Baker probably killed more Asian elephant than anyone before or since, hundreds of them. His favored technique was to shoot the animal at 10 or a dozen paces as it was charging him, making the, for him, certain frontal brain shot. He was one of the most knowledgeable sportsmen of his day on the subject of firearms, being a vocal advocate of not only rifles (versus smoothbores) and “plenty of powder,” but of sights as well—apparently a controversy of the moment. For all his hunting he preferred a matched pair of 15-pound Reilly No. 10 (10-bore) polygroove rifles that handled seven drams, or nearly 200 grains, of powder without “disagreeable recoil.”
In 1861, after the death of his first wife and his acquisition of Florence, he resolved to fulfill an old dream of seeing the elephant of Africa and exploring for the source of the Nile, the great quest of the day. To his battery he added a 20-pound 2-bore which the native Arabs he encountered in Abyssinia eagerly proclaimed “Child of the Cannon” after they found there was amply room to slip two fingers down the yawning muzzle. Baker simply called it “Baby” and described it as an “instrument of torture” to the shooter. He actually feared to use it, noting that when he fired it, it spun him around like “a weathercock in a hurricane.” (He assigned his gunbearers to discharge the weapon when the regular interval for cleaning it came around.) Its sole saving grace was that any elephant he hit with its half-pound projectile perished without fail.
Baker had significantly less success with his close-range brain shot on the African elephant he faced, due to the structure of their skulls being appreciably different from that of the Asian. Still, when called upon, Baby carried the day. Most of the elephant Baker killed on his four-year journey to discover Albert Nyanza, the freshwater inland sea of Africa through which the Nile flows, were to provision his expedition. Perhaps the truest hunter of his time, he found in the African wilderness among the elephant a place where he could live a life, with the doughty, and far from British, woman he loved, that was impossible for him in “civilization.”
The foremost popularizer of the professional elephant hunter’s way of life for the Victorian audience was one Roualeyn Gordon Cumming who pursued the animals with horses and dogs to good effect in southern Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Author of A Hunter’s Life in South Africa, his book inspired future elephant hunters from Baldwin to Selous to Bell to forsake the humdrum, and very real comforts, of England and strike off into the bush—in much the same way the writings of Jack London inspired my grandfather’s generation to go before the mast, or the writings of Hunter S. Thompson sent so many of my own generation careering off in search of “king hell” highs.
When it came to the actual shooting of elephant, Cumming was, to judge by his own words and at a time when the term sociopath had not been coined, either a bumbling incompetent or a thorough-going swine. He once spent from before noon to the setting of the sun to pump 57 balls into a single elephant before it succumbed to his attentions. He was apt to begin laying down his barrages out at 100 yards or more (a range Baker would have found despicable); and in an oft quoted passage, he blithely describes bringing up lame the largest elephant bull he ever happened on with a shoulder shot. As the elephant leaned immobilized against a tree, Cumming unsaddled his horse in a shady spot, built a fire, brewed up some piping-hot coffee, and hunkered down to contemplate this “noble” animal at his leisure. Finally he resolved to conduct his own science project and began to probe methodically for the bull’s vitals with rounds from his “two-groove” rifle. A cure for cancer could have been found in less time than it took him to dispatch this weary creature.
William Charles Baldwin followed in Cumming’s unspeakable wake with his own book, more a journal, African Hunting and Adventure. A parson’s son, Baldwin was another rover whose father was determined he should become a clerk at 16; but William Charles soon found himself better suited to “sport, dogs, and horses” than “quill-driving.” When his subsequent effort at “light Scotch farming” degenerated into nothing more than an excuse for running game on a daily basis, and Baldwin saw “no earthly prospect of the command of anything like a moor or a stud in the old country,” his thoughts turned to Canada and the American plains, both then awash in wildlife. Then came friends’ and Cumming’s stories of southern Africa, and with an accompaniment of seven deerhounds and a volume of Byron, Baldwin arrived in Natal in late 1851, aged 24, to commence an eight-year career of professional hide, ostrich-feather, and ivory hunting. His first expedition was to St. Lucia Bay for hippopotamuses (or “sea-cows” as they were called there and then), and seven out of 10 of his hunting partners died of fever and various illnesses.
