I had been sure it would be good meat the first time I had ever seen a lion skinned. Mkola, who was my gun bearer in those days, told me that the tenderloin was the best meat there was to eat. But we had been very disciplined then by Pop, who was trying to make at least a semi-pukka Sahib of me and I had never had the nerve to cut a tenderloin and ask the cook to prepare it. This year, though, when we killed the first lion and I asked Ngui to take the two tenderloins it had been different. Pop said it was barbarous and that no one ever ate lion. But this was almost surely the last safari we would ever make together and we had come to the point where we both regretted things we had not done rather than those we had and so he made only perfunctory opposition and when Mary showed Mbebia how to prepare the cutlets and when we smelled their fine savor and when he saw how the meat cut exactly like veal and how much we enjoyed it, he tried some too and liked it.
“You ate bear in America hunting in the Rockies. It’s like pork but too rich. You eat pork and a hog will feed fouler than a bear or a lion.”
“Don’t badger me,” Pop had said. “I’m eating the damned stuff.”
“Isn’t it good?”
“Yes. Damn it. It’s good. But don’t badger me.”
“Have some more, Mr. P. Please have some more,” Mary said.
“All right. I’ll have some more,” making his voice into a high complaining falsetto. “But don’t keep staring at me while I eat it.”
It was pleasant talking about Pop whom Mary and I both loved and whom I was fonder of than any man that I had ever known. Mary told some of the things Pop had told her on the long drive they had made together through Tanganyika when we had gone down to hunt the Great Ruaha river country and the Bohoro flats. Hearing these stories and imagining the things he had not told it was like having Pop there and I thought that even in his absence he could make things all right when they were difficult.
Then too it was wonderful to be eating the lion and have him in such close and final company and tasting so good.
That night Mary said she was very tired and she went to sleep in her own bed. I lay awake for a while and then went out to sit by the fire. In the chair watching the fire and thinking of Pop and how sad it was he was not immortal and how happy I was that he had been able to be with us so much and that we had been lucky to have three or four things together that were like the old days along with just the happiness of being together and talking and joking, I went to sleep.
WALKING IN THE early morning watching Ngui striding lightly through the grass thinking how we were brothers it seemed to me stupid to be white in Africa and I remembered how twenty years before I had been taken to hear the Moslem missionary who had explained to us, his audience, the advantages of a dark skin and the disadvantages of the white man’s pigmentation. I was burned dark enough to pass as a half-caste.
“Observe the White Man,” the Missionary had said. “He walks in the sun and the sun kills him. If he exposes his body to the sun it is burned until it blisters and rots. The poor fellow must stay in the shade and destroy himself with alcohol and stinghas and chutta pegs because he cannot face the horror of the sun rising on the next day. Observe the White Man and his mwanamuki; his memsahib. The woman is covered with brown spots if she goes into the sun; brown spots like the forerunners of leprosy. If she continues the sun strips the skin as from a person who has passed through fire.”
On this lovely morning I did not try to remember further about the Sermon against the White Man. It had been long ago and I had forgotten many of the more lively parts but one thing I had not forgotten was the White Man’s heaven and how this had been shown to be another of his horrifying beliefs which caused him to hit small white balls with sticks along the ground or other larger balls back and forth across nets, such as are used on the big lakes for catching fish, until the sun overcame him and he retired into the Club to destroy himself with alcohol and curse the Baby Jesus unless his wanawaki were present.