back to the camp, down the hill in the dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot, walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we saw the firelight in the trees.
We were excited that night because we had seen the three rhino and early the next morning while we were eating breakfast before starting out, Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo he had found feeding at the edge of the forest not two miles from camp. We went there, still tasting coffee and kippers in the early morning heart-pounding of excitement, and the native Droopy had left watching them pointed where they had crossed a deep gulch and gone into an open patch of forest. He said there were two big bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly on the game trails, pushing the vines aside and seeing the tracks and the quantities of fresh dung, but though we went on into the forest, where it was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see or hear them. Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but that was all. There were numbers of rhino trails there in the woods and many strawy piles of dung, but we saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some monkeys, and when we came out we were wet to our waists from the dew, and the sun was quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up, and we knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out would have gone back deep into the forest to rest out of the heat.
The others started back to camp with Pop and M’Cola. There was no meat in camp, and I wanted to hunt back in a circle with Droopy to see if we could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery and it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk, and to be able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked Droopy and liked to watch him walk. He strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and to feel the grass under my soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the rifle, held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass; with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England orchard to walk through. I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted to make a shot to impress Droopy.
From the top of one rise we saw two kongoni showing yellow on a hillside about a mile away and I motioned to Droop that we would go after them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and two cows. Waterbuck was the one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat and I had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the buck as he tore away, remembered about the worthless meat, and having the head, and did not shoot.
‘No shoot kuro?’ Droopy asked in Swahili. ’Doumi sana. A good bull.’
I tried to tell him that I had a better one and that it was no good to eat.
He grinned.
‘Piga kongoni m’uzuri.’
‘Piga’ was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should sound or the announcement of a hit. ‘M’uzuri’, meaning good, well, better, had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I used to make up sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M’usuri in them, but now it seemed natural, no longer to be italicized, just as all the words came to seem the proper and natural words and there was nothing odd or unseemly in the stretching of the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a man carrying a spear. The tribal marks and the tattooed places seemed natural and handsome adornments and I regretted not having any of my own. My own scars were all informal, some irregular and sprawling, others simply puffy welts. I had one on my forehead that people still commented on, asking if I had bumped my head; but Droop had handsome ones beside his cheekbones and others, symmetrical and decorative, on his chest and belly. I was thinking that I had one good one, a sort of embossed Christmas tree, on the bottom of my right foot that only served to wear out socks, when we jumped two reedbuck. They went off through the trees and then stood at sixty yards, the thin, graceful buck looking back, and I shot him high and a touch behind the shoulder. He gave a jump and went off very fast.
‘Piga.’ Droopy smiled. We had both heard the whunk of the bullet.
‘Kufa,’ I told him. ‘Dead.’
But when we came up to him, lying on his side, his heart was still beating strongly, although to all appearances he was dead. Droopy had no skinning knife and I had only a penknife to stick him with. I felt for the heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under the hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I could feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push it, but I felt around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against my fingers. Once bled, I started to open him, with the little knife, still showing off to Droopy, and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut away the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside it.
Droopy asked for the knife. Now he was going to show me something. Skilfully he slit open the stomach and turned it inside, tripe side, out, emptying the grass in it on the ground, shook it, then put the liver and kidneys inside it and with the knife cut a switch from the tree the buck lay under and sewed the stomach together with the withe so that the tripe made a bag to carry the other delicacies in. Then he cut a pole and put the bag on the end of it, running it through the flaps, and put it over his shoulder in the way tramps carried their property in a handkerchief on the end of a stick in Blue Jay corn plaster advertisements when we were children. It was a good trick and I thought how I would show it to John Staib in Wyoming some time and he would smile his deaf man’s smile (you had to throw pebbles at him to make him stop when you heard a bull bugle), and I knew what John would say. He would say, ‘By Godd, Urnust, dot’s smardt’.
Droop handed me the stick, then took off his single garment, made a sling and got the buck up on his back. I tried to help him and suggested by signs that we cut a pole and sling him, carrying him between us, but he wanted to carry him alone. So we started for camp, me with the tripe bag on the end of a stick over my shoulder, my rifle slung, and Droopy staggering steadily ahead, sweating heavily, under the buck. I tried to get him to hang him in a tree and leave him until we could send out a couple of porters, and to that end we put him in the crotch of a tree. But when Droopy saw that I meant to go off and leave him there rather than simply allow him to drain he got him down on to his shoulders again and we went on into camp, the boys, around the cooking fire, all laughing at the tripe bag over my shoulder as we came in.
This was the kind of hunting that I liked. No riding in cars, the country broken up instead of the plains, and I was completely happy. I had been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again. I would not even write a letter. The only person I really cared about, except the children, was with me, and I had no wish to share this life with anyone who was not there, only to live it, being completely happy and quite tired. I knew that I was shooting well and I had that feeling of well-being and confidence that is so much more pleasant to have than to hear about.
As it turned out, we started soon after three to be on the hill by four. But it was nearly five before we saw the first rhino come bustling short-leggedly across the ridge of hill in almost the same place we had seen the rhino the night before. We sat where he went into the edge of the forest near where we had seen the two fighting and then took a course that would lead us down the hill, across the grown-over gully at the bottom, and up the steep slope to where there was a thorn tree with yellow blossoms that marked the place where we had seen the rhino go in.
Coming straight up the slope in sight of the thorn tree, the wind blowing across the hill, I tried to walk as slowly as I could and put a handkerchief inside the sweatband of my hat to keep the perspiration out of my glasses. I expected to shoot at any minute and I wanted to slow up enough so my heart would not be pounding. In shooting large animals there is no reason ever to miss if you have a clear shot and can shoot and know where to shoot, unless you are unsteady from a run or a climb or fog your glasses, break them or run out of cloth or paper to wipe them