by Ruark, R.
We made it out of the close bush and graduated to rocks and rills. We handed the guns back to the boys. The rocks were reddish, iron-heavy stones, small boulders, and wonderful round ankle-twisters. They formed small islands in the hot sand where hot water seeped through. The pools were red from the iron and green around the edges from the copper deposits. There was a fine healthy stench of sulphur, and the water, as it trickled down from the mountain, was just under steaming. This was Maji Moto proper—Hot-Water Hill.
We crawled up some really respectable boulders the size of houses, lovely red, blue, black, and white rocks, with creepers growing over them. What breath I had saved was gone when we hit the summit of one special young mountain. The rhino had fed back while Harry had come to fetch me. We could just see the two bulls moving into the shade. The gray finally merged with the black of the thorn. I swore.
“This is the first and last time I ever send you off on any errand that I don’t go along myself if I have to crawl,” I said. “The only decent bull all day, and I’m sitting on my fat can reading Agatha Christie while you crawl up and carve your initials on him. How close did you get, by the way?”
“Not very,” Harry said. “He was feeding down there in the wet—in that patch of bright green grass. I’d say I crawled up to within twenty feet of him. Rather an easy shot. However. Nothing to do now but wait three or four hours to see if they feed out again. Pity.”
“Damn me for a lazy bastard,” I said.
“I think I’ll take a little nap,” Harry said. “Lovely day, isn’t it? I’ll crawl down here and stretch out on that sort of sloping boulder. Wake me if you see anything.” He scrabbled down a drop of thirty-five or forty feet, sliding like a mountain goat, and curled up contentedly on the ridge of the rock. If he’d slipped a foot each way he might have fallen sixty feet to some jagged and unpleasant-looking granite spikes. The possibility didn’t seem to bother him any. Presently he snored.
It was a magnificent day to be sitting on a rock. Manyara was a sheet of tin in the sun. Some crabbed but kindly trees were spreading a little shade on my rock. The breeze had stiffened now into a wind.
I pulled out an ancient copy of one of the gorier Raymond Chandler mysteries, which make wonderful reading for people with a slim library at hand and who drug themselves with words. The best thing about the modern detective story is that no matter how often you read it you never remember how it comes out, and you never know why it comes out that way. All you know is that the private peeper gets slapped silly and kicked in the face, and he is always shooting people in the belly and talking tough. He gets injected with dope and set afire, and the cops handle him rougher than the crooks. And there is always sex rampant and blood all over everything. For a long time there has been a Krafft-Ebing hookup between sex and criminal violence, but the Chandler–Hammett–Mickey Spillane school just recently became aware of it. In today’s detectives, each man kills the thing he loves, and as painfully as possible. The over-all scheme is confused, but it saves thinking.
This salvage of thinking is an important new trend in the construction of the modern mystery. There was a time when the plot, though involved, was finally simplified by a rousing denouement, where the deteckatiff rounded up everybody in a room, eliminated all the likely suspects, and then turned with a snarl on the butler. The butler immediately leaped out the window, thereby saving the state a considerable sum in prosecution fees and electric current. The detective perforce was free to select a cigarette from his case, blow smoke whimsically from his nostrils, and send down for a dish of tea. The whole operation called for some fancy footwork with the story line and some small logic. You don’t need that any more.
I defy anybody to step out of a modern hard-school novel and tell me simply what happened and why. The interlocking killings are always so tangled with the hero’s libido, and there is so much necking, wrestling, and whisky drinking between kills, and there is so much cultism, archaeology, politics, abnormality, and frustration wound into the story structure that I am just forced to sit there and enjoy each excursion into sex or slaying as a separate peep show. All I am sure of at the end is that the hero will be battered. He will be standing fanny-deep in corpses, and he will be languorously fondling the heroine, who, it seems, is also the villain, and shortly the police will come, take her away, and beat up on the hero some more. In looking backward, you can never tell why anybody had to die, except for kicks, and you can never figure why the detective didn’t settle for one of the earlier mattresses and save himself a whole lot of trouble. There have been no clues and no deduction—just gunplay and erotica.
