by Ruark, R.
“Local product,” Harry said. “Called Tusker. Bloody awful, I think. I love that Danish pilsner they have at the Norfolk, myself. But this can taste awfully good—well, say a month hence.”
“I ain’t knockin’ it now,” I said. “Pass the Tommy.”
Considering that this particular Thomson gazelle had been dancing on the village green about four hours ago, possibly contemplating matrimony, he was great. He was not so tough as tender, and he tasted unlike any game I had ever eaten. No rankness, no gaminess, no stringiness. He was succulent and unfit, and I had three helpings of him.
“Best of all, I think,” Harry said. “Except maybe gerenuk that you get up in the N.F.D. Long-necked little beggars, but beautiful to eat. You’ll really get to love Tommy over the long haul. He never gets tiresome on the tongue. This one’s a touch fresh for my fancy, though. I like to hang it at least a day. I love meat,” he said. “Give me cold meat and a hunk of bread, and you can have all the rest.”
We finished the meat, and I noticed that Virginia had not allowed her isolation in the midst of Africa to bother an appetite that always seemed to flourish best where night found her, whether at the Stork Club or some few miles out of Haddon Rig, the lost sheep station in New South Wales, Australia. She would leap slightly when a fresh, new hoot came out of the small, intimate jungle of trees, but as she leaped she chewed.
Juma, the head boy, came and swept away the dishes. He went back to the cook fire and returned with a smoking fry pan.
“What’s this?” Virginia asked.
“Dessert,” Harry said. “Crêpes suzette. Old Ali always makes ’em first night out. Instills any amount of faith in the clients. Good?”
“Saints preserve us,” Virginia said. “Wonderful. How does he do it on an open fire?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I’ve had him for years. He can cook anything. Uses a biscuit tin for an oven. Tell me what you want, and old Ali will produce it.”
“If we eat like this on the first night out in a temporary camp,” Virginia said, “God help my figure after two months of Ali’s fine Swahilian hand with the skillet. I’m about to bust.”
Juma and Kaluku came and cleared away the table. Juma fetched coffee, and I remembered a bottle of brandy I had stuck into the back of Jessica. We sat there facing the fire, listening to the night noises, the hyenas, the birds I did not know the name of, the leopard coughing somewhere up the creek, the bugs swooping and zooming but not biting. The moon had climbed steeply into the sky, and you could see the little hills plainly under it like a long caravan of camels suddenly stopped and still as though waiting beside a well.
It was cold—not bitter, not quite frosty, but chilly dew cold— and the fire was warm and wonderful. I was tired and I was full and the coffee was strong and black and the brandy slid down smoothly. I started to think about just how far I was from New York and newspaper syndicates and telephones and telegraphs and the 21 Club and income taxes and subways and elevators, and then I sat up with a startled feeling inside. I am a hunter, I said to myself. I must be a hunter, or I wouldn’t be here in the deep end of nowhere with a city-slicker wife and fifteen strange black boys and a young punk with no beard, practically, who says he is a white hunter. Looking at the fire and listening to the noises, I ran my mind back to what had brought me here, and I wrote a little mental essay for myself as I sat and sipped the brandy.
The hunter’s horn sounds early for some, I thought, later for others. For some unfortunates, prisoned by city sidewalks and sentenced to a cement jungle more horrifying than anything to be found in Tanganyika, the horn of the hunter never winds at all. But deep in the guts of most men is buried the involuntary response to the hunter’s horn, a prickle of the nape hairs, an acceleration of the pulse, an atavistic memory of their fathers, who killed first with stone, and then with club, and then with spear, and then with bow, and then with gun, and finally with formulae. How meek the man is of no importance; somewhere in the pigeon chest of the clerk is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter’s heart; somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood. There is no man with such impoverishment of imagination that at some time he has not wondered how he would handle himself if a lion broke loose from a zoo and he were forced to face him without the protection of bars or handy, climbable trees.
This is a simple manifestation of ancient ego, almost as simple as the breeding instinct, simpler than the urge for shelter, because man the hunter lives basically in his belly. It is only when progress puts him in the business of killing other men that the bloodlust surges upward to his brain. And even war is still regarded by the individual as sport—the man himself against a larger and more dangerous lion.
