True at First Light полностью

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.

Charo Mary Hemingway’s gun bearer. Hemingway is at pains to point out, in this story, the space and time aspect of ethical behavior in different cultures. Western ethics allows polygamy and polyandry sequentially by death or divorce but a person can have only one spouse at a time. Mary is married to a spouse at the time of this story who has, within the ethical framework of the West, already had two spouses by divorce and a third, Pauline, by both divorce and death. Mary, who has been married before twice herself, is protected from her husband taking a second wife by the ethics of the West, but not from sequential polygamy, which troubles her a great deal. It is what lies behind her desire to kill a lion, not in the way Pauline did twenty years before, but in a new and superior way. Charo was Pauline’s gun bearer on that other safari.

Mwengi Philip Percival’s gun bearer.

Arap Meina A game scout. A game scout was the lowest ranked game law enforcement officer in Kenya. There were no white game scouts. At the time of this safari there were no black game rangers. It is perhaps just a coincidence that Arap Meina has the same name as the young Kipsigis warrior who took Beryl Markham on the spear hunt for warthog in West with the Night and who was later killed in the First World War.

Chungo A handsome, spit-and-polish head game scout who works for G.C. He might remind readers of Denzel Washington as the Duke in the splendid movie version of Much Ado About Nothing.