In the night I woke and could not get back to sleep. I woke very suddenly and it was absolutely quiet. Then I heard Mary’s regular, smooth breathing and I had a feeling of relief that we would not have to pit her against the lion every morning. Then I began to feel sorrow that the lion’s death had not been as she hoped it would be and as she planned it. With the celebration and the really wild dance and the love of all her friends and their allegiance to her the disappointment that she felt had been anesthetized. But I was sure that after the more than a hundred mornings that she had gone out after a great lion the disappointment would return. She did not know the danger she had been in. Maybe she did and I did not know. Neither G.C. nor I wanted to tell her because we had both cut it too fine and we had not soaked in sweat that way in the cool of the evening for nothing. I remembered how the lion’s eyes had looked when he had looked toward me and turned them down and then looked toward Mary and G.C. and how his eyes had never left them. I lay in the bed and thought how a lion can come one hundred yards from a standing start in just over three seconds. He comes low down to the ground and faster than a greyhound and he does not spring until he is on his prey. Mary’s lion would weigh well over four hundred pounds and he was strong enough to have leaped out over a high thorn Boma carrying a cow. He had been hunted for many years and he was very intelligent. But we had lulled him into making a mistake. I was happy that before he died he had lain on the high yellow rounded mound with his tail down and his great paws comfortable before him and looked off across his country to the blue forest and the high white snows of the big Mountain. Both G.C. and I wanted him to be killed by Mary’s first shot or, wounded, charge. But he had played it his own way. The first shot could not have felt more than a sharp, slapping sting to him. The second that passed high through a leg muscle while he was bounding toward the heavy cover where he would make us fight would, at most, have felt like a hard slap. I did not like to think what my long-thrown running shot that was thrown at all of him, hoping to rake him and bring him down, must have felt like when it by chance took him in the spine. It was a two-hundred-and-twenty-grain solid bullet and I did not have to think how it would have felt. I had never yet broken my back and I did not know. I was glad G.C.’s wonderful distance shot had killed him instantly. He was dead now and we would miss hunting him too.
I tried to go to sleep but I started to think about the lion and what the moves would have been if he had reached the heavy cover, remembering other people’s experiences under the same circumstances and then I thought the hell with all that. That’s stuff for G.C. and I to talk over together and to talk with Pop. I wished Mary would wake and say, “I’m so glad I got my lion.” But that was too much to expect and it was three o’clock in the morning. I remembered how Scott Fitzgerald had written that in the something something of the soul something something it is always three o’clock in the morning. For many months three o’clock in the morning had been two hours, or an hour and a half, before you would get up and get dressed and put your boots on to hunt Miss Mary’s lion. I untucked the mosquito net and reached for and found the cider bottle. It was cool with the night and I built up the two pillows by doubling them over and then leaned back against them with the rough square balsam pillow under my neck and thought about the soul. First I must verify the Fitzgerald quotation in my mind. It had occurred in a series of articles in which he had abandoned this world and his former extremely shoddy ideals and had first referred to himself as a cracked plate. Turning my memory back I remembered the quotation. It went like this. “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”