The Story of Gombi

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.