by Ruark, R.
The first indication of something special was the guinea fowl. We passed through flocks of hundreds. By the time we had reached the river, we had seen five thousand or better. They were not scared, not in the slightest spooky. They trotted along, heads held high like pacing horses, but moving as unconcernedly as chickens. They cackled until the whole bright, sunny world seemed full of that harsh “potrack-potrack” sound they make.
Then there were the impala. I thought I had seen impala. I had not seen impala. They ran a hundred to the herd. The herds joined one another every thousand yards. There were hundreds of herds. They stood still at the side of the track, sniffing curiously. One bright gold chap was feeling the frost in the morning. He paced us tentatively at twenty miles an hour, moving easily in great arcs, and then jumped completely over the jeep—just to see if he could, I suppose. Then he stood still, waiting for applause. We applauded. He bowed and skipped away, his tiny heels catching the sun as he turned cartwheels out of exuberance.
And then there were the eland. For all a big bull’s bulk, the eland is shy. He grazes at a canter, and he almost never stops still. He moves, and always away, in a swinging lope that grows into a gigantic hop. Here we saw a herd of eland, with a magnificent bull, about two thousand pounds of bull, his hide gray-gold, horns heavy-twisted and worn round and smooth at the tips from age and use. There were a dozen younger bulls with the mob, and more than two hundred cows. We stopped the car to watch them, and the eland walked up toward us, to stand, finally, huge necks stretched, horns laid back along their spines, nostrils jumping at our scent, but standing still and unafraid, and then taking tentative steps toward us. I could hear Harry exhale.
“I never expected to see this,” he said softly. “I never saw an eland that wasn’t moving, and moving away, unless you were downwind from him and blinded in lots of bush. I don’t believe these beasts ever saw a man before.”
We left the eland staring at us like cattle and drove quietly along to Harry’s hill. The game thickened as we went, and the occasional oases of clay were scarred and rutted like a barnyard with tracks.
Harry drove the jeep in a tight circle, slowly around the track-bitten mud, and then he stopped the car and got out to look more closely. He kept shaking his head, muttering. Kidogo was with him, dropping occasionally to one knee to put his fingers into a track and crooning very softly to himself. After a while they both got back into the car.
“I never saw anything like it,” Harry said, still shaking his head as if to clear it. “There’s one kudu bull that passed here last night that’s got a hoof on him as big as a flatiron. There’s any amount of small bulls and mingi sana cows. There’s a herd of buffalo lives around here, and if the bull’s got horns to match his hoofs, he must be fifty inches.
“A pride of three male lions and about eleven females is around these parts, and there were three separate sets of leopard tracks out in the open. There’s no elephant out here, of course, but the old man says the bush on the other side of the river is stiff with tembo. There seems to be everything in the world here, and none of it seems to have been shot at. Kidogo says that they only shot a couple of times when they were here before, and got right out again. I’m beginning to believe everything Bowman told me about this place, especially since I saw how the eland acted. Let’s go on down and check along the river.”
We drove easily through the short yellow grass, making our own track, with the old man pointing and saying “Kishoto” or “Kulia” as he directed us left and right. After this trip we wouldn’t need him. Our own track would be plenty signpost.
As we came closer to the river, we passed a deserted native shamba to our left. The thatch was half stripped from the wattle huts, sagging and forlorn. The cactus boma had gone to seed. The gardens were tangled and overgrown. Someone had died there, and the survivors had moved away to avoid the evil spirits. As we passed, there was a short, sharp bark, and two immature bull kudus, followed by a harem of six cows, broke from the deserted garden and went for the wood. We followed slowly in Jessica and came up to them standing no more than a couple of hundred yards away, their nostrils flared and their huge mule ears flanged forward. They were curious and perhaps a little startled but not afraid. They were in easy gunshot.
“Two youngsters,” Harry said. “But they’ll go forty-five or forty-six easy with only one curl to their horns. And they’ve already grown the ivory. Give ’em another two or three years and they’ll both touch sixty inches. My God, my God. I never saw anything like this.”
