We left him undisturbed but magnificently and stupidly alert after his tick birds had left him and swung wide downwind of him to come out, finally, onto the salt flats that stretched toward the edge of the marsh. There would be very little moon that night and the lions would be hunting and I wondered how it would be for the game knowing the night was coming on. The game had no security ever but on these nights the least of all and I thought how it was on a dark night like tonight the great python would come out from the swamp to the edge of the flats to lie coiled and waiting. Ngui and I had followed his track once into the swamp and it was like following the single track of an oversize lorry tire. Sometimes he sunk so that it was like a deep rut.
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.”
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.
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.