by Ruark, R.
They were beautiful. A little suspicious at the extra rustle I made, maybe, but with no scent of our presence and no real worry about the snapping and crackling in the clump of trees. The bull was looking straight at me.
Waterbuck are awful to eat since they are tough and carry an insect repellent in their hides, a greasy ointment that comes off on your hands and smells like hell. Their fat is made so that it congeals swiftly in the cooking and winds up in hard balls, stuck in your teeth. But there is no more ruggedly handsome animal in Africa.
The bull will weigh nearly as much as an elk. He is not so rangy, nor does he stand so high, but he has a thick, tufted elk’s neck, a noble face, a compact, heavily furred body. He will weigh around seven hundred pounds. He is beautifully marked in black and white and grayish-fawn, and his horns are slim parentheses that are heavily gnarled at the base and finish off in four inches of clean ivory point. Perhaps a kudu is more beautiful, but he does not own the compact, rugged, swollen neck masculinity of a mature waterbuck.
My boy was walking steadily toward me. My breath had come back a little. The Remington was braced in the crotch of a small scrubby tree. The gun was shaking again, and the limber limb was moving gently to match my shakes. The buck kept coming. I put the post of the telescopic sight on his chest, sucked in my breath, and started what I hoped would be a squeeze.
The squeeze was two-thirds complete when Harry’s hand came back and closed over my trigger hand. “Watch,” he said. “Wait.”
The magnificent bull separated into two animals. What I had been aiming at suddenly became a cow, who sidled off to the left. My bull had been standing so directly behind one of his wives that his horns had appeared to be growing from her head. In a hundredth of a second I would have shot the cow. When they separated, it was exactly like watching two images merge and move apart in the sighting machinery of a Leica. The cow sidled off. The bull looked me straight in the eye at thirty yards and snorted irritably. His horns appeared to be the size and length of two evenly warped baseball bats.
Harry’s hand came away from my gun hand. The post went back to the old gentleman’s chest, and the unseen force that fires guns operated. There was a w’hunk like a boxer hitting the heavy bag. The waterbuck went straight up in the air and turned at the top of his leap. He must have gone a good six feet off the ground. The herd of cows and yearlings went off with a snort and a crash. There was nothing to be seen.
“I hit him,” I said to Selby. “I hit him where I was holding. I was holding just to the right of his breastbone. If this boy ain’t dead I am going back to Nairobi. This is the first time since I’ve been here that I felt confident about anything.”
“You hit him all right,” Harry said. “I heard the bullet smack. But where you hit him remains to be seen. Christ, wasn’t he something to see standing there with that head thrown back? Let’s go see what happened to him.”
Kidogo and Adam had come up. They looked at Selby.
“Piga,” Selby said. “Kufa—maybe. But he was a big one. A real m’kubwa sana.”
“Ehhh,” the boys said without much enthusiasm. Kidogo, stopping, tracking, walked over to where the animal had been when I shot him. You could see the deep scars his feet had made in the turf when he jumped. Fifteen yards away Kidogo stooped and picked up a stalk of yellow grass. It was brilliant scarlet for three inches at its tip.
“Damu,” Kidogo said. “Piga m’uzuri”
“That’s heart blood,” Harry said. “Not lung blood or belly blood. The lung blood’s dottier and pinker. The belly blood’s got more yellow to it. You got this bugger in the engine room, I think.”
Everybody tracking now, including me, we followed the bright slashes of blood for fifty yards or so, turned a sharp L around the patch of bush, and almost stumbled over my fellow. He was completely dead. I had taken him through the heart squarely as he stood with his head up and his chest thrown out. Harry took one look at him and let out a yell like a Masai moran on the warpath. He threw himself at the animal, seized it around the neck with both arms, and kissed it in the face. Both gunbearers fell on their knees. Kidogo picked up the great noble head by the ears, and he kissed the buck. Adam ran his fingers up and down the chestnut-colored horns, rubbing his fingers over the ivory tips. He said a short prayer in Wakamba. Selby hit me a punch in the chest that nearly floored me, and both boys grabbed me by the arms and danced me around the waterbuck.
