True at First Light

by Ernest Hemingway

  Charo shifted the big book to his other hand and flopped his arm to show how the leg had been.

  “We thought you would want a bait,” Mary said. “You did, didn’t you? He’s close to the road. We heard you come by afterwards, G.C. But we couldn’t see you.”

  “You did quite right to kill him and we did need a bait. But what were you doing hunting alone?”

  “I wasn’t. I was identifying birds and I have my list. Charo wouldn’t take me where there were any bad beasts. Then I saw the wildebeest and he was standing looking so sad and his leg looked awful with the bone sticking out. Charo said to kill him and I did.”

  “Memsahib piga. Kufa!”

  “Shot him right behind the ear.”

  “Piga! Kufa!” Charo said and he and Miss Mary looked at each other proudly.

  “It’s the first time I ever had the responsibility of killing without you or Papa or Pop along.”

  “May I kiss you, Miss Mary?” G.C. asked.

  “You certainly may. But I’m awfully sweaty.”

  They kissed and then we kissed and Mary said, “I’d like to kiss Charo too but I know I shouldn’t. Do you know the impala barked at me just as though they were dogs. Nothing is afraid of Charo and me.”

  She shook hands with Charo and he took her book and her rifle over to our tent. “I’d better go and wash too. Thank you for being so nice about my shooting the beast.”

  “We’ll send the truck for him and then put him out where he should be.”

  I went over to our tent and G.C. went to his tent to dress. Mary was washing with the safari soap and changing her shirt and smelling her fresh shirt that had been washed with a different soap and dried in the sun. We each liked to watch the other bathe but I never watched her when G.C. was around because it could be sort of hard on him. I was sitting on a chair in front of the tent reading and she came over and put her arms around my neck.

  “Are you all right, honey?”

  “No,” she said. “I was so proud and Charo was so proud and it was one shot whack like the pelota ball hitting the wall of the fronton. He couldn’t have heard the shot even and Charo and I were shaking hands. You know what it’s like to do something yourself for the first time with all the responsibility. You and G.C. know and that’s why he kissed me.”

  “Anybody’d kiss you anytime.”

  “Maybe if I wanted them to. Or made them. But this wasn’t like that.”

  “Why do you feel bad, honey?”

  “You know. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  “No, I don’t,” I lied.

  “I held straight on the center of his shoulder. It was big and black and shiny and I was about twenty yards from him. He was half toward me and looking toward us. I could see his eyes and they looked so sad. He looked as though he would cry. He looked sadder than anything I’ve ever seen and his leg looked awful. Honey, he had such a long sad face. I don’t have to tell G.C. do I?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t have to tell you. But we’re going after the lion together and now my god-damn confidence is gone again.”

  “You’ll shoot beautifully. I’m proud to be with you with the lion.”

  “The awful thing is that I can shoot properly too. You know it.”

  “I remember all the beauty shots you made. And all the wonderful times you shot better than anyone at Escondido.”

  “You just help me get back my confidence. But there’s such a short time.”

  “You’ll get it back and we won’t tell G.C.”

  We sent the lorry for the wildebeest. When they came back with him G.C. and I climbed up to have a look at him. They are never a handsome animal when dead. He lay big paunched and dusty, all his bluff gone and his horns gray and undistinguished. “Mary took an awfully fancy shot at him,” G.C. said. The wildebeest’s eyes were glazed and his tongue out. His tongue was dusty too and he had been drilled behind the ear just at the base of the skull.

  “Now where do you suppose she actually held?”

  “She shot him from only twenty yards. She had a right to hold up there if she wanted to.”

  “I’d have thought she’d have taken him through the shoulder,” G.C. said.

  I didn’t say anything. There was no use trying to fool him and if I lied to G.C. he would not forgive me.

  “What about that leg?” I asked.

  “Someone chasing at night with a car. Could be something else.”

  “How old would you say it was?”

  “Two days. It’s maggoty.”

  “Somebody up the hill then. We’ve heard no cars at night. He’d come downhill with the leg anyway. He certainly wouldn’t climb with it.”

  “He’s not you and me,” G.C. said. “He’s a wildebeest.”

  We had stopped under the hitching post tree and were all getting out. G.C. and I went over to the truck which still held the wildebeest and he explained to his Chief Game Scout and the other scouts who had come up where we wanted the bait tied up. It was only to be dragged up to the tree from the road and then hung up out of reach of hyenas. The lions would pull it down if they came to it. It was to be dragged past where last night’s kill had been. They were to go up and get it up as quickly as possible and return to camp. My people had all the baboon baits hung up and I told Mthuka to wash the car out well. He said he had stopped at the stream and washed it.

  We all took our baths. Mary took hers first and I helped dry her with a big towel and held her mosquito boots for her. She put a bathrobe on over her pajamas and went out by the fire to have a drink with G.C. before they started their cooking. I stayed with them until Mwindi came out from the tent and said “Bathi Bwana,” and then I took my drink into the tent and undressed and lay back in the canvas tub and soaped myself and relaxed in the hot water.

  “What do the old men say the lion will do tonight?” I asked Mwindi, who was folding my clothes and laying out pajamas, dressing gown and my mosquito boots.

