by Ruark, R.
“Wallop him,” I said.
There wasn’t anything to it. I got out, Harry tooled the Rover away, and I found another anthill. This was an eight-foot cheetah, about half dog, half cat, with a round cat’s face, a long cat’s tail, a spotted cat’s hide, long dog’s legs, and a dog’s nonretractile claws. I put the scope’s post on his shoulder at sixty yards, squeezed off, and missed him as clean as anybody ever missed anything. He went straight up in the air about six feet, turned a somersault, and hit the deck running. I don’t know if you ever saw a cheetah run, but when I slung another one at him on the gallop, I was just kidding myself. A cheetah flat out can catch anything that runs, and there are people who say that in a hurry he will be doing about seventy-five miles an hour. This lad was long gone.
The other lad wasn’t. He got up, stretched, walked a short distance away, and lay down in the grass. I could see his round head and hard, clear cat’s eyes and the outline of his body as he lay. This time I held the damned gun low, pointing at the ground in front of him. I shot, and he jerked and stayed there. I aimed at the ground and I broke his back, so high up that another inch would have missed him clean. Now this bloody machine was shooting two feet high. I unscrewed the telescopic sight and threw it away. Then I walked up on the big cat, who was snarling and crawling toward me, and put him quietly to sleep. He was beautiful and would look just fine with the lions and the lovely, lovely leopard, but what I had now was not just a hide and mask but a complete capsuling of a country and a day, with the heat of the sun and the cool of the breeze and the friendship of the boys and all I loved of Africa in it. This was as good a way to end it as any, not shooting any more, with the oryx neat and the cheetah neat and the damned traitorous scope thrown away to rust in the long yellow grasses.
The next morning the boys were knocking the camp apart.
“Let’s go look at it for a couple of hours,” I said. “I’m not content to leave it alone. I’m like a woman in a war who follows you to the airport or the railroad station and wants to keep on saying good-bye—stretching the agony and fattening off the misery until the last bitter second.”
“Okay,” Harry said. “We’ll take the .470 in case we just happen to see a rhino, and the .375. You really ought to shoot another zebra or so for those hides your friends wanted, and the boys can use a little fresh meat for the trip home. Pity about that fat cow you wanted to buy them for a farewell feast. But Juma spent the whole day trying to buy one. You know these Masai. They’d rather sell their mother than a cow.”
We rode over the hills, rode for the last time, looking for the last time at all the landmarks we knew so well now—the cobbled hills there, the green knobbly hills there, the long blue slopes there, the baobab here where the road crooks just before you turn in toward Kitete, the rhino hill yonder, the lonely village of musky anthills, the broad yellow plain, the swamp where the buffalo were, the high hill where the other buffalo were, the sheer drop of the escarpment, the green strip of lush grass with the giraffes always standing solemn and ludicrous nearby, the little scrubby orchards of thorn, the fleets of ostriches running and pacing like trotting horses at Roosevelt Raceway in New York, the buzzards wheeling, the dew fresh on the drying grass, the flowers beginning to wither, the sand-grouse specks in the sky, the doves looping and moaning lugubriously, the brilliant flight of the jays, the guineas running, the francolin scratching like chickens in the low grass between the ruts the car made, the weaver birds swarming like bees and dipping and rolling like a tornado. This was what I wanted to remember of it more than what I’d shot, but the shooting was important because the presence of the animals in my home would bring it back as fresh and sharp as the air of this last morning, this last, sad morning.
“Punda,” Harry said, pointing at a herd of zebra. “Best take one, anyhow, for the meat.”
There was a big stallion loping along at the end of his herd. I scrambled out of the jeep with the .375 and stuck one up his broad fat fanny as he went away. It was a long shot, but I was shooting with open iron sights, and I wasn’t surprised to hear it hit and see him lurch and break into a furious gallop. I knew this shot. It had gone in him and all the way forward through him and it had taken his heart. He would run five hundred yards and would be dead when we got up to him.
He ran the prescribed distance and folded as if somebody had skulled him with a hammer. We drove up to him and he lifted his head. Adam jumped out with his knife to sanctify him for the eating, to halal him for Mohammed. Adam cut his throat.
Throat cut, heart-shot, this zebra was dead and sanctified and ready to be skinned and eaten. But somebody forgot to tell him he was dead and approved of by Allah. He got up and threw Adam twenty feet. He reared on his hind legs and charged Selby and me. Harry was leaning against the open door of the jeep. I was leaning against the fender.
He was awful to see—bloody, fierce, making a stallion’s angry fighting squeal with his mouth distended and those huge yellow teeth, which can snap off an arm, bared in an equine snarl and his mouth looking bigger and wider and fuller of teeth than any lion’s. He was flailing the air with razor forefeet, each hoof capable of splitting your skull right down to your Adam’s apple. And he had Selby trapped against the jeep, wedged against the door. He was biting at Selby’s face and striking at him with hoofs, and Selby was yelling and shrinking backward into the jeep and trying to fend this monster off with one hand.
I ran round the front of the car and dived through the back seat, diving horizontally like we used to dive in bar fights when I was young and full of orneriness in Hamburg and Antwerp and the tough sailor towns of the Depression. On the way through the back seat I scooped up the .375 from the rack and pumped a bullet into the chamber as I dived. I stuck the barrel of the gun into the zebra’s mouth and pulled the trigger, and the back of his head came off. This time he was really kufa. He fell forward on top of Selby, pushing Harry under the wheel of the jeep. There was Selby, wedged into his own car by a dead zebra, sitting there, looking ruffled and hurt-feelinged and with a lapful of dead punda whose gory head was laid lovingly on Selby’s shoulder.
