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.
“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?”