by Ruark, R.
I heard of a rich old man who was not shooting his own stuff, and he eventually got a kudu. A big bull had knocked his horns on a tree and had ruptured a capillary. The hunters picked up the blood spoor, jumped the bull, and trailed him over the serried hills of Kondoa Irangi for about ten miles. They finally came up on the bull, weak from loss of blood and staggering on his feet. The professional shot him neatly and mercifully, and the bloated old buzzard who short-ordered the beast has him looking proud and noble on the walls of his lodge today. I claim that this debases the animal.
Harry told me that he and Bob Maytag hunted themselves into a constant fever for two weeks after kudu, just missing every time, almost getting but never quite achieving. Their time had run out, too, and they decided to make one last hunt while the boys were breaking camp. They put up a big bull, who confounded all rules of kudu conduct by walking leisurely across their bow, giving Maytag half-a-dozen whacks at him. They had tracked him in their stocking feet, and when the bull took off after being hit hard a couple of times, they raced him a mile over mountains, accumulating horrid stone bruises and a really notable collection of thorns in feet during the chase. They piled back into camp, bleeding worse than the animal, with the back seat full of kudu, which is about like trying to load a dead mule into a wheelbarrow. When they got there, the camp had been broken and the lorry was piled high with gear. It had been that close.
There are all sorts of ways to hunt kudu. If you are hunting them in the mountains, you drive along the edge of the foothills and scan the cliffsides minutely with high-powered binoculars. Or else you find yourself a high point of vantage and sit there all day, endlessly sweeping the slopes with your glasses until a faint flick of ear or a flash of sun on white belly or gray flank exposes the animal. Then the work starts, the tough, mean climbing, out-of-breath-and-pain-in-the-stomach climbing, the long and difficult tracking, with the animal always a good five miles ahead of you, until suddenly he whimsically decides to stop to feed and you come up on him and kill him if you can hit him. And a lot of people who can hit everything else go mad when they finally come to close association with kudu, fire into the air, throw the gun away, and sit quietly on the ground to sob.
If you hunt him at the saltlicks, you are there before dawn and you wait and wait and wait and fight the tsetses and the mosquitoes, and maybe he comes, but then again maybe he doesn’t. If he comes, maybe something else comes and spooks him. If he comes at all, it is almost certain that something will happen to run him off.
Hunting him by the river was a new aspect of the business because, apart from an infrequent trip to drink, the kudu is not a low-ground animal, and this finding him in profusion in the flats was a thing neither Selby nor I had been exposed to. We decided to hunt him by guess and by God, as we would hunt anything else less exotic, and see how it turned out.
I do not remember how the days ran chronologically. We hunted near the Little Ruaha for a week. We hunted up the river and down the river. Always we saw kudu. One day when we were out, a big bull ran right through the middle of the camp. We hunted in native gardens and we hunted in the low hills. We hunted in the swamps and we hunted on the thornbush plains. We went to the ’Ndrobo’s secret country and torturously traversed huge flat grasslands where always the local bee robbers had seen mingi sana doumi the day before.
We hunted from before dawn until black night. We cut roads through thorn and rearranged Jessica’s vitals on rocky terrain that a tank couldn’t have handled. Every day we saw kudu—big bulls, little bulls, young bulls, old bulls, and enough cows to start a ranch. Always something happened.
Once we made a very careful stalk, with the wind just so, on a marvelous animal with a rack that would have been at least fifty-eight inches, a full foot better than any exceedingly desirable bull. He was feeding with his harem of seven cows on the brown slopes of some gently rising hills. He had been down to the river’s edge to drink or to eat the mysterious leaves or whatever he was supposed to be doing down there by the river. We saw him about eight o’clock in the morning, the grass still dew-wet, the leaves tremulous in the morning breeze, the sun hesitant and just warm enough, and the air as piercingly clear as a blast of pure oxygen in a doctor’s tent.
