The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [81]
“That’s another thing I like about the Aberdares,” commented Oliver. “Anywhere else you’d have to stand fifty feet below the Colobus colonies and look at them through binoculars—if you could see them at all through all the foliage. But up here they’re almost in your lap.”
He started the car again, and they drove another two miles, stopping frequently to observe more Colobus monkeys, and once to let a huge bull elephant get off the road before trying to drive past him.
“Did you ever do any hunting here?” she asked.
“Not animals.”
“What, then?”
“This was where the King’s African Rifles fought the Mau Mau prior to independence, here and over on Mount Kenya.” He grimaced. “We won the war, and then Parliament decided it was too expensive to keep an empire, so we gave them independence anyway. Think of the lives we could have saved on both sides if someone had thought of that before the war began.”
“It’s terrible terrain for a war,” she remarked.
“I know,” agreed Oliver. “Sometimes you’d look off in the distance, and see your opposite number on a slope, and you knew it would take you at least three or four hours to climb over there and he’d be long gone by then . . . so you just smiled and waved at each other.”
“I’m amazed that there’s so little residual bitterness,” she said. “Everyone in Kenya seems to get along well these days.”
“Well, most of the men who fought that war are either dead or else getting up there in years,” he replied. “Hell, I was just a teenager when I saw my first action on this mountain. But strangely enough, there was never any lasting enmity, not on either side. It was a war, we all got it out of our system, they got their independence a couple of years later, we got out of the colonization business, they joined the Commonwealth, and everybody was happy.”
The road began leveling off, and suddenly they were driving over a flat field. Finally he stopped the car near a waterfall, pulled out his Magnum and tucked it in his belt, got out, and took the box lunches and a couple of cans of pop with him, and Lara climbed out from her side of the car.
“The Gura Falls,” announced Oliver.
“You couldn’t have chosen a lovelier place for a picnic,” said Lara.
“I didn’t choose it for its beauty,” replied Oliver. “I chose it because there’s not a tree or a bush for three hundred yards. If anything from a lion to a Mahdist approaches, we’ll have plenty of warning.”
“What do we do if a lion approaches?” she asked. “I don’t imagine my pistols would have much effect from more than a few feet away.”
“The only thing to remember is not to run,” said Oliver. “They’re hard-wired to chase about anything that runs away from them. And don’t talk. Human voices seem to irritate the bejabbers out of them.”
“So what do we do?”
“Just stare at them,” he replied. “They don’t like to meet your gaze.”
“And that’s it?”
He chuckled. “Lara, the car’s only ten yards away, and I promise you’ll see any approaching lions at three hundred yards. But even if the car wasn’t there, they probably wouldn’t bother us.”
“Even man-eaters?”
“I don’t like to take chances with man-eaters, which is why we’re not spending the night up here, but you have to remember that most of them became man-eaters because the spread of farms and villages had rid them of their natural prey. There’s plenty to eat up here, and one of Man’s greatest survival traits seems to be that we don’t smell very appetizing or taste very good. Feed a hungry lion, or give him a chance to feed himself, and ninety percent of your man-eaters go back to eating what they’re supposed to eat.” He smiled. “It’s the other ten percent I don’t trust.”
They opened the boxes and began eating the fried chicken and some roast beef sandwiches, washing them down with the soda. When they were done Oliver gathered the boxes and put them in the back of the safari car.
A small family of elephants, four females and two youngsters,