by Ruark, R.
Then one day even the cows and the calves and the immature bulls disappeared completely from Manyara. The last three days we hunted without seeing a pile of dung, without seeing fresh footprints, on a shore that is generally scarred and cut up like a cattle wallow from rhino spoor. The last night we dragged in at an early hour, something like 9 p.m. Virginia didn’t ask us any questions. She just handed us the gin. Harry, hollow-eyed and turned-down at the mouth corners, his beard full of dirt, spread his hands.
“Shauri mungu,” he said, going back to the Swahili excuse for everything. “God’s work. I never saw it like this before. I guess we’ll break camp tomorrow and go up top by Kitete and see what’s in the hills up there. I’m damned if I can understand it.” He glared in the firelight. “I wish,” he said vehemently, “I wish I’d run over that goddamned nightjar’s egg.”
The next day we went bird hunting.
Chapter 10
ACROSS the wide pewter-dull Manyara, on the other side of the lake, it was gray and barren as a plate full of wood ash. The wood ash was a drifting lava dust. There was little or no game about—a few spooky Tommies that had been shot over by every safari out of Arusha that needed a piece of meat in camp and didn’t want to rouse the rhino on the Maji Moto side. We could see Maji Moto distant and blue as we drove along, trying desperately to draw up within some sort of reasonable range of the panicked Tommies, who knew vehicles from the spurt a bullet makes when it kicks up dust under their feet, who knew what the report of a rifle sounded like and what it meant. We were meat-hungry. In the recent rage to find the right rhino, in the Ahab-like pursuit of a land-bound Moby Dick, we had been careful not to shoot. We had been living mainly off the birds the memsaab had been able to bring in from the low meadows where the Rift escarpment petered out. She had been taking Chege and the lorry and one of the personal boys and going out to hunt on her own.
We rolled over the soft gray lava soil, and the Tommies skipped ahead of us, usually a thousand yards or so in front. There was just one laggard, a youngish ram who seemed less spooky than the rest. He kept tagging behind the flock and looking back. He let us come up to four or five hundred yards and then did a very stupid thing. He turned his back, stopped, bowed his spine, and began to evacuate his bowels. Harry stopped the jeep in a hurry and I got out. I landed flat on my rear on the bare ground, wedged both elbows on my knees, and lifted the Remington. He was so far away that even with the scope, when the sight was on him, you couldn’t see him over the aiming post. I sucked in a long breath and squeezed. Tommy was still bent over. When the rifle blast dissipated, I looked up and I couldn’t see him at all. The jeep drove up and the boys were whooping a hunger-whoop. They beat me on the back and said extravagant things in Swahili. Through some sort of outlandish fool’s luck—certainly through no skill at over four hundred yards—I had settled this fellow’s troubles for him. He was neatly bored through the shoulder. I expect he died happy.
Apart from the Tommies, there was nothing on this side of the lake except a few birds. We ambled back and forth in the Rover, close to the marshy edges of the water, jumping a few small ducks and the odd Egyptian goose, and having some mild fun with the shotguns. On the way back we ran into a considerable bait of yellow-throated spur fowl, and between us, Virginia and I shot down a dozen or so, plus a sextet of minor bustards. Leaving the lake and crossing over the dwindled end of the escarpment, we came upon a small herd of kongoni, newcomers and tame. I walloped a young bull, and now everybody would eat hearty. The Tommy was for the white folks. The black folks got the kongoni, who was big enough to last at least three days, and the spur fowl we would save for the chop box, for lunch. We wouldn’t have any more noise for a little while, anyhow.
We kept the camp at Mto-Wa-Mbu, on second thought, and decided to drive daily up to the high hills under the escarpment. It meant getting up an hour earlier, but there was a pretty well-defined track through the high, waving yellow grass, and we could do the twenty-five miles up to the top in little better than an hour. It was cold in the morning and cold coming home, and dusty all day, but at least we didn’t have to ford any rivers. There was only one, anyhow, and it was easier to get out of the jeep and walk if anything popped up in the hills on the other side.
