by Ruark, R.
I noticed then for the first time that nobody had raised his voice above a whisper all day long.
Bending back to camp in the bloody-streaked sunset and the creeping chilliness of the dusk, we passed Harry’s ornate hill, and he climbed it. When he hit the summit, maybe two hundred feet of sheer drop above ground, he turned and waved at me. I lost a lot of breath getting up to the rock where Harry was sitting contemplatively like an old baboon. While I panted the ache out of my chest, he pointed. In the fading light you could see the shimmer of horns—big, back-twisted horns—a couple of hundred yards away and off to the right in the thorn. There was a steady wake behind the horns. We counted. There was the one big kudu bull. There were two youngsters, and then there were twelve cows.
“Too late to go after them,” Harry said. “By the time we’re down the hill you couldn’t see to shoot in that thick there. We’ll see ’em tomorrow. But my God, Bob, have you ever even imagined anything like this?”
When we climbed down over the square chunks of rocks and walked to the car, it was nearly black. We drove home quietly and carefully, with the yellow from Jessica’s headlamps tonguing out ahead of us hesitantly as we picked our way through the hardened ruts of the wallows and skimmed over the sedgy grass. We dropped the ’mzee at his shamba and told him that tomorrow we would shoot him a piece of meat, for very sure, before we went into the kudu country where we didn’t want to make any noise. The ’mzee looked doubtful, but another pack of Chesterfields happied him up a little.
We beat through the heavy bush and made the riverbank of the Great Ruaha. It was still as cold as I remembered it. We had a drink and ate quietly. We didn’t want to talk too much and mouth up what we had seen that day. I was going to be the very first load tomorrow when we started to shift the camp, carrying the necessities through the rushing river and moving what we could by a series of trips to the solemn camp by the Little Ruaha. I didn’t know what was apt to come after me, but I did know that I was going to be the first one to go and the one to stay there by myself, with a gun, a table, a typewriter, and a bottle of beer.
We packed the first necessities into Jessica in the early dawn and said “Jambo” to the old man as he sat in front of his meager little fire. We didn’t need the old man any more, but there was a small herd of zebra fidgeting around a half mile from his shamba, and I remembered that the old boy said he was sore and sick for meat. There was a big fat stallion who seemed overly curious for his own good, and we were twelve miles from the main kudu country. I hopped out of Jessica’s lap and found myself a tree with a crotch in it and bored a small hole through the punda’s ears so’s not to spoil the meat for the old man. Then we hitched a rope around the zebra’s neck and hauled him back a half mile for the ’mzee to skin and cut up, to eat the first day’s meat and dry the rest, to carve the fat off the bulging intestines, and to be happy over it and with it and to remember us kindly. The whole sweetness-and-light operation took a half-hour, and nobody was unhappy except perhaps the zebra’s first three widows and a flock of concubines he was undoubtedly cheating with when the legal mares weren’t looking.
The old man was surprised when we showed up dragging the zebra. His experience with white folks had led him to expect nothing in the way of the fulfillment of a promise. He looked a little disappointed at his miscalculation of worth. But he lost the disappointed look when he saw how fat the dead punda actually was. We told him “Kwaheri” and absconded. That was a nice old ’mzee.
We traveled through the zoo to the campsite and unloaded the jeep. There wasn’t much to unload this trip. I had the mess table and the big double rifle and the .375 and the chop box and some beer and my typewriter and some odd bits and pieces of equipment. The main stuff would come on the next three trips, and the last trip would bring Virginia. Harry had the Mannlicher, and he was going to shoot a piece of meat for us to eat on the last trip, far away from here, where the noise wouldn’t bother our friends. He had the little shotty-gun and was going to assassinate a couple of guineas just outside the ’mzee’s shamba, and that would feed us for half a week. Shooting around the camp on the Little Ruaha seemed very wrong unless it was awfully important or necessary.
