The Last Samurai

Another winner. Unfortunately it was the only thing on Inuit I could find. Of course, he may not be going where they speak Inuit. I could work out some of the words and grammar if I knew I was going to need it, but Sibylla still won’t say. It would help if she would just tell me something about him. I can’t believe I’m almost 11 and the only thing I know is that he’s not Thor Heyerdahl.

Not only is King George a man of great prudence and a hard worker; he is also a great hunter. Whether it be in the hunting of fierce animals like the bear, or in the crafty stalking of the deer or in the shooting of partridges while they fly, no man in the British Empire takes surer aim than our King.

AtaneK George silatudlartuinalungilaK angijomiglo suliaKarpaklune, ômajoKsiorteogivorletauK—

OK, that’s an exaggeration. That’s not the only thing I know. I also know he’s not Egon Larsen. He’s not Chatwin. She likes Thubron, so he’s out. I think I’ve narrowed it down to 8 or 9. For a while I thought it was Red Devlin: she always laughs at the gap-toothed urchins, and since he was captured five years ago his wife’s been campaigning for his release, so Sibylla might have thought it was safer not to tell me. But then last week James Hatton got back from the Arctic Circle and wrote an article for the Independent Magazine that used the phrase ‘veritable cathedral of ice’. VERITABLE CATHEDRAL OF ICE shouted Sibylla and she walked up and down saying veritable cathedral of ice and reading out other priceless phrases and suddenly I had a hunch that it was Hatton. So I got The Eskimo Book of Knowledge and started to work on Inuit.

Before returning to London to take pen in hand Hatton walked solo to the North Pole and back without telling anyone where he was going. At one point he was attacked by a walrus. It was so cold the action on his gun wouldn’t work, so he had to throw a knife at it. He got it in one eye (Hatton: ‘Bull’s-eye!’), and then was able to harpoon it. He had to eat some of the meat raw and then trek on another 15 miles, even though he’d been going for 20 hours, because he knew the smell of the blood would attract other predators. At one point the frostbite in one toe was so bad he had to cut it off.

If it is Hatton I’ve wasted years learning Xhosa, Swahili, Zulu, Hausa, Quechua, Faroese and Mongolian. If it isn’t I’m wasting my time on The Eskimo Book of Knowledge. I think I may be wasting my time anyway.

If you hunters used half the CARE of the White Men in setting your traps skilfully and in keeping your furs free from dirt, every Innuit family would gain greater possessions from the Company’s Trader.

If I get us both lynched my long lost father will probably tell his long lost son to get lost and stay lost.

Sibylla is supposed to be typing and is reading the paper. I’ve got the Kanji dictionary on one arm of my chair, and the little Kodansha Romaji on the other. If she asks what I’m reading I’ll tell her, but she probably won’t ask when she sees the Japanese dictionaries; she knows I’ve got a new book on judo. I don’t want to hear about how pay for schoolchildren, the right to death, homosexual marriage and all the other basic requirements of a culture not irredeemably sunk in barbarism will be commonplace by the year 2065.

No wonder your beautiful damsels prefer to marry a good hunter, a man who is an honour to his camp and can provide for his family comforts and new possessions! In all parts of the world such men are favoured by fair damsels—

OH MY GOD! shouted Sibylla. He’s OUT! He ESCAPED! This is WONDERFUL!

And striding up and down she said that Red Devlin had escaped three months ago and had just walked into the British Embassy in Tbilisi. She said: I’ve actually kind of MISSED those gap-toothed urchins toting Kalashnikovs. She was bounding around as though the gravitational force of the planet had suddenly dropped by a third.

I thought: It’s got to be Devlin.

I read one of his books a long time ago. It was called Get Out Before I Throw You Out. He wasn’t much of a writer; his talent was for making outrageous demands which people found impossible to refuse. For instance he once asked to go up with some paratroopers over a war zone and was told this was against all regulations.

Oh go on, said Red Devlin.

X: Oh all right then but no one must know this is strictly on the Q.T.

Red Devlin was equipped with a parachute purely as a safety precaution and then when the paratroopers jumped he jumped out too before anyone could stop him and got some story that no one could have got who had not gone in with the paratroopers. A newspaper hired him on the strength of this story and then fired him for refusing to file some other story, and then another newspaper hired him because he had penetrated a guerrilla hideout by going into a local bar and saying ‘I’d like to visit that guerrilla hideout.’