His Own Medicine

I

MOHAMMED ZAIN, his dark Arab eyes rolling in their sockets, rushed breathlessly to my chair. He was all in a flutter. ‘Gramus! Gramns, effendi! ’ (Buffalo! Buffalo, sir!)

From his excitement I supposed that a buffalo had chased him into camp. Sudan buffaloes are not above such pranks. A young bull had sent Abdullahi scurrying for home a week before, and Abdullahi had won the race only by a few inches of flapping loin cloth that trailed behind in the breeze like a desperate flag of truce. So I seized the big gun and followed Mohammed through the brush.

Everyone in camp trailed behind to see the fun — Mohammed Ali, Abdullahi, Osman, Haroun, and even dignified old Arabi.

We arrived at the river bank, and Mohammed Zain pointed across the narrow Rahad. A buffalo bull stood on the opposite bank, fifty yards away, with his feet in the water, and glared at us. The curve of his heavy horns reflected the bright sunlight in flashing bands. He was‘on the fight.’ Flies and ticks bothered him and he would have liked nothing better than a chance to take it out on human flesh and bone.

I made no move to shoot and Mohammed Zain urged eagerly, ‘Banduk, effendi!’ (The gun, sir!) But I held the gun down and said, ‘ Mushouse.’ (I do not want him.)

The buffalo continued to glare. He stamped a front foot and water splashed over his shoulders. He shook his head threateningly and a deep rumble came from his chest. He was in no mood to have his daily drink interrupted by a pack of half-naked Arabs and a white man in a battered sun helmet — a white man who looked like a tramp in ‘shorts’ torn by thorns and raveled with age, and a tattered upper garment that had once been a shirt. Lions were the only living things he respected; but the water flowed between us, and he was uncertain of its depth.

I sat down in the shade of a bush to watch him more comfortably in that intense heat while the men, eager for blood as always, chattered in Arabic among themselves. I caught a few phrases: ‘What seems to be wrong with the Effendi? Here is a perfectly good buffalo with the safety of a river between us. This is a rare and unusual set-up with no chance for a charge. Why does the Effendi refuse to shoot?’

Natives are not sportsmen, and to give a dangerous animal a chance is beyond their comprehension. They peered at me curiously in side glances and old Arabi came forward on hands and knees and patted the gunstock lovingly. ‘It is a good gun, is it not? It will kill the buffalo oh so dead, will it not?’ The remark was most insinuating and suggestive.

It was n’t meat they wanted. The carcass of a freshly killed reedbuck hung in camp with mosquito net around it to keep off the flies — better meat by far than that of a tough buffalo. But they were afraid of buffalo and would have watched with savage delight that tick-infested bulk crash to earth. However, I had not traveled many weary weeks by camel south from Khartoum to kill buffalo or to please Arabs, and I had no intention of supporting a host of hyenas and vultures in idleness and luxury.

Abdullahi’s imagination began to work. He pleaded, ‘Effendi! This is the very buffalo that chased me into camp that other day. I know him. He is a bad one.’ That was a brilliant touch for a native, one of Abdullahi’s few inspired utterances. But it did no good. The chances were a hundred to one that this was not his enemy of last week, and what if it were? I was not out for buffalo and I repeated, ‘No. I do not want him.’

The buffalo soon decided that it was poor headwork to trifle with his luck too far. He wheeled and trotted across the strip of sand to the dense brush and stopped for a last look — that final glance of curiosity that so often proves fatal for game animals. But I did not shoot, and he plunged from sight in the bush.

II

A few days later, when the meat of the reedbuck had gone to line dusky ribs, Osman, the cook, came to me while the men were packing the camels. He told a long story, talking all around the point in the usual native way. I listened patiently. He had carefully thought out what he intended to say, and if I should interrupt he would merely start over at the beginning. It was a long and flowery speech; after salaams and well-wishes for my health in this world and the next had been eliminated, after childish allusions to my cunning and wisdom ‘which none would dare to dispute’ had been disregarded, his tale boiled down to the simple fact that we were out of meat. Byron’s short couplet would have told the story as well: —

Osman finished with a flourish: ‘Will the Effendi, the favored of Allah, kindly condescend to direct the deathdealing rifle, the heavy gun that makes even the lion shiver in his tracks, against the tender ribs of some meatanimal during the day’s march, that we may eat and grow strong?’

