A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  He was the largest lion I’d ever seen. He weighed 650 or more pounds, and his mane was so thick that I knew at once that he had not been in the bush for long. He looked as if he had been bred for the purpose of eating me. He also looked as if he had not eaten lately; his ribs were getting close to the outside air.

  I’m not often amazed, but this was one of the times. In my seventy-nine years, I’ve fought at most twelve lions, considerably less than my biographer records. Usually, a male lion is as eager to avoid a battle as I am. But I have killed them with only a knife, as my biographer records, though there have never been any of the face-to-face encounters shown in those very bad and lying movies. If I got into the situations those actors did, my bowels would have been scooped out or my back muscles plucked out or my head bitten off.

  I crouched, waiting for the lion with my knife in my hand. The next thing that happened told me that the hitting of my rifle had been no lucky shot.

  The knife was jerked out of my hand. Like a bright bird, it flew up and away. I heard the distant report of the rifle before the knife struck the ground.

  My moment of shock almost cost me my life. The lion launched himself towards me on the final bound. I got to one side just in time; a paw flashed by, brushing the skin of my chest.

  Getting onto the lion’s back when he is in full charge requires very swift and unhesitating movements. If the slightest thing goes wrong—slipping a little, estimating the trajectory and speed of the final leap by too little or too much—it’s over for the man. I had jumped to one side while he was still on the downcurve of the arc of his leap and stomped one foot and was bounced back in again and had grabbed the mane with my left hand. A savage yank pulled me along with the beast and also up into the air. Usually, I had to use one hand because my knife was in the other, but this time I had both free. And so I had a better hold and was on its back even more quickly than usual.

  He reared up and then fell to one side. I went with him but twisted to keep from being crushed. Up he came again. I had my arms under his front legs, and when he rose I had my hands around the back of his neck and locked together.

  His roaring had been loud. Now, from somewhere in that cavernous body, he got the force to double the noise. He rolled again—making me feel as if I were being spread out like a turtle under an elephant’s hoof—but I managed to keep my legs locked around his belly. His hind feet moved up to tear my legs, but he could not get them under me or even touch my legs.

  Then, as we lay in the dirt, slowly, slowly, his bones creaking, his head went down under the pressure of my arms. I realize that this is difficult to believe. A lion has truly enormous strength in those massive neck muscles. But I am not as other men, in degree or kind. Not in many things, anyway, and this was not the first time I had broken a big cat’s neck with a full-Nelson, though the other had not been as huge as this one.

  It was not easy. For a long time, the lion, growling much more softly now, resisted my utmost efforts, and his neck refused to bend any more. But the time came when the bones creaked again like a wooden ship in a heavy sea. My head was buried in the mane as I sweated and strove. The hairs stuck in my face like little spears. The green-yellow lion odor was strong, and, beneath it, was the stench of awareness of death. Not fear of death, awareness of its inevitability. The end had come for him, and he knew it. Everybody born in Africa—antelope, lion, black man, Arab, Berber—knows when the time has come. The awareness is a legacy from this ancient land, the birthplace of mankind and of many many species of beast. Mother Africa lets her child know when he is about ready to fertilize her soil with the body she gave him. Everybody knows this except the descendants of Europeans—myself excepted.

  As I felt the neck muscles weaken with this awareness, and my arm muscles gain in strength for the same reason, I became conscious of an approaching orgasm. I don’t know when my penis had swelled and my testicles gathered themselves for the explosion. But my penis was jammed between the lion’s back and my belly, and it was throbbing and beginning to jerk.

  At that moment, the lion’s neck gave way. As the muscles loosened, and the bones broke, I spurted, sliming the fur and my belly.

  The lion moaned with a final outgoing of air, kicked, and himself spurted. I rose, unsteadily, after dragging my leg out from under him. I scooped up some of the lion sperm in the dust and swallowed it. This was a custom of The Folk, one which my biographer avoided describing. It is supposed to bestow the potency of the male lion upon the eater. I believe it does; no amount of European education has convinced me otherwise. Besides, I like the heavy big-feline taste and odor of it. It is, more than almost anything, African in its essence. There is everything in it. Let him who would envision the soul of this ancient continent, eat lion sperm.

