True at First Light

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True at First Light Page 17

by Ernest Hemingway


  “No. I want to go. But just let me try and feel better if I can.”

  I went out and washed in the cold water in the basin and washed my eyes with boric, dressed and went out to the fire. I could see G.C. shaving in front of his tent. He finished, dressed and came over.

  “Mary feels rocky,” I told him.

  “Poor child.”

  “She wants to go anyway.”

  “Naturally.”

  “How’d you sleep?”

  “Well. You?”

  “Very well. What do you think he was doing last night?”

  “I think he was just going walkabout. And sounding off.”

  “He talks a lot. Want to split a bottle of beer?”

  “It won’t hurt us.”

  I went and got the beer and two glasses and waited for Mary. She came out of the tent and walked down the path to the latrine tent. She came back and walked down again.

  “How do you feel, honey?” I asked when she came over to the table by the fire with her tea. Charo and Ngui were getting the guns and the binoculars and shell bags out from under the tents and taking them to the hunting car.

  “I don’t feel good at all. Do we have anything for it?”

  “Yes. But it makes you feel dopey. We’ve got Terramycin too. It’s supposed to be good for both kinds but it can make you feel funny too.”

  “Why did I have to get something when my lion’s here?”

  “Don’t you worry, Miss Mary,” G.C. said. “We’ll get you fit and the lion will get confident.”

  “But I want to go out after him.”

  She was in obvious pain and I could see it coming back on her again.

  “Honey, we’ll lay off him this morning and rest him. It’s the best thing to do anyway. You take it easy and take care of yourself. G.C. can stay a couple of more days anyway.”

  G.C. shook his hand, palm down, in negation. But Mary did not see him.

  “He’s your lion and you take your time and be in shape to shoot him and all the time we let him alone he will be getting more confident. If we don’t go out at all this morning it’s much better.”

  I went over to the car and said we were not going out. Then I went and found Keiti by the fire. He seemed to know all about it but he was very delicate and polite.

  “Memsahib is sick.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe spaghetti. Maybe dysentery.”

  “Yes,” Keiti said. “I think spaghetti.”

  “Meat too old.”

  “Yes. Maybe little piece. Made in the dark.”

  “We leave lion alone take care of Memsahib. The lion gets confident.”

  “Mzuri,” Keiti said. “Poli poli. You shoot kwali or kanga. Mbebia make Memsahib broth.”

  After we were sure that the lion would have left the bait if he had been on it G.C. and I went out to have a look at the country in his Land Rover.

  I asked Ngui for a bottle. It was wrapped in a wet sack and was still cold from the night and we sat in the Land Rover in the shade of the tree and drank it out of the bottle and looked off across the dried mud flat and watched the small Tommies and the black movement of the wildebeest and the zebra that looked a gray white in this light as they moved out across the flat to the grass on the far side and at the end toward the Chulu hills. The hills were a dark blue this morning and looked very far away. When we turned to look back at the great Mountain it looked very close. It seemed to be just behind camp and the snow was heavy and bright in the sun.

  “We could hunt Miss Mary on stilts,” I said. “Then she could see him in the tall grass.”

  “There’s nothing in the Game Laws against it.”

  “Or Charo could carry a stepladder such as they have in libraries for the higher stacks.”

  “That’s brilliant,” G.C. said. “We’d pad the rungs and she could take a rest with the rifle on the rung above where she stood.”

  “You don’t think it would be too immobile?”

  “It’d be up to Charo to make it mobile.”

  “It would be a beautiful sight,” I said. “We could mount an electric fan on it.”

  “We could build it in the form of an electric fan,” G.C. said happily. “But that would probably be considered a vehicle and illegal.”

  “If we rolled it forward and had Miss Mary keep climbing in it like a squirrel would it be illegal?”

  “Anything that rolls is a vehicle,” G.C. said judicially.

  “I roll slightly when I walk.”

  “Then you’re a vehicle. I’ll run you and you’ll get six months and be shipped out of the Colony.”

  “We have to be careful, G.C.”

  “Care and moderation have been our watchwords haven’t they?”

  “Any more in that bottle?”

  “We can share the dregs.”

  8

  THE DAY THAT Miss Mary shot her lion was a very beautiful day. That was about all that was beautiful about it. White flowers had blossomed in the night so that with the first daylight before the sun had risen all the meadows looked as though a full moon was shining on new snow through a mist. Mary was up and dressed long before first light. The right sleeve of her bush jacket was rolled up and she had checked all the rounds in her Mannlicher .256. She said she did not feel well and I believed her. She acknowledged G.C.’s and my greetings briefly and we were careful not to make any jokes. I did not know what she had against G.C. except his tendency to lightheartedness in the face of undeniably serious work. Her being angry at me was a sound reaction, I thought. If she were in a bad mood I thought she might feel mean and shoot as deadly as I knew she knew how to shoot. This agreed with my last and greatest theory that she had too kind a heart to kill animals. Some people shoot easily and loosely; others shoot with a dreadful speed that is still so controlled that they have all the time they need to place the bullet as carefully as a surgeon would make his first incision; others are mechanical shots who are very deadly unless something happens to interfere with the mechanics of the shooting. This morning it looked as though Miss Mary was going out to shoot with grim resolution, contemptuous of all those who did not take things with appropriate seriousness, armored in her bad physical condition, which provided an excuse if she missed, and full of rigid, concentrated do-or-die deadliness. It seemed fine to me. It was a new approach.

