Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  We went down through a poison-green patch of grass that covered a wet spot, with Kidogo, the gunbearer, testing the terrain with his horny feet ahead of us, and trundled up to a high knoll where a patch of mangy acacias gave grudging shade. Harry’s curly black hair was whitened and stiffened by dust. Jinny’s blond crop under the bandanna and the Stetson was blonder. There was dust in my whiskers and dust in my mouth and dust in the water bag and dust in the plastic glasses and dust in the gin, which made a very nice hot martini if you like them hot. I like them hot.

  Chabani and Kidogo got the chop box out of Jessica’s back seat and spread the front-seat cushions around under the trees. We had a couple martinis apiece and then we had a bottle of Tusker lager and some remnants of the cold Tommy and a can of cold spaghetti and bread and butter and pickles. The tsetses fed on us sparingly as we ate. A few hundred yards away a herd of wildebeests stared stupidly at us. The sun filtered through the acacia tops, and we sweated and the insects’ bites itched and our eyes were red and I still decided that I was a happy man, with two months ahead of me and nothing to do except look at the game and maybe shoot a little of it and not answer any telephones.

  “When we get off this bloody reserve, we’ll have to shoot a big piece of meat pretty quick,” Harry said. “It’s been a hard three days for the boys, and they’ll be ravenous and eat too much and I’ll have to dose them all for the bellyache. Sooner we get them fed up and over being sick, the better. I hope we can shoot something big like an eland. They love the fresh meat and the fat, and they make biltong out of what’s left and they make shoulder straps for their wives out of the hide.”

  “What sort of shoulder straps?” Jinny asked. “What do they use them for?”

  “Oh, for carrying wood,” Harry said. “The wives, I mean. They can carry more wood for their husbands with good comfortable shoulder straps. The wives are very happy when their husbands bring them eland shoulder straps. Shows the men are thinking of their happiness and welfare.”

  “Men,” Jinny said, finishing her beer. “Where is the ladies’ room?”

  “Try over there behind that tree,” Harry said. “Mind the snakes.”

  Virginia walked off, and I had to laugh a little. She was wearing dust-stained khaki pants and ankle boots, a belted bush jacket with empty cartridge loops in the front, and a saucy double-brim terai over a gypsy bandanna. What she wore couldn’t have cost twenty bucks, if you forget the Abercrombie and Fitch boots, and this was the girl who used to play the Stork–21 Club circuit in New York. If she had her mink with her in those days, she was worth twenty thousand bucks on the hoof, and she wouldn’t have thought of walking three blocks if there was a doorman handy and a taxicab to hail. She always needed a quarter to go to the little girls’ room, and now here is a raw stranger, Harry, directing her to the nearest bush and telling her to mind the snakes. This, the girl who wore a Hattie Carnegie frock and a rhinestone hat to ride a camel after a slightly wet evening on the town in Cairo. . . .

  “What are you snickering about?” Harry asked.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “I was just thinking about a dame who is afraid to walk the dogs in Central Park, who is afraid to spend the night alone in a Fifth Avenue penthouse, who spends God knows how much money on girl lunches and at the hairdresser and on her clothes, who would rather be naked than unminked, who wouldn’t ride a bus or a subway to save her life, all of a sudden lost out in the African bush with twenty bucks’ worth of Indian-made shoddy on her back, fifteen strange cannibals, and a strange East African guide, riding in a jeep, looking at lions at close range, weighing a good ten pounds more from dust alone, drinking a hot martini, and going to the john behind a tree while a rank stranger tells her to mind that no snakes take a chunk out of her. That is what I am laughing at—Osa Johnson Ruark, girl adventuress.”

  “I was serious about the snakes,” Harry said. “Touch more beer in the bottle. Have it? Knew a girl once was bit on the bottom. Hell’s own trouble trying to decide where to put the tourniquet.”

  “Not so much farther to go now?”

  “Ought to make the permanent camp on the Grumeti sometime after dark,” Harry said. “Must stop off to see the Game Department bloke. Nice lad name of Thomas. Sign the register and that sort of thing. He’ll buy us a drink. Then I want to stop in the village—the Wa-Ikoma manyatta—and pick up old Kibiriti. He’s wired for lion, and I’ve a hunch we’ll need what he knows. Ones with manes, shootable ones, getting tougher and tougher to come by. Here’s the mem. Let’s be about.”