We hunted him perfectly. We stalked him a mile or more, slowly, cautiously, not cracking the sticks, not stumbling over the stones, not talking, not even breathing loudly. We went over hills and into valleys and finally, the wind stiff into our faces, we came up to the brow of a hill that was crowned by a craggy battlement of stones. I was in wonderful shape by now after six weeks of exercise. I wasn’t breathing hard, except maybe a little from excitement. I knew all I was going to do was rest that big .375 on a rock and lay the aiming post square on his shoulder and that would be the story. We would admire this monster, and Harry would tell the boys to taka headskin. We would cut out his filet and the boys would rob him of his fat and of his hams. We would skin him carefully to make a sports coat for Virginia of his lovely blue-gray, white-barred hide, and we would go home and get drunk.
I crawled to the battlement of stones and rose cautiously, inch by inch. I slid the rifle through a parapet in the rocks and looked down the barrel at seven cows. For no reason at all the doumi was not there with his wives. He had fed off, not frightened, not because he was hungry, but only because he was of a mood to wander that morning. I saw him, two thousand yards away, fiddling aimlessly around a hilltop, looking for a crap game or a buddy to swap a lie with. The cows were completely unaware of us, we had stalked them so carefully. They fed for ten minutes at thirty yards, while their faithless lord meandered around the young mountains.
We spoored this fellow all day, or nearly all day. We tracked him slowly and meticulously, with all the skills that Harry and the blacks knew, and sometimes we got as close as four or five hundred yards from him. Then in the late afternoon the wind veered sharply and we heard him bark. When we got up to where he’d barked, we saw the deep wounds his hoofs had made when he jumped. There would be no more of this fellow this day. Or any other.
That was a day among the days. Another day among the days was losing a big bull in the impassable elephant swamps where we’d finally bayed him after six hours of vicious, wicked, awful walking. He barked. He crashed. He went away. He went away like the big bunch we jumped in the deserted ruined garden. He went away like the troop Harry spotted from his hill, a troop that could go only the one way. They went the other way. They went the same way the big bunch went on the ’Ndrobo’s guaranteed plains, to which we cut our way painfully with pangas when Jessica couldn’t butt the thorn trees down any more.
The paradise of game was still there, but we didn’t see it any longer. We were no longer amused at the caperings of the impalas or the cavortings of the baboons, the squeals of the elephants or the cackle of the guineas. The peak point of the day, the coming-home, bath-taking, drink-making, food-eating, bed-going part of the day, was soured and flawed by frustration. Harry was short and surly with the blacks. Virginia was intuitively intelligent enough not to speak to either of us. We would sit morosely in front of the fire and brood.
Meat was short in the camp. We would not fire a gun even for food. When the last impala and the guineas gave out, we ate from cans and scarcely tasted what we ate. The quest of Cap’n Ahab for Moby Dick arose into my mind again, and I could begin to understand even more clearly than after the abortive effort for the rhino how a man may become obsessed with pursuit until it rides him like a witch on a broom. This was a beautiful camp, but it was not a happy camp.
On the fifth morning we had made a stab at one more bull in the low hills and lost him when the wind did a ring-around-therosy on us. We were driving morosely down toward the river, along the edge of the big donga, to give it a final sweep before we rode home for the lunch we didn’t have any appetite for. We were testing the edge of the donga for a place where the jeep might cross it without capsizing when Jessica stalled and Kidogo clamped my neck with his horny hand and Harry p
ointed straight ahead. There he was.
The sun was still low and rosy from the dawn, red and gold behind this kudu. He stood there, not scenting us, but seeing us, not frightened yet, not quite ready to jump. The sun was behind him and it splintered off his horns. His head was thrown back and his chin was pointed out. We could see only to the first curl, but he was as big as a bull elephant, and the massive roll of his horns as they came out of his skull made them look as thick as logs.
Harry raked him with the glasses and nodded. He checked him with naked eyes and nodded. He gave him the glasses some more and bobbed his head even more vehemently. He spoke very quietly.
“Get out and wallop him,” Harry said. “Slip around the edge of the donga to the right, and if you can make that tree while he’s still looking at us he’s your baby.”
