"All that bastard cares about is trailing me," he said.
"I know it, Nickie."
"This is three times he's made trouble."
"I know it, Nickie. But don't you kill him."
That's why she came along, Nick thought. That's why she's here. I can't do it while she's along.
"I know I mustn't kill him," he said. "There's nothing we can do now. Let's not talk about it."
"As long as you don't kill him," his sister said. "There's nothing we can't get out of and nothing that won't blow over."
"Let's get back to camp," Nick said. "Without the berries?"
"We'll get the berries another day."
"Are you nervous, Nickie?"
"Yes. I'm sorry."
"But what good will we be back at camp?" "We'll know quicker."
"Can't we just go along the way we were going?"
"Not now. I'm not scared, Littless. And don't you be scared. But something's made me nervous."
Nick had cut up away from the stream into the edge of the timber and they were walking in the shade of the trees. They would come onto the camp now from above.
From the timber they approached the camp carefully. Nick went ahead with the rifle. The camp had not been visited.
"You stay here," Nick told his sister. "I'm going to have a look beyond." He left the sack with the birds and the berry pails with Littless and went well upstream. As soon as he was out of sight of his sister he changed the .22 shorts in the rifle for the long-rifles. I won't kill him, he thought, but anyway it's the right thing to do. He made a careful search of the country. He saw no sign of anyone and he went down to the stream and then downstream and back up to the camp.
"I'm sorry I was nervous, Littless," he said. "We might as well have a good lunch and then we won't have to worry about a fire showing at night."
"I'm worried now, too," she said.
"Don't you be worried. It's just like it was before."
"But he drove us back from getting the berries without him even being here."
"I know. But he's not been here. Maybe he's never even been to this creek ever. Maybe we'll never see him again."
"He makes me scared, Nickie, worse when he's not here than when he's here."
"I know. But there isn't any use being scared."
"What are we going to do?"
"Well, we better wait to cook until night."
"Why did you change?"
"He won't be around here at night. He can't come through the swamp in the dark. We don't have to worry about him early in the mornings and late in the evening nor in the dark. We'll have to be like the deer and only be out then. We'll lay up in the daytime."
"Maybe he'll never come."
"Sure. Maybe."
"But I can stay though, can't I?"
"I ought to get you home."
"No. Please, Nickie. Who's going to keep you from killing him then?"
"Listen, Littless, don't ever talk about killing and remember I never talked about killing. There isn't any killing nor ever going to be any."
"True?"
"True."
"I'm so glad."
"Don't even be that. Nobody ever talked about it."
" All right. I never thought about it nor spoke about it."
"Me either."
"Of course you didn't."
"I never even thought about it."
No, he thought. You never even thought about it. Only all day and all night. But you mustn't think about it in front of her because she can feel it because she is your sister and you love each other.
"Are you hungry, Littless?"
"Not really."
"Eat some of the hard chocolate and I'll get some fresh water from the spring."
"I don't have to have anything."
They looked across to where the big white clouds of the eleven o'clock breeze were coming up over the blue hills beyond the swamp. The sky was a high clear blue and the clouds came up white and detached themselves from behind the hills and moved high in the sky as the breeze freshened and the shadows of the clouds moved over the swamp and across the hillside. The wind blew in the trees now and was cool as they lay in the shade. The water from the spring was cold and fresh in the tin pail and the chocolate was not quite bitter but was hard and crunched as they chewed it.
"It's as good as the water in the spring where we were when we first saw them," his sister said. "It tastes even better after the chocolate."
"We can cook if you're hungry."
"I'm not if you're not."
"I'm always hungry. I was a fool not to go on and get the berries."
"No. You came back to find out."
"Look, Littless. I know a good place back by the slashing we came through where we can get berries. I'll cache everything and we can go in there through the timber all the way and pick a couple of pails full and then we'll have them ahead for tomorrow. It isn't a bad walk."
"All right. But I'm fine."
