Green Hills of Africa

PART II. PURSUIT REMEMBERED

CHAPTER ONE

It dated back to the time of Droopy, after I had come back from being ill in Nairobi and we had gone on a foot safari to hunt rhino in the forest. Droopy was a real savage with lids to his eyes that nearly covered them, handsome, with a great deal of style, a fine hunter and a beautiful tracker. He was about thirty-five, I should think, and wore only a piece of cloth knotted over one shoulder, and a fez that some hunter had given him. He always carried a spear. M’Cola wore an old U.S. Army khaki tunic, complete with buttons, that had originally been brought out for Droopy, who had been away somewhere and had missed getting it. Twice Pop had brought it out for Droopy and finally M’Cola had said, ‘Give it to me’.

Pop had let him have it and M’Cola had worn it ever since. It, a pair of shorts, his fuzzy wool curler’s cap, and a knitted army sweater he wore when washing the tunic, were the only garments I ever saw on the old man until he took my bird-shooting coat. For shoes he used sandals cut from old motor-car tyres. He had slim, handsome legs with well-turned ankles on the style of Babe Ruth’s and I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw him with the tunic off and noticed how old his upper body was. It had that aged look you see in photographs of Jeffries and Sharkey posing thirty years after, the ugly, old-man biceps and the fallen pectoral muscles.

‘How old is M’Cola?’ I asked Pop.

‘He must be over fifty,’ Pop said. ‘He’s got a grown-up family in the native reserve.’

‘How are his kids?’

‘No good, worthless. He can’t handle them. We tried one as a porter. But he was no good.’

M’Cola was not jealous of Droopy. He simply knew that Droopy was a better man than he was. More of a hunter, a faster and a cleaner tracker, and a great stylist in everything he did. He admired Droopy in the same way we did and being out with him, it made him realize that he was wearing Droopy’s tunic and that he had been a porter before he became a gun bearer and suddenly he ceased being an old timer and we were hunting together; he and I hunting together and Droopy in command of the show.

That had been a fine hunt. The afternoon of the day we came into the country we walked about four miles from camp along a deep rhino trail that graded through the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees, as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a foot deep in the ground and smoothly worn and we left it where it slanted down through a divide in the hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed, sweating, the small, steep hill on the right to sit there with our backs against the hilltop and glass the country. It was a green, pleasant country, with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of a mountain, and it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the thick timber on the mountain. Fingers of the forest came down on to the head of…