by Ruark, R.
I looked at Harry. He shrugged and spread his hands.
“Too many lions at once apt to be unsettling,” he said. “That was a very nasty lion. Thought for a second I’d have to shoot her.”
“Why in the name of Christ didn’t you?” I said. “By the time I’d finished with the big fellow, she was practically sitting in your lap. I could see her come out of the corner of my eye and I kept waiting for the sound of a gun going off. Why didn’t you belt her when she made that last jump?”
Harry looked at me in something approaching horror.
“My dear man,” he said, “she had cubs. One doesn’t go about shooting females with children—not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“When is necessary?” I said, bitter myself now, and still shaking.
“Oh,” Harry answered, “I thought I’d give her another foot or so before I shoved one down her gullet.”
“The memsaab is absolutely right,” I said, sticking a cigarette into a dry mouth. “She is surrounded by idiots and fools.”
We went up to see the dead lion. As we approached Gorgeous George in the car, Harry spoke over his shoulder to the gunbearers. “Toa .220 Swift,” he said, and to me, “When we get out, give him one more behind the ear.”
I got out and popped the old boy again with the little gun. It wasn’t necessary, but it didn’t do any harm, either. We walked to this fine redheaded gentleman, and sure enough, there was a fresh, ragged tear across his forehead.
“Thought so,” Selby said. “Fight with the young bleeder after we left. I’d hate to see the other fellow. . . .”
He prodded the lion with his toe while the boys shook my hand.
“Very fine simba,” he said. “Dead, now. Comes of being greedy. Never let your belly rule your reason.”
We jabbered, released from tension, all the way back to Campi Abahati. As we got out Harry sniffed.
“I can smell that pig we hung up for the leopard all the way from the tree,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll go and collect the leopard. Old chui must be getting very fond of that pig by now, to judge from the smell. He likes his cheese ripe, does old chui.”
I remember how the fire looked that night, and the flicker of the smaller fires on the shining black faces of the boys as they squatted round, roasting their bits of meat. I remember how marvelous the warm martinis tasted, and that we had eland chops for dinner, and we drank far too much brandy afterward as we sat in front of the fire in robes and pajamas, saying the same triumphant things to each other over and over again. I remember how the boys grabbed me by the thumb in that queer handshake of theirs when we came in with the second lion, and the almost reverent light in old Katunga’s mad eyes as he ran his thumb across the blade of his skinning knife, looking first at the redheaded lion, then at me.
“M’uzuri sana, bwana,” old Katunga said. “M’kubwa sana. M’uzuri, m’uzuri. Piga m’zuri. Bwana Simbambile.”
It sounded very fine to be called Bwana Two Lions that night, which is maybe why I am today dissatisfied with cocktail conversation and stale talk of politics and football scandals and congressional investigations. Also, my taste in sports has been somewhat spoiled.
This was a very fine simba, this last lion that I shall ever shoot. He had this real red mane, as red as Ann Sheridan’s, and bright green eyes. He was absolutely prime, not an ounce of fat on him, no sores, few flies, with a fine shining healthy coat. He was the handsomest lion I had ever seen, in or out of a zoo, and I was not sorry about the collection of him. Already I was beginning to fall into the African way of thinking: that if you properly respect what you are after, and shoot it cleanly and on the animal’s terrain, if you imprison in your mind all the wonder of the day from sky to smell to breeze to flowers—then you have not merely killed an animal. You have lent immortality to a beast you have killed because you loved him and wanted him forever so that you could always recapture the day. You could always remember how blue the sky was and how you sat on the high hill with the binoculars under the great umbrella of the mimosa, waiting for the first buzzard to slide down out of the sky, waiting for the first lioness to sneak out of the bush, waiting for the old man to take his heavy head and brilliant mane and burly chest out of the bush and into the clear golden field where the dead topi lay. This is better than letting him grow a few years older, to be killed or crippled by a son and eaten, still alive, by hyenas. Death is not a dreadful thing in Africa—not if you respect the thing you kill, not if you kill to feed your people or your memory.
