True at First Light

by Ernest Hemingway

  So you had brought him up here five days before because someone had to do it and you could do it if not gently without suffering and what difference did it make what happened afterwards. The trouble was, at the end, he thought it was a new game and he was learning it. He gave me a nice rubber-lipped kiss and then he checked the position of the other horse. He knew you could not ride him the way the hoof had split but this was new and he wanted to learn it.

  “Good-bye, Old Kite,” I said and held his right ear and stroked its base with my fingers. “I know you’d do the same for me.”

  He did not understand, of course, and he wanted to give me another kiss to show that everything was all right when he saw the gun come up. I thought I could keep him from seeing it but he saw it and his eyes knew what it was and he stood very still trembling and I shot him at the intersection between the cross lines that run from opposite eye to opposite ear and his feet went straight down under him and all of him dropped together and he was a bear bait.

  Now lying under the juniper I was not finished with my sorrow. I would always feel the same way about Old Kite all of my life, or so I told myself then, but I looked at his lips which were not there because the eagles had eaten them and at his eyes which were also gone and at where the bear had opened him so that he was sunken now and the patch the bear had eaten before I had interrupted him and I waited for the eagles to come down.

  One came, finally, dropping like the sound of an incoming shell and breaking, with doubled-forward pinions and feathered legs and talons thrust forward to hit Old Kite as though he were killing him. He then walked pompously around and started working in the cavity. The others came in more gently and heavy winged but with the same long feathered wings and the same thick necks, big heads and dipped beaks and golden eyes.

  I lay there watching them eat at the body of my friend and partner that I had killed and thought that they were lovelier in the air. Since they were condemned I let them eat a while and quarrel and go pacing and mincing with their selections from the interior. I wished that I had a shotgun but I hadn’t. So I took the .22 Winchester finally and shot one carefully in the head and another twice in the body. He started to fly but could not make it and came down wings spread and I had to chase him up the high slope. Nearly every other bird or beast goes downhill when it is wounded. But an eagle goes uphill and when I ran this one down and caught his legs above the killing and holding claws and, with my moccasined foot on his neck, folded his wings together and held him with his eyes full of hatred and defiance, I had never seen any animal or bird look at me as the eagle looked. He was a golden eagle and full grown and big enough to take bighorn sheep lambs and he was a big thing to hold and as I watched the eagles walking with the guinea fowl and remembered that these birds walk with no one I felt badly about Miss Mary’s sorrow but I could not tell her what the eagles meant to me nor why I had killed these two, the last one by smacking his head against a tree down in the timber, nor what their skins had bought at Lame Deer on the Reservation.

  We were out riding in the hunting car when we saw the eagles and the guinea together and it was in the open glades of the forest that had been so damaged when the great herd of more than two hundred elephants had come through early that year and pulled and butted the trees down. We had gone there to check on the buffalo herd and perhaps to run onto a leopard that I knew lived there in the big unharmed trees close to the papyrus swamp. But we had seen nothing except the overrunning of the caterpillars and the strange armistice between the birds. Mary had located a few more possible Christmas trees and I had been thinking too much about eagles and about the old days. The old days were supposed to have been simpler but they were not; they were only rougher. The Reservation was rougher than the Shamba. Maybe not. I did not really know but I did know that the white people always took the other people’s lands away from them and put them on a reservation where they could go to hell and be destroyed as though they were in a concentration camp. Here they called the reservations the Reserves and there was much do-gooding about how the natives, now called the Africans, were administered. But the hunters were not allowed to hunt and the warriors were not allowed to make war. G.C. hated poachers because he had to have something to believe in so he had taken to believing in his job. He would, of course, insist that if he did not believe in his job he would never have taken it and he would be right in that too. Even Pop in one of the greatest rackets of all, the safari swindle, had very strict ethics; the strictest. The customer must be taken for every possible cent but he must be given results. All Great White Hunters were touching about how they loved the game and hated to kill anything but usually what they were thinking about was preserving the game for the next client that would come along. They did not want to frighten it by unnecessary shooting and they wanted a country to be left so that they might take another client and his wife or another pair of clients into it and it seem like unspoiled, never shot-over, primitive Africa that they could rush their clients through giving them the best results.

  Pop had explained all this to me one time many years before and said when we were up the coast fishing at the end of the safari, “You know no one’s conscience would ever let them do this to anyone twice. If they like them I mean. The next time you come out and get some transport, better bring it, and I’ll find you the boys and you can hunt anywhere you’ve been and you’ll work out new places and it will cost you no more than to hunt at home.”

