I knew that Miss Mary must have had a good evening in Nairobi since she was not a fool and it was the only town we had and there was fresh smoked salmon at the New Stanley and an understanding although conniving headwaiter. But the fish from the great lakes, the non-named fish, would be as good as ever and there would be curries but she should not eat them so soon after dysentery. But I was sure she had dined well and I hoped she was in some good nightclub now and I thought about Debba and how we would be going up to buy the material for the two lovely hills that she carried so proudly and modestly and how the cloth would emphasize them as she well knew and how we would look at the different prints and how the Masai women with their long skirts and the flies and their insane, pretending, beauty parlor husbands would watch us in their unsatisfied boldness and syphilitic, cold-handed beauty and how we, Kamba, neither one with our ears even pierced but proud and worse than insolent because of too many things that Masai could not ever know, would feel the stuffs and look at the patterns and buy other things to give us importance in the store.
13
WHEN MWINDI brought the tea in the morning I was up and dressed sitting by the ashes of the fire with two sweaters and a wool jacket on. It had turned very cold in the night and I wondered what that meant about the weather for today.
“Want fire?” Mwindi asked.
“Small fire for one man.”
“I send,” Mwindi said. “You better eat. Memsahib go you forget to eat.”
“I don’t want to eat before I hunt.”
“Maybe hunt be very long. You eat now.”
“Mbebia isn’t awake.”
“All old men awake. Only young men asleep. Keiti says for you to eat.”
“OK. I’ll eat.”
“What you want to eat?”
“Codfish balls and hash-browned potatoes.”
“You eat Tommy liver and bacon. Keiti says Memsahib says to tell you to take fever pills.”
“Where are the fever pills?”
“Here,” he brought the bottle out. “Keiti says I watch you eat them.”
“Good,” I said. “I ate them.”
“What you wear?” Mwindi asked.
“Short boots and warm jacket to start and the skin shirt with the solids for when it gets hot.”
“I get the other people ready. Today very good day.”
“Yeah?”
“Everybody thinks so. Even Charo.”
“Good. I feel it is a good day too.”
“You don’t have any dream?”
“No,” I said. “Truly no.”
“Mzuri,” Mwindi said. “I tell Keiti.”
After breakfast we headed straight for the Chulus by the good trail that went north through the gerenuk country. The trail from the Old Manyatta to the hills where the buffalo should be now as they returned to the swamp was gray with mud and treacherous. But we went on it as far as we could and then we left Mthuka with the car, knowing the mud would be drying in the sun. The sun was now baking the plain and we left it and started up into the steep, small, broken hills covered with lava boulders with the new grass thick and wet from the rain. We did not wish to kill any buffalo but it was necessary to have the two guns as there were rhino in these hills and we had seen three of them the day before from the Cessna. The buffalo should be making their way to the rich new feed at the edge of the papyrus swamp. I wanted to count them and to photograph them if it were possible and to locate the huge old bull with the wonderful horns that we had not seen for more than three months. We did not wish to frighten them or let them know we followed them, but only to check on them so that we might photograph them properly and well when Mary came back.
We had intercepted the buffalo and the big herd was moving along below us. There were the proud herd bulls, the big old cows, the young bulls, and the young cows and the calves. I could see the curve of the horns and the heavy corrugations, the dried mud and the worn patches of hide, the heavy moving blackness and the huge grayness and the birds, small and sharp billed and busy as starlings on a lawn. The buffalo moved slowly, feeding as they moved, and behind them the grass was gone and the heavy cattle smell came to us and then we had the flies. I had pulled the shirt over my head and I counted one hundred and twenty-four buffalo. The wind was right so that the buffalo did not get our scent. The birds did not see us because we were higher than they were and only the flies found us, but evidently they did not bear tales.
It was almost noon and very hot and we did not know it but all our luck lay ahead of us. We rode along through the park country and all of us watched every likely tree. The leopard we were hunting was a trouble leopard that I had been asked to kill by the people of the Shamba where he had killed sixteen goats and I was hunting him for the Game Department so it was permissible to use the car in his pursuit. The leopard, once officially vermin and now Royal Game, had never heard of his promotion and reclassification or he would never have killed the sixteen goats that made him a criminal and put him back in the category where he started. Sixteen goats were too many goats to kill in one night when one goat was all he could eat. Then, too, eight of the goats had belonged to Debba’s family.
We came into a very beautiful glade and on our left there was a tall tree with one of its high branches extending on a straight parallel line to the left and another, more shaded branch extending on a straight line to the right. It was a green tree and its top was heavily foliaged.
“There’s an ideal tree for leopard,” I said to Ngui.
“Ndio,” he said very quietly. “And there is a leopard in that tree.”
Mthuka had seen us look and though he could not hear us and could not see the leopard from his side he stopped the car. I got out of the car with the old Springfield I had been carrying across my lap and when I was firmly planted on my feet I saw the leopard stretched long and heavy on the high right limb of the tree. His long spotted length was dappled by the shadows of the leaves that moved in the wind. He was sixty feet up in an ideal place to be on this lovely day and he had made a greater mistake than when he killed the sixteen unnecessary goats.
