‘Who does he mean, you or himself?’
‘Both of us.’
We saw the moon come up, smoky red over the brown hills, and we came down through the chinky lights of the village, the mud houses all closed tight, and the smells of goats and sheep, and then across the stream and up the bare slope to where the fire was burning in front of our tents. It was a cold night with much wind.
In the morning we hunted, picked up a track at a spring and trailed a rhino all over the high orchard country before he went down into a valley that led, steeply, into the canyon. It was very hot and the tight boots of the day before had chafed P.O.M.’s feet. She did not complain about them but I could see they hurt her. We were all luxuriantly, restfully tired.
‘The hell with them,’ I said to Pop. ‘I don’t want to kill another one unless he’s big. We might hunt a week for a good one. Let’s stand on the one we have and pull out and join Karl. We can hunt oryx down there and get those zebra hides and get on after the kudu.’
We were sitting under a tree on the summit of a hill and could see off over all the country and the canyon running down to the Rift Valley and Lake Manyara.
‘It would be good fun to take porters and a light outfit and hunt on ahead of them down through that valley and out to the lake,’ Pop said.
‘That would be swell. We could send the lorries around to meet us at what’s the name of the place?’
‘Maji-Moto.’
‘Why don’t we do that?’ P.O.M. asked.
‘We’ll ask Droopy how the valley is.’
Droopy didn’t know but the spearman said it was very rough and bad going where the stream came down through the rift wall. He did not think we could get the loads through. We gave it up.
‘That’s the sort of trip to make, though,’ Pop said. ‘Porters don’t cost as much as petrol.’
‘Can’t we make trips like that when we come back?’ P.O.M. asked.
‘Yes,’ Pop said. ‘But for a big rhino you want to go up on Mount Kenya. You’ll get a real one there. Kudu’s the prize here. You’d have to go up to Kalal to get one in Kenya. Then if we get them we’ll have time to go on down in that Handeni country for sable.’
‘Let’s get going,’ I said without moving.
Since a long time we had all felt good about Karl’s rhino. We were glad he had it and all of that had taken on a correct perspective. Maybe he had his oryx by now. I hoped so. He was a fine fellow, Karl, and it was good he got these extra fine heads.
‘How do you feel, poor old Mama?’
‘I’m fine. If we {are} going I’ll be just as glad to rest my feet. But I love this kind of hunting.’
‘Let’s get back, eat, break camp, and get down there to-night.’
That night we got into our old camp at M’utu-Umbu, under the big trees, not far from the road. It had been our first camp in Africa and the trees were as big, as spreading, and as green, the stream as clear and fast flowing, and the camp as fine as when we had first been there. The only difference was that now it was hotter at night, the road in was hub-deep in dust, and we had seen a lot of country.
CHAPTER FOUR
We had come down to the Rift Valley by a sandy red road across a high plateau, then up and down through orchard-bushed hills, around a slope of forest to the top of the rift wall where we could look down and see the plain, the heavy forest below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine of Lake Manyara rose-coloured at one end with a half million tiny dots that were flamingoes. From there the road dropped steeply along the face of the wall, down into the forest, on to the flatness of the valley, through cultivated patches of green corn, bananas, and trees I did not know the names of, walled thick with forest, past a Hindu’s trading store and many huts, over two bridges where clear, fast-flowing streams ran, through more forest, thinning now to open glades, and into a dusty turn-off that led into a deeply rutted, dust-filled track through bushes to the shade of M’utu-Umbu camp.