'Aywah’ (All right), I said, and mounted the bull riding camel, for the caravan was packed and ready to move.

A swaying camel saddle is an excellent lookout station. The beast moves deliberately and you pay little attention to guiding him. He follows the animal or man ahead steadily on the march, and he is afraid of nothing. The trail may be no more than a series of great round holes beneath trampled grass — the footprints of elephants made in the rainy season, a yard across and two or three feet deep. But your camel will never fall and you can watch the surrounding country without interruption.

Just before noon I saw, from my swaying station aloft, three water bucks in the open timber some four hundred yards ahead. Two were bulls and the third a doe. Down went the camel to his knees at a sharp crack of the stick upon his front legs. When I arrived on foot within two hundred yards of the water bucks, by keeping trees and brush in line, the bulls were fighting furiously — rapping horns, backing and charging, thrusting and recovering like the skilled fencers they are.

It was the usual fight for the female, and she, blasé lady, appeared to be without the slightest interest in the outcome. She nibbled a sprig from a bush, glanced behind, walked a few steps, cocked an eye at the branches of a thorn tree above, and brushed a fly from her pretty flank with a graceful motion of the head. She did everything but show interest in the wilderness knights so gallantly shivering lances in her behalf.

In one of her preoccupied, dreamy glances, however, she saw the camels of the caravan standing in the distance. Instantly she was all eyes and ears. Trotting forward with head held high and dainty, mincing steps, she came within fifty yards of the thorn tree that hid my body. There she stopped, craning her neck and doing her best to figure out what those gray beasts were. While she stood there nervous and uncertain, the gladiator swains still rapped horns and pushed and shoved each other, apparently enjoying the battle too much to notice that she had moved off.

The doe made up her mind that no good could be expected from such ungainly beasts as a string of pack camels, and she gave a series of short, stifflegged jumps. This was a signal of alarm, for the bloodthirsty duelists dropped their quarrel instantly and ran in opposite directions. They had been watching her more closely than I imagined.

I tried a long shot at one and it went down in a heap, rolling over and over from the speed of its flight. Arabi rushed forward to halleleh or cut its throat to make the meat clean for Mohammedan use. I was near enough to see that the bull was stonedead before Arabi arrived. That was unfortunate, for the Prophet states distinctly that an animal must be hallelehed before it is dead. But old Arabi was no prude. He had lived too long in the land of his fathers and had seen too much good meat wasted to be technical about it. The curved knife flashed in the sunlight and the job was done in the twinkling of an eye. Arabi always was clever with that curved knife; there were rumors in camp that at times Arabi had been too clever with cold steel; but that was none of my business.

Had one of the men been at hand to see this evidence of Arabi’s backsliding and so been in position to report the breach later to a mullah in Omdurman, Arabi’s home town, I think the old fellow would have announced smugly that the animal was dead and the meat unclean. But when the men came up Arabi remarked, as he wiped the knife blade on the animal’s back, that he had arrived just in time to save the meat. I smiled and winked at Arabi when he said this, and he grinned back at me as he slipped the knife into the sheath that all Sudani Arabs carry strapped to the left arm just above the elbow. We understood each other.

We dragged the waterbuck to the scanty shade of an acacia tree and began to cut it up. The first vulture arrived promptly, about four minutes after the shot, dropping from the sky with a loud, whistling sound, like the scream of an airplane’s wires as it drops in a steep glide. The bird came down in a zigzag course with wings folded back to half their normal spread. He dropped as fast as he dared; a touch more of speed and his enormous wings must have collapsed from the pressure, He leveled off and touched the ground, bouncing and almost falling as he alighted. Speed was a prime necessity in his business.

