The smug one, more righteous now than ever, refuses. ‘Go ahead,’ he says.
‘I’m through,’ says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he feels he has been tricked. Something is always tricking him, the need to do things other than in a regular order, or by an inexact command in which details are not specified, or to have to do it in front of people, or to be hurried.
‘We’ve got eleven,’ says smug face, sorry now. He knows he should not hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly righteous bastard again. ‘We can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we’ll go in.’
‘No, let’s get him. You get him.’
‘No, let’s go in.’
And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.
‘What you thinking about now?’ you ask. ‘What a son of a bitch I am, still?’
‘About this afternoon,’ he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked dust on his face.
‘Me too,’ you say.
Finally the afternoon comes and you start.
This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes, light to pull out when you sink, you work out from hummock to hummock, picking a way across the marsh and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks fly as before out to the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake itself and find the bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water get outside the big flocks, then there is a shot and you and M’Cola crouch, heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two again, and then a high one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you can load and shoot, you brown a bunch to get cripples for decoys and then take only fancy shots because you know now you can get all that we can use or carry. You try the high one, straight overhead and almost leaning backward, the {coup de roi}, and splash a big black duck down beside M’Cola, him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you decide you better kill them and pick up. You have to run in water to your knees to get in range of the last cripple and you slip and go face down and are sitting, enjoying being completely wet finally, water cool on your behind, soaked with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting the water out of the gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell,
M’Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of ducks, crouches and a flock of geese pass over in easy range while you try to pump a wet shell in. You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you were behind, and at the shot you see the cloud of flamingoes rise in the sun, making the whole horizon of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after that each time after you shoot you turn and look out into the sun on the water and see that quick rise of the unbelievable cloud and then the slow settling.
‘M’Cola,’ you say and point.
‘N’Dio,’ he says, watching them. ‘M’uzuri!’ and hands you more shells.
We all had good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three days afterward, travelling, we had cold teal, the best of ducks to eat, fine, plump, and tender, cold with Pan-Yan pickles, and the red wine we bought at Babati, sitting by the road waiting for the lorries to come up, sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night when the lorries finally came in and we were at the house of an absent friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the table, having waited so long for the broken-down lorry to come that we all drank much too much and were unspeakably hungry, P.O.M. dancing with the manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full of emetine and with a ringing headache drowning it successfully in whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark and the wind blowing a gale, and then those teal coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables. Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.