The kudu, still frozen, suddenly unfroze and began to graze. Harry swung the jeep gently away and we left them feeding. We went on again toward the river. As we came to within half a mile, there was a vast plateau of white, soft sand, studded here and there with scrub thorn, old logs, and a few cacti. It was again a barnyard, its large acreage almost entirely marred by tracks and sign.
“It looks like Johnny North’s circus has wintered here,” Virginia said. “There’s enough manure to fertilize a truck farm. There must be about eight million of everything using this place. I still don’t believe that there are enough wild animals to make all this mess and all these tracks. We must be in some extension of Texas.”
Just as Jinny said “Texas,” a bull kudu, his horns laid straight back along his spine, broke from the bush behind us and ran along parallel to the jeep. I saw him first and pointed.
“Holy Mother of God!” Selby said, and slammed the brakes. “Toa anything!” he yelled at Kidogo. I had trouble opening the door of the jeep, and by the time I got out the bull had crossed ahead of us and was going away in unhurried jumps, pausing briefly as if he were trying to make up his mind. As I fell out, Kidogo handed me the .375. I sat flat on my tail, wedged elbows on knees, and tried to cover the running animal. Harry had driven the jeep away.
The big bull almost stopped at, maybe, 150 yards. His horns were very fine—at least fifty inches, maybe more. He looked bluish as he cantered, and I finally got the sights on his shoulder and a little ahead of him. I was squeezing when he dived into a patch of thorn and I lost him. I swung the gun some more to where he was supposed to come out, and when he came I touched her off at what I thought was a respectable lead. The bull barked and lunged, diving upward into the air and seeming to soar. He smacked into the heavy thorn, and you could hear him crashing as he went through the cover.
“I think you got him,” Harry said, excited. “The boys think so too.”
“Piga, bwana,” Kidogo was saying over and over while he was hitting me on the back. “Piga m’zuri. Piga. Piga.”
“Hapana piga,” I said. “God damn it to hell. I missed him. He started that bloody jump just as I squeezed off, and jumped right over my lead. There wasn’t any bullet whunk. I’d know it if I hit him. I didn’t hit him.”
“Let’s go look, anyhow,” Harry said. “I still think you walloped him. He jumped awful funny. He jumped like that big waterbuck jumped when you socked him that day at Ikoma.”
“You won’t find any blood,” I said. “Remember the oryx. You aren’t going to find any blood.”
We walked over to where the bull had crashed into the thick thorn, and we saw the ground scored deeply where his hoofs had cut it when he took off. We saw some broken thorn branches and a few patches of gray hair stuck to the wait-a-bits. The boys fanned out like pheasant dogs, spooring and circling and crisscrossing each other. They went a couple hundred yards into the bush and came back crestfallen.
“Hapana piga, bwana,” Kidogo said. “Hapana damu.”
“I told you,” I said. “There isn’t any blood and there isn’t going to be any blood. I missed that bugger a long mile. In a way I’m glad. I don’t want this thing to end before it starts. Make it too easy and you cheapen the whole business. I want to work some for my kudu, and when I get him I want a good one. This is one I want to really earn.”
“I’m glad,” Harry said. “There’s no point to shooting these things if they’re easy as topi. Beast’s too nobl
e to just bash the first day out. Wants a bit of work to make him immortal on your wall.”
“I bet I could have hit him,” the memsaab said.
“None of that, please,” Selby said. “Leave the bwana be. Any man with two lions and a leopard and a waterbuck as good as his needs no backchat from the manamouki.”
“Yes, master,” Virginia said. “In retrospect I don’t think I might have hit him after all.”
