I thought how lucky we were this time in Africa to be living long enough in one place so that we knew the individual animals and knew the snake holes and the snakes that lived in them. When I had first been in Africa we were always in a hurry to move from one place to another to hunt beasts for trophies. If you saw a cobra it was an accident as it would be to find a rattler on the road in Wyoming. Now we knew many places where cobras lived. We still discovered them by accident but they were in the area where we lived and we could return to them afterwards and when, by accident, we killed a snake he was the snake who lived in a particular place and hunted his area as we lived in ours and moved out from it. It was G.C. who had given us this great privilege of getting to know and live in a wonderful part of the country and have some work to do that justified our presence there and I always felt deeply grateful to him.
The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me. I still loved to shoot and to kill cleanly. But I was shooting for the meat we needed to eat and to back up Miss Mary and against beasts that had been outlawed for cause and for what is known as control of marauding animals, predators and vermin. I had shot one impala for a trophy and an oryx for meat at Magadi which turned out to have fine enough horns to make it a trophy and I had shot a single buffalo in an emergency which served for meat at Magadi when we were very short and which had a pair of horns worth keeping to recall the manner of the small emergency Mary and I had shared. I remembered it now with happiness and I knew I would always remember it with happiness. It was one of those small things that you can go to sleep with, that you can wake with in the night and that you could recall if necessary if you were ever tortured.
“Do you remember the morning with the buff, kittner?” I asked.
She looked across the mess table and said, “Don’t ask me things like that. I’m thinking about the lion.”
That night after cold supper we went to bed early, since Mary had written her diary in the late afternoon, and lay in bed listening to the heaviness of the rain on that taut canvas.
But in spite of the steady noise of the rain I did not sleep well and I woke twice sweating with nightmares. The last one was a very bad one and I reached out under the mosquito net and felt for the water bottle and the square flask of gin. I brought it into the bed with me and then tucked the netting back under the blanket and the air mattress of the cot. In the dark I rolled my pillow up so I could lay back with my head against it and found the small balsam-needle pillow and put it under my neck. Then I felt for my pistol alongside my leg and for the electric torch and then unscrewed the top of the flask of gin.
In the dark with the heavy noise of the rain I took a swallow of the gin. It tasted clean and friendly and made me brave against the nightmare. The nightmare had been about as bad as they come and I have had some bad ones in my time. I knew I could not drink while we were hunting Miss Mary’s lion; but we would not be hunting him tomorrow in the wet. Tonight was a bad night for some reason. I had been spoiled by too many good nights and I had come to think that I did not have nightmares anymore. Well I knew now. Perhaps it was because the tent was so battened down against the rain that there was no proper ventilation. Perhaps it was because I had had no exercise all day.
I took another swallow of the gin and it tasted even better and more like the old Giant Killer. It had not been such an exceptional nightmare, I thought. I’ve had much worse than that. But what I knew was that I had been through with nightmares, the real ones that could drench you in sweat, for a long time and I had only had good or bad dreams and most of the night they were good dreams. Then I heard Mary say, “Papa are you drinking?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Could I have some too?”
I reached the flask over from under the net and she put her hand out and took it.
“Do you have the water?”
“Yes,” I said and reached it over too. “You have yours too by your bed.”
“But you told me to be careful about things and I did not want to wake you with the light.”
“Poor kitten. Haven’t you slept?”
“Yes. But I had the most awful dreams. Too bad to tell before breakfast.”
“I had some bad ones too.”
“Here’s the Jinny flask back,” she said. “In case you need it. Hold my hand tight, please. You aren’t dead and G.C. isn’t dead and Pop isn’t dead.”
“No. We’re all fine.”
“Thank you so much. And you sleep too. You don’t love anybody else do you? White I mean?”
“No. Not white nor black nor red all over.”
“Sleep well, my blessed,” she said. “Thank you for the lovely midnight drink.”
“Thank you for killing the nightmares.”
“That’s one of the things I’m for,” she said.