Published in Inscape, Fall 1976. 
Reprinted in Kaw, 1977.

      Bob Woodley, who had been my office mate for thirteen years, and whom I consider the best friend of my life, died in the summer of 1976 (while I was in Japan).  Bob had long directed the creative writing program at Washburn University, had organized the Topeka writers' group, Headwaters, and was editing the first issue of Inscape to be published by that group at the time.  We put out that first issue (our "Buster Brown" issue) in his memory in 1976, and, though Headwaters no longer exists, Inscape has been published ever since, more recently by the Washburn English Department, sometimes one, sometimes two, issues a year.  For two or three years we gave prizes for the best poem and best story published in Inscape, in Bob's name, but then, in 1980, we established The Woodley Press, as a non-profit corporation, to publish five book-length manuscripts by members of Headwaters, again in his name.  We managed to publish four of those five books.  Then, in 1985, we reincorporated as The Woodley Foundation, established tax-exempt status, and committed ourselves, among other things, to the publication of slender paperback volumes of poems, plays, and stories by  writers from across the state of Kansas.   That is still our mission, with four new books expected in the year 2000--our 20th anniversary year.  Over the years we have published more than thirty books, and, for almost two-thirds of our authors, it has been their first published book.

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As an example of Bob's own writing, I will present  Chapter V from the 318-page novel, Cry to Dream Again, he wrote for his Master's thesis at the University of Kansas about 1960, but which was never published (so if you want to read the rest . . . ).

        We went hunting when the rainy season was over and the lowlands near the escarpment were dry enough so that we could cross them in trucks without getting stuck.  Several of the men at Asmara hunted on their days off and I hunted quite a bit myself when I first went there, but I gradually gave it up; I guess it was just too much trouble.  I can't say that I was eager to take it up again, either, but Dave wanted to go so badly that it was less trouble to go than to argue with him.
        We arranged for an Italian doctor to take care of the dispensary for us and Mike took three days off from the station.  Harry could get off any time he was willing to take off.
        There had been more shifta trouble on the Massawa road so we decided to go north out of Asmara, through Cheren and down the mountains into the southern edge of the Sudanese desert.  We assembled the gear at the dispensary on Thursday night, and had a quick breakfast of coffee and hard Italian rolls, loaded the gear, and were off before daylight Friday morning.
        From the moment Dave turned me out in the cold pre-dawn I regretted promising to go.  I remembered the twisting road between Asmara and Cheren, worse in some places than the Massawa road, and I thought of the cold wind, damp at that time of the year with fog out of the valleys early in the morning, and then the heat on the plains below Cheren and how the change in altitude always gave me a headache.

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  By the time I had been up half an hour nothing could please me; I drank the coffee, sulked, and helped load the gear in tight-lipped silence, furious at having promised to go at all.  I hoped we would be turned back at the roadblock on the north edge of Asmara.
        But a few words from Mike to the Eritrean constable at the roadblock got us through that and I sat brooding beside Mike as we slid over the rim of the escarpment and down the twisting road.  I had balked at driving the jeep, finding all kinds of reasons for not driving it, for waiting until daylight, for putting off the trip for another week--until finally Harry had crawled behind the wheel and I had gotten sulkily into the weapons carrier with Mike.
        We rode along in silence.  I was busy feeling sorry for myself and wishing I were back in my warm bed and Mike was giving all his attention to the steep grade, braking, shifting, turning, driving with the same easy rhythm he used when he spoke Italian--or even English when the subject was right.
        The road at first was a long series of turns, all of them down grade, and Clementi seemed to know each one and to be able to swing into it on just the right arc so that he wouldn't overshoot or come up too tight to have to crowd or drift to stay in the turn.  Harry in the jeep behind us was having trouble keeping up with us even though all he had to do was follow us, gauging his speed from ours.
        And it was cold, colder than I'd remembered.  The wind at forty-five miles an hour whistled through the open weapons carrier and knifed through my field jacket and light khaki pants, and I sat and silently cursed my stupidity in not wearing something heavier.  I wanted to dig out some of the blankets from the back of the truck and I would have

