Laikipia, Kenya
Aidan Hartley has narrated this article for you to listen to.
When I was eight I used to go fishing in the Indian Ocean beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar with Mohamed. Once we pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin – a filusi. In Spanish it’s known as the dorado, referring to its iridescent golden flanks. As we watched the fish suffocate in the tropical air, its pigment, sheathed with a patina of stippled green, was transfigured for a brief instant like a beam of sunshine on a church mosaic. Then the dorado’s brilliance faded, and by the time Mohamed picked up his knife and sliced open her belly, removed the guts and tossed the body to the bottom of the canoe, it had turned to tarnished lead.
As a boy, my hunter’s remorse was as strong as my urge to kill. Once we trapped a mole-rat and, entranced by the perfection of its fur, I kept it in my coat pocket until my mother found it, stinking, days later. My bedroom was filled with stuff like a dead mud skipper, or a smelly cowrie, a sea urchin, a fox’s brush in meths, a bottled dung beetle or a snake’s sloughed skin. In these unfortunate creatures, I suppose I hoped to apprehend the very thing that I saw fade away, what Larkin calls the ‘million-petalled flower’ of life.
Since then I’ve enjoyed my share of bloodlust, hunting animals, shooting countless birds and landing many fish. I recoil at the memory of slaughtering sand grouse, those magical creatures that wheel out of the desert to fill their fluffed feathers with water to fly back to their waiting chicks.
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