‘You be a good girl.’
‘Don’t ever worry. I wish I could go.’
‘It’s a one-man show,’ Pop said. ‘You want to get in fast and do the dirty and get out fast. You’ve a big load as it is.’
The old man appeared and got into the back of the car with M’Cola who was wearing my old khaki sleeveless, quail-shooting coat.
‘M’Cola’s got the old man’s coat,’ Pop said.
‘He likes to carry things in the game pockets,’ I said.
M’Cola saw we were talking about him. I had forgotten about the uncleaned rifle. Now I remembered it and said to Pop, ‘Ask him where he got the new coat’.
M’Cola grinned and said something.
‘He says it is his property.’
I grinned at him and he shook his old bald head and it was understood that I had said nothing about the rifle.
‘Where’s that bastard Garrick?’ I asked.
Finally he came with his blanket and got in with M’Cola and the old man behind. The Wanderobo sat with me in front beside Kamau.
‘That’s a lovely-looking friend you have,’ P.O.M. said. ‘You be good too.’
I kissed her good-bye and we whispered something.
‘Billing and cooing,’ Pop said. ‘Disgusting.’
‘Good-bye, you old bastard.’
‘Good-bye, you damned bullfighter.’
‘Good-bye, sweet.’
‘Good-bye and good luck.’
‘You’ve plenty of petrol and we’ll leave some here,’ Pop called.
I waved and we were starting down hill through the village on a narrow track that led down and on to the scrubby dry plain that spread out below the two great blue hills.
I looked back as we went down the hill and saw the two figures, the tall thick one and the small neat one, each wearing big Stetson hats, silhouetted on the road as they walked back toward camp, then I looked ahead at the dried-up, scrubby plain.
PART IV PURSUIT AS HAPPINESS
CHAPTER ONE
The road was only a track and the plain was very discouraging to see. As we went on we saw a few thin Grant’s gazelles showing white against the burnt yellow of the grass and the grey trees. My exhilaration died with the stretching out of this plain, the typical poor game country, and it all began to {seem}. very impossible and romantic and quite untrue. The Wanderobo had a very strong odour and I looked at the way the lobes of his ear were stretched and then neatly wrapped on themselves and at his strange un-negroid, thin-lipped face. When he saw me studying his face he smiled pleasantly and scratched his chest. I looked around at the back of the car. M’Cola was asleep. Garrick was sitting straight up, dramatizing his awakeness, and the old man was trying to see the road.
By now there was no more road, only a cattle track, but we were coming to the edge of the plain. Then the plain was behind us and ahead there were big trees and we were entering a country the loveliest that I had seen in Africa. The grass was green and smooth, short as a meadow that has been mown and is newly grown, and the trees were big, high-trunked, and old with no undergrowth but only the smooth green of the turf like a deer park and we drove on through shade and patches of sunlight following a faint trail the Wanderobo pointed out. I could not believe we had suddenly come to any such wonderful country. It was a country to wake from, happy to have had the dream and, seeing if it would clown away, I reached up and touched the Wanderobo’s ear. He jumped and Kamau snickered. M’Cola nudged me from the back seat and pointed and there, standing in an open space between the trees, his head up, staring at us, the bristles on his back erect, long, thick, white tusks upcurving, his eyes showing bright, was a very large wart-hog boar watching us from less than twenty yards. I motioned to Kamau to stop and we sat looking at him and he at us. I put the rifle up and sighted on his chest. He watched and did not move. Then I motioned to Kamau to throw in the clutch and we went on and made a curve to the right and left the wart-hog, who had never moved, nor showed any fright at seeing us.