The Story of Gombi

Patrick Spence, a real, old Anglo-Irish gentleman, who would have cut your throat had you called him a liar, died not long ago at the age of eighty-six and had a bottle of port with his dinner the day before he took off. Those were Cassidy the old butler’s words. Cassidy said the master was as sound as a bell and walking along by the rhododendron bushes to have a look at the new wing they were adding to the stables when he sprang into the air, cried, “Got me by glory!” and fell flat, just as a buck falls when a bullet takes it through the heart. A fit end for a big-game hunter you will say. A fit, anyhow, the doctors said.

The ancestral home of the Spences, The Grange, Scoresby, Lincolnshire, stands half a mile from the road. You reach it by an avenue of chestnuts, and in Patrick’s time when the door opened you found yourself in a hall hung with trophies of the chase; the whole house was, in fact, a museum. Never in any man had the passion for collection burned more acutely than in the owner of The Grange, or shown itself in a more extravagant fashion. Here you found lamps upheld by pythons, door handles cut from rhinoceros horn, tables topped with hippopotamus hide, skins and masks everywhere of everything from black buffalo to Burchell’s zebra. In the long corridors where the hartebeest heads faced the elands and Grant’s gazelle grinned at Bohm’s zebra, black bears upheld the electric standards—black bears and apes.

The place was a mausoleum. To walk those corridors at night and alone required a fairly steady nerve, especially when the wind of Lincolnshire was howling outside like a troop of lost hyenas. There were envious men who said that three fourths of this collection had been bought and paid for, but that is the way of the world. No man ever dared to say it to the owner’s face.

I was staying at a village ten miles from Scoresby and twelve from The Grange, when one day I met the old gentleman, whom I had known in London, and he invited me to a day’s fishing in the stream that runs past The Grange to join the Witham. We had good sport, but toward the end of the day the rain began—the rain of Lincolnshire driving across the fens, drenching, disastrous, dismal. Spence insisted on my staying for dinner and the night; he gave me a rig-out which included a Canadian blanket coat and a pair of slippers and a dinner of the good old times, including a cod’s head served with oyster sauce and a capon the size of a small turkey.

Afterward we sat by the hall fire and talked, the light from the burning logs striking here and there, illuminating horns and masks and giving a fictitious appearance of life to the snow leopard crouching as if to spring at me from behind the door.

“Are those slippers comfortable?” asked Spence, filling his pipe from the tobacco jar—one of his infernal trophies, a thing made out of a cross section of elephant shin bone drilled out, for the leg bones of elephants have no marrow.

“Quite, thanks.”

“I got ’em in a queer way, didn’t pay a cent for them, either.” The cherry-colored cheeks of the old gentleman sucked in and he made the pipe draw against its will. Then, safely in the clouds, he went on. “Not a cent, though they cost me the lives of several men and near three hundred pounds of good ivory.”

“Mean to say you gave three hundred pounds of ivory for these old slippers?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said he. “It was such a mixed business. I’ll have to give you the whole story if you are to understand it, and first of all I must tell you that though my yarn has to do with Africa those slippers weren’t made in Africa.

“You’ve been to Cape Town, haven’t you?—and Durban and away up to Pretoria by rail, maybe—and you’ve passed thousands of square miles of country that I’ve seen crawling with game in my time—quagga, gnu, rhinoceros, lion—all gone now, not enough left to feed an aasvogel. Yes, I’ve seen that country when it was only to be compared to the country south of the Orange toward Cape Town—one big-game preserve. And it was on my second visit to it that the things happened I am going to tell you of.

“I was hunting with Tellemark, a Swede, I think he was, or Norwegian, I forget which, and we were traveling south of the Limpopo and close on to Portuguese territory; we had a regular caravan—four ox wagons, half a dozen horses, and about forty Kafirs; and we’d had good hunting, waters buck, buffalo, rhino and giraffe, but little elephant. However we were getting into the elephant country—a big rolling country, broken by thick bush and mimosa trees, with great clumps of forest sweeping away west where you could see the giraffes grazing against the trees, looking like toy giraffes taken out of a Noah’s ark.