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but Mike was no more warmly dressed than I was and he seemed to be comfortable; if he could take it, I could.  He's driving, though, I thought.  That's what keeps him warm.  Damn him.  Damn them all.  Especially Dave.  If it weren't for him I wouldn't be out here on the side of the damn mountain freezing in the middle of the night.
        I don't know when I've felt sorrier for myself.
        The air lost its bite as we dropped down the mountain, though, and pretty soon the sun came up, weak at first, then stronger on the right side of my face until I was warm enough to unzip the field jacket, and I began to feel better.
        An hour or so after sunup we came out of the hills temporarily into gently rolling country, though there were rocky peaks behind and on both sides of us.  Harry dropped behind in the jeep so Mike pulled over to give him a chance to catch up.  He set the hand brake, crawled into the back of the truck, and returned with two cold beers from the ice-box.  He opened one and shoved it in my direction.
        "What in hell's this, breakfast?" I snapped.
        "Drink it.  Maybe you'll feel better."
        "I don't want it.  The only thing'll make me feel better is to give up this nonsense and go home.  What in the hell am I doing here, anyway?"
        "Drink this beer, you cranky Irish son of a bitch."
        I turned to hit him but he didn't move, just stood there grinning.
        I glared for a long moment, then grinned back and took the beer.
        "I can't feel any worse.  I don't know what's the matter.  God, Mike, I'm getting so I hate to leave the post.  Just too much effort,

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or something."
        "You ought to get away from that dispensary more.  Dave's coming here may be the best thing that ever happened to you."
        We got out of the truck and stood drinking the beer.  The sun was just pleasantly warm, the air crystal clear, and the countryside smelling of recent rain and of green growing things.  Grass covered the rolling ground around us, new grass, dark green against the brown mountains; not a thing moved in the windless morning and except for the gun-grey gash that the road cut across the field of grass, there was nothing to indicate that anybody had ever stood in that natural meadow from the beginning of time.
        Then we heard the jeep behind us  up the road and a few minutes later Harry pulled it in behind the truck.  When they had stretched their legs and had a beer we were on our way again.  I felt better--almost glad I had come.
        We left the meadow for another series of twisting down grade turns and Mike concentrated on driving; after another hour we broke out of the mountains into rolling country again, not a meadow this time but bench-land extending for several miles on either side of the road.  Sheep and cattle grazed on the hillsides and the boys herding them shouted and waved to us.
        The land dipped into a gentle slope toward the north and then leveled out again and suddenly Cheren was there a little below us, white-washed and dazzling in the morning sun, the macadam road slashing into the very heart of it.
        It's not much of a town, not nearly so large as Asmara, but as Mike drove through the throng of people and livestock that crowded the

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street that morning, I could imagine what the town looked like to the truck and camel drivers who had come out of the desert to the north--the coolness of the place, the shops and cafes, the talk and the people; there were highland Copts and desert Moslems, European and Asiatic merchants, and Sudanese carrying spears with yard-long, razor-sharp heads.  I remembered all at once how exciting the town was and wondered why I hadn't come there more often.  I thought how it must be to a camel driver three weeks out of Khartoum, his goods sold and his camels resting easy someplace, and money in his pocket to spend in forgetting the thirst and the hunger, the hot days and the cold, empty nights.
        We slowed up on the other side of Cheren to let the jeep catch up; then we were in the "gut"--the steep defile that drops north out of Cheren to the floor of the desert.
        Here it was really a fight against gravity, down steep, straight grades that sucked at the truck, drawing it faster and faster into the hairpin turns at the end of each stretch, then half a mile or so of writhing turns that would finally spew us out onto another straight, steep grade.  It got hotter steadily from the time we left Cheren, and by the time we reached the bottom I was sweating and Mike's clothing was soaked.  He stopped at the bottom of the grade to wait for the jeep again and I crawled into the back of the truck for beer.
        When Harry and Dave came up we had some bread and canned meat and another beer; then we drove on along the Cheren-Khartoum road for a couple of hours, straight as a gun barrel across the flat floor of the desert, and finally we turned off at the little village of Agordat.  The town boasted a single street; paths led from it out between the