He had no sooner landed than we heard the rising crescendo of another scavenger coming to the feast. Another — and another — and another. In a few minutes the sky was filled with hurrying wings. The binoculars showed tiny specks at altitudes so great that not even vulture eyes could have seen that carcass upon the tawny ground. The specks grew larger, literally falling from the blue in great zigzag steps, guided to the meal by the telltale actions of birds at a lower level.

Surrounding trees were soon loaded with heavy, feathered bodies. Solid troops and phalanxes waited on the ground a few yards away. The craning of unclean red necks, the impatient ruffling of feathers, and the quick peering of little bloodshot eyes testified to the driving hunger of those lousy, feathered scavengers.

The carcass was quartered and loaded upon a kneeling camel, and as we set out for the river bank to make camp a tumbling, fighting rabble surged forward and piled upon the offal, burying it beneath a weight of brown bodies six or eight deep. Late arrivals, hobbling to the feast in that clumsy amble so characteristic of the bird on the ground, threw themselves croaking into the struggling mass, clawing and pulling at the backs of the more fortunate ones at the first table. A white-headed eagle with a perverted taste for carrion landed more leisurely and strutted forward, conscious of the superiority of his breed. The vultures made a place for him reluctantly. He was not welcome, but a sharp beak, powerful talons, and a more valiant spirit were his passports to the banquet; where the eagle sat was sure to be the head of the table. Hawks and kites, darting swiftly back and forth above the tearing, clawing mass, swooped gracefully on the alert for a crumb cast carelessly aside; too small and light to take part in that centre rush of gourmands, they were snappers-up of unconsidered trifles.

Within an hour after old Arabi’s religious gesture with the knife, the trees around a new camp were festooned with strings of raw meat dangling from ropes stretched between branches. A few days before, at a village of grass huts, a voluble, chattering native had asked to be allowed to go along with us until we killed some meat. He had not tasted meat in a long time, he said, and was too old and afflicted to kill anything with his spear. He was still with us, tagging along in the hope of meat, and now he was beside himself with glee. He was a queer specimen, with the face of a little gray monkey and eyes like animated shoe buttons — eyes that darted about with the quick, spasmodic movements of birds. He talked incessantly in a nervous jerky manner — paragraphs in Arabic without a pause for breath. He was like a person who has but one more minute to live and is determined to tell everything he knows before the end. We called him the Chatterer.

He was now laughing and babbling and holding an animated conversation with himself as he plied a bloody knife. He hung his meat in thick strings upon the lower branches of a thorn tree. But when a brown kite, diving swiftly, carried away a piece, the Chatterer raged and stormed and waved his knife in the air like a wild man. He was dangerously near the brink of insanity anyway, and if one of the men had come between him and his heritage of meat I doubt if he would have stopped at murder. But the Chatterer was not over-particular in his method of jerking meat. In his unnecessary haste he cut much of it in strips too thick to dry before the inside spoiled, and the next day a decided aroma blew from his private tree. When he left us on the second day, his back bowed beneath a load of half-dried meat wrapped in a net cleverly made from strips of bark, I watched him go with relief, marking his slow progress through the high grass by the diminishing odor that followed in his train.

III

One morning not long after, I went out at daylight and took Haroun to carry the heavy gun. We followed the river bank through open timber. The grass had been trampled flat by game herds, but it was thick and reached to our knees. Game trails led through it in all directions. We followed one of these, Haroun a pace or two behind. Fifty yards ahead something moved. In the half light it appeared to be dark and of solid color. It looked like a big baboon, but no baboon would be out that early or would be likely to be alone at any time. The dim shape had not seen us, and I hurried forward, keeping brush in line, on the chance that it might turn out to be a lion.

