West With the Night

by Beryl Markham

  This order of intelligence in a lesser animal can obviously give rise to exaggeration — some of it persistent enough to be crystallized into legend. But you cannot discredit truth merely because legend has grown out of it. The sometimes almost godlike achievements of our own species in ages past toddle through history supported more often than not on the twin crutches of fable and human credulity.

  As to the brutality of elephant-hunting, I cannot see that it is any more brutal than ninety per cent of all other human activities. I suppose there is nothing more tragic about the death of an elephant than there is about the death of a Hereford steer — certainly not in the eyes of the steer. The only difference is that the steer has neither the ability nor the chance to outwit the gentleman who wields the slaughterhouse snickersnee, while the elephant has both of these to pit against the hunter.

  Elephant hunters may be unconscionable brutes, but it would be an error to regard the elephant as an altogether pacific animal. The popular belief that only the so-called ‘rogue’ elephant is dangerous to men is quite wrong — so wrong that a considerable number of men who believed it have become one with the dust without even their just due of gradual disintegration. A normal bull elephant, aroused by the scent of man, will often attack at once — and his speed is as unbelievable as his mobility. His trunk and his feet are his weapons — at least in the distasteful business of exterminating a mere human; those resplendent sabres of ivory await resplendent foes.

  Blix and I hardly came into this category at Kilamakoy — certainly not after we had run down the big bull, or, as it happened, the big bull had run down us. I can say, at once with gratification still genuine, that we were not trampled within that most durable of all inches — the last inch of our lives. We got out all right, but there are times when I still dream.

  On arriving from Makindu, I landed my plane in the shallow box of a runway scooped out of the bush, unplugged wads of cotton wool from my ears, and climbed from the cockpit.

  The aristocratically descended visage of the Baron von Blixen Finecke greeted me (as it always did) with the most delightful of smiles caught, like a strip of sunlight, on a familiar patch of leather — well-kept leather, free of wrinkles, but brown and saddle-tough.

  Beyond this concession to the fictional idea of what a White Hunter ought to look like, Blix’s face yields not a whit. He has gay, light blue eyes rather than sombre, steel-grey ones; his cheeks are well rounded rather than flat as an axe; his lips are full and generous and not pinched tight in grim realization of what the Wilderness Can Do. He talks. He is never significantly silent.

  He wore then what I always remember him as wearing, a khaki bush shirt of ‘solario’ material, slacks of the same stuff, and a pair of low-cut moccasins with soles — or at least vestiges of soles. There were four pockets in his bush shirt, but I don’t think he knew it; he never carried anything unless he was actually hunting — and then it was just a rifle and ammunition. He never went around hung with knives, revolvers, binoculars, or even a watch. He could tell time by the sun, and if there were no sun, he could tell it, anyway. He wore over his closely cropped greying hair a terai hat, colourless and limp as a wilted frond.

  He said, ‘Hullo, Beryl,’ and pointed to a man at his side — so angular as to give the impression of being constructed entirely of barrel staves.

  ‘This,’ said Blix, with what could hardly be called Old-World courtesy, ‘is Old Man Wicks.’

  ‘At last,’ said Old Man Wicks, ‘I have seen the Lady from the Skies.’

  Writing it now, that remark seems a little like a line from the best play chosen from those offered by the graduating class of Eton, possibly in the late twenties, or like the remark of a man up to his ears in his favourite anodyne. But, as a matter of fact, Old Man Wicks, who managed a piece of no-man’s-land belonging to the Manoni Sugar Company, near Masongaleni, had seen only one white man in sixteen months and, I gathered, hadn’t seen a white woman in as many years. At least he had never seen an aeroplane and a white woman at the same time, nor can I be sure that he regarded the spectacle as much of a Godsend. Old Man Wicks, oddly enough, wasn’t very old — he was barely forty — and it may have been that his monkish life was the first choice of whatever other lives he could have led. He looked old, but that might have been protective colouration. He was a gentle, kindly man helping Blix with the safari until Winston Guest arrived.

  It was a modest enough safari. There were three large tents — Winston’s, Blix’s, and my own — and then there were several pup tents for the Native boys, gun-bearers, and trackers. Blix’s boy Farah, Winston’s boy, and of course my Arab Ruta (who was due via lorry from Nairobi) had pup tents to themselves. The others, as much out of choice as necessity, slept several in a tent. There was a hangar for the Avian, made out of a square of tarpaulin, and there was a baobab tree whose shade served as a veranda to everybody. The immediate country was endless and barren of hills.

  Half an hour after I landed, Blix and I were up in the Avian, hoping, if possible, to spot a herd of elephant before Winston’s arrival that night. If we could find a herd within two or three days’ walking distance from the camp, it would be extraordinary luck — always provided that the herd contained a bull with respectable tusks.

  It is not unusual for an elephant hunter to spend six months, or even a year, on the spoor of a single bull. Elephant go where men can’t — or at least shouldn’t.

