by Ruark, R.
There was only the tree to watch, a first fork full of nothing, and then there was a scrutching noise like the rasp of stiff khaki on brush, and where there had been nothing but tree, there was now nothing but leopard. He stretched his lovely spotted neck and turned his big head arrogantly and slowly and he seemed to be staring straight into my soul with the coldest eyes I have ever seen. The devil would have leopard’s eyes, yellow-green and hard and depthless as beryls. He stopped turning his head and looked at me. I had the post of the scope centered between those eyes. His head came out clearly against the black background of forest. It looked bigger than a lion’s head.
You are not supposed to shoot a leopard when he comes to the first fork. The target is bad in that light, and small, and you either spoil his face if you hit him well or you wound him and there is the nasty business of going after him. You are supposed to wait for his second move, which will take him either to the kill or to a second branch, high up, as he makes a decision on eating or going up in the rigging. If he is not shot on that second branch or shot as he poises over the kill, he is not shot. Not shot at all. You can’t see him up high in the thick foliage.
And Harry had said: On a given night there has never been more than one shot at a leopard.
I held the aiming post of my telescopic sight on that leopard’s face for a million years. While I was holding it, the Pharaohs built the pyramids. Rome fell. The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor.
And then the leopard moved. Only you could not see him move. Where there had been leopard, there now was only fork. There was not even a flash or a blur when he moved. He disappeared. He appeared. He appeared on a branch to the left of the kill, a branch that slanted upward into the foliage at a 45-degree angle. He stood at full pride on that branch, not crouching, but standing erect and profiling like a battle horse on an ancient tapestry. He was gold and black against the black, and there was a slightly ragged rosette on his left shoulder as he stood with his head high.
The black asparagus tip of the aiming post went to the ragged rosette, and a little inside voice said, Squeeze, don’t jerk, you jerk, because Selby is looking and you only get one shot at a—
I never heard the rifle fire. All I heard was the bullet whunk. It was the prettiest sound I ever heard. Not quite the prettiest. The prettiest was the second sound, which said Blonk. That was the sound the leopard made when he hit the ground. It sounded like a bag of soft cement dropping off a high roof. Blonk.
There were no other sounds. No moans. No growls. No whish of swift bounding feet on bush. A hand hit me on the shoulder, bringing me back into the world of living people.
“Piga,” Harry said. He was very excited. “Kufa. As bloody kufa as a bloody doornail. Right on the button. He’s dead as bloody beef in there. We were as near to losing him as damn to swearing, though. I thought he’d never leave that bloody fork, and when he went I knew he was heading up to the crow’s-nest. You shot him one sixtieth of a second before he leaped, because I could just make out his start to crouch. You got both shoulders and the heart, I’d say, from the way he came down. My God, aren’t they something to see when they first hit that fork? With those bloody great eyes looking right down your throat, and that dirty big head turning from side to side. You shot him very well, Bwana Two Lions. Did you aim for any particular rosette, like you said?”
“Go to hell twice,” I said. “Give me a cigarette.”
“I think you’ve earned one,” Harry said. “Then let’s go retrieve your boy. I’ll go in ahead with the shotty-gun. You cover me from the left. If he’s playing possum in there, for Christ sake shoot him, not me. If he comes, he’ll come quick, except I would stake my next month’s pay that this chui isn’t going anywhere. He’s had it.”
Harry picked up the old Churchill, and I slipped the scope off the .30-’06 and slid another bullet into the magazine. We walked slowly into the high bush, Harry six steps ahead and me just off to the left. I knew the leopard was dead, but I knew also that dead leopards have clawed chunks out of lots of faces. Selby was hobbling the shotgun up and down under his left shoulder, a mannerism he has when he wants to be very sure that there is nothing on his jacket to clutter a fast raise and shoot. We needn’t have worried.
Chui—my chui now—was sleeping quietly underneath the branch from which he had fallen. He had never moved. He was never going to move. This great, wonderful, golden cat, eight feet-something of leopard, looking more beautiful in death than he had looked in the tree, this wonderful wide-eyed, green-yelloweyed cat was mine. And I had shot him very right. Very pretty.
