by Ruark, R.
“As trackers, you could not follow a gut-shot hippo through the lobby of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. As scanners of the mountains, you could not see a greater kudu if it had radio antennae on its horns. Under your care, the guns rust and the bullets fly falsely because you leave too much oil in the rifle barrels. A wounded dik-dik would send you all into hysteria, and I doubt very much if any of you could conquer a female guinea fowl in single combat.
“But for some strange reason this bwana thinks you have worked hard and hunted well for the last two weeks, although meat in camp has been short and all we have shot for trophy is shauri mungu. Although we have no rhino horn to sell to the Indians to make them look longer at women, although we have seen no beisa oryx, although nothing has happened at all worth remembering, this bwana wants to say asante sana for the effort you have put forth.
“This bwana has rewarded laziness with money. Lack of ability he pays for in pounds sterling. Bad luck he celebrates. He does not curse or kick you at the end of a day in which nothing happens but boredom. He is a very simple bwana, but he is not a bwana who wants me to shoot it or for you to lie about it.
“So you will be kind to the bwana in his madness, and you will be goddamned appreciative in your actions, or I will take the toe of me boot to you all. He rewards you for nothing in the deliverance; he pays you for lack of performance. Twenty-five bob each the bwana gives you for what he calls in his strange language the good old college try. This is a new kind of bwana, and I warn you. If you don’t drag your asses into the ground from now on to get the bwana what he wants, you will all be left to starve with your whorish wives in Nairobi next trip out. Come get your money and say thank you.”
Harry turned and looked at me.
“This’ll completely bewilder ’em,” he said. “They’re used to the odd bob when you kill something big and difficult. They’re used to drunken clients throwing money all over the camp. But never before have they ever been paid for not accomplishing anything. Getting bonuses for effort instead of delivery is a new one in the book, and they’ll probably just accept it as white man’s madness. But on the other side, they may start to think and wonder a little bit about what manner of man they’ve got here, and if they even have a germ of thought, you have bought yourself a faithful retinue for a few lousy bob.”
Harry was right in his latter estimation. A man who paid for intent instead of meat on the block was completely new to simple thoughts. Thus incentive pay came to Tanganyika. The only trouble was, thereafter I had a hard time getting the kids to quit at all. They wanted to work all night as well as all day for the peculiar bwana who showered shekels for muscular activity, with or without horns to sanctify the sweat.
We were up and hungover from the birthday and into the hills early to look after our friend in his red dust wallow. We climbed the little garish hill again, and he had been back but was now gone. He was not gone to the donga but up into the high hills. We tracked him for three or four hours until his trail got onto the hardpan again, and we cursed him and went back four or five miles to the car. We headed for the top again and came onto a very fine herd of Grants. They were spooky and did not indulge in the looking-back habit. I followed the ram into some high grass on foot. All I could see were horns cutting a wake through the grass. They were fine-looking horns.
The old boy finally reached a shorter stand of grass and stopped to look back. I could see his chin and a little piece of neck, so I popped one at him offhand and accomplished nothing except to run him out of the grass and up the foothill of a minor mountain. He stopped behind a bush, leaving me his insolent tail and saucy hindquarters for a target. I did a quick calculation as to where his neck might be and winged one at him on pure speculation. I was speculating well because I broke his neck. There was about as much credit due me on this one as if I’d touched off a .45 at a flying quail and managed to hit it. He was measly when we cut him open, like all the Grants are measly these days, but his horns were heavy and more than long enough and shapely enough for Mr. Rowland Ward’s Bible.
“We finally score something out of this blasted area,” Harry said as we waited for the boys to take the headskin. “I’ve not seen a better Grant in years. You’re not going about saying that you made that shot on purpose, are you?”
