Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/801177
82 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Sergeant Nganya, a lean old Meru in starch-stiff Empire Builders and a faded beret, led us over to a lugga near the riverbank. In the bottom were the charred, cracked leg bones of a giraffe, scraps of rotting hide, the remains of a cook fire and an empty 7.62mm shell case stamped "Cartridge, M1943"—the preferred diet of the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle. Nganya, who had been with Winter since their days together in the Kenya game department, handed the cartridge over without a word. I 'm sure they'll leave us alone," Bill said as we drank our chai under the cool fly of the mess tent. "They know we're armed, and the lads will keep a sharp lookout around the kampi. Just to ensure sweet dreams for one and all, though, I'll post guards at night. Not to worry." That evening we went out for buffalo. I still had one on my license, having killed a decent bull on the Tinga Plateau near Naibor Keju. He died in a splendid sunset. Tonight's sunset was as gaudy as that one had been: a skyful of purples and mauves and lavenders shot through with ribbons of dying fire. Walking down the riverbank through those pyrotechnics was like strolling through a gallery of bad picture postcards. There were crocodiles along the bank, big ones that slithered off into the dark, fast water with a speed that belied their size; baboons yapped and snarled in the bush across the way. Big, abrupt knobs of dark red rock thrust up through the trees, and we scanned them as we walked, keeping our eyes skinned for shifta. And suddenly one was standing there—tall and skinny against the light, heartstopping in his instant emergence from nothingness. Then I saw that it was Lambat, our head tracker, who only a minute earlier had been right behind me. He must have scampered up the hundred-foot kopje like a klipspringer. "Ah," said Bill, following my gaze. "His Lordship's having a shufti—a bit of a look-see, as you'd say in America. Aha— and he sees something!" Lambat had squatted and was peering intently upriver. It was almost too melodramatic, like a scene from a John Ford western where the intrepid Indian scout on the rimrock suddenly spots Geronimo's band. But this was real life and there was that high intensity about Lambat: slow, quiet, loose-jointed as a dead snake during times of inaction, he literally "lit up" when he spotted game, his dull dark skin suddenly glowing like polished mahogany, his muscles showing like well-wrapped cables, eyes bright as a gundog's on point. Now he raised his hands, palms forward, fingers spread. Ten. Then folded them, and opened them again. And again and again. "Christ," Bill said, "he sees forty, fifty—sixty or more." "Shifta?" "No," Bill laughed. "Buffalo. At least I hope that's what he means." The herd was feeding a quarter of a mile ahead of us, along the riverbank. We could smell them before we saw them, that sweet stench of the cow barn that put me in mind of boyhoods in northern Wisconsin: trout streams and roast-chicken suppers in the big, comfortable lakeside kitchen after the evening chores were done and the herd milked, while bats flew over the flowering honeysuckle. But this was savage Africa: milkmen of doom, we bellied up to deal death to these wild bovines. "That one on the right," Bill whispered beside me in the bush. "With his head down right now, near that group of cows: he's lifting I n some strange way, the birds we kill fly on forever. Perhaps it's the broken arc, the interrupted parabola, the high zig through the alders that never quite made it to zag—all those incompletions crying out to be consummated. But something is there that keeps them airborne, if only in our hearts, their wings forever roaring at the base of our trigger fingers. The partridge that puffs to the shot string this morning at the edge of some frost-crisp apple orchard in the hills of Vermont is the self-same bird—but totally different, of course—as the very first dove we ever knocked down, a lifetime ago, over a Midwestern cornfield. And watched in disbelief the pale feathers spill slowly from a saffron sky. Sometimes, drunk or dreaming, I see the world crisscrossed in a webwork of avian force fields, the flight paths of ghost birds winging on out as if they'd never been hit. In the end, of course, they will weave our own rough winding sheets . . . The big Bedford lorries had arrived the day before, so by the time we wheeled into the campsite along the Ewaso Nyiro River, the tents were up—taut, green, smelling of hot canvas and spicy East African dust. It was a sandy country, red and tan, and the river rolled silently but strong, dark almost as blood, under a fringe of scrawny-trunked doum palms and tall, time-worn boulders. Sand rivers cut the main watercourse at right angles, and the country rolled away to the north and west in a shimmer of pale tan haze. The fire was pale and the kettle whistled a merry welcome. This was the last camp of the month-long shooting safari through Kenya's bone-dry Northern Frontier Province, a hunt that had begun three weeks earlier at Naibor Keju in the Samburu country near Maralal, then swung northward through the lands of the Rendile and Turkana tribes to Lake Rudolf, and back down across the Chalbi and Kaisut deserts past Marsabit Mountain to the Ewaso Nyiro. "I call it EDB," Bill said as we climbed down out of the green Toyota safari wagon. "Elephant Dung Beach. The first time I camped here the lads had to shovel the piles aside before we could pitch our tents, it was that thick. Ndovus everywhere." Not anymore. On the way in from Archer's Post, Bill had pointed out the picked skeleton of an elephant killed by poachers, and not long since, judging by the lingering smell. We'd stopped to look it over—vertebrae big as chopping blocks, ribs fit for a whaleboat, the broad skull still crawling with ants, and two splintered, gaping holes where the ivory had been hacked out. "Shifta," Bill said, and when we got into camp the safari crew confirmed his diagnosis. Shifta were even then the plague of northeastern Kenya, raiders from neighboring Somalia who felt, perhaps with some justification, that the whole upper right-hand quadrant of Kenya rightly belonged to them. When the colonial powers divided Africa among themselves, they all too often drew arbitrary boundaries regardless of tribal traditions. The Somalis—a handsome, fiercely Islamic people related to the Berbers of northwest Africa and the ancient Egyptians (theirs was the Pharaonic "Land of Punt")—are nomads for the most part, and boundaries mean as little to them as they do to migrating wildebeest. But these migrants, armed with Russian AKs and plastic explosives, have blood in their eyes. They poach ivory and rhino horn, shoot up manyattas (villages) and police posts, mine the roads and blow up trucks or buses with no compunction.