The Female of the Species

Gray nodded. Richardson would be salivating if he were here. He’d be on the phone already, chartering a plane to Nairobi.

“Hassatti …” said Gray slowly, “you know how it is customary for boys to go out on the plains and slaughter a lion that’s been killing Masai cattle, and when he returns with the tail and paws he’s considered a man?”

“Yez.”

“Any man—or woman, Bwana—wants to pass such a test, Masai or not. I have yet to pass my test. I want to, desperately. Dr. Richardson has passed many. He is ol-moruo, an old man, now. Let me have Corgie, as you would send a young warrior to kill a beast when the elder has killed several.”

Hassatti looked at her hard. “You? Go after Corgie?”

Gray’s face flushed and her heart beat. “I am very tall,” she said simply, “and very strong and very brilliant.”

Errol could see it, hear it; he liked to play this moment over in his mind: I am very tall and very strong and very brilliant. Her ears scarlet, her eyes that piercing blue-gray.

Hassatti kept looking at her. “Perhaps—Richasan should decide.”

“Dr. Richardson wouldn’t trust me, and he never will. He will never believe I’m that grown up, just as your father will never believe you’re a man.”

“Ah.” Hassatti nodded and smiled. Gray was only twenty-two, but she already understood how much psychology crossed cultures. Fathers condescended the world over.

“Richardson may never let me hunt my lion,” said Gray. “Will you?”

Hassatti shook his head with incredulity, reached over, and touched her cheek. “Ol-changito,” he said. “’L-oo-lubo.”

He had called her a wild animal; an impala, though translated literally “’l-oo-lubo” means “that which is not satisfied.”

Gray replied, “Ol-murani.”

Hassatti shook his head. “E-ngoroyoni.”

“Ol-murani o-gol,” Gray reasserted.

Hassatti shook his head again and smiled. “E-ngoroyoni na-nana.”

There was a conflict of interpretations here. Gray claimed to be a warrior, as Errol knew she saw herself. “Ol-murani” was an old joke with her, though they both knew it was no joke, not really. Yet Hassatti had called her something else, and wouldn’t take it back.

“You have,” said Hassatti, “a great deal to learn, ’l-oo-lubo. And as long as Msabu claims she is ol-murani o-gol and not e-ngoroyoni na-nana, she will not understand what even such a clever antelope must master.”

“And what is that?”

“To pour is to fill, Msabu. Ol-changito, to pour is to fill.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Gray.

“No, you will not,” he assured her. “This is to be understood, not remembered, fleet one. The words have already flown from your head like birds of different flocks to separate trees.

“However,” said Hassatti. “Since ’l-oo-lubo is such a costly creature, and she will not accept the twelve cows, perhaps Msabu will accept from Hassatti: one lion.”

Gray smiled. “And you won’t tell Richardson where I’ve gone?”

“No more,” he said, “than I would show him the food in my mouth.” Hassatti then wrote the name of his tribe and where it was currently located; he drew her a map and gave her the name of his family. “Now you will bring me the paws and tail of Corgie when you return?”

“You mean I should deliver the witch’s slippers?”

“The Corgie wears slippers—?”

“Never mind. I’ll bring you his gun, how’s that?”

“Most of all for Hassatti ’l-oo-lubo must go out and become wise. Then come back and we will talk of becoming Hassatti’s wife.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be that wise,” said Gray.

“Neither do I,” said Hassatti. “I tell you, Msabu, it will take you a long time, longer than most e-ngoroyoni. Know from Hassatti that this will cost you. It is like when a boy waits too long and becomes all grown before he is circumcised. There is much pain, and slow healing.”

It was five in the morning. Hassatti said he would wait for his friend Richardson; Gray would find an airplane. They spoke in Masai.

“Well, I am about to go,” said Gray.

“Aiya naa, sere! Goodbye. Pray to God, accost only the things which are safe, and meet no one but blind people.”

“Lie down,” said Gray, “with honey wine and milk.”

“So be it.”

