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.
I went over to the dining tent and told Nguili, who was tidying it up, what I wanted for breakfast. It was an egg sandwich with the egg fried firm with either ham or bacon and sliced raw onion. If there was any fruit I would have some and first I would have a bottle of Tusker beer.
G.C. and I nearly always drank beer for breakfast unless we were hunting lion. Beer before or at breakfast was a fine thing but it slowed you up, possibly a thousandth of a second. On the other hand it made things seem better sometimes when they were not too good and it was very good for you if you had stayed up too late and had gastric remorse.
Nguili opened the bottle of beer and poured a glass. He loved to pour beer and see that the foam rose just at the very last and topped the glass without spilling. He was very good-looking, almost as good-looking as a girl without being at all effeminate and G.C. used to tease him and ask him if he plucked his eyebrows. He may very well have since one of the great amusements of primitive people is to arrange and rearrange their appearance and it has nothing to do with being homosexual. But G.C. used to tease him too much, I thought, and because he was shy, friendly and very devoted, an excellent mess attendant who worshipped the hunters and fighters, we used to take him hunting with us sometimes. Everyone made fun of him a little for his wonderful surprise at and ignorance of animals. But he learned every time he was out and we all teased him lovingly. We all regarded any form of wound or disaster to one of us which was not crippling nor fatal as extremely comic and this was hard on this boy who was delicate and gentle and loving. He wanted to be a warrior and a hunter but instead he was an apprentice cook and a mess attendant. In the meantime that we lived in and were all so happy in that year, one of his great pleasures, since he was not yet allowed by tribal law to drink, was to pour beer for those who were allowed to drink it.
“Did you hear the leopard?” I asked him.
“No, Bwana, I sleep too hard.”
He went off to get the sandwich which he had called out to the cook to make and he hurried back to pour more beer.