by Ruark, R.
We half ran across the stubbly savanna to a long, low black strip of stubby thorn that made an island of the dry donga. Creeping round the lower edge, I saw a blur of gray that walked up to a bush and stopped. Harry pointed. I crouched down on my thighs for a steadier rest, and all I could see was a bluish-gray rear end. Kidogo and Adam were both on the other side of the donga. I didn’t know where. But my Grandfather Adkins took a sound switch to me when I was very young for shooting blindly into bushes when I couldn’t account for the rest of the party, and it’s a lesson I still remember. I lowered the gun and began to crawl around to the front of the bush. The lesser kudu bull barked once and leaped. He headed straight into the donga, and you could hear him crashing. Then he stopped.
I walked on up a quarter of a mile over the rocky earth, turning ankles and swearing monotonously. I stationed myself on a stand at the head end of the donga and waited for Harry and the boys to drive this sportsman at me. There wasn’t any other place he could go, for the donga was a peninsula that led to another donga that linked up with still another, to make a series of islands for intelligent kudus to hide in as they slip back to the hills.
This was not an intelligent kudu. He reversed his engine and ran the wrong way in the donga, almost knocking Kidogo down. I could see the bull streaking across half a mile of completely open plain, going the wrong way, away from the hills, away from the interlocking dongas, away from the river and the thick bush along its edge.
We got the jeep going again and spoored him as well as we could in the now rapidly fading shooting light. His sharp tracks led into a lonesome donga with no connecting strips of bush to any other place of refuge. I took up a stand again at the other end of it and sent my black bird dogs in to beat this junior-grade tandalla out past me. He reversed his engine again, ran smack over the boys against the stiff breeze that carried their scent into his flared nostrils. He barked sarcastically again, crashed out of the heavy thorn, and romped across the plain, heading for home and mother. It was so dark by the time we got back to the jeep that we were holding each other’s hands the last five hundred yards to keep from falling over the little boulders and loose rocks. It was bitter cold when we passed the thousand sentinel anthills. They smelled milkier and muskier than ever in the frost.
We belabored the high hills and the Kitete area for a week. We kept a faithful tryst with the old bull rhino for five more mornings. For five more mornings and five more afternoons he outsmarted us. Selby finally lost his temper.
“I told you this old bastard was a creature of habit,” he said. “I told you it was only a matter of getting onto his habits and we’d collect him. I still say it’s only a matter of fitting ourselves into his pattern. But I haven’t got the next thirty years to spend trying to adapt myself to his schedule. He’s got more alternates than a war map. I say the hell with him. We’ll stop off at Yaida Swamp or someplace on the way back from Iringa and do the rhino there. Or if we’re lucky with the kudu in Frank Bowman’s new country, we’ll have time to whiz up to the N.F.D., and I’ll guarantee you a big rhino there in less than three days.”
“Like you guaranteed him at Manyara,” I murmured.
“Yah,” Selby said.
We drove and we looked and we saw only one other band of oryx in a week, and the bull in this group had horns like railroad spikes. We saw another lesser kudu bull, a fine one, finer than the other, and he was a cinch. All we had to do was stalk over two little hills and make the summit of the third. A steady rest on a thorn, and I would have him nearly point-blank as he stood on the top of Hill No. 4, surrounded by three wives and a small son.
It is a long way over three little hills when you are scrabbling over sharp rocks and sharper thorns on your hands and knees. We made the summit of Hill No. 3. The bull had fed off, as per kudu habit, leaving three cows and Junior in his wake. They fed slowly down the slope, no more than seventy yards away. They didn’t know anybody was around. They didn’t care. I could have killed all three of them if there was any point to shooting females for fun. We let them walk into the bush. Then we went down the steep slant of our hill and up the steeper slant of the kudus’ hill to see if we could spoor the bull and track him to his next stopping place. When we got to where the cows had been and crouched to examine the tracks, there was a crash and a bark in the bush fifteen yards away. Father had remained.