  “Who’s Kibiriti?” Jinny asked as she got into the jeep and straddled the gearbox.

  “Bit of a sorcerer,” Harry said. “I expect his mother was a lion. He thinks exactly like a lion. He can find lions when other lions can’t find lions. I don’t know how he does it. One time I was in great trial and trouble with a couple of sports, must-have-lionor-the-safari’s-off type of blokes. I looked high and low. I put out kills and I said prayers. I consulted witch doctors and learned how to talk lionese. No lions. Nobody speaking in camp, just sitting there being surly over the gin-and-lime. Boys all unhappy. What’s called lionitis out here. Whole campi upset. So I send out a hurry call to Kibiriti. He arrives, complete with three wives. God-awful ugly except the young one.

  “‘Simba,’ I say. ‘Mbile. Simbambile. Got to have two, in a hurry. Pese pese hurry. Suria hurry.’ Suria’s a bad word. Old Kibiriti looks around and sees his wives are happy with their new friends—shocking morals, these people have—and scratches his head. ‘The Douma,’ he says. ‘We go there for the lions.’

  “‘You been there lately, you heard anything about lions in the Douma, you know for sure?’ I say to Kibiriti. ‘No, Bwana Haraka,’ he says to me, ‘but I feel like there are two large black-mane lions in the Douma. We go to the Douma.’

  “So,” Harry said, “we break the camp and we go to the Douma. First night we shoot one fine simba. The next day we shoot another fine simba. Don’t ask me how he does it, but you’ll have a chance to watch him work. We’ll pick him up in the village as we go through. He’s having a little trouble with three wives and will be glad to take the trip. That last wife of his is awfully young and pretty and she’s claiming most of his time. Others raising hell.”

  Bwana Thomas, the Game Department type, wasn’t in his compound, being out after some poachers. The askari took our names and looked at the licenses and allowed us to fill the vehicles and the water bags with some of Bwana Thomas’ nice fresh rainwater, and we pushed off. We headed on a nebulous trail for Ikoma, a village of some half thousand in God’s backyard of Tanganyika. This was a lion-hunting village. Its young men all had their personally killed manes of big doumi lions, each killed with arrow or spear, of course, and illegal, of course, as illegal as the marabou stork plumage they wear when they dance, as illegal as the colobus monkey fur they wear when they dance.

  The drums had been ahead of us. Kibiriti—which means “matches”—was expecting us. He made a big thing of seeing his patron saint, Bwana Haraka, once again, and was most hospitable about the premises of his newest wife’s compound. They are impeccably considerate about wifely rights in Tanganyika. Each wife has her own hut, her own goats to tend, her own water to draw, her own mealie corn to tend, her own wood to fetch, and her own babies to have. She brews her own brand of beer for her man, who, in order to show no favoritism, stays only a week with each wife unless he is cheating, and Kibiriti was cheating at the time.

  It was coming on for dark when we took Kibiriti away from his mud-wattle hut and his new baby and his euphorbia cactus boma and his pretty, shy new wife. He perched atop the lorry, his red fez cocked rakishly, as full of importance as Winston Churchill coming over for a new loan. I wished later we had kept him, for in the eighteen miles that separated us from our first permanent camp site Mr. Harry Selby, the infallible white hunter, to whom I had entrusted my life and that of my wife, got lost. Hopelessly lost. Bitterness was added to the brew when that ungainly slut, Annie L
orry, the faller-in-pig-holes and sticker-in-mud holes, that slab-sided, overloaded, weak-axled travesty of a truck, had to come to find us.

  “This,” said Mrs. Virginia Ruark, “is one hell of a way to start a safari. I am lost in Tanganyika with a child who does not know his own way, and a fool—meaning you—who was better off loaded at lunch at Toots’s. Pass the last of the scotch. If the lions eat me tonight, they will not eat me sober.”

  “I’m most awfully, dreadfully sorry,” Harry said. “But the bush has changed since I’ve been here, and what with the high grass and all, I seem to have missed the little avenue I must use to get from here to there. Let’s swing back and see if I can’t pick it up again. Meantime, I think I’ll have a bite at that bottle myself. Been a long day to get lost at the end of it.”

