If

by Christopher Benfey

  4.

  Kipling enjoyed Teddy Roosevelt’s boisterous company. And yet the two new friends differed on key points. They quarreled at the Smithsonian over the status of American Indians, whom Kipling had always admired for their self-reliance in the wilderness. “I never got over the wonder,” Kipling wrote in Something of Myself, “of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.” He shared his amazement with Roosevelt, “who made the glass cases of Indian relics shake with his rebuttals.” It also became clear that Kipling wasn’t particularly interested in Roosevelt’s bears. He was far more interested in the beavers.

  During his 1889 journey across the American continent, Kipling had spent a few days in Yellowstone. On a trail ride along the Firehole River, he had sought out a beaver lodge. “The question was, would they come out for their walk before it got too dark to see.” The question was soon answered. “They came—blessings on their blunt muzzles, they came—as shadows come, drifting down the stream, stirring neither foot nor tail,” he wrote. “There were three of them. One went down to investigate the state of the dam; the other two began to look for supper. There is only one thing more startling than the noiselessness of a tiger in the jungle, and that is the noiselessness of a beaver in the water.” Kipling looked at the beavers at work with an almost religious awe. Having “seen the beaver in his wilds,” Kipling vowed, “never will I go to the Zoo.”

  Five years later, Kipling was not only going to the zoo; he was going there repeatedly. Studying the beaver colony became a major preoccupation during his final days in Washington. Carrie’s diary for March 29 has a single entry: “R visiting the beavers at the zoo.” The beavers worked tirelessly—worked, as Kipling noted, “with the cold-chisel,” building dams, dens, and lakes.

  What Kipling admired in his beloved beavers was a colonial world in miniature. What Roosevelt admired in bears, by contrast, was their brute marauding strength. One might discern in the two friends’ diverging views two contrasting notions of empire. For Kipling, empire was a realm of responsibilities. For Roosevelt, empire was a world of opportunities. The primary aim of empire, for TR, was territorial expansion through glorious war. It is tempting to believe that these opposing views of empire—as public service and as territorial conquest—were partially established while Kipling and Roosevelt, those two celebrants of empire, strolled through the Washington Zoo, talking and arguing, during the spring of 1895.

  5.

  Carrie and Rudyard returned to Brattleboro on April 6, their journey delayed by torrential rains, and found a world underwater. One of the annual spring “freshets,” fueled by melting snow and the contours of the Vermont landscape, had submerged Brattleboro and their own access road in one of the worst floods of the city’s history. By mid-April, with the waters receding, Kipling reported to a friend that watching the beavers had been the high point of the Washington trip. “When the head of the Washington Zoo let me frolic in private enclosures where the beaver lived, and postponed feeding the beasts till I found it convenient to come, I felt that Notoriety was beginning to be worth something.” For Kipling had a dream as he eyed the swollen brooks and the incessant rain. His dream was to reintroduce the beaver to the wetlands of Vermont, where they had died out by the 1850s, victims of deforestation and the fur trade.

  A month later, he was still full of excitement about his “experiences with beaver” in Washington. He wrote to the New York publisher Ripley Hitchcock, an amateur naturalist: “How I met Bill Hofer the trapper who trapped ’em; how I was introduced to the whole seven of ’em that made the dam in the Zoo (such a Zoo!); how I got photographs of the said dam in three lights and finally how I went into the fencing question with the head of the Zoo.” The fencing question turned out to be the rub. Kipling wanted an enclosure for his Vermont beavers, to keep the beavers in a little private zoo of his own rather than allow them to increase and multiply—into the garden that he and Carrie had been building, and up and down the banks of the Connecticut River. “It’s beyond my means because unless you sink sheet iron or concrete five feet below ground the beaver will burrow out,” he concluded. “Everything else would be as easy as falling off a log but I can’t fence ten acres in that way.”

  6.

