“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 and 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.