True at First Light

by Ernest Hemingway

  “He wants you to show off,” she said. “Show off, Papa. Please show off.”

  “OK,” I said. “One more to show off.”

  I reached for the Jinny flask and Ngui shook his head. “Hapana,” he said. “Mzuri.”

  Ahead, in the next glade, two Tommy rams were feeding. They both had good heads, exceptionally long and symmetrical and their tails were switching as they fed quickly and eagerly. Mthuka nodded that he had seen them and turned the car so that when he stopped it my approach would be covered. I ejected two shells from the Springfield and put in two solids, lowered the bolt and got down and started to walk toward the heavy clump of bush as though I took no interest in it. I did not stoop over because the bush was sufficient cover and I had come to the conclusion that in stalking, when there was much game around, it was better to walk upright and in a disinterested way. Otherwise, you risked alarming other animals that could see you and they might alarm the animal you were after. Remembering that Miss Mary had asked me to show off I raised my left hand carefully and slapped it against the side of my neck. This was calling the location of the shot I would try for and anything else was worthless. No one can call their shot that way on a small animal like a Tommy when he may run. But if I should hit him there it was good for morale and if it did not, it was an obvious impossibility.

  It was pleasant walking through the grass with the white flowers in it and I slouched along with the rifle held behind me close to my right leg, the muzzle pointing down. As I walked forward I did not think about anything at all except that it was a lovely early evening and that I was lucky to be in Africa. Now I was at the far right edge of the clump and I should have crouched and crawled but there was too much grass and too many flowers and I wore glasses and I was too old to crawl. So I pulled the bolt back, holding my finger on the trigger so there was no snick, took my finger off the trigger and lowered it into place silently, checked the aperture in the rear sight and then stepped out past the right end of the clump.

  The two Tommy rams broke into full speed as I raised the rifle. The furthest one had his head turned toward me as I came out. They dug in with their small hooves into a bounding gallop. I picked up the second one in the sights, lowered my weight onto my left front foot, held with him and passed him smoothly with the sights and squeezed when the rifle had gone ahead of him. There was the report of the rifle, the dry whunck, and as I shucked in the second shell I could see his four legs stiff in the air and his white belly and then the legs lowered slowly. I walked out to him, hoping I had not shot him in the behind and raked him or given him the high spinal by mistake or hit him in the head and I heard the car coming. Charo dropped out from it with his knife out and ran to the Tommy and then stood there.

  I came up and said, “Halal.”

  “Hapana,” Charo said and touched the poor dead eyes with the point of his knife.

  “Halal anyway.”

  “Hapana,” Charo said. I had never seen him cry and he was very close to it. This was a religious crisis and he was an old and devout man.

  “OK,” I said. “Stick him, Ngui.”

  Everybody had been very quiet on account of Charo. He went back to the hunting car and there were only us unbelievers. Mthuka shook hands with me and bit his lips. He was thinking of his father being deprived of the Tommy meat. Ngui was laughing but trying not to show it. Pop’s gun bearer that he had left with us had a face like a round, very brown elf. He put his hand up to his head in sorrow. Then slapped his neck. The porter looked on happy, cheerful and stupid and happy to be out with hunters.

  “Where did you hit him?” Mary asked.

  “In the neck, I’m afraid.”

  Ngui showed her the hole and he and Mthuka and the porter picked the ram up and swung him into the back of the car.

  “It’s a little too much like witchcraft,” Mary said. “When I said to show off I didn’t mean that far off.”

  We came into camp, pulling around carefully to drop off Miss Mary and raise no dust.

  “It was a lovely afternoon,” she said. “Thank you, everybody, so much.”

  She went toward her tent where Mwindi would have the hot bathwater ready to pour into the canvas tub and I was happy that she was happy about her shot and I was sure, aided by the Jinny flask, that we would work out all the problems and the hell with a small variation of fourteen inches vertical at twenty-five yards on a lion. Sure the hell with that. The car drove out, gently, to the grounds where we butchered and skinned out. Keiti came out with the others following and I got down and said, “Memsahib shot a wildebeest beautifully.”

