Some Buried Caesar

"Oh… tell me about your first woman." "With pleasure." I took a draw and exhaled. "I was going up the Amazon in a canoe. I was alone because I had fed all our provisions to the alligators in a spirit of fun and my natives, whom I called boys, had fled into the jungle. For two months I had had nothing to eat but fish, then an enor- mous tarpon had gone off with my tackle and I was helpless. Doggedly I kept on up the river, and had resigned myself to the pangs of starvation when, on the fifth day, I came to a small but beautiful island with a woman standing on it about eight feet tall. She was an Amazon. I beached the canoe and she picked me up and carried me into a sort of bower she had, saying that what I needed was a woman's care. However, there did not appear to be anything on the island to eat, and she looked as if she wouldn't need to eat again for weeks. So I adopted the only course that was left to me, laid my plans and set a trap, and by sundown I had her stewing merrily in an enormous iron pot which she had apparently been using for making lemon butter. She was delicious. As well as I can remember, that was my first woman. Of course since then-"

She stopped me at that point and asked me to tell her about something else. Her wrap had fallen open in front, and she drew it to her again. We sat there for two more cigarettes, and might have finished the rest of my shift there on the running board, if it hadn't been for a noise I heard from the pasture. It sounded like a dull thud, very faint through the concert of the crickets and katydids, and there was no reason to suppose it was anything alarming, but it served to remind me that the nearby gate wasn't the only possible entry to the pasture, and I decided to take a look. I stood up and said I was going to do a patrol around to the other side. Lily protested that it was all foolishness, but I started off and she came too. The bull wasn't within range of my light.