time-true dawn in an hour. He reached the bridge and lay in its heavy
shadow, staring across at the far bank.
Nothing moved. In the twilight the kopjes loomed like the backs of
dark whales in the grassy sea. He waited five minutes-long enough for
a restless sentry to fidget-still nothing.
'Here we go,' he whispered aloud, and suddenly he was afraid. For an
instant he did not recognize the sensation, for he had experienced it
only three or four times in his life, but never with so little cause.
He crouched beside the steel girders of the bridge, with the weakness
in his legs and his belly full of the oiliness. It was only when he
caught the taste of it at the back of his throat, a taste a little like
that of fish oil mixed with the effluence of something long dead, that
he knew what it was.
I'm afraid. His first reaction was of surprise, which changed quickly
to alarm.
This was how it happened. He knew it happened to other men. He had
heard them talk of it around the camp fires, remembered the words and
the pity underlying them.
'Ja, his gun boy led him back to camp. He was shaking like a man with
fever, and he was crying. I thought he was hurt.
'Daniel, I said,
'Daniel, what is wrong?' ' 'It broke,' he said with the tears running
into his beard. 'It broke there in my head, I heard it break. I threw
the gun away and I ran. ' 'Did he charge, Daniel?'I asked.
'No, man. I didn't even see him, just heard him feeding close by in
the cat bush Then it broke in my head and I was running. ' 'He was no
coward. I had hunted with him many times, seen him kill an elephant
from a charge so that it fell close enough to touch with the
gun-barrel.
He was good, but he had lived too close to it. Then suddenly it broke
in his head. He hasn't hunted again. ' I have accumulated fear the
way an old ship collects barnacles and weed below the water-line, now
it is ready to break in me also-Sean knew. Knew also that if he ran
now, as the old hunter had run, he would never hunt again.
Crouching in the darkness, sweating in the cold of dawn with the
iciness of his fear, Sean wanted to vomit. He was physically sick,
breathing heavily through his open mouth, the warm oiliness in his
belly coming close to venting itself, so weak with it that his legs
began to tremble and he caught at one of the iron girders of the bridge
for support.
A minute that seemed like an eternity, he stood like that. Then he
began to fight it, bearing down on it, stiffening his legs and forcing
them to move forward. Consciously he checked the relaxation of his
sphincter muscle-that close he had come to the ultimate degradation.
He knew then that the old joke about cowards was true. And that it
applied to him also.
He went up on to the bridge; picking up each foot deliberately,
swinging it forward, laying it down and moving the weight of his body
over it. His breathing was deliberate, each breath taken and expelled