“I don’t suppose you know what you’ve got here, old boy,” Harry said. “Unless I am mad or drunk, you have just walloped the best waterbuck that anybody ever brought out of Tanganyika. If this one isn’t thirty-four inches, I will carry him back to camp on my back. This one you can hang on your wall, chum, and Mr. Rowland Ward’s records will be very pleased to include him at the top of the heap. Very nice shooting, bwana. For one dreadful split second I thought you were going to loose off at that bloody cow. I would have sworn she was the bull. Those horns of his were sticking right out over her ears, and it wasn’t until she moved just a fraction of an inch that I realized she was standing square in front of the doumi. If she hadn’t moved, you’d have shot her, the bull would’ve spooked and would have been halfway across the Serengeti by now. You’re a lucky lad.”
This was quite a creature, this buck. You couldn’t close your hands around his horns at the base. They were serrated and very clean, and they curved inward at each other in a nearly perfect ellipse. His big bull’s neck was thick and shaggy with a chest mane. He had a big deer’s face, although he was an antelope, and his hairy hide was gray-fawn like a good tweed suit. He was very heavy. It was all the four of us could handle to heft him into the back of the jeep. He smelled like hell, with his insecticide coming out of his special glands and making sweat splotches on his hide.
“We’ll take this baby back whole,” Harry said. “I want better pictures of him than we can get here. We’ll go back to camp and let the memsaab do her stuff with the color box.” Harry patted the buck on his poll. “You beauty,” he said. “You lovely, lovely hunk of horn.”
He wheeled Jessica around and we headed back to camp. We were driving slowly across the blue-and-white-flowered plain, full of self-congratulation and the yearning for a celebration drink, an afternoon off to gloat, an afternoon free of hunting, for no man likes to cheapen his achievement by doing something competitively else that same day. A miss on a good head can spoil the hit on the other. This waterbuck was all I wanted from that day or that week, for that matter. I was a little drunk already with the wine of the fine fresh morning and the first real good shot that I had actually made on purpose. I was warmed by the sun and by excitement and by the approval of the boys. They grinned when I turned my head and offered cigarettes. Like Charlie MacArthur when he offered Helen Hayes a bag of peanuts, I was sorry at the time that my cigarettes were not emeralds.
The plain was like a great wheat field, and Jessica went smoothly along on it, her windscreen down, and the grass seeds hitting you in the face as she plowed like a ship through the sea of grass. Tiny quail buzzed out from under her bonnet. Cloudlike flocks of weaver birds swarmed in masses, dipping and twisting like a miniature tornado. Kidogo braced his bowed Nandi legs around the waterbuck’s horns and leaned over to seize me on the shoulder.
“Simba,” he said. “Kishoto kidogo, Bwana Haraka.”
Harry swung Jessica left a little, and there the simba was. My neck hair was lifting again. There is no other word in Swahili that carries the electrifying impact of simba. Away off, making a gentle ripple in the sea of yellow grass, two rounded ears were flattened to a yellow skull as a lady simba stalked a herd of zebra. Her ears looked like a Portuguese man-o’-war sailing along on a quiet ocean. You couldn’t see her slither as she moved, belly flat-pressed to the ground, and just her nose and ears showing.
“Let’s go and have a look-see,” Harry said, wheeling the Rover. “The old girl’s stalking a kill. You very seldom see a solo lioness. The old boy has got to be around somewhere, probably
upwind from her, letting his scent float down to distract the zebra while she sneaks in for the kill. Very sensible arrangement. Make the wife do the work, what?”
We drove in narrowing circles through the grass and came up on the lioness. The zebras spooked and took off. The lioness looked annoyed. She curled a disdainful lip and made a half pass at a charge and then bounded away into some scrubby thorn acacia. We circled the bush. On the other side of the prickly island we turned up three more lionesses. And four unsteady, spotted, clumsy cubs. The first lioness growled and started toward the car.
“Mama simba,” Harry said. “Old boy’s bound to be about somewhere. Wouldn’t find four manamouki and young mtotos together without the big fellow, unless he’s just been killed, and nobody can’ve hunted here since before the last rains. Must be the fellow we’ve heard roaring ’cross the river at night. Nice one, I’ll promise you, by the sound of him.”
We widened the turning circles, and suddenly Kidogo tapped my shoulders again. “Doumi,” he said. “M’kubwa sana. M’uzuri sana.”
