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Updated: May 3, 2025
Of course this was good sense, and most ingenious; Fundi bade fair to be quite a boy, but the native African is very easily spoiled. Therefore, although my inclination was strongly to praise him, I did nothing of the sort. "A gunbearer carries the gun away from the branches," was my only comment. Shortly after occurred an incident by way of deeper test.
I set myself deliberately to learn his language, and after he had cautiously determined that I really meant it, he took the greatest pains-always gravely-to teach me. A more human feeling sprang up between us. But we had still the final test to undergo-that of danger and the tight corner. In close quarters the gunbearer has the hardest job in the world.
It evidently lay silently ahead of us until we were almost upon it. Then, almost beneath my feet, came the angry and ominous growl, and my Somali gunbearer leaped in terror, falling as he did so. I expected to see a long, lean flash of yellow body and to experience the sensation of being mauled by a lion. All was breathlessly silent for a moment.
The air was almost cloyingly sweet with a perfume like sage-brush honey. Our first task was to set our boys to work clearing a space; the grass was so high and rank that mere trampling had little effect on it. The Baganda, Sabakaki, we had been compelled to leave with the ox team. So our twenty-seven had become twenty-six. Next morning C. and I started out very early with one gunbearer.
This courage is always remarkable to me, even in the case of the gunbearer who knows all about the man whose heels he follows. But consider that of the gunbearer's first experience with a stranger. The former has no idea of how the white man will act; whether he will get nervous, get actually panicky, lose his shooting ability, and generally mess things up.
No matter how skilful your men are at stalking, the chances of alarming the game are greatly increased by numbers; while the possibilities of misunderstanding the plan of campaign, and so getting into the wrong place at the wrong time, are infinite. Alone, or with one gunbearer, a man can slip in and out a herd of formidable animals with the least chances of danger.
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