  We waited by the hunting car for it to be light enough to start and we were all solemn and deadly. Ngui nearly always had an evil temper in the very early morning so he was solemn, deadly and sullen. Charo was solemn, deadly but faintly cheerful. He was like a man going to a funeral who did not really feel too deeply about the deceased. Mthuka was happy as always in his deafness watching with his wonderful eyes for the start of the lightening of the darkness.

  We were all hunters and it was the start of that wonderful thing, the hunt. There is much mystic nonsense written about hunting but it is something that is probably much older than religion. Some are hunters and some are not. Miss Mary was a hunter and a brave and lovely one but she had come to it late instead of as a child and many of the things that had happened to her in hunting came as unexpectedly as being in heat for the first time to the kitten when she becomes a cat. She grouped all these new knowledges and changes as things we know and other people don’t.

  The four of us who had seen her go through these changes and had seen her now, for months, hunting something grimly and seriously against every possible sort of odds were like the cuadrilla of a very young matador. If the matador was serious the cuadrilla would be serious. They knew all the matador’s defects and they were all well paid in different ways. All had lost completely any faith in the matador and all had regained it many times. As we sat in the car or moved around it waiting for it to be light enough to set out I was reminded very much of how it is before a bullfight. Our matador was solemn; so we were solemn, since as is unusual, we loved our matador. Our matador was not well. This made it even more necessary that he be protected and given even a better chance
in everything he chose to do. But as we sat and leaned and felt sleep drain from us we were as happy as hunters. Probably no one is as happy as hunters with the always new, fresh, unknowing day ahead and Mary was a hunter too. But she had set herself this task and being guided and trained and indoctrinated into absolute purity and virtue of killing a lion by Pop who had made her his last pupil and given her ethics he had never been able to impose on other women so that her killing of her lion must not be the way such things are done but the way such things should ideally be done; Pop finding finally in Mary the spirit of a fighting cock embodied in a woman; a loving and belated killer with the only defect that no one could say where the shot would go. Pop had given her the ethics and then it was necessary that he go away. She had the ethics now but she only had G.C. and me and neither of us was to be really trusted as Pop was. So now she was going out again to her corrida that always was postponed.

  Mthuka nodded to me that the light was beginning to be possible and we started off through the fields of white flowers where yesterday all the meadows had been green. As we came even with the trees of the forest with the high dead yellow grass on our left Mthuka slid the car to a quiet stop. He turned his head and I saw the arrow-shaped scar on his cheek and the slashes. He said nothing and I followed his eyes. The great black-maned lion, his head huge above the yellow grass, was coming out toward us. Only his head showed above the stiff tall yellow grass.

  “What do you say we circle easy back to camp?” I whispered to G.C.

  “I quite agree,” he whispered.

  As we spoke the lion turned and moved back toward the forest. All you could see of him was the movements of the high grass.

  When we got back to camp and had breakfast Mary understood why we had done what we did and agreed that it was right and necessary. But the corrida had been called off again when she was all set and tense for it and we were not popular. I felt so sorry that she felt ill and I wanted her to let down in tension if she could. There was no use going on talking about how the lion had made a mistake finally. Both G.C. and I were sure we had him now. He had not fed during the night and had come out to look for the bait in the morning. He had gone back into the forest again. He would lie up hungry and, if he were not disturbed, he should be out early in the evening; that is he should be. If he was not G.C. had to leave the next day no matter what happened and he would revert back to Mary and me on our own. But the lion had broken his pattern of behavior and made a very grave mistake and I did not worry anymore about our getting him. I might have been happier to hunt him with Mary without G.C. but I loved to hunt with G.C. too and I was not so stupid as to want any sort of bad show to happen with me alone with Mary. G.C. had pointed out too well how it could be. I always had the great illusion of Mary hitting the lion exactly where she should and the lion rolling over like anything else I had seen them do so many times and be as dead as only a lion can be. I was going to drive two into him if he rolled over alive and that was that. Miss Mary would have killed her lion and been happy about it always and I would only have given him the puntilla and she would know it and love me very much forever world without end amen. It was now the sixth month that we had looked forward to this. Just then a new Land Rover, one of the new, larger and faster models we had never seen before, drove into camp through the wonderful field of white flowers that had been dust a month ago and mud one week before. This car was driven by a red-faced man of middle height who wore a faded khaki uniform of an officer in the Kenya police. He was dusty from the road and there were white smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that cracked the dust.

  “Anybody home?” he asked coming into the mess tent and taking off his cap. Through the open, muslin-screened end that faced toward the Mountain I had seen the car come up.

  “Everybody home,” I said. “How are you, Mr. Harry?”

  “I’m quite well.”

  “Sit down and let me make you something. You can stay the night can’t you?”

  He sat down and stretched his legs and moved his shoulders as pleasantly as a cat does.

