“She’s lovely, Tony. Where is she from?”
“From the Kamba Shamba, sar.”
She was the best all right and better than the best. We both watched her.
“Have you seen Miss Mary and the Captain Game Ranger?”
“Yes, sar. They were here a short time ago. I am truly happy that Miss Mary has killed her lion. Do you remember from the early days and the lion spearing with the bubblegum Masai, sar? Do you remember from Fig Tree camp? That was a long time, sar, for her to hunt lion. This morning I told her a Masai proverb. Did she tell you?”
“No, Tony. I don’t think she did.”
“I told her this saying, ‘It is always very quiet when a great bull dies.’ ”
“That is very true. It is quiet now even with the noise of the Ngoma.”
“Did you notice it too, sar?”
“Yes. I have been quiet inside all day. Do you want any beer?”
“No thank you, sar. Will there be boxing tonight?”
“Do you feel like it?”
“If you do, sar. But there are many new boys to try. We can do it better tomorrow without Ngoma.”
“Tonight if you like.”
“Perhaps it would be better tomorrow. One boy is not a very nice boy. Not bad. But not nice. You know the kind.”
“Town boy?”
“A little bit, sar.”
“Can he box?”
“Not really, sar. But fast.”
“Hit?”
“Yes, sar.”
“What is that dance now?”
“The new boxing dance. You see? They make infighting now and left hooks the way you teach.”
“Better than I teach.”
“Tomorrow is best, sar.”
“But you’ll be gone tomorrow.”
“I forgot, sar. Please excuse me. I am forgetful since the great bull died. We’ll make it when we come back. I go now to check the lorry.”
I went off to look for Keiti and found him on the outskirts of the dancing. He looked very cheerful and possessive.
“Please send them home in the truck when it gets dark,” I said. “Mthuka can take several loads in the hunting car too. Memsahib is tired and we should have dinner early and go to bed.”
“Ndio,” he agreed.
I found Ngui and he said, “Jambo, Bwana,” sarcastically in the dusk.
“Jambo, tu,” I answered. “Why didn’t you dance?”
“Too much law,” he said. “It is not my day to dance.”
“Nor mine.”
That night we had a cheerful dinner. Mbebia, the cook, had made breaded cutlets of the lion tenderloin and they were excellent. In September, when we had eaten the first lion cutlets, it had been a matter for discussion and was regarded as an eccentricity or something barbaric. Now everyone ate them and they were regarded as a great delicacy. The meat was white as veal and tender and delicious. It had no gamy flavor at all.
“I don’t think anyone could tell it from a costoletta Milanesa at a really good Italian restaurant except that the meat is better,” Mary said.
I had been sure it would be good meat the first time I had ever seen a lion skinned. Mkola, who was my gun bearer in those days, told me that the tenderloin was the best meat there was to eat. But we had been very disciplined then by Pop, who was trying to make at least a semi-pukka Sahib of me and I had never had the nerve to cut a tenderloin and ask the cook to prepare it. This year, though, when we killed the first lion and I asked Ngui to take the two tenderloins it had been different. Pop said it was barbarous and that no one ever ate lion. But this was almost surely the last safari we would ever make together and we had come to the point where we both regretted things we had not done rather than those we had and so he made only perfunctory opposition and when Mary showed Mbebia how to prepare the cutlets and when we smelled their fine savor and when he saw how the meat cut exactly like veal and how much we enjoyed it, he tried some too and liked it.
“You ate bear in America hunting in the Rockies. It’s like pork but too rich. You eat pork and a hog will feed fouler than a bear or a lion.”
“Don’t badger me,” Pop had said. “I’m eating the damned stuff.”
“Isn’t it good?”
“Yes. Damn it. It’s good. But don’t badger me.”
“Have some more, Mr. P. Please have some more,” Mary said.
“All right. I’ll have some more,” making his voice into a high complaining falsetto. “But don’t keep staring at me while I eat it.”
It was pleasant talking about Pop whom Mary and I both loved and whom I was fonder of than any man that I had ever known. Mary told some of the things Pop had told her on the long drive they had made together through Tanganyika when we had gone down to hunt the Great Ruaha river country and the Bohoro flats. Hearing these stories and imagining the things he had not told it was like having Pop there and I thought that even in his absence he could make things all right when they were difficult.
