“But I want to go out after him.”
She was in obvious pain and I could see it coming back on her again.
“Honey, we’ll lay off him this morning and rest him. It’s the best thing to do anyway. You take it easy and take care of yourself. G.C. can stay a couple of more days anyway.”
G.C. shook his hand, palm down, in negation. But Mary did not see him.
“He’s your lion and you take your time and be in shape to shoot him and all the time we let him alone he will be getting more confident. If we don’t go out at all this morning it’s much better.”
I went over to the car and said we were not going out. Then I went and found Keiti by the fire. He seemed to know all about it but he was very delicate and polite.
“Memsahib is sick.”
“I know.”
“Maybe spaghetti. Maybe dysentery.”
“Yes,” Keiti said. “I think spaghetti.”
“Meat too old.”
“Yes. Maybe little piece. Made in the dark.”
“We leave lion alone take care of Memsahib. The lion gets confident.”
“Mzuri,” Keiti said. “Poli poli. You shoot kwali or kanga. Mbebia make Memsahib broth.”
After we were sure that the lion would have left the bait if he had been on it G.C. and I went out to have a look at the country in his Land Rover.
I asked Ngui for a bottle. It was wrapped in a wet sack and was still cold from the night and we sat in the Land Rover in the shade of the tree and drank it out of the bottle and looked off across the dried mud flat and watched the small Tommies and the black movement of the wildebeest and the zebra that looked a gray white in this light as they moved out across the flat to the grass on the far side and at the end toward the Chulu hills. The hills were a dark blue this morning and looked very far away. When we turned to look back at the great Mountain it looked very close. It seemed to be just behind camp and the snow was heavy and bright in the sun.
“We could hunt Miss Mary on stilts,” I said. “Then she could see him in the tall grass.”
“There’s nothing in the Game Laws against it.”
“Or Charo could carry a stepladder such as they have in libraries for the higher stacks.”
“That’s brilliant,” G.C. said. “We’d pad the rungs and she could take a rest with the rifle on the rung above where she stood.”
“You don’t think it would be too immobile?”
“It’d be up to Charo to make it mobile.”
“It would be a beautiful sight,” I said. “We could mount an electric fan on it.”
“We could build it in the form of an electric fan,” G.C. said happily. “But that would probably be considered a vehicle and illegal.”
“If we rolled it forward and had Miss Mary keep climbing in it like a squirrel would it be illegal?”
“Anything that rolls is a vehicle,” G.C. said judicially.
“I roll slightly when I walk.”
“Then you’re a vehicle. I’ll run you and you’ll get six months and be shipped out of the Colony.”
“We have to be careful, G.C.”
“Care and moderation have been our watchwords haven’t they?”
“Any more in that bottle?”
“We can share the dregs.”
THE DAY THAT Miss Mary shot her lion was a very beautiful day. That was about all that was beautiful about it. White flowers had blossomed in the night so that with the first daylight before the sun had risen all the meadows looked as though a full moon was shining on new snow through a mist. Mary was up and dressed long before first light. The right sleeve of her bush jacket was rolled up and she had checked all the rounds in her Mannlicher .256. She said she did not feel well and I believed her. She acknowledged G.C.’s and my greetings briefly and we were careful not to make any jokes. I did not know what she had against G.C. except his tendency to lightheartedness in the face of undeniably serious work. Her being angry at me was a sound reaction, I thought. If she were in a bad mood I thought she might feel mean and shoot as deadly as I knew she knew how to shoot. This agreed with my last and greatest theory that she had too kind a heart to kill animals. Some people shoot easily and loosely; others shoot with a dreadful speed that is still so controlled that they have all the time they need to place the bullet as carefully as a surgeon would make his first incision; others are mechanical shots who are very deadly unless something happens to interfere with the mechanics of the shooting. This morning it looked as though Miss Mary was going out to shoot with grim resolution, contemptuous of all those who did not take things with appropriate seriousness, armored in her bad physical condition, which provided an excuse if she missed, and full of rigid, concentrated do-or-die deadliness. It seemed fine to me. It was a new approach.