Short Folk #1: Finch Hatton

I wish you could have known Christopher Talbot, who was killed by a hippo while walking back to his bungalow at Finch Hatton's safari camp, Tsavo National Park, Kenya, Africa.

From the main lodge there's a pathway to a long bridge over the spring and hippo pond, with a double rope railing strung through wooden posts. In the daytime if you look down you can see turtles gliding under the bridge, and from the bungalows laid out like an archipelago around the pond you can hear the hippos braying, obese revelers in the cool water, submerged to their ears, twitching away the flies.  At night, when the hippos leave the pond to graze, there's supposed to be an escort guard in a dark windbreaker with a penlight that makes his white teeth glow in the otherwise darkness. The danger is part of the luxury.

 I remember Christopher sitting in the lofted library just off the main dining hall, with white trousers reading a yellowed book about Africa, taking everything in, but none of it seriously. Finch Hatton's was such a strange place, trumped up exclusivity that traded freely on the luxury name of a man who had never even visited the land on which it was built. Too long, overwrought dinners in the cream colored dining room, with hard chairs, five courses and an army of waiters half-trained in the colonial style.
And we ate it up, all of us with our wives or our mistresses, with our entanglements, just languishing in the dream of an Africa from another century--the Queen, the hunt, the smell of cedar wood and pressed linen.

All of us but Talbot, who was there alone, it seemed almost without vices.  Who dealt with the pretentiousness with affability, a mocking conformity. Until the short high scream and the rutting sound of a surprised hippo, the sound of mud quickly being made, and then the back of the throat groan that was the last thing we heard. Such a coarse end for such a polished man.


Better, instead of leaving without an escort and finding that huge animal, I like to imagine him walking straight past the hippo pond and into the bush. In the daylight he stays cool in the shade of a Mimosa tree. In the darkness he sleeps high in the matted branches of a Bilbao tree. He won't come back because he knows something we don't. And he won't be found because he is at peace.  Or maybe my imaginings are just what we always do to dead things. In their absence we make them into what they never were.