A World of Strangers (31 page)

‘No loaded guns in the car,' said John, as everybody got in. But Hughie, grinning in the driver's seat, kept the muzzle of his gun pointing out the window. ‘I don't want to waste time. – Get a shift on, Eilertsen, for Chris' sake.' Eilertsen was feeling about himself like a man checking up on his train ticket.' Nearly ten past four,' said Patterson, screwing up his bright blue whisky-drinker's eyes against the mild sun. ‘Just right. They ought to be feeding nicely. Where're we going? Down to the far boundary?'

‘Bloody birds'll be going back into the bush by the time
we get out. Let's go down where the ground-nut field used to be, and then fan out through that little patch of bush and come out on the other side of the mealies.'

‘Look at that!'

‘Burned to blazes!'

‘Damn, damn, damn,' John moaned softly as we jolted along the track, crushed against each other, with the guns hard against our shins and elbows. A stretch of bush lay reduced to ashes.

‘Half our cover gone!'

A cry went up from Eilertsen: ‘Stop! Over there, look -'

The car stopped as if it had hit a wall.

‘Where, where?'

‘By that stump? See? Just to the left of that dead bush?'

The back of Hughie's neck, before me where I sat, became red with an excitement like rage. ‘What was it?'

‘Two pheasants, didn't you see?'

‘Ach, man, we don't want to go haring off after a couple of pheasants, let's get on.'

‘I think they've gone now, Eilertsen,' said Patterson, distant and kindly.

‘What I like to do,' said John, ‘when I see something like that, a couple of pheasant where the cover's not too thick, near the road, I like to let Gracie work it a bit. Just go quietly through the bush with her, let her see what she can find.'

The car bumped and swayed on; far away, the broken windmill appeared on our left. We went off the track and through a mealie-field, the tall stakes with their ragged beards and torn leaves staggering at the impact of the car and going down with a crack like breaking bone. On the edge of the field we left the car and spread in a wide sweep through the dead mealies. I could just see Patterson's cap, now and then, on my left, and hear, on the other side of me, John whistle softly to the dog. There was the water-sound of doves, a long way off. A whirr of finches, like insects, went up over my head. The sun had not begun to drop yet, but it seemed to hold off its warmth, in preparation for departure. My own footsteps, over the clods and the stubble, and the brush of my clothes against the mealie-stalks, seemed the
noisy progress of some particularly clumsy animal. Once I heard a low, clear questioning chirrup, a peevish, purring call. After a pause, it came again, or the answer to it, much nearer to me. But we came out, all into each other's sight, at the end of the field, all expectant, all with nothing to relate. ‘Did you hear them though?' said John. ‘That's guinea-fowl, my boy.' ‘That rather plaintive sort of call?' ‘That's it,' said Patterson.

We piled into the car again and crashed back over the field in the path we had already flattened before us. Hughie did not speak and swung the car determinedly this way and that. We came out on to a soft red dust road and drove cautiously, in first gear, along the bush. The car stopped, just where the bush ended and the mealies began again. No one spoke; like a yearning, our gaze and our attention went out over the field. And – ‘There!' said John hoarsely. ‘Look at them, look at them.'

‘Ah, there.'

‘Where. . . .'

‘Look, hundreds of them. And there.'

‘I had a feeling they'd be here.' Hughie, both hands on his gun, spoke lovingly. ‘It's funny, I had a feeling.'

In the middle of the field, among the clods that looked like broken chocolate, and the pale, untidy shafts of the mealies, I saw dark, small heads, jerky and yet serpentine, plump bodies with a downward sweep, stalking legs: guinea-fowl feeding. They reminded me of pea-hens, and their plumage was the blue-dark of certain plums.

We all got out of the car softly and swiftly. John made a plan of approach. Patterson would go up the centre of the field, making straight for them; John and I would swing out in a curve to the left, Hughie and Eilertsen would do the same on the right, so that when the flock was disturbed by Patterson, he would have his chance with them as they took to the air, and either John and I, if they flew West, or Hughie and Eilertsen, if they flew East, would have a chance with them as they made for cover. It was unlikely that they would fly directly away from Patterson, to the North, because there was a stretch of newly-ploughed ground there, and no cover.
Hughie, scowling with concentration, was off with Eilertsen behind him and an air of going his own way, almost before John had finished speaking. Patterson's big heavy shape went nimbly into the screen of mealies.

