That night after dinner we heard the flamingoes flighting in the dark. It was like the sound the wings of ducks make as they go over before it is light, but slower, with a steady beat, and multiplied a thousand times. Pop and I were a little drunk and P.O.M. was very tired. Karl was gloomy again. We had taken the edge from his victories over rhino and now that was past anyway and he was facing possible defeat by oryx. Then, too, they had found not a leopard but a marvellous lion, a huge, black-maned lion that did not want to leave, on the rhino carcass when they had gone there the next morning and could not shoot him because he was in some sort of forest reserve.
‘That’s rotten,’ I said and I tried to feel bad about it but I was still feeling much too good to appreciate any one else’s gloom, and Pop and I sat, tired through to our bones, drinking whisky and soda and talking.
The next day we hunted oryx in the dried-up dustiness of the Rift Valley and finally found a herd way off at the edge of the wooded hills on the far side above a Masai village. They were like a bunch of Masai donkeys except for the beautiful straight-slanting black horns and all the heads looked good. When you looked closely two or three were obviously better than the others and sitting on the ground I picked what I thought was the very best of the lot and as they strung out I made sure of this one. I heard the bullet smack and watched the oryx circle out away from the others, the circle quickening, and knew I had it. So I did not shoot again.
This was the one Karl had picked, too. I did not know that, but had shot, deliberately selfish, to make sure of the best this time at least, but he got another good one and they went off in a wind-lifted cloud of grey dust as they galloped. Except for the miracle of their horns there was no more excitement in shooting them than if they had been donkeys, and after the lorry came up and M’Cola and Charo had skinned the heads out and cut up the meat we rode home in the blowing dust, our faces grey with it, and the valley one long heat mirage.
We stayed at that camp two days. We had to get some zebra hides that we had promised friends at home and it needed time for the skinner to handle them properly. Getting the zebra was no fun; the plain was dull, now that the grass had dried, hot and dusty after the hills, and the picture that remains is of sitting against an anthill with, in the distance, a herd of zebra galloping in the grey heat haze, raising a dust, and on the yellow plain, the birds circling over a white patch there, another beyond, there a third, and looking back, the plume of dust of the lorry coming with the skinners and the men to cut up the meat for the village. I did some bad shooting in the heat on a Grant’s gazelle that the volunteer skinners asked me to kill them for meat, wounding him in a running shot after missing him three or four times, and then following him across the plain until almost noon in that heat until I got within range and killed him.
But that afternoon we went out along the road that ran through the settlement and past the corner of the Hindu’s general store, where he smiled at us in well-oiled, unsuccessful-storekeeping, brotherly humanity, and hopeful salesmanship, turned the car off to the left on to a track that went into the deep forest, a narrow brush-bordered track through the heavy timber, that crossed a stream on an unsound log and pole bridge and went on until the timber thinned and we came out into a grassy savannah that stretched ahead to the reed-edged, dried-up bed of the lake with, far beyond, the shine of the water and the rose-pink of the flamingoes. There were some grass huts of fishermen in the shade of the last trees and ahead the wind blew across the grass of the savannah and the dried bed of the lake showed a white-grey with many small animals humping across its baked surface as our car alarmed them. They were reed buck and they looked strange and awkward as they moved in the distance but trim and graceful as you saw them standing close. We turned the car out through the thick, short grass and on to the dried lake floor and everywhere, to the left and to the right, where the streams flowed out into the lake and made a reedy marsh that ran down toward the receded lake, cut by canals of water, ducks were flying and we could see big flocks of geese spread over the grassy hummocks that rose above the marsh. The dried bed was hard and firm and we drove the car until it commenced to look moist and soft ahead, then left the motor car standing there, and, Karl taking Charo and I, M’Cola, to carry shells and birds, we agreed to work one on one side and one the other of the marsh and try to shoot and keep the birds moving while Pop and P.O.M. went into the edge of the high reeds on the left shore of the lake where another stream made a thick marsh to which we thought the ducks might fly.