The Major took an axe and a length of cord. He handed me a billy-can, two cups and some coffee. He selected a double .303 from his battery. I took the only rifle I possessed, namely, a single Martini Metford.
Without more ado we set off to cover the ten miles back to Makululumi. There was no path, of course, merely the overgrown waggon track through the forest. The traffic on that road was insufficient to cope with the suckers which had sprung up round the stump of every tree felled in the cutting of this so-called road. The men who originally made the road had not troubled to stump it. The going was tiresome, and, lightly loaded as I was, I soon found the little I had to carry an increasing burden to me.
About a mile from our destination we met the rest of our natives driving the cattle along. We stopped for a few minutes to question them. They had kept the vultures off the fourth ox, which was still intact, but the birds had eaten up the other three almost entirely. A bushman had arrived shortly before they came away, attracted by the circling vultures. They made him stand guard over the yet untouched ox in case we came back for the lion.
All this was satisfactory, so, telling the boys to inspan the waggons when they reached them, and make as long a trek as they could through the heavy sand, we pushed on.
We had no difficulty in finding the spot where the oxen had been killed. Hundreds of vultures, gorged with meat, sat on the upper branches of a clump of trees. A little further on an unusually tall bushman stood up as we approached.
The Major examined the lie of the land with an experienced eye, and quickly made his plans.
The Makululumi water holes are really a series of pools strung out along the otherwise dry bed of a small river. Of three of the slaughtered oxen little remained but the bones and hide; they had been killed in the bed of the river. The fourth lay on the far bank, where the river made a very sharp hairpin bend and narrowed to not more than a dozen feet.
The Major selected a point as near as possible to the bank and immediately opposite the dead ox. He didn't waste much time in explanation, but, taking the axe, told me to follow him. The sun was just beginning to set. He hurried to the nearest clump of small trees and felled them rapidly, trimming off the branches and cutting them into poles about six feet long.
My part of the work was to carry the poles to the hairpin bend. Twenty in all were cut, varying in thickness from two to five inches in diameter. Then we built our moral support, for it was no more. I held the tops of three poles while the Major tied them together with the piece of cord which he had brought from the waggon. Then, standing them on end, he spread them to form a tripod. This he reinforced with additional poles, which he made fast with strips of bark. The finished shelter looked like a skeleton bell-tent. It had neither strength nor stability, for we had no time to sink the ends of the poles in the sun-baked ground.
By that time the sun had set, and the bushman, who had been watching us silently all this time, said something in that strange clicking language of his and hurried off, presumably to a place of safety.