  “Mzuri,” Keiti said.

  We left the lights of the car on for the game to be dressed out. Ngui had my best knife out and was joining the skinner, who had started work and who was squatting by the wildebeest.

  I went over and tapped Ngui on the shoulder and drew him out of the light. He was intent at the butchering but he understood and came fast out of the light.

  “Take a good big cut high on the back for the Shamba,” I said. I marked it with my finger on his own back.

  “Ndio,” he said.

  “Wrap it in a part of the belly when the belly is clean.”

  “Good.”

  “Give them a good piece of ordinary meat.”

  “Ndio.”

  I wanted to give away more meat but I knew it was not right to do so and I covered my conscience with the fact that it was necessary for the next two days’ operations and remembering this I said to Ngui, “Put in plenty of stew meat too for the Shamba.”

  Then I walked away from the lights of the car to the tree just beyond the light of the cooking fire to where the Widow, her little boy and Debba were waiting. They wore their bright, now faded, dresses and they leaned against the tree. The little boy came out and bumped his head hard against my belly and I kissed the top of his head.

  “How are you, Widow?” I asked. She shook her head.

  “Jambo, tu,” I said to Debba. I kissed her on the top of the head too and she laughed and I raised my hand up over her neck and her head feeling the close, stiff loveliness and she butted me twice against my heart and I kissed her head again. The Widow was very tense and she said, “Kwenda na shamba,” which meant, let’s go to the village. Debba said nothing. She had lost her lovely Kamba impudence and I stroked her bowed head, which felt lovely, and touched the secret places behind her ears and she put her hand up, stealthily, and touched my worst scars.

  “Mthuka will take you now in the car,” I said. “There is meat for the family. I cannot go. Jambo, tu,” I said, which is the roughest and the most loving you can talk and ends things quickest.

  “When will you come?” the Widow asked.

  “Any day. When it is my duty.”

  “Will we go to Laitokitok before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus?”

  “Surely,” I said.

  “Kwenda na shamba,” Debba said.

  “Mthuka will take you.”

  “You come.”

  “No hay remedio,” I said. It was one of the first things I had taught her to say in Spanish and she said it now very carefully. It was the saddest thing I knew in Spanish and I thought it was probably best for her to learn it early. She thought that it was part of my religion, which she was learning, since I had not explained to her what it meant, but only that it was a phrase that she must know.

  “No hay remedio,” she said very proudly.

  “You have beautiful hard hands,” I told her in Spanish. This was one of our first jokes and I had translated it very carefully. “You are the Queen of the Ngomas.”

  “No hay remedio,” she said modestly. Then in the dark she said very fast, “No hay remedio, no hay remedio, no hay remedio.”

  “No hay remedio, tú,” I said. “Get the meat and go.”

  That night while I woke listening to the hyenas talking and disputing over the refuse from the butchering and watching the firelight through the door of the tent I thought about Mary sleeping soundly now an
d happy about her good stalk and clean kill on the wildebeest and wondered where the big lion was and what he was doing now in the dark. I figured he would kill again on his way down to the swamp. Then I thought about the Shamba and how there was no remedy nor any solution. I was full of remorse that I had ever become involved with the Shamba but no hay remedio now and maybe there never was a time. I did not start it. It started by itself. Then I thought some more about the lion and about the Kamba Mau Mau and that we would have to expect them from tomorrow afternoon. Then, for a moment, there were no night noises at all. Everyone had stopped and I thought shit this is probably the Kamba Mau Mau and I have been sloppy and I took the Winchester pump that I had loaded with buckshot and listened with my mouth open to hear better while I could feel my heart pounding. Then the night noises started again and I heard a leopard cough down by the stream. It was a noise like the C string on a bass viol being stroked by a farrier’s rasp. He coughed again, hunting, and all the night began to speak about him and I put the shotgun under my leg again and started to go to sleep feeling proud of Miss Mary and loving her and being proud of Debba and caring about her very much.