  Always, after making a kill of a beast of prey, I stand with one foot on the carcass and give a great yell of triumph. This, too, I learned from The Folk. But this time, the orgasm and the knowledge that I was a target for a sharpshooter, chopped off that cry.

  8

  Although the knife bore the dent of the bullet near the hilt and also had been twisted by the impact, it was still serviceable. Moreover, I would not have thrown it away if it had been useless. Though I am not sentimental, I could not bear to get rid of it. It had been my real father’s in England, and he had given it to my uncle before he became mad. My first sight of the knife was my first knowledge of metal. And it had served me for 70 years and killed 10 times that number of prey and enemies.

  I put it in the sheath and looked towards the hills. The sun flashed now and then. The reflection of binoculars or cameras, possibly. Or of a telescope.

  A puff of dirt struck immediately in front of me as I stopped to pick up the rifle; the sound of the shot came about a second later. The shooter was approximately 1125 feet away. The second bullet struck a few inches to my left; the third, to my right. The fourth went between my legs. I was being told to run away onto the savanna and leave the rifle behind.

  Instead, I cut the lion open and removed a piece of his heart and chewed on it. Four more shots, very close, enabled me to discern the exact location of the rifle. I also saw four men through the bush on the hill.

  I left at a slow walk. I abandoned my rifle because its barrel had been bent by the bullet. I was angry because of the ease with which the rifleman was herding me and the contempt I felt he had for me. If he thought I was really dangerous, he would have killed me with his first shot. His actions seemed to say: Try your best, my dear Lord Grandrith. It won’t be nearly good enough.

  When I had walked a quarter of a mile, the shots ceased. From time to time, as I strode to the west, I looked back. Two miles away, a cloud of dust followed. When I stopped to bathe in a waterhole, the dust settled. I caught and ate several almost mouse-sized grasshoppers which inhabit this region. I threw a stone at a kingfisher but missed it by a wing’s length. There are many kingfishers in this region, where there is little water except during the rainy season. But the kingfishers have abandoned an aquatic diet; they have adapted to catching grasshoppers and other insects.

  When night came, I backtracked. Twenty minutes later, I had found the camp of the sharpshooter. It was on the flat top of a small hill in a clearing around which was an unusual growth of bush and number of trees. A depression beside it held some water, which accounted for the dense growth. In the clearing were two large trucks, one of which carried a very large camper, and two jeeps. Three tents were pitched; two fires had been built. Some blacks were cooking over one fire, and coffee was boiling over both. There were six blacks and two white men in sight. Then I saw a white man move behind the half-opened flap of a tent. The weak light from the lamp within gleamed on a bronze back for a moment.

  I had smelled the coffee a long way off and had been salivating. I love coffee. If these people had not been shooting at me that afternoon, I would have been tempted to join them.

  I moved around until I could get a better view of the man inside the tent. I still
could not see much of him, but I got the impression of a very large and very solid man. He seemed to be doing some peculiar exercises. I caught glimpses of bronzed biceps, bunching and smoothing over and over again. The muscles looked like mongooses slipping back and forth in a wild play under a blanket woven of bronze wires. I know that that is a rather fanciful description, but that is what occurred to me.

  The other two whites, old men, sat on folding chairs with their backs to me. The smaller was thin, quick-moving, wary as a bird, and had a face sharp as the neck of a broken-off bottle. He was dressed as if he had just stepped out of the most expensive safari outfitter’s store in Nairobi. As he talked, he gestured frequently with a silver-headed black cane.

  The other old man was so wide and had such abnormally long arms, thick neck, simian features, and low forehead, and his arms were so hairy, he could almost have passed for one of The Folk.

  The blacks had talked among themselves in Swahili, so I knew the names of all three whites. The man in the tent was a Doctor Caliban. The dapper old man was a Mr Rivers. The apish old man was a Mr Simmons. All three were from Manhattan Island.