I raised the rifle breathing in once and letting it out and shot very carefully for the point where his neck bulged behind his ear. It was high and an absolute miss and he flattened, long and heavy along the branch, as I shucked the cartridge case out and shot for his shoulder. There was a heavy thunk and he fell in a half circle. His tail was up, his head was up, his back down. His body was curved like a new moon as he fell and he hit the ground with a heavy thump.
Ngui and Mthuka were whacking me on the back and Charo was shaking hands. Pop’s gun bearer was shaking hands and crying because the fall of the leopard had been an emotional thing. He was also giving me the secret Kamba hand grip again and again. In a moment I was reloading with my free hand and Ngui, in excitement, had the .577 instead of the shotgun when we advanced carefully to view the body of the sixteen-goat-killing scourge of my father-in-law. The body of the leopard was not there.
There was a depression in the ground where he had hit and the blood spoor, bright and in chunks, led toward a thick island of bush to the left of the tree. It was as thick as the roots of a mangrove swamp and no one was giving me any secret Kamba hand grips now.
“Gentlemen,” I said in Spanish. “The situation has radically changed.” It had indeed. I knew the drill now having learned it from Pop but every wounded leopard in thick bush is a new wounded leopard. No two will ever act the same except that they will always come and they will come for keeps. That was why I had shot for the base of the head and neck first. But it was too late for postmortems on missed shots now.
The first problem was Charo. He had been mauled by leopards twice and was an old man, nobody knew how old, but certainly old enough to be my father. He was as excited as a hunting dog to go in.
“You keep the fucking hell out of this and get up on top of the car.”
“Hapana, Bwana,” he said.
“Ndio too bloody ndio,” I said.
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“Ndio,” he said not saying, “Ndio Bwana,” which with us was an insult. Ngui had been loading the Winchester 12-gauge pump with SSG, which is buckshot in English. We had never shot anything with SSG and I did not want any jams so I tripped the ejector and filled it with No. 8 birdshot cartridges fresh out of the box and filled my pockets with the rest of the cartridges. At close range a charge of fine shot from a full-choked shotgun is as solid as a ball and I remembered seeing the effect on a human body with the small hole blue black around the edge on the back of the leather jacket and all the load inside the chest.
“Kwenda,” I said to Ngui and we started off on the blood spoor, me with the shotgun covering Ngui, who tracked, and Pop’s gun bearer back in the car with the .577. Charo had not gotten onto the roof but sat in the rear seat of the car with the best one of the three spears. Ngui and I were on foot and following the blood spoor.
Out of a clot of blood he picked up a sharp bone fragment and passed it to me. It was a piece of shoulder blade and I put it in my mouth. There is no explanation of that. I did it without thinking. But it linked us closer to the leopard and I bit on it and tasted the new blood which tasted about like my own, and knew that the leopard had not just lost his balance. Ngui and I followed the blood spoor until it went into the mangrove root patch of bush. The leaves of this bush were very green and shiny and the trail of the leopard, which had been made with bounds of irregular length, went into it and there was blood low on the leaves, shoulder high where he had crouched as he went in.
Ngui shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. We were both very serious now and there was no White Man to speak softly and knowingly from his great knowledge, nor any White Man to give violent orders astonished at the stupidity of his “boys” and cursing them on like reluctant hounds. There was only one wounded leopard with terrible odds against him who had been shot from the high branch of a tree, suffered a fall no human being could survive and taken his stand in a place where, if he retained his lovely and unbelievable cat vitality he could maim or grievously injure any human being who came in after him. I wished he had never killed the goats and that I had never signed any contracts to kill and be photographed for any national circulation magazines and I bit with satisfaction on the piece of shoulder bone and waved up the car. The sharp end of the splintered bone had cut the inside of my cheek and I could taste the familiarity of my own blood now mixed with the blood of the leopard and I said, “Twendi kwa chui,” the statesman’s plural imperative, “Let us go to the leopard.”
It was not very easy for us to go to the leopard. Ngui had the Springfield 30-06 and he had also the good eyes. Pop’s gun bearer had the .577 which would knock him on his ass if he shot it and he had as good eyes as Ngui. I had the old, well-loved, once burnt-up, three times restocked, worn-smooth old Winchester model 12-pump gun that was faster than a snake and was, from thirty-five years of us being together, almost as close a friend and companion with secrets shared and triumphs and disasters not revealed as the other friend a man has all his life. We covered the enlaced and crossed roots of the thicket from the blood spoor entry to the left, or west end where we could see the car around the corner but we could not see the leopard. Then we went back crawling along and looking into the darkness of the roots until we reached the other end. We had not seen the leopard and we crawled back to where the blood was still fresh on the dark green leaves.
Pop’s gun bearer was standing up behind us with the big gun ready and I, sitting down now, started to shoot loads of No. 8 shot into the cross-tangled roots traversing from left to right. At the fifth shot the leopard roared hugely. The roar came from well into the thick bush and a little to the left of the blood on the leaves.
“Can you see him?” I asked Ngui.
“Hapana.”
I reloaded the long magazine tube and shot twice fast toward where I had heard the roar. The leopard roared again and then coughed twice.
