buffalo, ominously paralleling the previous day's lion hunt. Macomber, however, is confident this time, courageous. Wilson is again proud. When they find the buffalo, it charges Macomber. He stands his ground and fires, but his shots are too high. Wilson shoots as well, but the buffalo keeps charging. At the same time, Margot fires a shot from the car, which hits Macomber in the head and kills him. As told by the omniscient narrator, “… and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull …” Publication history "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" was published in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan and later in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Major themes The essence of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is the contrast of courage and fear. Mellow described the story as “one of Hemingway’s classic studies of fear”. Macomber hears the roar of a lion and is unnerved because he has never “heard, as Hemingway pointedly states, the Somali proverb that says, ‘a brave man is always frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees his track, when he first hears him roar, when he first confronts him'. Hemingway explains, Macomber is afraid of the lion’s roar and unnerved by his fear because “he did not know the Somali proverb.” Wilson has courage but Macomber, who is afraid of lions, has none. When the cowardly husband, whose wife had made her way from Wilson's tent hours before, finds the courage to face the charging buffalo, he forges the identity he wants: the courage to face both wild animals and his wife. Tragically, Macomber's happiness is measured in hours, and indeed in minutes. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker opines that Macomber loses his fear as the buffalo charges, and the loss of fear ushers Macomber into manhood, which Margot instantly kills. Baker suggests that Wilson symbolizes the man free of woman (because he refuses to allow Margot to dominate him) or of fear; the man Macomber wishes to be. Wilson understands, as he blasts the lion dead, that Margot is a woman who needs to be dominated. Jeffrey Meyers considers Margot Macomber to be the villain of the