I stacked the guns against a big tree’s butt, set up the mess table, opened the typewriter, pried the top off a bottle of beer, untangled a camp chair, and sat down to look and listen. I would write after a while, maybe after I had finished lunch and a nap. There was nobody around but me, nobody else in the world but me and a million animals and a thousand noises and the bright sun and the cool breeze and the shade from the big trees that made it cathedral cool but a lot less musty and damp and full of century-old fear and trembling. I got to thinking that maybe this was what God had in mind when He invented religion, instead of all the don’t and must-nots and sins and confessions of sins. I got to thinking about all the big churches I had been in, including those in Rome, and how none of them could possibly compare with this place, with its brilliant birds and its soothing sounds of intense life all around and the feeling of ineffable peace and goodwill so that not even man would be capable of behaving very badly in such a place. I thought that this was maybe the kind of place the Lord would come to sit in and get His strength back after a hard day’s work trying to straighten out mankind. Certainly He wouldn’t go inside a church. If the Lord was tired, He would be uneasy inside a church.
I was very happy to be here and very grateful to be here all by myself with a bottle of cool beer and some peaceful thoughts, and presently I would try to put some of them down on paper. I was awfully grateful to have been allowed to live long enough and to have made enough money to permit me to take this trip with a man I liked and admired and the only woman I had ever been married to and a baker’s dozen of black men whom I respected and who respected me. I was especially glad that ship didn’t blow up that day in the Mediterranean. I felt very sad for my best and oldest friend, Jim Queen, who loved this sort of stuff as much as I did but who was never going to be able to do it with me because a JU-88 came over a hill at Salerno one day and laid one into Jimmy’s stack and that was all there was of Jim, then and forevermore. I was grateful that it hadn’t worked that way with me, because the opportunity was equal.
I was never going to forget that day, a little east of Oran, about four-fifteen in the afternoon of a gray day, when the subs came and the low-level boys and the torpedo bombers—long, sharky-looking Heinkels—came up from around the Balearios and started to blow up the convoy. They got square onto the midships of a lad in the column to my left and just abaft me, and he blew like a firecracker because this was an all-ammunition convoy and there were about seven thousand tons of bombs under me, and tetryl detonators, and another two thousand tons of aviation gas in one hold of my ship, and if we got hit that was all she wrote.
There were about ninety big ships, not counting the escort, in this convoy, and they all had twin three-inchers forward and five-inch thirty-eights after and bristly clumps of Oerlikons in tubs fore and aft and on the bridge. The air was suddenly full of iron and fire, and the shrapnel was rattling down like hailstones, except sharper. I saw one ship, panicky, fire directly onto the bridge of a sister ship. The corvettes and destroyer-escorts were close into the African shore, dropping big, geysering depth charges. Occasionally a ship would blow or a plane would glide smokily down and explode in the gray cold sea. Then the Spits came out from Africa and started working upstairs, and a DE chased a submarine in close and walloped him with the ash cans.
The attack was nearly over and my kids were shooting at one last tenacious Heinkel who was unleashing a fish into the convoy when the entire starboard side of the gun crew yelled: “Torpedo on the starboard bow.” You could see whatever it was bucking through the gray chop, and I yelled down to the Old Man to give her all the right wheel he had so we could head into the torpedo and let it slip past the fantail. But the old bucket was belly heavy and sluggish, and although she began to swing she didn’t swing fast enough, and this thing
belted us just at the No. 2 hatch. The deck plates popped and flames came up and there was a great crash where the thing struck. This was going to be the end of the trip I hadn’t wanted to make—the one more run before we were relieved. This was the trip I wasn’t supposed to make because I already had seven months of ammo runs to tough places and we were supposed to get off in Baltimore the last time home, but nobody relieved us and here we were, dead.
The things you think about when you have a second or so of life left are not noble. I remember feeling a vague and misty sadness that all I loved of life was over and I would not be twenty-seven years old until the next month. What a pity, I thought, to leave it so soon and with so many things undone. I did not pray and I did not ask God’s forgiveness, nor did I rail or weep or raise my mental voice. The thought flickered that I would shoot no more quail, love no more women, drink no more whisky, eat no more steaks. I was a little sad for Virginia’s sake. I hated to leave her a widow because she would feel so bad so long and she was a peculiar kind of dame who would probably never find anybody who got along with her as well as I did. These are the thoughts I thought when I was already dead, because I had seen so many ammo ships catch the big horn and I knew what happened to them. Pinwheels and skyrockets and one big boom.
