A Feast Unknown

8

Although the knife bore the dent of the bullet near the hilt and also had been twisted by the impact, it was still serviceable. Moreover, I would not have thrown it away if it had been useless. Though I am not sentimental, I could not bear to get rid of it. It had been my real father’s in England, and he had given it to my uncle before he became mad. My first sight of the knife was my first knowledge of metal. And it had served me for 70 years and killed 10 times that number of prey and enemies.

I put it in the sheath and looked towards the hills. The sun flashed now and then. The reflection of binoculars or cameras, possibly. Or of a telescope.

A puff of dirt struck immediately in front of me as I stopped to pick up the rifle; the sound of the shot came about a second later. The shooter was approximately 1125 feet away. The second bullet struck a few inches to my left; the third, to my right. The fourth went between my legs. I was being told to run away onto the sava

Instead, I cut the lion open and removed a piece of his heart and chewed on it. Four more shots, very close, enabled me to discern the exact location of the rifle. I also saw four men through the bush on the hill.

I left at a slow walk. I abandoned my rifle because its barrel had been bent by the bullet. I was angry because of the ease with which the rifleman was herding me and the contempt I felt he had for me. If he thought I was really dangerous, he would have killed me with his first shot. His actions seemed to say: Try your best, my dear Lord Grandrith. It won’t be nearly good enough.

When I had walked a quarter of a mile, the shots ceased. From time to time, as I strode to the west, I looked back. Two miles away, a cloud of dust followed. When I stopped to bathe in a waterhole, the dust settled. I caught and ate several almost mouse-sized grasshoppers which inhabit this region. I threw a stone at a kingfisher but missed it by a wing’s length. There are many kingfishers in this region, where there is little water except during the rainy season. But the kingfishers have abandoned an aquatic diet; they have adapted to catching grasshoppers and other insects.

When night came, I backtracked. Twenty minutes later, I had found the camp of the sharpshooter. It was on the flat top of a small hill in a clearing around which was an unusual growth of bush and number of trees. A depression beside it held some water, which accounted for the dense growth. In the clearing were two large trucks, one of which carried a very large camper, and two jeeps. Three tents were pitched; two fires had been built. Some blacks were cooking over one fire, and coffee was boiling over both. There were six blacks and two white men in sight. Then I saw a white man move behind the half-opened flap of a tent. The weak light from the lamp within gleamed on a bronze back for a moment.

I had smelled the coffee a long way off and had been salivating. I love coffee. If these people had not been shooting at me that afternoon, I would have been tempted to join them.

I moved around until I could get a better view of the man inside the tent. I still could not see much of him, but I got the impression of a very large and very solid man. He seemed to be doing some peculiar exercises. I caught glimpses of bronzed biceps, bunching and smoothing over and over again. The muscles looked like mongooses slipping back and forth in a wild play under a blanket woven of bronze wires. I know that that is a rather fanciful description, but that is what occurred to me.

The other two whites, old men, sat on folding chairs with their backs to me. The smaller was thin, quick-moving, wary as a bird, and had a face sharp as the neck of a broken-off bottle. He was dressed as if he had just stepped out of the most expensive safari outfitter’s store in Nairobi. As he talked, he gestured frequently with a silver-headed black cane.

The other old man was so wide and had such abnormally long arms, thick neck, simian features, and low forehead, and his arms were so hairy, he could almost have passed for one of The Folk.

The blacks had talked among themselves in Swahili, so I knew the names of all three whites. The man in the tent was a Doctor Caliban. The dapper old man was a Mr Rivers. The apish old man was a Mr

Simmons. All three were from Manhattan Island.

I suspected that the old men were talking so loudly because they hoped to entice an evesdropper—me, of course—to come closer. I found the trip wire which would have set off some kind of alarm and got over that without disturbing it. I also detected the two rocks, made of papier-mache, which held electronic eye devices inside them. I had come close to wriggling between them, because that was the natural route to a depression in the ground behind a bush, an excellent place to hide while listening. Only because I happened to rub up against the false stone did I discover what it was.

I became even more cautious then. And I noticed that the flap of the tent in which Doctor Caliban had been exercising was now closed. For all I knew, he might be slipping out the rear of the tent to catch a spy.

If the two old men were part of a trap, they, certainly took no care to keep silent on matters that an enemy should not know. And they talked about Caliban as if he were deaf.

I crawled around to one side where I could see their lips. This was not as informative as listening, because I missed words now and then, but it was safer.

“... really know what’s got into Doc?” the dapper Rivers said. “Something sure as shit is wrong.”

“Looks as if he’s gone ape,” Simmons said.

Rivers laughed and spoke so loudly I could hear him. “Ape! Ape? You old Neanderthal, you’re throwing stones at a glass house!”

“Listen, you sick legal eagle, you,” Simmons said, “this is no time or place for your tired old bullshit.

This is serious, I’m telling you. Doc has a screw loose somewhere. I think it’s the elixir; it has to be. The side effects are finally coming through. I warned him years ago, when he offered it to us. I ain’t one of the world’s greatest chemists for nothing.”

I had been intrigued before. Now I was caught, a crocodile on a hook. Elixir!

“You really think he’s crazy? After all these years of doing good, combating evil, fixing up all those criminals we caught, and reforming them?” Rivers said.

The apish old man said, “That’s another thing ...”

I missed what he said next, then his cigar left his lips. “... operated on them, he said. Cut out the gland that made them evil, he said at first. Then later on he quit talking about that gland, because there ain’t no such thing, and he started to talk about re-routing and short-circuiting neural circuits. Now, I ask you, do you really believe that shit? It was all right in the old days, because we didn’t know much about the causes of crime then. But it’s different now. We know it’s caused mainly by psychosocioeconomic environments.”

“Do we?” Rivers said. “What really do we know now more than we knew then, besides some things in the physical sciences and a little progress in the biological?”

“O.K., so they ain’t as smart nowadays as they like to think they are,” Simmons said. “But in the ’30’s, we could believe anything Doc told us because he told us it was so. But did you ever see him operate on a criminal? Not that I doubt he did something to them, handy as he is with a knife. But this crap about curing criminals with surgery ... know as well as I do that a criminal is the product of genetic predisposition plus environment.”

“Doc isn’t the man we knew, that’s for sure,” Rivers said. “I don’t know. It’s like seeing Lucifer fall.

Well, that’s stretching it. Doc’s no evil angel, but ... if you want to get right down to the honest-to-Godcall-