It was quiet around camp and everyone had settled into normal life. I felt badly about Mary having the feeling she was never allowed to hunt alone and I had realized long before why white hunters were paid as well as they were and I understood why they shifted camp to hunt their clients where they could protect them accurately. Pop would never have hunted Miss Mary here, I knew, and would have taken no nonsense. But I remembered how women almost always fell in love with their white hunters and I hoped something spectacular would come up where I could be my client’s hero and thus become beloved as a hunter by my lawful wedded wife instead of her unpaid and annoying bodyguard. Such situations do not come by too often in real life and when they do they are over so quickly, since you do not permit them to develop, that the client thinks they were extremely facile. It seemed natural I should be reprimanded and it was certainly not the way a white hunter, that iron-nerved panderer to what a woman expects, should behave.
I went to sleep in the big chair under the big shade tree and when I woke the clouds had come down from the Chulus and were black across the flank of the Mountain. The sun was still out but you could feel the wind coming and the rain behind it. I shouted to Mwindi and to Keiti and by the time the rain hit, coming across the plain and through the trees in a solid white, then torn curtain everyone was pounding stakes, loosening and tightening guy ropes and then ditching. It was a heavy rain and the wind was wild. For a moment it looked as though the main sleeping tent might go but it held when we pegged the windward end heavily. Then the roar of the wind was gone and the rain held steadily. It rained all that night and nearly all of the next day.
During the rain of the first evening a native policeman came in with a message from G.C., “Shipment passed through.” The askari was wet and had walked from where a truck was stranded up the road. The river was too deep to cross.
I wondered how G.C. had the word so quickly and had been able to send it back. He must have run into a scout who was bringing it to him and sent it back by one of the Hindu lorries. There was no more problem so I went out in my raincoat through the driving rain walking in the heavy mud and around the running streams and lakes of water to the lines and told Keiti. He was surprised that there had been a signal so soon but happy that the alert was over. It would have been a difficult problem as conditions were to continue the exercise in the rain. I left work with Keiti to tell Arap Meina he could sleep in the mess tent if he showed up and Keiti said Arap Meina was too intelligent to show up to keep watch by a fire in this rain.
As it turned out Arap Meina turned up, really wet, having walked all the way from the Shamba in the worst of the storm. I gave him a drink and asked him if he did not want to stay and put on dry clothes and sleep in the mess tent. But he said that he would rather go back to the Shamba where he had dry clothes and that it was better for him to be there because this rain would last another day and maybe two days. I asked him if he had seen it coming and he said that he had not and neither had anyone else and that if they said they had they were liars. For a week it had looked as though it would rain and then it had come with no warning. I gave him an old cardigan of mine to wear next to his skin and a short waterproof skiing jacket and put two bottles of beer in the back pocket and he took a small drink and set off. He was a fine man and I wished that I had known him all my life and that we had spent our lives together. I thought for a moment about how odd our lives would have been in certain places and that made me happy.
We were all spoiled by too much perfect weather and the older men were more uncomfortable and intolerant of the rain than the young outfit. Also they did not drink, being Mohammedans, and so you could not give them a shot to warm them when they were soaked through.