“The place was thick with game. I’ve seen what looked like a moving cloud shadow miles away—it was a herd of springboks, thousands of them. I have seen twenty rhinoceros in five square miles of that country, and buffalo by the hundred. But one day I saw something stranger than all these. We had rounded a big clump of trees on our second day after entering this country, when we came upon an elephant. He was lying down, dead, a great brute thirteen feet to the shoulder, with ears six foot from tip to lobe, and tusks weighing, we guessed, close on three hundred pounds. The heaviest tusks ever taken in Africa weighed four hundred and fifty, so you may guess we were on to a pretty good thing. But the strange part of the show wasn’t the elephant but the chaps that had killed him. Pygmies—little chaps not five foot high.

“As far as I can make out there are several tribes of Pygmies lingering about in the African forests, and dying out so quick that to-day they are there and to-morrow they are gone. This lot we struck were evidently the stump end of some tribe worn down just to twenty or thirty members; they had killed the elephant on the edge of the forest and they were on him like flies. The trunk and feet had been cut off and the stomach cut open with a big stick stuck to keep it so; half the tribe was inside the elephant and half on top and round about. But when they saw us they dropped everything and made off, running for the woods—reminded me of a lot of sparrows flying from a cat; but one chap failed to get away, he tripped on something, fell flat on his face, and before he could get on his hands and knees, I had him.

“He kicked and fought, but only from fright, and after a while he quieted down and Tellemark gave him some sugar. You should have seen his face when he tasted the sugar! It didn’t seem a bad face, either, round and chubby. And that and the small size of him, together with his plumpness and the bow and arrow he had dropped, made us call him Cupid. The bow was the smallest I have ever seen, not a foot from tip to tip. The arrows were wrapped round with a piece of hide—kind of an attempt at a quiver; there were dozens of them, not thicker much than knitting needles, and without barbs.

“We thought at first that the arrows were used for killing small birds, but our Kafirs knew different; they pointed to the elephant; and, sure enough, there was an arrow sticking in the great ear of the brute, and three or four more sticking in the skin. They were poisoned arrows, and what the poison could have been, Lord knows, but something pretty powerful, for a rifle couldn’t have done the business better. We gave the arrows back to the chap, and the bow, expecting to see him make off to the woods after the others. Not he. The first fright over and seeing that we weren’t dangerous, he hung on, staring at the wagons; it was plain he had never seen anything on wheels before, and when Tellemark got one of the wagons on the move for a few yards to show him how it was done, he cried out like a bird chirruping, and laughed with one hand on his pot-belly till the laughter took the pair of us and doubled us up. But the Kafirs didn’t laugh; didn’t seem to see anything funny in him at all; and they didn’t call him Cupid; they called him Gombi.

“Our head man said he was no good, belonged to a bad lot and that we had better get rid of him. But Gombi had his own ideas about that. He seemed to have attached himself to us as a stray dog does and he hung round while the boys were taking the tusks, chirruping to himself and dodging about looking at this and that till the funniest feeling got hold of me that he wasn’t human but some sort of being from another world that had come across humans for the first time and was taking stock of them. But I hadn’t long to think about him, for all of a sudden round us the air was becoming filled with a stench worse than I ever smelled before.

“It was the elephant. The thing had been new killed and warm when we struck it and now it was going like this, decomposing right under our eyes, for great blisters were rising on the skin—and I won’t go into details. “The poison has done that,” said Tellemark. “Looks like it,” said I. “Let’s shift and get beyond the wagons. The Kafirs won’t mind.” We got away beyond the wagons and lay down on the wire grass watching the boys at work and Gombi hopping round them. Right up above them was a vulture waiting till we had cleared off. I watched him coming down and going up again. Sometimes you couldn’t see him at all, then he showed like a pin point, then he’d get bigger, then smaller.

