a bastard about the camera. She said it was all right and we were all right again looking at the buff with M’Cola making the cuts for the headskin and we standing close together and feeling fond of each other and understanding everything, camera and all. I took a drink of the whisky and it had no taste and I felt no kick from it.
‘Let me have another,’ I said. The second one was all right.
We were going on ahead to camp with the chased-by-a-rhino spearman as guide and Droop was going to skin out the head and they were going to butcher and cache the meat in trees so the hyenas would not get it. They were afraid to travel in the dark and I told Droopy he could keep my big gun. He said he knew how to shoot so I took out the shells and put on the safety and handing it to him told him to shoot. He put it to his shoulder, shut the wrong eye, and pulled hard on the trigger, and again, and again. Then I showed him about the safety and had him put it on and off and snap the gun a couple of times. M’Cola became very superior during Droopy’s struggle to fire with the safety on and Droopy seemed to get much smaller. I left him the gun and two cartridges and they were all busy butchering in the dusk when we followed the spearsman and the tracks of the smaller buff, which had no blood on them, up to the top of the hill and on our way toward home. We climbed around the tops of valleys, went across gulches, up and down ravines and finally came on to the main ridge, it dark and cold in the evening, the moon not yet up, we plodded along, all tired. Once M’Cola, in the dark, loaded with Pop’s heavy gun and an assortment of water bottles, binoculars, and a musette bag of books, sung out a stream of what sounded like curses at the guide who was striding ahead.
‘What’s he say?’ I asked Pop.
‘He’s telling him not to show off his speed. That there is an old man in the party.’