  Another of Kipling’s dreams that summer had a better result. Tired of riding, or sledding, into Brattleboro to get his voluminous mail—often as many as two hundred letters a day—he had hit on an alternative: a post office of his own, down where the road to his house intersected with Putney Road. He asked his new friend William Hallett Phillips to approach the McKinley administration with the request. In mid-June, Kipling was gratified to learn that the petition had been approved. “After this,” he wrote Phillips, in the mock-Indian banter that had become habitual with them, “the name of Sitting Fox [his nickname for Phillips] shall be entered among the Trues [the Indian gods]. His Lodge shall be in the center of the camp, painted and crowned with feathers.”

  Kipling invited Phillips to visit Naulakha. Phillips combined many qualities that Kipling admired: he was bookish, informal, generous, adventurous, and loved the outdoors. He was also of good (and colorful) family. Kipling had a weakness for Southerners and the Lost Cause. Phillips’s father, Philip, had represented Alabama in Congress until the firing on Fort Sumter, when the family—with the help of Philip’s friend Edwin Stanton, later Lincoln’s secretary of war—was allowed to return to the South, but not before his wife, Eugenia Levy Phillips, from one of Charleston’s prominent Jewish families, was arrested for suspicion of promoting Confederate interests. Kipling told Phillips that he had a job for him “much more important than PO’s,” namely, to build “a wigwam, wickyup, whaire or whatever its name is” for Josephine.

  Phillips arrived in Brattleboro in early September, on his way back to Washington from John Hay’s estate in New Hampshire. Kipling and Phillips spent long hours in the woods, or the “jungle” as Kipling called it, telling each other Indian legends, both authentic (Phillips) and invented (Kipling). Each morning, Phillips would “hear Kipling’s voice challenging me to go forth” into the jungle, he reported to Hay. “Into it we crawl, and I listen to what the Master of the Jungle tells; and what talk! . . . What a wonder that fellow is! What felicity and what fecundity.” A few years later, the escapades provided material for Kipling’s Just So Stories, with Josephine dressed as Pocahontas, and father and daughter honoring their totem animal, the beaver.

  Josephine on the porch of Naulakha, with a tiger skin for a blanket.

  7.

  Two selections from Kipling’s Just So Stories, “How the First Letter Was Written” and “How the Alphabet Was Made,” evoke the September idyll when Bill Phillips came to Naulakha to build a wigwam and to receive thanks for the post office. On the face of it, they tell the whimsical story of the invention of writing by a “Neolithic man” and his clever daughter, and how they sent the first letter through the mail. In “How the First Letter Was Written,” Tegumai and his daughter, Taffy, venture out from their cave by the beaver swamp to go fishing in the Wagai River. Trying to stab a carp, Tegumai breaks his spear, and Taffy hits on an ingenious way to alert her mother, Teshumai Tewindrow. “I say, Daddy, it’s an awful nuisance that you and I don’t know how to write, isn’t it?” she says brightly. “If we did we could send a message for the new spear.” A “Stranger-man” turns up and hands Taffy a “big flat piece of bark off a birch-tree” meant to show “that his heart was as white as the birch-bark.” Taffy sees the birch bark differently. “You want my Mummy’s living address?” she asks. “Of course I can’t write, but I can draw pictures if I’ve anything sharp to scratch with. Please lend me the shark’s tooth off your necklace.”

  And Taffy draws a picture of Tegumai’s plight, broken spear and all. This is the first letter, and Taffy, “draw
ing very hard and rather scratchily,” provides the address as well, replete with beavers. Taffy’s drawing is open to multiple interpretations. The Stranger reads it as Tegumai’s plea for help against his enemies “coming up on all sides with spears.” Teshumai Tewindrow assumes instead that the Stranger himself has stuck the spear into Tegumai, “‘and here are a whole pack of people’ (they were Taffy’s beavers really, but they did look rather like people) ‘coming up behind Tegumai.’” Everything is soon sorted out, and Taffy is assured that she has “hit upon a great invention,” and that (punning on the two meanings of “letters”) “a time will come, O Babe of Tegumai, when we shall make letters—all twenty-six of ’em—and when we shall be able to read as well as to write, and then we shall always say exactly what we mean without any mistakes.”