Then too it was wonderful to be eating the lion and have him in such close and final company and tasting so good.
That night Mary said she was very tired and she went to sleep in her own bed. I lay awake for a while and then went out to sit by the fire. In the chair watching the fire and thinking of Pop and how sad it was he was not immortal and how happy I was that he had been able to be with us so much and that we had been lucky to have three or four things together that were like the old days along with just the happiness of being together and talking and joking, I went to sleep.
11
WALKING IN THE early morning watching Ngui striding lightly through the grass thinking how we were brothers it seemed to me stupid to be white in Africa and I remembered how twenty years before I had been taken to hear the Moslem missionary who had explained to us, his audience, the advantages of a dark skin and the disadvantages of the white man’s pigmentation. I was burned dark enough to pass as a half-caste.
“Observe the White Man,” the Missionary had said. “He walks in the sun and the sun kills him. If he exposes his body to the sun it is burned until it blisters and rots. The poor fellow must stay in the shade and destroy himself with alcohol and stinghas and chutta pegs because he cannot face the horror of the sun rising on the next day. Observe the White Man and his mwanamuki; his memsahib. The woman is covered with brown spots if she goes into the sun; brown spots like the forerunners of leprosy. If she continues the sun strips the skin as from a person who has passed through fire.”
On this lovely morning I did not try to remember further about the Sermon against the White Man. It had been long ago and I had forgotten many of the more lively parts but one thing I had not forgotten was the White Man’s heaven and how this had been shown to be another of his horrifying beliefs which caused him to hit small white balls with sticks along the ground or other larger balls back and forth across nets, such as are used on the big lakes for catching fish, until the sun overcame him and he retired into the Club to destroy himself with alcohol and curse the Baby Jesus unless his wanawaki were present.
Together Ngui and I passed another brush patch where a cobra had his hole. The cobra was either still out or had gone visiting leaving no address. Neither of us were great snake hunters. That was a White Man’s obsession and a necessary one since snakes, when trodden on, bit the cattle and the horses and there was a standing reward of shillings for them on Pop’s farm; both cobras and puff adders. Snake hunting, for pay, was as low as a man could fall. We knew cobras as quick, lithe-moving creatures who sought their holes which were so small that it seemed impossible for them to enter them and we had jokes about this. There were tales of ferocious mambas that rose high on their tails and pursued the helpless colonists or intrepid Game Rangers while they were mounted on horses but these tales left us indifferent since they came from the south, where hippos with personal names were alleged to wander across hundreds of miles of dry country seeking water and snakes performed biblical feats. I knew these things must be true since
they had been written by honorable men but they were not like our snakes and in Africa it is only your own snakes that matter.
Our snakes were shy or stupid or mysterious and powerful. I made a great show of snake-hunting fervor which deceived nobody except, possibly, Miss Mary, and we were all against the spitting cobra since he had spat at G.C. This morning when we found that the cobra was absent and had not returned to his hole I said to Ngui that he was probably the grandfather of Tony anyway and that we should respect him.
Ngui was pleased at this since the snakes are the ancestors of all the Masai. I said the snake might well have been the ancestor of his girl at the Masai Manyatta. She was a tall, lovely girl and had a certain amount of snake about her. Ngui being cheered up and slightly horrified at the possible ancestry of his illegal love I asked him if he thought the coldness of the Masai women’s hands and the stranger occasional coldness of other parts of their bodies could be due to snake blood. First he said that it was impossible; that Masai had always been like that. Then, we were walking side by side now and heading for the high trees of camp that showed etched in yellow and green against the brown wrinkled base and the high snow of the Mountain; camp not visible but only the high trees marking it; he said that it might be true. Italian women, he said, had cold and hot hands. The hand could be cold and then become warm as a hot spring and in other ways they were as scalding as a hot spring if one could remember it. They had no more bubo, the penalty for relations, than the Masai. Perhaps the Masai did have snake blood. I said that the next time we killed a snake we would all feel the blood and see. I had never felt the outrush of snake blood since they were antipathetic to me and I knew they were to Ngui too. But we agreed to feel the blood and have others, if they could control their repugnance, feel it too. This was all in the interests of our anthropological studies which we pursued each day and we kept on walking and thinking of these problems and of our own small problems which we tried to integrate with the greater interests of anthropology until the tents of camp showed under the yellow and green trees which the first light of the sun was now turning to bright dark green and shining gold and we could see the gray smoke of the fires at the lines and the camp breaking of the Game Scouts and, seated by the fire before our own tents now deep under the trees and the sunlight of the new day, the figure of G.C. seated in a camp chair by a wooden table reading with a bottle of beer in his hand.
