Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, outmanoeuvred, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one. It is not the way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters, after which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers’ businesses. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing. So, coming in at noon, up since two hours before daylight, with only three days left, I was starting to be nervous about it, and there, at the table under the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had forgotten all about him.
‘Hello. Hello,’ he said. ‘No success? Nothing doing? Where is the kudu?’
‘He coughed once and went away,’ I said. ‘Hello, girl.’
She smiled. She was worried too. The two of them had been listening since daylight for a shot. Listening all the time, even when our guest had arrived; listening while writing letters, listening while reading, listening when Kandisky came back and talked.
‘You did not shoot him?’
‘No. Nor see him.’ I saw that Pop was worried too, and a little nervous. There had evidently been considerable talking going on.
‘Have a beer, Colonel,’ he said to me.
‘We spooked one,’ I reported. ‘No chance of a shot. There were plenty of tracks. Nothing more came. The wind was blowing around. Ask the boys about it.’
‘As I was telling Colonel Phillips,’ Kandisky began, shifting his leather-breeched behind and crossing one heavy-calved, well-haired, bare leg over the other, ‘you must not stay here too long. You must realize the rains are coming. There is one stretch of twelve miles beyond here you can never get through if it rains. It is impossible.’
‘So he’s been telling me,’ Pop said. ‘I’m a Mister, by the way. We use these military titles as nicknames. No offence if you’re a colonel yourself.’ Then to me, ‘Damn these salt-licks. If you’d leave them. alone you’d get one.’
‘They ball it all up,’ I agreed. ‘You’re so sure of a shot sooner or later on the lick.’
‘Hunt the hills too.’
Til hunt them, Pop.’
‘What is killing a kudu, anyway?’ Kandisky asked. ‘You should not take it so seriously. It is nothing. In a year you kill twenty.’
‘Best not say anything about that to the game department, though,’ Pop said.
‘You misunderstand,’ Kandisky said. ‘I mean in a year a man could. Of course no man would wish to.’
‘Absolutely,’ Pop said. ‘If he lived in kudu country, he could. They’re the commonest big antelope in this bush country. It’s just that when you want to see them you don’t.’
‘I kill nothing, you understand,’ Kandisky told us. ‘Why are you not more interested in the natives?’
‘We are,’ my wife assured him.
‘They are really interesting. Listen…’ Kandisky said, and he spoke on to her.