“Now a vulture even when he is so high as to be beyond sight can see the body of a dwarf antelope, let alone an elephant, so this chap wasn’t coming up and down to prospect; it was sheer impatience, hunger. And I was thinking how full of hunger that sky was when Tellemark shifted his position, and looking up I saw a bull rhino that had broken out of the thick stuff on the forest edge and was coming toward us moving quick, but unflurried. The wind was coming with him so he couldn’t scent us and being half blind he couldn’t see us. Two rhinoceros birds were with him, but they weren’t on his back, they were flying about here and there, following him, and they didn’t seem alarmed. That’s funny, isn’t it, for if those birds had been on his back when he was standing still or moving very slowly they would have cried out at once at the sight of us. Seems to me sometimes as if the animal and bird world is driven by clockwork, not sense. Then, other times, it seems as though there were a big genius behind their movements. Anyhow, the rhino came along unwarned and Tellemark let him get within thirty yards before he dropped him with a shoulder shot, dead as mutton.

“The boys working on the tusks had been looking on, so had Gombi; and when the dwarf saw old pongo graveled like that he came running for all he was worth, skipping round the dead brute, plugging his finger in the bullet wound and sucking it same as a child might with a pie. And then, when he’d done with the rhino, he fastened on to the rifle, looking down the barrels, sniffing at them and evidently connecting the smell with the smell of powder in the air. Then he examined the locks, as interested as a magpie with a marrow bone.

“When he’d done he seemed to have come to the conclusion that a Purdy eight-bore was a weapon he would like to have further acquaintance with, for he pointed to the elephant, then to the gun, then to himself and then away to the west. Then he opened and shut the hand that wasn’t holding the bow, about a dozen times. What he said was clear enough. There were many elephants to the west and he would lead us to them if we would take the gun and shoot them.

II.

“Between the wood clump and the one to the west there was maybe five miles of country rolling and dipping, broken here and there with euphorbia and mimosa trees. When we’d taken the tusks of the elephant and some of the rhino meat, we determined to shove right across and camp near the other woodside; first of all the elephant was getting more punch in its perfume; second, we wanted to put a considerable distance between ourselves and those confounded Pygmies, and third, Cupid was evidently in earnest when he gave us the news of elephant herds to the west.

“We hadn’t given much thought to the dwarf’s sign language, and as we started we expected to see him go off back to his friends who were, no doubt, watching us from the trees. Not a bit. He had stuck to us for keeps, as the Yankees say, and when I look back and think how that little chap stuck to us and followed us, it seems to me that there was a bit of Christopher Columbus and Leefe Robinson mixed up with the rest of his character. For it was plain as paint he’d never seen white men or guns before.

“He kept along with us right in our tracks like a dog, evidently thinking we had fallen in with his proposition about the elephant hunting, and he wasn’t far wrong. We had, in a way, without knowing it. For next morning when we were holding a hunt council, Tellemark, seeing that Gombi was still hanging about, waded right in with the proposition that we’d take the chap for guide—use him as a dog, so to speak, to find the game. I thought our native boys would buck against it, but our head man seemed to have lost his grudge against the chap; got used to him, I suppose, and didn’t put up any difficulties. That settled it. Leaving the main camp under our head man’s brother, we started, twelve in all, not counting Gombi, with provisions enough for a week, though we didn’t expect to be more than three days.