"Aren't you hungry?"
"No. Not at all now after the chocolate. I'd love to just stay and read. We had a nice walk when we were hunting."
"All right," Nick said. "Are you tired from yesterday?"
"Maybe a little."
"We'll take it easy. I'll read Wuthering Heights."
"Is it too old to read out loud to me?"
"No."
"Will you read it?"
"Sure."
An African Story.
HE WAS WAITING FORTHE MOON TO RISE and he felt Kibo's hair rise under his hand as he stroked him to be quiet and they both watched and listened as the moon came up and gave them shadows. His arm was around the dog's neck now and he could feel him shivering. All of the night sounds had stopped. They did not hear the elephant and David did not see him until the dog turned his head and seemed to settle into David. Then the elephant's shadow covered them and he moved past making no noise at all and they smelled him in the light wind that came down from the mountain. He smelled strong but old and sour and when he was past David saw that the left tusk was so long it seemed to reach the ground.
They waited but no other elephants came by and then David and the dog started off running in the moonlight. The dog kept close behind him and when David stopped the dog pressed his muzzle into the back of his knee.
David had to see the bull again and they came up on him at the edge of the forest. He was traveling toward the mountain and slowly moving into the steady night breeze. David came close enough to see him cut off the moon again and to smell the sour oldness but he could not see the right tusk. He was afraid to work closer with the dog and he took him back with the wind and pushed him down against the base of a tree and tried to make him understand. He thought the dog would stay and he did but when David moved up toward the bulk of the elephant again he felt the wet muzzle against the hollow of his knee.
The two of them followed the elephant until he came to an opening in the trees. He stood there moving his huge ears. His bulk was in the shadow but the moonlight would be on his head. David reached behind him and closed the dog's jaws gently with his hand and then moved softly and unbreathing to his right along the edge of the night breeze, feeling it on his cheek, edging with it, never letting it get between him and the bulk until he could see the elephant's head and the great ears slowly moving. The right tusk was as thick as his own thigh and it curved down almost to the ground.
He and Kibo moved back, the wind on his neck now, and they backtracked out of the forest and into the open park country. The dog was ahead of him now and he stopped where David had left the two hunting spears by the trail when they had followed the elephant. He swung them over his shoulder in their thong and leather cup harness and, with his best spear that he had kept with him all the time in his hand, they started on the trail for the shamba. The moon was high now and he wondered why there was no drumming from the shamba. Something was strange if his father was there and there was no drumming.
David had felt the tiredness as soon as they had picked up the trail again.
For a long time he had been fresher and in better shape than the two men and impatient with their slow trailing and the regular halts his father made each hour on the hour. He could have moved ahead much faster than Juma and his father but when he started to tire they were the same as ever and at noon they took only the usual five-minute rest and he had seen that Juma was increasing the pace a little. Perhaps he wasn't. Perhaps it had only seemed faster but the elephant dung was fresher now although it was not warm yet to the touch. Juma gave him the rifle to carry after they came upon the last pile of dung but after an hour he looked at him and took it back.They had been climbing steadily across a slope of the mountain but now the trail went down and from a gap in the forest he saw broken country ahead. "Here's where the tough part starts, Davey," his father said.
It was then he knew that he should have been sent back to the shamba once he had put them on the trail. Juma had known it for a long time. His father knew it now and there was nothing to be done. It was another of his mistakes and there was nothing to do now except gamble.
David looked down at the big flattened circle of the print of the elephant's foot and saw where the bracken had been pressed down and where a broken stem of a weed was drying. Juma picked it up and looked at the sun. Juma handed the broken weed to David's father and his father rolled it in his fingers. David noticed the white flowers that were drooped and dying. But they still had not dried in the sun nor shed their petals.
"It's going to be a bitch," his father said. "Let's get going."