“I will just be goddamned if I ever saw anything like it,” Harry said, throwing down his hat. “Everything I know about kudus tells me that the bull is going to lead off and drift, letting the cows follow him. Instead this blighter decides to back off and feed in that bush, letting the manamouki wander away ahead of him. If we’d known he was staying, all we’d have had to do was wait where we were, behind that big thorn, you with a steady rest, and this dumb bastard feeding out across the open within five or ten minutes. And at a range of no more than seventy-five or eighty yards. You could have whacked him with a two-two long rifle at that range. It’s all wrong. Everything is running wrong. Let’s see if we can follow this lad on this lousy rocky, dry terrain where tracks don’t show on lousy sunbaked soil and lousy rock.”
We tracked him. We tracked him over four more hills. We tracked him for four hours. We lost him.
It was like that for a week. Everything went wrong. Harry threw away the porcupine quill he was wearing in his hat. The memsaab had troubles and was half fainting in the heat when she tried to hunt with us. Everything disappeared, even the bloody giraffes. Even the shootable birds got scarcer. The small band of oryx never showed again. The kongoni went elsewhere. The impala that played around the camp on Mto-Wa-Mbu left the neighborhood.
We had invested three weeks in nothing. We broke the camp and packed the lorry and headed up the road for Babati. We saw fourteen lions as we left. They looked hungry. We had gone a miserable twenty miles when we pulled off at the side of the road to wait for the lorry, to see if she was faring all right. She didn’t show in half an hour and so we went back to find her. We found her on her side like a sick pig in a bog. She had thoughtfully broken an axle and splayed all her springs. We got her fixed at last and passed Babati, where we had a Coke with the Indian in the ducca and spoke kindly to the missionaries.
We passed Kondoa Irangi and made a temporary camp by the side of the road in the lee of a little hill. It was a very nice camp and the object of much concern by the local ladies and gentlemen. They were intrigued with us. They were so intrigued that one of them slipped into camp after we went to bed and removed from the back seat of the weary Land Rover one camera bag containing an Ikoflex, a Rolleiflex, a Leica, and a Cine-Kodak. Each camera was full of exposed film. They also stole a pair of brown tennis shoes I had bought Chabani from the Indian at Mto-Wa-Mbu that morning. This appeared to grieve Chabani considerably. And somewhere in the shuffle Harry Selby lost his last remaining lucky charm, the elephant-tail-hair bracelet. The hell with Kondoa Irangi.
Chapter 11
WE BROKE THE CAMP at Kondoa Irangi and headed up for Dodoma. There were altogether too many subservient blacks about the camp, begging for old tins and bottles, but we were leaving the locality, so there wasn’t going to be any necessity for warning them away. It was their country, anyhow.
We made Dodoma by the middle of the day, over good clay roads that were rain-wrinkled and corrugated into washboards. Jessica jolted painfully in a constant tooth-aching jog trot. The bush alongside the road was sparse and dusty and unprovocative. There were bridges every few miles—fine, sturdy, concrete-andiron bridges the Germans had built before World War I. They stretched across the sandy dongas as true-plumb and reliable as the ancient day the shaven-headed, red-necked overseers had whipped the blacks to build them.
“Say what you want to about the Hun,” Harry said, “he was a great engineer and he did more to open up this country than anybody else. When he put down a road, he put it down to stay. When he put up a bridge, he put it up on purpose. It’s funny how the people you conquer sometimes do the most for a forei
gn place. We’d no decent roads to speak of in Kenya until the Eyetie [Italian] prisoners of war started working on road projects. Then the war quit and so did the road building.”
We rolled into Dodoma and did something about getting new supplies and things. I strolled round the big square market close-by the railroad station and looked at the natives with their goods spread flat on blankets and skins. The tobacco they sold was twisted into hard, dunglike lumps. They had little mounds of beans and some sweets that even the flies tended to ignore, and some dust-gray strips of biltong that the hyenas might have thought over twice before tackling. The Masai men were lounging around, as usual, looking haughty and elegant and aloof as they leaned on their spears. Only a few of the women were bare-breasted. This was a metropolis.
The sun struck white and hot on the plaster buildings. The white, dusty streets were full of greenish-swarthy Indian boys in shorts, pedaling furiously on bicycles. The shops were all Arab and Indian, with possibly more Arabs than Indians. They were fine-looking old men, the Arabs, white-bearded and hook-nosed, heavy-headed in turbans or keffiyehs, wearing gabardine caftans over baggy white pajama-cloth breeches caught tightly at the ankles. They looked disdainfully at the Indians, and the Greeks, and the Negroes, and the Masai, and at us. They seemed mostly to be dreaming of an older, gentler civilization, but they had created Tanganyika and were stuck with her.
