Death in the Silent Places

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  During the years that he had been on his crusade of slaughter, Assassino had earned the reputation as a “devil-tiger,” much the same status successful man-eaters in Africa and Asia are awarded. It was generally believed that no bullet could harm him, nor could any man kill him in any way. Anybody who hunted him lost all his dogs and never got so much as a glimpse of his anthracite and amber hide. After killing an estimated 400 head of cattle to the south of the Xarayes, for some reason he became inactive for a period of time before resurfacing near the Fazenda Descalvados, a large ranch in the Xarayes Pantanal. It may have been that he was injured in a territorial battle or was sick for a while; the reason for his absence is unknown.

  It compliments Siemel’s believability and humility that he freely admits having refused to hunt Assassino, although begged to do so by ranchers on several occasions. He was only too aware, as a professional, that to try to hunt the big tigre with his hounds would be a death sentence for them, skilled though they were. And now, without his lead dog Valente, who might have stood some chance, there was no hope for it. Yet this decision had been made before Assassino killed Jose Ramos.

  It was Ramos himself who had ridden into Sasha’s camp near Ilha do Cara Cara, his horse lathered and his clothes crusty with sweat. Not taking time to dismount, he implored Siemel to come with his dogs to hunt Assassino, who had killed twelve of his small herd.

  Sasha turned him down flat. He would as soon send the fox terrier pup as his jaguar dogs for all the chance they would have. Jose Ramos, desperate, begged again, but the most Sasha could promise was that he would go after the cat if he saw him or knew he was close by. With a smoldering sense of resignation, Ramos swore to go after Assassino himself. He would kill or be killed. Little did he realize …

  It was within two days of Ramos’ visit that Sasha noticed a tall, dense column of vultures some miles off, over the marshes. Suspecting one of Assassino’s calling cards, he investigated and soon found the mangled body of a marsh deer, the carcass badly ripped by claws and teeth but the meat uneaten. Incredibly, as he went on with the dogs in close control, five marsh deer in all were found executed by the assassin cat, the spoor of his huge pug marks unmistakable. Not one ounce of meat had been eaten from any of the bodies except by the urubi. Assassino was having a fine day of sport.

  At the fifth kill, Raivoso lost control and ran off on the scent of the jaguar, Sasha quickly collaring the other dogs lest they take up the deadly trail, too. Clenching his teeth in impotent fury, Siemel listened to the bass bawling of the lead dog through the long grass, knowing what he would hear soon. It came as a piercing canine scream of agony that stopped abruptly as a slammed door. Assassino had won again.

  Siemel was at a complete loss as to how to hunt this insane tigre through the dense cover of the marshes. Back at camp, having buried the tattered remains of Raivoso, he thought back over the jaguar’s career, realizing the apparent impossibility of trying to run down the big cat without dogs, at the same time knowing that to expose his pack was as good as shooting them. For hours he pondered the problem. His rifle would be useless in the heavy grass; only the spear could draw the life blood of the tigre at such suicidally close quarters. But, he thought, even with the loss of Raivoso, possibly he could use the dogs to get close enough to the jaguar to deal with it. He was still wrestling with the problem the next morning when the thud of Maria Ramos’ horse galloping into camp set little Tupi into a paroxysm of excited barking.

  Maria was a wreck. Half-hysterical and bush-torn, she poured out all she knew; that Jose had gone after Assassino and only the claw-torn horse had returned with blood on the saddle. To the junglewise tigrero, it was like reading a newspaper headline. There was nothing to do but go now and try to find whatever might be left of Jose Ramos. He took four leashed dogs, two new ones called Amigo and Leon joining with Vinte and Pardo, and tied the fox terrier to one of the hut poles so he would not follow. Maria led the way along the river to the place where she said Jose had cut off the trail, refusing when Siemel tried to get her to ride home. She was a woman of the pantanal and insisted on coming.

  A mile ahead, the green capão stood like a beacon over the ocean of grass, a strange, verdant projection like a lichen-covered rock in some tropic sea. Above it, small specks that were vultures volplaned and circled.

  Jose Ramos lay as Assassino had left him, a mass of torn meat lying on its face. As Siemel rolled the corpse over in a loud whine of flies, Maria fainted and nearly fell from her horse. She did not now argue when sent back to the ranch.

  The sign was as clear as neon. Deep scars marked the spot from which the jaguar had leaped, and blackening speckles of blood freckled the grass stems around the hoof marks. Some yards away lay the unfired percussion gun. Siemel looked around him. If Assassino had knocked a man from his horse once, he would do it again. Also, there was no way to spear-fight effectively from horseback. Dismounting, he tied the animal to a tree in a small clearing and took the protective sheath off his zagaya blade. A pistol, probably the ubiquitous Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver, the Brazilian standard against which all other handguns were judged, was in a belt holster. Years later, Sasha would manage to shoot himself with it in the leg while spearfighting a jaguar. In any case, the .38 Special cartridge is of little value against a charging jaguar and was carried for delivering the coup de grace. On a hunch, he also took his bow and two arrows, in case he had the opportunity of provoking a charge with them.

