We left the lorry under some scrubby trees about two miles from the lick and walked along the sandy road towards the first salt place which was in the open to the left of the trail. We had gone about a mile keeping absolutely quiet and walking in single file, Abdullah the educated tracker leading, then me, M’Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of us. Where the sand was thin over the clay there was a pool of water and you could see that a heavy rain had drenched it all on ahead. I did not realize what this meant but Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and bared his teeth in anger.
‘It’s no good,’ M’Cola whispered.
Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.
‘Shut up, you bastard,’ I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on talking in above normal tones and I “looked up ‘shut up’ in the dictionary while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn’t find ‘shut up’ so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he closed it in surprise.
“Cola,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said M’Cola.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Salt no good.’
‘Ah.’
So that was it. I had thought of the rain only as something that made tracking easy.
‘When the rain?’ I asked.
‘Last night,’ M’Cola said.
Garrick started to talk and I placed the back of my hand against his mouth.
“Cola.’
‘Yes.’
‘Other salt,’ pointing in the direction of the big lick in the woods, which I knew was a good bit higher because we went very slightly up hill through the brush to reach it. ‘Other salt good?’
‘Maybe.’
M’Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed deeply hurt but kept his mouth shut and we went on down the road, walking around the wet places, to where, sure enough, the deep depression of the saltlick was half filled with water. Garrick started to whisper a speech here but M’Cola shut him up again.
‘Come on,’ I said, and, M’Cola ahead, we started trailing up the damp, sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the trees to the upper lick.
M’Cola stopped dead, leaned over to look at the damp sand, then whispered, ‘Man’, to me. There was the track.
‘Shenzi,’ he said, which meant a wild man.
We trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and stalking the lick carefully, up and into the blind. M’Cola shook his head.
‘No good,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
We went over to the lick. There it was all written plainly. There were the tracks of three big bull kudu in the moist bank beyond the lick where they had come to the salt. Then there were the sudden, deep, knifely-cut tracks where they made a spring when the bow twanged and the slashing heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then, far-spaced, the tracks running into the bush. We trailed them, all three, but no man’s track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.
M’Cola said, ‘Shenzi!’ putting great hate into the word. We picked up the shenzi’s tracks and saw where he had gone on back to the road. We settled down in the blind and waited there until it was dark and a light rain began to fall. Nothing came to the salt. In the rain we made our way back to the lorry. Some wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.
Kamau had rigged a tent out of a big canvas ground cloth, hung my mosquito net inside, and set up the canvas cot. M’Cola brought the food inside the shelter tent.
Garrick and Abdullah built a fire and they, Kamau and M’Cola cooked over it. They were going to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a couple of tin cups of half whisky and water.