“We went along the wood belt due west for half a day, then the forest took a big bend and as we turned it, just about three in the afternoon, we came on great wads of chewed bowstring hemp lying about, and the trees alongside of us looked as if a hurricane had stripped them of their leaves and broken their branches. Elephants are vegetarians and there’s not a vegetable they won’t eat from an acacia tree to a cabbage; they’ll beat small trees down and eat them clear of leaves and bark, and they’ll simply skin big trees, besides reaching up with their trunks and stripping the branches. Fortunately the wind had wandered round and was blowing from the west; for a moment after sighting the chewed hemp Gombi gave us a sign to halt. We saw nothing, but this little chap had eyes like a vulture and he saw away far ahead of us a movement in the treetops at one particular spot as if a wind was tossing them and then we knew there was a herd of elephants in the forest just there, feeding and shaking the trees.

“It took us an hour to get within shot. They weren’t feeding in the forest itself, but in a great bay among the trees; a fairish big herd, bulls, cows, and calves, some of the calves not more than a week old, little pinkish beggars, not bigger than a Newfoundland dog. We dropped two bulls, and when we’d taken their tusks and had supper that night, Gombi had fairly put his clutch on us and we were ready to follow him anywhere.

III.

“It’s a funny thing, but if we had come upon a poisonous snake we would have killed it right away without a thought. Yet coming upon a creature like Gombi, more poisonous than a snake and a lot more criminal, seeing he had invented and made his own poison, we let him live and even took him as a guide—like fools. And next day, listening to his sign talk and making out that if we followed him and struck right through the woods he could lead us to another hunting ground, we followed him.

“First we struck a great acacia belt and then we came on nsambyas and plantains mixed with cottonwood. The big lianas began to swing themselves across the trees and ground lianas to trip us, but the worst was to come, and it came about six hours after we had entered the trees. We struck a long patch where the nipa palms grew, springing like rockets out of the mud, and where you couldn’t take a step without sinking over ankle, then over knee, then to the middle. When you pulled your foot out there was a pound of black mud sticking to it. But Gombi didn’t mind. He knew that place by instinct and piloted us along till he reached firm ground, stretching like a road across the bad places and on we went till we hit the same thing again.

“When we camped that night we had three of those long stretches behind us, crossed by roads that only Gombi knew. That was a nice position, wasn’t it, for a lot of sane men to get themselves into and instead of tying him up and making him lead us back we let him share our meat and listened to more of his sign talk, telling us that a few hours more march would bring us out next day where there were elephants to be found more than he could number.

“Next day when we woke up he was gone—clean gone. Tellemark and I had done sentry duty during the night, not trusting the boys, but we had heard nothing and seen nothing. He must have slipped away like a snake and it came to me, like a blow over the heart, that we were lost men. Instinct told me that this beast, intending to destroy us for some reason of his own, would do his work thoroughly, and I was right. We had a compass with us and after swallowing our food we started still west, guessing that the forest wouldn’t last forever in that direction. But what’s the good of a compass when it only leads you to a bog patch? We hadn’t been half an hour on the march when we hit one just as bad as the ones over which Gombi had piloted us; worse, for we couldn’t find a road across anywhere.

“There was a big fallen tree just there and I sat down on it. I was knocked out for the moment. I sat there pretending to be thinking, but I was thinking about nothing, except that we were done. That was against reason, for it was clear that by searching we might be able to find those three roads again that would lead us back east, and where there’s half a chance no man has a right to give in. But the truth was my imagination had been seized by Gombi. His picture stood before my mind as a thing that was all cunning and evil—that and the picture of ourselves in his toils.

“Then at last I got a clutch on myself and as I came out of the doldrums a big idea struck me, big enough to make me laugh, it seemed so luminous and good.

“‘What’s the matter?’ asked Tellemark.

“‘The nipa palms,’ said I. ‘They only grow in the boggy places and they’ll show us where the firm ground begins.’

“But see here,’ said Tellemark. ‘Those roads weren’t more than twenty feet wide and the palms seemed just as thick there.’

“‘Bother the roads,’ said I. ‘Those long mud stretches don’t run forever north and south. We’ve got to get round them not across them. Let’s strike on till we reach the palms and then strike north for choice till the palms give out.’

“He saw my meaning at once, and we started due east, returning on our tracks.

