"M'palla!" He Hissed; And Then After A Second, In A Restrained
Fierce Voice, "Na-Ona?
Do you see?"
If I did not see he pointed cautiously. His own eyes never left
the beast. Rarely he stayed put while I made the stalk. More
often he glided like a snake at my heels. If the bullet hit,
Memba Sasa always exhaled a grunt of satisfaction-"hah!"-in
which triumph and satisfaction mingled with a faint derision at
the unfortunate beast. In case of a trophy he squatted anxiously
at the animal's head while I took my measurements, assisting very
intelligently with the tape line. When I had finished, he always
looked up at me with wrinkled brow.
"Footie n'gapi?" he inquired. This means literally, "How many
feet?", footie being his euphemistic invention of a word for the
tape. I would tell him how many "footie" and how many "inchie"
the measurement proved to be. From the depths of his wonderful
memory he would dig up the measurements of another beast of the
same sort I had killed months back, but which he had remembered
accurately from a single hearing.
The shooting of a beast he always detailed to his few cronies in
camp: the other gunbearers, and one or two from his own tribe. He
always used the first person plural, "we" did so and so; and took
an inordinate pride in making out his bwana as being an
altogether superior person to any of the other gunbearer's
bwanas. Over a miss he always looked sad; but with a dignified
sadness as though we had met with undeserved misfortune sent by
malignant gods.
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