I was thinking along these lines when I went happily to bed, pleasantly drunk on brandy and triumph. The next morning we got up and drove back to see how the lady lion and the kids were making out. The old girl charged the jeep again. We spun Jessica about and took off. There didn’t seem to be any future of friendship with this particular lion, and no point to pursuing further acquaintance. This girl purely despised jeeps named Jessica, and any humans associated with jeeps named Jessica, and like Harry said, she had an ugly face for a lion.
Chapter 6
THE memsaab was adjusting very well to her new life. Her fears had given way mostly to fascination. She was happy in her khaki drill pants and her Russell Birdshooter boots. She was getting so she could tell the difference between a leopard’s grunt and the bark of a baboon or the growl of a colobus monkey. She was fascinated by ants and anthills. She had made friends with all the baboons. She had found a dead cobra in the cook tent and had not screamed. She was taking better pictures all the time, and she had trapped Juma into the job of hairdresser to the queen. Juma, as head boy for safari for many years, was not surprised at assuming an extra added duty to replace the firm of Ceil et Paul in New York City.
It is no secret that Virginia is considerably blonder than she was born. She got sore at me once for some frivolity or other and dyed her hair a dazzling platinum. I can still remember when she turned up in Hawaii one morning with the new hair. A man named Don Beachcomber and I had been up most of the night before her arrival. We went early to the airport with some carnation and pikake leis to welcome the lady to Oahu. I hadn’t seen her in three months.
Pretty well overhung, Don and I watched the passengers disembark, and suddenly here was this woman with a face I knew but hair I couldn’t remember. A sudden thought struck me.
“Jesus Christ, Don,” I said to Beachcomber. “She’s brought her mother along with her.”
Virginia is a twin to her mother, except that Polly Webb’s hair is natural silver instead of bottled silver. That surprise hair-dye job was a lot of years ago, but Virginia had liked it and she was still platinum, even in the Tanganyikan bush. And to stay blonde when you are basically brunette takes work. It means a weekly anointing with some mysterious juju from a bottle.
Friday was hair day, and Juma would take great care to get his other chores done for the big event of the afternoon. There was usually a handful of locals from the nearest village around, waiting to watch the miracle of the ages. Friday was the day that Juma, using white man’s magic, turned the memsaab’s hair from black to white.
We had had a hard time explaining the nature of the trick. Harry consulted long with Virginia, and then mapped his lecture in Swahili.
“Look,” he said to Juma. “Memsaab’s hair is not really white. It is black. But Memsaab puts medsin on it to turn it from black to white every seventh day. You will take this stick with the cotton on it. You will put the medsin on Memsaab’s hair, as she directs you, being careful not to get any of the medsin on the ends.”
“Ndio, bwana,” Juma said, wondering at the madness of white people who keep the head and horns of animals and throw the meat away, who continually court death and disaster for fun, and whose women wish to look old and therefore change their hair from black to white. Nothing a white man ever does is surprising to the African unless he does something that the African expects him to do, creating surprise by concurrence.
So the old lady was keeping her ersatz hair white with Juma’
s medsin, and she had supervised the washing and ironing processes of her clothes and found it satisfactory, even if Kaluku and Gathiru, the personal boys, were a little over-brusque when they beat her underclothes on a rock and the hand-hewn, glowing-coal-filled iron was somewhat less gentle than an electric appliance. She had been back to check on old Ali’s kitchen, possibly expecting him to be serving us tarantula stew, and found the shriveled, gray old Swahili as clean as herself. In addition to which he knew a hell of a sight more about cooking, especially when you consider that he used a biscuit tin for a bake oven. The table service, supervised by Juma and implemented by Gathiru and Kaluku, was perfect.
Jinny got along very well with the blacks. When she sat alone in the hunting car with Chabani, the car boy, while Selby and I were off crawling after buffalo or some such nonsense, she and Chabani had long conversations in her sketchy Swahili and Chabani’s mission-school pidgin English. I recall she came in one day, highly indignant. Chabani had asked her age and she had told him the truth—that she was in her middle thirties.
“Then the Bwana M’Kubwa must be a very old man,” Chabani said with chill logic. “Else what would he want with such an old woman?”