  “Keiti says Memsahib’s lion maybe eats on bait maybe not. What does Bwana say?”

  “The same as Keiti.”

  “Keiti says you mganga with the lion.”

  “No. Only a little good medicine to find out when he dies.”

  “When he die?”

  “In three days. I could not find out which day.”

  “Mzuri. Maybe he dies tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think so. But he may.”

  “Keiti don’t think so either.”

  “When does he think?”

  “In three days.”

  “Mzuri. Please bring me the towel.”

  “Towel right by your hand. Bring him if you like.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. There is no word for I’m sorry in Swahili.

  “Hapana sorry. I just say where it was. You want me rub back?’ ”

  “No thank you.”

  “You feel good?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Hapana why. I ask to know.”

  “Feel very good.” I stood up and got out of the tub and started to dry myself. I wanted to say that I felt good and very relaxed and a little sleepy and did not feel much like talking and would have preferred fresh meat to spaghetti but had not wished to kill anything and that I was worried about all three of my children for different causes and that I was worried about the Shamba and I was a little worried about G.C. and quite worried about Mary and that I was a fake as a good witch doctor, but no more a fake than the others were, and that I wished Mr. Singh would keep out of trouble and that I hoped the operation we were committed in as from Christmas Day would go well and that I had some more 220 grain solids and that Simenon would write fewer and better books. I did not know all the things Pop would discuss with Keiti when he had his bath but I knew Mwindi wanted to be friendly and so did I. But I was tired tonight for no reason and he knew it and was worried.

  “You ask me for Wakamba words,” he said.

  So I asked him for Wakamba words and tried to memorize them and then I t
hanked him and went out to the fire to sit by the fire in an old pair of pajamas from Idaho, tucked into a pair of warm mosquito boots made in Hong Kong and wearing a warm wool robe from Pendleton, Oregon, and drank a whisky and soda made from a bottle of whisky Mr. Singh had given me as a Christmas present and boiled water from the stream that ran down from the Mountain animated by a siphon cartridge made in Nairobi.

  I’m a stranger here, I thought. But the whisky said no and it was the time of day for the whisky to be right. Whisky can be as right as it can be wrong and it said I was not a stranger and I knew it was correct at this time of night. Anyway my boots had come home because they were made of ostrich hide and I remembered the place where I had found the leather in the boot-maker’s in Hong Kong. No, it was not me who found the leather. It was someone else and then I thought about who had found the leather and about those days and then I thought about different women and how they would be in Africa and how lucky I had been to have known fine women that loved Africa. I had known some really terrible ones who had only gone there to have been there and I had known some true bitches and several alcoholics to whom Africa had just been another place for more ample bitchery or fuller drunkenness.

  Africa took them and changed them all in some ways. If they could not change they hated it.

  So I was very happy to have G.C. back in camp and so was Mary. He was happy to be back too because we had become a family and we always missed each other when we were apart. He loved his job and believed in it and its importance almost fanatically. He loved the game and wanted to care for it and protect it and that was about all he believed in, I think, except a very stern and complicated system of ethics.

  He was a little younger than my oldest son and if I had gone to Addis Ababa to spend a year and write back in the middle thirties as I had planned I would have known him when he was twelve since his best friend then had been the son of the people I was going out to stay with. But I had not gone because Mussolini’s armies had gone instead and my friend that I had been going out to stay with had been moved to another diplomatic post and so I had missed the chance to know G.C. when he was twelve. By the time I met him he had a long, very difficult and unrewarding war behind him plus the abandonment of a British Protectorate where he had made the start of a fine career. He had commanded irregular troops, which is, if you are honest, the least rewarding way there is to make a war. If an action is fought perfectly so that you have almost no casualties and inflict large losses on the enemy it is regarded at Headquarters as an unjustified and reprehensible massacre. If you are forced to fight under unfavorable conditions and at too great odds and win but have a large butcher bill the comment is, “He gets too many men killed.”

  There is no way for an honest man commanding irregulars to get into anything but trouble. There is some doubt as to whether any truly honest and talented soldier can ever hope for anything except to be destroyed.

  By the time I met G.C., he was well started in another career in another British Colony. He was never bitter and he did not look back at all. Over the spaghetti and the wine he told us of how he had been reproved by some newly arrived expatriate civil servant for using a bad word which might be overheard by this young man’s wife. I hated for G.C. to have to be bored by these people. The old Pukka Sahibs have been often described and caricatured. But no one has dealt much with these new types except Waugh a little bit at the end of Black Mischief and Orwell completely in Burmese Days. I wished Orwell were still alive and I told G.C. about the last time I had seen him in Paris in 1945 after the Bulge fight and how he had come in what looked something like civilian clothes to Room 117 of the Ritz where there was still a small arsenal to borrow a pistol because “They” were after him. He wanted a small pistol easily concealed and I found one but warned him that if he shot someone with it they probably would die eventually but that there might be a long interval. But a pistol was a pistol and he needed this one more as a talisman than a weapon, I thought.

