I had not known whether to go back and find the kongoni and run the risk of shooting and perhaps having him leave that country with the sound of the rifle shot. But we needed meat and this was a country where there was not much meat and all the game was wild because there were so many predators. You never killed a zebra that did not have black, riven lion claw scars on his hide and the zebra were as shy and unapproachable as desert oryx. It was a buffalo, rhino, lion and leopard country and nobody liked to hunt it except G.C. and Pop and it made Pop nervous. G.C. had so many nerves that he had ended by having no nerves and he never admitted the presence of danger until he had shot his way out of it. But Pop had said that he never had hunted this country without having trouble and he had hunted it, making the trek across the deadly flats at night to avoid the heat, which could be one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, many years before G.C. had been here or motor cars had been brought to East Africa.
I was thinking of this when we saw the tracks of the lion and afterwards, when we started to maneuver the kongoni, I thought only of that. But the lion track was in my mind as though it had been branded there and I knew that Mary, from having seen other lions, had imagined him as he must have looked coming along that trail. We had killed the highly edible, horse-faced, awkward, tawny kongoni, which was as innocent or more innocent than anything could be and Mary had finished it with a shot where the neck joins the head. She had done this to perfect her shooting and because it was necessary and someone must do it.
Sitting there in the tent I thought how abhorrent this would be to real vegetarians but everyone who has ever eaten meat must know that someone has killed it and since Mary, having engaged in killing, wanted to kill without inflicting suffering, it was necessary for her to learn and to practice. Those who never catch fish, not even a tin of sardines, and who will stop their cars if there are locusts on the road, and have never eaten even meat broth should not condemn those who kill to eat and to whom the meat belonged to before the white men stole their country. Who knows what the carrot feels, or the small young radish, or the used electric light bulb, or the worn phonograph disc, or the apple tree in winter. Who knows the feelings of the overaged aircraft, the chewed gum, the cigarette butt or the discarded book riddled by woodworms? In my copy of the regulations of the Game Department not one of these cases was treated nor was there any regulation about the treatment of yaws and of venereal disease which was one of my daily duties. There were no regulations regarding the fallen limbs of trees nor dust nor biting flies, other than Tsetse; see Fly Areas. The hunters who took out licenses to hunt and were allowed by valid permits to hunt for a limited time in certain of the Masai countries which had formerly been reserves and were now controlled areas kept a schedule of what beasts they were permitted to kill and then paid a very nominal fee which was later paid to the Masai. But the Wakamba, who used to hunt at great risk to themselves in the Masai country for meat, were not permitted now to do so. They were hunted down as poachers by Game Scouts, who were also, mostly, Wakamba, and G.C. and Mary thought Game Scouts were better loved than they were.
Game Scouts were nearly all of them a very high type of soldier who had come from the hunting Wakamba. But things were getting very difficult Ukambani. They had farmed their land in their own and their old fashion but shortening the fallow that should last a generation as the Wakamba grew and their land did not, it had eroded along with all the rest of Africa. Their warriors had always fought in all of Britain’s wars and the Masai had never fought in any. The Masai had been coddled, preserved, treated with a fear that they should never have inspired and been adored by all the homosexuals like Thessinger who had worked for the Empire in Kenya or Tanganyika because the men were so beautiful. The men were very beautiful, extremely rich, were professional warriors who, now for a long time, would never fight. They had always been drug addicts and now they were becoming alcoholics.
The Masai never killed game but only cared about their cattle. Trouble between the Masai and the Wakamba was always over cattle stealing, never over the killing of game.
The Wakamba hated the Masai as rich show-offs protected by the government. They despised them as men whose women were completely faithless and nearly always syphilitic and as men who could not track because their eyes were destroyed by filth diseases carried by flies; because their spears bent after they had been used a single time and finally, and most of all, because they were only brave when under the influence of drugs.