  Scouting by plane eliminates a good deal of the preliminary work, but when as upon occasion I did spot a herd not more than thirty or forty miles from camp, it still meant that those forty miles had to be walked, crawled, or wriggled by the hunters — and that by the time this body and nerve-racking manoeuvre had been achieved, the elephant had pushed on another twenty miles or so into the bush. A man, it ought to be remembered, has to take several steps to each stride of an elephant, and, moreover, the man is somewhat less than resistant to thicket, thorn trees, and heat. Also (particularly if he is white) he is vulnerable as a peeled egg to all things that sting — anopheles mosquitoes, scorpions, snakes, and tsetse flies. The essence of elephant-hunting is discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy can afford it.

  Blix and I were fortunate on our very first expedition out of Kilamakoy. The Wakamba scouts on our safari had reported a large herd of elephant containing several worth-while bulls, not more than twenty air miles from camp. We circled the district indicated, passed over the herd perhaps a dozen times, but finally spotted it.

  A herd of elephant, as seen from a plane, has a quality of an hallucination. The proportions are wrong — they are like those of a child’s drawing of a field mouse in which the whole landscape, complete with barns and windmills, is dwarfed beneath the whiskers of the mighty rodent who looks both able and willing to devour everything, including the thumb-tack that holds the work against the schoolroom wall.

  Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the sense that the twentieth century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden. Even in Africa, the elephant is as anomalous as the Cro-Magnon Man might be shooting a round of golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland.

  But, with all this, elephant are seldom conspicuous from the air. If they were smaller, they might be. Big as they are, and coloured as they are, they blend with everything until the moment they catch your eye.

  They caught Blix’s eye and he scribbled me a frantic note; ‘Look! The big bull is enormous. Turn back. Doctor Turvy radios I should have some gin.’

  Well, we had no radio — and certainly no gin in my plane. But just as certainly, we had Doctor Turvy.

  Doctor Turvy was an ethereal citizen of an ethereal world. In the beginning, he existed only for Blix, but long before the end, he existed for everybody who worked with
Blix or knew him well.

  Although Doctor Turvy’s prescriptions indicated that he put his trust in a wine list rather than a pharmacopoeia, he had two qualities of special excellence in a physician; his diagnosis was always arrived at in a split second — and he held the complete confidence of his patient. Beyond that, his adeptness at mental telepathy (in which Blix himself was pretty well grounded) eliminated the expensive practice of calling round to feel the pulse or take a temperature. Nobody ever saw Doctor Turvy — and that fact, Blix insisted, was bedside manner carried to its final degree of perfection.

  I banked the Avian and turned toward camp.

  Within three miles of our communal baobab tree, we saw four more elephant — three of them beautiful bulls. The thought passed through my head that the way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down. Elephant are never within three miles of camp. It’s hardly cricket that they should be. It doesn’t make a hunter out of you to turn over on your canvas cot and realize that the thing you are hunting at such expense and physical tribulation is so contemptuous of your prowess as to be eating leaves right in front of your eyes.

  But Blix is a practical man. As a White Hunter, his job was to produce the game desired and to point it out to his employer of the moment. Blix’s work, and mine, was made much easier by finding the elephant so close. We could even land at the camp and then approach them on foot to judge more accurately their size, immediate intentions, and strategic disposition.

  Doctor Turvy’s prescription had to be filled, and taken, of course, but even so, we would have time to reconnoitre.

  We landed on the miserly runway, which had a lot in common with an extemporaneous badminton court, and, within twenty minutes, proceeded on foot toward those magnificent bulls.

  Makula was with us. Neither the safari nor this book, for that matter, could be complete without Makula. Though there are a good many Wakamba trackers available in East Africa, it has become almost traditional in late years to mention Makula in every book that touches upon elephant-hunting, and I would not break with tradition.

  Makula is a man in the peculiar position of having gained fame without being aware of it. He can neither read nor write; his first language is Wakamba, his second a halting Swahili. He is a smallish ebon-tinted Native with an inordinately wise eye, a penchant for black magic, and the instincts of a beagle hound. I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.

  No matter how elaborate the safari on which Makula is engaged as tracker, he goes about naked from the waist up, carrying a long bow and a quiver full of poisoned arrows. He has seen the work of the best rifles white men have yet produced, but when Makula’s nostrils distend after either a good or a bad shot, it is not the smell of gunpowder that distends them; it is a kind of restrained contempt for that noisy and unwieldy piece of machinery with its devilish tendency to knock the untutored huntsman flat on his buttocks every time he pulls the trigger.

  Safaris come and safaris go, but Makula goes on forever. I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have ever known — so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away, though I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: ‘White men pay for danger — we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.’

  Makula always vanished. He went ahead in the bush with the silence of a shade, missing nothing, and the moment he had brought his hunters within sight of the elephant, he disappeared with the silence of a shade, missing everything.