“Piga tu,” I said to Ngui and he shot toward where the roar had come from.
The leopard roared again and Ngui said, “Piga tu.”
I shot twice at the roar and Pop’s gun bearer said, “I can see him.”
We stood up and Ngui could see him but I could not. “Piga tu,” I told him.
He said, “Hapana. Twendi kwa chui.”
So we went in again but this time Ngui knew where we were going. We could only go in a yard or so but there was a rise in the ground the roots grew out of. Ngui was directing me by tapping my legs on one side or the other as we crawled. Then I saw the leopard’s ear and the small spots on the top of the bulge of his neck and his shoulder. I shot where his neck joined his shoulder and shot again and there was no roar and we crawled back out and I reloaded and we three went around the west end of the island of rush to where the car was on the far side.
“Kufa,” Charo said. “Mzuri kubwa sana.”
“Kufa,” Mthuka said. They could both see the leopard but I could not.
They got out of the car and we all moved in and I told Charo to keep back with his spear. But he said, “No. He’s dead, Bwana. I saw him die.”
I covered Ngui with the shotgun while he cut his way in with a panga slamming at the roots and brush as though they were our enemy or all our enemies and then he and Pop’s gun bearer hauled the leopard out and we swung him up into the back of the car. He was a good leopard and we had hunted him well and cheerfully and like brothers with no White Hunters nor Game Rangers and no Game Scouts and he was a Kamba leopard condemned for useless killing on an illegal Kamba Shamba and we were all Wakamba and all thirsty.
Charo was the only one who examined the leopard closely because he had been mauled twice by leopards and he had shown me where the charge of shot at close range had entered almost alongside the first bullet wound in the shoulder. I knew it must have as I knew the roots and the bank had deflected the other shots, but I was only happy and proud of us all and how we had been all day and happy that we would get to camp and to the shade and to cold beer.
We came into camp with the klaxon of the car going and everyone turned out and Keiti was happy and I think he was proud. We all got out of the car and Charo was the only one who stayed to look at the leopard. Keiti stayed with Charo and the skinner took charge of the leopard. We took no photographs of him. Keiti had asked me, “Piga picha?” and I said, “Piga shit.”
Ngui and Pop’s gun bearer brought the guns to the tent and laid them on Miss Mary’s bed and I carried the cameras and hung them up. I told Msembi to put the table out under the tree and bring chairs and to bring all the cold beer and Coca-Cola for Charo. I told Ngui not to bother about cleaning the guns now but to go and get Mthuka; that we would drink formal beer.
Mwindi said that I should take a bath. He would have the water in no time. I said that I would bathe in the washbasin and to please find me my clean shirt.
“You should take big bath,” he said.
“I’ll take big bath later. I’m too hot.”
“How you get all the blood? From chui?”
This was ironic but carefully concealed.
“From tree branches.”
“You wash off good with blue soap. I put on the red stuff.”
We always used Mercurochrome instead of iodine if we could get it although some Africans preferred iodine since it hurt and so was considered a stronger medicine. I washed and scrubbed the scratches open and clean and Mwindi painted them carefully.
I put on my clean clothes and I knew Mthuka, Ngui, Pop’s gun bearer and Charo were putting on their clean clothes.
“Did chui come?”
“No.”
“Why everybody make so happy then?”
“Very funny shauri. Very funny hunt all morning.”
“Why you want to be African?”
“I’m going to be Kamba.”
“Maybe,” said Mwindi.
“Fuck maybe.”
“Here come your friends.”
“Brothers.”
“Broth
ers maybe. Charo not your brother.”
“Charo my good friend.”
“Yes,” Mwindi said sadly, handing me a pair of slippers that he knew were a little tight and watching to see how much they hurt when I put them on. “Charo good friend. Have plenty bad luck?”
“How?”
“Every way. And is a lucky man.”
I went out to join the others, who were standing at the table with Msembi in his green robe and green skullcap standing ready with the beer in the faded green canvas bucket. The clouds were very high in the sky and the sky was the highest sky in the world and I looked back over the tent and could see the Mountain high and white above the trees.
“Gentlemen,” I said and bowed and we all sat down in the chairs of the Bwanas and Msembi poured the four tall beers and the Coca-Cola of Charo. Charo was the oldest so I ceded to him and Mwindi poured the Coca-Cola first. Charo had changed his turban to one slightly less gray and he wore a blue coat with brass buttons fastened together at the throat with a blanket pin I had given him twenty years before and a natty pair of well-repaired shorts.
When the drinks had been poured I stood up and proposed the toast, “To the Queen.” We all drank and then I said, “To Mr. Chui, gentlemen. He is Royal Game.” We drank again with propriety and protocol but with enthusiasm. Msembi refilled the glasses this time starting with me and ending with Charo. He had great respect for an elder but it was hard to respect the carbonated beverage against Tusker beer.
“A noi,” I said bowing to Ngui who had learned his Italian in the captured brothels of Addis Ababa and from the hurriedly discarded mistresses of an army in flight. I added, “Wakamba rosa e la liberta, Wakamba rosa triomfera.”
True at First Light Page 26