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mud and grass huts.
        There were two permanent buildings there; in the very center of things was the two-story stone building housing the British Administration Police headquarters for that district, and next to it was a low, cool-looking stone restaurant with a large thatched porch in front.
        At a table on the porch was the British inspector for the area, half-heartedly drinking an un-iced lemon squash.  He came to life as we drove up, getting out of his chair and coming to the edge of the porch, squinting out of the shade into the brightness of the street.
        "Well, 'ello, Mike, 'ello."
        Mike introduced us and then got caught up in an argument with the Italian who ran the place about whether we were going to have a drink.
        "How's the hunting out toward Ademdeme?" I asked the inspector, whose name was Johnson.
        "Come for some shooting, have you?  Thought you might be looking for some night life.  Ha.  I wouldn't know about the game out that way; haven't been there since the rains.  Scattered, I would guess, all over the bloody shop.  Too much water.  You'll really get no decent shooting until most of the waterholes in the Barca dry up.  Why don't you go on to Carcobat?  Loads of leopard up there."
        "Too far.  This is the first time out for these fellows and we only have three days, counting today."
        "Ademdeme's the stuff, then.  You can easily make it in time to hunt this evening.  The road ought to be all right.  There's still some water in spots in the Barca, of course, but you won't have any trouble crossing it below town.  You can save time if you cut across to the northeast instead of following the river.  There's a good

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track across there, or was before the rains.  But I guess you know the country right enough, don't you, Mike?  Been here longer than some of the natives, eh?"
        "I haven't been down this way for over a year, but I can find the track, I think," Mike said.  "If I lose it, I can always swing back to the left and pick up the river.  Any shiftas around?"
        "Not likely.  Run a clean division here, we do.  The shiftas give my fuzzies a miss.  You've no worry on that score."
        We followed a trail out of Agordat across the Barca, a river of sand three hundred yards wide with heavy doum-palm growth on both banks and a trickle of water in the very center.  In another week that would dry up, I knew, and then there would be no water in the riverbed at all except in scattered holes.  The natives along the river dug wells down into the sand during the dry season and were able to get enough water for themselves and their livestock.  Game would gather around the waterholes at night and that was the place to hunt, except for gazelle, of course; nobody knows where they drink and you have to stalk them in the open desert.
        We crossed the Barca and made out a dim track on the other side across the flat desert.  The gray, sandy soil looked hard and packed from the rains, but it crumbled into powder on the surface under our wheels.  Here and there an outcropping of rock protruded above the ground and once we passed a mound of quartz pebbles, blinding white in the sun.  An occasional acacia tree broke up the landscape and along the larger washes or wadis that ran toward the river were baobabs; now and then we would pass a thorn thicket.  Several times we saw large herds of gazelle in the distance but Mike kept us moving.  Finally we

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saw a dark line of green palms on the horizon, and eventually I could make out a dozen grass huts, burnished bronze against the dark palms.
        We drove through the village and stopped on the edge of the line of palms that bordered the river on the other side.  Several men followed us from the village, running behind the trucks, shouting and waving to us.  All of them carried spears--inch-thick, four-foot shafts with a couple of feet of thin, lozenge-shaped steel on the working end.  Some of them had long, curved knives in sheaths belted to them, and one man carried a sword.
        There was still enough daylight left to give us time to get set at a waterhole, so we decided to hunt first and make camp later.  Mike stood on the front bumper of the truck and gave a little speech, trying to line up some guides for us for the evening, but there was so much laughter and excited talking among the natives that he couldn't get anywhere.
        The fellow with the sword was standing to the side of the crowd, somewhat aloof, a little taller than the others and straight as a West Pointer.  His cheeks, forehead, and chin had been deliberately and symmetrically scarred so that he wore a perpetual scowl, but I guessed that under the built-in scowl there was an amused grin; he was obviously the chief of the village.
        Mike finally gave up on the mob, jumped down from the bumper, and went over to the chief; they spoke together briefly and in about fifteen seconds the chief had his crew under control and was assigning the jobs for the evening.
        "There's a waterhole about three miles down the river," Mike said.  "Two of us can drive down to it, then come up on foot to another

