BY DON MEREDITH | It's a hot hour's walk along the waterfront from my Kenyan home to the village of Shella on the northeast corner of the island of Lamu. But the rewards are a cooling swim from a beach of fine silvery sand, a cold Tusker on the terrace at Peponi Hotel and a visit with Bunny and Jeri Allen at their Arab-Swahili house on the seafront.

Second gun to Denys Finch Hatton on the 1928 Prince of Wales safari and reputedly one of aviator-author Beryl Markham's legion of lovers, Bunny hunted with Bror Blixen as well as Finch Hatton, J.A. Hunter and Philip Percival, the doyen of African safari guides immortalized as Pop in Ernest Hemingway's "The Green Hills of Africa." When this legendary foursome went on that great safari in the sky, Bunny became the premier professional hunter in East Africa. The last of a tough, gentlemanly breed.

At 92 Bunny is a handsome old dog with dark bedroom eyes and a high, intelligent forehead. He wears a single golden hoop in his left ear, his magnificent nose has been broken three times, most recently by a pouncing leopard, and the ring finger of his left hand is missing. "Torn off in a Land Rover door on Nanyuki High Street," he says, waving the vanished digit. "Don't miss it a bit. All it ever did was get in my way. When it went, sliced right through, I caught the gold ring in my right hand but the finger dropped into a ditch. An Indian grocer found it and gave it to me a week later. Deep blue it was ... and useless as ever."

We speak of our mutual friend, retired California restaurateur George Gutekunst. In the early '80s, Gutekunst, while reading Hemingway's "Selected Letters," ran across the author's missive to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, praising Markham's "West With the Night." Intrigued by Hemingway's uncommon tribute for another's work, Gutekunst found a copy of the Markham book in his local library -- checked out but seven times since its 1942 publication -- and read it through at one sitting. A man of impeccable literary taste, Gutekunst knew he'd disinterred a masterpiece and, with the aid of author Evan Connell, initiated the book's republication by North Point Press.

When Gutekunst came to East Africa to meet Markham and to film "A World Without Walls," a public television documentary about Markham's extraordinary life, he met "everyone" in Kenya, including the charismatic Bunny, a featured "witness" in the film. Talk of Gutekunst inevitably leads to Beryl. "Beryl Markham was a good brave girl, all guts and a heart of gold. The first person to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic. A good, good girl," muses Bunny.

"Good?" I ask, surprised by Bunny's choice of adjective for the notoriously seductive Markham.

"Yes, yes, brave and good, very good. Beryl brought much pleasure to many people."

"And you, Bunny? Did she bring you much pleasure?"

"Me? Me? Oh, never, absolutely not. I kissed her in the morning and kissed her goodnight, but never in the middle of the day -- and the middle of the day means romance."

Born, he claims, of Gypsy stock and raised in Windsor in the south of England on the Thames, Bunny earned his nickname as a boy skilled at snaring rabbits. He took the hunting skills learned from his Gypsy mentor, Piramus Berners, in Windsor Forest and applied them to stalking wildlife in Africa. "I shot perhaps 50 elephant doing control work. When they came in and trampled crops, killing people and destroying villages, we had to protect local Africans. I shot a few lion and some leopard -- who were always taking our cattle when I farmed on the slopes of Mount Kenya. More often I was called upon to kill Cape buffalo. They're quite the most dangerous animal in Africa -- I'm sure they take more human life than any other. Though I grew quite tired of killing, I'd shoot a buffalo today if I had the chance."

Bunny's son David, a professional bush pilot, has taken over his father's safari business. Today, the safaris are strictly photographic, but when trophy hunting was the game, David and his brother Anton were often Bunny's back-up hunters. David, who has flown in this morning from Nairobi, now joins us under the umbrella thorns in Bunny's garden. "Once we were stalking buffalo," he says, stroking his silver beard, "when we rounded a clump of bush and five buffalo rushed out and came straight for us. Bunny stepped in front and shot the first two bulls. With the third bull on him, he fired again: Click. No shots left. Bunny dropped his rifle, grasped the animal's horns and vaulted onto his back."

"Luckily, his horns didn't touch me." Bunny says, looking back on those years. "I must have ridden 40 or 50 yards up there."

"Then I got him in range and fired," continues David, "praying my bullet wouldn't hit Bunny. When it slammed into the buffalo's brain, he did a somersault and Bunny disappeared under him. 'My God,' I thought, 'I've killed my father.'"

"Not a bit of it," says Bunny, laughing. "I went under the beast's belly. Soft and warm it was in there ... lovely spot to snuggle down."

Shooting straight is important to a professional hunter, but talking diplomatically, not necessarily straight, is equally so. "A month in the bush can bring friction between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and sons-in-law. A good safari guide has to spread oil on the waters; he wants everyone around the fire in the evening happy and content." Bror Blixen, one-time husband of Karen Blixen, author of "Out of Africa," was renowned for his cool courage, knowledge of the bush and uncanny skill with a gun. But if Bror had a bottle of gin and a comfy chair, his safari clients could go thirsty or come to blows for all he cared. Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen's lover, went to the other extreme, providing chilled champagne served in crystal flutes. Bunny struck a happy medium. "I saw that everyone was comfortable and enjoying themselves. I was never one to take out clients for the sole purpose of piling up trophies."

"Bunny always saw that no one went out exclusively with one hunter," David says. "It was one way of keeping clients happy. Bunny would take someone one day, I'd have someone else, Anton another. Next day, we'd swap. Bunny got mine, while I took Anton's. At safari's end no one complained they'd got the worst of it because they weren't with whomever they thought was the best hunter."

N E X T+P A G E+| Close encounter with a big cat