by Ruark, R.
“Let’s move back across the Great Ruaha to the campi by the village,” I said. “We can hunt from the road back up toward Iringa. That saltlick’s kicking about somewhere off the Iringa road, Abdullah the Charm Boy said. If they’re not at the lick, those hills are high enough to hide an army of ’em. Kidogo said that when he and Bowman came in they saw quite a lot of good bulls along the road.”
“Right,” Harry said. “I think we can give Jessica a rest and use the lorry for this operation. It’ll give Chege something to do. He’s been sitting on his fanny for the last week and courting the local demoiselles, and he’ll be getting soft. We can stand up in the back of that damned Annie and see a lot better on both sides than we can from the jeep. It’s a good ten feet of extra elevation.”
We packed up in echelons. I had some more writing to do, so I went with the first load. I was sorry to leave the Little Ruaha, the place of great promise that didn’t pay off. We hadn’t hurt it any. Apart from the one kudu and a few fowl for the pot, we had left the quiet and the trust of the animals intact. I hadn’t even shot any sand grouse, although that little sand bar was rugged with them. We left it as we found it, serene and beautiful and unspoiled.
We felt pretty good driving back to the other camp. Virginia was singing a song that went: “I killed a kanga in the donga with a panga, olé!” which didn’t make a whole lot of sense but had a nice lilt to it and meant that she had slain a guinea fowl in a dry arroyo with a big knife. I expect we were all pretty silly at times.
I remembered our nice old man and shot him a big, tough, ugly-horned impala ram just as we came up to his compound, and he seemed properly grateful. We paid off our Wa-Arusha ’Ndrobo and sent him off into the bush again, looking only a little less miserable than before. We came up to the high cutbank, and I waded the freezing river again for the last time, staggering and slipping and sliding, and went to the main camp and set up the typewriter. Virginia corralled Juma and got busy turning her hair from black to white again, with a sizable gathering of the local maids gazing fascinated at the operation. There was more and more ham coming out in Juma as he gained in proficiency as a hairdresser. Old Juma already had half-adozen wives staked out in little teashops and other commercial ventures, just to keep them away from the Kikuyu cabdrivers when he was out in the bush. I could already see a new shop in the making, with a sign saying: “Monsieur Juma. Coiffeuses élégantes.”
While I was writing, we had a visitor. It was Abdullah. Abdullah, the one-eyed dude. He was bareheaded this time. His hair was oiled with a perfume you could smell clean back to Dodoma. He was sweating some and the oil was running down his forehead. He was wearing sandals and a skirt and a Norfolk jacket and a bigger dagger. His fat stooge was now playing gunbearer. He was bearing a single-barrel shotgun guaranteed to blow up within the next week. They had been hunting, Abdullah said, making me a present. The present was a big, vicious, ugly Muscovy duck. Another stooge, a young boy stooge, had it on a leash. This was the ugliest duck I ever saw. He was even uglier than Abdullah, and when the Anointed One suggested that we have him for supper, Jinny muttered that if it came to a hard choice she personally would rather eat Abdullah. He figured to be both younger and tenderer. We gave the duck to the cook, with a short prayer that it would escape.
We were up reasonably early the next day and piled into the back of the truck. We hunted near the high rocky road all morning and saw nothing except a few scraggly guinea fowl. Abdullah the Mighty Hunter was with us, with two gunbearers for one gun, a bottle of tea, and a sack of hard candy. Abdullah had on his big-game clothes now—a pith helmet, a silk shirt, gabardine shorts, and fancy embroidered sandals. Today’s ceremonial sword had a tassel on it. Abdullah was a talker. He never quit. He told us about his children and his wives and his girlfriends and his boyfriends. He told us all about kudu. He showed us the way to the saltlick, about ten miles out of camp. It was a good lick. It had some animal droppings and a few kudu hoofmarks and some rhino tracks and one curled kudu horn from a good bull, since the horn was over fifty inches. We blinded and waited until after black dark, but nothing came to muzzle at the salty ooze that bubbled greenly up from the soft, white, rock-studded sand.
