We met the rest of the party at someone’s house, and after scenes of confusion amid guns and yapping dogs and harassed servants, the great mound of stuff that was to be taken along was packed into and on top of a car and a station-wagon. Johannesburg dropped away and we were out on an open road where the winter morning lost its edge and the chromium rim of the car’s window, on which I was resting my arm, warmed in the current of the sun. Past Pretoria, the winter was gone entirely; there was a fine, fragrant warmth, like the breath from a baker’s shop.
I was in Hamilton’s car with a man called Patterson who was some sort of senior official in Hamish Alexander’s mining group; the car was one of those huge, blunt, swaying-motioned American ones that Johannesburg people like so much, and the three of us sat in front, with a space just big enough for John’s setter bitch among the gear in the back. John and Patterson talked of the probable state of the birds, the height of the grass, and the possibility of persuading a farmer named Van Zyl to let them shoot over his land. It was happy, practical talk, the talk of good children occupied in a game, and it put me to sleep, reassuringly; I dozed and wakened, like a convalescent on a journey, looking out at the thin bush that marked no progress because in its sameness, it did not seem to pass. Suddenly there was a railway siding with a grain silo, a butcher-shop, and a shoddy modern hotel. We got out of our great, over-loaded barges of cars and had cold meat and pickles and beer in a dining-room that had one blue, one green, and one terra-cotta wall, and smelled deeply of a summer of insect-repellent. One of the men from the other car, a stocky, fair chap with a jeering schoolboy’s face, leaned his elbows on the table and said in his grim South African voice, ‘We’ve got it taped, boy. Jist you wait, this time. It’ll be the biggest bag you ever seen.’
John was full of doubts, like a thoughtful general on the eve of a campaign. ‘The trouble is, with so much rain this summer, a lot of chicks must’ve got drowned. I don’t think we’ll find the big flocks we had last year, Hughie.’
‘There’ll be plenty birds, don’t you worry.’ He looked as if he’d know the reason why, if there were not. ‘We must get old Bester to get Van Zyl to let us go over to his dam, too. I’m telling you, it’s lousy with duck.’
Patterson said in his amused Cambridge voice, ‘Blast, I didn’t bring my waders.’
‘Is that so,’ John said, in the excited way of one confirming a rumour. ‘What’s he got there, mallard, yellow-bill, or what?’
‘Man, there’s everything,’ Hughie was both shrewd and expansive, putting another head on his beer. ‘I know Willard – he’s the brother-in-law of one of those big guys that run the duck-shoots for Anglo-American, and he goes down with this guy to the farm next door, old man by the name of Geek, old German, owns it. There’s geese too.’
‘Geese?’
‘By God,’ said John, ‘have you ever tasted a spur-wing goose? Two years ago, a shoot out Ermelo way, I got one.’
‘You can’t compare geese with anything else. A turkey’s got nothing on a young goose.’
‘We could go over there to old Van Zyl with a couple of bottles of whisky.’
‘Well, I don’t know, waterfowl are damned tricky, once they’ve been shot over they’re wild as hell. . . .’
‘That time at Ermelo, up to the waist in freezing cold water. . . .’
‘I got my waders,’ Hughie said.
‘I can see us all with frozen balls,’ Patterson murmured gracefully. It was from him that John had borrowed a gun for me; he said, ‘I hope you won’t find that bloody thing too cumbersome. I wanted to give you my Purdie but the ejector keeps jamming, and I wouldn’t trust it. I had to give it over to the gunsmith.’ I told him I hadn’t yet seen the gun he was lending me, and he explained that it was a Geyger, old as the hills, but still useful, and had belonged to his father. We discussed the personality of the gun; Patterson had the amused, objective, slightly Olympian manner of the ex-hero – as if he were not entirely there, but in some way remained still, like an actor on an empty stage, in the battle air from which, unlike most of his kind, he had not been shot down. I had met men like him before, in London, those men ten years or so older than myself who had survived their own glory; who, having looked their destiny in the face, did not expect, as young men like myself whose war was the tail-end of childhood expected that face, anywhere and everywhere. I knew him slightly from Alexanders’; he didn’t actually talk much about his war; but you felt that in thirty years people would come simply to look at him, as, early in the century, you could still go and look at some old man who had fought in the Crimea.