He was, too. He was m’kubwa. He was real m’uzuri. He was male, all right, and he was very big, and he was awful good. His ginger mane sparkled in the climbing sun, and his gray-tawny hide glistened. He looked very burly and handsome against a backdrop of green bush, the yellowing grass just matching his hide. He looked at us and yawned as we drove slowly toward him, with all the bored disdain that a prime lion can muster. He spun on his heel and sauntered into the bush.
“Beauty,” Selby said. “Much better than the one you’ve got. Let’s go and have a spot of lunch, pick up the memsaab, and after we’ve eaten we’ll come back and collect him.”
I said nothing. I had been out long enough to know that Harry thought like an animal, and while I didn’t know how he expected to find the lion in the same spot, or how he figured to get him out of the bush, or just how we’d shoot him, or how we’d cope with the others, I shut up. Anyhow, that waterbuck was enough achievement for one day.
We drove the bumpy eight miles back to camp, took black and color pictures of the buck, knocked off a pink gin or so, and ate.
“Come on, Mama,” Selby said to Virginia. “We are now going out to collect a lovely lion”—in the same tone as a man who says he is going to walk down to the corner for the papers.
“Yes, master,” Virginia said. She had quit asking questions, too, some time back. “Just so long as it’s a lovely lion.”
We drove away. Two miles from where we’d seen the lions, Selby stopped the car. A big bull topi was standing sleepily under a tree.
“Get out and shoot him,” Harry said. “We need him in our business.”
I got out and shot the topi. We opened up his belly. One of the gunbearers hitched a rope around his crooked-ended horns, and we headed for the lions, the topi bumping along behind the car.
“Hors d’oeuvres,” Selby said. “The lions must be hungry, otherwise the lady wouldn’t have been out after those punda. Can’t have killed lately. We will ask our friends to tea. Fetch’m out of the bush for the party.”
We drove up and saw all the lionesses and the cubs where we’d left them. Mama lion snarled.
“Unpleasant sort,” Selby said. “Got an ugly face for a lion. Disagreeable. Oho,” he said, “look there.”
Here was Papa, all right, and he was about twice as big, twice as massively maned, and twice as fine as the other we’d seen that morning. He raised his heavy head, looked at us a very short second, and leaped into the bush. His mane was bright cherry-red.
“Shy type,” Selby said. “Wants coaxing. We’ll coax him.”
We drove back and forth in front of the bush.
“Smell it, chum,” Selby said. “Smell it good. Smells nice, what? Pray do come and dine with us.”
He drove then to a broad, clear, grassy oasis in the bush and dropped the topi. It was at least a couple of hundred yards from the nearest thorn. Then we drove a couple of thousand yards away and killed the motor under a mimosa. Harry got out the binoculars.
“All we need now is a few fine vultures or a noble hyena or so,” Harry said. “If just one vulture drops, or old fisi comes bouncing out to feed off that kill, you’ll see more lions boiling out of that bush than you’ll know what to do with. They just can’t stand to see anything else chewing up that nice, fresh topi. They’re greedy, just like people.”
The vultures came and circled slowly and warily in the clear blue sky. The sun was boiling down now, and everyone was sweating— me especially. The executioner’s job was mine. I’d killed my first lion ten minutes after I’d spotted him and hadn’t really had time to think about him before I was tumbling out of the jeep with a gun in my hand and crawling toward him. But now it was past three o’clock and I’d been thinking about this fellow for four hours.
“Damn birds,” Selby said. “They know the lions are there. You can’t depend on vultures. If they work for you, they’re fine. If they don’t, they can bugger up the whole bloody issue.”
Finally, after half an hour, one bird dropped his flaps and volplaned down to approach the kill warily. We beamed him in on a prayer. He sank his beak into the topi’s belly.
“The rest’ll come now,” Selby said, “and then the parade’ll start. Consider that we have a dead lion. Watch, now.”
A half-dozen, then a dozen vultures skidded down. Now the sky was blackened with birds.
“Thank you, ndege,” Selby said. “Asante sana. Here comes the parade.”
Four lionesses came out of the bush, finally followed by the big male. The younger male did not appear. They went quickly to the kill and commenced to feed.