Hunting is simple. Animals are simple. Man himself is simple inside himself. In this must lay some explanation for the fact that zoos are crowded on Sundays and museums that display mounted animals are thronged on weekdays as well as holidays. This must explain the popularity of moving pictures that deal with animals. This explains the lasting popularity of the exploits of Tarzan of the Apes, the half-animal figure created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Man is still a hunter, still a simple searcher after meat for his growling belly, still a provider for his helpless mate and cubs. Else why am I here? From the moment he wakes until the moment he closes his eyes, man’s prime concern is the business of making a living for himself and his family. Bringing home the bacon is the modern equivalent of banging a curly mammoth over the head with a big sharp rock.
Man has found it exceedingly difficult lately to decipher the weird incantations and ceremonies that surround the provision of meat and shelter for his spawn. He is mystified by the cabalistic signs of the economist. He does not understand billions of dollars in relationship to him and his. Parity baffles him; the administration of ceilings and floors and controls and excises and supports does not satisfy his meat urge or his aesthetic response to the chase, when the hunter’s horn of necessity rouses him. These are pretty fine thoughts, I thought. I will think some more.
But he can understand a lion because a lion is life in its simplest form, beautiful, menacing, dangerous, and attractive to his ego. A lion has always been the symbol of challenge, the prototype of personal hazard. You get the lion or the lion gets you.
And he can understand a gun because the gun is the symbol of man’s brain and ingenuity, the device of difference between small, weak man and big, brawny, cruel life. But I do not even know whether I can shoot a rifle yet.
And he can understand man, himself, puny ape with outsize brain and weak talons, short blunt teeth, and always ridden by consuming fear and uncertainty. And I am real scared at this moment.
And he can understand a star and a moon and the sun and grass and trees and uncontrived beauty, when modern art and physical formulae and aerodynamics and jet propulsion are cloaked in unreality.
A man and a gun and a star and a beast are still ponderable in a world of imponderables. The essence of the simple ponderable is man’s potential ability to slay a lion. It is an opportunity that comes to few, but the urge is always present. Never forget that man is not a dehydrated nellie under his silly striped pants. He is a direct descendant of the hairy fellow who tore his meat raw from the pulsing flanks of just-slain beasts and who wiped his greasy fingers on his thighs if he bothered to wipe them at all. I wiped my greasy fingers on my thigh for practice.
This is the only deeply rooted reason I can produce for the almost universal interest, either active or vicarious, in hunting. As time and civilization encroach more deeply on the individual, as man hunts his meat at the supermarket instead of in the swamps and forests, it is still interesting to note that in America some thirty-six million hunting and fishing licenses are sold annually, that the sale of outdoor magazines and books continues to boom, and that the firms that handle safaris in Africa are booked up four and five years in advance. Oddly, as the opportunity for direct participation dwindles, the interest in man versus animal continue
s to grow.
It seems to me I heard the hunter’s horn earlier than most. I was raised in the country-small-town part of North Carolina. My grandfather was a hunter, and a serious one. So was my father, although he never in his life shot anything larger than a five-ounce bobwhite quail. When I was six years old, they gave me an air gun, and I was physically sick from excitement when I killed my first sparrow. I was even sicker when I killed my first quail with the 20-gauge shotgun Santa brought me on my eighth milestone. Thereafter, I hunted six days a week, and on the seventh I did not rest. I worked out the bird dogs on dry runs with no gun. We did not defile the Sabbath with gunfire in those days. I had few gods, however, that were not to be found in the fields and woods, and I early learned that you did not have to shoot it to enjoy it. Seeing it wild and happy more often was enough.
You might say that Field & Stream was my early Bible. I worshiped before the shrines of men like Archibald Rutledge, David Newell, and Ray Holland, a far piece ahead of Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe. I had good dogs as a kid, and a great many marvelous things happened to me in the woods. For a long time I had a small boy’s dream of writing a story about my dogs and my quail—and of course, me—and seeing it printed in a magazine with a cover by Lynn Bogue Hunt. This was the goingto-sleep dream. I never expected to achieve it, but dreams are not taxed for small boys, not even the wildest ones.