  And that is exactly what happens in “How the Alphabet Was Made,” as father and daughter invent twenty-six different “noise-pictures,” one for each letter of the alphabet. Many of the letters scratched on birch bark are derived from animals: A is the sound a carp might make, gasping for air. B is for “beaver,” the sacred totem of Tegumai’s tribe. Kipling’s illustration shows its evolution from pictograph to stylized B. As Taffy invents one letter after another, her father realizes how momentous their invention is. It is, he tells her, “the big secret of the world.” Tegumai is so excited that he makes “a magic Alphabet-necklace of all the letters, so that it could be put in the Temple of Tegumai and kept forever and ever.”

  8.

  Another celebration of Bill Phillips’s visit was a spring poem that Kipling wrote in March 1897. “The Feet of the Young Men” is a love poem, really, and recalls “The Long Trail” in its yearning call to fellow vagabonds to join the poet on the open road.

  Now the Four-way Lodge is opened, now the Hunting Winds are loose—

  Now the Smokes of Spring go up to clear the brain;

  Now the Young Men’s hearts are troubled for the whisper of the Trues,

  Now the Red Gods make their medicine again!

  Who hath seen the beaver busied? Who hath watched the black-tail mating?

  Who hath lain alone to hear the wild-goose cry?

  The idyllic destination is the all-male precincts of the camp. “Let him follow with the others, for the Young Men’s feet are turning / To the camps of proved desire and known delight!” There, a man, “waiting as a lover,” might indulge in a “misty sweat-bath”: “And to each a man that knows his naked soul!” The poem, which owes something to Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage,” later became a favorite of the Boy Scouts.

  Kipling was about to mail the poem to Phillips when he received the terrible news that his friend, on just such a camping trip as he had imagined, had accidentally drowned in the Potomac River. “I had just written out in full his special copy of the ‘Red Gods’ and was getting ready to mail it,” Kipling wrote that May. “Now all I can do is to dedicate the thing to his memory.” Kipling must have noted the eerie parallel with “The Long Trail,” which had been written to another intimate male friend, Wolcott Balestier, just before his death in Dresden.

  The Boone and Crockett Club held its annual meeting the following January at the Metropolitan Club in New York. Teddy Roosevelt, who had risen to the rank of assistant secretary of the navy, took the train up from Washington. There was much to celebrate, notably the establishment of the Bronx Zoo, another urban game preserve that the club had vigorously supported. But there was also the sad news about Phillips, a founding member of the club. “Among the toasts . . . will be a silent one to the memory of William Hallett Phillips of Washington, who was accidentally drowned in the Potomac River last spring.” Phillips, The New York Times noted, “was numbered among the few very intimate friends of Rudyard Kipling, and to his memory Kipling dedicated his last stirring poem in Scribner’s Magazine entitled ‘The Feet of the Young Men.’”

  9.

  Five years later, in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt was in his first full year as president of the United States, after an assassin’s bullet killed William McKinley. During his many years of hunting, Roosevelt had bagged many different kinds of big game, many bears in particular, but never a Louisiana black bear. When the governor of Mississippi suggested a bear hunt in the Delta swamp led by the legendary guide Holt Collier, Roosevelt eagerly accepted. Collier, a former slave and scout of the Confederate army, was known to have killed more than three thousand bears.

  Collier knew the whereabouts of one mature bear in particular, and he had a plan. He placed Roosevelt in a blind, and instructed him to wait for a clear shot. Then he led his forty dogs into the dense tangle of virgin oak and cypress, with knee-high briars to plow through. It took several hours to bring the bear to bay, at which point Collier drove the bear, in a dangerous and delicate operation, toward the president’s blind. But the president wasn’t there. Impatient and hungry, he had taken a break for lunch. Collier, disgusted—“I could have killed him a thousand times,” he said of the bear—then adopted plan B, even more dangerous. With the dogs harassing the bear, he managed to club it, lasso it, and drag it, slightly dazed, to a willow tree, where he tied it. Then he went in search of the president and invited him to shoot his bear.