  It was an eerie evening. The sky was dusted with stars against the incredible furry velvet blue of the African night. The bush bulked black against the horizon, making strange animal forms, like a fancifully trimmed yew hedge on an English estate. The vast plain of grass—shorter now—was silver in the night and glimmered like a field of wheat. A slim, graceful crescent of moon made the grass sparkle as we sped over it fruitlessly, seeking the harbor entrance to the camp we knew was over a long, low-bulking hill. Little bat-eared foxes scampered ahead of us and grimaced at Jessica’s headlamps. Nightjars whooshed and got up ghostily ahead of us, fluttering off like startled spirits. My knees ached. My back ached. My knees cramped. My eyes were full of dust and my beard itched. My irreverent wife began to sing a song to the tune of “How High the Moon.”

  “How tall the trees,” she sang. “How green the grass. How skinned my knees. How tired my—Pass the spirits, Buster,” she said. “And where is Jack Armstrong, the all–East African boy, aiming to take us now?”

  “Home to Campi Abahati,” Harry said. “I see Annie Lorry’s headlamps. She’s waiting for us around that corner and just past that hill, damn her eyes. She found it first, and I shall never forgive myself.”

  “What does Abahati mean?” Jinny said. “Bugs in bed or rhinos in the john or what?”

  “It means Happy Camp, Lucky Camp,” Harry said, and pressed the gas. The jeep leaped and bounded at fifty miles an hour over the plain, occasionally loosening teeth as Harry struck a stone or a hole or a stick.

  “Happy Camp, yet,” Virginia said. “Lost in the jungle with two idiots, and they call it Happy Camp. Ah well, a girl learns to put up with anything if she’s married to a writer. Lead on, MacSelby, and tell the hyenas they got new food for thought, meaning me.”

  We couldn’t make much out of Campi Abahati at midnight, except that seven hyenas, three lions, and an assortment of baboons and leopards seemed to be eagerly awaiting us. It looked pretty dreary.

  “This doesn’t seem like the happiest campi I ever campi-ed in,” the memsaab said as we crawled under the mosquito nets and a lion voiced a certain amount of displeasure fifty yards away.

  When we left it ten days later she cried. And not from relief.

  Chapter 3

  I WOKE UP in an Old Testament, or possibly Koranic, paradise. To estimate a paradise today, you have to call it a place that God was happy to make, had not erred in the making, with the original creatures in it and not even man behaving very badly. The Happy Camp, the Lucky Camp, was on a grassy knoll overlooking the Grumeti River. We pitched the tents beneath big thorn acacias. Up the river a leopard sawed. Over the hill a lion spoke. The baboons came to call to see that we were doing everything right. Halfway between the camp and Harry’s favorite leopard trees was a big anthill twelve feet high. Somewhere along the marsh there would be a couple of juvenile twin rhinos, especial friends of Harry’s, and one old buffalo bull with a crumpled right horn.

  “One of these days I shall have to kill that ancient character,” Harry said at breakfast. “I have wasted more time stalking him than I have time to waste. Every time I at last get up to him, he looks at me and leers. He knows that I won’t permit the client to shoot him, with that ugly, stupid, worn-down horn. He wastes my time, but he is a friend of mine, and I’ve never had the heart to settle his troubles for him.”

  I am always amazed when I think of how much living can be compressed into a tent settlement. We had four major tents, not counting the toilet one. We had a big double-fly job for the memsaab and the bwana. Selby slept in a single double-fly. There was a big open-face dining tent in which all the boxes of food were stacked. There was a tiny cook tent, and some of the boys had shelter-halves. It takes fifty minutes to set it all up, and the next day it bears the earmarks of a thriving city. Somehow it suddenly becomes logical to go to the john in a canvas cell and to wash your dirty body in a canvas coffin, in water full of living things, and to sleep soundly with the hyenas tripping over the tent ropes.

  The sounds become wonderfully important. There is a dove that sounds like a goosed schoolgirl. He says: “Oooh. Oooh! OOOHH!” The bushbabies cry. The colobus monkeys snort like lions, except it does not carry the implied threat. At first it is hard to tell the baboons from the leopards when they curse each other in a series of guttural grunts. A hyena can roar like a lion. A lion mostly mutters with an asthmatic catch in his throat. The bugs are tumultuous. A well-situated jungle camp is not quiet. But the noise makes itself into a pattern that is soothing except when the hyenas start to giggle. A hyena’s giggle is date night in the female ward of a madhouse.