Somewhere along the way, when I was out after squirrels or creeping after ducks or following my old setter, Frank, after bobwhite, I got involved in an even more ambitious dream. I had early fallen under the spell of Mr. Burroughs and his Tarzan. Somewhat later came more realistic approaches to Africa—the Martin Johnsons, Trader Horn, Sanders of the River. I got involved with the travel tales of Somerset Maugham, and it seemed I would bust a gusset if I didn’t get to see jungles and lions and cannibals someday.
I believe I planned to follow the Alger technique. I would return a lost wallet to a banker and get a job in his bank. Then I would marry his daughter, inherit his riches, and one day I would pack up and take a safari into Africa. I would see, and maybe shoot, old Numa, the lion, and Sabor, the lioness, and Tantor, the elephant. (Mr. Burroughs’ nomenclature for Tarzan’s playmates was even more colorful than Swahili.) And then maybe, when I was rich and famous, I would write about Africa.
The implementation of dreams rarely follows the script, but the endings sometimes turn out surprisingly well. I married no banker’s daughter. I got into the seafaring business, and later into the writing trade, and then into the war business, and then again into the writing trade. I never got rich or famous, but I got action.
I saw Mr. Maugham’s South Seas, and I made six round trips to Africa. I wrote a lot of stuff for a lot of people—syndicated newspaper columns, and a raft of stories for a great many magazines, and several books. But I never stopped dreaming of lions.
For no real reason at all, save a boyish dream and a twenty-year itch, I suddenly rigged my own safari to Kenya and Tanganyika. It was mine. Nobody sent me. I was paying for it myself. Nobody goes along but my wife and the white hunter and a company of African “boys.” I refused to share the trip with anybody else, even though I had offers of plenty of company.
There is not much personal adventure left in this world—not many boyhood dreams that lose nothing, but rather gain, by fulfillment. So I combined two dreams in one: I was on a safari and I was going to write about it.
The fire was beginning to shake into solid glowing coals now, and some of the night noises had stilled others, and new ones had commenced. The boys had finally succeeded in dragging Annie Lorry out of her sloven nest in the pig hole, and she was moored alongside the sleeping tent. Harry had stretched a length of canvas as a dew cloth from her topmost rigging to the jeep and had set up his cot under the canvas. I yawned. Virginia yawned. Harry yawned. Harry got up.
“Time for bed, I expect,” he said. “Nataka lala. We’ll be up at dawn. Two more hard days’ drive yet to come. Sleep well.”
We walked to the tent where a small carbide lamp blazed on a rickety little table and the two white tall cones of mosquito netting draped over cots with inflated rubber mattresses on them. I reflected that if it were possible for a man to be happy in this day and age, I was a happy man. I didn’t know precisely why, despite the fine talk, but I was a truly happy man.
Chapter 2
IT STARTED out to be a funny trip. It had to be funny, funny peculiar, that is, because the kind friend who had been giving all the good advice either through malice or stupidity completely misled me on the time to go: He said June was great. I was in Nairobi a little less than an hour before I found out that June was not great. June was ungreat. June was lousy. June was not the time to do anything because of a simple truth: Rains make grass, and animals stay up in the hills where the grass is short and the carnivores can’t hide in it, and when the miles and miles of bloody Africa are a bloody sea of six-foot grass, there are no bloody animals to shoot at or take pictures of or even to look at. They burn the grass in July to get it short again, and the decent hunting starts in August. My fine friend, the expert, sends me over in June when the prairies are wet and all the game is either hidden out in the hills or still working on the water holes in the reserves. Some friend, my expert friend. Ten thousand bucks’ worth of former acquaintance.
But we got it stuck together with all the guns and the cameras and the money and the tickets and the farewell lunch at the numerical place, as Eddie Condon calls the 21 Club. The lunch was reasonably Homeric. It was a good lunch, unusual in that I had made a new will and we signed it with suitable flourishes. It was a very good lunch. At the airport the TWA pilot expressed some concern about the state of the bwana’s exuberance. This was a sleeper plane, full of decorous people.
The bwana’s wife replied. “Get into the plane,” she said. “Take it off the ground. When you reach twenty thousand feet, open the window and stick out your hand. The old boy will be flying along right up there beside you.”