We were up there in the black dawn the next day, too, and nothing came until about ten, when Harry saw a small herd feeding down from the hills in our general direction. Harry was high on a hilltop, while I was low at the edge of the lick. It seemed we would have some luck at last. The band of kudu was within five or six hundred yards and feeding steadily when some transient honey hunters decided the time had come to burn off the plain. They set fire to the grasses, and that was the end of that.
Harry came scowling down from the hill, and on the way home, heading down the steep clay road, we jumped two youngsters who whipped across the road ahead of us and then paused, barked, and dashed across the road again. We were watching the juveniles without getting down from the truck when the biggest, oldest, heaviest horned, longest horned grandfather of all kudus burst from the bush, cantered down the road ahead of us, stopped in the middle of the road to let us look at him, and then hopped blithely off the road to stand not twenty feet from it in a patch of low bush. This was a kudu. This was a real kudu.
As he had run along, his horns swept back and passed his rump. Kidogo muttered to Harry: “Bigger than Bwana Bowman’s.”
A shootable mature kudu bull is forty-five or forty-six inches long in the horns. A good kudu is forty-eight. A fine kudu is fifty. A miraculous kudu is anything over fifty. Bowman’s kudu was fifty-nine inches, a giant, a Primo Camera, a freak. And this kudu, this kudu now standing, waiting, ears cocked in the bush, was bigger than Bowman’s. He would go sixty or sixty-one. This was the Goliath of the kudu family. And he was right there, a couple hundred yards down the road, waiting to be collected. God was smiling again.
Harry and I soared over the side of the truck. We crouched and sneaked down the side of the road. Then God laughed right out loud. This kudu, this ancestor of all kudu, had chosen the only baobab tree within five miles to duck behind. We could hear him move in the bush. But between us and him, wherever he moved, he always stayed behind a baobab tree about as big as a railroad roundhouse. No baobab, one kudu in the bag, one record in the books, one head for the wall, and away we go, singing and scattering flowers. One baobab in the way, no kudu, no head for the wall, no record for the books.
There wasn’t anything for us to do but dash around the tree and try to belt him on the fly. We crept round it, and he had chosen his bush well. He was in it, but you couldn’t see him in it. Then he caught our scent and saw us and he barked like a great Dane and went through the heavy thorn like a herd of elephants. We never saw him. We just heard him, those horns clattering as they tore holes in the intermeshed thorn.
“We haven’t lost him yet,” Harry said. “There’s a cut there between the hills. He’ll go out one end or the other. We’ll take the high end of the pass and send the boys round to the other end to beat him. He almost has to come out our way because he’ll be heading for the cloud country. We’ll have to hurry, though.”
We hopped back in the truck. It deposited us at the top of a high hill. Harry spoke rapidly to Kidogo, and the truck departed for the other end of the draw. We fought our way over three or four hills and valleys and finally wound up in a commanding position at the high end of the draw. We sat down on rocks and lit cigarettes. The wind carried the smoke directly over our heads. We were even getting a break from the wind.
We waited and chatted in low voices, marveling at the size of this old grandfather and not daring to hope he’d come past us, although there really wasn’t any other way for him to come. The hell there wasn’t. In an hour the boys showed up, having beaten clear through and up the draw. Kidogo and Adam had seen him. Grandpa had gone straight up over the top. He didn’t need draws or coulees to run in. This was a real alpine-type kudu. He saw a mountain and he just ran straight up the side of it, shook his scornful tail, and aimed for Rhodesia
. We hunted him for the rest of the week. We never saw him again.
There were others. There was the good bull that Harry took a bang at from a range of no more than a hundred yards as the kudu stood proudly in a clump of bush, his chest and neck and head making a queer, camouflaged extension of the thorn. You could hear the bullet hit with a whack like a beater on a carpet. The bull went over. Or seemed to go over, just as my youngster had toppled. We shrieked again and ran to where he had stood. Hapana doumi. He was not there. We looked for blood, sure that he was hard hit and that we could track him easily. Hapana damu. No blood. No tracks, either, except the scars where he had jumped. The scars were there. A fresh pile of dung was there. Some hairs from his hide were caught in the thorn. He had been there. We had seen him there. We had heard the gun go off and heard the bullet strike, but there was no kudu and no blood and no tracks. Hapana. Three hours of hard work, six people tracking, six experts peering and spooring and sniffing, and no nothing at all. Hapana kapisa.
