by Ruark, R.
“Looks very much like we’ve been had, chums,” he said. “No sign of the cameras at all, at all. Kuisha. Either we’ve lost them somehow or those types in Kondoa Irangi pinched ’em. Let’s see what else is missing.”
They had got Chabani’s new tennis shoes and all the cameras except the little short-order Polaroid with which Virginia had earned such a reputation as a witch doctor by producing the finished print one minute from the snapping. The guns were all there, and the rest of the gear.
“Makes it a definite theft by one of those gay lads around Kondoa,” Harry said. “First time it ever happened to me. Never lost so much as a packet of cigarettes before. I’m dreadfully sorry. This must have been one of the gentlemen who’d been in the Army and knew the value of what he was pinching. He could never dispose of a rifle, but he could sell the cameras for five quid to a local Arab, and they’ll turn up in a bazaar in Nairobi six months from now with the serial numbers filed off. What makes me furious is my Leica. It had thirty-five very fine exposures of game in it—that whole day’s work Virginia and I put in while you were writing in Ikoma. And the Cine was full of film too.”
“So were the Ikoflex and the Rollei,” Virginia said. “I shot a lot of still color and black-and-white of the boys around the camp and left the exposed stuff in the cameras. Damn it to hell. All that work wasted, and now we’re stuck out here for three more weeks with no cameras.”
“I am most awfully sorry,” Harry said mournfully. “So are the boys. Look at ’em. In a way it’s a reflection on them. Not that we would ever suspect them, but they feel terribly careless, especially since you’ve been so nice to them.”
Kidogo seemed to be debating hara-kiri. Chabani was moping away off from us. Juma’s usual air of impudence had melted and he looked two sizes smaller.
“Ah, the hell with it,” I said. “I’m glad they’re gone, and there’s no use spoiling lunch. This camera business is a damned nuisance, anyhow. Always wanting you to stop and pose and testing the bloody light and fiddling with light meters and slowing down the hunt. I’m relieved, myself. Now we can get on with the kudu and forget the piga picha business. Let’s all have another drink in celebration of no more damned nonsense with f-7’s and apertures and the rest of that rot.”
Harry turned and said something to Kidogo, who brightened.
“I told him the bwana didn’t blame him and that the bwana was really happy that the cameras were stolen so that now we would have more time to hunt kudu,” Harry said. “He thinks the bwana is completely nuts, but he admires this kind of insanity. He fully expected to be fined or beaten or both. He says most bwanas would have raised hell for the next three days and held him personally responsible.”
“Tell him I think he is a black Daniel Boone who is too valuable as a hunter to bugger about with cameras,” I said. “Tell him cameras are women’s work, that only the mana-mouki should mess about with this piga picha routine. Tell him if he ever kids me about shooting birds again, I will remember to remind him of the cameras.”
Harry said something swiftly. Kidogo grinned and ducked his head at me. He said something fast and furious.
“Kidogo says that he will get out the whole Nandi vote any time you run for office,” Harry said. “He says that next to Kingi Georgi you are his favorite white man. He says he will personally attend to getting you a sixty-five-inch kudu.” Harry snickered. “He says his life is yours to command.”
“Tell him if he ever carries that elephant gun so I am looking down the barrels any more I will command his life, all right. I aim to shoot him in the tail with the shotty-gun ‘Mkubwa. Let’s knock off the dialectics and eat. I’m starved.”
We had some cold impala chops from the yearling buck I had shot yesterday by the roadside with Harry’s little Mannlicher, and as I chewed I was thinking that I really was glad the cameras had been swiped. You can hunt or you can take pictures, but you cannot hunt and take pictures. The two techniques are completely conflicting, and one bitches up the other. The camera bugs are always fretting about the light and trying to maneuver closer so that the animal will be squared off just so for the lens framing. They like to stir up the animals, and they always want to get a little bit closer, so they wind up by spooking the whole neighborhood. And they always say: “Just one more. No, no, stand over there. Not there. Over there.”
