The damage it was doing his tanks, the grinding wear on tracks running
hard over rough terrain and through diamond-hard abrasive sand,
was as nothing compared to the damage his pride was suffering.
He had been reduced to nothing but a gamekeeper, a beater, a peasant
beater. The Captain spent much of each day at the very edge of tears,
the tears of deep humiliation.
Every evening he protested to the mad Count in the strongest possible
terms and the following day found him once more pursuing wild animals
over the desert.
So far the bag had consisted of a dozen lions and wild dogs, and many
scores of large antelope. By the time these were delivered to where
the Count waited, they were almost exhausted, lathered with sweat, and
with a froth of saliva drooling from their jaws, barely able to trot
after the long chase across the plains.
The condition of the game detracted not at all from the Count's
pleasure. Indeed, the Captain had been given specific orders to run
the game hard so that it came to the guns docile and winded. After his
alarming experience with the beisa oryx, the Count was not eager to
take foolhardy risks. An easy shot and a good photograph were his
yardsticks of the day's sport.
The greater the bag, the greater the pleasure and the Count had enjoyed
himself immensely since the arrival of the tanks. However, the wastes
of the Danakil desert could not support endless quantities of animal
life, and the bag had fallen off sharply in the last few days as the
herds were scattered and annihilated. The Count was displeased.
He told the Captain of tanks so forcibly, adding to the man's
discontent and sense of grudge.
The Captain of tanks found the old bull elephant standing alone,
like a tall granite monument, upon the open plain. He was enormous,
with tattered ears like the sails of an ancient schooner, and tiny
hating eyes in their webs of deep wrinkles. One of his tusks was
broken off near the lip, but the other was thick and long and yellow,
worn to a blunt-rounded tip at the end of its curve.
The Captain stopped his tank a quarter of a mile from where the
elephant stood, and examined him through his binoculars while he got
over the shock of his size then the Captain began to smile, a wicked
twist of the mouth under his handsome mustache, and his dark eyes
sparkled.
'So, my dear Colonel, you want game, much game,' he whispered.
'You will have it. I assure you.' He approached the elephant
carefully from the east, crawling the tank in gingerly towards the
animal, and the old bull turned and watched them come. His ears were
spread wide and his long trunk sucked and coiled into his mouth as he
tested the air, breathing it onto the olfactory glands in his top lip
as he groped for the scent of this strange creature.
He was a bad-tempered old bull, who had been harried and hunted for
thousands of miles across the African continent, and beneath his
scarred and creased old hide were the spear-heads, the pot legs fired
from mule-loading guns, and the jacketed slugs from modern rifled
firearms. All he wanted now in his great age was to be left alone he