I heartily approve of this sort of entertainment because it is so much more like modern criminal-coursing than the old classics of Mr. S. S. Van Dine and the other neat clippers of loose ends. Everything ends in a muddle now, with the wrong people dead, the wrong people in love with the wrong people, the cops beating hell out of everybody, the obvious suspects slipping free to kill and kill again, and innocent maiden ladies being coerced into conversation with rubber hose and matches under the fingernails. It is lifelike in that, after it’s all over, nobody knows why or how, and when it ends on a sour note—well, hell, doesn’t everything?
I was immersed in some wonderful dialogue that went briefly like this: “Sure, I loved her. But a private eye don’t play it the way other people play it. I kissed her once, hard. I could taste her blood on my mouth. It tasted like saltines. Then I threw her off the cliff. She bounced once and quit. Then I poisoned myself with another slap of scotch. It tasted like iodine. I could feel it telling me that things were waiting for me to do ’em. They were weeping to be done. So I reached for the chopper. It felt sweet in my hands. I cut Joe in two pieces. I didn’t like the way Pete’s good eye was looking at me, so I shot it out of his head. I made Mike a present. Nine new navels. Then I went home. I belted myself over the head with another club of scotch. It tasted like quinine. I set a fag afire. It tasted like old rags. I went to bed. It felt like a rock pile. But I was tired. It had been a busy day.”
I was thinking that this kind of a day would make anybody tired, when my brave companion aroused himself from slumber on the boulder below with a scream that made his shriek of the caterpillar incident seem a muffled squeak. He came off the rock, standing straight up, and seemed to soar upward some thirty feet. He was white and trembling.
“Now what?” I asked him. “Bad dreams?”
“Christ,” he said. “I was catching a little nap and I put my hand over on a little stone in my sleep, to brace myself, I suppose. There was a sort of little coral snake—a red, yellow, and black thing—curled up on top of the rock. When I jerked my hand off it, a scorpion crawled out from under the same stone.”
“You’re a brave man,” I said. “I have seen you go. But you have the leaping fantods when you run against a bug or a tired little snake. I don’t get it.”
“I don’t like oysters, either,” Harry said. “I’d rather take on a wounded buffalo in thick bush than one of those woolly caterpillars. As for snakes, I might remind you that while there is an antivenin kit in the jeep, the jeep is a touch better than two miles from here.”
“I see your point,” I said. “I beg your pardon.”
We sat for a long time, watching the lizard playing ringaround-the-rosy on the rocks, listening to the birds, watching the duck flights and the billowing pink waves of flamingos as they passed over Manyara’s sheen. It was very peaceful there on the high rock, with the breeze drying up the sweat inside your shirt and the thousand blended noises coming down from the hills. Finally Harry swept the big meadow and the outer rim of marsh with the glasses and looked at his watch.
“It’s nearly four o’clock,” he said. “I don’t think that biggest rhino’s coming back this way. The buff are still feeding down by the point, and there’s one bull looks shootable. Let’s stalk up on the mbogo and take one if he’s bigger than your other one. If not, we can beat around that peninsula and maybe put up one of the
rhinos on the other side. It’s an old elephant wallow, and the faro might just be taking it easy in the mud.”
Harry may be afraid of snakes, but buffalo give me the feeling of wishing they hadn’t come up at all. There was nothing to say but yes. We slipped and slithered down off the rocks and started a stalk across the fairly open meadow, keeping to the six-foot, poison-green grass the rhinos had foraged earlier. It wasn’t a very long stalk, maybe a thousand yards, but I was blowing and soaking wet again when Harry sank to his knees ahead of me and motioned for his gun.
Pushing the rifles ahead of us, we crawled about twenty yards and achieved the protection of a small green bush. The wind was fine, coming straight down at us. You could smell the buff. It was an old familiar farm smell, the cattle smell of dung and dirty, muddy hide. It wasn’t strange we could smell them. When I peered around the corner of the bush, after my heart had come back down to its usual position, there were eight buffaloes about twenty-five yards away—three bulls and five cows. There was one good bull, an old boy with a magnificent heavy boss and one horn that might have completed a formal measurement of at least forty-eight inches between the tips. If there had been more than one tip. The right horn was broken and worn down to a nubbin, its former point scuffed and many-ended, like a handful of sticks.
