Then ahead we saw a big fire and as we came up and passed, I made out a lorry beside the road. I told Kamau to stop and go back and as we backed into the firelight there was a short, bandy-legged man with a Tyrolese hat, leather shorts, and an open shirt standing before an unhooded engine in a crowd of natives.
‘Can we help?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Unless you are a mechanic. It has taken a dislike to me. All engines dislike me.’
‘Do you think it could be the timer? It sounded as though it might be a timing knock when you went past us.’
‘I think it is much worse than that. It sounds to be something very bad.’
‘If you can get to our camp we have a mechanic.’
‘How far is it?’
‘About twenty miles.’
‘In the morning I will try it. Now I am afraid to make it go farther with that noise of death inside. It is trying to die because it dislikes me. Well, I dislike it too. But if I die it would not annoy it.’
‘Will you have a drink?’ I held out the flask. ‘Hemingway is my name.’
‘Kandisky,’ he said and bowed. ‘Hemingway is a name I have heard. Where? Where have I heard it? Oh, yes. The dichter. You know Hemingway the poet?’
‘Where did you read him?’
‘In the Querschnitt.’
‘That is me,’ I said, very pleased. The Querschnitt was a German magazine I had written some rather obscene poems for, and published a long story in, years before I could sell anything in America.
‘This is very strange,’ the man in the Tyrolese hat said. ‘Tell me, what do you think of Ringelnatz?’
‘He is splendid.’
‘So. You like Ringelnatz. Good. What do you think of Heinrich Mann?’
‘He is no good.’
‘You believe it?’
‘All I know is that I cannot read him.’
‘He is no good at all. I see we have things in common. What are you doing here?’
‘Shooting.’
‘Not ivory, I hope.’
‘No. For kudu.’
‘Why should any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent man, a poet, to shoot kudu.’
‘I haven’t shot any yet,’ I said. ‘But we’ve been hunting them hard now for ten days. We would have got one to-night if it hadn’t been for your lorry.’
‘That poor lorry. But you should hunt for a year. At the end of that time you have shot everything and you are sorry for it. To hunt for one special animal is nonsense. Why do you do it?’
‘I like to do it.’
‘Of course, if you like to do it. Tell me, what do you really think of Rilke?’
‘I have read only the one thing.’
‘Which?’
‘The Cornet.’
‘You liked it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have no patience with it. It is snobbery. Valéry, yes. I see the point of Valéry; although there is much snobbery too. Well at least you do not kill elephants.’
‘I’d kill a big enough one.’
‘How big?’
‘A seventy-pounder. Maybe smaller.’
‘I see there are things we do not agree on. But it is a pleasure to meet one of the great old Querschnitt group. Tell me what is Joyce like? I have not the money to buy it. Sinclair Lewis is nothing. I bought it. No. No. Tell me to-morrow. You do not mind if I am camped near? You are with friends? You have a white hunter?’
‘With my wife. We would be delighted. Yes, a white hunter.’
‘Why is he not out with you?’
‘He believes you should hunt kudu alone.’
‘It is better not to hunt them at all. What is he? English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bloody English?’
‘No. Very nice. You will like him.’
‘You must go. I must not keep you. Perhaps I will see you to-morrow. It was very strange that we should meet.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have them look at the lorry to-morrow. Anything we can do?’
‘Good night,’ he said. ‘Good trip.’
‘Good night,’ I said. We started off and I saw him walking toward the fire waving an arm at the natives. I had not asked him why he had twenty up-country natives with him, nor where he was going. Looking back, I had asked him nothing. I do not like to ask questions, and where I was brought up it was not polite. But here we had not seen a white man for two weeks, not since we had left Babati to go south, and then to run into one on this road where you met only an occasional Indian trader and the steady migration of the natives out of the famine country, to have him look like a caricature of Benchley in Tyrolean costume, to have him know your name, to call you a poet, to have read the Querschnitt, to be an admirer of Joachim Ringelnatz and to want to talk about Rilke, was too fantastic to deal with. So, just then, to crown this fantasy, the lights of the car showed three tall, conical, mounds of something smoking in the road ahead. I motioned to Kamau to stop, and putting on the brakes we skidded just short of them. They were from two to three feet high and when I touched one it was quite warm.
‘Tembo,’ M’Cola said.
It was dung from elephants that had just crossed the road, and in the cold of the evening you could see it steaming. In a little while we were in camp.
Next morning I was up and away to another salt-lick before daylight. There was a kudu bull on the lick when we approached through the trees and he gave a loud bark, like a dog’s but higher in pitch and sharply throaty, and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in the brush when he was well away; and we never saw him. This lick had an impossible approach. Trees grew around its open area so that it was as though the game were in the blind and you had to come to them across the open. The only way to make it would have been for one man to go alone and crawl and then it would be impossible to get any sort of a close shot through the interlacing trees until you were within twenty yards. Of course once you were inside the protecting trees, and in the blind, you were wonderfully placed, for anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards from any cover. But though we stayed until eleven o’clock nothing came. We smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks would show when we came back again and walked the two miles to the road. Being hunted, the game had learned to come only at night and leave before daylight. One bull had stayed and our spooking him that morning would make it even more difficult now.
This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning now it took the heavy, woolly sky an hour or so longer to clear and you could feel the rains coming, as they moved steadily north, as surely as though you watched them on a chart.
Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, out-manœuvred, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant