"Hemingway, Ernest - Green Hills of Africa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hemingway Ernest)

more came. The theatrical tracker was impatient and restless.
A little before the last of the light was gone he whispered to M'Cola
that it was now too dark to shoot.
'Shut up, you,' M'Cola told him. 'The Bwana can shoot after you cannot
see.'
The other tracker, the educated one, gave another demonstration of his
education by scratching his name, Abdullah, on the black skin of his leg
with a sharp twig. I watched without admiration and M'Cola looked at the
word without a shadow of expression on his face. After a while the tracker
scratched it out.
Finally I made a last sight against what was left of the light and saw
it was no use, even with the large aperture.
M'Cola was watching.
'No good,' I said.
'Yes,' he agreed, in Swahili. 'Go to camp?'
'Yes.'
We stood up and made our way out of the blind and out through the
trees, walking on the sandy loam, feeling our way between trees and under
branches, back to the road. A mile along the road was the car. As we came
alongside, Kamau, the driver, put the lights on.
The lorry had spoiled it. That afternoon we had left the car up the
road and approached the salt-lick very carefully. There had been a little
rain, the day before, though not enough to flood the lick, which was simply
an opening in the trees with a patch of earth worn into deep circles and
grooved at the edges with hollows where the animals had licked the dirt for
salt, and we had seen long, heart-shaped, fresh tracks of four greater kudu
bulls that had been on the salt the night before, as well as many newly
pressed tracks of lesser kudu. There was also a rhino who, from the tracks
and the kicked-up mound of strawy dung, came there each night. The blind had
been built at close arrow-shot of the lick, and sitting, leaning back, knees
high, heads low, in a hollow half full of ashes and dust, watching through
the dried leaves and thin branches I had seen a lesser kudu bull come out of
the brush to the edge of the opening where the salt was and stand there,
heavy-necked, grey, and handsome, the horns spiralled against the sun while
I sighted on his chest and then refused the shot, wanting not to frighten
the greater kudu that should surely come at dusk. But before we ever heard
the lorry the bull had heard it and run off into the trees, and everything
else that had been moving, in the bush on the flats, or coming down from the
small hills through the trees, coming toward the salt, had halted at that
exploding, clanking sound. They would come, later, in the dark, but then it
would be too late.
So now, going along the sandy track of the road in the car, the lights
picking out the eyes of night birds that squatted close on the sand until
the bulk of the car was on them and they rose in soft panic; passing the
fires of the travellers that all moved to the westward by day along this
road, abandoning the famine country that was ahead of us, me sitting, the
butt of my rifle on my foot, the barrel in the crook of my left arm, a flask
of whisky between my knees, pouring the whisky into a tin cup and passing it
over my shoulder in the dark for M'Cola to pour water into it from the
canteen, drinking this, the first one of the day, the finest one there is,