I slid out the door and wormed on my belly behind the jeep and then Indian-crawled for a light-year until I made the tree. When I raised up behind the low thorn and poked the gun over a branch, he was still there. Through the scope he looked as big as a bull moose. I still couldn’t see anything beyond the first tremendous curl of horn, but they were as huge in the scope as mooring hawsers for a liner.
I hadn’t been able to pick his body out of the gray bush he was standing in on the other side of the donga, but now I could see him clearly through the scope, and it was a very mean shot. He was standing tail-end, too. His fore-shoulder was slightly out of alignment and his neck was crooked around so that while his head faced me, all I had to shoot at was either his rear end or a thin wedge of shoulder blade. I settled for the shoulder blade and held just behind it, hoping the bullet would slip in and take the heart, or at least bust the other shoulder as it went through him diagonally. The post was steady on the fore-end of his rib cage, and the trigger got squeezed and the big Winchester roared and the striking bullet made that soggy sound. I knew he was dead before I pulled because you can feel it, and you always know it and the rest is anticlimax.
The big bull never jumped. He pitched. He pitched over backward and fell out of sight in one of the little sandy inlets that ran along the edge of the donga. He was going to be there when I got there. He wasn’t apt to be going anywhere. Not with that magnum through his heart and out the other side, smack on the shoulder blade.
The blacks and Harry came down on me like a festival of ravens. They were yelling, and the blacks were jumping in that jerky, spastic, uncontrollable leap that forms the basis of all their tribal dances. They screamed in their various dialects and hit me on the shoulders with clenched fists. Harry was swiping at me with his hat and yelling as loud as the boys were yelling. I was yelling, too, and jumping up and down in almost the same spastic leaps that the ’Ndrobo was practicing, that Kidogo was doing, that even the stolid Adam and the sophisticated Chabani were doing.
Then we started to run, slipping and sliding down the steep sandy sides of the donga, wanting to get close to him and see him and stroke him and measure him and marvel at him, to skin out his head lovingly and take his hide tenderly and then to carry his memory back to camp so we could sit and drink to him and talk about him over and over again, while the boys ate his fine rich flesh and told about how the bwana had done it right and carefully when the moment to do it came, saying “Eeeehhh” to each other and bragging about their part of it.
For that thirty seconds I was the richest man in the world, as we ran, hearts thudding, breath gasping, to see our kudu, the cumulation of our joint effort.
We pounded up the other side of the donga, and there he lay, dead on his side, with his horns obscured by his twisted neck, the neat hole where the bullet went in exactly as I aimed it. Blue-gray on top, as clean and beautiful and neat and sweet and lovely as any animal ever will be, immortal now and past the possibility of rinderpest or hyenas or poisoned arrows or native blunderbusses. He was big. My God but he was big. Big as a horse and as dainty as a dik-dik.
Harry lunged for his head, twisted the neck, and almost screamed. We all saw it at once. He was a huge bull, all right. His horns had five inches of clear ivory tip. The roll from the forehead and the front curl were even more massive than they had looked through the scope. These horns would go forty-eight inches at least, a damned fine length of horn for any kudu. I wasn’t greedy. All I wanted was a good representative head.
The only thing was this: There was only one spiral to the horns instead of the great double spiral that makes a kudu a kudu. With his head thrown back against the sun, we had shot a three-year-old bull. The second curl was just starting. In two years he would have been sixty inches of magnificence. I had deprived him of the right to become worth collecting, the right to breed his wondrous possibilities into countless other calves who someday might be as magnificent as their father had had the chance to be before I robbed him of it by accident. I had cheated him and I had cheated me. I had done everything right except the one most important thing, the absolute certainty that this bull was of shootable qualification. I am afraid I cried a little. I cried for me and I cried for the bull and mostly I cried for the spoilage of perfection—of the ruination of the day and the trip and the location.
I do not know how to explain this, either. It was as if you had worked all your life to find gold, had found it, and suddenly it was transformed overnight into clay. It was as if you had courted a woman long and patiently, wooed her, won her, and she turned out to be the village dirty joke, a beautiful idiot with a nymphomaniac’s sense of values.
We had shot at the symbol of the kudu, the symbol manifest in the splendor of his horns. We had shot at the symbol and captured it whole, in pride, and then had it turn into shame.
