Green Hills of Africa

CHAPTER FIVE

It was a hot place to camp, under trees that had been girdled to kill them so that the tsetse fly would leave, and there was hard hunting in the hills, which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard climb before you got up into them, and easy hunting on the wooded flats where you wandered as though through a deer park. But everywhere were tsetse flies, swarming around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms, and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch and swished away at the back of my neck as we walked and we hunted five days, from daylight until dark, coming home after dark, dead tired but glad of the coolness and of the darkness that stopped the tsetse from biting. We took turns hunting the hills and the flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed a very fine roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal feeling about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it was someone’s fault, the guides, the choice of beat, the hills; these all betrayed him. The hills punished him and he did not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would get one and that the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about the kudu complicated the hunting. He was never a climber and took real punishment in the hills. I tried to take the bulk of the hill beats to relieve him but I could see, now that he was tired he felt they probably were in the hills and he was missing his chance.

In the five days I saw a dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull with a string of cows. The cows were big, grey, striped-flanked antelope with ridiculously small heads, big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that moved them in big-bellied panic through the trees. The young bull had the start of a spiral on his horns but they were short and dumpy and as he ran past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he was no more like a real bull than a spike elk is like a big, old, thick-necked, dark-maned, wonder-horned, tawny-hided, beer-horse-built bugler of a bull-elk.

Another time, headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in the hills, the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped, moving animals, against the sun at the top of the hill, showing only their flanks through the trunks of the trees and said they were kudu bulls. We could not see the horns and when we got up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the rocky ground we could not find their tracks. But from the glimpse we had they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl find them the next day when we sent him there.

We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting along a ridge with a steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented us, and as we stood, perfectly quiet, M’Cola holding his hand on mine, we watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, da…