We got back in the jeep and turned her into a point of land where Kidogo said he and Frank Bowman had made their camp. It was under a huge grove of palms that grow those little round red nuts the elephants love—palms and towering thorns and figs and baobab. The thorns were the flat-topped acacia that make a flat canopy over a long, clean expanse of trunk. The trunks reached upward a hundred feet or more before they began to branch and form their roof. The ground was flat-trampled straw. Elephants had stood beneath these trees since there were elephants to stand beneath trees. The straw was as clean and dry and sweet smelling as the packed needles in an Italian pine forest down around Fregene. A slight breeze rustled the treetops and passed sweetly through the clearing. There was no reek of baboon. The sun, coming through occasional gaps in the foliage overhead, made little hot pools of light, slashes and crosses and islands of golden light on the golden straw, piercing the green shade as it pierces the windows of a church, leaving slanting streams of light in which the motes were swimming.
There were two piles of dung in the middle of the five-acre area. One was conical, two feet high and still smoking in the morning cool. The other, also smoking, was scattered in pellets the size of small golf balls. Harry pointed.
“Elephants,” he said solemnly. “Kudu. Just here. Took off when you shot back there. Man, you don’t have any problem with kudu. It’s just a matter of shooting the first very good one we see, and then hanging around a few more days to see if we can better him. I’ve been hunting this M.M.B.A. since I was a boy and I never, ever saw anything like this for game. Especially kudu. Place is simply stiff with ’em, and if they hang about the river like Bowman said, we’ve no problem. No problem at all.”
We didn’t really seem to have a problem about anything. Harry walked me down to the edge of the Little Ruaha, which was slow moving when compared to its big brother, and a half-dozen crocs just raised their snouts, blinked, and took their time sliding reluctantly into the water. The guineas were everywhere, squawking their “potrack” symphony and not bothering to fly. The big goosy doves were clamoring in the trees. We started a herd of waterbucks that didn’t even trouble to jump before they ran. Across the river you could hear the elephants bugling at each other in an amiable sort of way.
We strolled back to the clearing under the palms and the thorn and fiddled with lunch, but nobody ate much. We were too excited. The excitement that Harry felt, that Kidogo felt, that even the phlegmatic Adam felt, was too electric to permit much indulgence in food. We wanted to go and see it all, everything in it. As we finished the beer, a leopard sawed no more than a hundred yards away. This was high noon, when God-fearing leopards are supposed to be sleeping off last night’s excesses in the swamp.
About two we clambered back into Jessica and started down the river’s edge. By river’s edge you mean maybe half a mile away from it, because a thickish swamp and a broad donga divided the first swell of the hills from the actual water. We wound in and out of this swamp, all of which was elephant swamp, kudu swamp (for all we knew), but certainly baboon swamp, impala swamp, waterbuck swamp, leopard swamp, guinea swamp. Even to call it swamp is insult. It was a series of interlocking groves, shady and cool and clear underfoot where the elephants kept it trampled down. The troops of shrieking nugus were even very tame for baboons because you could stop the car and they wouldn’t panic and dash off, the kids clinging to the mamas’ backs and the old dogs looking surly and apprehensive in the rear-guard action. It was a hard bit of bush to describe. We had the groves, and we had the river, and we had the glades and the hills, and occasionally we had the bush, all laid out like somebody landscaped it that way. There were some peculiar laurel-looking bushes growing down around the river, and we wondered if maybe the kudu didn’t come down at certain times of the year to cram themselves with a certain leaf that for all we knew contained a kudu-type aphrodisiac.
Still coughing and spluttering and retching a bit from her bath, Jessica indicated in jeep sign language that she thought she ought to rest a bit and have her diaphragm looked into, so we stopped under one of the big elephant groves to tidy up her innards. Then we heard the elephant orchestra. We never saw the herd, even when we walked down to the banks of the river. What we saw were buffalo standing placidly on the bank, but what we heard was the awful crashing of the elephant bulls as they waded through the deep bush we couldn’t get to, with the river as high as it was. What we heard was the trumpeting like a philharmonic composed entirely of Harry Jameses. What we saw was the turmoil in the treetops as the herd threshed about.
And the buffalo. Yes, the buffalo. I looked at one bull for twenty-five measured minutes across twenty yards of water. I looked at him. He looked at me. When I left, he was still looking. So were the two or three hundred friends he had behind him. They never seemed a dime’s worth of alarmed.
