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Passengers
By George Agnew Chamberlain
Taken from "McClure's Magazine," Volume 44, November 1914 - April 1915
The tenderfoot, preparing for his first big-game shoot, has many misgivings in his mind to which, if he is man-size, he never gives voice. He wonders how he will face those three supreme tests of nerve: charging lion, buffalo, elephant. The old hand does not give a thought to the dangers from game. He knows that a man can walk through a hundred thunder-storms without being struck by lightning. What the old hand dreads is the "heart-breaking condition."
Almost every African big-game country that has not been reduced to a Cook's coupon basis has its heart-breaking condition. In Guijá, home of mighty beasts, it is pitiless reaches of waterless country; on the coast to the east it is grass--eternal grass, higher than a man's head; and to the north it is tsetse-fly, with its sudden death to cattle and its seven years' suspended sentence to the victim of sleeping-sickness.
The old hand is forever seeking some prolific game region where no heart-breaking condition exists. He often thinks he has found it. Catran and Annestley thought they had found it when they went up the Great River in flood, passed the upper shoals, and stumbled into the deep. narrow waters of an uncharted creek.
The creek itself, which they called the Nameless River, seemed too good to be true; for it was interminable in its twists and turns, and of a comfortable even depth, like a canal. Along its banks grew tremendous wide-spreading figus trees. For long reaches their branches interlaced overhead, and the motor-boat chugged along in shade--always a boon in Africa.
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