“I expect if we get on oryx, we’ll call ourselves lucky and push on up to Iringa for the kudu,” Harry said as we drove up in the freezing morning, the lava dust in the track still settled by the dew. “Frankly, I’m not expecting much. There’s still bags of water on the reserve plains and in the high hills, and from what we’ve seen, the game just hasn’t come down yet. These hills are generally black with animals at this time of the year. This damned grass has ruined everything, everywhere, except around Ikoma in that pocket we hunted. Whoa!”
He stopped the Rover and screwed up his eyes to peer at the knobbly green-and-granite hill on our right. “Looks to be a rather decent steenbok up there,” he said. “He may be all we’ll have of this area. Better get out and do for him. Use the .220 Swift. It’s plenty big enough. Toa .220, Kidogo.”
The Nandi gunbearer handed me the vicious little gun, which I hadn’t touched since I abused the hyena with it. I crawled across the track, sat down in the usual nest of thorns, and picked the little fellow out where he stood, poised like a corny table lamp, his four tiny feet jammed together on a rocky kopje. He melted into the side of the hill like part of the foliage, and you could barely see him without the scope. I held on what seemed to be his shoulder. The bullet made a soft whap, and he jumped straight up off the rocky knob. That’s the last I saw of him. We toiled up the hill and found a clump of neck hair. There was no blood.
“I hate this bloody gun,” I said to Selby. “It’s bewitched. I was cold on that little bugger. And don’t tell me that I shot under him because I was shooting uphill. That’s neck hair, off the top of his neck.”
Selby shrugged. We got back into Jessica and drove on. We had gone possibly ten miles, past the strangely milky-muskysmelling settlement of anthills and were working along to where the escarpment begins to look high and haughty when Kidogo clamped his broad black hand on the back of my neck and whispered, “Faro.” Harry stopped the car and got out the glasses. He was excited now.
“By God, I think we’re going to have luck after all,” he whispered, although the rhino was at least three thousand yards away. That Kidogo had seen him at all was miraculous. The green valley was studded with gray rocky outcrops and pimpled with thousands of anthills, each one of which looked exactly like a feeding rhino at a distance. This faro was browsing under the lee of a little red, black, brown, white, and green hill. They have very picturesque hills in Tanga.
“There’s a good one,” Harry said. “I can’t make out his horn at this distance, but I think I know him. We killed a hell of a big cow here a couple of years ago, and there was a bull about then. We only got one swift look at him, and he was enormous. The cow went twenty-eight inches, herself, and he looked to be bigger. If it’s the same old boy, you’ve got yourself a real one. This is the smartest rhino I know. He’s evidently lived here for the last twenty years or so. Creature of habit.”
We decided to drive down about three miles, leave the car at the river, walk over to the little hill, climb it, and come down on the rhino from over the top.
“He rolls there right under that hill,” Harry said. “He holes up in that long donga off to the right, behind the hill. I’d judge he was feeding back. He’ll take his dust bath and then bugger off to his hidey-hole in that grown-over donga. If we miss at the hill we can beat him out of the donga. Send the boys in with stones along both sides, and we’ll stand downwind of him and wallop him as he boils out. That’s how we did it with the cow.”
We parked the jeep and picked our way across the tree-lined, swift-running, clean little river, jumping from stone to stone. It was a mile to the hill, and we nearly ran it. It was a little hill to look at distantly, but it was a sizable mountain when we reached the bottom, about a hundred yards str
aight up. We took an old game trail and wound around a bit on its circumference, but it was nasty climbing—slipping and falling on loose stones, and pulling muscles in the thigh from the stress of the climb. I was blowing and hurting in the chest when we hit the top and peered over.
Hapana faro. We could see his rolling bed, all right, the dust still loose and swirling in the mounting breeze. We clambered down the near side and walked up to his beauty bath. There were fresh hoofprints the size of ash-can covers. There was plenty of new dung, and the clear marks of his wallowing. The outlandish hoofprints led off toward the grown-over donga.
“Wind must have changed a little on us, and he heard the car,” Harry said. “Smack into the bush for this gentleman. It’s the same one, all right. Couldn’t be two bulls in this neighborhood with feet that big. If he fits his feet, he’s as big as an elephant, and he’s got to be at least forty years old. Lone bull, now, too set and surly in his ways to find a new wife. I’ll bet he’s a cantankerous old brute. Let’s go and flush him.”