It was not until 1858 that Baldwin finally killed his first elephant at 15 yards with a 5-bore round in front of six drams of powder, dropping the bull a witch doctor had prophesied would be his. He went on to kill considerably more, to be sure, his wagons sometimes bringing out 5,000 pounds of “white gold” at a safari’s end. On a whim, seemingly to break the drudgery of his hunting, he once marched all alone to the Zambezi River to become the second European, after Dr. Livingstone, to view Victoria Falls; he was overcome by their magnificence—though not to such an extent that he was unable to note that the “baboons here are out of all number.” Yet after almost a decade of being chivvied through the African bush by belligerent inthlovi, he was to conclude that elephant hunting was “the very hardest life a man can chalk out for himself,” and retired to England on his ivory money, never to return.
Some of the more noted Southern African ivory hunters harassed the elephant in large squads, employing as assistants African hunters, such as the ex-jockey Cigar whom both William Finaughty and Frederick Selous hunted with and made famous, or as family parties, such as Henry Hartley & Sons who tallied 1,200 animals in 30 years’ work. Finaughty took most of the 500 elephant he accounted for in his nine years of professional hunting in Matabeleland and Mashonaland on his own. Born in South Africa in 1843, and by his own description a “harum-scarum from youth,” he was also a total abstainer with a wily Roscommon face, a relentless gambler, a good horseman, a fair shot, a gunrunner, a freebooter, and a looter. On one two-month hunt alone along the Umfuli River in 1868 (“the two finest months of my life”) he took 95 elephant and numerous rhino, the ivory fetching 6s. 10½d. per pound, while the rhino horns brought £4 apiece.
Finaughty, like the Blackfeet, refused to hunt in any manner but from horseback, his cherished bay mount Dopper having trained itself to lower its head and hold its breath whenever Finaughty leveled his ponderous muzzleloader. When in the mid-1870s, with the elephant driven into “fly” country where horses could no longer be used, Finaughty abandoned hunting in favor of other forms of roguery.
On one of his last hunts, Finaughty used one of the “newly-invented” breechloaders, a trifling 12-bore, to kill half-a-dozen or so elephant in a single day; but even in a gun as “light” as this, the recoil was such that recalling it 30 years later still made Finaughty’s “eyes moist.” The punishing recoil of the enormous big-bore weapons they used was a topic all elephant hunters got around to discussing at one time or another. Selous, who hunted all his elephant on foot, explained that his first pair of cheap 4-bores—actually waterfowl guns—when loaded with a “handful” of “common trade powder” (approximately 20 drams), “drove better” than more expensive guns he acquired later, but kicked so unmercifully that his nerves were utterly destroyed by them and his shooting was affected ever after. The recoil of most elephant guns was such that the stocks invariably had to be bound in the green skin of an elephant’s ear and the skin let to dry like “iron” around the wood to keep it from splitting when the gun was discharged. (Selous once touched off a 4-bore that had accidentally received a double-charge of powder, the resulting detonation cartwheeling him backward and splintering the stock to smithereens.)
Frederick Courteney Selous’s advent upon the African scene occurred in 1871 at age 18, and for 20 years he followed the “free-and-easy gipsy [sic] sort of life�
� of Cumming and Baldwin in the wild country between the Limpopo River and the Congo Basin. An ethnologist and naturalist besides, Selous contributed vitally to the outside world’s knowledge of the area’s flora, fauna, and native cultures. He hunted widely around the globe and become a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, organizing, as we recall, Teddy’s 1909–10 East African safari; in 1917, while a 65-year-old captain with the 25th Royal Fusiliers battling German guerrilla forces for nominal control of the inhospitable Tanganyikan bush, he took a sniper’s bullet in the neck. And back in his ivory-hunting days, he could express genuine regret over having to kill elephant for just their tusks, yet pointed out the basic fact known to all those in his chosen field, that ivory was the sole item obtainable in that wild country “with which to defray the heavy expenses of hunting.” Ivory paid the way for Selous to hunt and to live his life in Africa, where he lies buried beside a tributary of the Rufiji River in the 21,000-square-mile Tanzanian game reserve that bears his name, established by the iconic game warden, C. J. P. Ionides.
