‘I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,’ Karl said to me.
‘You’ll get a sixty-incher.’
‘No,’ said Karl. ‘Don’t kid me. I’ll be happy with any kudu.’
‘You’ll probably get a hell of a one,’ Pop said.
‘Don’t kid me,’ Karl said. ‘I know how lucky I’ve been. I would be happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.’
He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you for it, and understand it.
‘Good old Karl,’ I said, warmed with whisky, understanding, and sentiment.
‘We’re having a swell time, aren’t we?’ Karl said. ‘Where’s poor old Mama?’
‘I’m here,’ said P.O.M. from the shadow. ‘I’m one of those quiet people.’
‘By God if you’re not,’ Pop said. ‘But you can puncture the old man quick enough when he gets started.’
‘That’s what makes a woman a universal favourite,’ P.O.M. told him. ‘Give me another compliment, Mr. J.’
‘By God, you’re brave as a little terrier.’ Pop and I had both been drinking, it seemed.
‘That’s lovely.’ P.O.M. sat far back in her chair, holding her hands clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her quilted blue robe in the firelight now, and the light on her black hair. ‘I love it when you all reach the little terrier stage. Then I know the war can’t be far away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?’
‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Your husband, one of the bravest bastards that ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.’
‘Now he’s drunk, we get the truth,’ I said.
‘Let’s eat,’ said P.O.M. ‘I’m really frightfully hungry.’
We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road and beyond the village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off, eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light. We stopped the car at the edge of the bush and getting out and sitting down with the glasses saw there was a herd of kongoni scattered between us and the eland and with the kongoni a single bull oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai donkey with marvellous long, black, straight, back-slanting horns that showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.
‘You want to go after him?’ I asked Karl.
‘No. You go on.’
I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot in front of people and so I said, ‘All right’. Also I wanted to shoot, selfishly, and Karl was unselfish. We wanted meat badly.
I walked along the road, not looking toward the game, trying to look casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and down from the left shoulder away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I knew that if I moved toward them they would at once move off out of range so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again, and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the top of his back and squeezed off. You do not hear the noise of the shot on game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and to the right, the whole plain backgrounding into moving animals against the rise of the sun, the rocking-horse canter of the long-legged, grotesque kongoni, the heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx I had not seen before running with the kongoni. This sudden life and panic all made background for the one I wanted, now trotting, three-quartering away, his horns held high now and I stood to shoot running, got on him, the whole animal miniatured in the aperture and I held above his shoulders, swung ahead and squeezed and he was down, kicking, before the crack of the bullet striking bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot that broke a hind leg.