We started to track. I can include myself in the we because following this lad was as simple as tracing a tractor in the snow. He had great round pads, sunken deeply at the heel, as if his head were so heavy he rocked backward to counterbalance its weight. He had been in no hurry. He had used his own deep-worn trail. You could see the shattered clay uptossed in crumbles and the low thorn broken where he’d passed. We followed him over two little mountains and into the donga, at least three-quarters of a mile long by a block in width. He was in there somewhere. Doggo. And smart. That’s how you live that long if you are a rhino with a heavy horn.
We figured the wind, and we figured his point of entrance, and Harry figured where he’d bust out if he came. We went to where Harry figured he’d bust out. Kidogo and Adam went up to the end of the donga. Each took a side. They yelled. Kidogo cursed him in Nandi. Adam belabored him in Wakamba. For our benefit they translated into Swahili. What they said roughly was that somewhere in those thickly interlaced bushes was the father of all rhinos, a great beast to see but one who unfortunately had been born without testicles. Doumi-manamouki, they called him, bull-cow. They mentioned in passing that he lacked the courage to find another female, and that, unlike all the other rhinos they knew, only this one would scurry off to hide instead of charging out like a full warrior. They accused him of misalliances with topi cows. Adam called him a Nandi heathen. Kidogo called him a Mohammedan Wakamba. Then they both threw rocks. He didn’t bust out.
Harry and I stood at the edge of the donga, with the safeties slipped and the big doubles rocking gently up and down. He had to come out here, like the music that went down and round. There wasn’t any other place for the big sonofabitch to go but out into the clear past us. And if he fit his feet, like Selby said, you could have shot him on the hurry with a bow and arrow, he would be that big.
We heard him snort and we heard him crash and we heard him turn and that is all we heard. We clasped insanity by the hand eventually and beat the donga upwind, our scent blowing straight to him, figuring maybe we would anger him into a pass. He didn’t anger. He didn’t pass. He went. He went quietly.
I know that Harry Selby is as fine a tracker as any native loose in Tanganyika. He can track with Kidogo. He can track with Kibiriti. He can track anything from elephant to dik-dik on the strength of a blade of grass arranged the wrong way, a rumpled leaf, a suspicion of blood, a dissipation of dew, alignment of dust or loam. He can also smell. Especially he can smell fresh rhino. I had seen him stretch a neck and distend a nostril and say in his schoolboy English: “Bob, there’s a rhino just over the rise there, in that patch of bush. A female in heat, I’d say.” And sure enough, there would be a cow in season.
We tracked this faro. We tracked the big blundering behemoth most of the day. We lost him on the seventh hill, where the sun-dried rock showed no passage. This faro got lost.
We turned up late for camp again. Later than we’d planned. We stopped off at the Indian ducca to buy some cigarettes and have a beer to wash the lava dust loose from our throats and got hooked up with a local farmer and his Canadian houseguest. They were feeling festive.
“If it’s rhino you’re after,” the local said, “you must stop and pay a call at my farm as you go up past Ngorongoro again. My fields are simply teeming with the creatures. Buffalo, too, any amount. And elephant. Come and shoot over the farm a few days.”
Selby put on his mysterious, displeased, wary-of-strangers look. Later he said: “Best never to have anything to do with these farmers. They see one rhino a year and make it into an epidemic. They hear an elephant in the bush and make it into a herd. All you ever get out of visiting anybody is headaches. You’ll sit around and yarn all night long over a bottle of your whisky. They’ll smoke all your cigarettes and then call you a bloody bounder in the morning if no animals show up for you to shoot. It suddenly becomes your fault that the elephants tread down the mealies and the rhinos break into the fencing. Let us bid these gentlemen good night and be vague. Else we’ll have the whole bloody lot for dinner.”
We drove down toward the camp, and as we went past the whorehouse, a familiar-looking native was running down the track, his khaki streaming in the wind, with some giggling girls coursing after him. We gave the fugitive a lift and foiled the pursuers. The fugitive was Chege, the lorry driver, the dude, the ladies’ man. He was escaping with his virtue. Or else he was escaping without his virtue and without having paid for the loss of it. We didn’t ask him. We just scooped him up and took him home to dinner. The fires glimmered beautifully in a small and jewel-like way as we approached Mto-Wa-Mbu. The butterflies fluttered before the headlamps. You could smell Ali, the cook, at work half a mile down the road. The big anthill on the right smelled like bread in the oven.