Dodoma is a pretty little town, its streets rimmed with the brilliant Nandi flame-flower trees, its walls looped with great purple and red and white bougainvilleas. There are schools and churches and a cinema, a good hotel and restaurant where you can even eat the greens without fretting too much about dysentery.
“Too many people,” Harry said, coming out of a ducca where we’d drunk an iced Coca-Cola and bought some new gin and other vital necessities. “Let’s shove off and have our lunch outside of town. Juma! Kwenda!”
Half the boys weren’t around the lorry. They had straggled off for their own purposes—Katunga to get his back straightened, Chege in search of less commercial romance, the tea hounds away to the teahouses, and the secret drinkers to the pombe palace. They straggled back in front of the jeep, with Kidogo driving them ahead like balky Masai donkeys.
We jounced down the dusty road, admiring the flame trees, and I had another of those attacks of unreality. It no longer seemed strange that I was in a town called Dodoma in Tanganyika, surrounded by motley filed-tooth, stretched-lobed, cicatrized Negroes, henna-and-ochered Masai warriors, wrangling Greeks, bickering Indians, haughty Arabs, and weary-looking, sun-parched pukka British in floppy terais and rumpled khakis. It seemed strange now that it no longer seemed strange. I felt that I didn’t stick out from the mob even a little bit. If anything, I felt cramped, as did Selby, in a city, even such a small and insignificant city as Dodoma.
We rolled along, glad to be quit of the tumult and the crush, and Harry drove up alongside a handsome baobab the size of a water tank. It had pegs stuck into its soft, fleshy bark, where the locals had hammered them, so that they could swarm up easily to collect the water that gathers in the pits and craters of the baobab’s vast trunk. I looked slantwise at Virginia and saw her heave a small sigh of relief as Chabani unbuttoned the green chop box and Harry handed me the gin and the lime and the vermouth and the gay red and green plastic cups, with the checkered red-and-white napkins to wipe the dust out. It was ritual now, Selby bending over the chop box and slapping slabs of the cold guinea on the plastic plates, unscrewing the mustard jar and the House of Parliament sauce bottle, slicing hunks off the coarse loaf, prizing the cover from the butter jug, setting out the bottles of Tusker beer.
Virginia sat down on the hard cushion from the Land Rover, rested her khaki back against the baobab, and took a long belt at her warm martini with the fine dust settled on the bottom of the cup. She sighed again. She was uneasy around civilization, too, and glad to be back in the bush again. We drank two martinis apiece and ate. Nobody spoke much. Then we cleaned the campsite and drove on to the high plateau of Tanganyika, up to Iringa where the giant kudu and the roan antelope lived, up toward Frank Bowman’s secret country.
The lorry had her usual number of mishaps. We were frightened blue when a local safari rig came past us and announced that a lorry had overturned just outside Dodoma and the people said they thought some of the people in it had been killed. Then they drove off.
We wheeled Jessica around and headed back as fast as we could push her, leaping over the corduroy road in great bounds, like an impala in a panic. Harry was white around the edges of his mouth. It had not been so long ago that another lorry under his command had turtled on him, killing a couple of boys and mangling some more. We were tense as we came up to Annie Lorry, on her side again, like a dead cow with its feet stiffly in the air.
Nobody had been hurt. Chege, God bless his Kikuyu intuition, had felt a tremor of fear and slowed her to a mere amble just a few seconds before the right front wheel had bitten clean through its lugs and sheered off the hub. The wheel had spun down the road and Annie rolled over gently, hurling the boys a short piece without killing anybody. We jacked the old bitch up, propped her on even keel, and fitted her with new shoes. Harry, greasy to the armpits, was flat on his back under her, her axle held up off his chest by a mound of stones, and the air was gently blue around him. He had been trying to lose this particular truck for the last three safaris, and the office kept sticking him with her. We had expelled her in shame from Mto-Wa-Mbu, but they sent her back just the same, and Selby was livid.