But the ship did not blow. She listed, moaned, and some fires flickered and went out, but she did not blow. Nobody knows why. For the longest thirty seconds of any man’s life she was potential explosion and she didn’t explode. I was an older man when I went round to the ladder and yelled down at the Old Man. The Old Man was a quiet Dane who never flustered.
“What are you going to do about this pot?” I yelled into the wind. “Do we get off and walk, or what?”
“Vell,” the Old Man said calmly, “she don’t blow and she’s still answering de veel. If she’s answering de veel, I guess ve vill just stay aboard and see what happens.”
She answered de veel all the way to Malta, where we got bombed, and all the way up the Adriatic to Bari, where we dodged mines and got bombed, and all the way back to Bizerte, where we got submarined and missed and then hit by lightning. She answered de veel all the way to Oran, where they sank a ship as she came out to join us. She answered de veel all the way home, as far as Philadelphia, where it was Thanksgiving Day and nobody was working on Thanksgiving Day in the States, and we had to stay in the stream.
Then I got off her and was a little mad for a period of days, having noisy trouble with waiters and hitting a Pullman conductor and drinking too much and not sleeping at all. It was going to be a long time before I could hear an airplane in the night without coming full awake and reaching blindly for tin hat and pistol. I remembered undressing one afternoon to take a nap at my mother-in-law’s house, and she was having a hen bridge party. A commercial plane came over, flying low, and I hit the stairs, running. That I was entirely naked seemed to disconcert the female guests.
I thought of all the stuff about the Pacific, the Japs living in caves and in the woods on Guam, and coming up at night to drink from our freshly erected outdoor shower baths and to steal what they could and occasionally shoot a Marine or a Seabee. I remembered that ghastly hop all the way from Guam to Melbourne in a two-motored aircraft, and waking up with a hangover in the middle of the Owen Stanley range in New Guinea and not knowing where I was, and landing blind at a place called Owi or Ebi or some such, landing with no radio on a field that had no lights at night. I thought about the long, painful hospital time in the Solomons and later in San Francisco, with a shattered arm that could just as easily have been a shattered back. I thought of all the landings and takeoffs and the near squeaks when the motors cut out that time over Brazil, cut out first and then caught fire, and we were just lucky to be right over a place called Barreiras when it happened, the only decent emergency field between Rio and Belém.
I believe that this was when I said a short and simple prayer of thanks to Whomever it was that had been keeping His eye on me all these years. It was sort of like a delayed bread-and-butter note, way overdue, but nonetheless well meant and sincere. I hoped God would understand that I had been awful busy and was sorry I hadn’t gotten around to thanking Him earlier. I hoped He would keep on looking after me so I could live to be an old, cranky man and come back to Africa many more times.
I suppose I must have dropped off to sleep a little bit because when I woke up there was a nearly naked native leaning on a spear and looking at me with considerable interest. He had on an old moth-bit goatskin, as filthy as he was, if that was possible. His beard grew in scabby patches, and he had no front teeth. There was a bow and a quiver of arrows on his back. He was barefoot, and his legs were sore and scabby from insect bites.
“Jambo,” I said. “Pray do join me.”
“Jambo, bwana,” he said. “Wapi Haraka?”
I said as best I could that Harry was off at the other camp on a highly secret mission involving the fetching of tents and other gear. I didn’t bother to ask him how he knew Harry’s nickname was Haraka, meaning “hurry.”
“Wapi Memsaab?” he asked. “Where is the lady with the white hair?”
I told him that the lady was back at the other camp, too, waiting for Harry so that they could shoot me in the neck and run off to live on my millions. I didn’t bother to ask him how he knew there was a memsaab and how he knew she had white hair. Except the goose pimples started to form and my neck hairs bristled. Harry had never been here before, and we had never been here before, but here is this black Robin Hood calling Harry by his Swahili nickname and asking after Virginia’s dyed hair. Then I remembered the drums going loud all the way along the line and reckoned pretty accurately that the locals were alerted as we traveled, sort of alerted that some live ones were en route and could be depended on for tips, tin cans, bottles, food, tobacco, and in some instances employment.