Then they always brag about how they are so stinking humane, they wouldn’t think of killing one of the lovely beasties that God made so beautiful, and they don’t see how a hunter can be so horrid as to shoot something when all they want to do is imprison its beauty on film. This is of course a lot of crap.
Every time some brave camera hunter drags you into the living room after dinner for two tedious hours of blinking at his amateur African film, you can reflect on the rhino that charges directly at you from the screen did not stop charging after the shutter snapped. You cannot say to a rhino: “Knock off, bud, your picture’s took and you don’t have to charge any more.” Some poor harassed professional, standing affrightedly flat-footed while the camera hound runs, has to shoot the poor old faro as he comes barreling on, whether he’s any good or not as a trophy. This applies to any dangerous game that gets itself annoyed into charging for the selfish benefit of the camera. The self-admittedly humane Martin Johnsons killed more game than rinderpest in getting their pictures, and the animals were slaughtered after deliberate incitement to nervousness and a final charge. Some black boys got killed, too, in some of the numerous lion-spearing shots that have been made by sundry photographers because when you take on lions with spears, some laddy-buck has got to get chewed.
It is the same way with all those lovely, peaceful shots of the happy lions, bloated, contented, and kitten-purring-playful for the camera. They are happy because their guts are distended with nice fresh zebra or topi, slain callously to serve as bait to beckon the carnivore in close. The zebra is just as dead as if you had shot him for his hide.
Harry strode into my thoughts.
“I mind me a couple of camera hounds came out here one time, going to get in the last word on lion charges. They went out without a professional and they deliberately gut-shot a lion, wounding him just enough to make him sick and nasty. Simba departed into bush, and they went in after him, one with the gun, t’other with the camera. Going to make an epic, and they didn’t mind deliberately wounding the animal to do it.”
Selby spat and curled his lip, like a lioness when you get too close to her cubs.
“Some natives chanced by the next morning,” Harry said. “Found the two camera blokes ripped into ribbons and dead as mutton. Lion was dead a bit farther on, but his mouth was bloody and his claws were full of—things. I felt most awfully, dreadfully sorry for the lion. Didn’t feel so damned sorry for the two fools that were willing to hurt him on purpose just to make him sick and angry. Lion’s too good for people like that.
“I’m never going along on another one of those Hollywood picture safaris where they want you to rile up the elephants for day after day, and finally you have to shoot some old cow that gets nervous, splits off from the herd, and chases the cameraman. Tony Dyer had a devilish near thing up on the Tana River while they were making some bloody cinema or other. Old bull finally got tired of being annoyed and tore loose at the camera group, and Tony had to shoot it offhand from about nine yards. Same thing with Stan Lawrence-Brown while they were making King Solomon’s Mines. That bull you see shot in the opening sequence is no Hollywood fake. Those spurts of dust off the elephant’s head was old Stan standing and shooting while the electric cameras ground.”
Selby spat again, scornfully and angrily.
“I can understand killing something you want so badly that you are willing to go to weeks of trouble and great expense to collect it so that you will have it and enjoy it and remember it all your life. But this wanton stuff gravels the devil out of me. I hate conscious cruelty. Some bow-and-arrow bloke out here, breaking lions’ backs with a rifle first so that he could
shoot it safely with his bloody play toy. And popping elephants in the knees to pin them down while they get the right pictures of our hero and his bow and arrow. Yah! I’ll never make another one of these things where the first object is camera, with nothing but dirty work to be done with the gun, mopping up after the humanitarians.”
We finished the lunch and drove down the rutted, rock-strewn, eroded road toward Bowman’s last big camp, with Kidogo standing in the back of the jeep, exclaiming and pointing as he saw landmarks he remembered. There were about thirty miles of it to do, and in midafternoon we came to a village where Kidogo seemed to know everybody. They gathered round the car and grabbed his thumb, jabbering nine to the dozen, and subsiding slightly when a character stepped out of the main hut, as full of dignity as a hustler who’s just married the cop on the beat.