“Of course I am,” I said. “I always break the necks of Grant gazelles when they stand behind bushes at a four-hundredyard minimum. Have you ever noticed that nobody ever kills anything out here that wasn’t a measured four hundred yards plus? Someday somebody must shoot something that staggers up to within rock-throwing range, and he ought to shoot him early in the day, not courting desperation in the dark. It must be against the law to ever get a good shot from close—at least it’s against the law for American bwanas to tell about anything that wasn’t hard come by. Lessens the worth of the story. As for shooting this thing on purpose, you know and I know that anybody who hits anything in the neck is jerking his gun one way or the other. I just fired blind at where I thought his shoulder might be if he had a shoulder.”
“Such honesty will have me weeping in a moment,” Harry said. “Let’s go scare us up an oryx. Ought to be a few up top here, anyhow, no matter what the weather.”
It was pleasant driving along up top with the escarpment stern and beautiful and blue and the little hills green and pretty. The broad, rolling meadows were yellow as wheat except in the bottoms, where there was still some ooze, and the grass was virulent green. There was a nice stretch of green grass all along the river, and the country was laid out as neatly as farmland in the Midwest, except it rolled and was occasionally accented by blunt hills. There were birds everywhere.
The bright bluejays swooped back and forth from the scrubby trees. We put up thousands of quail every time we crashed through a high-grass field. They didn’t make much noise when they rose, and flew more like flying fish than birds. They would scud from under Jessica’s wheels, level off, sail with stiff wings, and suddenly plop into the grass again as if paralyzed by effort.
Over the tops of the low hills where the trail was well defined, hundreds of the francolins, the spur fowl, scratched as busily between the treadmarks as chickens. They ran down the trail ahead of us, looked curiously back at us, and then ducked into the brush and froze themselves. Close alongside the trees, scratching in the shade, there were countless guinea fowl, and the trees along the river were full of doves. The weaver birds, like swarming bees, dipped and rolled and wavered in flight, a million tiny birds all in one pattern big enough to move across the brilliant blue sky like dark clouds.
“Nice place for a man who likes the shotty-gun,” I ventured as a couple of black-bellied floricans, the bustard’s cousin, squawked and flew from beneath the Rover’s nose.
“No shotty-gun right now,” Selby said. “Look yonder.”
Yonder was a herd of oryx, the first I’d seen. They look enormous at a distance, bigger than they actually are. They are fawn-grayish, with a black stripe down their back, with a black, brown, and white face shaped like a mule’s, big flop ears, and a mule’s tail. They look more like mules than antelopes. The straight, rapier horns make an oryx look as if somebody had pasted them on a jackass, daubed him with black and white, and turned him loose. These animals, an old bull, a couple of youngsters, and a herd of cows and calves, were swinging along at a steady loping trot a thousand yards up front and heading for the steep hills. Harry fed Jessica some fuel, and we barreled after them, occasionally losing teeth when the Rover springboarded off a hidden rock in the dense grass. We had the windscreen down to lessen the concentration of dust, and grasshoppers as big as bars of soap hurtled backward and struck us in the face. I was wearing broad contour sunglasses, and you could hear the steady rapping of razory grass seeds on the panes. Harry doesn’t wear glasses when he drives, and I am always amazed that he isn’t blinded daily. But he squeezes his eyes half shut and makes a protective hedge of thick, dust-crusted lashes, and so far has gone along unblinded.
T
he oryx were very wild. They kicked their heels occasionally and ran at a steady swinging gallop—not panicky but very wary, as a herd of eland is wary and always moving.
“These are pretty tough beasts,” Harry said. “They’re a desert animal, you know, and they’ve a hide a good inch and a half thick around the back of the neck. They’ll take an awful lot of lead and still go, and they’re one of the few antelopes who’re really dangerous when they’re hurt. You never go up to an oryx from the front when he’s down. They’ve accounted for several natives with those thin, straight stickers they wear on their heads. Go through you like a double bayonet. Up on the farm at Nanyuki I’ve seen them carrying dogs around, stone dead, skewered on their horns. For my money, they’re more dangerous than sable when they’re hurt.”
“It don’t look like we are apt to hurt these babies very much, friend,” I said. “Every time they stop, they start again. We haven’t shortened the gap very much in the last half hour.”
