Cecily says if some one doesn’t arrange a marriage for her soon she’ll be left on the shelf, but one can see a lot from a shelf, provided it is high enough. Of course she’d be unpopular. Old maids always are. And this is just because a man sees in every unmarried woman a walking statistic against his irresistibility.
The Opposition kept us going in meat these days, but at last I prevailed on Cecily to leave me and do a stalk on her own. But Ralph joined her, and I wonder how much stalking they did. Anyway, they were bound for the Toyo to look for hartebeest, and all they came back with was the tail, very much the worse for wear and time, of an aoul. Ralph said he grabbed it as the animal dashed past him, and it came off in his hand! I told him he reminded me of the Book of Chronicles—Unveracious Chronicles! After all, it was no taller story than many one hears, and a good deal funnier than some. We know Eve told the first lie, but I am confident that if Adam ever went big game shooting he came in a very good second at the winning post.
The leader had a brilliant inspiration just then. We would have a day at pig-sticking. He was great after pig in India, and of course where we were was quite the right sort of country. I won’t say we had the right sort of mounts. They did not understand the chase of a pig, did not yearn to, and certainly never fathomed the secret.
First, we were explained to about the rules of the game. Then Clarence and some hunters were told off to beat, and we saw to the spears, tipping them, choosing the most likely from the collected ones belonging to our men. I was allowed to wield a light one, being still a semi-invalid. We all rode out towards the Toyo Plain, the men walking behind. I think I have forgotten to mention the fact that Cecily and I rode astride. That torturing, awkward, and most uncomfortable position which is at home considered the correct way to sit a horse would have been impossible in Somaliland, not to say dangerous, living under our present conditions.
The men beat every bush and blade of grass most conscientiously, but at first nothing resulted. On nearing the Toyo, however, we joyfully discovered that a bit of thick thorn cover concealed a small sounder of wart-hog. They scattered as we rode into them.
Cecily smartly detached one of them, which immediately charged away back into the fastnesses of the waving grass of the “bun.” A grand hiding-place, and I feared we had lost the treasure. The leader and Ralph dashed like lightning after the pig, and rounded it up in style. Back it came like a whirlwind, and made for the open again. I rode at him, thinking I was doing quite the right thing, and wild to draw first blood, when Ralph signalled “Sow.” I was going far too quickly to draw up, my stirrup leather broke, and the consequence was the pig and my steed cannoned violently, and bang over I went. I called to the others not on any account to stop, but to pursue the vanished sounder before it was too late. This they did, and disappeared in a moment.
After I had sorted myself from out the pony, and with Clarence’s help picked sundry bits of the landscape off my clothes, I mounted again, and following the trail of the others, and led by their shouts, I arrived on the scene of action just as one spear—Ralph’s—was taken. I tried to join the exciting chase that ensued, but my pony would not see the thing through, and disgraced me and itself every “jink.” The leader’s spear now flashed about so very quickly I could hardly follow each phase of the game, intent as I was on forcing my pony to take a hand in it. The boar charged several times most ferociously, but the nimble warrior parried each onslaught successfully. The boar was indeed a game one, and nothing could hold him. Ralph and his pony went down like ninepins before him, but the effort was the gallant hog’s last. The leader pinned him down, and that spear was the coup-de-grâce.
They said Cecily and I did very well for complete novices at the sport, but I can’t see that we did anything but get in the way. It was all very exciting, and we were no end done up by the time we made camp again. Cecily’s pony had a nasty gash as a reminder of the fray. Ralph stitched it up most scientifically. We were promised the tushes of the boar, set up in some way, as a souvenir of the great adventure.
One late afternoon Cecily went off with Ralph and Clarence for a final attempt on the life of a hartebeest, while the leader and I peacefully collected butterflies, or tried to, and paid a visit to the opposition camp to see their trophies. All the skulls and skins were inspected. They had a couple of Grevy’s zebra, having been to the Bun Feroli (Zebra Plain), after we left them in the Ogaden, and a magnificent hippo from near the Webbi. I felt very envious, but one can’t go everywhere. The zebra skins were most exquisite, shining and silky, marked in great lines of white and brown. The stripes varied very much in the two skins, one having much narrower lines than the other. Birds of many varieties the leader had collected, snakes too, and all the lizards. Being full of infinite variety he loved the coleoptera as much as the flaunting glories of the lepidoptera, and it took us a long time to go through it, for each treasure was safely put away in its own box. We made for my camp to find Ralph in the seventh heaven of delight because he had brought down a hartebeest that Cecily had missed—missed on purpose, she said, to give him the pleasure of bagging it. Anyway, there lay the trophy, a present, Ralph said, for me. I thanked him profusely, because our collection was not overdone with this variety.
I do not really admire this antelope very much, or perhaps I should say I admire it less than any other, since every antelope has some points of undoubted beauty. Their faces are what baulk me. They are so silly looking, like a particularly inane cow—a cow’s face, and yet not a cow’s face, and though very massive and magnificent in the fore they pan out to nothing in the hind quarters. The horns, set in sockets, are hardly ever the same, curving this way and that way,’ as cow’s do. Hartebeest are the quickest goers in all the antelope world. They are never spoken of by the natives by any other name than “sig.” And this is odd, because in other varieties I frequently heard the correct designation.