Watch your step indeed. No white man walks alone on safari. Not only would it be suicidal; it’s also patently illegal, the accounts of your untimely demise plastered across the wire services being considered bad for business. Always there is an entourage—your PH, gun bearer, two or three game scouts wearing jump boots and green fatigues, carrying Chinese rifles and the Power of Law. The average bush African speaks six or seven languages; the average educated bush African speaks everything this side of Urdu and Ancient Greek. So they knew where we were going, and there was much soft murmuring in Bantu when the driver fired the diesel and slipped the Toyota into gear.
That time of year the Luangua was barely flowing, an indifferent trickle along a braided stream, hippos and crocs lounging in the scant shallows, a chorale of baboons hooting and cussing all around, and lions in the road. Lions? Six or seven females and a giant of a black-maned King Leo. We tried to push them, but they wouldn’t be hurried. Twenty feet from the open car, a lioness bared her teeth, growled, and the game scouts brought their guns to the ready, clickety-clack.
Somehow we got around them. After another mile, maybe two, the PH pulled into a clearing. My gun bearer passed me my shotgun, a Fox Sterlingworth double 12, and picked up his own, a Martini single-shot rifle from the Zulu War converted to a shotgun. The lion-driven guineas came through fast and low, and we had about 30 minutes of fine shooting before the baboons popped off again.
“Here come the lions, bwana,” the PH said. “We’d better get the hell out of here.
We did.
Sunset Shorthair by C.D. Clarke
Mr. John talked the mules around a tight turn. “Ease off a bit now, Dina; find the road now, Lou.” Lou crow-hopped and caught the front corner of the wagon box with a rear hoof—just a little love kick, but it would’ve sent a man straight to oral surgery and maybe clean to Jesus. “Lou, Lou, what’s wrong with you?” Lou laid one ear back and leaned into the load. The harness squeaked, and we rocked on down the road.
“How long you been driving mules, Mr. John?”
“Ever since I was a boy, way back in the Great Compression. But you don’t drive mules. Mules is unionize democrack, and you negotiates ’em along.”
“Mules smarter than a hoss?”
Mr. John considered a moment. “Well, sir, mule got more sense, but hoss got more education.”
It was Me and Mr. John and two democrack mules and Calvert Huffines beside me in the wagon seat. We were hunting deer the last time I saw Calvert Huffines, 50-odd years before. It was his daddy’s plantation, and we couldn’t start without the boy, and the boy was off chasing ducks around the rice fields on horseback. Calvert made a fashionably late entrance astride a fine jumping horse muddied to the flanks. He carried a battered Winchester pump with its factory rib bent and twisted like a washboard road; a limit of curly-tail green-heads dangled from the saddle horn. He shucked out the #4s, stuffed in double-aughts, shed his hip boots, whistled up the hounds, and we were off.
I saw my first covey of wild quail a half second before I put my 12-D brogan square in the middle of them. It was crowding dark, scrub oak woods, Beaufort County, South Carolina. I was 16 years old, and quickstepping for the pickup with a brace of fat cottontails swinging from my belt. There were a dozen quail in a circle, heads out, tails in, perfect as spokes of a wagon wheel. The birds blew with an explosion to stop an old man’s heart. But I was a young man then, and it didn’t stop mine. But I did have to find a pine stump and sit a spell.
Half a century later, I came prepared. Pointers fanned out before that wagon, and two horsemen followed the dogs. The dogs locked up, and one horseman looked over his shoulder and lifted his cap. We had a point, but there was no hurry. The quail wouldn’t move until the dogs made them move, and the dogs wouldn’t move until we gave the word.
We eased from the wagon seat, fetched the guns from the gun box, fumbled with the shells, tweaked our hats, hitched our britches: plenty of time.
Maybe I’m not up to dragging a duck skiff anymore, or crawling up a brushy coulee or contesting lions, either. But I’m damn sure up for this. I can’t say if I’ve earned it or it’s just how things worked out. Either way, I’ll take it.
Miles to go before I sleep.
Essayist and novelist Roger Pinckney lives on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, remote, beautiful, and sparsely settled. His ninth book, The Mullet Manifesto, was released in July 2015 by River’s Edge Media.