  3

  I GOT UP AT daylight and went out to the cook tent and the lines. Keiti was always conservative so we inspected the camp in a very military manner and I could see he was not upset about anything. Our meat was hung wrapped in cheesecloth and there was plenty of meat for three days for the men. Some of it was being roasted on sticks by the early risers. We went over the plans for intercepting the Mau Mau if they should come to any of the four Shambas.

  “The plan is good but they will not come,” he said.

  “Did you hear the quiet before the leopard last night?”

  “Yes,” he said and smiled. “But it was a leopard.”

  “Didn’t you think it might be those people?”

  “Yes. But it was not.”

  “All right,” I said. “Please send Mwindi to me at the fire.”

  At the fire that had been built up by pushing the unburned ends of the logs together and putting a little brush on top of the ashes I sat down and drank my tea. It was cold by now and Mwindi brought another pot of tea with him. He was as formal and as conservative as Keiti and he had the same sense of humor except that his was rougher than Keiti’s. Mwindi spoke English and understood it better than he spoke it. He was an old man and looked like a very black, narrow-faced Chinese. He kept all my keys and was in charge of the tent, making the beds, bringing the baths, doing laundry and boots, bringing early morning tea and he also kept my money and all the money I carried to run the safari. This money was locked in the tin trunk and he kept the keys. He liked being trusted as people were trusted in the old days. He was teaching me Kamba but not the same Kamba I was learning from Ngui. He thought Ngui and I were bad influences on each other but he was too old and too cynical to be disturbed by anything except interruptions in the order of his work. He liked to work and he loved responsibility and he had made an orderly and pleasant pattern of safari life.

  “Bwana wants something?” he asked, standing looking solemn and dejected.

  “We have too many guns and too much ammunition in this camp,” I said.

  “Nobody knows,” he said. “You bring hidden from Nairobi. Nobody sees anything at Kitanga. We always carry hidden. Nobody sees. Nobody knows. You always sleep with pistol by your leg.”

  “I know. But if I were Mau Mau I would attack this camp at night.”

  “If you were Mau Mau many things would happen. But you are not Mau Mau.”

  “Good. But if you are not in the tent, someone must be in the tent armed and responsible.”

  “Have them stand the watch outside please, Bwana. I do not want anyone in the tent. For the tent, I am responsible.”

  “They will be outside.”

  “Bwana, they have to cross an open plain to come to this camp. Everybody would see them.”

  “Ngui and I came through the camp from end to end three times at Fig Tree and no one saw us.”

  “I saw you.”

  “Truly?”

  “Twice.”

  “Why did you not say so?”

  “I do not have to say everything I see that you and Ngui do.”

  “Thank you. Now you know about the guard. If Memsahib and I are gone and you leave the tent call the guard. If Memsahib is here alone and you are not here, call the guard.”

  “Ndio,” he said. “You don’t drink the tea? It gets cold.”

  “Tonight I make some booby traps around the tent and we will leave a lantern on that tree.”

  “Mzuri. We will make a very big fire too. Keiti is sending out for wood now so the lorry driver can be free. He goes to one of the Shambas. But these people that they say come here will not come here.”

  “Why do you say that so surely?”

  “Because it is stupid to come here into a trap and they are not stupid. These are Wakamba Mau Mau.”

  I sat by the fire with the new pot of tea and drank it slowly. The Masai were a pastoral and war-making people. They were not hunters. The Wakamba were hunters; the best hunters and trackers that I had ever known. And now their game had been killed off by the white men and by themselves on their Reserve and the only place they could hunt was in the Masai Reserves. Their own Reserve was overcrowded and overfarmed and when the rains failed there was no pasture for the cattle and the crops were lost.