  He was very gaunt and looked in bad shape and I asked him if he would not stay and eat. But he had to go. I told him I could give him a couple of people who would look after him if “They” were after him. That my characters were familiar with the local “They” who would never bother him nor intrude on him. He said no, that the pistol was all he needed. We asked about a few mutual friends and he left. I sent two characters to pick him up at the door and tail him and check if anybody was after him. The next day their report was “Papa nobody is after him. He is a very chic type and he knows Paris very well. We checked with so and so’s brother and he says no one pursues him. He is in touch with the British Embassy but he is not an operative. This is only hearsay. Do you want the timetable of his movements?”

  “No. Did he amuse himself?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “I’m happy. We will not worry about him. He has the pistol.”

  “That worthless pistol,” one of the characters said. “But you warned him against it, Papa?”

  “Yes. He could have had any pistol he wished.”

  “Perhaps he would have been happier with a stinger.”

  “No,” the other character said. “A stinger is too compromising. He was happy with that pistol.”

  We let it go at that.

  G.C. did not sleep well and often would lie awake most of the night reading. He had a very good library at his house in Kajiado and I had a big duffel bag full of books that we had arranged in empty boxes in the mess tent as a library. There was an excellent bookstore in the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi and another good one down the road and whenever I had been in town I bought most of the new books that looked worth reading. Reading was the best palliative for G.C.’s insomnia. But it was no cure and I would often see his light on all night in his tent. Because he had a career as well as because he had been brought up properly he could have nothing to do with African women. He did not think they were beautiful either nor attractive and the ones I knew and liked the best did not care for him either. But there was an Ismaili Indian girl who was one of the nicest people I have ever known and she was completely and hopelessly in love with G.C. She had convinced him that it was her sister, who was in strictest purdah, who loved him and she sent him gifts and messages from this sister. It was a sad but also clean and happy story and we all liked it. G.C. had nothing to do with the girl at all except to speak pleasantly to her when he was in her family’s shop. He had his own white Nairobi girls that he was fond of and I never talked with him about them. Mary probably did. But we had no personal gossip among the three of us on serious personal things.

  In the Shamba it was different. There and in the lines there were no books to read, no radio, and we talked. I asked the Widow and the girl who had decided she wished to be my wife about why they did not like G.C. and at first they would not tell me. Finally the Widow explained that it was not polite to say. It turned out that it was a question of smell. All people with the color of skin I had smelled very badly usually.

  We were sitting under a tree by the bank of a river and I was waiting for some baboons that, by their talking, were working down toward us.

  “Bwana Game smells good,” I said. “I smell him all the time. He has a good smell.”

  “Hapana,” the Widow said. “You smell like Shamba. You smell like smoked hide. You smell like pombe.” I did not like the smell of pombe and I was not sure I liked smelling like it.

  The girl put her head against the back of my bush shirt, which I knew was salty with dried sweat. She rubbed her head against the back of my shoulders and then the back of my neck and then came around for me to kiss her head.

  “You see?” the Widow asked. “You smell the same as Ngui.”

  “Ngui, do we smell the same?”

  “I don’t know how I smell. No man knows. But you smell the same as Mthuka.”

  Ngui was sitting against the opposite side of the tree looking downstream. He had his legs drawn up and was resting his head against the tree. He had my new spear beside
him.

  “Widow, you talk to Ngui.”

  “No,” she said. “I look after girl.”

  The girl had laid her head in my lap and was fingering the pistol holster. I knew she wanted me to trace the outline of her nose and her lips with my fingers and then touch the line of her chin very lightly and feel the line where she had her hair cut back to make a square line on the forehead and the sides and feel around her ears and over the top of her head. This was a great delicacy of courtship and all I could do if the Widow was there. But she could explore too, gently if she wished.

  “You hard-handed beauty.”

  “Be good wife.”

  “You tell Widow go away.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  She told me and I kissed her on top of the head again. She explored very delicately with her hands and then picked my right hand up and put it where she wished it. I held her very close and put the other hand where it should be.

  “No,” the Widow said.

  “Hapana tu,” the girl said. She turned over and put her head facedown where it had been and said something in Kamba that I could not understand. Ngui looked down the stream and I looked up it and the Widow had moved behind the tree and lay there with our fused, implacable sorrow and I reached up to the tree and got the rifle and laid it by my right leg.

  “Go to sleep, tu,” I said.

  “No. I sleep tonight.”

  “Sleep now.”

  “No. Can I touch?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a last wife.”

  “As my hard-handed wife.”

  She said something else in Kamba that I did not understand and Ngui said, “Kwenda na campi.”

  “I have to stay,” the Widow said. But as Ngui went off walking with his careless walk and casting a long shadow through the trees she walked a little way with him and spoke in Kamba. Then she took up her post about four trees back and looking downstream.

  “Are they gone?” the girl asked.

  I said yes and she moved up so we lay tight and close together and she put her mouth against mine and we kissed very carefully. She liked to play and explore and be delighted at the reactions and at the scars and she held my earlobes between her thumb and fore-finger where she wanted them pierced. Hers had never been pierced and she wished me to feel where they would be pierced for me and I felt them carefully and kissed them and then bit them a little very gently.