“I know it,” Harry said. “I’m going to cut across that patch of meadow and come out ahead of that piece of bush about a mile up to the right. They’ll be coming out about the same time, and all you can do is hop out and snap one offhand, like you did when you got lucky with that eland bull back at Ikoma. It’ll be the only chance you’ll have at this crew because they’re going right up the side of that escarpment where we can’t follow with the Rover.”
Selby jammed his foot on the accelerator, and Jessica bucked and flattened out for the chase. We careened over the field, jouncing two feet off the seat when we hit a pig hole or a boulder, and when we came out of the woods the oryx were trotting amiably along about two hundred yards ahead of us. They picked up the tempo of the trot. Harry squeezed a last burst of speed out of Jessica, closed to a hundred yards or so, and clapped on the brakes. I went out the door in an arc, lit miraculously on my feet, and threw up the .30-’06. The herd bull was running fast, quartering away from me. I forced the gun ahead of him, pulled it out in front of him on a level with his shoulder, and squeezed off. The bullet made the right slapping sound, and the oryx bucked and jumped with all four feet off the ground, and then he straightened out and was last seen going like hell in the general direction of Rhodesia.
The car came up, and both Harry and the boys were yelling. The boys were yelling “Piga!” and “Kufa!” like they yelled the day I took a running whack at an eland from about three hundred and managed to take him up the rear end and break his spine. I didn’t bother to tell the boys that day that I thought I’d led the eland enough to get him in the shoulder. If they wanted to think I was a hell of a rump-shooting artist, I wasn’t aiming to disillusion them any.
“You hit him,” Harry said. “That was quite a shot, offhand, on this bloke. He was a good 250 when you cut down on him.”
“I don’t think I hit him,” I said. “I would love to believe it, but he was quartering more than I allowed for. I thought I was going to stick one up his tail, but I think I shot just behind him. There was a little puff of dust right behind him that I don’t think his feet made. If he jumped, I probably sprayed him with some ricocheting pebbles. But it didn’t say whunk like it ought to. It sounded more like a slap than a whunk.”
“The boys say you hit him,” Harry said. “Hop in and we’ll go look for some blood.”
“You ain’t going to find any,” I said. “This isn’t my day. Mind what I say. There won’t be any damu, or bloody dung, or anything.”
I was all too right. Somehow you know. Weeks later when I shot another eland for the boys to make biltong to take back home with them, the whole carfull shook their heads sadly and said “Hapana.”
“I hit the sonofabitch,” I said. “He was standing head on, and I had a rest on a thornbush and the damned bullet said whunk. I hit him where I was holding.”
“I didn’t hear any bullet slap,” Selby said. “We can still collect him, but I don’t think you hit him.”
“I know goddamned good and well I hit him,” I said, getting mad. “When we pick him up, you’ll see. Hell, you couldn’t even see him standing under that thorn. If you can’t see two thousand pounds of eland standing under a thornbush in broad daylight, how are you going to say I didn’t hit him when I know I was cold on his chest?”
“There, there,” Selby said. “No temper, please. There he is, loping around that hill. Dismount and try your luck again.”
I held about six feet ahead of the eland and squeezed, and the bullet slapped again and down he went, tail over horns. He struggled up, and I could see that the second shot had broken his right foreleg just below the shoulder. The big ones can’t travel much on three legs, and I took a lot of time squeezing off at his neck. You could hear it break even that far away, and his head went down. He was a beauty, better than my first one. We turned him over, and there was my first bullet where I said it was. It had taken him a little low and to the right on his chest, had gone through the bottom of his heart, and wound up in the lung cavity.
“I told you I hit him,” I said. “He’d have been deader than Kelssy’s knuckles in another thousand yards. Don’t tell me I didn’t hit ’em when I know that I did.”
It was like that with this oryx now. I knew damned well I hadn’t touched him. We went up to where the band had been when I fired at the bull and they had torn up the grass getting across the field and over the river and up into the high hills. If there had been any blood, we would have seen it as clearly as ink on a sheet. There wasn’t any blood.
“Hapana damu,” Kidogo said. “Hapana piga.”
