I ran toward him, then slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be blown if he jumped and ran; but he was down for good. He had gone down so suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I saw it was cutting the lee from under him that brought him down. They all came up and Charo stuck him to make him legal meat.
‘Where did you hold on him the second time?’ Karl asked.
‘Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.’
‘It was very pretty,’ Dan said.
‘By evening,’ Pop said, ‘he’ll tell us that he broke that off leg on purpose. That’s one of his favourite shots, you know. Did you ever hear him explain it?’
While M’Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood, on one leg, watching the skinning. He spoke to me at some length, and I called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.
‘He wants to know if you are going to shoot something else,’ Pop said. ‘He would like some hides but he doesn’t care about oryx hide. It is almost worthless, he says. He wonders if you would like to shoot a couple of kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.’
‘Tell him on our way back.’
Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.
‘Tell him he can always find me around Harry’s New York Bar,’ I said.
The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.
‘He says why did you shoot him twice?’ Pop asked.
‘Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later in the day we shoot them once. In. the evening we are often half shot ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr’s.’
‘He says what do you do with the horns?’
‘Tell him in our tribe we give the horns to our wealthiest friends. Tell him it is very exciting and sometimes members of the tribe are chased across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.’
Pop told the Masai something and we shook hands again, parting on a most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see some other Masai coming along the road, earth-brown skins, and kneeing forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.
Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap sack, the meat tied inside the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road of red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to the edge of the road, we came up into some hills and through the little village of Kibaya where there was a white rest house and a general store and much farming land. It was here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting for a kudu to feed out into the edge of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he sat and nearly gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the village of Kibaya and as it was still cool and the sun had not yet burned off the dew from the grass I suggested we drink a bottle of that silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman in armour on it in order that we might remember the place better and even appreciate it more. This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries to follow on to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.
For a long time, while the sun rose and the day became hot we drove through what Pop had described, when I asked him what the country was like to the south, as a million miles of bloody Africa, bush close to the road that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.