“You picked the correct rosette,” Harry said. “Grab a leg and we’ll lug him out. He’s a real beauty. Isn’t it funny how most of the antelopes and the lions lose all their dignity in death? This blighter is more beautiful when he’s in the bag than when he’s in the tree. Lookit those eyes. No glaze at all. He’s clean as a whistle all over, and yet he lives on filth. He eats carrion and smells like a bloody primrose. Yet a lion is nearly always scabby and fly-ridden and full of old sores and cuts. He rumples when he dies and seems to grow smaller. Not chui, though. He’s the most beautiful trophy in Africa.”
“How does he compare with Harriet Maytag’s leopard?” I said, rather caustically, I thought.
“Forget Harriet Maytag, chum,” Harry said. “I was only kidding. As far as I am concerned, you are not only Bwana Simba, Protector of the Poor, but a right fine leopard man too. Here come the boys. Prepare to have your hand shaken.”
The boys oohed and ahed and gave me the old double-thumb grip, which means that the bwana is going to distribute largesse later when he has quit bragging and the liquor has taken hold. We piled the big fellow into Jessica’s back seat and took off for camp. Mama nearly fainted when we took the leopard out of the back and draped him in front of the campfire. The wind had changed again and she had heard no shot. When the boys left in the dark with the Rover, she had assumed they were just going to pick us up.
The leopard looked lovelier than ever in front of the campfire. His eyes were still clear. His hide was gorgeous. Even the bullet hole was neat. He was eight feet and a bit, and he was a big tom. About one-fifty on an empty stomach.
“Tail’s a bit too short for my taste, though,” Harry said. “Harriet’s had a longer tail.”
“Harriet be damned,” I said. “After you’re through with the pictures, mix me a martini.”
Harry took the pictures. He mixed me a martini. I drank it and passed out—from sheer excitement, I suppose. Because I hadn’t had a drink all day.
The next evening when Harry and Mama went down with cameras to see about the female, she had already acquired another tom. This leads me to believe that women may be fickle. The tom came in across the plain, which leopards never do, and passed within a few feet of the blind. He growled mightily as he bounded past. The memsaab gave up leopard photography. She said that Selby was obviously deaf or he would have heard the leopard coming through the grass.
Chapter 8
TIME WAS spinning out on our stay at Campi Abahati. We’d spent some ten days there and had had a really phenomenal run of luck. Everything had been much, much too easy. The long corridor of short grass was overflowing with new hordes of game flocking in as the water dried up on the Serengeti, as the grass towered high and dry in the long-grass country. The plains now were solidly swarmed with zebras and wildebeests. The little gazelles, the Tommy and the Grant and the impala, had increased by thousands. A big herd of buffaloes had come in from somewhere, and the carnivores were all around. There were at least half-a-dozen leopards feeding up and down the Grumeti. You could hear the lions in a dozen directions. The grass fires were beginning to start—a patch here, a patch there. This was around the first of July. By August it would all be burnt and the tender green shoots would be coming up everywhere, waiting for the early autumn rains to send it plunging upward in almost visible growth. By then the animals would be back off the plains and up into th
e hills where they would have enough to drink from the pockets and the little water holes, and where they would be safe for a while from the cats that sneaked through the thick grasses.
There were only the twin young rhinos in the area. The buffaloes had been numerous but meager in the horn. The best bull we saw measured only forty-three inches. But otherwise we had had this wonderful burst of luck. In a space of about five days we had taken two lions—one decent, one very fine—an entirely noble leopard, a fair buff, two exceptionally fine impalas, a magnificent Tommy and Grant, the best waterbuck to be seen in those parts, and a damned good eland. I am no shooter for shooting’s sake, and Harry was the kind of man who would rather not shoot at all than to shoot something unworthy of his reputation.
The memsaab had had a couple of days out on the plain with her cameras, while I stayed in camp and wrote, and there didn’t seem to be much point to staying on. But we hated to go. I would have been content to stay there all summer watching the baboons, watching the grazing game, shooting a piece of meat once in a while for the pot, and keeping track of the progress the ants were making in rebuilding one of their dilapidated hills. It was a wrench to leave. I suppose it is always like that with your first camp in a new place, where the weather has been fine and the luck full and the new fresh wonders countable daily on the fingers.