We hadn’t been very careful in the stalk and had made as much noise as necessary because the wind was dead in our face and the grass high enough to hide us. The buffalo couldn’t smell and they couldn’t see, but the old boy and one tick-ridden old cow were uneasy. The bull kept snorting and kicking up the water he was standing in. The cow kept swinging her head and sniffing painfully.
“No good,” Harry said. “Hapana.”
He stood up and motioned me up. We stood quietly and looked at the buffalo. The old bull took a couple of steps forward. He raised his head and stared through his bugged-out eyes. But he made no effort to run. All the buffaloes had spotted us now, but the man smell wasn’t there and they seemed puzzled. We stood quietly for at least a minute, maybe longer. Then the old bull seemed satisfied. He swung his muzzle as a man swings a foot against a ball, hit the nearest cow in the tail with his nose, and indicated departure. Looking back with dignity, they shambled out of the water and cantered off into the bush.
“Wonderful thing about buff,” Harry said. “That half-minute of curiosity. You can run smack into the middle of a herd, and they’ll stand quite still for that thirty seconds or more. Just wait. All we’ve done so far is stalk. When the situation’s right, I’ll show you how to hunt buffalo when a quiet stalk is impossible.”
“I don’t really want to know,” I said. “I’m scared enough when we just stalk ’em like this.”
“Well,” Harry said, “long’s we’ve come this far, we might take a little stroll around the end of this bit o’ land and see if we can raise one of those rhinos. Better hang onto your weapon. This grass ahead is pretty thick, and we might jump something out of it.”
I have mentioned a leg. Since they rechanneled the blood stream in it and removed certain essential portions from it, I have competed for no marathons. Selby runs up and over mountains for fun. He walks through marshes for fun.
This was a cute marsh. It was mostly of sword grass, which will take off a finger cleanly if you grasp it correctly. It was eight to ten feet tall. There were portions of this marsh in which the water came armpit-high if you missed a stout tussock and your foot slipped. For two more miles we walked, swam, and crawled through this marsh. The sun, hotter around four than at noon, was a brass ball. Sweat rolled down my face in solid sheets, blinding me. I staggered, fell, caught myself, crawled, pulled myself semierect on stalks of grass, cushioned my headlong plunges by falling with the rifle across my body. The Westley Richards .470 double weighed about eleven pounds when I entered the marsh. It weighed two tons when we came out of the muck and water into just plain elephant grass fourteen or fifteen feet high and as nice a covert for rhino or elephant as you’re likely to see. A cow buffalo snorted at close hand and scared me witless.
We conquered half a mile of this terrain and came to the shore with its hard ground and rocky shale. Harry climbed a tree and looked long around him. He saw nothing. We walked inshore a few hundred yards and found an old elephant trail that, by our stooping under the low-hanging branches, made quick and comfortable walking back to our big boulder at the point of Maji Moto.
We caught a blower at the bottom of the boulder and smoked a cigarette. I looked rather reproachfully at Harry. He looked a little apologetic.
“I really didn’t think it would be that bad,” he said. “But certainly I’d never have taken you into that elephant grass if I’d not been reasonably sure that at this time of day, at this season, the elephants wouldn’t all be up on the side of the hills in the shade.”
There was a crashing in the bush some five hundred feet up the hill and a few hundred yards to our left, between us and the long two miles to the car. There was more crashing, some squeals, and the thin trumpet of a displeased bull elephant.
“You see?” Harry said. “In the hills.”
We walked slowly back to the jeep. We skipped from rock to rock. We waded in the hot-water pools. We took the guns again when we came to the section of thick bush and gave them back to the boys when we came out of it. I was stumbling and tripping again in the last half mile of marsh when Harry stopped and waited for me to quit playing tail-end-Charlie.
“Back there a bit,” he said. “I saw you start and look at something. And then hurry a bit and come along. What did you see?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “Only a cobra. ‘Twasn’t a very big cobra.”