Ngui took the rifle and shouldered it with the old shotgun and I walked over to the fire.
“Good morning, General,” G.C. said. “You were up early.”
“We hunters have it rugged,” I said. “We hunt on our own two feet and the chips are always down.”
“Somebody ought to pick the damned chips up sometime. You’ll tread on them with your own two feet. Have some beer.”
He poured a glass very carefully from the bottle bringing the head up to the point of running over and then delicately holding it bubble by bubble until the glass was full.
“Satan will find work for idle hands to do,” I said and lifted the glass which had been filled so that a swell of the amber beer seemed to hang like the lip of an avalanche and conveyed it gently and unspilling to my lips taking in the first sip with the upper lip.
“Not bad for an unsuccessful hunter,” G.C. said. “Such steady hands and red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes have made our England’s greatness.”
“ ‘Neath twisted shards and iron sands we drink it down as God commands,” I said. “Are you across the Atlantic yet?”
“I passed over Ireland,” G.C. said. “Frightfully green. I can all but see the lights of Le Bourget. I’m going to learn to fly, General.”
“Many have said it before. The question is how are you going to fly?”
“I’m going to straighten up and fly right,” G.C. said.
“On your own two feet and when the chips are down?”
“No. In the aircraft.”
“Probably sounder in the aircraft. And will you carry these principles into Life, son?”
“Drink your beer, Billy Graham,” G.C. said. “What will you do when I am gone, General? No nervous breakdowns, I hope? No trauma? You’re up to it, I hope? It’s not too late to refuse the flank.”
“Which flank?”
“Any flank. It’s one of the few military terms that I retained. I always wanted to refuse them a flank. In actual life you’re always putting out a defensive flank and anchoring it somewhere. Until I refuse a flank I’ve been thwarted.”
“Mon flanc gauche est protégé par une colline,” I said remembering too well. “J’ai les mittrailleuses bien placés. Je me trouve très bien ici et je reste.”
“You’re taking refuge in a foreign tongue,” G.C. said. “Pour one and we’ll go out and get that measuring over while my well-peppered ruffians do whatever it is they do this morning before they are for the town’s end to beg during life.”
“Did you ever read Sergeant Shakespeare?”
“No.”
“I’ll get it for you. Duff Cooper gave it to me. He wrote it.”
“It isn’t reminiscences?”
“No.”
We had been reading the Reminiscences serialized in one of the thin paper airmail editions that came out to Nairobi on the Comets that landed at Entebbe. I had not liked them very much in the newspaper installments. But I had liked Sergeant Shakespeare very much and I had liked Duff Cooper without his wife. But there was so much of her in the Reminiscences that both G.C. and I had been put off.
“When are you going to write your reminiscences, G.C.?” I asked. “Don’t you know old men forget?”
“I hadn’t really thought much of writing them.”
“You’ll have to. There’s not many of the really old timers left. You could start on the early phases now. Get in the early volumes. Far Away and Long Ago in Abyssinia would be a good one to start with. Skip the university and bohemian times in London and the Continent and cut to A Youngster with the Fuzzy Wuzzies then move into your early days as a Game Ranger while you can still recall them.”
“Could I use that inimitable style you carved out of a walnut stick in An Unwed Mother on the Italian Front?” G.C. asked. “I always liked that the best of your books except for Under Two Flags. That was yours wasn’t it?”
“No. Mine was The Death of a Guardsman.”
“Good book too,” G.C. said. “I never told you but I modeled my life on that book. Mummy gave it to me when I went away to school.”
“You don’t really want to go out on this measurement nonsense do you?” I said hopefully.
“I do.”
“Should we take neutral witnesses?”
“There are none. We’ll walk it ourselves.”