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to use it.  By that time we were off the open plains and cutting through the heavy brush toward the river, our guides motioning and glaring us into silence, hoping that there might already be game at the waterhole, but there was nothing so we took up positions on the rocks above the hole and waited.
        An old sow and three half-grown pigs came out of the bush on the other side of the river, made their way alertly across the sand and finally drank almost directly below us but neither Dave nor I would shoot, though the natives became almost frantic in urging us to; any hog was fair game to them--sows and pigs did just as much damage to their dhurra crop as boars did and they were all inedible anyway to the desert Moslems.  The old sow heard the argument, snorted once, and led her brood off at a tail-high gallop.  One of the guides stood up and pegged a rock after them that took the hindmost pig in the rump, jumping him to an easy lead and starting Dave and me laughing so hard that we gave up all pretense of silence.
        There was a good fire going when we got back to camp, and a space cleared on the ground for our bedrolls.  A native whom I easily identified as the chief's son from his looks and manner was chopping and piling wood in a business-like way.  Squatting near the fire, buttocks on his heels, arms across his knees, was an old man; all the other natives were gone, and the old man might as well have been too for all the attention he gave us.
        By the time Mike and Harry got back, we had camp pretty well made and a hot meal started.  While we ate they told us how they had jumped a boar in the brush before they got to the waterhole but hadn't been able to get a clear shot at it.  They hadn't seen anything else.

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        After we ate I dragged my bedroll out and spread it on the cleared space near the fire.  The old man was still squatting by the fire, and through the flames and heat of the fire he looked to me like an ancient devil.  His hair was sparse and completely white and his skin was ashen grey rather than black, drawn tightly across his forehead and cheekbones.  No expression on his face gave any clue to the private hell he stared at in the depths of that campfire.
        Behind the old man Mike and the chief were arguing in a wild mixture of Italian, Arabic, and arm waving, broken now and then by Mike's explanation to Dave and Harry.  Mike wanted to hunt kudu the following morning; the chief insisted that there weren't any kudu because they had all gone back to the Nacfa game preserve over toward the coast.  But pigs were everywhere.  Everywhere.  They ate the crops and chased the children set on guard to scare them off.  In the mornings great herds of them came to the waterholes; we would see--grande boars with grosse tusks (gesturing with his thumbs thrust up from the corners of his mouth).  Gazelle?  Yes, but a long way off.  More pig.  We would see.
        Finally Mike agreed to hunt pigs.  The chief, turning to go, called "Abdu" softly and the old devil on the other side of the fire rose slowly to his feet but instead of following the others he came around the fire to where I was lying on my bedroll.  At close range he looked more impish than devilish; he had a scraggly beard of maybe a dozen hairs that I hadn't seen through the fire and he smiled through a set of broken teeth.
        "You want kudu, Sergente?"
        "Sure.  Si.  I'll take a kudu."  I wondered if he had been in

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the beer while we were away.
        "Okay.  Morning.  You, me, shoot kudu.  Okay?"
        "Chief said no kudu," I said, pointing to the chief, who was already leading the others out of the firelight toward the village.
        "Si.  Okay for chief.  Chief got dhurra.  Abdu got no dhurra field.  Capito?  Morning, okay?"
        And he followed the others toward the village.
        "What in the hell did he mean by that, Mike?  What's so funny?"
        "Old Abdu.  He was telling you that he knows where the kudu are because he doesn't have anything planted that the pigs can eat.  The chief isn't going to help us hunt anything else until we shoot some of the pigs off his corn, I guess."
        "Do you think Abdu knows where there are kudu?"
        "He might.  There are some around here during the rainy season and for a while afterward; then they go back up to Nacfa where there is more water and it's cooler.  Abdu used to hunt with an Englishman named Williams but I never knew him to hunt with anybody else.  Williams was as redhead like you; maybe that's why he picked you.  Going?"
        "I don't know."
        "Listen, I'll go if you don't want to," Harry said.  "I'd love a crack at a kudu.  Boy, I'd have his head mounted and put it up over the bar in the club."
        "I don't think he'll hunt with any of us but Al," Dave said.  "That's the way it sounded to me."  Mike nodded.  "Maybe one of the others will take you after kudu, Harry."
        "Not if the chief wants to hunt pig," Mike said, "and it wouldn't do us much good to go after them alone.  We'd just as well hunt

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boar."
        "Why can Abdu hunt kudu, then?"
        "He's different.  For one thing, he doesn't even belong to this village.  He's only half Sudanese; his father was a Portuguese sailor, Williams told me.  Abdu's been around--in the Italian navy, the Ethiopian army, and God knows where else.  He speaks good Italian and a lot more English than he was showing tonight, but he doesn't speak anything unless he wants to.  I don't know whether he'll find any kudu, but if there are any here and he wants to find them, he will.  He doesn't give a damn for the chief, and he knows this country like the back of his hand.  I've seen him all over Eritrea--up in Asmara, over in Massawa, in villages to the west toward Ethiopia--liable to run across him anywhere.  Williams told me once that they even know Abdu down on the strip of desert between the plateau and the sea south of Massawa, and that's almost the end of the world."
        "Down toward Uangabo?" Dave asked.  "I've heard about the place from Dr. Delucca at the hospital."
        "That's the place.  Roughest country in Eritrea--maybe in all Africa.  The natives speak a language nobody else knows, and live in caves up on the side of volcano."
        "You've been there, Mike?"
        "Well, actually, no," Mike admitted with a grin, "but I've heard plenty of reports about the place."
        "Mark it down," Dave said.  "We'll hunt down there one of these days.  Then you'll know what it's like first-hand."
        "Not me, Dave."  Mike was serious.  "I haven't been all the way to Uangabo, but I've been as close as I'll ever go.  I went part

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way across that plain with a British patrol once, not very long after I came out here.  We were trying to map the country, but we gave it up.  It was rainy season and we couldn't make it across the wadis; the country's full of them through there.  Gets all the run-off from that side of the plateau."
        "We'll wait until the wadis are dry.  We can make it in a jeep."
        "Forget it, Dave.  At night in dry season the temperature drops as low as ninety-five--sometimes.  At six in the morning, it starts back up.  And with the sea so close, the humidity is high all the time.  No drinking water, no shade, damn little game, and shiftas over in the mountains waiting for you to get hung up in a wadi.  You can't even imagine what that country is like."
        "Well, we can at least go have a peek at the edge of it sometime, can't we?"
        "Not until you convince me that you'd be willing to stop there."
        They were both still talking when I dropped off to sleep but both of them were up before Harry and I turned out in the morning.  By the time I got my boots on, located a cigarette and match, and came awake enough to curse the place and the hour, the smell of bacon and coffee and woodsmoke was heavy in my nostrils, as heavy as the cigarette smoke.  I cursed, but without conviction.
        The chief was there with the guides he had selected for the day, and Abdu squatted by the fire, drinking coffee.
        After I had eaten, I took a canteen of water and some hard rolls from the truck, and picked up the Springfield.  Abdu started off without a word and I followed.
        We went directly out into the center of the Barca and started

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upstream, walking easily in the packed sand.  There were some boar at the waterhole where Dave and I had hunted the night before but as soon as Abdu had identified them, he ignored them, not even glancing at them as they bolted.  We were after kudu and nothing else, and on the other side of the waterhole in the damp sand Abdu showed me the incredibly large, heart-shaped track of a kudu.
        "Early.  Not run, see?  Walk away."
        I nodded and we strode off on their track where it was easy to follow across the sandy river but slowed down when we reached the difficult tracking in the thick brush on the other side.  When the trail left the brush and led up into the rocky plain, I could no longer follow it at all so I contented myself with following Abdu, who would stoop, study the rocks, squint, and then choose a direction.  For the first time I noticed that the old man was blind in his left eye; I wondered how much he could see out of the other eye--whether he was following a track or just taking me for a morning stroll.
        We followed the track for two hours, moving slowly but steadily and covering a lot of ground, and never far from the river.  Finally the trail led back toward the palm growth along the river.  Abdu paused and scratched his head.  "You want kudu?"
        I nodded.  The sun was not far up but it was already hot on my face and I had begun to sweat a little, but we were moving slowly and I felt good.
        "Long time," the old man said, "maybe till sun up there."  He pointed to where the sun would be in the middle of the afternoon.  "Maybe go now drink beer.  Hunt kudu tomorrow, you think?"
        "You want to go back now?  We just got started."  I grinned at

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him but he didn't return the grin.  He stared hard at me with his good eye and I suddenly began to see that he wasn't trying to beg off, he was giving me a chance to back out!
        "Come on, you one-eyed old son of a bitch.  Hunt kudu."
        The old man turned without a word and started off on the track again and from that time we hunted together.  He let me know in one way and another that he could see well enough close up but couldn't see much at a distance, so I left the tracking to him and kept a close watch ahead of us.  The trail led back into the thick brush and seemed to move aimlessly around in it.  Abdu made a motion with his mouth as though chewing and I understood that the kudu had grazed in the bush.
        Once we followed the track to the edge of the brush and out into the riverbed but there in the sand Abdu showed me a track that seemed a little smaller than the one we had been following, and another that was very small.
        "Mama?" I asked.  "Baby?"
        He nodded and launched into a whispered explanation, mostly in Italian, the gist of which seemed to be that we had lost the track of the bull we had been following and picked up the track of a cow and calf.  By this time the sun was hot off the sand and I was beginning to lose my taste for the whole thing.  I thought that we had probably been following the cow from the first; Abdu was sure we hadn't.  I wished I was back in camp, or better yet, back in Asmara.  I swore loudly, went back to the shade of the palms, and sat down, and pretty soon Abdu came and sat wordlessly beside me.
        I offered him a drink from the canteen but he shook it off.  He wouldn't have any of the rolls I had brought, either, so I munched one

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and sipped water.  A joke is a joke, I told myself, but this one has gone far enough.  The old phoney was following that cow all the time.  He couldn't find a kudu in a phone booth.
        I kept telling myself things like that but it didn't make me feel any better; I had a feeling I had been tested and had flunked.  I finished the roll, hung the canteen on my belt, and got up, and Abdu got up too and started down the riverbed with me behind him.
        We were moving slowly but the sand, even though it was fairly well packed, was not easy to walk in, and while Abdu didn't set a hard pace, he went steadily and evenly, his eyes on the ground.
        The sun was high by now and burning into me, my shirt was crusted with salt from perspiration that evaporated as rapidly as it formed, the rifle sling dragged at my shoulder, and I was just barely keeping up with the old man.  We went for nearly an hour that way; for an hour I trudged along behind Abdu with my eyes on his heels, alternately cursing the heat and the old man and after while including the impulse that had started me hunting the night before, and Dave and Harry and Mike.  I was several times on the verge of calling out to Abdu to stop but I had pride enough not to, and I wasn't certain he would stop anyway.  He hadn't looked back since we left the shade of the palms.
        After about an hour Abdu slowed his pace for an instant, then veered from the riverbed up into the palm fringe, through it, and out onto the plains.  I followed him without a word, thinking he was leaving the river to take a shortcut back to camp.
        It was easier walking on the plains than it had been in the sand of the river but it was hotter.  I wanted nothing more, finally, than to sit just where I was, drop the rifle, loosen the cartridge belt, and

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wait for evening.  But as long as Abdu kept going, I was determined to follow.  It had become a contest and I wanted to win it even more than I wanted to sit.  He was an old man, half blind, spindly shanked, grey; I looked at my watch and speculatively gave him ten minutes, then ten more, positive that he couldn't last out the half hour.  The half hour passed; I studied his back and shoulders for signs of fatigue.  He hadn't looked good for five miles when we left that morning, but if he had changed for the worse, I couldn't tell it.
        When he stopped I nearly ran into him--I was walking mechanically and I couldn't shut off the mechanism.  I was dizzy and my vision was blurred but I had won--then I glanced at the old man triumphantly and realized that there had never been a contest; he looked exactly the way he had at daylight.  I didn't know what had stopped him, but I knew it wasn't fatigue.
        I sank to the ground, slipped the rifle off my aching shoulder, and started to loosen the canteen.  Abdu grabbed my arm and motioned for silence; he pointed to a massive outcropping of rock jutting up out of the plain like the prow of a ship going down by the stern.  His lips formed the word "kudu" without actually giving it sound.  The old bastard was still hunting!  Now I understood that all the time we had walked down the riverbed he had been looking for the track of the bull, guessing rightly that it must have cut across the river somewhere between where we were and where we picked it up that morning.
        He waved me to follow him and I moved off woodenly after him, my breath coming a little easier but my head still spinning.  We crept silent up to the rock, then worked around its base on our hands and knees.  Abdu stopped and motioned me to go around him, and I inched

