I knew that Miss Mary must have had a good evening in Nairobi since she was not a fool and it was the only town we had and there was fresh smoked salmon at the New Stanley and an understanding although conniving headwaiter. But the fish from the great lakes, the non-named fish, would be as good as ever and there would be curries but she should not eat them so soon after dysentery. But I was sure she had dined well and I hoped she was in some good nightclub now and I thought about Debba and how we would be going up to buy the material for the two lovely hills that she carried so proudly and modestly and how the cloth would emphasize them as she well knew and how we would look at the different prints and how the Masai women with their long skirts and the flies and their insane, pretending, beauty parlor husbands would watch us in their unsatisfied boldness and syphilitic, cold-handed beauty and how we, Kamba, neither one with our ears even pierced but proud and worse than insolent because of too many things that Masai could not ever know, would feel the stuffs and look at the patterns and buy other things to give us importance in the store.
WHEN MWINDI brought the tea in the morning I was up and dressed sitting by the ashes of the fire with two sweaters and a wool jacket on. It had turned very cold in the night and I wondered what that meant about the weather for today.
“Want fire?” Mwindi asked.
“Small fire for one man.”
“I send,” Mwindi said. “You better eat. Memsahib go you forget to eat.”
“I don’t want to eat before I hunt.”
“Maybe hunt be very long. You eat now.”
“Mbebia isn’t awake.”
“All old men awake. Only young men asleep. Keiti says for you to eat.”
“OK. I’ll eat.”
“What you want to eat?”
“Codfish balls and hash-browned potatoes.”
“You eat Tommy liver and bacon. Keiti says Memsahib says to tell you to take fever pills.”
“Where are the fever pills?”
“Here,” he brought the bottle out. “Keiti says I watch you eat them.”
“Good,” I said. “I ate them.”
“What you wear?” Mwindi asked.
“Short boots and warm jacket to start and the skin shirt with the solids for when it gets hot.”
“I get the other people ready. Today very good day.”
“Yeah?”
“Everybody thinks so. Even Charo.”
“Good. I feel it is a good day too.”
“You don’t have any dream?”
“No,” I said. “Truly no.”
“Mzuri,” Mwindi said. “I tell Keiti.”
After breakfast we headed straight for the Chulus by the good trail that went north through the gerenuk country. The trail from the Old Manyatta to the hills where the buffalo should be now as they returned to the swamp was gray with mud and treacherous. But we went on it as far as we could and then we left Mthuka with the car, knowing the mud would be drying in the sun. The sun was now baking the plain and we left it and started up into the steep, small, broken hills covered with lava boulders with the new grass thick and wet from the rain. We did not wish to kill any buffalo but it was necessary to have the two guns as there were rhino in these hills and we had seen three of them the day before from the Cessna. The buffalo should be making their way to the rich new feed at the edge of the papyrus swamp. I wanted to count them and to photograph them if it were possible and to locate the huge old bull with the wonderful horns that we had not seen for more than three months. We did not wish to frighten them or let them know we followed them, but only to check on them so that we might photograph them properly and well when Mary came back.
We had intercepted the buffalo and the big herd was moving along below us. There were the proud herd bulls, the big old cows, the young bulls, and the young cows and the calves. I could see the curve of the horns and the heavy corrugations, the dried mud and the worn patches of hide, the heavy moving blackness and the huge grayness and the birds, small and sharp billed and busy as starlings on a lawn. The buffalo moved slowly, feeding as they moved, and behind them the grass was gone and the heavy cattle smell came to us and then we had the flies. I had pulled the shirt over my head and I counted one hundred and twenty-four buffalo. The wind was right so that the buffalo did not get our scent. The birds did not see us because we were higher than they were and only the flies found us, but evidently they did not bear tales.