Chapter I: A Hunter and His Dog

Garram stopped silently in midstride and listened. On each side the narrow path beaten through the parched, straw-like grass by the feet of different game animals, trees, gnarled and stunted by the annual forest fires, hid all the view. Heat from the midday tropical sun beat down into the breezeless African bush and made the perspiration run down the silken black skin of the young hunter, down the uplifted foot as he paused, leg raised in midstride, down the worn hollow of the path in the red brick-like clay.

He was bare except for a soft leather loincloth and the knife at his waist, the quiver and hunting ax slung over his shoulder. Everything in his clean-cut build, even his long thin muscles, seemed in an attitude of attention as he turned his head first this way, then that, to locate more accurately the sound he had just heard.

As usual Garram hunted to-day far away from his father’s tribe in the Hills. Deep in the country of the Plains, he was as a stranger liable to be killed on sight if discovered.

As Garram waited for the sound to be repeated, Kon, his dark brown, smooth-coated hunting dog, also waited. In the same attitude of strained attention, one foot raised, he suppressed with difficulty his panting so that he might hear the better. Then clear through all the mingled and various sounds of the hot jungle, the bursting of seed pods, the chirping of insects, the rustle of dried leaves and twigs stretching and twisting in the heat, came the faint but unmistakable click of hoof on stone.

Kon’s huge head swung round to the boy, awaiting orders.

The young hunter’s right hand went up to the quiver over his left shoulder, drew an arrow, and with a sweeping movement placed it across the bow in readiness. Swift, almost too swift to follow, but the swing of the arm and the pointing of the arrow had given the dog his orders. As the arm had swung round to the right Kon plunged into the bush in the direction indicated.

Then began a method of hunting probably unique, invented after long practice by the boy and his dog. Hidden from each other by the dense bush, Garram began to move Kon cautiously toward the game by sound signals. Where Kon and the boy had waited listening, a pool of scent would hang on the hot, stagnant air. The buck, probably a male kob by the sound, could not be got to approach this place. So, swiftly but silently as ever, Garram sought another station.

A hundred paces up the trail was a tree. Rather taller than the rest, its boughs overhung the narrow clearing made by the game track. With the ease of a forest monkey the boy swung himself up and lay, arrow on bow, along a bough, waiting. Listening for occasional sounds made by the buck’s horns striking against branches, or the rustle and crackle of dry grass beneath his hoofs, Garram could follow the general line taken by the grazing animal. With faint bird-like whistles he moved the well-trained dog first to one side then the other, backward and forward, but always edging the now suspicious quarry backward toward the tree by the path.

The hunt continued, Garram motionless, eyes half shut, every atom of attention concentrated in his ears. The bush grew more still as the terrible heat seemed to increase and bludgeon into silence even the sound of the insects. But even so, sounds needed sorting from each other, locating, and, above all, understanding. A lizard dropped from a height with that flat flop which saves him from damage but makes him sound like a much larger animal. Bent grass straightened in the blazing heat. A snake rustled in some cool undergrowth. These sounds, once understood, could be dismissed as not likely to disturb the game or complicate the hunt. But to the left was a faint crackle of some larger game moving along a dry reed bed. A faint whistle from Garram ordered the dog around to that side. This would edge the kob away from threatened complication.

The little sweat bees of the bush were clustering in dozens and hundreds in the corners of the boy’s mouth, the corners of his eyes, anywhere where there was moisture. Garram was used to this. Moreover, he was too intent even to notice them at the moment. He could picture Kon, wriggling with eagerness, ears pricked, crawling from cover to cover, almost flat bellied on the ground. The kob, he knew, would be tossing his head in defiance of the unknown danger, reaching down occasionally for a promising tuft of grass or leaf, but steadily moving away from the suspicious sound made by Kon in his stalk, steadily moving toward where Garram lay perched above the line of his sight, above the range of his nose.

Then the kob emerged into the game trail. He sniffed for a moment and got the full body scent left by Garram and Kon as they had stood listening and waiting. With a snort the tawny yellow beast broke into a swift but lumbering gallop, following the track that passed beneath Garram’s tree. Now, from a slow painstaking stalk the hunt had reached its phase of the last tearing split second of tense action. Thrusting his bow and quiver swiftly among some boughs which would hold them, the hunter prepared to launch himself flat upon the game.

The beast was two lumbering strides away when the lithe black body dropped through the leaves, straightening itself as it fell. By a miracle it seemed to miss impalement on the needle-sharp lyre-shaped horns, and Garram’s weight, as he fell astride the shoulders, drove the point of his outstretched knife deep between the vertebræ of the heavy neck!

A blow instantly fatal. The great beast, killed in full gallop, thudded upon the ground. The boy with one spring alighted unhurt and smiling in the dust of the fall. For a moment he stood so, half sorry for his fine opponent, then turned to the work on hand.

GARRAM FINDS TROUBLE