Late in the afternoon they were still tracking through the broken country. He had been sleepy now for a long time and as he watched the two men he knew that sleepiness was his real enemy and he followed their pace and tried to move through and out of the sleep that deadened him. The two men relieved each other tracking on the hour and the one who was in second place looked back at him at regular intervals to check if he was with them. When they made a dry camp at dark in the forest he went to sleep as soon as he sat down and woke with Juma holding his moccasins and feeling his bare feet for blisters. His father had spread his coat over him and was sitting by him with a piece of cold cooked meat and two biscuits. He offered him a water bottle with cold tea.
"He'll have to feed, Davey," his father said. "Your feet are in good shape. They're as sound as Juma's. Eat this slowly and drink some tea and go to sleep again. We haven't any problems."
"I'm sorry I was so sleepy."
"You and Kibo hunted and traveled all last night. Why shouldn't you be sleepy? You can have a little more meat if you want it."
"I'm not hungry."
"Good. We're good for three days. We'll hit water again tomorrow. Plenty of creeks come off the mountain."
"Where's he going?"
"Juma thinks he knows."
"Isn't it bad?"
"Not too bad, Davey."
"I'm going back to sleep," David had said. "I don't need your coat."
"Juma and I are all right," his father said. "I always sleep warm you know."
David was asleep even before his father said good night. Then he woke once with the moonlight on his face and he thought of the elephant with his great ears moving as he stood in the forest, his head hung down with the weight of the tusks. David thought then in the night that the hollow way he felt as he remembered him was from waking hungry. But it was not and he found that out in the next three days.
The next day was very bad because long before noon he knew that it was not just the need for sleep that made the difference between a boy and men. For the first three hours he was fresher than they were and he asked Juma for the .303 rifle to carry but Juma shook his head. He did not smile and he had always been David's best friend and had taught him to hunt. He offered it to me yesterday, David thought, and I'm in better shape today than I was then. He was, too, but by ten o'clock he knew the day would be as bad or worse than the day before.
It was as silly for him to think that he could trail with his father as to think he could fight with him. He knew too that it was not just that they were men. They were professional hunters and he knew now that was why Juma would not even waste a smile. They knew everything the elephant had done, pointed out the signs of it to each other without speaking, and when the tracking became difficult his father always yielded to Juma. When they stopped to fill the water bottles at a stream his father said, "Just last the day out, Davey." Then when they were past the broken country and climbing toward the forest the tracks of the elephant turned off to the right onto an old elephant trail. He saw his father and Juma talking and when he got up to them Juma was looking back over the way they had come and then at a far distant stony island of hills in the dry country and seemed to be taking a bearing of this against the peaks of three far blue hills on the horizon.
"Juma knows where he's going now," his father explained. "He thought he knew before but then he dropped down into this stuff." He looked back at the country they had come through all day. "Where he's headed now is pretty good going but we'll have to climb."
They climbed until it was dark and then made another dry camp. David killed two spur fowl with his slingshot out of a small flock that had walked across the trail just before the sunset. The birds had come into the old elephant trail to dust, walking neatly and plumply, and when the pebble broke the back of one and the bird began to jerk and toss with its wings thumping, another bird ran forward to peck at it and David pouched another pebble and pulled it back and sent it against the ribs of the second bird. As he ran forward to put his hand on it the other birds whirred off. Juma had looked back and smiled this time and David picked up the two birds, warm and plump and smoothly feathered, and knocked their heads against the handle of his hunting knife.
Now where they were camped for the night his father said, "I've never seen that type of francolin quite so high. You did very well to get a double on them."
Juma cooked the birds spitted on a stick over the coals of a very small fire. His father drank a whiskey and water from the cup top on his flask as they lay and watched Juma cook. Afterward Juma gave them each a breast with the heart in it and ate the two necks and backs and the legs himself.
"It makes a great difference, Davey," his father said. "We're very well off on rations now."
"How far are we behind him?" David asked.
"We're quite close," his father said. "It depends on whether he travels when the moon comes up. It's an hour later tonight and two hours later than when you found him."