Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) by Audrey Schulman

the native pointed. He imagined the coup of posting home a photograph of himself sitting astride a dead lion.
    â€œSixty yards,” said the N’derobbo. “Dark ears above the grass.”
    But Jeremy saw only grass, waving gently.
    â€œGone.” Otombe let his arm fall while his eyes methodically searched. Standing now beside him, Jeremy realized this was the way the N’derobbo experienced the savannah, swimming through it, the grass up to his chest, holding only a single spear. The lion was somewhere out there. Jeremy understood now why he watched the grass around him with such care.
    â€œWhere did it go?”
    Otombe shrugged.
    The savannah ran uninterrupted up to this small trampled clearing where the eland had fallen. One of the bearers was kneeling down, gutting the animal. There was the coppery smell of blood. The organs were quickly scooped out and tossed onto the ground. Woozy at the sight, he turned away while the two unfamiliar natives who’d followed the hunting party stepped forward to claim the innards. Behind them the grass trembled. Was it only the breeze? Even holding his gun as he was, Jeremy found himself stepping closer to the N’derobbo.
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    Riding back from the hunt, Jeremy turned to see if any natives followed them now. The prairie behind them was empty, but he spotted the bundle of eland steaks balanced on the head of one of his WaKikuyu bearers. The bundle was tiny in comparison to the animal, fifty pounds taken from a half-ton creature. The meat was wrapped in the animal’s own hide and, from a fold in the pelt, a little blood escaped, dripping down the WaKikuyu’s neck. He remembered that moment while the creature had lain on its side, gasping for breath.
    Turning away, he decided to leave these men for now. He should not have taken the day off, even if it was Sunday—too much depended on his leadership.
    He sent the hunting party straight home while he journeyed back the longer way, following the railroad tracks, in order to check on the integrity of the newest section of embankment after last night’s downpour.
    Thus, when the sun set, he was riding Patsy along the tracks, getting close to camp, admiring the railroad’s clean line. Although the tracks’ final stop was supposed to be Lake Victoria, Jeremy had already figured out the lake would be merely an incidental layover to a much more important destination. This destination, the true purpose of the construction, had occurred to him as soon as he grasped the extent of the railroad’s likely cost. The proposed budget was almost four million pounds, an imposing amount all on its own, but it seemed unlikely the total bill would come close to being that low. The surveying team had been too rushed to map the terrain in detail. Without a thorough assessment, any estimate of cost could be only a guess, and there were so many possible complications in this foreign clime: attacks by hostile tribes, the Indian workers going on strike, army ants devouring the wooden railway ties, the difficulties of engineering the railway up the two-thousand-foot-tall Kikuyu escarpment, the havoc caused by rhino footprints and rain. No, on this continent there was little chance that the railroad construction would proceed smoothly, that everything would play out according to a plan developed in a tidy, temperate country. The final price tag for this railroad would be staggering even to the British Empire.
    And this was where the true destination or purpose became apparent. Once England had spent this much on a colony, it could not possibly let things continue as before, the tribes puttering around naked and hunting, the animals roaming free, the minerals lying untouched beneath the ground, the land unfarmed. No, long before this railway reached Lake Victoria, it would forcibly offload onto this land British values and lifestyles. Before this railway was finished, there would be cities built and English spoken,