by Ruark, R.
“Nice shooting,” Harry said.
“Piga. Kufa. M’zuri sana.” the boys said.
“Nuts,” I said. “It looks like I am a shotgun man.”
“You broke his neck,” Harry said.
“I was aiming at his behind,” I said.
“It’s like that for everybody at first,” Harry said. “The light, you know. Everybody misses at first.”
“Look, the light hasn’t got anything to do with my shakes,” I said. “The light doesn’t make the gun wiggle like a cooch dancer. I got no guts. I shake and I can’t control my breath. I aim at the shoulder and hit it in the foot. I am sighted in on his can and I break his neck. This we can’t blame on the light. This we can’t blame on the gun.”
“Take it easy, take it easy,” Harry said. “It happens to everybody. Even Hemingway. It even happened to Theodore Roosevelt.”
“Bwana Haraka,” Adam, the Wakamba gunbearer, said.
“Pandi hio. Ngiri.”
“Nice warthog,” Harry said. “We need him to go with the Grant. Toa .220, Kidogo. You can shoot this one from the car,” he said to me. “It’s vermin and legal and you can get a steady rest on the windscreen. Wallop him up the rear. Bullet ranges forward, and if it doesn’t break his back, it’ll work into his chest cavity.”
The pig was trotting, his antenna-tail straight up. I held the little hopped-up .22 on his buxom backside and it felt steady. I squeezed and peeled a ham off his right hip. He let out a squeal and went into the bush, leaving blood behind him. We tracked him and we never found him. I looked sadly at the .220 Swift and sadly at the boys and sadly at Selby.
“You can blame the gun on this one,” Harry said. “The bullet broke up on the outside of the pig. Didn’t penetrate. I have read a lot about these speedy little guns, but it seems to me they wreck the little stuff and just savage the bigger stuff. Let’s try it once again on the hyena over there. This is the only hyena you get. I don’t like to shoot them, even if they are miserable creatures. Except on the farm. When you see one of your dairy herd come in with her udder ripped off, or if you watch old fisi standing by a calving cow so he can snatch the calf when she drops it, or when you wake up one night to find one looking at you as if you were a mutton chop, you shoot hyenas. Wallop this one. He’s got an especially evil look on his face.”
The hyena was watching us as we drove up, his big dog’s face mean and sullen, his lion’s ears pricked, scabby hide ugly in the sun. As we approached, he galloped slowly away, the hindquarters that God crippled sloping down from his bear’s body, a dog’s head with a lion’s ears on a bear’s body with the hind legs of a crippled beggar. Fisi, spotted and stinking and no friend to anyone. I shot him. I shot him nine times with the .220 Swift. I hit him every time, and every time the bullet splattered on his outside. One time I hit him in the face and took away his lower jaw and still he didn’t die. He just bled and began to snap fruitlessly with half a face at his own dragging guts. I spoke my first command in Swahili.
“Toa bundouki m’kubwa,” I said. ‘The big one. Gimme the .470.”
The gunbearer snapped the barrels onto the elephant gun and slipped a couple of cigar-size shells into it. I held it on the gory hyena and took his head off.
“They say it’s a good woodchuck gun, the .220,” Harry said. “I’m inclined to believe they may be right. But for pigs and hyenas and such, it ain’t much gun, is it?”
“I just fired it for the last time,” I said. “I wouldn’t even use it on a woodchuck. Or a skunk. Or anything else I had any respect for. Give it to the deserving poor.”
“I am beginning to like you a little bit,” Harry said. “I am completely caught up with clients who want to go out and slay a bull rhino with one of these silly little freak guns with an ounce of lead and a lot of speed. I am strictly a heavy bullet man myself. I cannot abide wounding things that could be killed simply if you used enough gun. But you’d be surprised how vain some of these sportsmen are. It gets us professionals killed. Some sporty type wants to do it all himself, wounds it, doesn’t want us to collaborate, it goes off into the bush, and then I wind up having to go after it.”
“Pal, you are not hunting with a vain man,” I said. “Anything I shoot that needs extra shooting you are invited. Be my guest. Collaborate, when and as necessary, and do not pause to check with your client. Shoot it first and I will argue with you later.”
