BIG GAME
Just as going along the coast by Pondoland one sees English park scenery
running down to the very sea edge, so the Congo has its surprises in
strips of country that might, as far as appearance goes, have been cut out
of Europe and planted here.
This glade which Félix had chosen for a camping place was strewn with
rough grass and studded here and there with what at first sight seemed
apple trees: they were in reality thorns.
The camp was pitched and the fires lit on the edge of the forest, and then
Berselius proceeded to take tale of his people and found one missing. One
of the cook boys had dropped behind and vanished. He had been lame shortly
after the start. The soldiers had not seen him drop behind, but the
porters had.
"How many miles away was it?" asked Berselius of the collected porters.
"Nkoto, nkoto (Very many, very many)," the answer came in a chorus, for a
group of savages, if they have the same idea in common, will all shout
together in response to an answer, like one man.
"Why had they not told?"
"We did not know," came the irrelevant answer in chorus.
Berselius knew quite well that they had not told simply from heedlessness
and want of initiative. He would have flogged the whole lot soundly, but
he wanted them fresh for the morrow's work. Cutting down their rations
would but weaken them, and as for threatening to dock their pay, such a
threat has no effect on a savage.
"Look!" said Berselius.
He had just dismissed the porters with a reprimand when his keen eye
caught sight of something far up the glade. It wanted an hour of sunset.
Adams, following the direction in which Berselius was gazing, saw, a great
distance off, to judge by the diminishing size of the thorn trees, a form
that made his heart to leap in him.
Massive and motionless, a great creature stood humped in the level light;
the twin horns back-curving and silhouetted against the sky told him at
once what it was.
"Bull rhinoceros," said Berselius. "Been lying up in the thick stuff all
day; come out to feed." He made a sign to Félix who, knowing exactly what
was wanted, dived into the tent and came back with a .400 cordite rifle
and Adams's elephant gun.
"Come," said Berselius, "the brute is evidently thinking. They stay like
that for an hour sometimes. If we have any luck, we may get a shot
sideways before he moves. There's not a breath of wind."
They started, Félix following with the guns.
"I would not bother about him," said Berselius, "only the meat will be
useful, and it will be an experience for you. You will take first shot,
and, if he charges, aim just behind the shoulder--that's the spot for a
rhino if you can reach it; for other animals aim at the neck, no matter
what animal it is, or whether it is a lion or a buck; the neck shot is the
knock-out blow. I have seen a lion shot through the heart travel fifty
yards and kill a man; had he been struck in the neck he would have fallen
in his tracks."
"Cow," said Félix from behind.
Out of the thick stuff on the edge of the forest another form had broken.
She was scarcely smaller than the bull, but the horns were shorter; she
was paler in colour, too, and showed up not nearly so well. Then she
vanished into the thick stuff, but the bull remained standing, immovable
as though he were made of cast iron, and the two awful horns, now more
distinct, cut the background like scimitars.
The rhinoceros, like the aboriginal native of the Congo, has come straight
down from pre-Adamite days almost without change. He is half blind now; he
can scarcely see twenty yards, he is still moving in the night of the
ancient world, and the smell of a man excites the wildest apprehension in
his vestige of a mind. He scents you, flings his heavy head from side to
side, and then to all appearances he charges you.
Nothing could appear more wicked, ferocious, and full of deadly intent
than this charge; yet, in reality, the unfortunate brute is not seeking
you at all, but running away from you; for the rhino when running away
always runs in the direction from which the wind is blowing. You are in
that direction, else your scent could not reach him; as your scent grows
stronger and stronger, the more alarmed does he become and the quicker he
runs. Now he sights you, or you fire. If you miss, God help you, for he
charges the flash with all his fright suddenly changed to fury.
They had got within four hundred yards from the brute when a faint puff of
wind stirred the grass, and instantly the rhino shifted his position.
"He's got our scent," said Berselius, taking the cordite rifle from Félix,
who handed his gun also to Adams. "He's got it strong. We will wait for
him here."
The rhino, after a few uneasy movements, began to "run about." One could
see that the brute was ill at ease; he went in a half-circle, and then,
the wind increasing, and bringing the scent strong, he headed straight for
Berselius and his companions, and charged.
The sound of him coming was like the sound of a great drum beaten by a
lunatic.