  Roosevelt was in awe of what Collier had done but refused to shoot a bear tied to a tree. It went against everything that the Boone and Crockett Club stood for. The “Fair Chase Statement” required the hunter to take his prey “in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage.” A bear tied to a tree surely offered the hunter an improper advantage. Collier’s feat was widely celebrated in the national press, but it was Roosevelt’s refusal—and his preference for lunch over hunting—that had the greater notoriety. Clifford Berryman drew a cartoon in The Washington Post of reluctant Roosevelt, his Rough Rider hat on his head and his rifle butt on the ground, with the caption “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.” Instead of an old bear, Berryman drew a cute little black bear with ears that look fit for a mouse.

  The little bear cub lived on. Morris Michtom, a shopkeeper in Brooklyn, made stuffed animals for toys. He designed a toy bear based on Berryman’s drawing and called it “Teddy’s Bear,” securing the president’s permission to market it, at a $1.50 per bear. So successful was his teddy bear that Michtom founded the Ideal Toy Corporation in 1903. By 1938, when Michtom died, Ideal Toy was selling more than a hundred thousand teddy bears a year. It seems a missed opportunity, in retrospect, that Michtom did not also make a stuffed animal called Ruddy Beaver, with Kipling’s familiar round-lensed glasses, his unmistakable shaggy eyebrows, and his rounded head.

  Clifford Berryman, Drawing the Line in Mississippi.

  III

  Chapter Nine

  A FISHING TRIP

  1.

  President Grover Cleveland loved to go fishing. Not fly-fishing, which he considered a deplorable affectation of pretentious purists, but plain old fishing, with a bobber, a sinker, and a baited hook. During the summer, the president fished every day at his retreat on Cape Cod. In the fall, he fished on the Potomac or on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. He fished “through hunger and heat, lightning and tempest,” wrote Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Magazine and a frequent companion on the president’s leisurely outings. A large and slow-moving man, Cleveland weighed 240 pounds and disliked exercise. “Bodily movement alone,” he wrote, “is among the dreary and unsatisfying things of life.” But the president liked to fish and he liked to hunt—preferably sitting down, in a blind, from dawn to dark. When the cares of office weighed on him, he grabbed a fishing rod or a gun and lit out for the territory. The president “was immoderate in only two things,” Gilder wrote, “his deskwork and his fishing.”

  What drove Cleveland to the North Carolina coast, during the late fall of 1895, was a hostile note from the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury. British Guiana, colonized during the early nineteenth century, shared a border with Venezuela, though
the precise location of the boundary had long been in question. When gold was discovered in the disputed region, the British reasserted their claim to the Orinoco River, deep in Venezuela territory. Venezuela appealed to the United States to serve as a neutral arbitrator between the rival claimants. Cleveland accepted, prompting outrage from Lord Salisbury.

  It was not the first time that the president had tangled with Great Britain over boundaries and natural resources. During his first term, there were testy negotiations over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. There was also a boundary dispute between Alaska and British Columbia—where gold was again at issue—and a debate about the declining population of fur seals in the Bering Sea, which inspired Kipling’s story “The White Seal.” (Included in The Jungle Book, the story is about a seal who leads thousands of his comrades to safety, away from the depredations of merciless hunters armed with clubs.) But the Venezuelan crisis was different, and the stakes were higher. American interests were not involved, as the British pointed out, so what should a president do? The US Navy was negligible; Britannia, by contrast, ruled the waves. The president, as was his habit at such times, packed his guns and headed south to think about his response.

  The duck hunting was excellent. The president returned pumped up and resolved. He consulted with his bellicose secretary of state, Richard Olney, and stayed up all night writing a response to the British ultimatum. “I am . . . firm in my conviction,” he wrote, “that, while it is a grievous thing to contemplate the two great English-speaking peoples of the world as being otherwise than friendly competitors in the onward march of civilization and strenuous and worthy rivals in all the arts of peace, there is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”