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

Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo he had found feeding at the edge
of the forest not two miles from camp. We went there, still tasting coffee
and kippers in the early morning heart-pounding of excitement, and the
native Droopy had left watching them pointed where they had crossed a deep
gulch and gone into an open patch of forest. He said there were two big
bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly
on the game trails, pushing the vines aside and seeing the tracks and the
quantities of fresh dung, but though we went on into the forest, where it
was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see or hear them.
Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but that was all. There
were numbers of rhino trails there in the woods and may strawy piles of
dung, but we saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some monkeys, and
when we came out we were wet to our waists from the dew, and the sun was
quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up, and we
knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out would have gone back deep into
the forest to rest out of the heat.
The others started back to camp with Pop and M'Cola. There was no meat
in camp, and I wanted to hunt back in a circle with Droopy to see if we
could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery
and it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk,
and to be able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for
the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked Droopy and liked to watch him walk.
He strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and
to feel the grass under my soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the
rifle, held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and
the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass;
with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England
orchard to walk through. I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted
to make a shot to impress Droopy.
From the top of one rise we saw two kongoni showing yellow on a
hillside about a mile away and I motioned to Droop that we would go after
them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and two cows.
Waterbuck was the one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat
and I had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the
buck as he tore away, remembered about the worthless meat, and having the
head, and did not shoot.
'No shoot kuro?' Droopy asked in Swahili. {'Doumi sana}. A good bull.'
I tried to tell him that I had a better one and that it was no good to
eat.
He grinned.
{'Piga kongoni m'uzuri.'}
Piga' was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should
sound or the announcement of a hit. 'M'uzuri', meaning good, well, better,
had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I
used to make up sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M'usuri in them, but
now it seemed natural, no longer to be italicized, just as all the words
came to seem the proper and natural words and there was nothing odd or
unseemly in the stretching of the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a man
carrying a spear. The tribal marks and the tattooed places seemed natural
and handsome adornments and I regretted not having any of my own. My own