“We hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when suddenly one of the boys looked at his arm—something was sticking from it. It was one of those infernal knitting-needle arrows that had struck him and struck without causing the least pain. It had come from the thick growth to the right and Tellemark and I without stopping to look at the boy plunged right in, chasing here and there, beating the bush and firing our rifles on chance. Not a sign of anything. When we got back the chap was dead.

“It took about twelve seconds for that poison to do its work.

IV.

“Now you’ll see plainly enough that this new development had made matters ten times worse. Yet instead of that depressing me it bucked me like a glass of brandy. Sitting there on the log and thinking of those bog patches round us like traps I’d been down out of sight in the blues; but now I was as full of life and energy as a grig. Had to be, for the boys, stampeded by fright, tried to break. Tellemark and I had our work cut out kicking and gun-butting them so that at the end of two minutes they were as frightened of us as of Gombi. If we hadn’t done that they’d have run in every direction, north, south, east and west, and some would have been bogged and the rest starved and we with them, for they were throwing the provisions away. We stopped all that and made them shoulder the bundles and shoulder the tusks. It may seem funny to you that we should bother about the tusks, seeing the position we were in; but if we had abandoned that ivory just then we would have lost half our hold over the boys; they’d have seen that Gombi had rattled us.

“We struck the nipa palms after half an hour or so and turned north, Tellemark leading, while I brought up the rear, each of us with our guns ready to shoot the first man that bolted and both of us full up with the knowledge that somewhere in the trees Gombi was tracking us and only waiting his chance.

“We had frightened him evidently by chasing and firing through the bushes, for the whole of that day we heard no more from him. We made good way and got clear at last from the infernal nipa palms into a great tract of cottonwoods and nsambyas.

“Lord! it was like getting out of prison. We knew we had got to the stump end of the bogs and, turning due east, we reckoned an eight-hour tramp or so would bring us out somewhere into the open where we had left the main camp.

“Tellemark and I figured it out as we went. Four hours due east, was our idea, and four hours due south. We were right as it afterward turned out, but we had reckoned without the dark. A couple of hours after we had turned east it came on and we had to camp in a little glade, eating our supper in the last of the daylight and then lying down. We daren’t build a fire and we put out no sentries. If Gombi were laying round, sentries were no use against him in that black dark and he was the only thing we feared. We lay spread about, the boys pretty close together and Tellemark and I apart from them and side by side.

“We talked for a bit as we lay there, speaking almost in a whisper, and then we lay quiet, but we couldn’t sleep. The boys slept like logs. They thought themselves safe in the dark, no doubt.

“As for myself I felt certain that beast was lurking somewhere near and that he would be up to some trick, though what I couldn’t say. I lay listening for sounds and heard plenty. Away off, miles away it seemed, I heard the cry of a lion. Not the questing cry, but the cry of a lion that has fed; then I heard the rooting of a bush pig. Then, somewhere in the forest, maybe a mile away, a tree went smash. You often hear that and there is no other sound like it. Some great cottonwood or euphorbia going rotten for years had suddenly tumbled.

“After that things got pretty silent till suddenly there came a little sound that made my heart jump—something different from any other sound.

“‘Thr-rub-b!’

“I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn it was the sound of a taut string suddenly relaxed. I waited. Then after a while it came again.

“‘Thr-rub-b!’

“I drew my head close to Tellemark’s and whispered, ‘Is that the sound of a bow?’

“‘Yes,’ he whispered.

“‘Shall we fire?’ I asked him, and he whispered back, ‘No, we’d stampede the boys—chap’s shooting on chance: Don’t move.’

“I took his meaning. Gombi had marked us down. Afraid of firing when there was light enough to chase him by, he was shooting blind in the hope of bagging some of us—maybe getting the lot. He’d hit nothing as yet evidently.

“I lay still and said my prayers and the thing went on. Five or six times that bow went; then it stopped. A minute passed, ten minutes.

