Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  In the truly magnificent spectacle of the leopard erupting from the bush Mike, really unaccustomed to the rifle, had forgotten to snap the bolt handle all the way home. And with leopard you are not allowed mistakes. Not even one. Not the littlest one.

  There is really not much you can say to comfort at a time like that. I claim I helped some. I mentioned to Mike that he was only an amateur in the frustration league, because anybody who knows me might remember the painful story of the tiger that got away.

  This particular tiger was the biggest of three in the Madhya Pradesh of India, and I killed it just as dead as I had slain the two others. He was a huge old tiger, a cattle-lifter, and I shot him, smirking the while, through the neck. He collapsed and my shikari and I congratulated each other. The shikari suggested a second, make-sure shot, but I waved him off. What need? We smoked a couple of cigarettes and had a pull at the flask. It was then that the tiger got up and slowly walked away. We never saw him again.

  The tiger story helped Mike some, but not enough. The Old Man said once that you never forget a mistake that cost you dearly; so when somebody said that Mike’s leopard would be a mere memory on the dewy morrow I said, No. No sir. That leopard would continue to grow, and Mike would still be hating himself twenty years hence.

  “That’s the real beauty part of hunting,” the Old Man had said. “A hunter still finds it possible to kick himself in the tail after everybody else has forgotten the tragic incident. That separates the men from the boys in the hunting business, because a casual gent will pretend that it never happened, and even if it did, it was somebody else’s fault. The mark of the true man is will he continue to hunt, instead of busting his gun over the nearest tree.”

  But Mike has the mark of the true man, and I was perfectly certain that before we removed ourselves from tie Loita Plains he would have his leopard, and Jill might one day be able to sit on the skin in front of the fire and whip up a batch of Martinis, extra dry.

  Like the Old Man said, it ain’t so much talent as energy, and the bad breaks can’t go on forever. The Old Man just claimed that the stature of the man was measured by how much he could smile when fate was beating him over the head with a stick.

  Mike shot a big leopard later. But it’ll never be as big as the one that walked across the road.

  16—Lions and Liars

  There is a saying among the Masai of Africa—or maybe it’s the Somali—that a brave man is frightened three times by a lion: when he first sees its track, when he first hears its roar, and when he first sees the lion in the flesh. It’s a pity the Old Man didn’t live to see me get to Africa, because I wish to add to this generalization and I’m sure he would approve.

  The first time a man comes in contact with a lion he automatically turns liar. If there is a tiny, faint shred of mendacity in a man his first Eon will bring it out. This applies in a similar, if lesser, degree to male deer, giving rise first to an ague-making malady called buck fever and later to delusions of grandeur accompanied by faint falsehoods. These expand into outright fantasies that might even be medically described as an early journey into schizophrenia. Every day becomes April first.

  In the bird world I believe that the bobwhite quail has done more to corrupt man’s truce with fact that any other feathered friend, although a duck liar and a wild turkey liar enjoy certain phases of the moon when they take an adverse view of temperance and truth. In the exotic fields I suppose a tiger liar is almost as good as a lion liar, and the African elephant as a liar-breeder stands all by itself.

  This, of course, refers only to low-level lying. People who climb mountains in search of such rich fare as ibex, tahr, mountain sheep and goats, chamois, and greater kudu are not to be included among the sea-level liars, because the altitude obviously affects fantasy. Rarefied air has a tendency to loosen the centers of imagination and also the tongue, because there are often very few witnesses to call the liar a liar. This is what generally gives rise to legends about Abominable Snowmen and such.

  The Old Man had some definite ideas about sporting liars. He claimed that in his better days, weight for age, no holds barred, he could outlast anybody he knew in the solid construction of an airproof lie, although he was not so much for the gaudy fringes. The Old Man believed that when you got your mouth fixed to lie you ought to start at the ground and work up, and that a soundly planted liar didn’t need a lot of fancy trimmings.

