True at First Light

by Ernest Hemingway

  “Hapana,” he said. This was the absolute negative.

  Keiti was standing by the cooking fire now with his slashed flat doubting smile. He had wound his turban in the dark and there was an end that should have been tucked in. His eyes were doubting too. There was nothing of the feeling of a serious lion hunt.

  “Hapana simba kubwa sana,” Keiti said to me, his eyes mocking but apologetic and absolutely confident. He knew it was not the big lion that we had heard so many times. “Nanyake,” he said to make an early morning joke. This meant, in Kamba, a lion old enough to be a warrior and marry and have children but not old enough to drink beer. His saying it and making the joke in Kamba was a sign of friendliness, made at daylight when friendliness has a low boiling point, to show, gently, that he knew I was trying to learn Kamba with the non-Moslem and alleged bad element and that he approved or tolerated.

  I had functioned on this lion business almost as long as I could remember anything that had happened. In Africa you could remember around a month at a time if the pace was fast. The pace had been almost excessive and there had been the allegedly criminal lions of Salengai, the lions of Magadi, the lions of here, against whom allegations had now been repeated four times and this new intruding lion who had, as yet, no fiche nor dossier. This was a lion who had coughed a few times and gone about hunting the game that he was entitled to. But it was necessary to prove that to Miss Mary and to prove that he was not the lion she had hunted for so long who was charged with many offenses and whose huge pug marks, the left hind one scarred, we had followed so many times only finally to see him going away into tall grass that led to the heavy timber of the swamp or to the thick bush of the gerenuk country up by the old Manyatta on the way to the Chulu hills. He was so dark with his heavy black mane he looked almost black and he had a huge head that swung low when he moved off into country where it was impossible for Mary to follow him. He had been hunted for many years and he was very definitely not a picture lion.

  Now I was dressed drinking tea in the early morning light by the built-up fire and waiting for Ngui. I saw him coming across the field with the spear on his shoulder stepping out smartly through the grass still wet with dew. He saw me and came toward the fire leaving a trail behind him through the wet grass.

  “Simba dumi kidogo,” he said, telling me he was a small male lion. “Nanyake,” he said, making the same joke Keiti had made. “Hapana mzuri for Memsahib.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll let Memsahib sleep.”

  “Mzuri,” he said and went off to the cooking fire.

  Arap Meina would be in with the report on the big black-maned lion who had been reported by the Masai from a Manyatta up in the Western Hills to have killed two cows and dragged one away with him. The Masai had suffered under him for a long time. He traveled restlessly and he did not return to his kills as a lion would be expected to. Arap Meina had the theory that this lion had once returned and fed on a kill that had been poisoned by a former Game Ranger and that he had been made terribly sick by it and had learned, or decided, never to return to a kill. That would account for his moving about so much, but not for the haphazard way he visited the various Masai villages or Manyattas. Now the plain, the salt licks and the bush country were heavy with game since the good grass had come with the violent spot rains of November and Arap Meina, Ngui and I all expected the big lion to leave the hills and come down to the plain where he could hunt out of the edge of the swamp. This was his customary way of hunting in this district.

  The Masai can be very sarcastic and their cattle are not only their wealth but something much more to them and the Informer had told me that one chief had spoken very badly about the fact that I had two chances to kill this lion and instead had waited to let a woman do it. I had sent word to the chief that if his young men were not women who spent all their time in Laitokitok drinking Golden Jeep sherry he would have no need to ask for me to kill his lion but that I would see he was killed the next time he came into the area where we were. If he cared to bring his young men I would take a spear with them and we would kill him that way. I asked him to come into camp and we would talk it over.

  He had turned up at camp one morning with three other elders and I had sent for the Informer to interpret. We had a good talk. The chief explained that the Informer had misquoted him. Bwana Game, G.C., had always killed the lions that it was necessary to kill and was a very brave and skillful man and they had great confidence in him and affection for him. He remembered too that when we had been here last in the time of the dryness Bwana Game had killed a lion and Bwana Game and I had killed a lioness with the young men. This lioness had done much damage.

  I answered that these facts were known and that it was the duty of Bwana Game, and for this time myself, to kill any lions that molested cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats or people. This we would always do. It was necessary for the religion of the Memsahib that she kill this particular lion before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus. We came from a far country and were of a tribe of that country and this was necessary. They would be shown the skin of this lion before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus.

  As always I was a little appalled by my oratory after it was over and had the usual sinking feeling about commitments made. Miss Mary must, I thought, belong to a fairly warlike tribe if she, a woman, had to kill a longtime marauding lion before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus. But at least I had not said she had to do it every year. Keiti took the Birthday of the Baby Jesus very seriously since he had been on so many safaris with churchgoing and even devout Bwanas. Most of these Bwanas since they were paying so much for their safari and since the time was short did not let the Birthday interfere with their shooting. But there was always a special dinner with wine and, if possible, champagne, and it was always a special occasion. This year it was even more special since we were in a permanent camp and with Miss Mary taking it so seriously and it being so obviously such an important part of her religion and attended by so many ceremonials, especially that of the tree, that Keiti, loving order and ceremony, gave it a great importance. The ceremony of the tree appealed to him since in his old religion, before he had become a Moslem, a grove of trees had been of the highest importance.