"Don't fire till I give the word," cried Berselius, "and aim just behind
the shoulder."
Adams, who was to the left of the charging beast, raised the rifle and
looked down the sights. He knew that if he missed, the brute would charge
the flash and be on him perhaps before he could give it the second
barrel.
It was exactly like standing before an advancing express engine. An
engine, moreover, that had the power of leaving the metals to chase you
should you not derail it.
Would Berselius never speak! Berselius all the time was glancing from the
rhino to Adams.
"Fire!"
The ear-blasting report of the elephant gun echoed from the forest, and
the rhino, just as if he had been tripped by an invisible wire fence,
fell, tearing up the ground and squealing like a pig.
"Good," said Berselius.
Adams wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had
never gone through a moment of more deadly nerve tension.
He was moving toward his quarry, now stretched stiff and stark, when he
was arrested by Félix.
"Cow," said Félix again.
The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun and had got their wind.
Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, when wound up, and
touched off, perform the same actions, the cow did exactly what the bull
had done--ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then charged
right in the eye of the wind.
"Mine," said Berselius, and he went forward twenty paces to meet her.
Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysteriousness, had, since
the very starting of the expedition, shown little of his true character to
his companion. What he had shown up to this had not lowered Adams's
respect for him.
Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that commanding force which this
strange man exercised. His reprimand to the porters for the loss of the
boy, expressed in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their
places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell them of a terrible
animal which the self-restraint of that quiet-looking little man, with the
pointed beard, alone prevented from breaking upon them.
Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred
yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American's nerve to a
nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the
hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who
has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging
rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been
passed.
The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. Had
its head been a feather-pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh
moving behind it would have been certain death; but the head was an
instrument of destruction, devised when the megatherium walked the world,
and the long raking horn would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a
sharp penknife rips up a rabbit.
Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in hand, stood Berselius.
He did not even lift the gun to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit
was passed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that Adams felt the
sweat-drops running on his face like ants, and even Félix swallowed like a
man who is trying to choke down something nauseous. It was a magnificent
exhibition of daring and self-restraint and cool assurance.
At twenty-five yards or a little under, the cordite rang out. The brute
seemed to trip, just as the other had done, over some invisible
taut-stretched wire, and skidding with its own impetus, squealing,
striking out and tearing up the grass, it came right up to Berselius's
feet before stiffening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had
scented the human beings just as the bull had scented them, "fussed" just
as he had fussed, charged as he had charged, and died as he had died.
And now from the camp rose a great outcry, "Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!)."
From the soldiers, from the gun-bearers, from the porters it came. There
were no longer soldiers, or gun-bearers, or porters; every distinction was
forgotten; they were all savages, voicing the eternal cry of the jungle,
"Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!)."
In the last rays of the sunset the two gigantic forms lay stretched
forever in death. They lay as they had composed themselves after that long
stiff stretch which every animal takes before settling itself for eternal
sleep; and Adams stood looking at the great grinning masks tipped with the
murderous horns, whilst Berselius, with his gun butt resting on his boot,
stood watching with a brooding eye as the porters and gun-bearers swarmed
like ants around the slain animals and proceeded, under his direction, to
cut them up. Then the meat was brought into camp. The tails and the best
parts of the carcasses, including the kidneys, were reserved for the white
men, and the rations from the rest of the meat were served out; but a
dozen porters who had been last in the line, and who were accountable for
letting the boy drop behind, got nothing.
It was pitiable to see their faces. But they deserved their punishment,
notwithstanding the fact that in the middle of the meat distribution the
missing boy limped into camp. He had a thorn half an inch long in his
foot, which Adams extracted. Then the camp went to bed.
Adams in his tent under the mosquito net slept soundly and heard and knew
nothing of the incidents of the night. Berselius was also sleeping soundly
when, at about one o'clock in the morning, Félix aroused him.
One of the porters had been caught stealing some of the meat left over
from the distribution of the night before.
The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, not being one of the
proscribed. He had stolen from pure greed.
He was an undersized man, a weakling, and likely to break down and give
trouble anyway. His crime was great.
Berselius sent Félix to his tent for a Mauser pistol. Then the body was
flung into the forest where the roaring, rasping cry of a leopard was
splitting the dark.