Hassatti followed her out the door to watch that long, sweeping stride of hers, listening to the clean click of her heels against the linoleum like the clop of small hooves. Gray never seemed to be walking fast, but she covered ground quickly, like a languorous, leggy animal across the plain. Strange she was not Masai. She had the bones of his own people. Hassatti could see her ranging into the bush, standing spear-straight to meet this ghostlike white man and his many guns. Though he had just arrived in this new country and had much to study, Hassatti almost went after her down the hall, for this was a scene he would have given much to see.

Gray returned that morning to her apartment, having arranged her trip to Nairobi for the following day. She sat at her desk and composed three notes. First, to Richardson, she wrote: “On good advice I am off to become wise.—Gray Kaiser.”

Second, she wrote the man she was dating. Most certainly he wanted to marry her, too. “Dear Dan,” she jotted. “I’ve been called out of town. May be gone for a long time. Don’t hold your breath. —G.”

So you put a stamp on it, Gray, what was it, three cents then? That’s how much it cost you. What did it cost him, though? You didn’t even know. Set on the corner of your desk, it was one more of those easy dismissals of a man who adored you. Ever since she was fifteen, men had been proposing to her, and she’d learned early to whisk them away like so many flies. How many times had Errol himself watched her discard prostrate admirers? He’d enjoyed watching, yet it pained him a little. Errol truly believed she didn’t understand how they felt, and for an anthropologist that was a failing.

The third letter she sent to her father, and it was the one note of consideration she struck all morning. Gray enclosed a copy of Hassatti’s map, just in case she didn’t return. Perhaps Gray feared as Errol did each time they returned to Kenya that ol-changito, let loose on those hard-packed plains, would lope across the white horizon to graze under acacia trees, to bolt between watering holes, to sniff the hard brilliant air and so give up on English and coffee and little efficient notes in the mail altogether.

More likely she knew the situation she was walking into was dangerous. Even Gray now admitted that going on this expedition by herself had been pigheaded. But ol-murani was planning on shouldering her pack and her spear and her wooden club and launching off into the sunset to find her lion … Gray had seen too many Westerns, and you knew she identified, not with the simpering prairie wives, but with the sharpshooters.

Gray took out her tent and began to reroll it to fit into its insanely small bag. So it was dangerous. So he had guns. Gray paused at the thought for one tiny, intelligent moment. She took a breath and kept on going. Fine. Here was a woman who had spent the better part of World War II thinking. Enough was enough. She was tired of having men tell stories about dragging their best friends for ten miles on their backs under fire, all the while Gray feeling abstracted and left out. It was time to begin a life in which actions could have consequences.

Besides. Gray shot a look up at the mirror that hung on her door and caught her own face looking keenly back at her. You didn’t look at a face like that without staring for a second, even if it was yours. Not bad hair. Kind of strange the way that collarbone stood out, but interesting, too … No, he wouldn’t shoot her. Not right away, she was sure. Gray wrapped the straps around the tent summarily; it fit in the bag.

Gray did own a handgun, and considered taking it. The gun had been a gift from an earlier suitor, the one he’d captured in the war. (It chilled Errol how often Gray was given weapons as presents, all over the world. As if she weren’t destructive enough already.) Yet finally Gray decided to leave the gun behind. To prepare for a military encounter was to create one. As many movies as she might have seen, Gray knew she would not succeed in her mission by hiding behind a boulder and picking off the troops. That hair and collarbone would surely prove more powerful weapons than her German Luger.

Throwing the rest of her gear together through the day, Gray thought about the Great White Corgie. She already had a strong sense of the man. He was arrogant. Ruthless. Racist. Brave, she conceded. But cruel and condescending.

And for some reason she decided he was handsome.

chapter three (#u673c00cf-37da-516e-823e-cc616eabb94f)

Hassatti’s mother also called Gray ’l-oo-lubo, taking her into the family like a stray from the plains—isolated from the herd, difficult, but a fine specimen, and tamable.