The memsaab had shot a few things with the rifle—a topi bull for meat, which she shot capably, breaking his neck with the first bullet. She also came in from a photographic trip one day with a fine Thomson gazelle ram, which was only an eighth of an inch away from the world’s record. But she had tried her luck on zebra and had managed to shoot the lower jaw off a big stallion, necessitating some extra killing, and she got a little sick. She never cottoned to the rifle any more but concentrated on the shotgun. And after a bit she never hunted but half a day with Harry and me, preferring to sit around the camp in the afternoons, reading some of the detective junk we had brought, watching the baboons, listening to the birds, and occasionally picking up the little Sauer .16 to provide the odd francolin or guinea for the pot. She said she was happy enough just being away from telephones and New York cocktail parties.
We drank quite a lot, for outdoor types. We’d roll back to camp about 1 p.m. after a hard morning’s hunt, starved, thirsty, and dust-covered. The ginny bottle would be hanging, coolly beaded with sweat from the evaporation of the water bag. I was bartender, it always seemed.
“What’ll it be? Dr. Ruark’s nutritious, delicious, character-molding martini, or one of those gin-and-nonsense things that children drink?” Gin-and-nonsense was Gordon’s elixir of life mixed with Rose’s lime juice or orange squash. Harry and Virginia usually drank gin-and-nonsense. I am a martini man, myself. Over six weeks we used up forty-six bottles of gin and a little less than half a bottle of vermouth. I like martinis dry.
We drank, sitting in the comfortable camp chairs, with the mess tent cool and breezy and the river trees green and soothing for us to look at, and the fact that the martinis were warm in their plastic cups and that the bees dive-bombed the attractive nonsense drinks did not detract from the flavor or the effect. We drank a lot. Three apiece before lunch killed the whole bottle. But we never got tight. We never felt bad.
It is funny about booze. I have been drinking it constantly since my first tentative sampling of North Carolina corn liquor when I was fifteen. I love liquor. It has been a good and constant friend for over twenty years. I have never used the bottle to hide in from fear or frustration, and I’ve never been on a protracted bat. I just like its taste and the way it feels and the wondrous atmosphere of celebration, of relaxation, of pure festivity that it creates. Each drink in my book should be an adventure, neither a dull habit nor a screaming necessity. There is no point to coming in out of the snow after a long rough walking day after pheasant or deer, or coming in wet from a duck blind, or coming in hot and tired off the African plain unless there is a drink at the end to commemorate the homecoming.
But there are places I do not like to drink in. New York City is one. I do it, of course, but I am not happy with whisky. I feel bad the next day. It depresses me while it’s in me. New York people drink to stay sober, to kill boredom, to drown their nervous unrest and irritation at being forced to live in that steaming, sweating, raucous, stinking, overcrowded asphalt purgatory between farm and farm. I can drink two bottles of wine at lunch in Rome or Paris or Madrid, top it off with three brandies, and feel marvelous all day. A glass of wine at lunch, two glasses at dinner in New York would keep me in bed with the miseries for half a week. I have never had a hangover nor have been really drunk in a place I like. I have never felt an unpleasant impact from liquor when I was happy—drinking with friends in front of a fire, drinking at the end of a good day’s shooting or fishing, drinking to celebrate a new book or a raise in pay or the start or return of a trip.
Here by the little Grumeti River it was happy drinking. It was drinking with point. We were either applauding the beauty of the day or a good shot at a fine head or the prospect of lunch or the sheer wonder of being where we were, with more days to spend and a hope to return someday to spend more days just like the ones we were milking of their fullest potential at this time. Never in my life have I seen days of which I was so stingy with the hours. When I went to bed at night I felt beautifully tired and spent, but at the same time a tiny voice told me that this was another one marked off the calendar, that this one had subtracted another twenty-four hours from my sum.
We laughed and jabbered an awful lot in the pre-meal cocktail hour, retelling the morning’s events, talking without caution, without the guarded carefulness of the city man who does not want to commit himself or become accused of naïveté or spontaneity. We didn’t care what we said. There was no effort to be consciously amusing or brittle or ponderously wise. We jabbered as happily as our cousins in the swamps.