We shaped back to camp again and put up another hog, a biggish boar accompanied by the sow and six piglets.
“You’ll kill this one well,” Harry said. “Mind what I say. Use the .30-’06.”
The boar was running diagonally across and ahead of us. The Remington felt comfortable in my hands. I swung it ahead of the boar’s shoulder and squeezed her off. The pig did a forward flip and stayed still. One of the gunbearers exhaled sharply.
“Kufa,” he said. “M’zuri sana. Piga m’zuri.”
“Old Bwana Firecracker,” Harry said, grinning. “The toast of the Muthaiga Club. You have now passed your apprenticeship. That is a very dead pig and a very nice shot and we will hang the pig in the tree next to the Grant and we will shoot us a very nice leopard, and now for Christ sake quit worrying about your shooting.”
Just before we got back to camp we remembered that I was supposed to shoot a Tommy for our table. There was a likely looking one standing and switching his tail. I got out of the jeep with the Remington and shot at him. I shot at him fourteen times. My wife killed him three days later. He had horns good enough for space in Rowland Ward’s records.
I did not speak much during lunch.
I don’t think I ate any, as a matter of fact. All I could think of was the fact that the guy who couldn’t hit a Tommy was supposed to shoot a lion.
We left the mem in camp again to do whatever it is that women have to do, and we went down by the reeds. We had Kidogo and Adam and Kibiriti along as ballast. We drove slowly along the wet edge of the high green reeds, and we flushed a herd of waterbucks, but the bull wasn’t much and you can’t eat them anyhow, so we pushed on and then Kibiriti rapped Harry on the shoulder. A ripple showed through the reeds.
“Kita,” Kibiriti said.
It was a hunting cheetah, and you could see his small round head plowing through the reeds, and he looked over his shoulder once and then took off like a shot.
“Hapana,” Kibiriti said.
“He’s right,” Harry said. “This one we will not see again. When they go they go, and you have had him. Let’s go shoot a zebra for the blacks to eat.”
Kibiriti said something rapidly in Swahili. It was about a paragraphful of Swahili.
“The old boy’s come down with one of his hunches,” Harry said. “He’s feeling liony. He says that, the way the moon is and what with the rains and all and the state of grass and economics amongst lions in general, he feels like a lion ought to be about three miles from here, contemplating his navel under a tree hard by a rocky hill. To my certain knowledge Kibiriti has not been here for a year. But if he feels liony, we’d best go and take a dekko at his hill. Don’t let the fez fool you. This is a true savage, and he is finer with a bow or spear than anybody I ever met, and he feels lions. Are you up to shooting one today, your first day?”
“Christ preserve us,” I said. “Let’s hope this lion fancier is wrong. Today I would hate to go up against a bull butterfly.”
“You’ll change your tune when you see your first shootable simba,” Harry said. “You’ll be awfully brave. You’ll probably be so scared that you will mistake fear for bravery and do everything right.”
“That’s nice to know, Mowgli,” I said.
“What’s this Mowgli business?” Harry asked.
“He’s a fictional figure,” I said. “Kipling dreamed him up. He lived among the beasts of the field and seemed to like it. His mother was a wolf.”
“Did he have fleas?” Harry asked politely, and swung the jeep toward Kibiriti’s hunch, his lion-tenanted rocky hillside.
&nbs
p; And it was that simple. We traveled the three miles. There was a rocky hill alongside the marsh. There was a clump of thorn, and under it there was a lion, catching a nap in the afternoon sun, which slanted under the umbrella tops of the trees and struck some golden sparks from his blackish-yellow hide.
“Simba,” Kibiriti said. “M’kubwa. Doumi,” he said like a man who might remark that if you go east far enough on Fifty-fourth Street, you will find the East River.
“I’m damned if I understand it,” Harry said reverently.
“This silly bastard is infallible. I know he hasn’t been here in a year. I also know that three days ago there couldn’t have been a lion in the neighborhood because the game is just starting to come in. But here we are. Your first shooting day in Africa and now you’ve got to shoot a lion. His mane is a little short on top and he’s a little past prime. But he’s the biggest blighter I’ve ever seen, and today a lion is a lion. I think you’d best collect this bloke, and maybe we can better him later.”
