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the civilization of mankind."^ One has to wonder about the effect of such an attitude on a very young, half-educated Kenyan from the White Highlands, which were already being claimed by the restless Kikuyu who would revolt in the Mau-Mau rebellion a few years later.
    On one of the first of his long safaris Nicholson visited the Lung'onyo River, making his camp where we now were by the Kingupira Forest. There had been a report of heavy poaching, and everywhere he found hunters' blinds set up at the water pans and thorn fences that guided the game into set snares. In those days, poaching was a local enterprise, mostly for meat, which because of the tsetse fly and the virtual absence of livestock was in heavy demand. In a nearby Ngindo settlement he discovered some large stacks of hides, and sat himself atop a termite hill while his game scouts burned down the thatch village and placed its men under arrest. At the people's request, he spared the ngokwes (stilt storage huts) until the grain could be removed, and the next morning, several hours away along his route, he sent a few men back to finish off the job, under the leadership of a huge Ngoni Zulu named Nonga Pelekamoyo. ("The Ngoni like to give themselves resounding names; 'Pelekamoyo' means 'take your heart'.") Doubtless inspired by the memory of the great days when the Zulu armies from the south swept through this country, scattering the fearful Ngindo into the bush, Nonga

    PETER MATTHIESSEN
    Take-Your-Heart put the torch to every community that he passed, an estimated ninety huts m all, an outrage for which, the following year, Bwana Kijana was summoned to Game Department headquarters at Arusha, and forced to stay there for approximately six months. "This old man who met us at the airstrip" - Brian pointed at Saidi Mwembesi -"he's the nephew of old Nonga, and he has a son who's m the Game Department now. Those people are a Game Department family."
    In 1955, when Brian took his first leave from the Game Department, he was no longer Bwana Kijana but a full-fledged Bwana Nyama, or "Mister Game", as the Africans called the Game Department wardens (or "Mister Meat", Brian said wryly, choosing the other meaning of nyama], and so absorbed in his job that he did not want to take leave at all. "In those days," he says, "they used to make us take overseas leave, and so I decided to visit the U.K." At the Overseas Club in London, where he went for want of any destination, he met a pretty Australian girl named Melva Peal. Miss Peal came out to Africa in August of that year, and despite the warnings of lonides, who had avoided women all his life, and who assured Nicholson that domesticity would never mix with a life in the bush, they were married in January 1956, proceeding immediately to NachingWea. This erstwhile hub of the Ground-Nut Scheme, with its grandiose avenues and city planning, "was a dead city by the time I got there," Melva said. "There were hardly any Europeans left. I was there three days, and without any furniture, when Brian left on a six-week safari. He just handed me a gun and said, 'If anybody tries to break in here, shoot him.'"
    All three Nicholson children - Susan, Sandra, and John Philip (named for lonides) - were born in Nachingwea: Susan is married now, living in Bangkok. "Brian was hunting a man-eating lion down near Mtwara when Susan was born," Melva remembered. "Fourth of August, 1956." But five years later, Nicholson was made Senior Game Warden for the southeast sector of what was now the independent nation of Tanzania, a sector that included all of the Selous, and was posted to the large agricultural center of Morogoro, north of the Reserve, where traders were sponsoring the rampant poaching. As Brian wrote a few years later:
    It is necessary to digress for a while and examine events which were affecting Tanganyika as a whole, for these have a direct bearing on the policies concerning the Selous, the Government's acceptance of our requirements in land,