  A very simple plan—Sasha decided that the cat was probably still quite close, and, by releasing the dogs and running after them as fast as he could, there was a possibility that he might throw the jaguar’s ambush tactics off. Yes, if he could keep up, maybe there was a chance. He let slip the dogs.

  Aften ten minutes of running through the marsh grass, the vocal bedlam of the dogs ever farther ahead, he knew that he had been wrong. The death shriek of Pardo, the leader, sounded over the plain and was followed in less than a minute by the screech of the disembowelled Vinte. Within 450 yards, Assassino killed all four of the dogs in his classic ambush pattern. His lungs of fire, Siemel was sick with fury at finding the last one, Leon, in an opening in the capão. And then another bark filtered through the bush and caught his ear. It was the fox terrier, Tupi, who had chewed through his tether and followed his master’s scent.

  As the little dog ran by, barking insanely at the cat smell, Sasha slammed his heel over the trailing end of the broken tether, flipping Tupi over as the line tautened in a full run. As the pet yelped in surprise, that same moment there was the rustle of heavy movement just across the clearing, then ominous silence. Carefully, Sasha laid his spear at his feet and nocked an arrow. Without a glance down, he stepped on the little dog’s foot, making it shriek with startled pain.

  It worked. Across the opening a few stalks of grass twitched. In a single fluid movement, Sasha came to full draw, and his arrow hissed blindly into the tangle as Tupi began to bark again. The thug! of the arrow told Siemel he had touched the jaguar, and there was a flurry of movement through the curtain of grass. Scant seconds ticked mutely by in time with his heaving chest as he sighted his last shaft and sent it whipping into the cover. Would the confusion of the barking dog and the flash of the arrows bring the charge he needed? The answer appeared in a blur of streaking motion as Assassino, a broken-off shaft protruding from the bunched muscles of his shoulder, ran for a low scrub tree out of pure instinct. He was nearly there when he saw Sasha.

  The man gulped involuntarily when he saw the jaguar’s tremendous size as the cat stopped and then stood glowering at Siemel across a thirty-yard open space. The zagaya in position, the spearman realized that he would never again have a fight like this one, very possibly because he would not be alive for the next one. He had none of the advantages of the dogs to break the concentration of the jaguar, to keep him off balance. Furious with the pain in his shoulder, the monster cat would be completely unpredictable in his next attack. It became a battle of nerve and will,
the killer tigre measuring the man, stalking back and forth with guttural growls as if caged, punctuated with screaming roars that fluttered Sasha’s guts. Every sense locked on the cat, he began to move slowly in, edging closer, pushing for the charge. Both man and jaguar were searching for an opening. The tigre’s came first.

  It was just the airy flutter of wings, the flap of an urubi vulture settling into a tree above him. But it was enough. The terrible strain broke Siemel’s all-important concentration, and he committed the fatal sin of glancing away from the jaguar. In that microsecond, it saw its chance and launched itself straight at the spearman. Off balance, Sasha lunged and pivoted at the same time, the foot-long forged-steel spearhead catching Assassino a lucky slice on the neck as the mottled mass of golden-sheathed muscle hurtled by. A giant, talon-studded paw glanced off Siemel’s right shoulder, knocking him down like a flung doll. In that moment, he should have been a dead man.

  Somehow, probably because of the shock of the neck wound, the cat was also thrown off balance. Siemel gained the second he needed to roll to the side and scramble to his knees, the spearblade once more leveled and weaving for a thrust. As lithe as any cat, Sasha regained his feet. He could feel his strength flowing away like sweat, but Assassino was also showing some effect of the heavily bleeding neck wound. Mere feet between them, the two fighters stood panting, eyes locked, for what seemed to Siemel a long time. He knew that if he could drive the blade home once more, he would win. The question was really whether he could stand up to the charge that would make that thrust possible. He did not have long to ponder the question. As if reading his mind, through the blue eyes, the jaguar gave a last terrific roar and exploded straight at Siemel.

  It was so fast and from so close a range that Sasha nearly did not manage to lift the spear point in time. As the irresistible impact slammed through the thick shaft of louro wood, he saw that the blade had caught the throat too high, and a thrill of horror raced over him; so close were the raking claws that he was sure he had held the shaft too far forward. As he had seen Joaquim Guató do, he pushed forward hard, withdrawing the spear, and in the same motion plunged it deep into the chest. With the last of his draining strength, he pinned the jaguar down, the cutting steel buried near the heart. Assassino fought madly, the lashing of his claws deeply lacerating the spear shaft, scoring the wood as Sasha drove his full weight down. As the tip of the blade passed completely through the chest and grated against the ground on the far side despite the flesh-buried cross-stop, the paw strokes slowed and, with a great shudder, stopped. How long he leaned on the zagaya shaft, Sasha Siemel did not know. He did know that Assassino was dead, and he was alive.