“Do you want the headskin?” Harry said quietly. “It’s no trophy, of course. A one-curl kudu is like a tuskless elephant or a maneless lion or a hornless rhino. It’s not worth anything to you unless you just like to kill things, and if you like to kill things you might just as well shoot cows or wildebeests or giraffes.”
“Cut the head off and throw it to the hyenas,” I said. “I don’t want to be reminded of this ever again. I was so goddamned proud for thirty seconds. I thought this was all finished and I hadn’t butched it, and now it isn’t even started except for the lousy taste in my heart and in my mouth. I’d give ten of my own years to put him back as he was, standing high on that bank, waiting to grow that other curl, waiting to be worth immortalizing. The hell with him. Skin the poor bastard out and let the boys take his meat. But cut his head off first. I don’t mind him dead so much if he’s just a lovely hide for Virginia’s coat and a lot of fresh meat for the boys. But don’t expect me to eat any of him. I’d feel like a bloody cannibal.”
He wasn’t so bad with his head off. Now he was just a carcass. Nyama. The boys took his tenderloin and the two hindquarters and his liver, heart, and the stomach fat, and they skinned him carefully for Virginia’s coat. We stuck the dripping hide, wrapped around the hindquarters, into the back of the jeep and headed for camp. Nobody said anything, but Selby drove like an embittered demon, fighting the Rover and punishing her for his mistake and for my mistake.
The camp was waiting for us, because we were in early. Juma and Katunga and Virginia had run down from the camp up to the edge of the sandy plateau, and when they saw the slim legs sticking up from the back seat and the bit of gray hide showing above the side rails, they let out whoops and started a war dance. The other boys came down too, yelling, but when they saw our faces they all shut up. Kidogo said something in Swahili. The boys’ faces lengthened.
“Eeeehhh,” they said in sadness, and walked away.
“Lousy luck,” I said to Virginia. “Shot an immature bull by mistake. Make you a nice coat, though.”
“I don’t want any nice coat,” she said. “I’m awfully, dreadfully sorry.”
“Skip it,” Harry said. “There’s more about, and if the old boy handles it the same way, he’ll have no trouble. It was a lovely shot. A perfect shot for the circumstance. He shot it very well, really. Let’s all hav
e a spot of gin, what?”
“It’s ready,” Jinny said quietly. “I mixed up a batch of martinis when I heard Jessica coming down the river.”
We had lunch and we did not hunt kudu any more that day. I took the shotgun and went out after guinea fowl, to make them suffer for my sins. I didn’t care how much noise I made now. That night we had a lot more drinks and Juma came in proudly bearing a wonderful-smelling dish of broiled kudu tenderloin. I didn’t eat any of it. I ate a can of beans. I wasn’t very hungry.
We gave it another three days on the Little Ruaha. We hunted upriver as far as we could drive Jessica, and we hunted downriver. We saw mingi sana waterbucks and crocodiles and located three leopards. We avoided the elephants and marveled at the impalas. We saw plenty of kudu cows and plenty of young bulls, but the real bulls, the big bulls, were someplace else.
“Maybe in the hills back toward Iringa,” Harry said. “Maybe in the licks that one-eyed Somali is so high on. We’ve worn this place out. Riding up and down it for a week would’ve spooked every decent bull for some time. It’s my guess we’re not here for the real right time when the bulls leave the cows and congregate in bachelor mobs.
“Bowman was here in September. It’s my guess that whatever herb they’re after doesn’t leaf out until then. Then I think the cows hide out in the hills and the old men get together and go a little loco in the coco about that time. Frank said that they seemed a little goofy—that you could ride right up to them. We know there’s kudu here—God knows we’ve seen enough. But every mature bull we’ve seen has had a harem with him, and a bull around his family is twice as scary as when he’s off with the boys.”
I had regained a little perspective since shooting the young one-curl bull and had reassumed some good nature, if not charm. The humor of grown men grimly hunting an extra curl to a horn began to crop out. You would have thought we were looking for a lost lode or a mythological diamond pipe.