“Young one’s lying doggo, licking his wounds,” Harry said. “He and the big boy had a fight after we left, or else he’d be out there feeding with the rest of the pride. If he’s not dead, he’s awfully discouraged. Shouldn’t wonder if we find this one marked up a touch when we collect him.
“Hmmmm,” Harry said. “Old boy’s got his head stuck all the way into that topi’s paunch. Guess we’d best go and terminate his troubles for him. Mind, I’d really not wound this un if I were you. Any lion’s troublesome enough in thick bush when he’s hurt, and if this bloke gets into that thorn, we’ll have two wounded lions, a mother with cubs, and three more lionesses to deal with. That’s a lot of lions. Let’s go.”
We took the door off the jeep, and Harry gave the wheel to the car boy, Chabani. Kidogo was carrying the big .450 No. 2, Harry checked his .416, and I slid a second look into the bolt of my .375. The bullets were there, all right.
We passed fairly close aboard the five lions, who never raised their heads. Chabani swung the car round behind some bush, and Harry and Kidogo and I fell out of the open door. The car took off, and we commenced to crawl. We crawled to within forty yards and crouched behind a small tussock. The lions never raised their heads. These were hungry, disdainful lions.
“End of the line,” Selby whispered. “Wallop him.”
I got up on one knee and set the sights on the back of Gorgeous George’s neck and squeezed off. He turned over with a roar and began to flop. Three lionesses let out for the bush. The nasty lioness inaugurated a charge toward us and then halted. Gorgeous George got up on his front feet and began to shake the earth with noise.
“Clobber him again,” Selby said.
I had to stand now, and as I stood, the lioness charged. I was not uninterested in a charge of a lady lion, but the papa was galloping around, roaring and carrying on, and I was having a hard time getting the gun on him. He held still for a second, finally, and I socked him again, this time directly behind the ear. He flopped over with a grunt, and I was free to use both eyes on the lioness.
She had come to us, was still coming at twenty feet, and came again another five. I switched my gun toward her and noticed Selby still casually on one knee, his scarred old .416 held rather carelessly to his cheek. At twelve feet, she put on the brakes and stopped, but her tail was still waving and she had a mighty big m
outh. Selby got up. He advanced toward her, and I advanced with him, feeling rather lonely. The cat backed up a yard. We walked again. She retreated another yard.
Harry said quietly in Swahili to Kidogo, who was standing by with the spare rifle, “Get into the car. Then cover the bwana with your gun.” He said to me in English, “Cover me. Then get into the car. Keep covering me from the car.”
Kidogo got into the car, which Chabani—who had thoughtfully stalled it into a dead end of bush—had revived and driven up to us. I got into the car. The lioness stopped. Harry stopped. He made a step backward. The cat seemed inclined to follow him, but stopped, her face flat on the ground, her chest on the ground, her tail waving gently, her rump in the air. Harry walked backward slowly. He came alongside the jeep. He slid in. Chabani slid over to the center of the seat. Harry eased out the clutch. He hit the side of the jeep a tremendous whack with his hand and roared. I jumped. So did the cat.
“Begone, you surly slut!” Harry said, tramping the gas and whacking the door again. “Go back to your babies! Go back to your other boy friend! Away with you!”
The lioness sneered and backed up. She walked reluctantly to the edge of the bush, across the broad savanna of grass, and stood at the edge, still looking unpleasant. We drove up to where the dead lion lay, his head pillowed on the haunch of the considerably disheveled topi. I looked then for the first time at Virginia.
“I hope you got pictures of all the commotion,” I said. “It is so seldom that you have five lions to play with at once, one of them charging, in easy range of a camera.”
Virginia stared at the camera in her hand as if she were seeing one for the first time. “Pictures,” she said bitterly. “This idiot”—she pointed at Chabani—“drove this car into a dead end and stalled it. I looked over the side, and there was another lioness, with more cubs, right by the front fender. I have to watch my insane husband standing off another lion while three more bound around and one is flopping all over the landscape roaring and there is one more practically in my lap and then you two fools drive another one off like she was an alley cat and I am not accustomed to this many lions on an empty stomach and you ask me if I got pictures. No, I did not get pictures. I forgot I had a camera. I want a drink, and I will try to forget that my fate is in the hands of fools.”