  But it had turned out that rich people liked how much it cost and they came back again and again and it always cost more and was something that others could not do so that it was increasingly attractive. Old rich people died and there were always new ones and the animals decreased as the stock market rose. It was a big revenue-producing industry for the Colony too and because of this the Game Department, which had control over those who practiced the industry, had, with its development, produced new ethics that handled, or nearly handled, everything.

  It was no good thinking about ethics now and less good to think about Lame Deer where you sat on a mule deer hide in front of a teepee with your two eagle tails spread out with the under sides up so that the lovely white ends and the soft plumes showed and said nothing while they were looked at and held your tongue in the bargaining. The Cheyenne who wanted them the most cared nothing anymore except for tail plumes. He was beyond all other things or all other things had been removed. To him eagles on the land of the Reservation were as they circled high in the sky and unapproachable when they settled on a pile of gray rock to watch the country. Sometimes they could be found and killed in blizzards when they sat against a rock back against the driving snow. But this man was no good in blizzards anymore. Only the young men were and they were gone.

  You sat and did not talk and did not talk and sometimes reached out and touched the tails and stroked the plumes very lightly. You thought about your horse and about the second bear that had come through the pass to the horse after the killing of the eagles while the horse was still a bear bait and how when you had shot him a little too low in the bad light, taking him from the edge of the timber where the wind was right, he had rolled over once and then stood and bawled and slapped both his great arms as though to kill something that was biting him and then come down on all fours and came bouncing like a lorry off a highway and you had shot him twice as he came down the hill and the last time so close you smelled the fur burn. You thought of him and of the first bear. The hide had slipped on him and you took the long cured grizzly claws out of your shirt pocket and laid them out behind the eagle tails. Then you did not talk at all and the trading started. There had been no grizzly claws for many, many years and you made a good trade.

  There were not any good trades this morning but the best thing was the storks. Mary had only seen them twice in Spain. The first time was in a small town in Castile on our way across the high country to Segovia. This town had a very fine square and we had stopped there in the heat of the day and gone out of the blinding light into the
cool darkness of the inn to get our wine skins filled. It was very cool and pleasant in the inn and they had very cold beer and in this town they had a free bullfight one day each year in the lovely square in which everyone who wished could fight the three different bulls that were turned loose from their boxes. People were nearly always wounded or killed and it was the big social event of the year.

  On this particularly hot day in Castile Miss Mary had discovered the storks nested on top of the tower of the church which had looked down on so many tauric incidents. The wife of the innkeeper had taken her up to a high room of the house where she might photograph them and I was talking at the bar with the owner of the local transport and trucking company. We talked about the different Castilian towns which had always had storks’ nests on the churches and from all I could learn from the trucking man these were as plentiful as ever. No one had ever molested storks in Spain. They are one of the few birds that are truly respected and, naturally, were the luck of the village.

  The innkeeper told me about a compatriot of mine, an inglés of some sort; they believed him to be a Canadian who had been in the town for some time with a broken down motorcycle and no money. He undoubtedly would eventually receive money and he had sent for the part that he needed for his motorcycle to Madrid but it had not come. Everyone liked him in the town and they wished that he were there so I might meet a compatriot who might even be a fellow townsman. He had gone off somewhere painting but they said someone could go off and find him and bring him in. The interesting thing the innkeeper said was that this compatriot of mine spoke absolutely no Spanish at all except one word, joder. He was known as Mr. Joder and if I wished to leave any message for him I could leave it with the innkeeper. I wondered what message I should leave for this compatriot with such a decisive name and finally decided to leave a fifty peseta folded in a certain way that old travelers in Spain may be familiar with. Everyone was delighted at that and they all promised that Mr. Joder would surely spend the ten duros that night without leaving the bar but that he and his wife would be sure to get him to eat something.

  I asked them how Mr. Joder painted and the transport man said, “Hombre he is neither Velázquez nor Goya nor Martínez de León. That I promise you. But times are changing and who are we to criticize?” Miss Mary came down from the high room where she had been photographing and said that she had taken good and clear pictures of the storks but that they would be worthless because she had no telescopic lens. We paid up and drank cold beer on the house and all said good-bye and drove out of the square and the blinding light on the steep climb above the town to the high country toward Segovia. I stopped above the town and looked back and saw the male stork come in with his lovely flight to the nest on the top of the church tower. He had been down by the river where the women beat the clothes and later on we had seen a covey of partridges cross the road and later in the same lonely high bracken country we had seen a wolf.