This type was a Somali, delicately slim, light, one-eyed, scarred in the face, and overfull of manners. His name was Abdullah. He was the head cattle wrangler for an Englishman named Ricardo. He was the kind of native who carries his own candy. He affected shorts with his snood and looked as if he expected you to ask him for the next dance. He had a couple of stooges with him, and very soon his pretty light-brown wife, with her head in a kerchief and wearing a dress of many iridescent colors, stepped out to abet the welcome. Abdullah also wore a knife to match his shorts and was so extremely unctuous he turned your stomach.
Abdullah pointed down the trail to where the river lay, uttered many phrases about how many million kudus could be killed by a backward child armed only with a sjambok, and allowed us to proceed. Harry wrinkled his nose. He didn’t like Somalis.
The other villagers were nice enough. They were very black and twice as ugly as home-cultured mud, but cheerful and gently stupid. They didn’t have much company there by the river, unless you counted the cows as company, because this Abdullah was too damned grand for anything but the governor’s bazaar, and they were glad to see the safari. It was the second one they’d ever seen. Katunga pointed out later that these were very backward natives, indeed, because he’d borrowed two shillings to get his back straightened and the girls were so unsophisticated that he had one of the shillings left over to buy beer.
They trooped after us as we drove the half-mile to the Ruaha and clustered around while we set up the camp. Selby was feeling a little surly. He told them to push off and stay bloody well pushed, a sentiment re-echoed by Kidogo. They were both thinking of the cameras.
Here on the interior ford of the Ruaha the ground was high, sloping sharply into the water. Here, twice a day, the women drove the black-and-white and red-spotted cattle down to drink, creating all sorts of noises. We pitched the camp off the trail to the right, a hundred yards from the river, under a tremendous green-leaved tree whose name we didn’t know. It was a lovely camp. Even the elephants liked it. One came and left his calling card in front of the mess tent the first day. The monkeys liked it, too. They capered overhead and impressed us with their presence by depositing their droppings on the flap of the tent that served as an awning in front of the mess. It sounded like gentle steady rain on a tin roof.
There was an old man, a real ’mzee, come to call in the early cool of the evening, after we had resighted the guns and scared the green pigeons out of the trees in enormous clouds. The old man was grizzled. He limped against his knobby stick. His goatskin toga was dirty and mangy. His feet and legs were sore and scarred with the white remembrances of ancient sores. His beard was clotted and filthy.
“Jambo,’ mzee,” Harry said. “Iko tandalla hapa?”
“Hapana,” the old man said sadly. “I have lived here for 120 years [this would make him sixty, because the Africans have two full seasons each year], and I have never seen a kudu. I am an old man, and if there were kudu here I would have seen them.”
“How about across the river?” Harry asked. “How about down by the Little Ruaha? Are there tandalla there?”
“I would not know this, bwana,” the old man said, sadder still. “I have never been across the river. What would I be doing across the river? The shenzis live across the river. The ’Ndrobos, the wild men and the bee chasers, they live across the river. There are no kudu here.”
We gave the old man a cigarette and he limped off. Harry turned to Kidogo.
“This is the country where Bwana Bowman got the doumi ’Mkubwa? You sure?”
“Ndio, bwana,” Kidogo said, pointing. “Pandi hio.”
“Where else?”
“Also back there,” Kidogo said, pointing at the road behind the village, the road from which we had just come. “Mingi sana tandalla. M’zuri.”
“It looks all right,” Harry said. “I don’t know. Let’s try and get the jeep across the river before dark. We can leave her there and wade over in the morning.”
Jessica didn’t like this river, this swiftly running, rapid-rippling Ruaha River, with its slippery boulders underfoot and its current fit to pull you down and drown you. She made a heavy effort to crawl across and stalled when she went in over her dashboard in the shallowest part. We sent Adam back to the village to press a gang of locals while we broke out the towline.