  I suspected that the old men were talking so loudly because they hoped to entice an evesdropper—me, of course—to come closer. I found the trip wire which would have set off some kind of alarm and got over that without disturbing it. I also detected the two rocks, made of papier-mâché, which held electronic eye devices inside them. I had come close to wriggling between them, because that was the natural route to a depression in the ground behind a bush, an excellent place to hide while listening. Only because I happened to rub up against the false stone did I discover what it was.

  I became even more cautious then. And I noticed that the flap of the tent in which Doctor Caliban had been exercising was now closed. For all I knew, he might be slipping out the rear of the tent to catch a spy.

  If the two old men were part of a trap, they, certainly took no care to keep silent on matters that an enemy should not know. And they talked about Caliban as if he were deaf.

  I crawled around to one side where I could see their lips. This was not as informative as listening, because I missed words now and then, but it was safer.

  “. . . really know what’s got into Doc?” the dapper Rivers said. “Something sure as shit is wrong.”

  “Looks as if he’s gone ape,” Simmons said.

  Rivers laughed and spoke so loudly I could hear him. “Ape! Ape? You old Neanderthal, you’re throwing stones at a glass house!”

  “Listen, you sick legal eagle, you,” Simmons said, “this is no time or place for your tired old bullshit. This is serious, I’m telling you. Doc has a screw loose somewhere. I think it’s the elixir; it has to be. The side effects are finally coming through. I warned him years ago, when he offered it to us. I ain’t one of the world’s greatest chemists for nothing.”

  I had been intrigued before. Now I was caught, a crocodile on a hook. Elixir!

  “You really think he’s crazy? After all these years of doing good, combating evil, fixing up all those criminals we caught, and reforming them?” Rivers said.

  The apish old man said, “That’s another thing . . .”

  I missed what he said next, then his cigar left his lips. “. . . operated on them, he said. Cut out the gland that made them evil, he said at first. Then later on he quit talking about that gland, because there ain’t no such thing, and he started to talk about re-routing and short-circuiting neural circuits. Now, I ask you, do you really believe that shit? It was all right in the old days, because we didn’t know much about the causes of crime then. But it’s different now. We know it’s caused mainly by psychosocioeconomic environments.”

  “Do we?” Rivers said. “What really do we know now more than we knew then, besides some things in the physical sciences and a little progress in the biological?”

  “O.K., so they ain’t as smart nowadays as they like to think they are,” Simmons said. “But in the ’30’s, we could believe anything Doc told us because he told us it was so. But did you ever see him operate on a criminal? Not that I doubt he did something to them, handy as he is with a knife. But this crap about curing criminals with surgery . . . know as well as I do that a criminal is the product of genetic predisposition plus environment.”

  “Doc isn’t the man we knew, that’s for sure,” Rivers said. “I don’t know. It’s like seeing Lucifer fall. Well, that’s stretching it. Doc’s no evil angel, but . . . if you want to get right down to the honest-to-God-call-it-shit-not-peanut-butter-reality, Doc may be right about the causes and cure of criminals.”

  Simmons looked as if he were grunting. He said, “Maybe. And maybe Doc was getting his kicks . . . well, I shouldn’t say that, wouldn’t, if it wasn’t for his funny behavior now. You gotta admit he’s been acting kinda peculiar lately. Now, I ain’t saying he’s become a Doctor Jekyll-Mr Hyde . . . but . . .”

  They were silent for a while. Simmons puffed on his cigar. Rivers lit a long cigarette in a long cigarette holder. After a while, Simmons pulled some rectangles—photographs, I presumed—from the pocket of his bush jacket. He held them up so that the firelight illuminated them.

  He said, “Looka the whang on that wild man! Did you ever see such a prick on a white man?”

  Rivers took one of the photos and studied it. “My tool is longer,” he said. “Used to be, anyway. Eight inches. But it’s skinny. I never saw such a shaft on a man except once.”

