West with the Night by Beryl Markham Page B

was damp and pitted with footprints of the game that followed a web-work of thin trails to drink at dawn, leaving the racy smell of their droppings and their bodies in the air. The river forest was narrow and cool and vibrant with the songs of multi-coloured birds, and clotted with bright flowers that scorned the sun.
    We laid down our weapons and rested under the trees and drank the chilled water, making cups with our hands.
    Arab Maina lifted his face from the edge of the river and smiled gently. ‘My mouth was like unto ashes, Lakweit,’ he said, ‘but truly this water is even sweeter than Jebbta’s carefully brewed tembo!’
    ‘It is sweeter,’ said Arab Kosky, ‘and at this moment it is more welcome. I promise you, my stomach had turned almost sour with thirst!’
    Looking at me, Arab Maina laughed.
    ‘Sour with thirst, he says, Lakweit! Sour, I think, with the sight of the lion at the salt-lick. Courage lives in a man’s stomach, but there are times when it is not at home — and then the stomach is sour!’
    Arab Kosky stretched his lithe, straight limbs on the tangled grass and smiled, showing teeth white as sun-cured bone. ‘Talk lives in a man’s head,’ he answered, ‘but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of some men there is nothing to keep it company — and so talk goes out through the lips.’
    I laughed with both of them and pressed my shoulders comfortably against the tree I leaned upon and looked through a chink in the ceiling of the forest at a vulture flying low.
    ‘Maina, you know, I hate those birds. Their wings are separated like a lot of small snakes.’
    ‘As you say, Lakwani, they are creatures of evil omen — messengers of the dead. Too cowardly to slay for themselves, they are satisfied with the stinking flesh from another man’s kill.’ Arab Maina spat, as if to clean his mouth after talking of unpleasant things.
    Buller and the native dogs had gone into the river and wallowed in the cool black muck along its banks. Buller returned now, sleek with slime, dripping and happy. He waited until he had the two Murani and me easily within range and then shook himself with a kind of devilish impudence and stood wagging his stump tail as we wiped water and mud from our faces.
    ‘It is his way of making a joke,’ said Arab Kosky, looking at his spattered shuka.
    ‘It is also his way of telling us to move,’ said Arab Maina. ‘The hunter who lies on his back in the forest has little food and no sport. We have spent much time today at other things, but the warthog still waits.’
    ‘What you say is true.’ Arab Kosky rose from the grass. ‘The warthog still waits, and who is so without manners as to keep another waiting? Surely Buller is not. We must take his advice and go.’
    We went up the riverbank, falling into single file again, and threaded our way through a labyrinth of silver-grey boulders and rust-red anthills, shaped variously like witches caps or like the figures of kneeling giants or like trees without branches. Some of the anthills were enormous, higher than the huts we lived in, and some were no higher than our knees. They were scattered everywhere.
    ‘Seek ’em out, Buller!’
    But the dog needed no urging from me. He knew warthog country when he saw it and he knew what to do about it. He rushed on ahead followed by the native mongrels running in a little storm of their own dust.
    I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains — the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. Even his weapons are plebeian — curved tusks, sharp, deadly, but not beautiful, used inelegantly for rooting as well as for fighting.
    He stands higher than a domestic pig when he is full grown, and his hide is dust-coloured and tough and clothed in bristles.