  “A sporting liar,” the Old Man once said, “is a truthful man turned dishonest by circumstances beyond his control. There is no real malice in him, and he is unique among all brands of liars, because with practice and careful handling his lies eventually become unshakable truth. This applies to all sporting liars except dog liars. I wouldn’t believe anything a man said about his hound, his Labrador, his pointer, or his setter, sworn before a notary on a stack of Ken-L Ration.”

  The bare anatomy of non-malicious lying is a complex thing. First, a silent self-deluder doesn’t count, because such deception is lying on your own time and creates no harm save personal confusion, such as fanning yourself with a fly swatter. Fishermen are also excluded, because a fisherman starts lying to himself before he takes down the rod and chases the kittens out of the creel. It does no real self-eroding damage for the self-liar to add a pound to the fish or an inch to the horn or a brace to the bag.

  If controlled, this self-deception is difficult to detect. You look at a pair of elephant tusks framing a fireplace and the owner says calmly, “A hundred and sixteen and a hundred and twenty.” He knows better than the elephant’s ghost that one weighs a hundred and ten and the other weighs a hundred and twelve, but something impels him to add a few pounds to the trophy, even though it makes no difference in their appearance or to the facts of acquisition, and his latest target for untruth has no way of weighing them anyhow.

  They say that tusks have a habit of losing weight after they are thoroughly dry. My best pair is unique. Standing for the last half-dozen years by a roaring fire that operates six months a year those tusks have gone from a hundred and ten and a hundred and twelve, wet, to a hundred and twenty and a hundred and twenty-five, dry. I suppose as I grow older they’ll eventually weigh a hundred and ninety-five and two hundred respectively.

  An elephant is the biggest land-bound animal in the world. Conversely, the bobwhite quail is the smallest ferocious bird I know. But the quail outweighs the elephant as a corrosive influence on ordinary truth. I have long believed that one day I killed fifteen quail with thirteen shots. This is an outright falsehood, although I tell it frequently. It actually happened, but it happened to Mr. Bernie Baruch. I stole it callously, and I don’t know why, any more than Henry McLemore knows why he stole H. Allen Smith’s dream about the bouncing pussy-pup.

  I have shot exactly two elephants, two tigers, and two lions in my life. I have shot exactly five leopards. But wind me up, boy, let me ramble, and I make Karamoja Bell and Jim Corbett look like pikers. It is a strange thing, but the tendency to outdoor falsehood generally touches on quantity rather than trophy weight or actual size. What I mean is I have hunted massive concentrations of elephants on a control operation that was supposed to thin the herds by three or four hundred beasts. Actually I never fired a shot, but unless you listen closely you might believe that I fetched back three hundred jumbo tails, was hailed as Protector of the Poor, and was duly decorated.

  One of the more unusual, unvarying, and untrue aspects of big-game tale-telling is that nearly all bull elephants are rogues, and that all lions, tigers, and leopards brought to bag are man-eaters. I know there are rogue elephants. There must be, because so much is written about them. But I never saw one. Certainly there are man-eating cats, but the outsize pussies I have fetched home never sampled so much as a rasher of bacon off Homo sapiens. The leopards all seemed to relish pork, preferably maggoty, and the lions and tigers generally chose an animal like a jackass, a zebra, a young buffalo, or a cow—something with much more eatin’ meat on it than a skinny human.

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nbsp; Possibly the main thing about lions’ effect on liars is that very few people you will meet in your daily life ever saw a loose lion. This more or less prevents challenge on your veracity or lack of same. The mere fact that you are within a few feet of the unfettered king disarranges the chromosomes of your soul and everything thereafter seems bigger, more profuse. Once you’ve seen a wild lion at close hand, once you’ve shot a lion at a range of thirty yards or so your perspective changes, even when you speak of such innocuous fluffy beasts as bunnies.

  I have noticed recently that I retroactively tend to shoot all lions and elephants at a range that is never greater than ten yards. Up to now I’ve not shot either animal from the hip, but I’m gaining, men, I’m gaining. A fellow named Harry Selby did have to shoot a wounded buff from the hip not so long ago, and I see no real reason not to steal the experience from him.

