West with the Night (25 page)

No matter how elaborate the safari on which Makula is engaged as tracker, he goes about naked from the waist up, carrying a long bow and a quiver full of poisoned arrows. He has seen the work of the best rifles white men have yet produced, but when Makula’s nostrils distend after either a good or a bad shot, it is not the smell of gunpowder that distends them; it is a kind of restrained contempt for that noisy and unwieldy piece of machinery with its devilish tendency to knock the untutored huntsman flat on his buttocks every time he pulls the trigger.

Safaris come and safaris go, but Makula goes on forever. I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have ever known — so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away, though I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: ‘White men pay for danger — we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.’

Makula always vanished. He went ahead in the bush with the silence of a shade, missing nothing, and the moment he had brought his hunters within sight of the elephant, he disappeared with the silence of a shade, missing everything.

Stalking just ahead of Blix through the tight bush, Makula signalled for a pause, shinned up a convenient tree without noise, and then came down again. He pointed to a chink in the thicket, took Blix firmly by the arm, and pushed him ahead. Then Makula disappeared. Blix led, and I followed.

The ability to move soundlessly through a wall of bush as tightly woven as Nature can weave it is not an art that can be acquired much after childhood. I cannot explain it, nor could Arab Maina who taught me ever explain it. It is not a matter of watching where you step; it is rather a matter of keeping your eyes on the place where you want to be, while every nerve becomes another eye, every muscle develops reflex action. You do not guide your body, you trust it to be silent.

We were silent. The elephant we advanced upon heard nothing — even when the enormous hindquarters of two bulls loomed before us like grey rocks wedded to the earth.

Blix stopped. He whispered with his fingers and I read the whisper. ‘Watch the wind. Swing round them. I want to see their tusks.’

Swing, indeed! It took us slightly over an hour to negotiate a semicircle of fifty yards. The bulls were big — with ivory enough — hundred-pounders at least, or better.

Nimrod was satisfied, wet with sweat, and on the verge, I sensed, of receiving a psychic message from Doctor Turvy. But this message was delayed in transit.

One bull raised his head, elevated his trunk, and moved to face us. His gargantuan ears began to spread as if to capture even the sound of our heartbeats. By chance, he had grazed over a spot we had lately left, and he had got our scent. It was all he needed.

I have rarely seen anything so calm as that bull elephant — or so casually determined upon destruction. It might be said that he shuffled to the kill. Being, like all elephant, almost blind, this one could not see us, but he was used to that. He would follow scent and sound until he
could
see us, which, I computed would take about thirty seconds.

Blix wiggled his fingers earthward, and that meant, ‘Drop and crawl.’

It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.

By the time I had crawled three feet, I am sure that somewhere over fifty distinct species of insect life were individually and severally represented in my clothes, with Siafu ants conducting the congress.

Blix’s feet were just ahead of my eyes — close enough so that I could contemplate the holes in his shoes, and wonder why he ever wore any at all, since he went through them almost in a matter of hours. I had ample time also to observe that he wore no socks. Practical, but not comme il faut. His legs moved through the underbrush like dead legs dragged by strings. There was no sound from the elephant.

I don’t know how long we crawled like that, but the little shadows in the thicket were leaning toward the east when we stopped. Possibly we had gone a hundred yards. The insect bites had become just broad, burning patches.

We were breathing easier — or at least I was — when Blix’s feet and legs went motionless. I could just see his head close against his shoulder, and watch him turn to peek upward into the bush. He gave no signal to continue. He only looked horribly embarrassed like a child caught stealing eggs.

But my own expression must have been a little more intense. The big bull was about ten feet away — and at that distance elephant are not blind.

Blix stood up and raised his rifle slowly, with an expression of ineffable sadness.

‘That’s for me,’ I thought. ‘He knows that even a shot in the brain won’t stop that bull before we’re both crushed like mangos.’

In an open place, it might have been possible to dodge to one side, but not here. I stood behind Blix with my hands on his waist according to his instructions. But I knew it wasn’t any good. The body of the elephant was swaying. It was like watching a boulder, in whose path you were trapped, teeter on the edge of a cliff before plunging. The bull’s ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up and extended toward us, and he began the elephant scream of anger which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand, like fingers clamped upon your throat. It is a shrill scream, cold as winter wind.

It occurred to me that this was the instant to shoot.

Blix never moved. He held his rifle very steady and began to chant some of the most striking blasphemy I have ever heard. It was colourful, original, and delivered with finesse, but I felt that this was a badly chosen moment to test it on an elephant — and ungallant beyond belief if it was meant for me.

The elephant advanced, Blix unleashed more oaths (this time in Swedish), and I trembled. There was no rifle shot. A single biscuit tin, I judged, would do for both of us — cremation would be superfluous.

‘I may have to shoot him,’ Blix announced, and the remark struck me as an understatement of classic magnificence. Bullets would sink into that monstrous hide like pebbles into a pond.

Somehow you never think of an elephant as having a mouth, because you never see it when his trunk is down, so that when the elephant is quite close and his trunk is up, the dark red-and-black slit is by way of being an almost shocking revelation. I was looking into our elephant’s mouth with a kind of idiotic curiosity when he screamed again — and thereby, I am convinced, saved both Blix and me from a fate no more tragic than simple death, but infinitely less tidy.

The scream of that elephant was a strategic blunder, and it did him out of a wonderful bit of fun. It was such an authentic scream, of such splendid resonance, that his cronies, still grazing in the bush, accepted it as legitimate warning, and left. We had known they were still there because the bowels of peacefully occupied elephant rumble continually like oncoming thunder — and we had heard thunder.