  As I sat and drank the tea I thought that the cleavage, a friendly cleavage, in the camp, but a cleavage in spirit and in outlook, was not between the devout and the unbelievers, nor the good and the bad, nor the old and the new but basically between the active hunters and warriors and the others. Keiti had been a fighting man, a soldier, a great hunter and tracker and it was he that held everything together by his great experience, knowledge and authority. But Keiti was a man of considerable and a conservative wealth and property and in the changing times we had now the conservatives had a difficult role. The young men who had been too young for the war and who had never learned to hunt because there was no longer any game in their country and they were too good and inexperienced boys to be poachers and not trained to be cattle thieves looked up to Ngui and the bad boys who had fought their way through Abyssinia and again through Burma. They were on our side in everything but their loyalty to Keiti, to Pop and to their work. We made no attempt to recruit them or to convert them or to corrupt them. They were all volunteers. Ngui had told me the whole thing and trusted me and put it on a straight base of tribal loyalty. I knew we, the hunting Wakamba, had gone a long way together. But sitting there, drinking the tea, and watching the yellow and green trees change in color as the sun hit them I thought about how far we had gone. I finished the tea and walked over to the tent and looked in. Mary had drunk her early cup of tea and the empty cup lay on the saucer where the mosquito netting now hung to the canvas ground sheet by the side of the cot. She was sleeping again and her lightly tanned face and her lovely rumpled blond hair were against the pillow. Her lips were turned toward me and as I watched her sleeping, touched deeply as always by her beautiful face, she smiled lightly in her sleep. I wondered what she was dreaming about. Then I picked up the shotgun from underneath the blankets on my bed and took it outside the tent to take the shell out of the barrel. This morning was another morning that Mary could get her proper sleep.

  I went over to the dining tent and told Nguili, who was tidying it up, what I wanted for breakfast. It was an egg sandwich with the egg fried firm with either ham or bacon and sliced raw onion. If there was any fruit I would have some and first I would have a bottle of Tusker beer.

  G.C. and I nearly always drank beer for breakfast unless we were hunting lion. Beer before or at breakfast was a fine thing but it slowed you up, possibly a thousandth of a second. On the other hand it made things seem better sometimes when they were not too good and it was very good for you if you had stayed up too late and had gastric remorse.

  Nguili opened the bottle of beer and poured
a glass. He loved to pour beer and see that the foam rose just at the very last and topped the glass without spilling. He was very good-looking, almost as good-looking as a girl without being at all effeminate and G.C. used to tease him and ask him if he plucked his eyebrows. He may very well have since one of the great amusements of primitive people is to arrange and rearrange their appearance and it has nothing to do with being homosexual. But G.C. used to tease him too much, I thought, and because he was shy, friendly and very devoted, an excellent mess attendant who worshipped the hunters and fighters, we used to take him hunting with us sometimes. Everyone made fun of him a little for his wonderful surprise at and ignorance of animals. But he learned every time he was out and we all teased him lovingly. We all regarded any form of wound or disaster to one of us which was not crippling nor fatal as extremely comic and this was hard on this boy who was delicate and gentle and loving. He wanted to be a warrior and a hunter but instead he was an apprentice cook and a mess attendant. In the meantime that we lived in and were all so happy in that year, one of his great pleasures, since he was not yet allowed by tribal law to drink, was to pour beer for those who were allowed to drink it.

  “Did you hear the leopard?” I asked him.

  “No, Bwana, I sleep too hard.”

  He went off to get the sandwich which he had called out to the cook to make and he hurried back to pour more beer.

  Msembi, the other mess attendant, was tall, handsome and rough. He always wore his green mess attendant’s gown with the air of participating in a masquerade. He achieved this by the angle he wore his green skullcap and he had ways of manipulating the gown which showed that while he respected it for his service he realized it was a little comic. With Mary and I alone we did not need two men for the mess but the cook was going back to see his family shortly and take allotments to the families of the men and while he was away Msembi would cook. Like everyone but me he hated the Informer and this morning when the Informer appeared outside the mess tent and coughed discreetly he looked at me meaningfully, bowed, closing his eyes slightly, and they both went out.