We found a shallow sand bar where the sand grouse flighted to drink, and I marked it down against the morrow. We jumped five or six kudu cows and a couple more young bulls just across the donga that separated the swampy part from the brown hills. We walked up one bull we never saw. He barked throatily and crashed just ahead of us as we stumbled back from the riverbank to the jeep. He sounded old and he sounded big.
We rolled on some more and came onto a small shamba with some scared kids and timid wives in it, and they said that the boss man was off with his gun, trying to shoot the tandalla out of the corn patch. We achieved this fellow eventually and he was carrying a wire-trapped, sewer-pipe-barreled, muzzleloading flintlock that was undoubtedly loaded with rocks, nails, and pieces of broken glass. He said yes, there were tandalla. Between the tandalla and the tembo—the kudu and the elephants—he was just about to be et out of house and home. He had seen three big bulls this morning, but the bachelor coteries of bulls had not yet come down from the high hills. They were still with the cows, each man to his dames, and it would be maybe next month, September, before the big stag parties started on the banks of the river, and the bulls would desert the cows to hang stupidly about the river to eat some shrub he had not yet been able to identify. He said he would appreciate it very much if we would shoot twenty or thirty kudus just to keep them out of his yams. We said thank you very much, we would try to save him some trouble.
We wheeled the jeep around and headed back, fighting our way through the baboons and the hyenas and the impala, and suddenly came onto another herd of buffalo. There was a herd bull out in front that made my mouth secrete furiously, but Harry said no, we wouldn’t shoot anything around here until we’d collected the kudu. All of us—Harry, Virginia, Kidogo, Adam, Chabani, the old man, and me—got out of the car without guns. We walked toward the herd of buffalo. The herd walked toward us. At twenty yards both herds, human and buffalo, stopped walking and looked keenly at each other. The old bull stretched his neck and sniffed. He didn’t paw the nervous way they do, and he didn’t snort. The cows with him that had the little calves at their sides didn’t snort and nudge their kids back behind them. The calves walked ahead of their mothers.
We squatted down on our hams and smoked a couple of cigarettes each, and the smoke drifted straight away from us toward the buffalo. Eventually they stopped staring and began to crop the weeds around them. The calves played and butted each other and kicked up some fuss. The herd bull was still serious. He looked and looked and looked and finally said the hell with it, these people have no importance. He turned his back, and the herd began to feed away. Somewhere down the swamp two more leopards sawed, a crew of baboons scolded, a kudu barked, and a lion complained. This was still bright da
y.
“I’ve seen enough,” Harry said. “I want to go back to camp and think about it. I have always laughed at this business about untouched country because every hunter is always sounding off about secret territory, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t the secretest territory I ever saw. Not an animal we have seen today ever saw a man before, bar a few natives maybe, and these natives aren’t hunters. They’re bee robbers and agriculturists. Not even old Joe with the blunderbuss counts as a hunter. He couldn’t get close enough to kill anything with that sewer pipe, and even if he hit it, he wouldn’t hurt it. Might blow up and kill him, but that’s all.
“What I think we’d best do is bring a few pieces of gear over tomorrow and camp there by the river, under that fine grove, and not have to bother for a few days with fording the big Ruaha and making the eighteen-mile run twice a day. We’ll just hunt up and down the river from the camp until we’ve got our kudu. If we don’t like the first one too much we can switch back across the big Ruaha and hunt from the road in the high hills backward to Iringa.”
We drove slowly back to the old Bowman campsite, watching the game and hearing the noises and feeling the sun still warm as the breeze stiffened and grew chillier, as content as seven white and black people can be. We stopped for another look at the camp, and as we walked into it another young kudu bull barked, leaped, and streaked across the ground on which we would be living tomorrow. The shady grove still looked like a cathedral. We walked to the river again, and the same crocodiles looked bored and slid into the stream. The same elephants, I suppose, bugled in the deep green thicket across the way. There were two or three other piles of fresh dung, deposited since we had left that morning.
“You know,” Selby said, “I am not a particularly religious man, but there’s an awful lot of God loose around here.”