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

There was a kudu bull on the lick when we approached through the trees and
he gave a loud "bark, like a dog's but higher in pitch and sharply throaty,
and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in the brush when he
was well away; and we never saw him. This lick had an impossible approach.
Trees grew around its open area so that it was as though the game were in
the blind and you had to come to them across the open. The only way to make
it would have been for one man to go alone and crawl and then it would be
impossible to get any sort of a close shot through the interlacing trees
until you were within twenty yards. Of course once you were inside the
protecting trees, and in the blind, you were wonderfully placed, for
anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards
from any cover. But though we stayed until eleven o'clock nothing came. We
smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks
would show when we came back again and walked the two miles to the road.
Being hunted, the game had learned to come only at night and leave before
daylight. One bull had stayed and our spooking him that morning would make
it even more difficult now.
This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not
seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were
moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay
where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they
came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning
now it took the heavy, woolly sky an hour or so longer to clear and you
could feel the rains coming, as they moved steadily north, as surely as
though you watched them on a chart.
Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a
long period of time, being outwitted, outmanoeuvred, and failing at the end
of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that,
sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that
you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you
must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one. It is not the
way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to
Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters, after
which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers'
businesses. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as
there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as
there is you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as you can live
and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or
anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool,
to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the
season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been
as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into
that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing
something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing. So,
coming in at noon, up since two hours before daylight, with only three days
left, I was starting to be nervous about it, and there, at the table under
the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had
forgotten all about him.
'Hello. Hello,' he said. 'No success? Nothing doing? Where is the
kudu?'