Palmer shot a lion named Cecil outside Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Last month, an American dentist named Walter J. Dead, nothing about them is “superfluous ” dead, like a necrotic feline Adam and Eve, they are naked and unashamed dead, they are “what they ought to be.”įast-forward ninety years. They are – as Blixen so touchingly observes – unmasked in death. (I say they were drinking wine and having a nibble but of course we can assume that “they” did not include Kanuthia, the “native boy,” who is – like the car and the binoculars – part of the expedition’s machinery: the hand that holds your skinner’s knife, that passes you your gun, that wouldn’t even dream of sneaking some of your raisins.) The lions, dead and partially skinned, lie “close by” this domestic scene. Here we find her on the road to Narok, in colonial Kenya, with her paramour Denys Finch Hatton and his “boy” Kanuthia, drinking wine and having a nibble after a strenuous day of motoring through the bush and killing, first, a lioness who was feeding on a dead giraffe and, second, on the way home, a lion who happened on the scene of slaughter and had the misfortune of not putting two and two together. Karen Blixen can always be counted on to bring a certain sweetness to the grisly work of empire. The dead lions, close by, looked magnificent in their nakedness: there was not a particle of superfluous fat on them, each muscle was a bold controlled curve, they needed no cloak, they were, all through, what they ought to be. We sat on the short grass and ate and drank. When they took a rest we had a bottle of claret and raisins and almonds, from the car I had brought them with us to eat on the road, because it was New Year’s Day. Denys and Kanuthia pulled up their sleeves and while the sun rose they skinned the lions.
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