“I’m licked,” Harry said. “I am not the best shot in the world, but I can hit a running lion or a charging leopard and I can shoot a Tommy at four or five hundred yards with no scope. I am dead on the chest of a bull kudu standing at eighty or ninety yards, and I hear the bullet smack and see the bull go over, and when I get up to where he was there isn’t any bull and there isn’t any blood and there aren’t any tracks leading out. Where the hell did he go? To heaven?”
“The angels came and took him away,” I said. “He is riding up in heaven on a thornbush cloud. How the hell do I know what happened to him? You’re the expert. At least we find the ones I shoot, immature bulls or not. They are on the ground when we come up to them. Are you sure you’re a real professional hunter? After all, you got us lost at Ikoma and. . . .”
“All right, all right,” Harry said. “Let’s go back to camp and eat that bloody duck of Abdullah’s as penance. I can’t think of a harder penance, can you?”
“Not even in a joke,” I said. “Let’s go report another futile expedition to the memsaab. I haven’t seen her to speak to in about a week.”
Ali had tenderized Abdullah’s offering through incantation, prayer, and about two days of steady boiling. It was very tender and surprisingly good, but tempered by the fact that Abdullah came to call in his party clothes. Mohammedan or not, he seemed to expect an invitation to drinks, which was not offered. Harry is not the kind of Englishman who has the locals in to tea. Especially if the locals are Somalis.
Of course we hunted along the road some more. We hunted by the licks some more. Some ’Ndrobo came in one day with lofty stories of a fabulous lick they knew where the tandalla were so mingi sana that only a bow and arrow was considered a sporting weapon. After a long and tough trek afoot, we wound up at their fabled lick. It was the same old tired lick we had been patronizing for a week, and driving up to within a quarter mile of it. Some ’Ndrobo.
“They’d starve to death in a butcher shop,” Selby said contemptuously.
We saw a lot more kudu, some good, some medium, some poor. We never got another shot. There was the one last, good, big bull we located, but he played baobab-around-the-rosy with us as his cousin had done, using the only other baobab in the locality as his operating base.
On the fifteenth day we said the hell with it and packed up. We weren’t having any fun any more, the kind of fun we had had earlier. It had become a grim game, a monotonous business of riding along the roads and climbing in the hills, watching and waiting and always being bored and disappointed. The camp talk had degenerated into a one-track business of kudu, kudu, kudu, what we’d done wrong and what the kudu had done to thwart us. Virginia said that as companions we rated somewhere between deaf mutes and professional athletes.
“If I ever hear the word ‘kudu’ again, I intend to scream and not stop screaming for a full day,” she said.
We paid a call on Abdullah, who was got up in a red fez and a bolero jacket and jodhpurs, with a purple-and-gold sash and something very heavy and fancy in the way of bangles. He had changed his scent and his pomade, and his hair was very artistically done. He had changed his earrings, too. He seemed sorry to see us go because he still had hopes of being asked to dinner.
We drove the jeep into Iringa, ahead of the lorry, and went to the little hotel to wait for the truck to labor and wheeze up the hills behind us. They had real scotch whisky at the bar and flush toilets. Virginia was so carried away by the bar and the flush toilets that she got rather uproariously loaded on no more than half-a-dozen scotches. She said later that it wasn’t the whisky. It was the reaction from too much kudu. Kudu poisoning, she called it.
When the boys came up, they were jabbering. I knew what they were saying without understanding it.
“They say they jumped the biggest kudu bull they’ve ever seen,” Harry says. “On the road behind us. Chege says he was bigger than the huge old boy we lost behind the baobab. How about it? Make you angry?”
“I couldn’t care less,” I said. “Let’s have the bartender throw another double at us and then let’s go back down to Kitete and shoot us an oryx before we go home. I’m all caught up on kudu.”
“You know,” Harry said, “if you ever write this I have a title for you. It’s Earned but Not Collected.”
