Free Out of Africa: And Shadows on the Grass by Isak Dinesen Page A

shambas close by, to help me; they would only run away immediately when they saw why I had called them. I ordered Kamante to run back to the house and fetch down Farah to assist me. But Kamante did not move.
    “Why do you want me to run?” he asked.
    “Well you see yourself,” I said, “that I cannot carry the old Bwana alone, and you Kikuyus are fools, you are afraid to carry a dead man.”
    Kamante set up his little mocking noiseless laughter. “You again forget, Msabu,” he said, “that I am a Christian.”
    He lifted the old man’s feet while I bore his head, and between us we carried him to his bungalow. From time to time we had to stop, lay him down, and rest; then Kamante stood up erect and looked straight down at Old Knudsen’s feet, with what I think will have been the Scotch Mission manner in the presence of death.
    As we had laid him on his bed, Kamante went about the room, and into the kitchen, in search of a towel to cover his face with,—he only found an old newspaper. “The Christians did that at the Hospital,” he explained to me.
    A long time afterwards Kamante had great satisfaction out of the thought of this instance of my ignorance. He would work with me in the kitchen, filled with a secret pleasure, and suddenly break out laughing. “Do you remember, Msabu,” he said, “the time when you had forgotten that I was a Christian, and thought that I should be afraid to help you to carry the Msungu Msei?” —the old white man.
    Kamante as a Christian was no longer afraid of snakes. I heard him state to the other boys that a Christian might at any moment put his heel upon the head of the largest snake and crush it. I have not seen him try to do so, but I saw him standing very still, with a set face and his hands behind his back, within a short distance of the Cook’s hut when a puff-adder had appeared on its roof. All the children of my household spread in large circles around it, like chaff before the wind, with wild wails, while Farah went into the house to fetch my gun, and shot the puff-adder.
    When it was all over, and the waves had settled down again, Nyore, the Sice’s son, said to Kamante: “Why, you Kamante, did you not set your heel upon the head of the big bad snake and crush it?”
    “Because it was up on the roof,” said Kamante.
    At one time, I tried to shoot with a bow and arrow. I was strong, but it was difficult to me to bend the Wanderobo bow which Farah had got for me; still in the end, and after long practice, I became skilful as an archer.
    Kamante was very small then, he used to watch me when I was shooting on the lawn, and seemed doubtful about the undertaking, and one day said to me: “Are you a Christianstill when you are shooting with a bow? I thought that the Christian way was with a rifle.”
    I showed him in my pictorial Bible an illustration to the tale of Hagar’s son: “And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer.”
    “Well,” said Kamante, “he was like you.”
    Kamante had a good hand with sick animals, as with my Native patients. He took out splinters from the dogs’ feet, and once cured one of them when it had been bitten by a snake.
    For some time I had in the house a stork with a broken wing. He was a decided character, he walked through the rooms and when he came into my bedroom he fought tremendous duels, as with the rapier, with swaggering and flapping of wings, with his image in my looking-glass. He followed Kamante about between the houses, and it was impossible not to believe that he was deliberately imitating Kamante’s stiff measured walk. Their legs were about the same thickness. The little Native boys had an eye for caricature and shouted with joy when they saw the pair pass. Kamante understood the joke, but he never paid much attention to what other people thought of him. He sent off the little boys to collect frogs for the stork in the bogs.
    It was also Kamante who had charge of