  That was this same year when we had been in Spain on the way to Africa and now we were in a yellow green forest that had been destroyed by elephants about the same time that we were riding across the high country to Segovia. In a world where this could happen I had small time for sorrow. I had been sure that I would never see Spain again and I had returned only to show Mary the Prado. Since I remembered all the pictures that I loved truly and so owned them as though I possessed them there was no need for me to see them again before I died. But it was very important that I should see them with Mary if that were possible and could be done without compromise or indignity. Also I wanted her to see Navarre and the two Castiles and I wanted her to see a wolf in high country and storks nesting in a village. I had wanted to show her the paw of a bear nailed onto the door of the church in Barco de Avila but it was too much to expect that would still be there. But we had found the storks quite easily and would find more and we had seen the wolf and had looked down on Segovia from a near and pleasant height, coming onto it naturally on a road that tourists did not take but that travelers would come by naturally. There are no such roads anymore around Toledo but you can still see Segovia as you would see it if you walked over the high country and we studied the city as though it were being seen for the first time by people who had never known it was there but had always lived to see it.

  There is a virginity that you, in theory only, bring once to a beautiful city or a great painting. This is only a theory and I think it is untrue. All the things that I have loved I bring this to each time but it is lovely to bring someone else to it and it helps the loneliness. Mary had loved Spain and Africa and had learned the secret things naturally and hardly without knowing she had learned them. I never explained the secret things to her; only the technical things or the comic things and my own greatest pleasure came from her own discovering. It is stupid to expect or hope that a woman that you love should love all the things that you do. But Mary had loved the sea and living on a small boat and she loved fishing. She loved pictures and she had loved the West of the United States when we had first gone there together. She never simulated anything and this was a great gift to be given as I had been associated with a great simulator of everything and life with a true simulator gives a man a very unattractive view of many things and he can begin to cherish loneliness rather than to wish to share anything.

  Now this morning with the day becoming hot and the cool wind from the Mountain not having risen we were working out a new trail out of the forest that the elephants had destroyed. After we came out into the open prairie land after having to cut our way through a couple of bad places we saw the first great flock of storks feeding. They were true European storks black and white and red-legged and they were working on the caterpillars as though they were German storks and under orders. Miss Mary liked them and they meant much to her since we had both been worried about the article that said that storks were becoming extinct and now we found that they had merely had good sense enough to come to Africa as we had done ourselves; but they did not take away her sorrow and we went on toward camp. I did not know what to do about Miss Mary’s sorrow. It was proofed against eagles and proofed against storks, against neither of which I had any defense at all, and I began to know how great a sorrow it really was.

  “What have you been thinking of all morning when you’ve been so uncommonly silent?”

  “About birds and places and how nice you are.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “I didn’t do it as a spiritual exercise.”

  “I’ll be all right. People don’t just jump in and out of bottomless pits.”

  “They’re going to make it an event in the next Olympic Games.”

  “You’ll probably win it.”

  “I have my backers.”

  “Your backers are all dead like my lion. You probably shot all your backers one day when you were feeling especially wonderful.”

  “Look there’s another field of storks.”

  Africa is a dangerous place for a great sorrow to live very long when there are only two people in a camp and when it gets dark shortly after six o’clock in the evening. We did not talk about lions nor think about them anymore and the emptiness where Mary’s sorrow had lived was filling again with the routine and the strange fine life and the coming of the night. When the fire burned down I pulled a long heavy dead tree from the pile of deadwood the lorry had brought in the afternoon onto the coals and we sat in our chairs and watched the night breeze blow the coals up and watched the wood catch fire. This night breeze was a small wind that came off the snows of the Mountain. It was so light that you only felt its coolness but you could see it in the fire. You can see the wind in many ways but the loveliest is at night in the brightening and the lowering and raising of the flame in your fire.

  “We’re never alone with our fire,” Mary said. “I’m glad now there is only us and our fire. Will that log burn until morning?”

  “I think so,” I said. “If the wind doesn’t rise.”

  “It’s strange now without
the lion to look forward to in the morning and you haven’t any problems or worries now, have you?”

  “No. Everything is quiet now,” I lied.

  “Do you miss all the problems you and G.C. had?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe now we can get some really beautiful pictures of the buffalo and other fine color pictures. Where do you think the buffalo have gone?”