“You’re so bloody right,” I said in English. “When I piga, I will know I piga-ed, and I will be the first to announce it. Let’s go eat some lunch.”
We swung over by Kitete Swamp, with lunch about an hour away in the blinding, brassy sun, across the hot, dusty plain. There were a lot of giraffes—eighty-some in one bunch—and a few ostriches and the occasional sand grouse crouching in the hot, rocky sand. But there wasn’t a scrap of common game—no Grant, no eland, no kongoni, even. Not even a lousy zebra.
“It’s got me beat,” Harry said as we whizzed down an open track making a fairly well-worn road. “Last time I was here, with the Maytags, these damned hills were crawling with stuff. Bob and I got a marvelous lesser kudu bull over those hills there. We tracked him for about six hours. You could track then. It wasn’t so dirty dry and grassy high. The soil wasn’t so rock hard. But trying to track this country now is just a plain and simple waste of time. You can’t track when you can’t see sign.
Apart from the lesser kudu, there were bags of oryx even as far down as the road to Babati. Bob Maytag saw one in a low field just as we were pulling out of Kondoa Irangi. I stopped the car in the road. Bob got out, stalked up along the road, and walloped him with little or no trouble at all. And the plains were filthy with Grants and kongonis and buffaloes, and stuff. But she’s a dry hole right now.”
We swung down the road past some big baobabs and turned off to go into Kitete. It was a big, cool swamp. We started to park under a clump of high mimosas, but Harry sniffed and said a rhino had just left the locale and we didn’t particularly need it busting in on the luncheon party. It was a cow, anyhow, he said, and not a very big one. This he ascertained with his nose. A little later along we saw the hoofprints. It was a cow, and not a very big one.
We wound on into the swamp and came to an old and favored campsite of Harry’s, a big amphitheater under huge liana-draped trees. There was a staggering reek of baboon and a loud orchestral arrangement of hippo grunts coming from deeper into the swamp. The roots of the trees were gnarled and crawled along on top of the ground and made fine chair backs. It was cool and cathedral dark under the sheltering umbrella of green, with just a few arrows of light slanting in from holes in the leafy canopy. There weren’t many bugs, and the ground was clean, clear of brush, and cool. Elephants had been at the place fairly recently, for some of the shorter, smaller trees had been ripped apart at the top for fodder, leaving bright sha
rp spears of raw wood sticking up. There was a porcupine quill on the ground and another sticking into one of the trees.
“Luck,” Selby said. “We can use some.” He wedged the quill in his professional hunter’s badge and unsnapped the chop box. Juma had stuck a couple of bottles of Tusker beer into the box, under the red plastic plates, and it was pleasantly cool. Anything that wasn’t boiling would have tasted cool after that long morning under that sun and in that dust. My lips felt woolly, like somebody else’s, and my nose was a brilliant cherry-red from the sun.
We ate the staple cold boiled francolin with the mustard pickles, and I polished off half a can of beans mixed with half a can of spaghetti, both cold. You could feel the peace spreading through you, hand in hand with the beer, and I lay down under one of the big trees, propped my head up on one of the kneelike roots, and went happily to sleep. I woke up when a baboon misconducted himself high up in the trees over me and a portion of his misconduct hit me on the head. It was time to go, anyhow, about four o’clock.
It was after five when we made the low hills, down toward the bottom where the escarpment begins its long, low slope. I had decided to shoot a few francolins. The stupid but delectable little semi-pheasants love this time of day. They sit on anthills, looking forlorn, and say “quarank-quarank” back and forth to each other in the waning light. It is as lonesome a sound as any. I was out of the car and walking over to a covey of anthills that held a dozen or more lonesome quarankers when I heard a whistle, and Harry was waving me back. He grabbed the shotgun and handed me the Remington.
“I was sick for fear you’d shoot that blunderbuss,” he said. “There’s a wonderful lesser kudu bull just jumped as you got out, and he’s over there in that donga. Wonderful head on him, and I don’t see how we can lose him. Let’s go. The wind’s just about right.”