  The lion that sent me darting off the narrow path of truth was almost, but not quite, the first thing I ever shot with a rifle larger than a .22 I have to admit to a couple of zebras and a wart hog on my first day of safari, and some shocking misses on Thomson’s gazelle. But I actually did shoot the lion the morning of the second day out, and a second-day lion is heady fare for a tenderfoot who is not quite sure how to load a magazine rifle. I clobbered this slightly moth-bitten old fellow medium-clean and semi-truly through the ear, and he spread out into a rug midly studded with camel flies. On advice of Master Selby, who even at the age of twenty-four was a cautious professional, I walloped him again behind the shoulder before I walked close enough to pose with a prideful foot on his neck.

  We slung Simba into the back of the Land-Rover, suitably padded by hastily hewn grass, and jounced merrily off to camp to show Mama how brave her little man was his second day in Africa. Mama got out of the sack to admire the beast, and I was accorded to be quite a fellow by the black boys, who had a keen nose for baksheesh on a triumphant day and broke out the formal celebration.

  We propped Bwana Simba’s chin on a rock, and Mama unlimbered her cameras. Then Bwana Simba’s eyes opened wide, his ears perked up, and he let out a soul-shattering roar. Never before have so many people so swiftly and successfully climbed so few trees, thorns and all.

  Now the truth is that the lion was stone-cold dead from the first .375 in the ear, and even deader from a second slug through the heart, and had been dead for two hours by the time we got him to camp. The opened eyes, the pricked ears came from some sort of muscular contraction as he prepared for rigor mortis. The roar was nothing but a sudden release of stomach gases.

  But you check back a couple of paragraphs and you will see that I have a dandy story—if I skip the explanation. The thing is to tell it modestly and mention quietly that you ran to the jeep and got a gun and shot the lion again. (Which I did, because I hadn’t figured out what made him come alive and roaring after having been dead for two hours.)

  About a week later we had another bright day of derring-do, which combined the slaying of a kind of champion waterbuck in the morning, a very fine lion in the early afternoon, and a very big leopard (the first) toward evening. The lion was accompanied by several lionesses and cubs. It seems there were six or nine or twelve lionesses. I think six would be the more accurate figure, but these days I just settle for two dozen and let it go.

  I wouldn’t know today what happened on the rest of the trip if I hadn’t written some modest pieces for Field & Stream, and later a less modest book about it. I find a streak of basic honesty in a writing-sporting liar. If he records the facts at the time he will be scrupulous in his adherence to basic truth—at the time. I never told any major fibs in print. My conscience dwelt among the scribbled notes. It is only age and distance that lend an added luster to the unvarnished fact.

  The Old Man said he blamed whisky and open fireplaces as much as anything else for the decay of probity. Also he said no outdoor man ever touched his peak performance for tall stories before he was forty-plus.

  “Lies,” the Old Man said, “are like whisky. They go down better after having been aged in the wood.”

  I came up in a little town where the expansive yarn would have made a Paul Bunyan blush. I couldn’t have been more than six when I heard the one about the bird dog who was so stanch that he froze to death on point, and when the thaw came the next year his master found a skeletal dog still standing a covey of skeletal quail. And, of course, there was one character in our town who was such a smooth and adept thief that he slid into a house one night and stole a lamp so fast that its owner kept right on reading after it was gone.

  As to dogs, I certainly do not care to say whether I am an accurate witness on the prowess of some of the beasts I owned. I think it highly unlikely that any dog of mine ever pointed a live bird with a dead bird in his mouth and one foot pinning down a cripple, but wouldn’t it be lovely if it were as true as it sounds when I tell it?

  Sometime, when you’ve got a minute, remind me to tell you of the white-tailed deer I once shot in Carolina. The hounds coursed it through a friend’s back yard. I shot it, and its dying leap carried it through the door of the smokehouse, and when we got inside it was hanging there, its horns caught on a hook.

  17—Fishing Is a State of Mind

  “The only thing crazier than a duck hunter or a mountain climber,” the Old Man repeatedly said, “is a really dedicated fisherman—a man who will fish where he knows there are no fish, just as long as he’s fishing. In fact, the dedicated fisherman is Simple Simon with a license.”

