“When are you going to write your reminiscences, G.C.?” I asked. “Don’t you know old men forget?”
“I hadn’t really thought much of writing them.”
“You’ll have to. There’s not many of the really old timers left. You could start on the early phases now. Get in the early volumes. Far Away and Long Ago in Abyssinia would be a good one to start with. Skip the university and bohemian times in London and the Continent and cut to A Youngster with the Fuzzy Wuzzies then move into your early days as a Game Ranger while you can still recall them.”
“Could I use that inimitable style you carved out of a walnut stick in An Unwed Mother on the Italian Front?” G.C. asked. “I always liked that the best of your books except for Under Two Flags. That was yours wasn’t it?”
“No. Mine was The Death of a Guardsman.”
“Good book too,” G.C. said. “I never told you but I modeled my life on that book. Mummy gave it to me when I went away to school.”
“You don’t really want to go out on this measurement nonsense do you?” I said hopefully.
“I do.”
“Should we take neutral witnesses?”
“There are none. We’ll walk it ourselves.”
“Let’s get out then. I’ll see if Miss Mary’s still sleeping.”
She was sleeping and she had drunk her tea and looked as though she might well sleep for another two hours. Her lips were closed and her face was smooth as ivory against the pillow. She was breathing easily but as she moved her head I could tell that she was dreaming.
I picked up the rifle where Ngui had hung it on a tree and climbed into the Land Rover beside G.C. We went and finally picked up the old tracks and found where Miss Mary had shot the lion. Many things were changed as they always are on any old battlefield but we found her empty cartridges and G.C.’s and off to the left we found mine. I put one in my pocket.
“Now I’ll drive to where he was killed and then you pace it on a straight line.”
I watched him go off in the car, his brown hair shining in the early morning sun; the big dog looking back at me and then turning to look straight ahead. When the Land Rover made a circle and stopped this side of the heavy clump of trees and bush I put my toe a pace to the left of the most westerly of the ejected shells and started to pace toward the vehicle counting as I paced. I carried the rifle over my shoulder holding it by the barrel with my right hand and when I started the Land Rover looked very small and foreshortened. The big dog was out and G.C. was walking around. They looked very small too and sometimes I could only see the dog’s head and neck. When I got to the Land Rover I stopped where the grass was bent where the lion had first lain.
“How many?” G.C. asked and I told him. He shook his head and asked, “Did you bring the Jinny flask?”
“Yes.”
We each took a drink.
“We never, never tell anybody how long a shot it was,” G.C. said. “Drunk or sober with shits or decent people.”
“Never.”
“Now we’ll set the speedometer and you drive it back in a straight line and I’ll pace it.”
There was a couple of paces’ difference in our tallies and a slight discrepancy between the speedometer reading and the paces so we cut four paces off the whole thing. Then we drove back to camp watching the Mountain and feeling sad because we would not hunt together again until Christmas.
After G.C. and his people were gone I was alone with Miss Mary’s sorrow. I was not really alone because there was also Miss Mary and the camp and our own people and the big mountain of Kilimanjaro that everyone called Kibo and all the animals and the birds and the new fields of flowers and the worms that hatched out of the ground to eat the flowers. There were the brown eagles that came to feed on the worms so that eagles were as common as chickens and eagles wearing long brown trousers of feathers and other white-headed eagles walked together with the guinea fowl busily eating the worms. The worms made an armistice among all the birds and they all walked together. Then great flocks of European storks came to eat the worms and there would be acres of storks moving on a single stretch of plain grown high with the white flowers. Miss Mary’s sorrow resisted the eagles because eagles did not mean as much to her as they did to me.
She had never lain under juniper bush up above timberline at the top of a pass in our own mountains with a .22 rifle waiting for eagles to come to a dead horse that had been a bear bait until the bear was killed. Now he was an eagle bait and then afterwards he would be a bear bait again. The eagles were sailing very high when you first saw them. You had crawled under the bush when it was still dark and you had seen the eagles come out of the sun when it had cleared the opposite peak of the pass. This peak was just a rise of grassy hill with a rock outcropping at the top and scattered juniper bushes on the slope. The country was all high there and very easy traveling once you had come this high and the eagles had come from far away toward the snow mountains you could have seen if you had been standing instead of lying under the bush. There were three eagles and they wheeled and soared and rode the currents and you watched them until the sun spotted your eyes. Then you closed them and through the red the sun was still there. You opened them and looked to the side limit of the blind of the sun and you could see the spread pinions and the wide fanned tails and feel the eyes in the big heads watching. It had been cold in the early morning and you looked out at the horse and his too old and too exposed now teeth that you had always had to lift his lip to see. He had a kind and rubbery lip and when you had led him to this place to die and dropped the halter he had stood as he had always been taught to stand and when you had stroked him on the blaze on his black head where the gray hairs showed he had reached down to nip you on the neck with his lips. He had looked down to see the saddled horse you had left in the last edge of the timber as though he were wondering what he was doing here and what was the new game. You had remembered how wonderfully he had always seen in the dark and how you had hung on to his tail with a bear hide packed across the saddle to come down trails when you could not see at all and when the trail led along the rimrock in the dark down through the timber. He was always right and he understood all new games.
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.