The dog wove in and out just ahead of John and me, but discreetly, held by the invisible check of obedience. The discomfort of her body was forgotten, she did not seem aware of it at all, but followed the map of smells spread under her pads like a crazy, enchanting dream, the dream that gun-dogs, twitching, dream all summer, and suddenly wake up to find themselves inhabiting, in the winter. We trudged without speaking, round the margin of the field; a barbed wire fence stood between the mealies and the beginning of the bush, on the left side, and we followed it for a hundred and fifty yards and then stopped and waited. John was unaware of himself, and me; he gave me an absent, flitting smile, and kept his white-haired, cockatoo head lifted. The dog panted with happiness, like an athlete who has just breasted the tape, and he put a hand down to quiet her. I opened the breech of my gun to look at the two cartridges lying ready. It did not seem likely that there was anyone else alive, in the multiplication of mealies not moving out there; I forgot what we were waiting for, as, I suppose, fishermen forget when they sit with the rod in their hands, and Patterson forgot the moment before he loosed fire among the Messerschmitts. I watched John, in the perfect moment of inaction that only comes in action, and wondered, after all this time, if this was what Stella Turgell had meant when she had said of her husband that Africa was for active and not contemplative natures.

The guinea-fowl came over, black and sudden, tossed up into the air by their own alarm, and cracks sounded, sharp and near and far and feeble. John gasped as if something had got him by the throat and swung up his gun wildly. A second flock came, rising steeply as they passed us. I felt the recoil against my shoulder, smelled the explosion-warmed grease of the gun. The black, plump shapes were lifting; nothing touched them. Then I saw them along the path of the barrel; a line drew taut in the bright air between my
eye and a bird that hung, a split second, breasted on the air. The gun nudged me; the air toppled the bird and let it fall. I spilt the smoking cartridges, re-loaded, and shot another. Out of range over the bush, we saw the rest of the birds skim down into the trees.

My first bird was dead, the second lay in long grass on the other side of the fence. The dog found it at once, and John, who had gone through the wire to look for his own bird, picked it up by the neck and snapped the thread of life that remained in it as neatly as he would pluck a stalk of grass. The heads of the dead birds were ugly; they looked like the carved heads of old ladies' umbrellas.

I followed John through the fence into the bush, carrying the soft, plump weight of my birds. As we searched for his wounded bird, we heard the voices of the other men, excited as the cries of boys on a beach. We went deeper into the bush, talking and purposeful; I had seen John's bird come down, he had seen it flutter, half-rising again, once or twice. I looked all round the thorn-tree where I had seen it fall, but there was nothing, not a feather; was it that tree? Wherever you looked there were trees exactly like it; the moment I found myself five yards into the bush I knew myself to be in a place of uncertainty, and this was right – the beginning of the bush was like the middle, you did not go deeper into it in any sense but that of distance, for it was same, all the way. It reduced time and space to the measure of the sun's passing across the sky and the tiredness of your own feet; I could well imagine that if you walked through it for ten minutes or ten hours, whether you went round in a small circle or covered miles in a straight line, you would have covered the same ground and have the same lack of sense of achievement. It had the soothing monotony of snow. John poked about and grumbled. ‘You see it's hopeless without a dog in this stuff. We'd've lost yours, ten to one, if there'd been no dog.' The setter swam steadily, head up, through a drift of thick grass, sniffed round thorny thickets as if they were about to explode. We didn't find the bird.' Lying low somewhere, under our feet.' John reproached the dog, but she gave him a moment's absent flick of the ears and went off
again, her course erratic and mysterious as a water-diviner's. The voices of the others were lost; alone again and in silence except for the clumsy passage of our bodies, we followed the dog through the indifference of the empty afternoon. I heard my own breathing and felt the prick of the thorns; they were thicker than leaves, on every bush and tree and bramble and, with scabby bark and crusted twig, gave everything the touch and feel of old men's horny fingers. The enormous air paled; the sun was so withdrawn you could look right up into it, but the little scratchings of shadow from the bush did not seem to grow longer, but only to disappear in soft shoals of shadow that the grasses threw upon themselves, as the sea often seems to darken from beneath rather than from the failure of the light above. We went on, and, suddenly, the spasm of a muscle in a dream, three pheasant blustered into the air right before us. I was foolishly startled, and missed, but John, with that gasping intake of breath, wheeled on them and got one.

