on to half, cock.
Now they would be moving. The does first, ginger, brown and away down
the valley with then dappled like roe, deer, slipping fawns long,
legged beside them. Then the bucks, the Inkonka, black and big and
silent as shadows; crouching as they moved, horns flat against their
shoulders. Moving away from the faint cries and the commotion, moving
their mates and their young away from danger, down towards the waiting
guns.
'I heard something there! ' The Reverend Smiley's voice sounded as
though he were being strangled, probably by the dog collar which showed
as a pale spot in the gloom.
'Shut up, you fool!' Sean gambled his chance of salvation on the
rebuke, but he need not have worried for the endearment, was drowned by
the double blast of Smiley's shotgun, so in decently loud and totally
unexpected that Sean's feet left the ground.
'Did you get him'?' Sean asked, his voice a little shaky from the
fright.
'Reverend, did you get one?' Sean demanded. He had seen nothing, and
heard nothing that might by the most generOU' stretch of imagination
lead anyone to suspect the presence of bush buck.
'My goodness, I could have sworn . Smiley's reply was in the kind of
voice you would expect from beyond the grave
'Oh dear, I think I must have been mistaken.'
Here we go again, thought Sean with resignation.
'If you run out of cartridges let me know,' he called softly and
grinned at Smiley's inured silence. The shots would have turned the
game back towards the beaters, they would be start iv to mill now as
they sought an avenue of escape. Perhaps move over out on the flanks.
As if in confirmation of Scans thoughts, a shotgun thudded out on the
left, then another, then two more on the right.
The fun had started in earnest.
In the brief silence he heard the beaters now, their excited cries
muffled but urgent.
A blur of movement ahead of him through the screen of branches, just a
flick of dark grey and he swung the gun and fired, wallop of the butt
on to his shoulder, and thud and scuffle and roll and kick in the
undergrowth.
'Got him!' exulted Sean. Still kicking, the head and shoulders of a
half, grown ram emerged from under a bramble bush.
it was down, mouth open, bleeding, crabbing against the earth, leaving
a drag mark through the dead leaves. Boom again, the mercy stroke, and
it lay still. Head speckled with tiny gunshot wounds, eyelids
quivering into death and the swift rush of blood from the nostrils.
The din of gunfire all about, cries of the beaters and the answering
shouts of the gunners, the panic, stricken run and crackle in the bush
ahead.
Inkonka, big one, black as a hellhound, ffiree twists in the horn, eyes
staring, lunging into the clearing to halt with head up and front legs
braced wide, hunted, panting, wild with terror.
