Green Hills of Africa. Ernest Hemingway

pointed, and the rhino was not in sight. We went all through the edge of the forest and it was full of tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side of the mountain, hoping to see a rhino in the open glades. When it was almost too dark to shoot, I saw Droopy stop and crouch. With his head down he motioned us forward. Crawling up, we saw a large rhino and a small one standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.

      ‘Cow and calf,’ Pop said softly. ‘Can’t shoot her. Let me look at her horn.’ He took the glasses from M’Cola.

      ‘Can she see us?’ P.O.M. asked.

      ‘No.’

      ‘How far are they?’

      ‘Must be nearly five hundred yards.’

      ‘My God, she looks big,’ I whispered.

      ‘She’s a big cow,’ Pop said. ‘Wonder what became of the bull?’ He was pleased and excited by the sight of game. ‘Too dark to shoot unless we’re right on him.’

      The rhinos had turned and were feeding. They never seemed to move slowly. They either bustled or stood still.

      ‘What makes them so red?’ P.O.M. asked.

      ‘Rolling in the mud,’ Pop answered. ‘We better get along while there’s light.’

      The sun was down when we came out of the forest and looked down the slope and across to the hill where we had watched from with our glasses. We should have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back up the trail the way we had come, but we decided, like fools, to grade straight across the mountainside below the edge of the forest. So in the dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed only as wooded patches until you were in them, slid down, clung to vines, stumbled and climbed and slid again, down and down, then steeply, impossibly, up, hearing the rustle of night things and the cough of a leopard hunting baboons; me scared of snakes, and touching each root and branch with snake fear in the dark.

      To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into the moonlight and the long, too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed one foot up to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at a time, leaning forward against the grade and the altitude, dead tired and gun weary, single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the top where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into camp.

      So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the canvas bath had been a quarter filled with hot water.

      ‘Bathi, B’wana.’

      ‘Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,’ you say.

      ‘I never could,’ says P.O.M. ‘You all made me.’

      ‘You climbed better than any of us.’

      ‘Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?’

      ‘I wonder,’ Pop said. ‘I suppose it’s merely condition.’

      ‘It’s riding in the damned cars that ruins us.’

      ‘If we did that walk every night we could come back in three nights from now and never feel it.’

      ‘Yes. But I’d be as scared of snakes if we did it every night for a year.’

      ‘You’d get over it.’

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘They scare me stiff. Do you remember that time we touched hands behind the tree?’

      ‘Rather,’ said Pop. ‘You jumped two yards. Are you really afraid of them, or only talking?’

      ‘They scare me sick,’ I said. ‘They always have.’

      ‘What’s the matter with you men?’ P.O.M. said. ‘Why haven’t I heard anything about the war to-night?’

      ‘We’re too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?’

      ‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Where is that boy with the whisky?’ Then calling in that feeble, clowning falsetto, ‘Kayti . . . Katy-ay!’

      ‘Bathi,’ said Molo again softly, but insistently.

      ‘Too tired.’

      ‘Memsahib bathi,’ Molo said hopefully.

      ‘I’ll go,’ said P.O.M. ‘But you two hurry up with your drinking. I’m hungry.’

      ‘Bathi,’ said Kayti severely to Pop.

      ‘Bathi yourself,’ said Pop. ‘Don’t bully me.’

      Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.

      ‘All right. All right,’ said Pop. ‘Going to have one?’ he asked.

      ‘We’ll have just one,’ I said, ‘and then we’ll bathi.’

      ‘Bathi, B’wana M’Kumba,’ Molo said. P.O.M. came toward the fire wearing her blue dressing-gown and mosquito boots.

      ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You can have another when you come out. There’s nice, warm, muddy water.’

      ‘They bully us,’ Pop said.

      ‘Do you remember the time we were sheep hunting and your hat blew off and nearly fell on to the ram?’ I asked her, the whisky racing my mind back to Wyoming.

      ‘Go take your bathi,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I’m going to have a gimlet.’

      In the morning we were dressed before daylight, ate breakfast, and were hunting the forest edge and the sunken valleys where Droop had seen the buffalo before the sun was up. But they were not there. It was a long hunt and we came back to camp and decided to send the lorries for porters and move with a foot safari to where there was supposed to be water in a stream that came down out of the mountain beyond where we had seen the rhinos the night before. Being camped there we could hunt a new country along the forest edge and we would be much closer to the mountain.

      The trucks were to bring in Karl from his kudu camp where he seemed to be getting disgusted, or discouraged, or both, and he could go down to the Rift Valley the next day and kill some meat and try for an oryx. If we found good rhino we would send for him. We did not want to fire any shots where we were going except at rhino in order not to scare them, and we needed meat. The rhino seemed very shy and I knew from Wyoming how the shy game will all shift out of a small country, a country being an area, a valley or range of hills, a man can hunt in, after a shot or two. We planned this all out, Pop consulting with Droopy, and then sent the lorries off with Dan to recruit porters.

      Late in the afternoon they were back with Karl, his outfit, and forty M’Bulus, good-looking savages with a pompous headman who wore the only pair of shorts among them. Karl was thin now, his skin sallow, his eyes very tired looking and he seemed a little desperate. He had been eight days in the kudu camp in the hills, hunting hard, with no one with him who spoke any English, and they had only seen two cows and jumped a bull out of range. The guides claimed they had seen another bull but Karl had thought it was kongoni, or that they said it was a kongoni, and had not shot. He was bitter about this and it was not a happy outfit.

      ‘I never saw his horns. I don’t believe it was a bull,’ he said. Kudu hunting was a touchy subject with him now and we let it alone.

      ‘He’ll get an oryx down there and he’ll feel better,’ Pop said. ‘It’s gotten on his nerves a little.’

      Karl agreed to the plan for us to move ahead into the new country, and for him to go down for meat.

      ‘Whatever you say,’ he said. ‘Absolutely whatever you say.’

      ‘It will give him some shooting,’ Pop said. ‘Then he’ll feel better.’

      ‘We’ll