Margot now snubs at him totally and begins to throw herself at Wilson. Macomber knows about the affair, but in his disgrace he is too weak to make any objections. At this point, Margot hates Francis, Francis hates Wilson, and Wilson is beginning to despise them both.
The buffalo hunting scene represents the climax of this story. The description of the chase shows us Hemingway as a writer preoccupied almost exclusively with action, both in real life and in the life of his characters, whose inner life is revealed by the actions they undertake. Even the finer sensation of his characters - love, fear, loyalty - are re-scaled by their phys
ical reactions, thus Macomber is dominated by two conflicting sensations - the first one is of terrible fright and the other of unrestrained hatred. In order to render to the reader a feeling of Macomber's almost animalic fear, Hemingway operates exclusively on the level of the concrete images of the chase, as perceived by his character's eyes. Macomber perceives all the dangerous anatomical details of the galloping bull with the accuracy of a camera. He sees the bull "bigger and bigger", "huge", "with shiny horns", his "plunging hugeness". His actions are hasty, precipitated and he tries to shoot at the buffalo from the moving car, afraid of an encounter with the animal on the ground. Once Wilson calls him "a fool" and he has "no fear, only hatred for Wilson", his physical reactions change completely. He becomes a self-assured, cool, buffalo killer, aiming carefully at the haunted animals. His total change on the physical level then results in
a feeling of "drunken elation", symbolic of his newly acquired manliness and self-respect. Macomber experiences danger and his change is obvious. Danger becomes the most challenging test in his experience, being both impressing and exciting. From this point of view, Hemingway is not only a writer who copes with life, with the problems of violence and death, but also a novelist interested in the fundamental human experiences including fear as a psychological phenomenon inherent in the human condition. It is not only fear when facing death, but man's dramatic fear of being cut off completely from his fellow human beings. His change takes place keeping the calm of the hunting, passing from weakness, cowardice and fear through disappointment to confidence and courage, ending in manliness and self-respect.
