“How are you? Are you all right?”
“Very well. I’m reading this book.”
“How is it?”
“I can’t tell you till day after tomorrow. I’m reading very slowly to make it last.”
“What’s that? The pact?”
“I suppose so. But I wouldn’t worry very much about the book nor how I feel about you. It’s not changed.”
“All right,” David said. “But I missed you very badly this morning.”
“Day after tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t worry.
Chapter Twenty-one
THE NEXT DAY in the story was very bad because long before noon he knew that it was not just the need for sleep that made the difference between a boy and men. For the first three hours he was fresher than they were and he asked Juma for the .303 rifle to carry but Juma shook his head. He did not smile and he had always been David’s best friend and had taught him to hunt. He offered it to me yesterday, David thought, and I’m in much better shape today than I was yesterday. He was too but by ten o’clock he knew the day would be bad or worse than the day before. It was as silly for him to think that he could trail with his father as to think he could fight with him. He knew too that it was not just that they were men. They were professional hunters and he knew now that was why Juma would not even waste a smile. They knew everything the elephant had done, pointed out the signs of it to each other without speaking, and when the tracking became difficult his father always yielded to Juma. When they stopped to fill the water bottles at a stream his father said, “Just last the day out, Davey.” Then when they were finally past the broken country and climbing again toward
the forest the tracks of the elephant turned off to the right onto an old elephant trail. He saw his father and Juma talking and when he got up to them Juma was looking back over the way they had come and then at a far distant stony island of hills in the dry country and seemed to be taking a bearing of this against the peaks of three far blue hills on the horizon.
“Juma knows where he’s going now,” his father explained. “He thought he knew before but then he dropped down into this stuff.” He looked back at the country they had come through all day. “Where he’s headed now is pretty good going but we’ll have to climb.”
They had climbed until it was dark and then made another dry camp. David had killed two spur fowl with his slingshot out of a small flock that had walked across the trail just before the sunset. The birds had come into the old elephant trail to dust, walking neatly and plumply, and when the pebble broke the back of one and the bird began to jerk and toss with its wings thumping, another bird ran forward to peck at it and David pouched another pebble and pulled it back and sent it against the ribs of the second bird. As he ran forward to put his hand on it the other birds whirred off. Juma had looked back and smiled this time and David picked up the two birds, warm and plump and smoothly feathered and knocked their heads against the handle of his hunting knife.
Now where they were camped for the night his father said, “I’ve never seen that type of Francolin quite so high. You did very well to get a double on them.”
Juma cooked the birds spitted on a stick over the coals of a very small fire. His father drank a whiskey and water from the cup top of his flask as they lay and watched Juma cook.. Afterward Juma gave them each a breast with the heart in it and ate the two necks and backs and the legs himself.
“It makes a great difference, Davey,” his father said. “We’re very well off on rations now.
“How far are we behind him?” David asked.
“We’re quite close actually,” his father said. “It all depends on whether he travels when the moon comes up. It’s an hour later tonight and two hours later than when you found him.”