There was rather a stiff-backed Lord Something-or-other aboard. I heard him asking the stewardess to lower his curtains and make his bunk immediately. “I do not choose to look at those dreadful Americans for the next fifteen hours,” said he.
I cast about me for the dreadful Americans and realized with a sudden shock that he meant me. The hell with you, Your Highship, I said to myself, and to prove that one American can lick a hundred Limeys, I had my berth made, too, and slept all the way to Paris. That’ll teach ’em, I said, because nobody sleeps when Buster snores. And Buster was in excellent form that evening.
We were just a touch heavy on the baggage allowance, owing to seventeen pieces of luggage, including a long-playing record machine that an itinerant piano player named Bushkin had forced into my fist at the airport.
“You may get lonesome out there with all the cannibals,” said Bushkin. “You may yearn for civilization, and so here are some records by me and by Louis Armstrong and Lee Wiley to remind you of home.”
(I sent Joe Bushkin a bitter wire sometime later from a place in Tanganyika called Lake Manyara. “Have finally found AC-type firefly,” I cabled. “Have plugged in machine. Think you going little sour on left hand.”)
Mr. Bushkin’s machine, plus a Remington .30-’06 rifle, a Winchester .375 Magnum, a Winchester .220 Swift, a Churchill 12-gauge shotgun, a Sauer 16-gauge I borrowed from Bernie Baruch, an Ikoflex camera, a Rolleiflex camera, a Cine-Kodak movie camera, assorted film, thirty cartons of Chesterfields, and considerable ammunition weighed slightly more than a fairy’s wings. I recall we were 278 pounds over allowance. This puzzled a redheaded French customs employee.
“Seize bagages, monsieur?” he said. “Pour deux personnes seulement? Mon Dieu, seize bagages pour deux personnes, c’est affreux.”
“But,” I said in my cat’s-in-the-garden-of-my-aunt French, “we go to hunt the lion in the Afrique. These bagages of which you speak are not so much bagage as guns and cameras and little teensy-weensy-type pacque
tages, including contraband cigarettes to fool the British customs into believing they are household effects.”
“Ah, bon, bon” he said. “A bas les Anglais. You say you go to shoot in the Afrique, hein? I me myself once was in Afrique during a war and found fine sport there. Life was very sportif. We shot and we shot, and it was very sportif.”
“What were you shooting to make for yourself such a great sportiveness?” I asked.
“Les Italiens,” he said simply, and flapped my seize bagages checks on the counter.
Cairo was unusual, too. Everybody fell off camels at dawn in Cairo, including my ancient friend, Amin El Alaily Bey. Then we went to the zoo. I never did figure out why we went to the zoo, but the lions looked rather larger than life. So did the belly dancers in the nightclubs. A man I know named Hassan who was celebrating Ramadan, the holy month, took a sip of his seventieth lemonade that night and snickered slightly. I choked over the mouthpiece of my narghile, the water pipe that comes with the table in Egyptian nightclubs, and asked him about the snicker.
“These two girls are the toast of Egypt,” Hassan said. “We have just concluded a holy war with the Jews over the issue of Palestine. These two girls are the toast of Egypt, but they are Jewish. To me it does not make any sense that we applaud the girls and shoot their cousins.” Then Hassan went to sleep.
Now in Kenya, a stone’s toss across the border of Tanganyika, I woke up. A few mosquitoes buzzed dispiritedly about the net. Away off somewhere the lion coughed and complained. I contemplated the high cost of lions as I lay on an inflated chilly rubber mattress in a strange land. (The cost of lions is considerable.)
It had been such a swift transition from New York to a lion in your lap. Philip Wiley, I believe it was, once wrote that when you travel by plane you leave a little of your soul behind. I figured in my semisleep that a part of my soul was somewhere between Rome and Asmara, which is in Eritrea and which might stay right there in Eritrea for all of me. Or maybe it was just now trying to check into the second-worst hotel in Addis Ababa, since the Ras Hotel, naturally, would be off limits to souls that were traveling behind their corporeal headquarters. It is not lulling to think of souls when you are only half asleep in strange terrain.
