West with the Night by Beryl Markham Read Free Book Online

gazelle and eland and eats the same food, but his meat lacks even the doubtful succulence of horse. His hide, while striking in appearance, is only fairly durable and has made its greatest decorative triumph as panelling for the walls of a New York night club. Ostrich and civet cat have contributed more to the requirements of civilized society, but I think it not unjust to say that the zebra clan, in spite of it all, is unaffected by its failure to join in the march of time. I base this conclusion on a very warm friendship that developed, not too long ago to remember, between myself and a young zebra.
    My father, who has raised and trained some of the best Thoroughbreds to come out of Africa, once had a filly named Balmy. He chose all of the names for his horses with painstaking care, sometimes spending many evenings at his desk on our farm at Njoro jotting down possibilities by the light of a kerosene lamp. Balmy was selected for this particular filly because no other name suited her so precisely.
    She was neither vicious nor stubborn, she was very fast on the track, and she responded intelligently to training. Besides her light bay colour and the distinguishing white star on her forehead, her chief peculiarity was an unorthodox point of view toward life. She lived and won races some time before the Noel Coward jargon became commonplace, but, had she made her début on Park Avenue in the middle thirties instead of on the race-course at Nairobi in the middle twenties, she would have been counted as one of those intellectually irresponsible individuals always referred to as being ‘delightfully mad.’ Her madness, of course, consisted simply of a penchant for doing things that, in the opinions of her stable mates, weren’t being done.
    No well-brought-up filly, for instance, while being exercised before the critical watchfulness of her owner, her trainer, and a half-dozen members of the Jockey Club, would come to an abrupt halt beside a mudhole left by last month’s rains, buckle at the knees, and then, before anything could be done about it, roll over in the muck like a Berkshire hog. But Balmy did, as often as there was a mudhole in her path and a trusting rider on her back, though what pleasure she got out of it none of us ever knew. She was a little like the eccentric genius who, after being asked by his host why he had rubbed the broccoli in his hair at dinner, apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.
    On a morning in my thirteenth year when Balmy was due for a canter, I rode her up a long slope that lay north of the farm and was called the Green Hill. All our horses, when doing slow work, were taken up the Green Hill to the place where it overlooked the Rongai Valley, which, in those years, was alive with game.
    Balmy was alert as usual, but it seemed to me there was a pensive quality about the way she touched her neat hooves to the ground, and about the thoughtful tilt of her distinguished head. It was as if she had begun at last to see the error of her ways, and when we reached the crest of the hill, she was behaving as if no filly on God’s earth had ever been so wantonly miscalled. Had there been no herd of zebra to come upon us as we rounded a little group of mimosa trees, Balmy’s resolve to reform might never have been broken or even threatened.
    The zebra were grazing in and out of the mimosa and on the slopes that fell into the valley. There were several hundred of them spread over an area of many acres, but those nearest us were an old dam and her foal of a few months.
    Balmy had seen zebra before and zebra had often seen Balmy, but I had never observed that any gestures of mutual respect had been made by either side. I think Balmy was aware of the dictum, noblesse oblige, but, for all her mud-rolling, she never got very close to a zebra or even oxen without distending her nostrils in the manner of an eighteenth-century grande dame forced to wade through the fringes of a