We started off; the tires taking hold very well on the drying track; me leaning out with both boots outside the cutout door; the morning air cold off the Mountain; the rifle feeling good. I put it to my shoulder and aimed a few times. Even with the big yellow light concentrating glasses I saw that there was not enough light yet to shoot safely. But it was twenty minutes to where we were going and the light was strengthening every minute.
“Light’s going to be fine,” I said.
“I thought it would,” Mary said. I looked around. She was sitting with great dignity and she was chewing gum.
We went up the track past the improvised airstrip. There was game everywhere and the new grass seemed to have grown an inch since the morning of the day before. There were white flowers coming up too, solid in the spread of the grass and making the whole field white. There was still some water in the low parts of the tracks and I motioned to Mthuka to turn off the track to the left to avoid some standing water. The flowered grass was slippery. The light was getting better all the time.
Mthuka saw the birds perched heavily in the two trees off the right beyond the next two glades and pointed. If they were still up it should mean the lion was on the kill. Ngui slapped on the top of the car with the palm of his hand and we stopped. I remember thinking that it was strange that Mthuka should have seen the birds before Ngui when Ngui was much higher. Ngui dropped to the ground and came alongside of the car crouching so his body would not break its outline. He grabbed my foot and pointed to the left toward the belt of forest.
The great black-maned lion, his body looking almost black and his large head and shoulders swinging, was trotting into the tall grass.
“You see him?” I asked Mary softly.
“I see him.”
He was into the grass now and only his head and shoulders showed; then only his head; the grass swaying and closing behind him. He had evidently heard the car or else he had started for the forest early and seen us coming up the road.
“There’s no sense you going in here,” I said to Mary.
“I know all that,” she said. “If we’d have been out earlier we would have found him.”
“It wasn’t light enough to shoot. If you had wounded him I’d have had to follow him in there.”
“We’d have had to follow him.”
“The hell with the we stuff.”
“How do you propose to get him then?” She was angry but only angry with the prospect of action and a termination gone and not stupid in her anger so that she could expect to demand to be allowed to go into grass taller than her head after a wounded lion.
“I expect him to get confident when he sees us drive on now without even going over to his kill.” Then I interrupted to say, “Get in, Ngui. Go ahead poli poli Mthuka.” Then feeling Ngui beside me and the car proceeding slowly along the track with my two friends and brothers watching the vultures perched in the trees, I said to Mary, “What do you think Pop would have done? Chased him into the grass and the down timber and taken you in where you’re not tall enough to see? What are we supposed to do? Get you killed or kill the lion?”
“Don’t embarrass Charo with your shouting.”
“I wasn’t shouting.”
“You ought to hear yourself sometime.”
“Listen,” I whispered.
“Don’t say listen and don’t whisper. And don’t say on your own two feet and when the chips are down.”
“You certainly make lion hunting lovely sometimes. How many people have betrayed you in it so far?”
“Pop and you and I don’t remember who else. G.C. probably will too. If you know so much you lion-hunting general who knows everything why haven’t the birds come down if the lion’s left the kill?”
“Because either one or both of the lionesses are still on it or laying up close to it?”
“Aren’t we going to see?”
“From further up the road and so as not to spook anything. I want them all to be confident.”
“Now I’m getting a little tired of the phrase, ‘I want them to be confident.’ If you can’t vary your thinking you could try to vary your language.”
“How long have you been hunting this lion, honey?”
“It seems like forever and I could have killed him three months ago if you and G.C. would have let me. I had an easy chance and you wouldn’t let me take him.”
“Because we didn’t know he was this lion. He might have been a lion that had come from Amboseli with the drought. G.C. has a conscience.”
“Both of you have the consciences of bush-wacky delinquents,” Miss Mary said. “When will we see the lionesses?”
“To your right bearing forty-five degrees about three hundred more yards up this track.”
“And what Force is the wind?”
“About Force Two,” I said. “Honey, you are a little lion-wacky.”
“Who has more right to be? Of course I am. But I take lions seriously.”
“I do too, really. And I think I care as much about them as you do even if I don’t talk about it.”