I asked this character what manner of man he was and what tribe proudly claimed him.
“ ’Ndrobo,” he said. “Wa-Arusha ’Ndrobo.”
If he was a Wa-Arusha ’Ndrobo, he was a hell of a far piece from home. The ’Ndrobo, maybe you don’t know, are outcasts of all the tribes. They have been expelled for one sin or another, like Robin Hood’s men, and they live in the high hills. They live by stealing and robbing beehives and trapping and shooting animals with their bows and arrows. They are generally magnificent woodsmen. They have to be, or starve.
This laddy-buck said that the birds had told him that we wanted a tandalla, and that he was the local expert on tandalla. He said he had seen two big bulls this morning, back over yonder—with a wave of the hand—and three big bulls yesterday, away down yonder—with the other hand sweeping down the river. He said he knew a saltlick, back over yonder— with the finger pointing back across the big Ruaha—that was so populous with tandalla that the horns made a thicket all by themselves. He said that for a remarkably small amount of money he would slave for us, guarantee us a fine tandalla, and otherwise richen our lives by his constant attendance. I said I would think it over and we would wait for Harry. He allowed me to give him a cigarette, which he stuck in the hole in his ear, and went happily off to sleep.
I built myself a spot of lunch from the chop box and opened another bottle of the Tusker. Then I got out the writing paper and unlimbered the typewriter, to try to tell the folks back home what all this was like. I don’t imagine I was very successful at it.
Harry rolled up after a bit, with the cook and one personal boy and Juma packed into the Rover, together with the sleeping tent and the cooking gear. There was an impala buck tied on the bonnet, and he tossed a couple brace of guinea fowl out of the car. He woke up the ’Ndrobo, questioned him a long time, told him he was hired, told Juma to give him something to eat, and went back to get Virginia and the rest of the duffel.
It was nightfall when he got back, with a story about having seen another big mob of kudu and some more tame eland. He looked tired and happy. He knew and I knew—we all knew—that we would get a kudu tomorrow.<
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Chapter 13
I DO NOT KNOW if I can explain a kudu, or tandalla, except possibly by the drawing at the head of this chapter. The drawing is done fuzzily, an impression rather than a sharp delineation—a gray blur, partially seen, swift to vanish. A kudu is definite only when he is dead.
There is something about this lovely beast that makes him a hunter’s grail. Perhaps it is the tremendous sweep of those double-curling horns, as brown and clean as rubbed mahogany, heavy-ridged from the base around the curls, and ending in polished ivory points. Perhaps it is the chevron on his nose, or his clean, gray, white-barred hide, the skin thin as parchment. Perhaps it is the delicacy of his long-legged deer’s body, the slimness of his long deer’s legs, the heaviness of his mane and the swell of his neck, the enormity of his ears that pick up whispers at a radar range. Perhaps it is his perverseness, his consummate genius for doing the wrong thing always, to confound his pursuer, such as being in the hills when he should be at the licks, or being by the river when he should be in the hills, or being by the licks when he should be by the river. A djin gradually crawls into the body of the man who hunts him, to where he is devilishly possessed by kudu and is incapable of transferring his attention to anything else. The kudu is just under your hand, and yet he always manages to escape you. Sometimes he escapes you even if you kill him.
There is nearly always a sardonic touch to the story of a kudu. You always seem to get him at the last hour of the last day, with the rains sweeping down from the south, the money and the time running out, and personal patience whetted to an unbelievable edge of irritability. The frustration mounts and mounts and finally achieves an outlandish proportion, to where the whole camp pins its entire attention on the late-evening arrival of the hunting car. If there are horns in it, the camp rejoices. If there are no horns, the boys set out the whisky and move as quietly as possible, not laughing, and talking in whispers. Nobody asks you how it went that day. Everybody knows.