LONG BEFORE IT was light in the morning Mwindi woke us with the tea. He said “Hodi” and left the tea outside the door of the tent on the table. I took a cup in to Mary and dressed outside. It was overcast and you could not see the stars.
Charo and Ngui came in the dark to get the guns and the cartridges and I took my tea out to the table where one of the boys who served the mess tent was building up the fire. Mary was washing and getting dressed, still between sleeping and waking. I walked out on the open ground beyond the elephant skull and the three big bushes and found the ground was still quite damp underfoot. It had dried during the night and it would be much drier than the day before. But I still doubted if we could take the car much past where I figured the lion had killed and I was sure it would be too wet beyond there and between there and the swamp.
The swamp was really misnamed. There was an actual papyrus swamp with much flowing water in it that was a mile and a half across and perhaps four miles long. But the locality that we referred to as the swamp also consisted of the area of big trees that surrounded it. Many of these were on comparatively high ground and some were very beautiful. They made a band of forest around the true swamp but there were parts of this timber that had been so pulled down by feeding elephants that it was almost impassable. There were several rhino that lived in this forest; there were nearly always some elephant now and sometimes there was a great herd of elephant. Two herds of buffalo used it. Leopards lived in the deep part of this forest and hunted out of it and it was the refuge of the particular lion when he came down to feed on the game of the plains.
This forest of great, tall and fallen trees was the western boundary of the open and wooded plain and the beautiful glades that were bounded on the north by the flat salt flats and the broken lava rock country that led to the other great marsh that lay between our country and the Chulu hills. On the east was the miniature desert that was the gerenuk country and further to the east was a country of bushy broken hills that later rose in height toward the flanks of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was not as simple as that but that was how it seemed from a map or from the center of the plain and the glades country.
The lion’s habit was to kill on the plain or in the broken glades during the night and then, having eaten, retire to the belt of forest. Our plan was to locate him on his kill and stalk him there, or to have the luck to intercept him on his way to the forest. If he got enough confidence so that he would not go all the way to the forest we could track him up from the kill to wherever he might lie up after he had gone for water.
While Mary was dressing and then making her way on the track across the meadow to the belt of trees where the green canvas latrine tent was hidden, I was thinking about the lion. We must take him on if there was any chance of success. Mary had shot well and was confident. But if there was only a chance of frightening him or of spooking him into high grass or difficult country where she could not see him because of her height, we should leave him alone to become confident. I hoped we would find that he had gone off after he had fed, drunk at some of the surface water that still lay in the mud holes of the plain, and then gone to sleep in one of the brush islands of the plain or the patches of trees in the glades.
The car was ready with Mthuka at the wheel and I had checked all the guns when Mary came back. It was light now but not light enough to shoot. The clouds were still well down the slopes of the Mountain and there was no sign of the sun except that the light was strengthening. I looked through the sights of my rifle at the elephant skull but it was still too dark to shoot. Charo and Ngui were both very serious and formal.
“How do you feel, kitten?” I said to Mary.
“Wonderful. How did you think I’d feel?”
“Did you use the Eygene?”
“Of course,” she said. “Did you?”
“Yes. We’re just waiting for it to get a little lighter.”
“It’s light enough for me.”
“It isn’t for me.”
“You ought to do something about your eyes.”
“I told them we’d be back for breakfast.”
“That will give me a headache.”
“We brought some stuff. It’s in a box back there.”
“Does Charo have plenty of ammo for me?”
“Ask him.”
Mary spoke to Charo, who said he had “Mingi risasi.”
“Want to roll your right sleeve up?” I asked. “You asked me to remind you.”
“I didn’t ask you to remind me in an evil bad temper.”
“Why don’t you get angry at the lion instead of me?”
“I’m not angry at the lion in any way. Do you think there is enough light for you to see now?”
“Kwenda na Simba,” I said to Mthuka. Then to Ngui, “Stand up in back to watch.”