  “The son of a bitch is queer,” Simmons said. “I was looking through the glasses when he got up after breaking that lion’s neck. He had a hard-on you wouldn’t believe outside a zoo. And he was coming like a Texas oil well.”

  “Yes, I know,” Rivers said. “My choppers about dropped out. I saw Doc once, just once, and he’s the only man I ever saw, black or white, with a dong as big as that Englishman’s. In fact, I’ll swear his was even thicker and longer.”

  “You saw Doc’s cock?” Simmons said. “When the hell was that?”

  “. . . adventure of the Tsar of . . .” Rivers said. “You remember, Doc and I’d been a long time hiding . . . had to piss . . . my eyes about flew the coop, believe me.”

  Simmons looked around uneasily. “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking like this. Doc might . . .”

  “You think he hasn’t heard us a million times before? He knows how curious we’ve been. Personally, I think he’s been listening to us for years. But what we said never seemed to bother him. You know what a button-down lip he’s got. And he’s the most self-controlled man in the world; he couldn’t admit that anything we said would stick in his craw. And maybe it doesn’t. He knows he’s the superman’s superman!”

  “After what I seen today, I ain’t so sure,” Simmons said. “I’ve never seen anything like it! But I can understand now why Doc is so hot to tangle with him. He wants to test his mettle on somebody who looks as if he could give him a hard time!”

  The little man said, as if he hadn’t heard Simmons, “You know, I used to put it out of my mind, or tell myself that Doc was just keeping his private life entirely to himself. But he never lied to us, as far as I know. And he always said he led too dangerous a life and was too busy and always off on some quest or other. He couldn’t afford to get married; it made him too vulnerable. That’s understandable. But he went further. He said he didn’t want to get involved with any woman because it wouldn’t be fair to waste her time. That’s understandable. But then he claimed he had nothing at all to do with women. Nothing at all! Now, didn’t you ever think that was peculiar? No ass at all! No pussy, no nothing, for God’s sakes!”

  “Well,” Simmons said, “he coulda been jerking off. But it just doesn’t seem like Doc to be doing that. I always thought maybe he wasn’t so perfect, after all. You know, maybe he was paying for his mental and physical superiority to the rest of us—to every fucking man in the world—by not being able to get a hard-on. Could be. Jesus Christ! There has to be some sort of compensation in this world!”

>   “There does?” Rivers said. “Who told you that, you shoddy imitation of a philosophizing orangutan!”

  “One a these days, I’ll orangutan it all the way up your decrepit asshole,” Simmons said.

  “No, you won’t. I don’t allow anything but high-quality shit up there,” Rivers said.

  They talked for a moment with their hands over their mouths as they held their smokes in their mouths. Then I saw Rivers’ lips.

  “You know, Doc and . . . as if they were brothers . . . coloring . . . black hair and gray eyes and a darker skin, but Doc has . . .”

  They talked on, rambling much. I got the impression that these two octogenarians had known each other intimately for a long long time. They had been through much with each other, and they were very fond of each other. The abuses and insults they loosed at each other were good-natured, indeed, their second natures. And as I listened—read, rather—I understood that they were here on The Last Great Adventure. There had been three other men who had shared their exploits and dangers in the past. But these were dead now. The two old men expected to die soon, but they had insisted on coming to Africa with Caliban, and he had reluctantly agreed.

  Now, they were sorry they had come. Or, at least, disturbed. Something had happened to the good doctor. He was here to hunt me down and to kill me. Not with guns. In bare-hand combat. This was not at all like Doc. He had always been averse to killing. He had only done so when he absolutely had to. And he had maintained that every man, no matter how evil, was worth saving.

  Something had changed his mind. They knew what it was, but so far they had not named it. They referred to it circuitously.

  Doc Caliban had told them that I was an abysmally evil man who should be obliterated. The two were not convinced. From what they had learned about me from other sources, they did not think I could be the monster that Doc described. Yet, all their adult lives, they had trusted Doc. They had regarded him as an oracle, as the fount of wisdom, as a doer of great good.