I was even going to miss the black gentlemen in the nearby Ikoma village, especially the chief. The chief was a pompous type who wore a white solar topi as his badge of office over a reasonably clean white drill suit. He also carried a cane, and when he came out to meet us the day we attended the big ngoma, he was holding his fingers carefully away from his suit and blowing on the tips. The nails were bright red. In his other hand he had a bottle of Revlon nail polish.
“Hollywood,” Virginia said, “is everywhere these days.”
I was going to miss the pleasant Indian and his pretty little shy wife who ran the local ducca—the general store that is always to be found as the social center of any fairly populous village. He was a nice little bloke who lived a life of infinite boredom, leavened only by occasional conversation with his rival tradesman across the clayey street and his pretty shy little wife. They competed with each other for the local trade, out of the sparse, shoddy stores of their little tin shacks, taking a few goat- and sheepskins in return for coarse Army hand-me-downs, tinned goods, and staple country-store provender. Business was never brisk. Both were clamorous with joy over the appearance of an occasional safari. Our Hindu was pathetically eager for us to accept his dead-grass cigarettes and cold beer in return for a few minutes’ chat while we stocked a few canned goods and replenished the gasoline. It would probably be a long time before he saw another safari.
When we went by to pay a call on Kibiriti, the lion tracker, we received not much response. Kibiriti was drunk. He had been drunk since the lion dance. So had a considerable portion of the young bucks who had performed. It takes them two days and much beer to plaster on the paint, and a week at least for the paint and the pombe to wear off.
The last full day in camp I laid down some law and demanded the right to my kind of shooting. I am a compulsive bird shooter. Therefore I am accorded to be nuts by people who wish to slay large, angry animals every day. The natives especially regard a bird shooter as mad. They cannot understand a man spending time and energy blasting away at birds when there are two thousand pounds of eland over every hill and a sleepy topi standing under every bush. Harry was nearly as impatient. He is a trophy man and considers a six-months’ hunt with no armed activity as highly worthwhile if it yields one monumental head at the end of the struggle.
But I was raised on quail and matured on ducks and pheasant, and to me the shotgun is the noblest weapon yet devised. I had a hoary Churchill 12-gauge with me—a lovely piece as only the British make them lovely—the scarred Circassian walnut stock as slim as a girl’s wrist, all balance and precision. It grew out of my face and pointed itself and I was beginning to itch to point it at something. There is more good and variegated bird shooting in Africa than anywhere else in the world, and by God I was going to have some. I was frustrated.
Every time I saw something worthy of the shooting—a flock of guinea fowl or a covey of big, pheasanty-looking spur fowl run across the trail and into a bush—I would look longingly at the shotty-gun and entreatingly at Harry. (“Best not spook the country with the shotty-gun, Bob,” or “Best not bother with the birds now, Bob. We want a really good three-toe unicorn”—or some such disparaging talk.)
One day, coming back from Ikoma, I got mad and told the boys to toa the shotty-gun. A couple of francolins, those wonderful big partridge with all the white meat, even on the legs, trotted across the path and into a sedgy field. I got out and put up both birds simultaneously. I took the cock with the right and the hen with the left and glanced backward at the jeep, expecting some applause for a very clean double. Harry was looking at Kidogo and Adam, and all three were shaking their heads sorrowfully, as over the misbehavior of an unruly child.
“Ndege,” Kidogo said. “Bwana Ndege.” I was the Bird Master from that time on. They used it as an epithet and only forcibly restrained themselves from tapping their foreheads to indicate my insanity.
Daft or not, I was paying for this shauri. So the last day I announced calmly that this morning was to be devoted to the bwana’s especial pleasure, and anybody who didn’t like it could damned well stay home. I kidnapped Selby, armed him with the little Sauer .16, took down the Churchill, and we bumped over the yellow plain to a water hole—to which, by personal and sneaky observation, I had noted that the sand grouse flocked in to drink at precisely eight-fifteen every morning.