  I didn’t believe a word of this, of course, because I was kind of partial to fishing myself in those days, but only when I could catch fish.

  “In fact,” the Old Man went on, “I think the dedicated fisherman really hates fish. Take Cap’n Ahab. You perhaps know the story of Moby Dick. I don’t suppose you could actually call a whale a true fish, but let’s say that at least a whale can’t walk, and concede that he’s got fins and flippers and lives in the water. Well, this here Cap’n Ahab was a clear case of a man who hated fish, and one fish in particular. This hatred for fish ruined his life and lost him a leg.”

  The Old Man was drawing the longbow, as usual, but there was a seed in what he said. This came to mind the other day in Spain, when a neighbor dropped in of a Sunday and announced proudly, “I caught another fish.” You’d have thought he’d just won the Nobel prize.

  A fish hooked this character two years ago when he moved to my occasional neck of the woods. Using a borrowed rod he landed a three-pound dorada—a very fine sort of sea bass. From that point on he was lost. He had a seagoing monkey on his back.

  Every Sunday since that awful day he has fished, when he was in the little town of Palamós, up and down the beach in front of my house. He bought rods and reels and lines and tackle and one large milk can to keep his bait alive. He had more bait than the professionals, and more equipment than Ernest Hemingway.

  Two years he fished, and the other Sunday he caught his second fish—another dorada, weighing a pound and a half. That, you must admit, was a long time between bites. It took him two years and three hours of lonely fishing to snag this critter, and he was late to lunch and got chewed out at home. Then he gave the fish away to a neighbor (not me).

  There are a passel of fish in Spain, and in my neighborhood fishing is the major industry. But it is big-boat, deep-sea stuff with seines. Angling off the beach you might just catch a tourist or find yourself tied onto a bikini. But this does not discourage my friend Ted. He once had a hell of a day with a submerged auto tire. He is as trustingly tireless as the poor souls who fish the Seine in France. One day, the Parisian thinks, I’ll catch a tuna that has strayed from the Strait of Gibraltar, or at least a large sardine.

  A slightly more successful slave to the foul fishing habit is another neighbor, Artie Shaw, the reformed clarinetist. He lives on a lofty mountaintop a league or so away, and he has more equipment than Abercrombie & Fitch. He ties his own flies, hand-wraps his own rods, and makes regular pilgrimages to Austria and
France and America to see what’s newest and most expensive in the angling equipment dodge.

  Shaw threshes the streams of the Pyrenees and the small rivers in our neighborhood. He can flick your eye out with a fly, wet or dry, at fifty yards. He hunts fish nearly every day, and from time to time he catches something, be it nothing larger than a whiskered minnow. But since he has one whole room in his castle devoted to fishing gear I keep asking him where he is going to use those platinum-mounted mammoth reels that are suitable for the tuna tournament in the Bahamas. He just mutters and ties another fly.

  About the only notable trophy I ever took with a fly rod was my own ear, but occasionally the poison that invaded my veins when I was a kid in Carolina seeps back, and I can still handle a spinning reel or the old-time surf rod without seriously wounding anybody. And I came down with a craving for fishing recently that probably qualifies me to become president of the Idiots’ club.

  As seems usual these years, I was in Africa, and I was sick of safari. “Let’s go fishing. I need a rest,” says I to Harry Selby, my professional hunter friend, and to Brian Burrows, who runs some hotels out Kenya way.

  “Sure,” Selby said, “I know just the place. Lake Rudolf. You’ll find it fascinating. We got a permanent camp up there I built a couple years back, and a motor launch that I transported nearly six hundred miles over land. She’ll do nicely if she hasn’t sunk, which is entirely likely.”

  The difficulties involved in transporting about thirty-eight feet of specially built lake boat, on the order of the “African Queen,” across the Northern Frontier District of Kenya atop a lurching lorry add up to a logistical feat comparable to carrying a ton of coal to Newcastle on your head, and I will not bore you with the harrowing details.