Haroun was not a regular gun bearer. He was a mere tent boy or male chambermaid, and I did n’t expect much from him. But I did expect him at least to be quiet. At that critical moment Haroun opened his cavernous mouth and let out a cough — a loud, deep cough that came from the chest and sounded, in the stillness of early morning, like the cough of a wind-broken horse. The dark shape ahead sprang with the sound and disappeared in the background of black thornbush. That leap showed the gleaming spots, the trailing tail, and the feline action of a large and most desirable cat, a prowling leopard. Shade of Bahrám! To cough away a chance like that! I could have wrung Haroun’s neck and enjoyed every minute of the exercise. Someone has remarked that a stutter may be an affliction, a harelip an act of God; let me add that a horse-cough at such a time is beyond classification.

Haroun was sent to camp in disgrace and I went on alone, disgusted with all spotted cats so careful of their precious hides. For beasts of strength, lightning speed, and dangerous armament, leopards are cowards. Guinea hens, monkeys, and harmless young baboons are their usual victims. The leopard has no standing in the bush, no tradition of valor to uphold as has the lion; so he fades away at the first sign of danger as meekly as a virgin in the night. But I have seen a leopard, surrounded, rush to the attack with all the fury of a wounded lion, and, with one slash of a lightning-swift paw, rip the entire scalp from a man’s head. I know several men whom leopards have come within an ace of finishing. So, attempting to generalize on how animals in the bush will behave is a thankless job; they seldom do the same thing twice under identical circumstances.

A half hour later the sun came through the trees in a golden flood and I sat down to rest upon a high bank overlooking the river. It was a classic landscape. A grove of wild fig trees with low and gracefully sweeping branches lined the opposite bank. It was a pleasant place for daydreaming, but in Africa daydreams are often interrupted. A little farther along, a herd of giraffes shuffled down the bank to drink at the river. I counted seventeen as they straggled through the trees and lurched along a trail to the water’s edge. Nervousness and fear were in every movement — fear of death so constant and so real that we wiser humans can no longer understand it in the happy safety of our lives. One by one they spread wide their mottled front legs like great stilts and swung down towering heads to drink; awkward relics of a long-dead world, giraffes appear as out of place in the modern world as would a dinosaur in a dining room.

Two young bulls, whose narrow paths joined before they reached the stream, came face to face and stopped. A question of precedence then arose. Each blocked the other’s way. Necks stretched higher and angry tails switched back and forth. Neither seemed quite willing to begin hostilities; each waited for the other to start the battle. They reminded me of Lord Hay and Count d’Auteroches at Fontenoy facing each other in rigid and polite formality, their respective forces drawn up behind them.

LORD HAY. ‘Gentlemen the French Guard! Fire first.’

COUNT D’AUTEROCHES. ‘Sir, we never fire first. Please to fire yourselves.’

But the nervous tension, the constant need for watchfulness, and the everlasting spirit of qui vive that was so great a part of their lives, soon drove away all thought of battle, and the two giraffes went peacefully down to drink.

I was curious to know how near I could approach the herd, so I made a wide detour and crouched behind a bush near the path they had followed coming to water. Soon they straggled up from the river. An old female with a small calf was in the lead. She shuffled forward almost to the bush I crouched behind and stripped a branch of leaves, reaching to a height of twenty feet. Close behind, her calf, teetering like a boy on clumsy stilts, nuzzled at lower leaves in imitation of his mother but without her enthusiasm. Leaves were evidently quite new to him and thorns were uncomfortably sharp for one of his tender age; and besides, milk was always there on tap. He punched his mother’s udder playfully with his nose and took an early morning swig not thirty yards from where I lay. A hungry lion might have caught and pulled the mother down in two swift bounds and left him parentless to face that world of tooth and claw.

One giant bull was in the herd, as fat and round as a prize Hereford at a stock show. He was powerful enough to defend himself, at least for a time, from a pack of iron-jawed hyenas or a band of those relentless killers, African hunting dogs. But a lion might have landed on his sloping shoulders and broken that long neck, offhand, with a single crunching bite. The mother giraffe stretched her neck to reach a bunch of leaves almost over my head. She saw me and with sudden fright reared and just missed trampling her calf in a wild desire to escape the expected attack. The calf, so rudely interrupted at his meal, wheeled and ran behind her, his lips covered with white milky foam from his breakfast. The herd raced away. A galloping tattoo resounded through the trees, punctuated by the clicking rattle of split hoofs. Polelike necks bobbed and ducked to pass beneath the limbs of thorn trees. The only thing those giraffes wanted at the moment was distance, leagues of it, between themselves and anything that looked or smelled like sudden death.