The alert, anxious, feminine face of the dog was waiting for us at the window of John’s car. The three Africans who had been packed in along with the rest of the gear, sat eating over paper packets in the station-wagon and did not even look up when we came out of the hotel. Hughie Kidd and his companion, Eilertsen, drew a trail of dust round us and went ahead with a curt wave.
The talk of guns and birds went on, mile after mile, an assessment of known hazards, calculable satisfactions, action within the order of limits that will never change, handicaps that will remain fixed for ever, for men cannot fly and birds cannot fire guns. It was all improbable: the elaborate instrument panel of the car before me, trembling with indicators and bright with knobs that didn’t work, the talk that, with a few miles and a change of clothes, had slipped gear and gone, like a wandering mind, easily back to the old concept of man against nature, instead of man against man. Outside, the bush was endless. The car was a fat flea running through the pelt of a vast, dusty animal.
We came at last to great stretches of farmland, where the mealies stood in tattered armies, thousands strong, already stripped of their cobs of corn. Children waved from ugly little houses. From road to horizon, there was a stretch of black ploughed earth, and the smell of it, rousing you like the smell of a river. Then, in a dead straight line, exactly where the plough had cut its last furrow, the bush began again, from road to horizon. We drove through farm gates, and made a choice at ochre sand crossroads where the roads were indistinguishable as those of a maze. A plump, pastel-coloured bird – John said it was the lilac-breasted roller – sat at intervals on a telephone pole, looking over-dressed, like a foolish woman, in that landscape that had dispensed with detail.
At three o’clock in the afternoon we skirted a mound of mealie-chaff at which a few dirty sheep were nibbling, passed a house with a broken windmill, like a winged bird, behind it, roused a ferocious old yellow dog, and bumped off on a track through the mealies. After a short way, there were mealies on one side of us and bush on the other; we came to a shallow clearing where Hughie Kidd’s car was already at rest. John backed up under a thin tree whose thorns screeched along the car’s side, and with a flying open of doors and an immediate surge of voices and activity, camp was set up. John, Patterson, and Hughie rushed about like boys who have come back to an old hide-out; they appropriated their own low, shallow trees as hanging-places for their things and shelter for their blankets, and allotted places to Eilertsen and men, to whom this clearing on the fringe of the bush was simply a piece of ground. Hughie chivvied everyone, shouting at the Africans, pummelling at and joking with his friends with determined impatience; the idea was to get a shoot in that afternoon, and not wait until morning.
When I had done my share of lugging things from the cars, I thought I had better have a look at the gun Patterson had brought for me, and I walked out with it twenty yards or so into the field of dry mealie stalks to get the feel of it. It was bigger than anything I’d used before, but well-balanced. In my hand, in the sun, it had the peculiar weight that weapons have; even a stone, if you are going to throw it, feels heavy. At school, in cadet target practice, I had shown a cool eye and a steady hand; a minor distinction that my mother had found distressing. Hardly anyone can resist the opportunity to do the thing he happens to do well, and for a year or two, I had gone shooting whenever I had the opportunity, more because I wanted to show off a
bit, than out of any particular enthusiasm for the sport. On the other hand, I’ve never shared my family’s sentimental horror of killing what is to be eaten; I’ve always felt that so long as you eat meat, you cannot shudder at the idea of a man bringing home for the pot a rabbit or a bird which he himself has killed. Among the people I knew in England, my somewhat freakish ability as a shot was regarded as a sort of trick, like being double-jointed or being able to wiggle one’s ears, only in rather poorer taste, and I had lost interest in my small skill and hadn’t used a gun for at least a year before I came to South Africa. But, like most things you don’t care about, the small skill stayed with me whether I used it or not, and when I felt the gun on the muscle of my shoulder and I looked, like a chicken hypnotized by a chalk mark on the ground, along the shine of the barrel, I knew that I could still bring something down out of the sky.