“You know,” Harry said seriously, “I read all I could about the old hunters, Karamojo Bell and Selous and the rest. I read about the old-time elephant shooting where the professionals used smallbores and how they used to shoot one beast and then climb up on it to shoot a dozen as the herds milled. I know one old bloke who has killed more than one native who crossed him—and this, mind you, less’n twenty years back. I’ve read all the hunting literature of this country, and you know the one thing sticks out in my memory? Karamojo Bell. Bloody old ivory-poacher, mass murderer of animals that he was, he still wrote a line makes me want to cry. He had a bit about the small-gleaming campfires at the end of a hard day’s hunt, and that, by God, is the Africa I love. The small-gleaming campfires at the end of a long day’s hunt.”
“Son,” I said, “you are a sentimentalist and I forgive you. I also forgive you for trying to kill us all coming home tonight when you were having that stake race with the bat-eared fox. Some clients would be annoyed when you nearly capsize a jeep at forty miles an hour to keep from hitting some bloody stupid little animal that charges the jeep out of sheer bravery. When that fox turned and snarled and charged—all three pounds of him—I knew you would turn Jessica over and kill you, me, Kidogo, Adam, and Chabani rather than run down the bat-eared little bastard. I forgive you because I am a tiny-gleaming-campfire man myself. When man made fire, he lifted himself up, over, and above the animals. Fire is actually too good for people. Let us sit in front of one of these tiny, gleaming blazes and drink a little gin.”
“It is nice to hunt with a philosopher-poet, especially on my birthday,” Selby said. “I am now twenty-seven years old, battered and worn from clients.”
“Happy birthday, little man,” I said, and wondered if Virginia and Juma and Ali had done right by the celebration. They had, it turned out. I had sent them after cakes with candles. They were short on candles but long on cakes. They had bought out the Indian’s candle store. They had two candles and about twelve cakes. Ali had made one. Juma’d bought eleven more, of all shapes and sizes. They all tasted like browned sawdust with lard frosting. Birthdays are an umplumbed art form in Tanganyika.
The dinner was fairly festive. The mem had had Juma har
d at work on her coiffure that afternoon, and she showed up blonder and tighter-curled than usual. We had the ripened Tommy chops— Tommy had been dead a whole day—and we had stringy duck and some exotic bland canned goods from the Indian and a lot of Danish beer with the dinner and a lot of brandy after. Harry blew out the candles and manfully strove to eat the rubbery cakes, and then we had a ceremony. I summoned the faithful—Adam, Kidogo, and Chabani—the brothers in frustration. I was going to make a big gesture to celebrate Harry’s birthday.
Juma was the custodian of coin, so I went and collected seventy-five shillings from him and fetched the faithful. We had been attempting an experiment of weaning the black brethren from their expected harvest of money every time the bwana shot something of woofed and warped celebratory stuff. That kind of free-handed dough-throwing can louse up a camp’s morale because the hunters are finally hunting for pound notes, and a lion is no longer a lion. He is baksheesh to the crew that collects him, and this sours the cook and off-browns the personals and curdles the rest of the camp. We had decided to pull a switch. I wrote the speech and Harry rehearsed it in Swahili.
Adam and Kidogo and Chabani came, like dutiful subjects awaiting the dub, and crouched by the fire. Harry dipped into my hat, which was resting on the mess table, and took out handfuls of silver. He blessed each boy with twenty-five shillings each. I am afraid that Harry was a little shikkered on his birthday. What he said was fulsome. This is roughly what he said:
“Oh, you bloody nugus and direct descendants of nugus. I am hunting with an insane Yankee bwana whose brains have been boiled to porridge by the sun and whose reasoning has been unhinged by a severe shortage of shootable rhinos. His kidneys now dwell under his armpits due to punishment from Jessica, the jeep. He has hunted unavailingly for a fortnight, and now he makes a supreme gesture to prove that all Yankees are completely mad. He wishes to give you money for nothing.