THE NEW YORKER FI by Doris Lessing January 21, 1956
Nowadays, when I meet types who flush grouse or work salmon (I think these are the correct terms), I more often than not be heard saving, 「All the same, food, spive me a flock of guinea fowl in open try.」 From there, I pass on to casual mention of the higher fauna—deer and lions, and so on—and in no time the most hardened sportsmen are oozing envy of what sounds like a girlhood spent oual safari. I keep the truth to myself.
Not that I haven』t seen lions. I have entered them, and other iing animals, in the London Zoo, where I go to look at them from time to time. And on my home ground, which is Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia, fauna of every kind used to flourish and, for all I know, flourish yet. I do not care. I never did.
Along with my indiffereoward big and little game goes the fact that this whole plex is linked irretrievably with my sibling rivalry (for my brother) and my mase protest (against practically everything). It all started very, early, when my brother was given a .22 rifle— But perhaps it would be best to go even further back, to his bicycle, which he rode perfectly at the first attempt, whereas I could only look at it and shudder with fear. I decided it was not being firl to ride a boy』s bicycle, and stuck out for one of my own, knowing full well that the state of the family』s finances would put off the evil hour indefinitely.
In the light of this discreditable and evasive behavior, it is easy to uand what happened when the .22 rifle appeared, during one of my brother』s holidays from school. He picked it up, took aim at a small bird sitting on a twig a hundred yards away, judiciously pressed the trigger, and the bird fell dead. I remember he felt bad because the shot had not gohrough the eye. To him, therefore, sport immediately took on its proper colors; to fire at a sitting bird was altogether beh him, and unless he could get in a good oblique shot at a bird h widdershins a hundred and fifty yards off, with a strong wiween him and it, he would not shoot. As for duikerbok—small antelope, which are not only plentiful in our parts but very good to eat—he would not kill one unless he had first arranged an exhausting crawl through thick bush, preferably in heavy mud.
When, one day, he hahe rifle to me, I said I did not care for it. Why I did not stick to this simple truth I agine. I did point out that even people like Hunter Jim and Elephant Bill used shotguns for birds on the wing and deer on the run, and that it would never have eheir heads to use a .22 rifle, but my brother was not moved. I did not expect him to be.
After he had gone back to school, I crept to his room and took the .22 from the bed of oiled waste in which he had laid it away for the duration of the term. I spent a week or mingerly opening and shutting the thing, and putting bullets in and taking them out. When I could do this without fling, I went out into the bush with it.
There was a lot of bush all around our house—in fact, miles of it in every dire, wild, uninhabited, a perfect paradise for sportsmen. I remember clearly how, that first day, I mooned along, thinking about Guinevere and Anne of Green Gables, until a fine kudu bull (fauna of the most covetable sort, antelope the size of a horse) that had apparently been scrutinizing me from an anthill took to its hoofs and fled. I watched it go. (My brother, needless to say, had already shot half a dozen k