They were so clumsy, so ungainly, and so ludicrous in their desperate hurry that I stood up and laughed aloud. To my notion it had been rare sport to throw a scare into them and to watch the comic antics of such shy and fear-bitten animals. Madame giraffe’s disordered despair, her mortal funk, her clumsy plunge and dumb, misguided terror, seemed to me excruciatingly funny at the time. But such mortal terror is far from funny if you yourself happen to be the one scared. I did not, however, put myself in her place. But late that very day the mills-that-grind-exceeding-small did it for me. They staged a one-act play for my benefit that might be called, ‘His Own Medicine.’

IV

In the late afternoon I called old Arabi and handed him the heavy gun to carry. There was always a chance of meeting a lion in the evening along the river. We followed a broad elephant trail for an hour through high and dismal grass. I was not after elephants, but such broad trails are the only highways through the fifteen-foot grass at that season. The sun dipped below the western trees, and birds in noisy flocks passed overhead, hurrying to some distant roosting place. Darkness was just around the corner. We were more than two miles from camp and now turned and started back. It is not conducive to a ripe old age to be rummaging about in high grass after dark in lion and elephant country.

Old Arabi was in the lead, for his remarkable homing-bee instinct was infallible in high grass among twisting trails. Arabi stopped suddenly in the elephant road and stood in an attitude of strained unbalance, listening for the repetition of some faint sound. Then I too heard a sound as soft as rumbling thunder beyond the curve of far horizons, dim and vague and puzzling. It had the muffled tone of thunder and was barely audible.

‘Fîl!’ (Elephant!), Arabi muttered. The enigmatic sound was that strange phenomenon, the rumble in the stomachs of the great pachyderms. The sound was indefinite in direction and was not constant, but it seemed to come from the high grass ahead of us. We could not turn aside and there was so little daylight left that we did not care to turn directly away from camp and make a wide detour. We continued on our way slowly and carefully. I thought of the body of an Abyssinian ivory poacher found a month before, trampled so flat that — but never mind.

A crash a hundred yards ahead brought us to a halt. Some feeding tusker, tons of flesh and bone, had snapped a tree as thick as the thigh of a strong man. It sounded like a cannon shot. The tree met the earth with the crackling noise of smaller branches breaking, like the ripping sound of shingles being torn from a roof. Then a smaller tree or a heavy branch snapped upon our right. Another on the left. The herd was feeding all around us.

There was no wind, and the high grass hemmed us in so that eyes were almost useless; we could see only ten or fifteen feet. We stood stock-still and I took the heavy gun from Arabi. In a moment more we heard the ominous sound of giant bodies swishing through the grass, unseen, and much too close for comfort.

One moment more and the crack of limbs, the swish of heavy bodies through the grass, and every sound of movement stopped. Silence, blank and absolute! Silence as deep and vacant as the ghostly stillness around high mountain peaks fell on that sea of grass. It reigned a solitary moment, then Pandemonium! Chaos! Hell broke loose. Black giants rushed this way and that through the matted grass and heavy brush. And we, unable to see, could only stand and wait and hope that in his mad career no rushing mountain of bone and sinew would bear down upon us. The brittle, sun-dried grass that rose so high above our heads snapped and crackled as if a dozen whirlwinds were passing through it. The deafening noise swept toward our rear, two hundred yards—then stopped. Again, absolute silence.

The herd had stopped to listen, and the sudden silence after the first wild rush had something ominous in it. I felt distinctly uncomfortable in that high and dismal grass. It would surprise you to know what gentle, altruistic thoughts come romping to the brain when you find your precious carcass jeopardized. I remembered smugly, as if it made a difference, that I had not come for elephants and had no murderous plans against that wise and bulky race; that I always had admired elephants since first dispensing peanuts at a circus.