  The rougher pagan element of the camp thought that Miss Mary’s tribal religion was one of the sterner branches of religion since it involved the slaying of a gerenuk under impossible conditions, the slaughter of a bad lion and the worship of a tree which fortunately Miss Mary did not know produced the concoction which excited and maddened the Masai for war and lion hunting. I am not sure that Keiti knew this was one of the properties of the particular Christmas tree that Miss Mary had selected but about five of us knew it and it was a very carefully kept secret.

  They did not believe that the lion was a part of Miss Mary’s Christmas duty because they had been with her while she had sought a big lion now for several months. But Ngui had put forth a theory that perhaps Miss Mary had to kill a large black-maned lion in the year sometime before Christmas and being too short to see in the high grass she had started early. She had started in September to kill the lion before the end of the year or whenever the Birthday of the Baby Jesus was. Ngui was not sure. But it came before that other great holiday the Birth of the Year which was a payday.

  Charo did not believe any of this because he had seen too many Memsahibs shoot too many lions. But he was unsteadied because nobody helped Miss Mary. He had seen me help Miss Pauline years before and he was puzzled by the whole thing. He had been very fond of Miss Pauline but nothing to what he felt for Miss Mary, who was obviously a wife from another tribe. Her tribal scars showed it. They were very fine delicately cut scars across one cheek and horizontal light traces of cuts on the forehead. They were the work of the best plastic surgeon in Cuba after a motor car accident and nobody could see them who did not know how to look for almost invisible tribal scars as Ngui did.

  Ngui had asked me one day very brusquely if Miss Mary was from the same tribe that I came from.
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  “No,” I said. “She is from a Northern Frontier tribe in our country. From Minnesota.”

  “We have seen the tribal marks.”

  Then afterwards one time when we were talking tribes and religion he asked me if we were going to brew and drink the Baby Jesus birthday tree. I told him I did not think so and he said, “Mzuri.”

  “Why?”

  “Gin for you. Beer for us. Nobody thinks Miss Mary should drink it unless her religion requires it.”

  “I know if she kills the lion she will not have to drink it.”

  “Mzuri,” he said. “Mzuri sana.”

  Now on this morning I was waiting for Miss Mary to wake up of her own accord so she would be rested and have a good backlog of normal sleep behind her. I was not worried about the lion but I thought of him quite a lot and always in connection with Miss Mary.

  There is as much difference between a wild lion and a marauding lion and the type of lion tourists take pictures of in the National Parks as there is between the old grizzly that will follow your trap line and ruin it and tear the roofs off your cabins and eat the supplies and yet never be seen and the bears that come up alongside the road to be photographed in Yellowstone Park. True, the bears in the park injure people every year and if the tourists do not stay in their cars they will get in trouble. They even get in trouble in their cars sometimes and some bears get bad and have to be destroyed.

  Picture lions that are accustomed to being fed and photographed sometimes wander away from the area where they are protected and having learned not to fear human beings are easily killed by alleged sportsmen and their wives always, of course, backed up by a professional hunter. But our problem was not to criticize how other people had killed lions or would kill lions but to find and have Miss Mary find and kill an intelligent, destructive and much hunted lion in a way that had been defined if not by our religion by certain ethical standards. Miss Mary had hunted by these standards for a long time now. They were very severe standards and Charo, who loved Miss Mary, was impatient of them. He had been mauled twice by leopards when things had gone wrong and he thought I was holding Mary to a standard of ethics which was too rigid and slightly murderous. But I had not invented them. I had learned them from Pop and Pop, on his last lion hunt and taking out his last safari, wanted things to be as they were in the old days before the hunting of dangerous game had been corrupted and made easy by what he always called “these bloody cars.”

  This lion had beaten us twice and both times I had easy chances at him which I had not taken because he was Mary’s. The last time Pop had made a mistake because he was so anxious for Mary to get the lion before he had to leave us that he made an error, as anyone can who is trying too hard.

  Afterwards we had sat by the fire in the evening, Pop smoking his pipe while Mary wrote in her diary where she put in all the things she did not wish to say to us and her heartaches and disappointments and her new knowledge that she did not wish to parade in conversation and her triumphs that she did not wish to tarnish by talking of them. She was writing by the gaslight in the dining tent and Pop and I were sitting by the fire in our pajamas, dressing gowns and mosquito boots.

  “He’s a damned smart lion,” Pop said. “We should have had him today if Mary had been a little taller. But it was my fault.”

  We avoided talking of the error which we both knew about.

  “Mary will get him. But keep this in mind. I don’t think he’s too brave, mind you. He’s too smart. But when he’s hit he’ll be brave enough when the time comes. Don’t you let the time come.”

  “I’m shooting all right now.”

  Pop ignored that. He was thinking. Then he said, “Better than all right, actually. Don’t get overconfident but stay as confident as you are. He’ll make a mistake and you’ll get him. If only some lioness would come into heat. Then he’d be money from home. But they’re about ready to pup now.”

  “What sort of a mistake will he make?”