Harry squawked. “Why didn’t you . . .”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” I said. “I know it would only upset you. Anyhow, at this season and at this time all the cobras are up in the hills with the elephants. This one was a little overdue. He was heading for the hills.”
Actually it wasn’t a cobra at all. I was just feeling a little mean. It was only a very few seconds later that one of the gunbearers let out a yip and jumped about five feet in the air, backward. This time it was a cobra. I presume he was heading for the hills, like I said.
We were pleased to get back to the car, where the memsaab had obviously not been eaten by the fauna. She had sandwiches and Cokes and water. I don’t suppose I drank more than a quart of the water.
It is a long ride back from Maji Moto to Mto-Wa-Mbu. It is a long ride and a ghostly ride. There were five rivers—rivulets or wet dongas—to ford, and one of them was deep enough to let the water rise a foot beyond Jessica’s floor boards. Jessica likes water, as a rule, and can go most places a duck can go. This night she didn’t like it and fouled up her transmission. This takes time to fix in the dark.
The rocky road, when it was not muddy, was serrated and full of small boulders. Each lunge that Jessica took dislocated something new. Each lurch and bump fetched into focus a fresh ache in pulled leg muscles, in cramped knees, in tooth-sore back. The mosquito bites and the tsetse wounds started to smart and ache and throb again. The plovers screamed like banshees and flashed ghostly white as they squawkingly rose ahead of the car. The snipe shrieked at us, and the nightjars swooped ahead of us. It was like a funeral procession to a madhouse in a weapons carrier on a rough road. The trail was visible for only a few feet ahead of us under Jessica’s feeble candlepower. Once Harry stopped the jeep, got out, and tenderly removed some object on the shale from the path of the hunting car.
“Nightjar’s egg,” he said. “Finding it and not crushing it means good hunting. Like finding a porcupine quill. That’s my special fetish. If I find a porcupine’s quill, I know we’ll have luck, just as I know that losing this elephant-tail-hair bracelet of mine is lousy luck.”
Once we took a wrong turning in the dark and went down a strange pathway. Kidogo and Adam both yelled at the top of their lungs. The pathway we had innocently adopted led straight into Lake Manyara. We stopped three feet
from the water’s edge.
The last three miles through the immensely tall grasses, through the velvet-black jungle amounted to some sort of masterpiece of homing instinct on Selby’s part. Trees and stumps became rhino and elephant. Animal trails and old native trails crisscrossed the only feasible track. We ran into blind alleys and had to back out of them. Three times the boys off-loaded and pushed as Jessica mired in streams. The itching seedpods from a specially accursed bush flew jaggedly into our eyes and down the front of our jackets, where they set up local irritations to rival the insect bites. We finally made the semifloating bridge over Mto-Wa-Mbu, and Jessica lurched and snorted up the steep incline leading to camp. We had left before 6 a.m. It was 10 p.m. when we dismounted.
The fire was beautiful. The pressure lamp in the mess tent was beautiful. Juma in his white kanzu was beautiful. Even old Katunga as he came up to take the dead impala for skinning was beautiful, snaggleteeth and all. The gin bottle was especially beautiful, nearly as beautiful as Gathiru and Kaluku trudging by with the bathi. I don’t remember what we had to eat or how I got to bed.
The next morning when Gathiru roused the memsaab, she threw the chai cup at him and in clearly enunciated, beautifully concise words announced that her aching bones would remain in the sack, and that the Brothers Rover could go and hunt rhinos all by themselves.
This we did. We hunted them just as hard for the next two weeks. The days began at five and we crawled into camp at ten. We saw in that time some twenty-eight rhinos. We stalked them all. We ran from most of them. We fired no shot, in anger or otherwise. We spoke very little. We were hunting now with a hard, stubborn, bubbling inner anger. It communicated to the boys, who stopped joking and who cleaned the guns and repaired the ravages to Jessica’s springs and axles and motor and who staggered to bed at midnight to be up and on deck at five. Their eyes became red from dust and lack of sleep. Hapana faro.
