by Ruark, R.
Percival, Harry told me, in his later days as a hunter, had still another narrow squeak. Three rhinos charged him and Tommy Shevlin, an American sportsman and a fine shot, penning them in a narrow avenue cut through the thorn. Shevlin’s killing shot dropped the nearest rhino across old Philip’s legs.
Anyone who hunts elephants, rhinos, or buffaloes is a candidate for catastrophe. It is occasionally necessary in a buffalo stampede in high grass to whack the nearest animal and climb up on him so that the other great beasts can swerve aside and pass around you. Both elephants and rhinos will charge, unwounded and unpredictably.
The point is: What is one client’s rare thrill is routine for the pros. I imagine Murray Smith has been hurt three or four times. Selby has already had six or seven scrapes with buffaloes, several with elephants, and a couple of do’s with lions and leopards. Syd Downey has been tossed twice by buffaloes and has contracted sleeping sickness from tsetse-fly bites. Nearly all East African hunters have chronic malaria that reduces them to bone-breaking agony and pitiful shakes several times a year. Their lungs are abrased from constant inhalation of lava dust, and their eyes are permanently bloodshot from dust and glare.
Their average day starts at 4:30 a.m., and they rarely bed down before 11 p.m. During the course of a day they will drive a hunting car an average of 125 miles over trackless, tough terrain. They will walk an average of ten miles over mountains and through swamps, and they will crawl from one to five miles on their bellies. If you are hunting elephants, you will walk from twenty to thirty miles a day over dry riverbeds that suck your shoes into the sliding softness and make every step a mighty effort. The sun smites like hammers all day long, and the nights, in most parts of huntable Africa, are bitter cold. After a full day’s work, they are still supposed to supervise the constant necessary repair of the hunting vehicles, see that the camp is in good order, solve the problems of from one to two dozen natives, tend the sick, and still be jovial drinking, talking, and card-playing companions to the paying guests. Added to the general chores is the task of explaining the same things, over and over, to a succession of clients who want to know (and rightly) what is that tree, what kind of bird is that, why do we camp here instead of there, and what were the boys saying in Swahili? The hunter also must listen to all the alibis, again and again, as to why the shooter missed the topi at twenty-five yards from a steady rest, and must soothe the injured pride of the man who is paying a hundred dollars a day to do something he would really rather not do, such as crawling through thorns after a sick and angry leopard.
The question, then, must be: What do they get out of it? They don’t shoot unless they have to, and mostly they take no delight in killing, but rather regard it regretfully as the logical end point of an exciting adventure. They are the greatest of game conservationists—the strictest abiders by the rules. They’ll average five or six hundred bucks a month, plus free food and whisky, but they’ll spend three or four hundred fixing up the cars they wreck in their mad dashes over rocky hills and pig-holeriddled fields. They put up with boors and bores and bitches and cowards and braggarts and creeps and occasional homosexuals who have the eye more on the hunter than on the game. They work harder than any of the blacks in their retinue. They have no home life—they don’t even share the canvas latrine tent that is set up for the client. They consider death as calmly as life, even when it applies to themselves. They drink too much, like sailors off a long cruise, when they are in town, and they mostly throw away their money. There is no real future in professional hunting—when you get older you get too cautious for your own safety, and your slowed reflexes make you a liability to yourself and to your party. You cannot bet on yourself as a husband, for what wife will hold still for a husband who is away nine months of the year?
I believe I already knew what they get out of it. There is a simple love of outdoors and of creatures and a hatred for the contrived living of cities, for the claustrophobic connivances of civilization. It is this that drives a man to the vastnesses of Africa to fulfill some need of basic simplicity in himself. My friend Selby, hopelessly lost in the jungles of so small a town as Nairobi, is Moses leading his flock when all he can see is horizons and a lion or two. The complete love and trust of his blacks are testament to this.