“Somebody get this goddamned creature off of me,” Selby roared, his dignity shattered. And then we began to laugh.
The boys hurled themselves onto the ground and screamed with laughter. They ached with laughter. I fell down on the ground and began to hiccup with uncontrollable mirth. Finally Harry, still with a lapful of zebra, began to laugh, and the zebra’s head moved up and down, so it seemed he was laughing, too.
The first hysteria played out a little, and after dragging it out of the jeep and off the Bwana Haraka’s lap, the boys began to skin out the dead animal. But one would say something to another, and then Harry would say something and the skinning would stop. The knives would be dropped and the entire pantomime of the semicatastrophe would be re-acted, and everyone would fall on the ground and scream. It took an hour to skin out the zebra. It usually takes fifteen minutes.
“Fancy,” Harry said finally, the tears still streaming down his face and his sides hurting, “fancy the flap in the Queen’s bar in Nairobi when the word spreads that old Selby, after all these years, had been done in by a bloody zebra. My family’d never live it down.”
“It’s sort of like being gored to death by a Tommy,” I said.
“Or beaten to death by a dove,” Harry said.
“Or nibbled to death by moths,” I said.
“Or tickled to death with a feather duster,” Harry said.
“But suddenly you think: You’re just as dead if a zebra bites you as you are if an elephant steps on you. Anything they’ve got here can kill you, from a snake to a thorn to lousy zebra. That’s why this job is so interesting. It’s the unexpected does you in.”
There were some guinea fowl running down the track on the way in. Sentimentally, Kidogo had packed the shotty-gun ’Mkubwa for his friend, the Bwana Ndege, the Master of Birds. The Bird Master got out and chased the guineas and they flew, finally, and the Maste
r of Birds missed with both barrels. All the boys fell out of the car again. We laughed all the way home— which as of that very moment was no longer home.
We headed down for Arusha to register the trophies, and in Babati they told us that Harry’s friend, Tony Dyer, had been frightfully beaten up by a buff. We stopped in Arusha, the little Greeky-Englishy Arusha, registered the trophies with a fat Indian babu in the Game Department, and took the good fast road back to Nairobi. Nobody talked much. Virginia tried singing. She tried her parody about how skinned her knees, how tired her et cetera. She tried the kanga-in-the-donga-with-the-panga song. She even tried the hymn we had written in honor of the missionaries who seemed to have the finest hunting equipment in the world, fancy shooting cars, expensive rifles, fine scopes and cameras, and who seemed to spend more time on safari than they did in alleviating the plight of the poor natives. This one was called “Taka Headskin for the Lord” and was very funny. Nobody laughed.
“Shut up,” I said. “I am a very sad man.”
We stopped once near an anthill, which Virginia loved, and three giraffes, which she loved, walked up curiously to watch us. I looked at Virginia, and she was crying quietly.
All the way to Nairobi I kept feeling something familiar. I remembered suddenly: This was the way I felt when the Japs quit and the war was over and I was headed home. All the excitement and the dangerous security of the war were finished. Now it would be work and civilian frustration and complication again. All the neatness was gone with the war, all the feeling of complete fatalism was gone. Now the future was in my hands again. The Navy and fate were no longer responsible. If I got on a plane and it crashed and killed me, I couldn’t blame the Navy or fate. My shauri mungu—my God’s work—was all over. That is how I felt as the jeep pressed on in the dust toward Nairobi, with old Annie Lorry, tractable for once, lumbering and creaking on behind us.
We hit Nairobi and found my friends, Tommy and Durie Shevlin, just back from an unsuccessful safari in Rhodesia or someplace, and Tony Dyer was there, limping around on crutches. Little Maureen at Ker and Downey’s was just as pretty to look at, and there was a flock of other pleasant folk about. Old Zim, the taxidermist, oohed and ahed over the trophies, which were really quite fine and something to be proud of. Virginia bought a couple of leopard skins for some bags and shoes and a stole, and everybody drank a good deal too much. Harry’s pretty airline hostesses were all over the place, and there was a party every night and one drunken South African Airlines pilot that I nearly had to slug but didn’t.
None of it was any good. I was glad to leave. There was a part of me, of us, back there on a hill in Tanganyika, in a swamp in Tanganyika, in a tent and on a river and by a mountain in Tanganyika. There was a part of me out there that would stay out there until I came back to ransom that part of me. It would never live in a city again, that part of me, nor be content, the other part, to be in a city. There are no tiny gleaming campfires in a city.
We got on the plane one day and pointed back to Paris and New York and work and cocktail parties and penthouses and expensive, fashionable saloons. Our first stop was in Addis Ababa. The natives were just as ugly, and there were even more flies than I remembered. I was sure New York would be worse.
END
December 5, 1952—at sea
En route to Nairobi, Kenya Colony,
British East Africa
HORN OF THE HUNTER. Copyright © 1953 and subsequent renewals by Robert C. Ruark. This Safari Press edition is published by arrangement with the Harold Matson Company, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any from or by any means without permission from the publisher.
The trademark Safari Press ® is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and with government trademark and patent office in other countries.
Ruark, Robert C.
First Safari Press Edition
Safari Press
1987, Long Beach, California
Print ISBN 978-1-57157-023-9
ebook ISBN 978-1-57157-439-8
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