‘Don’t shoot men?’ I asked him.
‘No! No! No!’ he said putting his hand to his head. I took the gun down with great reluctance, clowning for M’Cola who was grinning, and it very hot now, we walked across a meadow where the grass was knee high and truly swarming with long, rose-coloured, gauze-winged locusts that rose in clouds about us, making a whirring like a mowing machine, and climbing small hills and going down a long steep slope, we made our way back to camp to find the air of the valley drifting with flying locusts and Karl already in camp with Us kudu.
Passing the skinner’s tent he showed me the head which looked, body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a very strange and unfortunate kudu. Only the skin running from the eyes down to the nostrils, smooth grey and delicately marked with white, and the big, graceful ears were beautiful. The eyes were already dusty and there were flies around them and the horns were heavy, coarse, and instead of spiralling high they made a heavy turn and slanted straight out. It was a freak head, heavy and ugly.
Pop was sitting under the dining tent smoking and reading.
‘Where’s Karl?’ I asked him.
‘In his tent, I think. What did you do?’
‘Worked around the hill. Saw a couple of cows.’
‘I’m awfully glad you got him,’ I told Karl at the mouth of his tent. ‘How was it?’
‘We were in the blind and they motioned me to keep my head down and then when I looked up there he was right beside us. He looked huge.’
‘We heard you shoot. Where did you hit him?’
‘In the leg first, I think. Then we trailed him and finally I hit him a couple of more times and we got him.’
‘I heard only one shot.’
‘There were three or four,’ Karl said.
‘I guess the mountain shut off some if you were gone the other way trailing him. He’s got a heavy beam and a big spread.’
‘Thanks,’ Karl said. ‘I hope you get a lot better one. They said there was another one but I didn’t see him.’
I went back to the dining tent where Pop and P.O.M. were. They did not seem very elated about the kudu.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.
‘Did you see the head?’ P.O.M. asked.
‘Sure.’
‘It’s {awful} looking,’ she said.
‘It’s a kudu. He’s got another one still to go.’
‘Charo and the trackers said there was another bull with this one. A big bull with a wonderful head.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll shoot him.’
‘If he ever comes back.’
‘It’s fine he has one,’ P.O.M. said.
‘I’ll bet he’ll get the biggest one ever known, now,’ I said.
‘I’m sending him down with Dan to the sable country,’ Pop said. ‘That was the agreement. The first to kill a kudu to get first crack at the sable.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Then as soon as you get your kudu we’ll move down there too.’
{‘Good.’}
PART III PURSUIT AND FAILURE
CHAPTER ONE
That all seemed a year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way out to the twenty-eight-mile salt-lick, the sun on our faces, just having shot the guinea fowl, having, in the last five days, failed on the lick where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big hills and the small hills, having failed on the flats, losing a shot the night before on this lick because of the Austrian’s lorry, I knew there were only two days more to hunt before we must leave. M’Cola knew it too, and we were hunting together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a shortness of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.
Kamau, the driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who, with an old brown tweed coat some shooter had discarded, trousers heavily patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed always to give an impression of great elegance. Kamau was very modest, quiet, and an excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country and into an open, scrubby, desert-looking stretch, I looked at him, whose elegance, achieved with an old coat and a safety pin, whose modesty, pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would have meant nothing to me except that we would be short a driver; while now whenever or wherever he should die I would feel badly. Then abandoning the sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the look on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then, we put up another flock of guineas. M’Cola handed nie the shotgun and I shook my head. He nodded violently and said, ‘Good. Very Good’, and I told Kamau to go on. This confused Garrick who began an oration. Didn’t we want guineas? Those were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook a bull off of it, by a shot, to frighten him in the way we had seen the lesser kudu leave the salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were in the blind.