I was only twenty yards from the others, from the big, beached shiny cars twinkling under their dust, the patent camp table and gleaming metal chairs, the boxes of food, the oil-lamps, and the paper-back detective novels; I could see Hughie throwing things to one of the Africans with a rhythmical ‘Here! Here!’, Patterson filling up the ammunition clips on the belt that was hitched round under his bulging diaphragm, Eilertsen shaking out a blanket, and John bending down to give his bitch a bowl of water. But they had all shrunk away in the enormous bush and mealie-land; their boisterous voices were tiny in the afternoon, and their movements were as erratic and feeble as those of insects lost in grass. I was suddenly aware of a vast, dry, natural silence around me, as if a noise in my ears that I hadn’t been aware of, had ceased. The sun came out of everything; the earth, space, the pale dry mealie stalks. There was no beauty, nothing ugly; it was as I had always imagined it would be if you could get out and stand on a motionless aircraft in the middle of the sky.
John looked up, where he was squatting beside the dog, as I came up. ‘Mind you, I was in two minds about bringing her,’ he said. She licked her lips and wagged her long feather tail, and her heavy belly swung; I thought she was pregnant. ‘No, it’s a big tumour, in there, poor old girl. A tumour on her liver.’ Feminine, downcast, she submitted while he turned back her lips and showed me her pallid gums. ‘I’m keeping her going with big shots of vitamin, and feeding her raw liver. She’s nearly ten and the vet doesn’t think she’d pull through an operation.’
‘Let her come, it’s her life,’ said Patterson. He had put on short gumboots, and the sort of sharkskin cap American golfers wear covered the lank, thinning hair on his sunburnt head.
‘Come on, Grade, up, up, my girl.’ John coaxed the dog to jump into the back of the car. I saw the muscles flex under the smooth freckled coat as she made the effort to lift her burden, and landed with a thud on the seat.
‘No loaded guns in the car,’ said John, as everybody got in. But Hughie, grinning in the driver’s seat, kept the muzzle of his gun pointing out the window. ‘I don’t want to waste time. – Get a shift on, Eilertsen, for Chris’ sake.’ Eilertsen was feeling about himself like a man checking up on his train ticket.’ Nearly ten past four,’ said Patterson, screwing up his bright blue whisky-drinker’s eyes against the mild sun. ‘Just right. They ought to be feeding nicely. Where’re we going? Down to the far boundary?’
‘Bloody birds’ll be going back into the bush by the time we get out. Let’s go down where the ground-nut field used to be, and then fan out through that little patch of bush and come out on the other side of the mealies.’
‘Look at that!’
‘Burned to blazes!’
‘Damn, damn, damn,’ John moaned softly as we jolted along the track, crushed against each other, with the guns hard against our shins and elbows. A stretch of bush lay reduced to ashes.
‘Half our cover gone!’
A cry went up from Eilertsen: ‘Stop! Over there, look -’
The car stopped as if it had hit a wall.
‘Where, where?’
‘By that stump? See? Just to the left of that dead bush?’
The back of Hughie’s neck, before me where I sat, became red with an excitement like rage. ‘What was it?’
‘Two pheasants, didn’t you see?’
‘Ach, man, we don’t want to go haring off after a couple of pheasants, let’s get on.’
‘I think they’ve gone now, Eilertsen,’ said Patterson, distant and kindly.
‘What I like to do,’ said John, ‘when I see something like that, a couple of pheasant where the cover’s not too thick, near the road, I like to let Gracie work it a bit. Just go quietly through the bush with her, let her see what she can find.’
The car bumped and swayed on; far away, the broken windmill appeared on our left. We went off the track and through a mealie-field, the tall stakes with their ragged beards and torn leaves staggering at the impact of the car and going down with a crack like breaking bone. On the edge of the field we left the car and spread in a wide sweep through the dead mealies. I could just see Patterson’s cap, now and then, on my left, and hear, on the other side of me, John whistle softly to the dog. There was the water-sound of doves, a long way off. A whirr of finches, like insects, went up over my head. The sun had not begun to drop yet, but it seemed to hold off its warmth, in preparation for departure. My own footsteps, over the clods and the stubble, and the brush of my clothes against the mealie-stalks, seemed the noisy progress of some particularly clumsy animal. Once I heard a low, clear questioning chirrup, a peevish, purring call. After a pause, it came again, or the answer to it, much nearer to me. But we came out, all into each other’s sight, at the end of the field, all expectant, all with nothing to relate. ‘Did you hear them though?’ said John. ‘That’s guinea-fowl, my boy.’ ‘That rather plaintive sort of call?’ ‘That’s it,’ said Patterson.