The sand grouse is quite a wonderful little bloke. He is a desert bird and not a true grouse at all. The big imperial is heavier than a teal, and his little cousin, the pintail, is a few sizes smaller and a few knots faster. Both the imperial and pintail have long, backswept wings, more like waterfowl than anything else, possibly, except hawk. The sand grouse is closer to the pigeon family than he is to a grouse, but he is stripped for speed and he is beautiful to watch when he flies and he is also beautiful to eat. He is a plump little fellow, speckled in brown, buff, and black, and while his meat is dark, I never saw anybody curse him when he turned up in a pot roast.
For true sport, sand-grouse shooting touches a par with the high-pass shooting of teal in a high wind. A pintail sand grouse coming in with his eye fixed on a water hole is logging fifty knots or better, and when he swoops he makes a Mexican white-wing dove look clumsy and slow. He comes just once a day to dip his sharp little bill in the water hole, and then he takes off to crouch in the hot sand or to hide among the rocks for the rest of the day.
When he comes, he comes by the millions, by the thousands, by the hundreds, and if you wanted to wait him out you could kill a hundred of him as he bunches up over the watering place. But if you shoot him for sport, it is quite a different matter, unlike the habits of one particular Austrian nobleman who shot some 675 in one morning up on the Northern Frontier.
I doubt if I will ever forget this morning. It had rained briefly the day before, a slashing thundershower that had cleaned the sky a well-washed blue. The sun was just beginning to warm itself, and the breeze was tremulously soft. A few animals— a Tommy or so and a couple of wildebeests—moved off lazily as Harry and I parked the jeep and walked over to the lone scraggly acacia that guarded the water hole. It was a morning so common to the African plain country, the kind of morning where a man is highly content to be himself and nobody else at that particular time.
I broke open a couple of boxes of shells and placed one on one side of the tree, one on the other. I addressed Selby as sternly as he had been addressing me. “You may be able to kill buffalo cleanly at six feet,” I said. “You may be the devil’s own choice boy on lions at six yards in thick bush. But in the shotgun department you will now pay careful heed to the master. We are going to pretend that we are standing under a eucalyp
tus tree on a muddy meadow in the outback of New South Wales, which is in Australia. We will pretend we are shooting ducks the hard way. We will crouch as the flock of sand grouse approaches, and we will let them get within range, and then we will stand up and expose ourselves fully. And we will shoot only at doubles. Nor will we shoot simultaneously. Each in his turn.”
I remembered suddenly that morning in Australia—hotter than this but as blue of sky and as soft of breeze. I had gone out with a rancher named Keith Leahey on his vast Oxley Ranch, and he had posted me under a tree in a soggy meadow and said: “Shoot. I’ll come and fetch you after a while.”
I thought he was plain insane. No blind, no cover, no decoys. But the ducks swept down in huge flocks, all the kinds of ducks I knew and a score of breeds I’d never seen. They zipped and swooped and passed high and skimmed low. After five minutes I was shooting only for sex, species, and in such position that they’d drop on a grassy hummock about thirty yards square. I’ve been telling that story to duck hunters for years. They never believe me.
Presently here in Africa the air was full of a throaty chucklechuckle—and you could see the tiny spots in the distance. Five hundred there. Three hundred there. Two hundred over here. Scores and tens and fifties and pairs and an occasional single. Ahead of the flock came a lone big billy dove, swooping faster than he looked. I turned and casually shot him over my right shoulder. He dropped ten feet from the tree. It was a very simple shot, but impressive.
“That is how you do it, Hunter,” I said. “Can Harriet Maytag do that?”
“You go to hell,” said Selby. And then the birds came.
They came with whistles, like policemen summoning help. The sky darkened over the water hole. I shot blind into a couple of the big mobs, hitting nothing, but splitting them up into twosomes and foursomes. They made a great wheel and now began to return in shootable groups. There is nothing you can really do to discourage a sand grouse from his morning drink. Unless there is another water hole in the vicinity, he will keep coming back all day.
