We found the tracks of the two lionesses on the flat and then along the trail. One was very large and we expected to see them lying up but did not. The lion, I thought, was probably over by the old abandoned Masai Manyatta and he might be the lion that had been raiding the Masai we had visited that morning. But that was conjecture and no evidence to kill him on. Tonight I would listen to them hunt and tomorrow if we saw them I would be able to identify them again. G.C. had said, originally, we might have to take four or perhaps six lion out of the area. We had taken three and the Masai had killed a fourth and wounded another.
“I don’t want to go over too close to the swamp, so we won’t give our wind to the buff and maybe they will feed out in the open tomorrow,” I told Mary and she agreed. So we started back toward home on foot and Ngui and I read the sign on the flats as we walked.
“We’ll get out early, honey,” I said to Mary, “and there is a better than fair chance we’ll find the buff in the open.”
“We’ll go to bed early and make love and listen to the night.”
“Wonderful.”
20
WE WERE IN bed and it was quite cold and I lay curled against the tent side of the cot and it was lovely under the sheet and the blankets. No one has any size in bed, you are all the same size and dimensions are perfect when you love each other and we lay and felt the blankets against the cold and our own warmth that came slowly and we whispered quietly and then listened when the first hyena broke into the sudden flamenco singing noise as though he were blasting into a loudspeaker in the night. He was close to the tent and then there was another one behind the lines and I knew the drying meat and the buffalo out beyond the lines had brought them. Mary could imitate them and she did it very softly under the blankets.
“You’ll have them in the tent,” I said. Then we heard the lion roar off to the north toward the old Manyatta and after we had heard him we heard the coughing grunts of the lioness and we knew they were hunting. We thought we could hear the two lionesses and then we heard another lion roar a long way away.
“I wish we did not have to ever leave Africa,” Mary said.
“I’d like never to leave here.”
“Bed?”
“We’d have to leave bed in the daytime. No, this camp.”
“I love it too.”
“Then why do we have to go?”
“Maybe there will be more wonderful places. Don’t you want to see the most wonderful places before you die?”
“No.”
“Well, we’re here now. Let’s not think of going away.”
“Good.”
The hyena slipped into night song again and took it far up past where it was possible. Then broke it sharply off three times.
Mary imitated him and we laughed and the cot seemed a fine big bed and we were comfortable and at home in it. Afterwards she said, “When I’m asleep, just straighten out good and take your rightful share of the bed and I’ll get into mine.”
“I’ll tuck you in.”
“No, you stay asleep. I can tuck myself in asleep.”
“Let’s go to sleep now.”
“Good. But don’t let me stay and you be cramped.”
“I won’t be.”
“Good night, my dearest sweet.”
“Good night, dear lovely.”
As we went to sleep we could hear the closer lion making deep heavy grunts and far away the other lion roaring and we held each other hard and gently and went to sleep.
I was asleep when Mary went to her bed and I did not wake until the lion roared quite close to camp. He seemed to shake the guy ropes of the tent and his heavy coughing was very close. He must have been out beyond the lines but he sounded, when he woke me, as though he were going through the camp. Then he roared again and I knew how far away he was. He must be just at the edge of the track that ran down to the landing strip. I listened as he moved away and then I went back to sleep.
Cast of Characters
The Narrator The author, who never in his whole life ever kept a journal, is writing, a year after the events that inspired it, a story in the first person. As he once remarked to his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, “We’re just sitting cross-legged in a bazaar and if people aren’t interested in what we’re saying they’ll go away.”
Mary Ernest Hemingway’s fourth and last wife.
Philip (Mr. P., Pop) Philip Percival, the longest lived and most knowledgeable of all white hunters, who guided, among many others, Teddy Roosevelt and George Eastman, and whose physical appearance Hemingway used to disguise Baron Bror von Blixen as the model for the white hunter in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
Gin Crazed (G.C.) The game warden of the Kajiado District of the British administration of what was then Kenya Colony. This was a very large area comprising most of the game country south of Nairobi and north of the Tanganyika (now Tanzania) border with Kenya. At no time during their safari except for their taking the whole outfit down to visit their son and daughter-in-law in southern Tanganyika did the Hemingways hunt outside the Kajiado District.
Harry Dunn A senior police officer in the same administration.
Willie A commercial bush pilot. Like all pilots who do not bomb civilians, a very noble character.
Keiti The chief and the authority figure of the white hunter’s safari crew. His Edwardian opinions as to what was appropriate behavior on the part of Europeans differed little from those of the butler in the movie many readers may have seen: The Remains of the Day, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.
Mwindi Under Keiti, the person in charge of the safari household servants.
Nguili A steward and apprentice cook.
Msembi A steward.
Mbebia The safari cook, a highly skilled and important job. The daughter of the last governor general of the Belgian Congo, whom together with her husband I was guiding on a month’s shooting safari, told me that the roast wild duck that she had just eaten was better than the one she had enjoyed last at the Tour d’Argent in Paris. The first of these cooks learned their craft from European ladies who knew their cooking. There is a fine account of the training of such a cook in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.
Mthuka A black African driver. The generation of white hunters to which I belonged, who learned their trade after World War II, drove shooting breaks that they designed and owned themselves and which were not part of the equipment provided by the safari outfitter, but that was not the case with the Hemingways’ safari. Percival used a shooting break supplied by the outfitter and it was driven by Mthuka. Hemingway, when he took over the safari crew from Percival, had Mthuka drive for him as well.
Ngui Hemingway’s gun bearer and tracker. No one who liked big-game hunting and was fit enough to do it would have ever let his rifle be carried by a gun bearer. The term really meant a native guide as that term was used in Maine or Canada. A gun bearer was expected to have all the skills that General Baden-Powell and Ernest Thompson Seton thought a Boy Scout should. He had to know the animals and their habits, the useful properties of wild plants, how to track, especially how to follow a blood spoor, and how to look after himself and others in the African bush, in short, a Leather-Stocking or Crocodile Dundee.