“I whispered to Tellemark, ‘He’s gone,’ and the whisper came back, ‘Not he—changing his position.’

“I felt things running down my face—sweat drops. Far away off in the woods came a cry; it was the cry of a hyena; then silence shut down again. Not a sound, till suddenly—but farther away now—came the noise of the bow.

“‘Thr-rub-b!’ and after it, right over my head, something passed through the air.

‘Whitt!’ An arrow had missed me by inches. I whispered to Tellemark. ‘Shall we fire?’ and the whisper came back, ‘No. Don’t know where he is. Flash would give him our position—stampede boys. Chance it.’

“It went on. No more arrows came near. Then it stopped. The beast was evidently changing his position again. A minute passed and then suddenly out of the dark there came a muffled crash followed by a squeal and silence. I listened, the sweat running into my eyes, and there came a new sound close beside me. It was from Tellemark. He seemed in convulsions. I thought one of the poisoned arrows must have got him, he was shaking and choking. I clutched him by the shoulder but he shook himself free.

“I’m all right,’ he whispered. ‘I’m only laughing—oh, Lord, can’t you see, that chap’s fallen into an elephant trap.’ Then he went off again. It wasn’t laughter so much as hysterics, sheer hysterics from the snapping of the tension and the relief.

“Tellemark had an ear that could tell the meaning of any sound, and by the sound he had heard he could tell the truth as plainly as though he had seen Gombi treading on the bush covering of an elephant trap and its collapse. Now that he had told me, I could see it too. After a while, when he had quieted down, I asked him should we rouse the boys and get the beast out, and he whispered ‘No, can’t do it in the dark. Leave him till morning and get to sleep.’

“I heard him give a few more chuckles as he turned about, then I heard him breathing quietly and next minute I was asleep myself. I slept for hours and when I awoke it was just before dawn. Tellemark had stirred me up. ‘Smell that?’ he whispered.

“I did. Then the truth broke upon me and I lay there in the dark thinking of Gombi’s work and waiting for day to show how many he had got. Then as the day broke I could see, lying there among the others who were soundly asleep, the swollen bodies of three of the boys, each with an arrow sticking somewhere in him. The bite of the arrows hadn’t been enough to wake them.

“‘We’ve got to get those chaps away before the others see them,’ said Tellemark. We did—into the woods far to leeward. When we returned, we could see in the stronger light arrows sticking here and there in the trees, arrows that had missed their mark. We broke them off carefully, and flung them away lest the boys should see them. Then we located the pit with its broken cover. Then, and not till then, we kicked the boys awake and before they had time to look round told them Gombi was in the pit.

“Tellemark had peeped down and seen that it was unstaked, and then began a powwow as to how we should get the creature out.

“All sorts of suggestions came from the boys, one fellow wanted to catch a wild cat and lower it tied by the tail, the cat would catch Gombi and we’d drag both up. Not a bad idea either, only we hadn’t a wild cat. Then I solved the business by jumping down myself. He showed no fight and we had him out in a tick and he bothered the world no more.

“That’s all; we got back to camp all right, only we forgot the tusks in our excitement, nearly three hundred pounds of ivory.

“Those slippers,” finished the collector of trophies, “are made of Gombi’s skin. Allenby, of Bond Street, made them for me.”

By his look of expectancy I guessed at once that I was not the only man he had trapped into wearing those slippers while listening to that tale. But the howl of disgust he was waiting for never came—and he never forgave me, I think. The story ought to end here, but it doesn’t. For the chief protagonist is not Gombi but Patrick Spence.

It remains only to ask and answer the debated question—does the gun like the fishing rod breed liars?

At the great sale after Sir Patrick’s death I bought those slippers for four and sixpence and sent them to a high authority, with a simple question and a stamped telegraph form. The reply came promptly next day. “Absolutely not. Lamb skin.”