I never cared much for food before this; I had eaten to stoke my body with energy, not caring what it tasted like and hoping to get it done in a hurry. I have eaten alone a great deal, with a book or paper propped against a water tumbler, and people who eat alone hate food. I discovered food out here in the bush. I approached each meal with the reckless abandon of a small boy. What we ate was not tremendously varied. I can eat Tommy chops seven days a week with the same enthusiasm. I can eat cold guinea or cold grouse or cold spur fowl every day. I can eat sand-grouse stew or roast duck or broiled catfish with undiminishing appetite. I can also eat potatoes and tomatoes and spaghetti and beans and bread and butter and pickles and relish and mustard and House of Parliament condiment with no palling on my tongue. These things we ate, with tinned fruit and an occasional pie or pudding for dessert, and I found I was consuming five or six pounds of meat a day.
A normal lunch was the breasts of two guinea fowl, accompanied by more starch than I ever dreamed existed, and the whole thing washed down with a quart of beer. I couldn’t drink a quart of beer in a week in New York. Virginia ate comparably. Harry doubled me in consumption, and the blacks trumped Harry. We were burning up so much energy with 150 miles a day in Jessica, plus an average stroll of ten miles, that there just wasn’t enough meat to restoke the furnace. I’d have eaten a cold boiled hyena when somebody yelled for chacula and Juma came out with a covered dish in his lean black hand.
The nights were the best, of course. The nights were when you were really tired. Harry Selby is the kind of hunter who squeezes the last drop of effort from the final moments of shooting light, and it was always seven or better when we started back to camp. You could pick up the pinpoint gleam of the boys’ cooking fires a half mile away from camp and see the big blaze of the bwana’s fire in front of the mess tent. You could see the hot light of the pressure lamp that Juma would have hung from the ridgepole of the mess tent, and if Virginia hadn’t hunted with us in the afternoon you would know she would be waiting and curious and satisfactorily questioning, with her first evening drink already in her hand. She would be bathi-ed and robed by now, with her pajama pants tucked down into her mosquito boots, and she would mix us one of Dr. Ruark’s et ceteras automatically while we commiserated o
r bragged. We would have flung ourselves out of the jeep, filthy, weary, bone-sore from the jouncing and pounding that Jessica gave us, grasping for the drink and hurling ourselves into the camp chairs drawn up along the festive fire’s rim.
People who are clean all the time and who take two showers a day are apt to forget the tremendous adventure of removing a couple pounds of topsoil from the body at the end of a man-killing day. By the time the first drink of the evening was done, one of the personal boys would be scurrying into the tent with a couple of five-gallon petrol tins full of hot water to pour into the canvas tub that always seemed to be placed just over a thornbush. It was not the cleanest water in the world, and sometimes it was full of sticks, small fish, and other debris, but it washed off the alkali dust and it ironed the kinks out of knotted muscles and soothed the tsetse bites on the wrists and ankles. It took the powdered soil out of your whiskers and your hair and from between your teeth.
And it made the sight of clean flannel pajamas and fresh boots and a woolly camel’s-hair bathrobe a beautiful thing. It made the beckon of the other drink, accepted leisurely now by the fire in a cold that was beginning to be bitter enough to stop the mosquitoes and discourage the flies, bitter enough to command at least two thick blankets on the cot, bitter enough to spur an appetite that was already going at full gallop inside you. Your breath was white against it, and the stars had a North Woods twinkle to them.
Along about nine Gathiru and Kaluku would bring the mess table outside the mess tent, place it close against the fire, and start the evening meal with a smoking tureen of soup, liberated from a can or perhaps made mysteriously from sand grouse or the odds and ends of eland joints or the tougher sections of Tommy and impala. It scorched going down and tingled clean to your toes. Where the luncheon was nearly always cold, everything that came out of Ali’s biscuit-tin oven at night was white-hot. And when it was over and the coffee served with a bite of brandy in it, we stretched out our feet to the fire, smoked lazily, and listened to the concert.