We watched him in vast disgust. He cavorted out
into a bare open space without cover of any sort, and then
flopped over. I thought I caught a fleeting grin of delight on
Mavrouki's face; but he knew enough instantly to conceal his
satisfaction over sure meat.
There were now no zebra anywhere near; but since nobody ever
thinks of omitting any chances in Africa, I sneaked up to the
tree and took a perfunctory look. There stood another,
providentially absent-minded, zebra!
We got that one. Everybody was now happy. The boys raced over to
the first kill, which soon took its dismembered way toward camp.
C. and I carefully organized our plan of campaign. We fixed in
our memories the exact location of each and every bush; we
determined compass direction from camp, and any other bearings
likely to prove useful in finding so small a spot in the dark.
Then we left a boy to keep carrion birds off until sunset; and
returned home.
We were out in the morning before even the first sign of dawn.
Billy rode her little mule, C. and I went afoot, Memba Sasa
accompanied us because he could see whole lions where even C.'s
trained eye could not make out an ear, and the syce went along to
take care of the mule. The heavens were ablaze with the thronging
stars of the tropics, so we found we could make out the skyline
of the distant butte over the rise of the plains. The earth
itself was a pool of absolute blackness. We could not see where
we were placing our feet, and we were continually bringing up
suddenly to walk around an unexpected aloe or thornbush. The
night was quite still, but every once in a while from the
blackness came rustlings, scamperings, low calls, and once or
twice the startled barking of zebra very near at hand. The latter
sounded as ridiculous as ever. It is one of the many
incongruities of African life that Nature should have given so
large and so impressive a creature the petulant yapping of an
exasperated Pomeranian lap dog. At the end of three quarters of
an hour of more or less stumbling progress, we made out against
the sky the twisted treelet that served as our landmark. Billy
dismounted, turned the mule over to the syce, and we crept slowly
forward until within a guessed two or three hundred yards of our
kill.
Nothing remained now but to wait for the daylight. It had already
begun to show. Over behind the distant mountains some one was
kindling the fires, and the stars were flickering out. The
splendid ferocity of the African sunrise was at hand.