Annie’s indisposition slowed us up, so instead of making Iringa for the night we quit at dusk on the far side of the Great Ruaha River, a really respectable stream that flows at ten knots over boulders, is spanned by a noble German bridge, and is maggoty with crocodiles. This was fine, lovely country now, high and cold and Swissy in its green slopes, with little blue lakes alongside the road and severe blue hills on both sides.
We crossed the span and curved the caravan in a half circle to return to a cool cluster of big trees on the edge of the sheer drop into the river. The ground was mostly clear and trampled under the trees, and the boys scythed it clearer with pangas while we broke off some dead thorn twigs for the fire. This was a night you needed a big fire because even at dusk you could see your breath cold and distinct in clouds ahead of you, separate from the cigarette smoke. We ate fast and turned in, with Harry not bothering to pitch the mess tent or his own sleeping quarters, but bunking in with us, and all of us eating in the open.
“Can’t get over that other bloke, that social fellow you know,” Harry said. “Kidogo tells me he insisted on pitching the mess tent and dining in lonely splendor even in temporary camps. Also made the boys carry him across streams on their back. Six foot four and he makes the boys carry him. What we call a high-spineshot man. Nothing else is good enough. Cries and curses if he doesn’t hit it high on the spine, first crack, and won’t take the trophy if he has any collaboration. One of these skeet shooters.”
“Got a pretty good kudu, though,” I said. “I’ve seen it.”
“Not with Bowman up here he didn’t,” Harry said. “They didn’t shoot a kudu on that trip. Didn’t even hunt them. Frank only came in here once, the trip before he packed up and went off to Australia. Was with a fellow named Bill Something-or-other. Shot a fifty-nine-incher, the damnedest kudu I ever saw. At least I saw the pictures of it. Kidogo was still with Bowman then. Says the kudu came down onto the river like impala. Saw one herd of sixteen bulls, all good, and as tame as bloody topi. Saw one bull better than the one they shot. I find it hard to believe, but Kidogo swears it’s so. And he doesn’t lie, or even exaggerate, like most of them. Must be a different kind of kudu altogether from those blokes that hang out in the Kondoa hills.”
“I hope we get one,” I said, “but I’m not willing to believe we will. This luck we had couldn’t stretch forever. We loused up the rhino, and that was supposed to be easy.”
“Frankly, I’m not prepared to bet on an
ything any more. This grass has changed the whole complexion of everything else, and I don’t see why it mightn’t change the kudu business, too. You read that note Tony Dyer left for me at the ducca in Babati. ‘Lost in a wilderness of bloody grass with a French purist,’ he said. ‘Seen little, shot nothing.’ I really don’t know.”
“Let’s turn in and pray,” I said. “I’m beat.”
“We’ll know tomorrow,” Harry said. “Night, all.”
We made Iringa about eleven and stopped at the machine shop for some nuts and bolts and information. Iringa was a prettier town than Dodoma, smaller, more Englishy, with a neat white hotel and a Ford agency and a modern movie and even a sprouting housing project. It had an airfield and a once-weekly plane. It was Sunday, and everything was closed as tight as a watchcase except the machine shop, where we managed to knock up the owner long enough to dig a direction out of him. We pulled out of Iringa, headed for a village by the Ruaha, and a few miles out of town we stopped for the lunch ceremony.
“I love these picnics,” Virginia said, nibbling happily at her nutritious delicious. “I always loved picnics as a kid. We used to go down into Rock Creek Park and have them on Saturdays when I was a little girl in Washington. There were always a lot of sex fiends loose in Rock Creek Park, and Mother was always afraid I would get raped or something, but I used to slip off and have picnics anyhow. Never thought I’d have a picnic three times a day, every day, though. Let’s take some pictures, this is such a lovely spot.”
“Fine,” I said. “We’ve got nearly enough game shots now after that big day you and Harry had with the cameras at Ikoma. We better start shooting some fill-in stuff from now on—camp stuff and old Annie stuck in the mud and the like. Kidogo can take some footage of all of us together while we’re eating. Kidogo! Lette picha qua memsaab!”
Kidogo walked over to the jeep and rummaged around in the back, where we kept the camera bag and the film. He looked a long time, and when he came back he was just a touch pale. He talked furiously to Selby, waving his arms and walling his eyes. Selby was disturbed. He got up and went over to Jessica and looked for himself. He walked back, frowning.