Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

I was only twenty yards from the others, from the big, beached shiny cars twinkling under their dust, the patent camp table and gleaming metal chairs, the boxes of food, the oil-lamps, and the paper-back detective novels; I could see Hughie throwing things to one of the Africans with a rhythmical ‘Here! Here!’, Patterson filling up the ammunition clips on the belt that was hitched round under his bulging diaphragm, Eilertsen shaking out a blanket, and John bending down to give his bitch a bowl of water. But they had all shrunk away in the enormous bush and mealie-land; their boisterous voices were tiny in the afternoon, and their movements were as erratic and feeble as those of insects lost in grass. I was suddenly aware of a vast, dry, natural silence around me, as if a noise in my ears that I hadn’t been aware of, had ceased. The sun came out of everything; the earth, space, the pale dry mealie stalks. There was no beauty, nothing ugly; it was as I had always imagined it would be if you could get out and stand on a motionless aircraft in the middle of the sky.

John looked up, where he was squatting beside the dog, as I came up. ‘Mind you, I was in two minds about bringing her,’ he said. She licked her lips and wagged her long feather tail, and her heavy belly swung; I thought she was pregnant. ‘No, it’s a big tumour, in there, poor old girl. A tumour on her liver.’ Feminine, downcast, she submitted while he turned back her lips and showed me her pallid gums. ‘I’m keeping her going with big shots of vitamin, and feeding her raw liver. She’s nearly ten and the vet doesn’t think she’d pull through an operation.’

‘Let her come, it’s her life,’ said Patterson. He had put on short gumboots, and the sort of sharkskin cap American golfers wear covered the lank, thinning hair on his sunburnt head.

‘Come on, Grade, up, up, my girl.’ John coaxed the dog to jump into the back of the car. I saw the muscles flex under the smooth freckled coat as she made the effort to lift her burden, and landed with a thud on the seat.

‘No loaded guns in the car,’ said John, as everybody got in. But Hughie, grinning in the driver’s seat, kept the muzzle of his gun pointing out the window. ‘I don’t want to waste time. — Get a shift on, Eilertsen, for Chris’ sake.’ Eilertsen was feeling about himself like a man checking up on his train ticket.’ Nearly ten past four,’ said Patterson, screwing up his bright blue whisky-drinker’s eyes against the mild sun. ‘Just right. They ought to be feeding nicely. Where’re we going? Down to the far boundary?’

‘Bloody birds’ll be going back into the bush by the time we get out. Let’s go down where the ground-nut field used to be, and then fan out through that little patch of bush and come out on the other side of the mealies.’

‘Look at that!’

‘Burned to blazes!’

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ John moaned softly as we jolted along the track, crushed against each other, with the guns hard against our shins and elbows. A stretch of bush lay reduced to ashes.

‘Half our cover gone!’

A cry went up from Eilertsen: ‘Stop! Over there, look — ’

The car stopped as if it had hit a wall.

‘Where, where?’

‘By that stump? See? Just to the left of that dead bush?’

The back of Hughie’s neck, before me where I sat, became red with an excitement like rage. ‘What was it?’

‘Two pheasants, didn’t you see?’

‘Ach, man, we don’t want to go haring off after a couple of pheasants, let’s get on.’

‘I think they’ve gone now, Eilertsen,’ said Patterson, distant and kindly.

‘What I like to do,’ said John, ‘when I see something like that, a couple of pheasant where the cover’s not too thick, near the road, I like to let Gracie work it a bit. Just go quietly through the bush with her, let her see what she can find.’

The car bumped and swayed on; far away, the broken windmill appeared on our left. We went off the track and through a mealie-field, the tall stakes with their ragged beards and torn leaves staggering at the impact of the car and going down with a crack like breaking bone. On the edge of the field we left the car and spread in a wide sweep through the dead mealies. I could just see Patterson’s cap, now and then, on my left, and hear, on the other side of me, John whistle softly to the dog. There was the water-sound of doves, a long way off. A whirr of finches, like insects, went up over my head. The sun had not begun to drop yet, but it seemed to hold off its warmth, in preparation for departure. My own footsteps, over the clods and the stubble, and the brush of my clothes against the mealie-stalks, seemed the noisy progress of some particularly clumsy animal. Once I heard a low, clear questioning chirrup, a peevish, purring call. After a pause, it came again, or the answer to it, much nearer to me. But we came out, all into each other’s sight, at the end of the field, all expectant, all with nothing to relate. ‘Did you hear them though?’ said John. ‘That’s guinea-fowl, my boy.’ ‘That rather plaintive sort of call?’ ‘That’s it,’ said Patterson.

We piled into the car again and crashed back over the field in the path we had already flattened before us. Hughie did not speak and swung the car determinedly this way and that. We came out on to a soft red dust road and drove cautiously, in first gear, along the bush. The car stopped, just where the bush ended and the mealies began again. No one spoke; like a yearning, our gaze and our attention went out over the field. And — ‘There!’ said John hoarsely. ‘Look at them, look at them.’

‘Ah, there.’

‘Where. . ’

‘Look, hundreds of them. And there.’

‘I had a feeling they’d be here.’ Hughie, both hands on his gun, spoke lovingly. ‘It’s funny, I had a feeling.’

In the middle of the field, among the clods that looked like broken chocolate, and the pale, untidy shafts of the mealies, I saw dark, small heads, jerky and yet serpentine, plump bodies with a downward sweep, stalking legs: guinea-fowl feeding. They reminded me of pea-hens, and their plumage was the blue-dark of certain plums.

We all got out of the car softly and swiftly. John made a plan of approach. Patterson would go up the centre of the field, making straight for them; John and I would swing out in a curve to the left, Hughie and Eilertsen would do the same on the right, so that when the flock was disturbed by Patterson, he would have his chance with them as they took to the air, and either John and I, if they flew West, or Hughie and Eilertsen, if they flew East, would have a chance with them as they made for cover. It was unlikely that they would fly directly away from Patterson, to the North, because there was a stretch of newly-ploughed ground there, and no cover. Hughie, scowling with concentration, was off with Eilertsen behind him and an air of going his own way, almost before John had finished speaking. Patterson’s big heavy shape went nimbly into the screen of mealies.

The dog wove in and out just ahead of John and me, but discreetly, held by the invisible check of obedience. The discomfort of her body was forgotten, she did not seem aware of it at all, but followed the map of smells spread under her pads like a crazy, enchanting dream, the dream that gun-dogs, twitching, dream all summer, and suddenly wake up to find themselves inhabiting, in the winter. We trudged without speaking, round the margin of the field; a barbed wire fence stood between the mealies and the beginning of the bush, on the left side, and we followed it for a hundred and fifty yards and then stopped and waited. John was unaware of himself, and me; he gave me an absent, flitting smile, and kept his white-haired, cockatoo head lifted. The dog panted with happiness, like an athlete who has just breasted the tape, and he put a hand down to quiet her. I opened the breech of my gun to look at the two cartridges lying ready. It did not seem likely that there was anyone else alive, in the multiplication of mealies not moving out there; I forgot what we were waiting for, as, I suppose, fishermen forget when they sit with the rod in their hands, and Patterson forgot the moment before he loosed fire among the Messerschmitts. I watched John, in the perfect moment of inaction that only comes in action, and wondered, after all this time, if this was what Stella Turgell had meant when she had said of her husband that Africa was for active and not contemplative natures.