Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari by Ruark R

Author:Ruark, R. [Ruark, R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hunting
ISBN: 9781571574398
Publisher: Safari Press
Published: 1953-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We were up early and excited; at least, I was excited. It was still gray when we got into the jeep and headed across the bridge on the River of Mosquitoes, a bridge that shook and shivered frighteningly under Jessica’s tentative wheels. The forest, dripping, thick, and poison-green, with knobby roots like cypress knees threading across the track, lasted for about three miles, until we hit marsh, which was sopping still and impossible to cross in anything but a light four-wheeldrive job such as our Jessica. You could see the deeply bitten tracks where the last safari’s hunting car had gone just so far and then no farther. We put up a reedbuck and some sort of hog before we finished with the marsh and headed back into another patch of jungle—real jungle, this time, like Congo jungle in the bad television movies.

This was not cheerful bush at all. It was sticky, butterfly-clogged, creeper-twisted, humid bush, with immense trees rearing out of the practically impassable underbrush. You could see the raw stump occasionally where the elephants had broken the top off a tree. The trail was very narrow, crossed and recrossed with streams, and at every stream we had to unload and push.

“These’ll take some digging,” Harry said. “They’ve been washed out too steep even for Jessica, and she’ll go anywhere. We’ll shallow the banks some and cut some sticks for a tread at the bottom. Nasty bush, hey?”

We were crawling along through a sort of open-topped tunnel in the solid mass of vegetation when Harry was struck by a happy thought.

“I believe it was right here that Andy Holmberg and Chris Aschan were driving along when they ran head onto a bull elephant standing right in the track. Andy couldn’t drive around him, and the bull was walking steadily at them, and I do believe Andy slapped his Rover into reverse and set a new record for backward driving. I hear he was hitting sixty when he came assward out of the bush.”

I could believe it. In that compressed wilderness of malignant growth there would be no place to go except backward, and that highly unlikely, since the trail twisted and contorted in constant S-turns. If Holmberg made any time backward, his jeep had a flexible spine.

We burst out of the jungle suddenly, curved toward the lake, and passed through a sea of saw-edged grass that towered over the Land Rover by half-a-dozen feet. The showers of seeds added to general irritation of last night’s bites. The sun was coming up now, and while it was still cool, the tsetses had relieved the mosquitoes of their watch and were working lustily. It did no good to swat them. You had to pull them off and pinch their heads, as you did with the lion flies.

We came out of the grass as suddenly as we had come out of the jungle. We rounded a point where some fishermen had erected a small palm-thatched lean-to, waved at the two scrawny locals

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