Back at the car, Hughie and Eilertsen were already there. They waved and shouted as we came up; there was a dark heap on the roadside beside them.' Where the hell'd you get to,' yelled Hughie, extraordinarily cheerful and friendly, swaggering with satisfaction. ‘We heard you potting away in the bundu; what's the score? Jesus, that was some flock came your way, we only got the lousy stragglers, the few that panicked and went the other way.'

‘He got four, I got three,' said Eilertsen, turning a bird over with his foot.

‘Jesus!' Hughie looked at what we had in our hands. ‘I don't believe it! Whatsa matter with you, John, you paralysed or something? I ruddy well don't believe it! And what's that, a pheasant – one of them's even a pheasant. Didn't you chaps
see
a few hundred or so guinea-fowl over your heads?'

‘Hughie, man,' John said worriedly, ‘I come up too fast. I know it. You remember, it was just the same last year. The first afternoon, I'm just too damned het up and excited.'

‘Jesus,' said Hughie resentfully, ‘only two.'

‘I did get one blighter, but he came down in the bush and even Grade couldn't find him.'

Hughie began to piece together the strategy of the first shoot: ‘Why did Patterson have to make right for the middle of the birds, like that? He should've gone round, and driven them down a bit.'

‘Who can tell?' Eilertsen had the look of a man for whom almost everything is a little beyond him. ‘You never know what they'll do.'

‘But that's fine,' John said eagerly. ‘That means they're not wild at all, this year, eh? Did you see, Hughie? He went right up dose, eh? We couldn't see a thing, where we were.'

‘If I'd'a bin him, I'd'a gone round a bit, that's what I would'a done.'

Patterson came out of the mealies with the happy, calm roll of a man who is smiling to himself. A duster of dark bodies hung from the hooks on his belt, bumping against his hip as he walked. As he drew nearer, I saw a feather, stuck in the band of the shark-skin cap. ‘Not bad,' he said. A year of alcohol was beading, streaming, oozing out of his skin.

Hughie was counting. ‘Three, and me and Eilie seven, that's ten, twelve -'

Eilertsen tossed the pheasant to him.

‘Thirteen, could be worse. Patterson, why'd you go straight for them, man?'

‘It was amazing,' Patterson was telling John, while he smeared at his face. He had taken off the cap and his hair was brilliantined with sweat. ‘I felt as if they would have come up and eaten out of my hand. They simply ignored me. One old boy just gave me a wink and went on feeding. D'you remember the one-legged one? He's still here. He's with this lot.'

At the sight of the car, as if at a reminder, the dog had dropped into exhaustion. She lay in the back, almost as inert as her prey. We drove back to the camp talking, scarcely listening to each other, and huddled comfortably together, rank and uncaring as animals in the loose, unquestioning association of the pack.

While we were gone, the three Africans had collected
wood and fetched water from the farmhouse. Hughie shook himself out of the car and at once began to shout and berate in the meaningless convention of men who are brought up in a country where there are many menials; the Africans, in the same convention, heard only the sense, ignored the words, and did the minimum of what was required of them. Two of the men were John's servants, very black Nyasas with blank faces that looked worried the moment they took on any task. The other was Hughie's own servant, a little snivelling Basuto with a face the colour of fear. Hughie bellowed at him harmlessly, as if he were deaf. He sat down on a camp stool and shouted, ‘Here! Come on, get my boots off!' Then he was all over the camp, looking into everything. ‘These lazy bastards! How long d'you think this wood will last, eh? That's no good, all that small stuff. You get on out there and bring some big logs.
Makulu, Makulu,
eh? Plenty big logs.'

The darkness was cold. It came up around our legs and, as we stood around the fire, drinking the first whisky, the whole land became steeped in dark, while the sky took on the sheen of a wet shell. The shapes of the men changed clumsily as they put on pullovers and mufflers; I dragged out of the duffle-bag my souvenir of Zermatt. Meat had been brought from town for the first night's meal, and John prepared and grilled it. Hughie opened a tin of beans and asked for bacon, butter, and various utensils John hadn't got. ‘You should have one of those heavy iron pots, John, that's the only way to do these things properly. Isn't there a spoon with a long handle? Here! Find me a spoon, big one, one with long handle! – Jesus, this bloody thing's burning me up.' The unlikely-looking food was delicious, and with it we drank mugsful of red wine. We sat like spectators round the dance of the flames and the stars came out sharply and the dark seeped up and up. It was night, and in the great dark room of the world, we were a scene in somebody's sleeping head, alight, alive, enclosed.