He is happy in the dawn and in the tiny-gleaming fires of the camp, and secure in his knowledge of domination of his element. He worships a buffalo or a lion or an elephant because he knows it can kill him painfully if he is not very careful. He builds his own bridges, makes his own roads. He still has the thrill of providing his own food and the food of his friends. He recognizes the inevitability of death as an adjunct to life.
There are no more jealous people in the world than hunters. They have an intense pride in their work. A good white hunter will work himself into a breakdown to scare up a record bag for a man he despises. Hunters criticize each other constantly, and each man has his secret ground, a territory he endeavors, as long as possible, to keep from shooting the easy animal—what he wants is “heads.”
“You are not shooting an elephant,” Selby told me. “You are shooting the symbol of his tusks. You are not shooting to kill. You are shooting to make immortal the thing you shoot. To kill just anything is a sin. To kill something that will be dead soon but is so fine as to give you pleasure for years is wonderful. Everything dies. You only hasten the process. When you shoot a lion, you are actually shooting its mane, something that will make you proud. You are shooting for yourself, not shooting just to kill.”
These few surviving men are largely Jasons in search of the Golden Fleece, and they do not care who brings it down, so long as they are present at the chase. Selby and his companions will actually work harder for a man they loathe than for a man they like and admire because the ultimate end is noble in the mind.
I was beginning to be impressed with this boy—even though he got us lost—after just a few days. I hoped he was going to like me. I hoped I wasn’t going to embarrass him. I hoped I wasn’t going to shame myself in front of the blacks or run at the wrong time. I hoped I wasn’t going to drink too much. I didn’t want my new young friend to worry about the steadiness of my shooting hand. About that time Harry clapped his hands.
“Boy,” he said, “Lette gin-i.” The boy brought the gin. It was warm but palatable.
Chapter 5
THERE WAS something enchanted and enchanting about the little lucky camp on the Lower Grumeti, eighteen miles from the shambling village of Ikoma in Tanganyika. We lived later in lovelier camps, scenically—the jungle camp at Mto-Wa-Mbu, at the fundament of the Ngorongoro Crater, was more Tarzany and more majestic. The temporary camp on the Little Ruaha River was the most beautiful spot I have ever seen. What Virginia later called “Hippo Haven” on the fringe of Kitete Swamp, on the high plain away up from Mto-Wa-Mbu, was breathtaking with its cool canopy of huge wild figs and acacias, their trunks yellow-mottled like a leopard’s hide. But the little lucky camp—Campi Abahati—grabbed and hung onto my heart. Maybe it was because it was my first one, my first permanent one.
We had come round the elbow of the little mountain and pitched the tents on a grassy slope fifty yards away from the river greenery. It was always cool without being creeper-jungly and bug-infested there. Coming up to it in a car was like a ride through South Carolina savanna land, with its clumps of dwarf oak and second-growth scrub pine. The grass looked like the broom grass of familiar quail country. The trees around the little river looked like the trees around the edges of the Green Swamp, where I shot my first deer as a youngster. Outside the flower-decked yellow plains looked like land I’d seen before— rimmed here by a patch of wood, squared off there by a strip of green reed by a wet spot, regimented by a green hill, and dappled by little isolated groves of thorn that looked like seedy orchards on Maryland hillsides. The fantastic thing about the high East Africa country is that it always looks like someplace you’ve loved—the country around Monfalcone in Italy, a slice of Spain, a piece of Eng
lish countryside.
Nobody but us had been shooting here since the rains, and the game was thick and very tame. The lions had just come in, following the migration off the Serengeti. The second night in camp a pride of five strolled through the middle and relieved us of two Grant gazelles we had hanging back by the cook tent. There were three leopards, at least, within half a mile. We could hear them hunting up and down the river at night. We could hear the leopard’s racking cough and the curses of the baboons—friends who soon developed a steady habit of checking by the camp at exactly 4 p.m. to see what the visiting baboons were doing. They were especially intrigued by Virginia. They had seen so few baboons with white hair.