We piled into the car again and crashed back over the field in the path we had already flattened before us. Hughie did not speak and swung the car determinedly this way and that. We came out on to a soft red dust road and drove cautiously, in first gear, along the bush. The car stopped, just where the bush ended and the mealies began again. No one spoke; like a yearning, our gaze and our attention went out over the field. And – ‘There!’ said John hoarsely. ‘Look at them, look at them.’
‘Ah, there.’
‘Where. . . .’
‘Look, hundreds of them. And there.’
‘I had a feeling they’d be here.’ Hughie, both hands on his gun, spoke lovingly. ‘It’s funny, I had a feeling.’
In the middle of the field, among the clods that looked like broken chocolate, and the pale, untidy shafts of the mealies, I saw dark, small heads, jerky and yet serpentine, plump bodies with a downward sweep, stalking legs: guinea-fowl feeding. They reminded me of pea-hens, and their plumage was the blue-dark of certain plums.
We all got out of the car softly and swiftly. John made a plan of approach. Patterson would go up the centre of the field, making straight for them; John and I would swing out in a curve to the left, Hughie and Eilertsen would do the same on the right, so that when the flock was disturbed by Patterson, he would have his chance with them as they took to the air, and either John and I, if they flew West, or Hughie and Eilertsen, if they flew East, would have a chance with them as they made for cover. It was unlikely that they would fly directly away from Patterson, to the North, because there was a stretch of newly-ploughed ground there, and no cover. Hughie, scowling with concentration, was off with Eilertsen behind him and an air of going his own way, almost before John had finished speaking. Patterson’s big heavy shape went nimbly into the screen of mealies.
The dog wove in and out just ahead of John and me, but discreetly, held by the invisible check of obedience. The discomfort of her body was forgotten, she did not seem aware of it at all, but followed the map of smells spread under her pads like a crazy, enchanting dream, the dream that gun-dogs, twitching, dream all summer, and suddenly wake up to find themselves inhabiting, in the winter. We trudged without speaking, round
the margin of the field; a barbed wire fence stood between the mealies and the beginning of the bush, on the left side, and we followed it for a hundred and fifty yards and then stopped and waited. John was unaware of himself, and me; he gave me an absent, flitting smile, and kept his white-haired, cockatoo head lifted. The dog panted with happiness, like an athlete who has just breasted the tape, and he put a hand down to quiet her. I opened the breech of my gun to look at the two cartridges lying ready. It did not seem likely that there was anyone else alive, in the multiplication of mealies not moving out there; I forgot what we were waiting for, as, I suppose, fishermen forget when they sit with the rod in their hands, and Patterson forgot the moment before he loosed fire among the Messerschmitts. I watched John, in the perfect moment of inaction that only comes in action, and wondered, after all this time, if this was what Stella Turgell had meant when she had said of her husband that Africa was for active and not contemplative natures.
The guinea-fowl came over, black and sudden, tossed up into the air by their own alarm, and cracks sounded, sharp and near and far and feeble. John gasped as if something had got him by the throat and swung up his gun wildly. A second flock came, rising steeply as they passed us. I felt the recoil against my shoulder, smelled the explosion-warmed grease of the gun. The black, plump shapes were lifting; nothing touched them. Then I saw them along the path of the barrel; a line drew taut in the bright air between my eye and a bird that hung, a split second, breasted on the air. The gun nudged me; the air toppled the bird and let it fall. I spilt the smoking cartridges, re-loaded, and shot another. Out of range over the bush, we saw the rest of the birds skim down into the trees.
My first bird was dead, the second lay in long grass on the other side of the fence. The dog found it at once, and John, who had gone through the wire to look for his own bird, picked it up by the neck and snapped the thread of life that remained in it as neatly as he would pluck a stalk of grass. The heads of the dead birds were ugly; they looked like the carved heads of old ladies’ umbrellas.
A World of Strangers Page 24