The locals arrived and peeled their breechclouts, and about thirty of them breasted across the stream to the far shore. They horsed on the towline, and the jeep surged a bit and then the towline snapped. It was a two-inch line. We spliced the line and heaved again, and it snapped again. All together it snapped four times before we sweated the jeep up on the far bank and mopped out her vitals so she would run again. There was still time for a small hunt, and we aimed off into the bush, following Kidogo’s directions until we came to a clearing of hard-baked clay with a little shamba in it—a few goats, three seedy huts, and another old man sitting in front of the biggest hut.
We stopped and asked him about tandalla and the Little Ruaha. This was an adventurous old man. He said he knew the trail, only eighteen miles, as well as he knew the body of his wife. He said he would like to show us how to get there. He said he was sadly in need of meat—that he was too old to hunt any more and that the game would not feed close to his shamba. He said that a few miles farther on the tandalla would trample you unless you were careful and that the bulls were even tamer than the cows, and that the cows were even tamer than the chickens.
The old man was right. We got only two thirds of the way to the little river, along the grown-over trail that Bowman had made, but we saw fourteen kudus in ten miles, not so spooky as eland, as nearly sloven in their movements as topi. There were two immature bulls we might have shot with a .22. There was one big bull with a retinue of cows, who moved slowly off into the bush just at dark. There was a fine big red, black, white, and blue hill in the middle of the scrubby mesa that gave an admirable view of the country. Harry scurried up the side like a baboon and reported another herd of kudus, and also that he had located the river and it all answered to Bowman’s sketchy description. His eyes were shining when he scurried down and turned the Rover’s nose toward home and campi.
We came back in the chilly black night and dropped the old man off at his shabby manyatta, with a packet of cigarettes for his trouble and the promise of meat tomorrow. We fought through the low thornscrub to the river’s edge and left Jessica high and dry to spend the night by herself. We didn’t figure anybody was apt to steal her. There wouldn’t by any place to take her if they did steal her.
Crossing the river was very cold and very scary. Juma had come down from camp on the opposite bank with a lantern to light us across, but the water was well past waist high and the current was now a good twelve knots. The stones were sharp and mossy slick and loose underfoot, and even with Adam on one side of me and Kidogo on the other, we all slipped and went in to the armpits three or four times. I kept thinking about crocodiles, but obviously the water was too swift for them, so Harry said. I still kept thinking about crocodiles.
We limped barefooted to the camp, accumulating thorns in the process, and staggered in wet and cold and beat and st
arved. Gathiru and Kaluku had the bathi steaming and Mama had the whisky on the hob. There was a big fire blazing and the night sounds had tuned up and there were certain smells coming from Ali’s cook fire. The sky was as frosty-looking as Connecticut in the fall and the stars twinkled coldly and I felt a great upsurge of confidence. This was going to be another Campi Abahati, despite Abdullah the Somali and his grand airs, despite the pessimistic old man, despite the freezing crossing of that river twice a day. I was going to come out of here with a kudu bull bigger than a stud mastodon. I knew it. Harry knew it, too. We had some drinks and ate the impala and turned in. I went to sleep smiling. Tomorrow had to be a lovely day.
Chapter 12
THE Ruaha was bitter cold again as we stripped and bundled our clothing, held high overhead as we staggered through the rushing waters to cross to where the jeep was waiting. Harry carried Virginia on his back, which must have been an awful job of maintaining balance. We dressed, shivering in the predawn gray, and got into the jeep. It was just coming on light when we stopped to pick up the old man. He was sitting in front of his hut before a small blaze of thorn branches, waiting for us.
“Jambo, ’mzee,” Harry said. “Kwenda nataka piga tandalla?”
“Ndio, bwana,” the old man said, grinning. “Doumi mkubwa. Horns like this.” He stroked the back of his head, made a graceful double curl with his hand, then carried the hand backward until it passed his buttocks.
“God save us,” Harry said. “If there are bulls here so big their horns pass their rump when they run, we must have found a sanctuary.”
The jeep swept along, following its own track as far as the gaudy little red, blue, black, and white hill, and as it rolled it passed through a sort of Eden. I thought I had seen wildlife before. I had not seen it this way.