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THE LAST HUNT
By Jack
Ensoll (Elspeth Huxley and Jocelin Grant’s Pioneer Scrapbook)
We met at Marindas, 9000 feet up on the old Barnett place and
I remembered how John Barnett had complained as reedbuck played hide-and-seek
around a few acres below a copse. Always the same, this time of year, out of
one wheat field and into another. Then the wheat was beginning to stand high
and was the signal for the end of another Molo season. Now it was just a slight
green bloom on the brown land under a leaden sky, and I leaned from the saddle
and picked everlasting flowers as moved off to draw.
Kariuki put the hounds into covert beside a stream and before
long we heard the brassy summons of the Gone Away, the music of a good pack
running, the rumble of fast cantering horses and the crack as they took their
fences. Our pilot took us straight uphill, up one of those labouring,
high-altitude hills, and we checked in at the woodland at the top. Now and then
the panting and rustle of a hound at work, and again a burst of music, as they
broke covert, and were down the far side
of the Marindas and running fast towards Summerhills and all that magnificent
galloping Molo country, was at our feet.
The sweet African wind whistled past our ears and the damp earth
flew from the hooves of the horses ahead and the astounded sheep drew together
and watched. Through a swamp and over a fence in the wire and at the far side
of Summerhills I gave it best and watched them go, the hounds a swift-moving pattern
of black, white and tan. Kariuki and the whips are diminutive galloping figures
in red and the rest of the field is behind.
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