Flynn was sweating. It ran down his flushed jowls and dripped on to his already sodden shirt. "Yes," he nodded and a small cloud-burst of sweat scattered from his head at the movement. "He will have crossed the ridge."
"What makes you so certain?" Sebastian spoke in the same sepulchral whisper as the others.
"The cool evening breeze will come from the east he will cross to the other side of the ridge to wait for it." Flynn spoke with irritation and wiped his face on the short sleeve of his shirt. "Now, you just remember, Bassie. This is my elephant, you understand that? You try for it and, so help me God, I'll shoot you dead."
Flynn nodded to Mohammed and they moved on up the slope, following the spoor that meandered between outcrops of grey granite and scrub.
The crest of the ridge was well defined, sharp as the spine of a starving ox. They paused below it, squatting to rest in the coarse brown grass. Flynn opened the binocular case that hung on his chest, lifted out the instrument and began to polish the lens with a scrap of cloth.
"Stay he reP Flynn ordered the other two, then on his belly he wriggled up towards the skyline. Using the cover of a tree stump, he lifted his head cautiously and peered over.
Below him the Sonia Heights fell away at a gentle slope, fifteen hundred feet and ten miles to the plain below. The slope was broken and crenellated, riven into a thousand gulleys and ravines, covered over-all with a mantle of coarse brown scrub and dotted with clumps of bigger trees.
Flynn settled himself comfortably on his elbows and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. Systematically he began to examine each of the groves below him.
"Yes!" he whispered aloud, wriggling a little on his belly, staring at the picture puzzle beneath the spread branches of the tree, a mile away. In the shade there were shapes that made no sense, a mass too diffuse to be the trunk of the tree.
He lowered the glasses and wiped away the sweat that clung in his eyebrows. He closed his eyes to rest them from the glare, then he opened them again and lifted the glasses.
For two long minutes he stared before suddenly the puzzle made sense. The bull was standing half away from him, merging with the trunk of the wild fig, the head and half the body obscured by the lower branches of the tree and what he had taken to be the stem of alesser tree was, in fact, a tusk of ivory.
A spasm of excitement closed on his chest.
"Yes!"he said. "Yes!"
Flynn planned his stalk with care, taking every' precaution against the intervention of fate that twenty years of elephant hunting had taught him.
He had gone back to where Sebastian and Mohammed waited.
"He's there, "he told them.
"Can I come with you Sebastian pleaded.
"In a barrel you can," snarled Flynn as he sat and pulled off his heavy boots to replace them with the light sandals that Mohammed produced from the pack. "You stay here until you hear my shot. You so much as stick your nose over the ridge before that and, so help me God, I'll shoot it off."
While Mohammed knelt in front of Flynn and strapped the leather pads to his knees to protect them as he crawled over rock and Thorn, Flynn fortified himself from the gin bottle. As he re corked it, he glowered at Sebastian again.
"That's a promise! "he said.
At the top of the ridge Flynn paused again with only his eyes lifted over the skyline, while he plotted his stalk, fixing in his memory a procession of landmarks an ant-hill, an outcrop of white quartz, a tree festooned with weaver birds'
nests so that as he reached each of these he would know his exact position in relation to that of the elephant.
Then with the rifle cradled across the crook of his elbows he slid on his belly to begin the stalk.
Now, an hour after he had left the ridge, he saw before him through the grass a slab of granite like a headstone in an ancient cemetery. It stood square and weathered brown and it was the end of the stalk.
He had marked it from the ridge as the point from which he would fire. It stood fifty yards from the wild fig-tree, at a right angle from the old bull's position. It would give him cover as he rose to his knees to make the shot.
Anxious now, suddenly overcome with a premonition of disaster sensing that somehow the cup would he dashed from his lips, the maid plucked from under him before the moment of fulfilment, Flynn started forward. Slithering towards the granite headstone, his face set hard in nervous anticipation, he reached the rock.
He rolled carefully on to his side and, holding the heavy rifle against his chest, he slipped the catch across and eased the rifle open, so that the click of the mechanism was muted. From the belt around his waist he selected two fat cartridges and examined the brass casings for tarnish or denting; with relief he saw the fingers that held them were steadier. He slipped the cartridges into the blank eyes of the breeches, and they slid home against the seatings with a soft metallic plong. And now his breathing was faintly ragged at the end of each inhalation. He closed the rifle, and with his thumb pushed the safety-catch forward into the "fire'
position.
His shoulder against the rough, sun-heated granite, he drew up his legs against his belly and rolled gently on to his knees. With his head bowed low and the rifle in his lap, he knelt behind the rock, and for the first time in an hour he lifted his head. He brought it up with inching deliberation.
Slowly the crystalline texture of the granite passed before his eyes, then suddenly he looked across fifty yards of open ground at his elephant.
It stood broadside to him but the head was hidden by the leaves and branches of the wild fig. The brain shot was impossible from here. His eyes moved down on to the shoulder and he saw the outline of the bone beneath the thick grey skin. He picked out the point of the elbow and his eyes moved back into the barrel of the chest. He could visualize the heart pulsing softly there beneath the ribs, pink and soft and vital, throbbing like a giant sea anemone.
He lifted the rifle, and laid it across the rock in front of him. He looked along the barrels, and saw the blade of dry grass that was wound around the bead of the foresight, obscuring it. He lowered the rifle and with his thumb-nail he picked away the shred of grass. Again he lifted and sighted.
The black blob of the foresight lay snugly in the deep, wide vee of the backsight; he moved the gain, riding the bead down across the old bull's shoulder then back on to the chest. It lay there ready to kill, and he took up the slack in the trigger, gently, lovingly, with his forefinger.
The shout was faint, a tiny sound in the drowsy immensity of the hot African air. It came from the high ground above him.
Flynn!" and again, "Flynn!"
In an explosive burst of movement under the wild fig tree the old bull swung his body with unbelievable speed, his great tusks riding high. He went away from Flynn at an awkward shambling run, his flight covered by the trunk of the fig-tree.