Baker died in Devon in 1893 in Florence’s arms, dreaming of lion hunting in Somaliland. By then in the scramble for Africa, the concerted European powers had all but demolished the vast Moslem empires the Arab ivory-slave sultans had constructed in the interior, including that of the greatest of them all, Hamed bin Muhammed bin Juma bin Rajab, or Tippu Tib (meaning either “the sound of guns” or a reference to a nervous blink, depending upon the authority one cites). A charming, intelligent gentilhomme or a ruthless, blood-thirsty corsair, as circumstances dictated, Tippu met and aided during his life both Stanley and Livingstone, and others of their ilk, while going on to gain harsh control over 100,000 square miles of the Upper Congo Basin. In time, even he was made to see that the game was up and retired to Zanzibar to die of a fever in his late 60s in 1905, a modestly wealthy man.
It was to fall, then, to a pale imitation of Tippu, one Shundi, who terrorized the area around Kilimanjaro for a brief period with his ivory-gathering activities, to collect the grandest prize of all the elephant hunters. One day in 1898 at the base of the snow-cowled mountain, one of Shundi’s armed slaves caught sight of a small-bodied elephant bull with high shoulders and a sloping back, the “like a hyena” elephant the old Zanzibaris contended always carried the heaviest ivory. When this one fell, his el Hadam, “the servant,” tusk—the one more worn due to greater use because of right- or left-“handedness”—weighed 228 pounds, while the other came to 232. Each was 12 feet long. No bigger elephant ivory has ever been found, and none is ever likely to be.
Nonetheless, there were more elephant to be killed, an estimated 30,000 a year in the period between 1905 and 1912, and more men to kill them. Arthur H. Neumann was one of them, using a, for then, laughably puny 577 to gather the ivory needed to recoup the cost of his following his “bent of wandering in the most remote wilds” to be found across fin de siècle Kenya, as far as the northern shore of Lake Rudolf. He donned gloves at the equator because his “small bore” 577’s recoil tore his hands to shreds, and when not hunting elephant he collected butterflies. Once terribly wounded by an elephant cow, he lay in the bush for several months, fed a diet of milk by his porters who titled him Nyama Yangu (“my meat”) for his prowess in obtaining game for them. The scope of his hunting restricted in time by colonial authorities, Neumann returned to England and died.
Captain “Jimmy” Sutherland, who because of his services to the German government during the Maji-Maji Rebellion of 1905–06 was given free rein to slay elephant in what was then German East Africa, was another who employed the 577. Safari-ing after ivory with a virtual municipality of porters—1,000 men, women, and children—he was conveyed along in a swaying hammock borne by relays of runners and slept in tents of silk. He was the acknowledged first, in that phrase that sounds as if it were taken from the Book of Samuel, to “have shot his thousand” singlehandedly. Yet he was never confident of his ability to halt a charging elephant; and so his unease was somehow communicated to his prey, as often happens, and he was charged again and again. Yet his demise on safari came not by elephant but by native poison, perhaps administered by disgruntled hammock bearers.
Then, of course, there was the famous “Karamojo” Bell of the 1,011 documented bull elephant and the “tiny nickel pencil-like” 275 bullet he used to dispatch an inordinate number of them. As a solitary boy in the 1880s, he dreamed of going off to hunt the bison of North America, not realizing that the buffalo were already long gone by then. Then he was to hear of Africa, and it was he who was long gone. It did not end with him, either, because even into our lifetimes there were the likes of “Pondoro” Taylor, Wally Johnson, Ian Nyschens, and the notorious Zimbabwean Shadrek Muteruko, in their own wild wrinkles in time, still practicing the very hardest life a man can chalk out for himself as the greatest wars were fought and space explored. Yet perhaps not so ironically, it was when these lonesome outlaws (far more pilgrims than imperialists) had finally passed from the scene that the armies of organized poachers marched in with their Kalashnikovs and Chinese buyers in Vietnam and began to persecute the elephant more heartlessly than any of the old ivory hunters ever had in their blackest dreams.