“Let’s get out then. I’ll see if Miss Mary’s still sleeping.”
She was sleeping and she had drunk her tea and looked as though she might well sleep for another two hours. Her lips were closed and her face was smooth as ivory against the pillow. She was breathing easily but as she moved her head I could tell that she was dreaming.
I picked up the rifle where Ngui had hung it on a tree and climbed into the Land Rover beside G.C. We went and finally picked up the old tracks and found where Miss Mary had shot the lion. Many things were changed as they always are on any old battlefield but we found her empty cartridges and G.C.’s and off to the left we found mine. I put one in my pocket.
“Now I’ll drive to where he was killed and then you pace it on a straight line.”
I watched him go off in the car, his brown hair shining in the early morning sun; the big dog looking back at me and then turning to look straight ahead. When the Land Rover made a circle and stopped this side of the heavy clump of trees and bush I put my toe a pace to the left of the most westerly of the ejected shells and started to pace toward the vehicle counting as I paced. I carried the rifle over my shoulder holding it by the barrel with my right hand and when I started the Land Rover looked very small and foreshortened. The big dog was out and G.C.
was walking around. They looked very small too and sometimes I could only see the dog’s head and neck. When I got to the Land Rover I stopped where the grass was bent where the lion had first lain.
“How many?” G.C. asked and I told him. He shook his head and asked, “Did you bring the Jinny flask?”
“Yes.”
We each took a drink.
“We never, never tell anybody how long a shot it was,” G.C. said. “Drunk or sober with shits or decent people.”
“Never.”
“Now we’ll set the speedometer and you drive it back in a straight line and I’ll pace it.”
There was a couple of paces’ difference in our tallies and a slight discrepancy between the speedometer reading and the paces so we cut four paces off the whole thing. Then we drove back to camp watching the Mountain and feeling sad because we would not hunt together again until Christmas.
After G.C. and his people were gone I was alone with Miss Mary’s sorrow. I was not really alone because there was also Miss Mary and the camp and our own people and the big mountain of Kilimanjaro that everyone called Kibo and all the animals and the birds and the new fields of flowers and the worms that hatched out of the ground to eat the flowers. There were the brown eagles that came to feed on the worms so that eagles were as common as chickens and eagles wearing long brown trousers of feathers and other white-headed eagles walked together with the guinea fowl busily eating the worms. The worms made an armistice among all the birds and they all walked together. Then great flocks of European storks came to eat the worms and there would be acres of storks moving on a single stretch of plain grown high with the white flowers. Miss Mary’s sorrow resisted the eagles because eagles did not mean as much to her as they did to me.
She had never lain under juniper bush up above timberline at the top of a pass in our own mountains with a .22 rifle waiting for eagles to come to a dead horse that had been a bear bait until the bear was killed. Now he was an eagle bait and then afterwards he would be a bear bait again. The eagles were sailing very high when you first saw them. You had crawled under the bush when it was still dark and you had seen the eagles come out of the sun when it had cleared the opposite peak of the pass. This peak was just a rise of grassy hill with a rock outcropping at the top and scattered juniper bushes on the slope. The country was all high there and very easy traveling once you had come this high and the eagles had come from far away toward the snow mountains you could have seen if you had been standing instead of lying under the bush. There were three eagles and they wheeled and soared and rode the currents and you watched them until the sun spotted your eyes. Then you closed them and through the red the sun was still there. You opened them and looked to the side limit of the blind of the sun and you could see the spread pinions and the wide fanned tails and feel the eyes in the big heads watching. It had been cold in the early morning and you looked out at the horse and his too old and too exposed now teeth that you had always had to lift his lip to see. He had a kind and rubbery lip and when you had led him to this place to die and dropped the halter he had stood as he had always been taught to stand and when you had stroked him on the blaze on his black head where the gray hairs showed he had reached down to nip you on the neck with his lips. He had looked down to see the saddled horse you had left in the last edge of the timber as though he were wondering what he was doing here and what was the new game. You had remembered how wonderfully he had always seen in the dark and how you had hung on to his tail with a bear hide packed across the saddle to come down trails when you could not see at all and when the trail led along the rimrock in the dark down through the timber. He was always right and he understood all new games.
True at First Light Page 22