  “You will find yourself growing fond of old fisi,” Harry said. “He’s a noisy nuisance and a cheeky brute, but if you took him out of Africa it wouldn’t be Africa any more. He’s a tidy one, too. Cleans up everything for you.”

  We slept late that morning, bone-sore from the three-day drive, and along about elevenish Harry said we’d best go and sight in the guns. We left Mama in the camp to repair the ravages to her beauty and drove out along the plain. The grass was short. The grass was trampled. And all the animals in the world were busy trampling it.

  Our camp was cuddled in the crook of a low mountain’s arm, but behind was a plain, a brilliant yellow plain dotted with blue-and-white primrosy sorts of flowers. Wherever you looked there was life. Five thousand wildebeests there. Five thousand zebras yonder. Two hundred impalas here. A thousand Tommies there. Five hundred Grant gazelles there. A herd of buffaloes on the river. Harry’s twin baby rhinos. A shaggy-neck, elkylooking waterbuck with his harem in the green reeds. If you grew grass on Times Square and cleaned up the air and made it suddenly quiet and filled it with animals instead of people, you might approach some likely approximation of what I saw that morning, with the sky blue and the hills green and the plain yellow and blue and white.

  The animals looked at us casually and with little curiosity. We stopped the jeep beneath a thornbush and Harry motioned to Kidogo. Kidogo, wearing his floppy shorts on his skinny, bowed legs and his big cheerful grin on a face like an Abyssinian king, picked up the panga and walked a hundred yards away to another tree and chopped a big blaze off it. Harry took a couple of cushions out of the Land Rover and laid them on its bonnet. He spraddled his short thick legs, leaned the .375 against the cushions, and fired. Kidogo tapped a point of the blaze with his panga.

  “High and left,” Harry said. “We’ll just rearrange these graticules.”

  He did something to the scope and then rapped on it with a big .416 cartridge to see that the new setting was solid. He fired again, and this time the big Winchester was dead on.

  “Good gun, that,” he said. “Just remains to see if you can hold it as steadily as it’ll shoot straight for you if you give it the chance.”

  We sighted all the guns, the .375, the .30-’06, the .220, and the big ugly .470 double. I shot them all afterward. They all seemed to kick. The big .470 had a push, but it pushed you back two feet. I was beginning to feel nervous, having never shot anything more serious than a shooting-gallery duck with a rifle. These guns seemed to make a god-awful amount of noise.

  “Tell you what,” Harry said. “We’d best break you in e
asy and get you used to the light and the guns. On the way back to camp we’ll let you shoot a zebra for the boys to eat and a Tommy for us to eat and a Grant and a warthog for a leopard bait. I’ve a very fine tree just down from the camp. Always seem to haul a leopard out of it. Harriet Maytag shot an eight-foot tom out of it three months ago, and the manamouki—the tabby—had a new boy friend in it the next night. A lot of blokes fancy just hogs for leopard kills, but I’ve had any amount of luck with Grants. To play the percentage evenly, I generally use both a Grant and a pig. Been awfully lucky so far.”

  We climbed into Jessica and aimed for the camp and lunch. A herd of Grants looked at us and ambled slowly away, walking gingerly on seemingly sore feet.

  “See the old boy, the last one, just over there?” Harry said. “He’s an old ram and about ready for the hyenas. He’d be tougher than whitleather and his liver is full of worms and his meat is measly, but the leopards won’t care. Get out and wallop him.

  Toa .30-’06,” he snapped over his shoulder to Kidogo.

  The Nandi gunbearer slid the bolt of the little Remington and handed it to me. I slid out of the car and crawled to an anthill. The jeep went away. One does not shoot from cars in Africa, nor until the vehicle is a good five hundred yards away. The Game Department aesthetically deplores car shooters and also puts them in jail.

  I have shot at submarines and I have shot at airplanes and I didn’t shake, but now I shook. The sight of the rifle was revolving like a Catherine wheel. It seemed to me my breath had ceased forever, and I was panting like a sprint horse extended out of class in a distance race. My eyes blurred. I aimed at the gazelle’s shoulder, waited until the rifle stopped leaping, snatched at the trigger, and heard the bullet whunk. I aimed at the shoulder and I hit him in the hind left ankle. Great beginning, boy, I said. Steady rest on 135 pounds of standing animal, and you hit him in the foot. I shot five more times, carefully. The last time I shot, he jumped into the bullet, which broke his neck. He went over on his horns, and the jeep drove up to get me.