I looked at Kibiriti’s broad black face and saw the sun shining through the holes in his pierced lobes. I looked at his red fez and disliked him extremely.
“Why doesn’t this idiot mind his business and stay home with his wives? They should cuckold him constantly,” I said bitterly. “Why has the son of a bitch got to go around finding lions on my first day when I can’t hit a Tommy in fourteen tries and mammock up a warthog and shoot a Grant in the foot? I don’t know anything about shooting lions. I couldn’t hit myself in my own foot if I was a conscientious objector. I don’t even know if I want to shoot a lion. Tell that grinning bastard to quit living my life for me and find his lions on his own time.”
“Everybody wants to shoot a lion,” Harry said. “That’s why safaris cost so much. Even Aly Khan wants to shoot a lion. It’s the high cost of lions that’s ruining our economy. You can’t mean you’d pass up a bargain lion your first day? Harriet Maytag shot one her first—”
“God damn Harriet Maytag, whoever she be,” I said. “All I hear is Harriet Maytag. Harriet’s leopard. Harriet’s lion. So all right. Call me Harriet. Let’s go shoot the damn thing and then I will be sick.”
Harry grinned. Selby is an extraordinarily handsome young man, with the kind of curly black hair and dark eyes that bring out the mother in women. He also has wrists as thick as ordinary men’s ankles, and a hard mouth that turns down at the corners. In town he looks like what the fagot writers call a “pretty boy.” Take him into the bush among the blacks and beasts, and he is called m’zee by natives. M’zee means old man. It means respected, ancient sir. It means wisdom and courage and experience. At that particular moment I decided that I had met few people with so much to admire and so little to worry about. He swerved the jeep away from the lion, and we stopped her on the side of a hill, five thousand yards away. I lit a cigarette and passed it to Selby. I lit one for myself. Looking at the hands, I noticed that they were not shaking.
“What do you know?” I said wonderingly. “Check old Francis Macomber here. All I need now is Virginia to shoot me in the back of the neck.”
Harry unbuttoned the left door from the jeep. He tossed it onto the grass. He said something to Kidogo, the bowlegged gunbearer. It sounded like wapi hapa iko simba lio pandi hi m’kubwa bandouki bwana piga bloody nugu. I didn’t really listen. I was sending my soul away again. I hoped it was at Toots Shor’s having a drink with friends.
“We will collect this simba like this,” Harry said sternly, like an over-young professor lecturing the class. “Kidogo drives Jessica here. I sit in the middle. You sit on the outside. We will drive as close as we can without annoying this creature overmuch and taking care to observe the government’s rule about five hundred yards away, et cetera. When I nudge you, fall out of the jeep. Fall flat and lie still, and then we will crawl as close to this simba as we can, and when I tell you to shoot him you shoot him. The idea is to get close as you can—less danger of wounding him that way. You wound this chap, old boy, and he gets into those reeds, and we will all have a very nasty time. I’d not wound him if I were you. When you’ve shot him once, shoot him again, and then shoot him once more for insurance. Very sound rule. Old Phil Percival taught it me. All set?”
I couldn’t say anything but yes. Kidogo had taken the telescopic sights off the .375. I slid back the bolt and caught the comforting glint of the bullets in the magazine. There was one in the chamber. Good-bye, Mother, I said to myself. Et up by a lion in the bloom of youth.
“Well, let’s go shoot him,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”
“That’s the spirit,” Harry said. “Pese pese. Suria. Kwenda.”
The jeep began to roll, Kidogo obeying motions of Harry’s hands. We approached the lion deviously. We seemed always to be going away from him but actually were growing closer. Kidogo took his foot off the gas. Harry hit me in the ribs with his elbow. I fell out of the jeep. I remembered to fall with the gun protected and pointing away. Harry tumbled out behind me. He had a dirty, rusty-looking .416 Rigby bolt-action rifle in his hand. He had told me once that it could not hit anything but lions.