“I never shoot them, even though they are a pest,” Harry said the first day out. “It’s too much like murdering a relative. There is one trick to getting rid of them. You run down a small one on the plain and paint him with luminous paint and turn him loose at night. The whole troop takes off for parts unknown. I suppose they believe in ghosts.”
We didn’t shoot around the camp, and the beasts seemed to appreciate it. A herd of impalas was always frolicking, showing their heels and pawing at the ground like puppies, a few rods away. The guinea and the spur fowl and the doves kept a fearful clamor going all around us. The baboons and the bushbabies and the colobus monkeys and God knows what array of noisy insects kept the place in a clamor, but it was a peaceful clamor. The hyena symphony at night was superb, like calliopes gone mad. The lions grunted as they hunted, and one old boy about six miles away was complaining bitterly about his rheumatism on every cold night.
The boys were very happy to be back at the Happy Camp after six months. Each man knew his own place, where he was, where to pitch his shelter-half, where to put the cook tent, where the best dry firewood was, where to get the water. There was an awful lot of singing out behind us, mostly by Katunga, the mad Wakamba skinner, who squatted happily on his stringy thighs and chanted what seemed to be highly humorous and very dirty songs in Wakamba. Katunga wore a pair of ragged shorts and an old police sweater that sagged down past his knees. He wore a jaunty Australian military hat, pinned up on one side, with a brilliant blue spray of vulturine guinea-fowl feathers in the band. He hoped we would kill soon, and frequently. When he was not skinning, he was supposed to gather firewood, and Katunga’s contention was that anybody who was called “Bwana” Katunga and who shared his snuff with the best hunter in Africa, his Bwana Haraka, was too dignified to gather firewood. So Katunga sang, and Katunga skulked, whenever Juma, the head boy, acquired one of those why-don’t-you looks in his eyes.
We knew what we wanted here. There was a deep reservoir of common game—the plains antelopes, the waterside animals, and a sprinkling of the bigger stuff, lions, leopards, buffaloes, rhinos.
“We should get you a decent Tommy, a good Grant, a decent buff, a fair shot at a leopard, and possibly a rhino,” Harry said on the second day. “The tough part is over. There’ll be no lionitis in this camp because you’ve already got old Scruffy. We’ll do what we can and then push on back across the Serengeti and over Ngorongoro and down to Lake Manyara. It’s stiff with rhinos there by the lake. Then we’ll go on up to this new country of Frank Bowman’s and see about those monster kudus. Then if we’ve time, we’ll whiz back to Nairobi and go on up to the N.F.D. for a look-round at elephants and stuff.”
The ordered simplicity of the day was what struck me after so long a period of overcomplication. At five in the morning either Gathiru or Kaluku would bring the tea into the tent and shake me awake. They aroused Mama more pointedly. They let the air fizz out of her mattress. Then they would unhook her mosquito netting, and there wasn’t much she could do but get up. During the night your boots had been dubbined and left by the bed. Your fresh bush jacket and pants and heavy socks had been laid neatly on the canvas flooring of the big double-fly tent. There was hot water in the basin at the wash table out front. The fire in front of the mess tent had been revived. The morning was cold and gray and dewy, and the birds were just beginning to speak. Juma would have the table set in the mess tent, with its clean checkered cloth and its green plastic dishes. There was no New York Times by each plate.
Selby was usually up, sitting morosely on a nonburning log by the fire, wearing a ratty old turtleneck sweater under his green bush jacket. And wearing the look of a man who has had malaria all his life and who is never really comfortable until the sun breaks.
“Good morning, Bob,” he would say. “Good morning, Virginia.” He always gave “Virginia” the formal four-syllable pronunciation. We would say: “Good morning, Harry.” Then nobody would say anything. We would eat cold plums or cold pears, their syrup chill from the night, and we would drink two cups of tea and eat a slice of crumbly toast with marmalade and then Harry would say, “Kwenda,” and the boys would drive up Jessica, the jeep. Kidogo and Adam and Chabani, wearing the same miserable look of recently awakened malarials on a cold morning, would be standing silently in the back of Jessica, clinging to the hold-on bar over which the canvas top was stretched when we were not hunting. We would drive a mile through the frosty woods in the half-light and then turn out into the plain. Then we would hunt—Harry driving, Virginia in the middle, me on the outside, the boys standing up and peering from the back.