They left, and it seemed they tore the country from its roots in leaving. Everything went, bush, trees, sansivera, clods of dirt — and the monster who confronted us. He paused, listened, and swung round with the slow irresistibility of a bank-vault door. And then he was off in a typhoon of crumbled vegetation and crashing trees.

For a long time there wasn’t any silence, but when there was, Blix lowered his rifle — which had acquired, for me, all the death-dealing qualities of a feather duster.

I was limp, irritable, and full of maledictions for the insect kind. Blix and I hacked our way back to camp without the exchange of a word, but when I fell into a canvas chair in front of the tents, I forswore the historic propriety of my sex to ask a rude question.

‘I think you’re the best hunter in Africa, Blickie, but there are times when your humour is gruesome. Why in hell didn’t you shoot? ‘

Blix extracted a bug from Doctor Turvy’s elixir of life and shrugged.

‘Don’t be silly. You know as well as I do why I didn’t shoot. Those elephant are for Winston.’

‘Of course I know — but what if that bull had charged?’

Farah the faithful produced another drink, and Blix produced a non sequitur. He stared upward into the leaves of the baobab tree and sighed like a poet in love.

‘There’s an old adage,’ he said, ‘translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages — “Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.” ’

T
HE ONLY DISADVANTAGE IN
surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it — and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.

Blix is the only man I know who could write posthumously about a fatal happening without arousing doubtful comment. He went about for years in Africa with enough malaria in his system to cause the undoing of ten ordinary men. Every now and then, when the moment seemed propitious, the malaria demon would go through all the formalities of a coup de grâce and then walk away, leaving Blix, more often than not, huddled motionless on a forest path without even Doctor Turvy for comfort. A day later, Blix would be on his way again, resembling a half-brother to Death, but shooting just as straight as he always had and performing his job with his usual competence.

Like the Irish, of whom it is said that they never know when they are beaten, Blix never knew when he was dead. He was charged by a bull elephant once and fell against a tree in attempting a sidestep. Blix lay flat on his back while the bull tore the tree from its roots, ground most of it into the earth within inches of Blix’s body, and then stormed away in the blind conviction that his puny enemy was dead. To this day, Blix argues that the bull was wrong, but everybody is aware that Nordic blood sometimes bestows a stubbornness, impervious to conviction, upon its bearers.

But there were occasions when Blix was the victim of more commonplace, even tedious, hardships.

Winston had got the elephant that had almost got Blix and me. That elephant was big, but not big enough for the dynamic Mr. Guest, who seems to wring from each moment of his life its ultimate squeal of excitement, so Blix and I took off together again and went scouting toward a place called Ithumba.

For a long time we saw nothing, but on the way back, flying over the Yatta Plateau, we found a colossal bull grazing in majestic loneliness amongst the thorn trees and the thicket.

A bull like that is a challenge to a hunter. It is one thing to track down a herd with its cows and calves and its republican method of formulating communal policy, but it is another thing to tackle a seasoned individualist unfettered by responsibility — selfish, worldly-wise, and quick to act.

We returned to camp about mid-afternoon and Winston decided to go straight after the bull. Big as Winston is and physically powerful as he is, he could hardly have hesitated, with honour, in ordering the advance. There was the elephant and there was Winston — with a possible fifteen miles between them. Man and beast, notwithstanding, it brought to mind those two mutually respectful sons of Greece who meet so often in print without anybody’s ever knowing the outcome. Winston heard, in our description of the lone colossus, the call of Destiny. Late as it was, he commanded action.

Blix fixed up a light safari, using about fifteen porters. This contingent, organized for mobility, carried mostly non-edible supplies, and would strike out across country, while, with Farah and Arab Ruta in joint command, a couple of lorries were sent around, over what roads there were, to establish new headquarters at Ithumba. The plan had an almost military flavour.

Some idea of the kind of terrain and difficulty of organization may be got from the fact that, while the foot party might expect to force its way a distance of only thirty miles in order to reach Ithumba, the lorries would have to travel more than two hundred miles in a great circle to reach the same point.

The Yatta Plateau, rising about five hundred feet from the plain, is caught between the Athi River on the west and the Tiva on the east. The plateau itself is a man-trap of bush, thicket, and thorn trees fifteen to twenty feet high, interlocked like steel mesh, dark enough and deep enough to swallow an army.

Blix’s strategy had to be simple, and was. The party would camp on the banks of the Athi for the first night, climb the plateau at dawn, hunt down the spoor and, with luck, bring Winston’s bull to bay before dark in a kind of lightning manoeuvre. Having been successful (any other expectation was of course fantastic), the party would descend the eastern slope of the plateau, wade the narrow Tiva, and arrive at Ithumba joyously bearing its treasure of ivory.

For my part, needing some servicing on the Avian, I prepared to fly back to Nyeri (about sixty miles north of Nairobi) and then return to Ithumba within three days.

‘When the plane is ready,’ Blix said, ‘fly straight to Ithumba. We’ll be waiting there.’

I took off from our camp near Kilamakoy just as Winston and Blix, like the twin heads of a determined dragon, made off through the bush with a long tail of burdened porters dragging closely behind.

I flew the hundred and eighty-odd miles up to Nyeri and landed at John Carberry’s coffee farm, Seramai.

Lord Carberry, an Irish peer with an African anchorage and an American accent, was a brilliant flyer in the days when it was still considered a noteworthy feat to drive an automobile a hundred miles and then be able to walk away from it reasonably erect. Carberry was a pilot in the First World War — and before it. After the war, he came out to British East Africa and bought and developed Seramai.

The place borders the Kikuyu Reserve near the southern hem of Mount Kenya’s foothills and lies at an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet. The country is cool, misty, and lush with rich soil and a wealth of rain. Blue-green coffee trees cover it like a geometrically tufted counterpane.