  “Oh, he’ll make one. You’ll know. I wish I didn’t have to go before Mary gets him. Take really good care of her. See she gets some sleep. She’s been at this now for a long time. Rest her and rest the damn lion. Don’t hunt him too hard. Let him get some confidence.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Keep her shooting the meat and get her confident if you can.”

  “I thought of having her stalk until fifty yards and then maybe to twenty.”

  “Might work,” said Pop. “We’ve tried everything else.”

  “I think it will work. Then she can take them longer.”

  “She makes the damnedest shots,” Pop said. “Then for two days who knows where it’s going?”

  “I think I have it figured out.”

  “So did I. But don’t take her to any twenty yards on lion.”

  It was more than twenty years before that Pop and I had first sat together by a fire or the ashes of a fire and talked about the theory and practice of shooting dangerous game. He disliked and distrusted the target range or woodchuck hunter type.

  “Hit a golf ball off the caddy’s head at a mile,” he said. “Wooden or steel caddy of course. Not a live caddy. Never miss until they have to shoot a really great kudu at twenty yards. Then couldn’t hit the mountainside. Bloody gun waving around the great shooter shaking until I was shaking myself.” He drew on his pipe. “Never trust any man until you’ve seen him shoot at something dangerous or that he wants really badly at fifty yards or under. Never buy him until you’ve seen him shoot at twenty. The short distance uncovers what’s inside of them. The worthless ones will always miss or gut shoot at the range we get to so we can’t miss.”

  I was thinking about this and happily about the old days and how fine this whole trip had been and how awful it would be if Pop and I would never be out together again when Arap Meina came up to the fire and saluted. He always saluted very solemnly but his smile started to come out as his hand came down.

  “Good morning, Meina,” I said.

  “Jambo, Bwana. The big lion killed as they said at the Manyatta. He dragged the cow a long way into thick brush. He did not return to the kill after he had eaten but went in the direction of the swamp for water.”

  “The lion with the scarred paw?”

  “Yes, Bwana. He should come down now.”

  “Good. Is there other news?”

  “They say that the Mau Mau who were imprisoned at Machakos have broken out of jail and are coming this way.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Who says?”

  “A Masai I met on the road. He had ridden in the lorry of a Hindu trader. He did not know which duka.”

  “Get something to eat. I will need to speak to you later.”

  “Ndio, Bwana,” he said and saluted. His rifle shone in the morning sunlight. He had changed to a fresh uniform at the Shamba and he looked very smart and he looked very pleased. He had two happy pieces of news. He was a hunter and now we would have hunting.

  I thought I better go over to the tent and see if Miss Mary was awake. If she was still sleeping, all the better.

  Miss Mary was awake but not all the way awake. If she had left a definite call to be wakened at a half past four or five she woke fast and efficiently and impatient with all delay. But this morning she woke slowly.

  “What’s the matter,” she asked sleepily. “Why didn’t anybody call me? The sun’s up. What’s the matter?”

  “It wasn’t the big lion, honey. So I let you sleep.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t the big lion?”

  “Ngui checked.”

  “What about the big lion?”

  “He isn’t down yet.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Arap Meina came in.”

  “Are you going out to check on the buff?”

  “No. I’m going to leave everything alone. We’ve got a little trouble of some sort.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “No, honey.
You sleep some more.”

  “I think I will for a little while if you don’t need me. I’ve been having the most wonderful dreams.”

  “See if you can get back into them. You call for chakula when you’re ready.”

  “I’ll sleep just a little more,” she said. “They’re really wonderful dreams.”

  I reached under my blanket and found my pistol on the belt with the sling strap hanging from the holster. I washed in the bowl, rinsed my eyes with boric acid solution, combed my hair with a towel, it was now clipped so short that neither brush nor comb were needed, and dressed and shoved my right foot through the leg strap on the pistol, pulled it up and buckled the pistol belt. In the old days we never carried pistols but now you put the pistol on as naturally as you buttoned the flap of your trousers. I carried two extra clips in a small plastic bag in the right-hand pocket of my bush jacket and carried the extra ammunition in a screw top, wide-mouth medicine bottle which had held liver capsules. This bottle had held fifty red-and-white capsules and now held sixty-five rounds of hollow points. Ngui carried one and I another.

  Everyone loved the pistol because it could hit guinea fowl, lesser bustard, jackals, which carried rabies, and it could kill hyenas. Ngui and Mthuka loved it because it would make little sharp barks like a dog yapping and puffs of dust would appear ahead of the squat-running hyena then there would be the plunk, plunk, plunk, and the hyena would slow his gallop and start to circle. Ngui would hand me a full clip he had taken from my pocket and I would shove it in and then there would be another dust puff, then a plunk, plunk, and the hyena would roll over with his legs in the air.

  I walked out to the lines to speak to Keiti about the developments. I asked him to come where we could speak alone and he stood at ease looking old and wise and cynical and partly doubting and partly amused.

  “I do not believe they would come here,” he said. “They are Wakamba Mau Mau. They are not so stupid. They will hear that we are here.”

  “My only problem is if they come here. If they come here where will they go?”