What could they have all been seeking, those singular men, as they went about cutting off the tails of dead elephant to mark the kills as theirs and burying tusks to keep them from burning like “candles” in the all-too-frequent grass fires? No white whale, certainly. And probably since they had to walk, it is calculated, an average of 100 miles for every large bull elephant they killed, surely the ivory alone could not have been inducement enough to set them seeking.
It must have been, I think, the search itself that drew them to the life, the absolute freedom they discovered in those places so far from the orderly cities and citizens they had put behind them, learning “the joy of wandering through lonely lands” that Roosevelt so profoundly knew. In a real sense, they ruled those lands, being their self-crowned monarchs (Ahab, remember, is also the name of a king). Lonely monarchs, yes, lonely hunter kings. Perhaps lonesomeness became their true Moby Dick, leading them on long after more conventional, and mundane, men would have abandoned such a quest.
I think, unlike Captain Ahab, they must have finally come to love, even more than the hunt, the elegant isolation itself of that empty country where, as their eyes circled the horizon, the only other living creature they might behold would be—look! there—an elephant.
The One
The 1970s …
THE GREATER PART of a lifetime ago, red volcanic Tsavo dust displayed for me a track like an impression incused in metal with a die. When new, the edges and outlines were sharp as stamped steel, so that a hunter could hunker down and touch his finger to the pugmark and feel the mass and energy of the animal whose paw imprinted it. In my case, I first felt a frisson traveling up my spine, then an unsightly grin spreading across my face.
We found the carcass of the impala ewe hauled into a tall tree near the Njugini River the next afternoon. I had killed a ram that morning, and now we hung its forequarters from the limb as well, saving the better haunches to eat. We built the blind 20 yards from the tree, weaving it from cut brush—a curtain with loopholes. That night in camp we dined on peppery slices of impala rump roast. And thought about leopard.
Before dawn, Jbwani came to my tent with the tea tray. Ten minutes later I was eating breakfast with Fletcher under the propane lamp in the large dining tent. Thirty minutes after that, the night seeping from the sky, John, his gunbearer Mmaku, and I dropped from the Land Cruiser and crawled to the blind as the Toyota drove off. The Maasai herded cattle and goats in this Rombo country of southern Kenya, where Kilimanjaro bulked on the horizon; and as we sat motionlessly in the blind, flat on the ground, we could do nothing about the ticks affixing themselves to our skin. Fletcher had his 375, I my 300; and Mmaku had the 500 Nitro Express double, loaded with the 578-grain soft-nosed bullets. No one, ultimately, can define what is “too much gun” for a leopard, becau
se the idea is to slam and bolt a door between you and it if it charges.
When in the first light only a few minutes later a leopard walked around the edge of the blind and stood two dozen feet from us, staring off in the direction in which the Land Cruiser had driven, I was the first to see it. I moved only my eyes, but was able to see with absolute clarity the black rosettes charred into the golden hide, and how the lithe, female line of the cat’s body was broken by loose white fur hanging along its belly. Mmaku beside me did not see the leopard until I touched his leg. He hissed across me to John.
“Chui.”
“Do not move,” John ordered without turning his head to look at the cat, his whisper raspy. Move? I went on sitting here, watching this first leopard I had ever seen in the wild—who because we were motionless could not identify us—until the ticks made a dry husk of me. Then the leopard snapped its head toward us, perhaps having detected the flick of an eyelash; and I was staring into bottomless panther eyes. The cat was frozen there for a full minute or more before crouching and spinning and rustling off through the tall dry grass.
We saw the leopard an hour later, stretched out on the limb bearing the impala.
“She-leopard,” the PH said after studying her for a few minutes through his binocular. “And there’s a cub.” I reset the 300’s safety. For the next two hours, until the Land Cruiser came back for us, we watched the cat in the tree, she with her big cub curled near her in the crotch of the limb. A fish eagle circled, whiffling down toward the carcasses hanging on the limb, opened talons outstretched. The she-leopard watched the raptor with entranced attention, until the bird was about to close its scaled yellow feet on the impala; then she shot out the limb to the end, the claws of one paw sinking into the wood, clenching it, the other paw swiping through the air as the eagle urgently backstroked its wide wings.
Augusts in Africa Page 13