About three minutes passed and nothing happened. We started on again. I had no sooner handed the heavy gun back to Arabi than the steady shuffle of our feet was drowned by a high falsetto scream that tore the air to tatters! It came from close behind, thirty yards or less, and seemed to lift the short hairs of the neck and stiffen the muscles. It was a scream so shrill and piercing and so eloquent of rage that words cannot describe it. Old Arabi, in mortal terror, dived head foremost from the trail and disappeared in the grass. He had the heavy gun. I leaped and jerked it from his hand, dropping the light Springfield and whirling about in desperation, expecting to see the charging herd already upon us.

‘The first to come,’ this thought flashed through my mind, ‘will be a rogue with ears spread wide and trunk upreared, covering the brain. The only chance will be his chest, a snap shot for the heart!’ Nothing happened. So tense were mind and nerves that seconds dragged like hours. One — two — three seconds passed. Not another sound! The elephants were not sure of our exact position. Old Arabi was keen enough to know that the slightest sound might bring them down upon us, screaming, in a thunder of revengeful, trampling feet. We did not move. The stillness was so intense, so filled with possibilities, that anything, it seemed, even another piercing scream to break the tension, would be a relief. Seconds grew to minutes, and the giants that had crept upon us with the stealth of mice still waited for a telltale sound. It occurred to me that in another moment they might shuffle forward searching through the grass, and some member of the herd get our wind even in that still air. In such a matted trap our chances would not be worth a burned-out candle in the gathering darkness. I motioned to Arabi, and, quietly as a gliding snake, he joined me on the trail.

V

We picked our way as carefully as children creeping through a haunted house at night. It took us minutes to go a dozen yards, while behind us the silence remained as deep and soft as feathers to the ear. We eased ourselves along that trail for forty yards and came abruptly to the river bank — a bank that fell straight down for fifty feet to a deep and ghostly pool of the Rahad. These pools, we knew, were swarming with crocodiles as ‘ugly as sin and not half so pleasant’ — great scaly brutes that passed the days basking in the sun on sandy bars. If we were charged by elephants in the dusk, when sights were dim and indistinct, there would be nothing left, if a shot should fail to turn them, but a desperate Hobson’s choice — elephants or crocodiles. We stood, indeed, between the devil and the deep, infested sea.

Again we heard a mammoth body swishing through the grass. Another curdling scream, and, with the deafening noise, a pell-mell rush. Giant feet shook the earth. But in the next agelong second the thunder of the great feet and the crashes that marked the progress of those devastating hulks came from farther away. The herd was in retreat. We breathed again and the gun came down and rested, butt upon the ground. Again we heard the whisper of the grass, the pleasant scrape of insects, and the soft beat of gentle wings above our heads. All those harmless, homely sounds were as welcome as a whispered benediction in an ancient church. Nerves relaxed. The world continued in its orbit as it should.

Arabi sat down, his drooping shoulders limp and sagging. He pulled a spear of grass with a hand that seemed almost too heavy for his listless arm to raise. His face was drawn and marked with haggard lines. He looked ten years older in the fading light. I did not blame him. I too had lived a long time in those past few fleeting moments.

The monstrous oxen with tails at both ends, as the Roman soldiers described the elephants of Hannibal, are not to be taken lightly in high grass in the dusk of early night. Better men than Arabi and I, in such a tricky game of blindman’s buff, have come off second best, and, later, vultures circling to the feast have found a thing of two dimensions only, scattered in the trampled grass.

In the distance the sound of a crashing tree drifted to our ears, and at the same instant a muffled and sinister splash echoed from the black pool at our backs, and a heavy, coldblooded body slid beneath the surface. It was then that jokes of terror inflicted on giraffes somehow seemed to lose their humor. My own medicine was bitter on a parched and arid tongue.