Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

The guinea-fowl came over, black and sudden, tossed up into the air by their own alarm, and cracks sounded, sharp and near and far and feeble. John gasped as if something had got him by the throat and swung up his gun wildly. A second flock came, rising steeply as they passed us. I felt the recoil against my shoulder, smelled the explosion-warmed grease of the gun. The black, plump shapes were lifting; nothing touched them. Then I saw them along the path of the barrel; a line drew taut in the bright air between my eye and a bird that hung, a split second, breasted on the air. The gun nudged me; the air toppled the bird and let it fall. I spilt the smoking cartridges, re-loaded, and shot another. Out of range over the bush, we saw the rest of the birds skim down into the trees.

My first bird was dead, the second lay in long grass on the other side of the fence. The dog found it at once, and John, who had gone through the wire to look for his own bird, picked it up by the neck and snapped the thread of life that remained in it as neatly as he would pluck a stalk of grass. The heads of the dead birds were ugly; they looked like the carved heads of old ladies’ umbrellas.

I followed John through the fence into the bush, carrying the soft, plump weight of my birds. As we searched for his wounded bird, we heard the voices of the other men, excited as the cries of boys on a beach. We went deeper into the bush, talking and purposeful; I had seen John’s bird come down, he had seen it flutter, half-rising again, once or twice. I looked all round the thorn-tree where I had seen it fall, but there was nothing, not a feather; was it that tree? Wherever you looked there were trees exactly like it; the moment I found myself five yards into the bush I knew myself to be in a place of uncertainty, and this was right — the beginning of the bush was like the middle, you did not go deeper into it in any sense but that of distance, for it was same, all the way. It reduced time and space to the measure of the sun’s passing across the sky and the tiredness of your own feet; I could well imagine that if you walked through it for ten minutes or ten hours, whether you went round in a small circle or covered miles in a straight line, you would have covered the same ground and have the same lack of sense of achievement. It had the soothing monotony of snow. John poked about and grumbled. ‘You see it’s hopeless without a dog in this stuff. We’d’ve lost yours, ten to one, if there’d been no dog.’ The setter swam steadily, head up, through a drift of thick grass, sniffed round thorny thickets as if they were about to explode. We didn’t find the bird.’ Lying low somewhere, under our feet.’ John reproached the dog, but she gave him a moment’s absent flick of the ears and went off again, her course erratic and mysterious as a water-diviner’s. The voices of the others were lost; alone again and in silence except for the clumsy passage of our bodies, we followed the dog through the indifference of the empty afternoon. I heard my own breathing and felt the prick of the thorns; they were thicker than leaves, on every bush and tree and bramble and, with scabby bark and crusted twig, gave everything the touch and feel of old men’s horny fingers. The enormous air paled; the sun was so withdrawn you could look right up into it, but the little scratchings of shadow from the bush did not seem to grow longer, but only to disappear in soft shoals of shadow that the grasses threw upon themselves, as the sea often seems to darken from beneath rather than from the failure of the light above. We went on, and, suddenly, the spasm of a muscle in a dream, three pheasant blustered into the air right before us. I was foolishly startled, and missed, but John, with that gasping intake of breath, wheeled on them and got one.

Back at the car, Hughie and Eilertsen were already there. They waved and shouted as we came up; there was a dark heap on the roadside beside them.’ Where the hell’d you get to,’ yelled Hughie, extraordinarily cheerful and friendly, swaggering with satisfaction. ‘We heard you potting away in the bundu; what’s the score? Jesus, that was some flock came your way, we only got the lousy stragglers, the few that panicked and went the other way.’

‘He got four, I got three,’ said Eilertsen, turning a bird over with his foot.

‘Jesus!’ Hughie looked at what we had in our hands. ‘I don’t believe it! Whatsa matter with you, John, you paralysed or something? I ruddy well don’t believe it! And what’s that, a pheasant — one of them’s even a pheasant. Didn’t you chaps see a few hundred or so guinea-fowl over your heads?’

‘Hughie, man,’ John said worriedly, ‘I come up too fast. I know it. You remember, it was just the same last year. The first afternoon, I’m just too damned het up and excited.’

‘Jesus,’ said Hughie resentfully, ‘only two.’

‘I did get one blighter, but he came down in the bush and even Grade couldn’t find him.’

Hughie began to piece together the strategy of the first shoot: ‘Why did Patterson have to make right for the middle of the birds, like that? He should’ve gone round, and driven them down a bit.’

‘Who can tell?’ Eilertsen had the look of a man for whom almost everything is a little beyond him. ‘You never know what they’ll do.’

‘But that’s fine,’ John said eagerly. ‘That means they’re not wild at all, this year, eh? Did you see, Hughie? He went right up dose, eh? We couldn’t see a thing, where we were.’

‘If I’d’a bin him, I’d’a gone round a bit, that’s what I would’a done.’

Patterson came out of the mealies with the happy, calm roll of a man who is smiling to himself. A duster of dark bodies hung from the hooks on his belt, bumping against his hip as he walked. As he drew nearer, I saw a feather, stuck in the band of the shark-skin cap. ‘Not bad,’ he said. A year of alcohol was beading, streaming, oozing out of his skin.

Hughie was counting. ‘Three, and me and Eilie seven, that’s ten, twelve — ’

Eilertsen tossed the pheasant to him.

‘Thirteen, could be worse. Patterson, why’d you go straight for them, man?’

‘It was amazing,’ Patterson was telling John, while he smeared at his face. He had taken off the cap and his hair was brilliantined with sweat. ‘I felt as if they would have come up and eaten out of my hand. They simply ignored me. One old boy just gave me a wink and went on feeding. D’you remember the one-legged one? He’s still here. He’s with this lot.’

At the sight of the car, as if at a reminder, the dog had dropped into exhaustion. She lay in the back, almost as inert as her prey. We drove back to the camp talking, scarcely listening to each other, and huddled comfortably together, rank and uncaring as animals in the loose, unquestioning association of the pack.

While we were gone, the three Africans had collected wood and fetched water from the farmhouse. Hughie shook himself out of the car and at once began to shout and berate in the meaningless convention of men who are brought up in a country where there are many menials; the Africans, in the same convention, heard only the sense, ignored the words, and did the minimum of what was required of them. Two of the men were John’s servants, very black Nyasas with blank faces that looked worried the moment they took on any task. The other was Hughie’s own servant, a little snivelling Basuto with a face the colour of fear. Hughie bellowed at him harmlessly, as if he were deaf. He sat down on a camp stool and shouted, ‘Here! Come on, get my boots off!’ Then he was all over the camp, looking into everything. ‘These lazy bastards! How long d’you think this wood will last, eh? That’s no good, all that small stuff. You get on out there and bring some big logs. Makulu, Makulu, eh? Plenty big logs.’