  Stalking just ahead of Blix through the tight bush, Makula signalled for a pause, shinned up a convenient tree without noise, and then came down again. He pointed to a chink in the thicket, took Blix firmly by the arm, and pushed him ahead. Then Makula disappeared. Blix led, and I followed.

  The ability to move soundlessly through a wall of bush as tightly woven as Nature can weave it is not an art that can be acquired much after childhood. I cannot explain it, nor could Arab Maina who taught me ever explain it. It is not a matter of watching where you step; it is rather a matter of keeping your eyes on the place where you want to be, while every nerve becomes another eye, every muscle develops reflex action. You do not guide your body, you trust it to be silent.

  We were silent. The elephant we advanced upon heard nothing — even when the enormous hindquarters of two bulls loomed before us like grey rocks wedded to the earth.

  Blix stopped. He whispered with his fingers and I read the whisper. ‘Watch the wind. Swing round them. I want to see their tusks.’

  Swing, indeed! It took us slightly over an hour to negotiate a semicircle of fifty yards. The bulls were big — with ivory enough — hundred-pounders at least, or better.

  Nimrod was satisfied, wet with sweat, and on the verge, I sensed, of receiving a psychic message from Doctor Turvy. But this message was delayed in transit.

  One bull raised his head, elevated his trunk, and moved to face us. His gargantuan ears began to spread as if to capture even the sound of our heartbeats. By chance, he had grazed over a spot we had lately left, and he had got our scent. It was all he needed.

  I have rarely seen anything so calm as that bull elephant — or so casually determined upon destruction. It might be said that he shuffled to the kill. Being, like all elephant, almost blind, this one could not see us, but he was used to that. He would follow scent and sound until he could see us, which, I computed would take about thirty seconds.

  Blix wiggled his fingers earthward, and that meant, ‘Drop and crawl.’

  It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.

  By the time I had crawled three feet, I am sure that somewhere over fifty distinct species of insect life were individually and severally represented in my clothes, with Siafu ants conducting the congress.

  Blix’s feet were just ahead of my eyes — close enough so that I could contemplate the holes in his shoes, and wonder why he ever wore any at all, since he went through them almost in a matter of hours. I had ample time also to observe that he wore no socks. Practical, but not comme il faut. His legs moved through the underbrush like dead legs dragged by strings. There was no sound from the elephant.

  I don’t know how long we crawled like that, but the little shadows in the thicket were leaning toward the east when we stopped. Possibly we had gone a hundred yards. The insect bites had become just broad, burning patches.

  We were breathing easier — or at least I was — when Blix’s feet and legs went motionless. I could just see his head close against his shoulder, and watch him turn to peek upward into the bush. He gave no signal to continue. He only looked horribly embarrassed like a child caught stealing eggs.

  But my own expression must have been a little more intense. The big bull was about ten feet away — and at that distance elephant are not blind.

  Blix stood up and raised his rifle slowly, with an expression of ineffable sadness.

  ‘That’s for me,’ I thought. ‘He knows that even a shot in the brain won’t stop that bull before we’re both crushed like mangos.’

  In an open place, it might have been possible to dodge to one side, but not here. I stood behind Blix with my hands on his waist according to his instructions. But I knew it wasn’t any good. The body of the elephant was swaying. It was like watching a boulder, in whose path you were trapped, teeter on the edge of a cliff before plunging. The bull’s ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up and extended toward us, and he began the elephant scream of anger which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand, like fingers clamped upon your throat. It is a shrill scream, cold as winter wind.

  It occurred to me that this was the
instant to shoot.

  Blix never moved. He held his rifle very steady and began to chant some of the most striking blasphemy I have ever heard. It was colourful, original, and delivered with finesse, but I felt that this was a badly chosen moment to test it on an elephant — and ungallant beyond belief if it was meant for me.

  The elephant advanced, Blix unleashed more oaths (this time in Swedish), and I trembled. There was no rifle shot. A single biscuit tin, I judged, would do for both of us — cremation would be superfluous.

  ‘I may have to shoot him,’ Blix announced, and the remark struck me as an understatement of classic magnificence. Bullets would sink into that monstrous hide like pebbles into a pond.

  Somehow you never think of an elephant as having a mouth, because you never see it when his trunk is down, so that when the elephant is quite close and his trunk is up, the dark red-and-black slit is by way of being an almost shocking revelation. I was looking into our elephant’s mouth with a kind of idiotic curiosity when he screamed again — and thereby, I am convinced, saved both Blix and me from a fate no more tragic than simple death, but infinitely less tidy.

  The scream of that elephant was a strategic blunder, and it did him out of a wonderful bit of fun. It was such an authentic scream, of such splendid resonance, that his cronies, still grazing in the bush, accepted it as legitimate warning, and left. We had known they were still there because the bowels of peacefully occupied elephant rumble continually like oncoming thunder — and we had heard thunder.