“It’s a good title,” I said. “I’ll try to remember it.”
Chapter 14
SOME PEOPLE say I look a little like Ernest Hemingway used to look when he was younger. At least I have a mustache. At least I read the man when I was much less aged and learned a lot thereby. I also followed his habits. He liked Cuba. So did I. We used to drink together, before the war, in different parts of the Floridita Café, which Constante runs off the square in Havana. I never spoke to Hemingway, who would be sitting behind the potted palm in the corner of the café, peering like a nearsighted professor over his glasses and reading the Diario, drinking the best daiquiris in the world, and looking very wise and schoolmasterish.
I liked the cangrejos moros that the maestro liked, and I liked all the food next door at the Zaragozana, and I liked his good friends around the town. I liked how he wrote and what he had done and the things he was interested in. I liked it that he had been to Africa, where I had not been. I liked it that he had seen bulls that I had not seen, and that he had married women I had not married. Also that he had divorced women I had not enjoyed the opportunity of divorcing.
But I was very young and full of pride. I was too proud to walk twenty feet to talk to Papa. I was too proud to ask Constante to introduce me. I couldn’t go over to this man and say that I was a writer, too. Not especially since I toiled for the same firm that had paid Papa’s way through Paris when he was learning to work with a typewriter. I was very possibly making more money at that time than he was making when he was learning how it felt to be young in Paris.
But you cannot just walk up to Ernest Hemingway and say, “Que tal, Papa, I am a writer too,” or “I am a turísta who admires your stuff.” So for two weeks I sat and looked at the gran maestro and wished something would happen so we could have a drink together because there were so many things I wanted to ask him. Nothing happened.
The time passed and a war came and I got mixed up in the gunnery end of that one and made several experiments into fear. I became an authority on fear, real fear and imagined fear. We were hit once by a German and again by lightning. We dodged mines and got bombed and watched friends disintegrate. That was real fear. A worse fear was seeing a naval battle at night—a battle that did not actually happen—and seeing a German E-boat run through the ranks of a convoy while being bombed by a plane, and learning that although everybody saw it there wasn’t any E-boat there and no plane was bombing the E-boat that wasn’t actually there anyhow.
Then the war was over and I began to write again and I went back to the Africa I knew now and loved and went to Spain and Mexico and saw bullfights. I shot quail and drank whisky and went back to Australia to see if the women were still pretty, and the
y were. I shot Nauru deer in the high hills of Kiawe Nui on Molokai and pheasants in Connecticut and ducks in Louisiana. I busted a general out of Italy and chased a hoodlum out of Havana and imagined myself to be a hell of a fellow, always in the Hemingway pattern.
One day I looked around and realized that I was in Tanganyika, shooting lions with the same basic string of blacks that Hemingway had used fifteen years before. I had a handsome white hunter, just like the late Francis Macomber had a handsome white hunter, and a pretty wife I hoped wasn’t going to shoot me in the head for convenience. I hoped I wasn’t going to acquire gangrene or get chewed up, either. I am not Gregory Peck.
This day I was crawling after buffalo, which I did not really want to do. I am bitterly afraid of buffalo, the big, rope-muscled wild ox with horns like steel girders and a disposition to curdle milk. I had walked through a swamp that was full of water and snakes and rhinos. I had crawled and stumbled over two young mountains to reach a herd of buffalo that I didn’t really want to associate with. I had already shot a buffalo and figured that was one thing I wouldn’t have to do any more of. But Selby has a mad affection for the mbogo, a sort of perverse love and a completely unmanageable fascination for the big beasts. We had come back to the high plains under the Rift escarpment by Kitete, back from the fruitless kudu expedition, back for one more try at rhino. And there was no rhino. But on the steep side of one of the hills reaching up to the escarpment there was a sprinkling of tiny black worms.
Adam, the Wakamba gunbearer, pointed. “Mbogo,” he said, and I could already feel my stomach start to knot. It was the same feeling I used to get when the lookout on the bow would reach for the phones and ring the bridge. “Periscope,” he would say. “Periscope bearing so-and-so many degrees off the starboard bow,” as if he were pleased at having done me a favor.