  “Couldn’t drink anything. No proper people drink at this hour.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Would you share a beer?”

  I opened the beer and poured it out and watched him relax and smile with his dead tired eyes as we raised the glasses.

  “Have them put your gear in young Pat’s tent. It’s that green one that’s empty.”

  Harry Dunn was shy, overworked, kind and ruthless. He was fond of Africans and understood them and he was paid to enforce the law and carry out orders. He was as gentle as he was tough and he was not revengeful nor a hater nor was he ever stupid nor sentimental. He did not hold grudges in a grudge-holding country and I never saw him be petty about anything. He was administering the law in a time of corruption, hatreds, sadism and considerable hysteria and he worked himself, each day, past the limit that a man can possibly go, never working to seek promotion or advancement because he knew his worth at what he was doing. Miss Mary one time said that he was a portable fortress of a man.

  “Are you having fun here?”

  “Very much.”

  “I’ve heard a little. What’s this about having to kill the leopard before the Birthday of the Baby Jesus?”

  “That’s for that picture story for that magazine we were making the pictures for in September. Before we met. We had a photographer and he took thousands of pictures and I’ve written a short article and captions for the pictures they use. They have a beautiful picture of a leopard and I shot him but he isn’t mine.”

  “How does that work?”

  “We were after a big lion that was very smart. It was over on the other side of the Ewaso Ngiro beyond Magadi under the escarpment.”

  “Well off my beat.”

  “We were trying to work up on this lion and this friend of mine climbed up a little rock kopje with his gun bearer to look ahead to see if the lion had showed. The lion was for Mary because he and I had both killed lions. So we didn’t know what the hell had happened when we heard him shoot and then something was down in the dust roaring. It was a leopard and the dust was so deep that it rose solid in a cloud and the leopard kept on roaring and nobody knew which direction he was coming out of the dust. This friend of mine, Mayito, had hit him twice from up above and I had shot into the moving center of the dust and ducked and moved to the right where it was natural he would break out. Then he showed his head up just once out of the dusk, still talking bad and I hit him in the neck and the dust started to settle. It was sort of like a gunfight in the dust outside of an old-time saloon out West. Except the leopard didn’t have any gun but he was close enough to have mauled anyone and he was awfully worked up. The photographer took pictures of Mayito and him and of all of us and him and of me and him. He was Mayito’s because Mayito hit him first and hit him again. So the best picture of him was the one with me and the magazine wanted to use it and I said they couldn’t unless I killed a good leopard alone by myself. And so far I’ve failed three times.”

  “I didn’t know the ethics were so rigid.”

  “Unfortunately they are. It’s the law too. First blood and continuous pursuit.”

  Arap Meina and the Chief Game Scout had brought back the word that the two lionesses and the young lion had killed far up on the edge of the salt flat. The bait had not been uncovered except where hyenas had pulled at it and the two scouts recovered it carefully. There were birds in the trees around it that would surely draw the lion but the birds could not get at the remains of the zebra, which were high enough to draw the lion surely. He had not fed nor killed in the night, and since he was not hungry and had not been disturbed we might, almost surely, find him in the open in the evening.

  We had lunch, finally, and Mary was very cheerful and gracious with all of us. I believe she even asked me if I wanted any more of the cold meat. When I said no thank you, that I had enough, she said it would be good for me, that any man who drinks a great deal need
s to eat. This was not only a very old truth but had been the basis of an article in the Reader’s Digest that we had all read. That number of the Digest was down in the latrine now. I said that I had decided to run on a platform of true rummyhood and deceive none of my constituents. Churchill drank twice what I did if you could believe the accounts and he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was simply trying to step up my drinking to a reasonable amount when I might win the Prize myself; who knows?

  G.C. said that the Prize was as good as mine and that I ought to win it for bragging alone since Churchill had been awarded it, at least partially, for oratory. G.C. said that he had not followed the Prize awards as closely as he should but that he felt I might well be awarded it for my work in the religious field and for my care of the natives. Miss Mary suggested that if I would try to write something, occasionally, I might win it for writing. This moved me very deeply and I said that once she had the lion I would do nothing but write just to please her. She said that if I wrote even a little it would certainly please her. G.C. asked me if I planned to write something about how mysterious Africa was and that if I planned to write in Swahili he could get me a book on up-country Swahili that might be invaluable to me. Miss Mary said that we already had the book and that she thought even with the book it would be better if I tried to write in English. I suggested that I might copy sections of the book to help me get an up-country style. Miss Mary said I could not write one correct sentence in Swahili nor speak one either and I agreed with her very sadly that this was true.

  “Pop speaks it so beautifully and so does G.C. and you are a disgrace. I don’t know how anyone can speak a language as badly as you do.”

  I wanted to say that at one time, years before, it had looked as though I were going to speak it quite well. But that I had been a fool not to have stayed on in Africa and instead had gone back to America where I had killed my homesickness for Africa in different ways. Then before I could get back came the Spanish war and I became involved in what was happening to the world and I had stayed with that for better and for worse until I had finally come back. It had not been easy to get back nor to break the chains of responsibility that are built up, seemingly, as lightly as spiderwebs but that hold like steel cables.

 

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