It is a relatively new kind of hunting, certainly a radical change from the old foot-safari days, and even a change from the heavy hunting-car days when you had to pay some respects to terrain. Nearly anywhere an animal could go, the little British Land Rover named Jessica could go. In a day’s hunt we would cover thirty square miles, putting 150 miles on the speedometer.
When we saw likely looking game, one of the boys would point. Harry would stop the car, get out the glasses, stare long, and speak for the first time since breakfast. “Nice impala ram over there,” he would say. “Let’s go and look at him more closely. Lovely rack on him.”
He would drive off in a curiously circuitous fashion, always seeming to go away from the animal, and always approaching more closely. Selby, like most of the able professionals, can see animals with a naked eye at four miles and judge their horns accurately within a quarter inch before the visitor can tell what species he is looking at.
“Hmm,” he would say, “toa .30-’06, Kidogo,” and turn to me. “This is the best I’ve seen lately,” he’d say. “I’ll drive you past that anthill over there, and you fall out. After I’ve driven away, you stalk up to just behind that thornbush and take him from there.”
When you are out in the bush for any considerable length of time, you do not remember days by date or week or weather. You reach backward to the day of the buffalo or the day of the lion or the day the lorry busted her axle. The day of the waterbuck was quite a day. It got to be more of a day as it went along. It was a hazy day, made more hazy by what Virginia called the “thousand-dollar pills,” some sort of modern scientific confection that was guaranteed to cure anything from clap to constipation. I was using it for a chronic sore throat and a burning itch in the middle ear, a couple of little symptoms that had ripened last spring into a beautiful streptococcus invasion of my skull.
We headed out of camp with the dew still bright on the grasses, looking for nothing. It is a gorgeous way to hunt, looking for nothing. You spin along in the jeep and just look. The breakfast is still warm inside you and the second cigarette is tasting almost as good as the first. The sun is just beginning to take a touch of chill off your face, and the woods and plain are alive, vibrant with tentatively stirring animals. The birds, just wakened, are starting to scratch and fly and complain. You drive along by the wood or the river or out along the veld, and you almost hope you will see nothing worth working for that day because it is more fun to watch it than to chase it or shoot it.
“I think we’ll check down by the river and see about that waterbuck,” Harry said, driving around a herd of impala that seemed trying to set a record for altitude in their leaps. “The ones we have seen have been fairish, but I seem to remember
an old gentleman from the last trip who’s got more horns than he needs. They must be making his head ache. He used to live over here,” Harry said, driving through some reeds and coming out of the reeds to draw up to a small grassy hill with trees and shrubs that looked considerably more like woodcock country than waterbuck country. As we drove up to the summit of the little hill, a herd of perhaps a dozen waterbuck broke from the rushes and loped leisurely up the hill and across a small pasturylooking field and stopped just short of a wood.
“That’s the gentleman I had in mind,” Harry said. “I believe he’s the best I’ve ever seen, but I’ve never yet had a good close look at those horns. Suppose we walk a bit and investigate this fellow.”
We climbed out of Jessica. Kidogo handed me the Remington, and Harry started a stalk in that half crouch that looks so easy at first and then forcibly reminds you of age and girth as it continues. I was puffing when Harry held his hand, palm down and pushing backward, in the stop sign. We were in a small copse of trees and thick lianas as big as your wrist, with the dew still heavy on the grass underfoot and on the leaves that brushed your face. Harry reached around, grabbed my gun arm, and pointed with my arm. The herd of bucks was in the pasture, feeding straight at us. You could feel the fresh, brisk wind blowing directly into your face, curling back your eyelashes and causing a constant rustle in the trees—which is always fortunate if you are the kind of man who steps on dry sticks and goes through bush like a bull buffalo in a hurry.
