Already the carrion birds had gathered in incredible numbers. The sky was full of them circling; an encompassing ring of them sat a scant fifty yards distant, their wings held half out from their bodies, as though they felt overheated. And in the low bushes could be discerned the lurking, furtive, shadowy jackals.
The men were laughing, their weariness forgotten. Maulo, the camp humourist, declaimed loudly at the top of his lungs, mocking the marabouts, the buzzards, the vultures great and small, the kites and the eagles.
"Go to the lion," he cried, "he kills much, and leaves. Little meat will you get here. We keep what we get!"
And the men broke into meaningless but hearty laughter, as though at brilliant wit.
But Bwana Kingozi's low voice cut across the merriment.
"Bandika!" he commanded.
And immediately Cazi Moto and Simba took up the cry.
"Bandika! bandika! bandika!" they vociferated over and over. Cazi Moto moved here and there, lively as a cricket, his eyes alert for any indication of slackness, his kiboko held threateningly.
But there was no need for the latter. The men willingly enough swung aloft their loads, now augmented by the meat, and the little caravan moved on.
Scarcely had Cazi Moto, bringing up the rear, quitted the scene when the carrion birds swooped. They fell from the open sky like plummets, their wings half folded. When within ten feet of the ground they checked their fall with pinion and tail, and the sound of them was like the roar of a cataract. Those seated on the ground moved forward in a series of ungainly hops, trying for more haste by futile urgings of their wings. Where the wildebeeste had fallen was a writhing, flopping, struggling brown mass. In an incredibly brief number of seconds it was all over. The birds withdrew. Some sat disgruntled and humpbacked in the low trees; some merely hopped away a few yards to indulge in gloomy thoughts. A few of the more ambitious rose heavily and laboriously with strenuous beating of pinions, finally to soar grandly away into the infinities of the African sky. Of the wildebeeste remained only a trampled bloody space and bones picked clean. The jackals crept forward at last. So brief a time did all this occupy that Maulo, looking back, saw them.