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forward.  As I came up even with him my canteen bumped the rock, not loudly, but perceptibly.  The old man fixed me with such a reproachful stare that I felt a kind of shame I had never known before, and, I think, will never know again.  I thought for a moment that he was going to get up and walk away and I couldn't face him.  I reached back with my free hand and as silently as I could, worked the cartridge belt around on my waist until the canteen hung in the middle of my back.  Abdu didn't move as I crawled to the edge of the outcropping.
        About a hundred and fifty yards to the left front and slightly below us down a gentle slope was a bull kudu, turned sideways to us, his head high in the air and obviously alerted.  I slid on my belly backward out of his line of vision, set the sight on the rifle for two hundred yards with no windage, and slipped off the safety.
        Abdu watched all this impassively, noting everything I did with no sign of approval or disapproval, disassociated, waiting.  I crawled back into position, silently cursing myself for not having zeroed in the rifle, for forgetting the trajectory of a 30.06 bullet, for some other things--and all the time thinking of what I was doing.  I knew that the hard-jacketed military slug would go through an animal without killing, and I decided that the best bet was to aim for the front quarters and high; if I were too high I would miss cleanly, just right would break the spine, and too low would hit a bone in the front quarters and put the bull down.  I aimed, held my breath, and squeezed the trigger, and he went down in front, staggered to his feet and took a step forward.  I threw another round into the chamber, snapped off a shot that raised the dust two feet in front of him, and jacked a third round into the chamber, but before I could fire it, the bull collapsed.

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Abdu walked beside me to the kudu; we stood looking down at it, at the amazing size of it and the length of its corkscrew horns, and Abdu suddenly touched the canteen at my belt, shook his head from side to side, and laughed, and I laughed with him.
        He cut the buck's throat to bleed it and together we got the carcass on its back.  We couldn't dress it without help but Abdu managed to open the body cavity and fish out the liver, which he hung on a stick in the branches of a thorn tree.
        He wanted to go for the truck while I guarded the carcass from hyenas, but I insisted on going so he pointed out the approximate location of the camp along the line of green that marked  the Barca in the distance.  I left him sitting beneath the thorn tree, slicing off bits of liver and eating them raw.
        It was a long walk under the noon sun and I walked it without stopping so that when I got there my face was flushed and I was chilling a little.  Dave wanted me to stay in camp while Mike went after Abdu and the kudu but I was sure Mike couldn't find the place and anyway it would take more than two of them to dress and load the animal.  More than anything else, though, it was important to me to finish the thing and Dave understood that finally, so we all went.
        All that remained of the liver were some bloodstains on Abdu's hands and lips, and if he was tireder than when we left camp that morning, I couldn't tell it.  He supervised the dressing of the kudu while Mike and Harry turned the carcass and Dave and I gutted it and skinned out the cape.  Only when we were finished and had the meat on the truck did Abdu as for a drink and I remembered guiltily that I had gone off with the canteen and left him there in the desert, but he didn't

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seem to mind.
        Harry and Mike had killed a boar apiece that morning and later had both fired on one and wounded it, finally chasing it into deep brush and killing it when it charged.  Both of them were keen to go again in the evening.  Dave begged off and he and I hunted guinea hens unsuccessfully until nearly dark.
        I felt strangely exhilarated all evening.  Dave noticed it and mentioned it as I helped him put together a meal.
        "Lots of guys hunt them for years and never get one," I said, glancing at where it hung drying in a tree on the edge of our clearing.
        "Well, if it makes you feel that good, you'd better go again in the morning.  How about that, Abdu?" he called to the old man, who was squatting by the fire as though he had not moved since the night before.
        Abdu shook his head and smiled.  "No more.  One kudu plenty.  Okay, Sergente?"
        I nodded in agreement.  "He's right, you know," I said to Dave.  "I'll never shoot another.  It's a nice trophy, but it doesn't mean that much to me.  I almost wish I'd never shot it."
        Dave said, "That's funny; I could swear it meant a lot to you.  But I guess I know what you mean--a second one wouldn't be the same."

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