I was on my belly in the stiff, coarse yellow grass, and the lion was looking enormous now, staring in that oddly stuffed-shirt profile way they do, like bankers contemplating the future. A lion’s hide is not tawny. It is yellowish black. This one flexed the muscles of his forelegs, hooking his claws, and flicked his back hide to express annoyance at the camel flies that buzzed around him. I was humping along on my elbows, with the gun pushing out ahead of me. I seemed to have done this before.
I had done this before. I had done it in an Italian town a long time ago when a shot spurted at me from out of an alley along the Corso. I had fallen to the cobbles, clutching and cocking a Walther P-38 that I had bought for a carton of cigarettes from a Scots paratrooper who had killed a German paratroop lieutenant at Termoli and who had liberated his sidearm. Some more shots spurted from the alley and I shot back at the shots, moving the P-38 gently from left to right and shooting out the full magazine. No more shots came from the alley. There was nothing in the alley but a dead co-belligerent with a lot of new navels. We used to lose a lot of allies in those days before we disarmed the co-belligerents.
I was feeling now like the lion was a co-belligerent in an alley, and the feeling flooded over me like it is when you come in from a long day in the snow, and the fire and the whisky both start working on you at once. The Winchester was as light as the Walther P-38 liberated from the dead German leutnant at Termoli.
We were close to the lion now. I could count flies on him. Harry reached back and touched me, pressing me down behind a hummock. The lion turned his head and looked straight at us. He was a little scruffy on top, but he had a fine dark mane below. His feet were as big as Satchel Paige’s feet. His head was as big as a bale of hay. He yawned and I saw he had his right canine tooth broken off. He was huge.
“Wallop him,” Selby whispered.
I got up on one knee and went for just behind his ear. He flopped over like a big dog, kicked once, roared once, and stretched out. I never did hear my gun go off and felt no concussion, although a .375 magnum is not as kickless as, say, a P-38 Walther pistol.
“This is the biggest lion I ever saw in my life,” Harry said. “Also the deadest. But I should slip another one into him just behind that shoulder blade if I were you. I keep telling you, these dead animals are the ones that get up and kill you. Bust him again.”
I busted him again. You could tell he was dead from the sound of the bullet hitting him and his bodily reaction to the bullet hitting him.
“Kufa,” Harry said. “My Christ, he’s huge. An old boy to boot. Shouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t the type that citizen in Ikoma was calling a cattle killer. He’d be about ready for cattle now and mauling the odd native now and then. He’s about ten years old. I might say you shot him rather well, chum.”
“I always shoot lions in the ear,” I said. “Like I always shoot Grant gazelles in t
he foot. I was probably aiming at this one’s can too.”
“No bloody fear,” Harry said. “I was watching you. Old Bwana Simba. Old Bwana Lisasi Moja. One-Bullet Bob. The toast of the Muthaiga Club. Here come the worshiping throng. They want your autograph. Kill a lion, make friends, influence natives. Nice going, chum.”
The boys knew the script well. They all gave me the special handshake, grasping the thumb, roaring asthmatically, and telling me that I was the one-shot bwana, the mighty simba slayer, the protector of the poor. I agreed readily and then went over behind a bush and vomited just a little bit. This was because of something I had eaten disagreeing with me. Then I went to look at my lion. He looked awfully rumpled. A dead lion has no dignity. All the majesty leaks out of him with the blood. He looks like a moth-bit rug, and after a while his mane drops off.
“This is a hell of a lion,” I said. “He looks like Russell Nype. I have just slain the only crew-cut simba in Tanganyika.”
“Who’s Russell Nype?” Harry asked.
“He’s a society-type singer who wears horn-rims and goes out socially with the Duchess of Windsor,” I said. “He made the crew cut what it is today. Friend of the Donahues.”
I looked at my lion. The top of his brainpan was off. We walked off his measurements, and he was ten foot six. That is a lot of lion. His paws were as big as pumpkins. It suddenly occurred to me that I had crawled up on this thing as close as I had to get and when I had to shoot him I shot him and didn’t wound him and of a sudden the boys were admiring me and Harry was kidding me and I felt real good. I hadn’t spooked. I hadn’t botched it. I hadn’t looked bad in front of the boys.
