Green Hills of Africa. Ernest Hemingway

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СКАЧАТЬ on the lick when we approached through the trees and he gave a loud bark, like a dog’s but higher in pitch and sharply throaty, and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in the brush when he was well away; and we never saw him. This lick had an impossible approach. Trees grew around its open area so that it was as though the game were in the blind and you had to come to them across the open. The only way to make it would have been for one man to go alone and crawl and then it would be impossible to get any sort of a close shot through the interlacing trees until you were within twenty yards. Of course once you were inside the protecting trees, and in the blind, you were wonderfully placed, for anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards from any cover. But though we stayed until eleven o’clock nothing came. We smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks would show when we came back again and walked the two miles to the road. Being hunted, the game had learned to come only at night and leave before daylight. One bull had stayed and our spooking him that morning would make it even more difficult now.

      This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning now it took the heavy, woolly sky an hour or so longer to clear and you could feel the rains coming, as they moved steadily north, as surely as though you watched them on a chart.

      Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, out-manœuvred, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one. It is not the way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters, after which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers’ businesses. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing. So, coming in at noon, up since two hours before daylight, with only three days left, I was starting to be nervous about it, and there, at the table under the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had forgotten all about him.

      ‘Hello. Hello,’ he said. ‘No success? Nothing doing? Where is the kudu?’

      ‘He coughed once and went away,’ I said. ‘Hello, girl.’

      She smiled. She was worried too. The two of them had been listening since daylight for a shot. Listening all the time, even when our guest had arrived; listening while writing letters, listening while reading, listening when Kandisky came back and talked.

      ‘You did not shoot him?’

      ‘No. Nor see him.’ I saw that Pop was worried too, and a little nervous. There had evidently been considerable talking going on.

      ‘Have a beer, Colonel,’ he said to me.

      ‘We spooked one,’ I reported. ‘No chance of a shot. There were plenty of tracks. Nothing more came. The wind was blowing around. Ask the boys about it.’

      ‘As I was telling Colonel Phillips,’ Kandisky began, shifting his leather-breeched behind and crossing one heavy-calved, well-haired, bare leg over the other, ‘you must not stay here too long. You must realize the rains are coming. There is one stretch of twelve miles beyond here you can never get through if it rains. It is impossible.’

      ‘So he’s been telling me,’ Pop said. ‘I’m a Mister, by the way. We use these military titles as nicknames. No offence if you’re a colonel yourself.’ Then to me, ‘Damn these salt-licks. If you’d leave them alone you’d get one.’

      ‘They ball it all up,’ I agreed. ‘You’re so sure of a shot sooner or later on the lick.’

      ‘Hunt the hills too.’

      ‘I’ll hunt them, Pop.’

      ‘What is killing a kudu, anyway?’ Kandisky asked. ‘You should not take it so seriously. It is nothing. In a year you kill twenty.’

      ‘Best not say anything about that to the game department, though,’ Pop said.

      ‘You misunderstand,’ Kandisky said. ‘I mean in a year a man could. Of course no man would wish to.’

      ‘Absolutely,’ Pop said. ‘If he lived in kudu country, he could. They’re the commonest big antelope in this bush country. It’s just that when you want to see them you don’t.’

      ‘I kill nothing, you understand,’ Kandisky told us. ‘Why are you not more interested in the natives?’

      ‘We are,’ my wife assured him.

      ‘They are really interesting. Listen ...’ Kandisky said, and he spoke on to her.

      ‘The hell of it is,’ I said to Pop, ‘when I’m in the hills I’m sure the bastards are down there on the salt. The cows are in the hills but I don’t believe the bulls are with them now. Then you get there in the evening and there are the tracks. They have been on the lousy salt. I think they come any time.’

      ‘Probably they do.’

      ‘I’m sure we get different bulls there. They probably only come to the salt every couple of days. Some are certainly spooked because Karl shot that one. If he’d only killed it clean instead of following it through the whole damn countryside. Christ, if he’d only kill any damn thing clean. Other new ones will come in. All we have to do is to wait them out, though. Of course they can’t all know about it. But he’s spooked this country to hell.’

      ‘He gets so very excited,’ Pop said. ‘But he’s a good lad. He made a beautiful shot on that leopard, you know. You don’t want them killed any cleaner than that. Let it quiet down again.’

      ‘Sure. I don’t mean anything when I curse him.’

      ‘What about staying in the blind all day?’

      ‘The damned wind started to go round in a circle. It blew our scent every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.’

      ‘I saw him starting off with it.’

      There wasn’t a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just light to shoot. He tried the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these crêpe-soled boots and it’s soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked at fifty yards.

      ‘Did you ever see their ears?’

      ‘Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work on him.’

      ‘They’re СКАЧАТЬ