Petite Chasse

By HUGO CHARTERIS

HERE no one but les Brands patrons can live in hotels, so people camp out and even the bureaucracy shoots its food. You can have a per- mit for big chasse, middle chasse, or little chasse. Middle includes N'Koba, a horned beast bigger than a Suffolk Punch. Little includes deer and pig. But with a mere piece of green cardboard, rubber- stamped, we were chary of pulling the trigger. Where? When? How? Whose? seemed to be prohibitive question marks—even between hori- zons without any mark of man but the road.

Then two beasts appeared, twice the size of otters, scampering furtively in the scrub. Their tails were too long and limp to lift so they dragged them.

'What are those?'

Our 'boy,' guide and interpreter, is a Foulani with a melancholy, noble face, khaki shorts, no calves and, a grey balaclava with a pompon.

'Mice,' he replied (souris).

The soil under the maize and millet is Hereford red. Suddenly out of it a covey of near-English partridges scrambled across the road. My com- panion shot out, armed, but once out, being short- sighted, was in doubt where to shoot to.

'There!'

He stood like a poaching bishop, vast, sacer- dotal, enormously conspicuous on the road's edge, and my heart now sank at the sound of an approaching car, the second that day.

`Quick—someone's coming.'

BANG! With a metallic whirr one partridge vanished skilfully like a skimmed plate into the tall reeds.

A big half-metal brake appeared in a cloud of pink dust. Impetus carried it forty yards past us. There the crunch of locked wheels was quickly succeeded by the high pining note of quick reverse. Red-handed. My companion still had his gun in the aiming position, ready for the next partridge—which now appeared, rather lower than expected, still, in fact, on foot. His barrels came down sharply.

At this moment the noise of the brake in reverse ceased with a squawk, and now, like a full stop to the sudden short sentence of its arrival, there came the snap of a .22 rifle. The ' partridge pitched forward in a skewered way and, while still aimed at by my companion, was retrieved by a fast young Senegalese in a silver- zipped siren-suit. His white employer withdrew the snout of his gun and started off forwards again, but slow enough to be caught by the boy returning with the partridge. A second later dust obscured them.

For some time we drove in silence. Perhaps, we said at last, we ought to get a rifle. We were still innocent about 'petite chasm.'

At Podor the gerant de la poste, a Peul tribes- man in floppy clothes, sad eyes and with the silence of a fabulous and irremediable umbrage, invited us to shoot wild boar. This, we said, was it. In spite of a stupendous fiscal and political discrepancy here we were going big-game shoot- ing like our grandfathers. We hadn't even par- ticularly wanted to.

When we came to the place for 'Phago' (they call the wild pig Pliagoceres) he led us into the

Senegal bush at what seemed a city pace to a city appointment. Suddenly he skipped twenty paces forward and there he stood, aiming surely at what must be somebody's porker were it not for the high shoulders. The half-curious, half- umbilical grunt which greeted him confirmed that the animal was now almost a member of some human family and had views about trespassers. Then there was an explosion and agonised, protracted screams.

We. followed the hobbling rump, darkening, even as one looked, into coagulation under the sun's fierce heat. When the postmaster was fifteen feet away the animal suddenly turned with a ferocious snort and faced him. But its hind- quarters sank slowly into the dust.

'Finish it off.' The Peul then addressed the pig: 'Now, my fine fellow, what are you going to do now? Not much, eh?' etc.

`Go on.' But he didn't want to. He had become someone else. He raised his gun at last, but even then remained nearly a full minute in the aiming position, when no aim was necessary. The creature shifted its position slightly and the little eyes looked round.

English ideas about 'sport' are perhaps a rather artificial valve. Tolstoy's attitude to the Geneva Convention would probably have had something in common with the Peul's feelings for our nausea after the shot.

On the way back the postmaster said, 'Even up to 1954 pig and guinea-fowl were common round Podor. Today you have to go far to find them. Tomorrow farther. There is a law that no shot will be fired from cars. The truth is most shots are fired from cars. Africa is big, but the commonest cars—Jeeps and Rovers—can go almost anywhere.'