  For a long time he sat regaining his strength, as Tupi nipped bravely at the dead cat. Finally able to return to his horse, he rode back to the brush-covered body of Jose Ramos and returned the corpse to the widow, seeing that she and her child were moved down to the big Fazenda Descalvados. It was two days before Sasha was able to return to the lonely little clearing in the capão that had been the silent arena of one of the greatest known battles between man and beast. Assassino had been largely eaten by the eternal urubi, but Siemel was able to salvage the skull as a trophy and to measure the body. Assassino’s maggot-crawling hulk was nine feet three inches long and estimated by Siemel—who knew his jaguars like nobody else—at something very near 400 pounds!

  In many ways, the spear fight with the great assassin jaguar was a prominent marker along the trail that was Sasha Siemel’s life. For a man of such daring and sense of adventure, he was wonderfully human to come to grips with the fact that he had very nearly been the loser of that battle. This seemed to shake him from an interesting angle, possibly influenced by the psychological impact left over from discovering the desolate end of his teacher, Joaquim Guató. No one could ever make the insinuation that Sasha Siemel was afraid of death or dying; that ran counter to every fact of his life. What he did seem worried about, though, was the idea of dying alone, food for birds somewhere in the marshes. With the humility to admit that should he come up against another such tigre as Assassino, he might indeed become the trophy, he never hunted jaguar as a lone tigrero again. He killed many more over his long career with the zagaya (the Assassino fight having taken place in the summer of 1928), yet always had someone nearby or with him who would know his fate, if not be of any help in the combat.

  In September of 1928, Sasha joined forces with three amateur adventurers: Mamerto Urriolagoita, who later became president of Bolivia; a British photographer named Bee-Mason; and a writer, Julian Duguid, who later returned to Brazil to write Sasha’s early biography. Their venture was a journey across the wilderness of the Bolivian Grán Chaco, following the route of a Spanish conquistador to the Andes. The trip produced the well-known book by Duguid, Green Hell, as well as the later work, Tiger Man, which sprang Sasha (Duguid spelled it “Sacha”) Siemel into the world adventure spotlight.

  Siemel married a talented woman, Edith Bray, a Philadelphian whom he met while giving a lecture in that city in 1938. Tying the knot in 1940 in Rio de Janeiro, they had three children, the youngest, “Sashino,” becoming something of an adventurer and author in his own right. For years the Siemel family lived in the Mato Grosso on Sasha’s houseboat, the Adventureira; Sasha ran hunting safaris and gave lectures in the United States. At one time, he was presented the “Adventurers’ Medal” of the Adventurers’ Club of New York. When he finally wrote his own story, Tigrero, the book did well and further established him as the giant of adventure he really was.

  The tigre called Death finally slipped past Sasha’s flashing blade in Green Lane, Pennsylvania, in February 1970 when he was nearly eighty years of age.

  It was my honor to know him slightly, so perhaps you’ll take my word for it that never again shall we see his like.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aitken, Russell Barnett. Great Game Animals of the World. New York: MacMillan Co., 1968.

  Baillie-Grohman, W.A. and F. The Master of Game—The Oldest English Book on Hunting. London: 1904, translation of Gaston Phoebus, Paris: circa 1510.

  Capstick, Peter Hathaway. Death in the Long Grass. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.

  Clarke, James. Man Is the Prey. New York: Stein & Day, 1969.

  Duguid, Julian. Green Hell. New York: The Century Co., 1931.

  ————. Tiger-Man. New York: The Century Co., 1932.

  Schaller, George B. “Epitaph for a Jaguar,” Animal Kingdom, New York Zoological Society: April/May 1980.

  Siemel, Sasha (Alexander). Tigrero. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1953.

  Stuart, Hans and Connor, Inez. “Reclassification Proposed for the Leopard,” News Release of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior, March 31, 1980.

  W. D. M. “Karamojo” Bell

  IVORY HUNTER! Lord, what images the very term dredges up from the dark past of the old Africa: long, chanting, sweating lines of tusk-toting porters; sweat-rimed khaki; the delicious waft of cordite smoke on the hot breeze, mingled with that of drying blood and the whine of flies. And the man. Faceless, yet legend, with names like Sutherland, Taylor, Neumann, Stigand—and “Karamojo” Bell—the pure individualists who did what so many of us wish we could do: Live our lives on our own terms. Totally self-sufficient in savage and often unexplored lands with dozens of lives hanging on their judgment, the professional elephant hunter was the highest form of Man the Predator, each one as romantic and fearless, as resourceful and steadfast as any knight who ever opened the dragon season or went Holy Grailing. From one point of view, the only difference was that ivory hunting held no requirements of purity … .

  Since 1661, when a Dutch hunter in South Africa named Pieter Roman achieved the somewhat negative distinction of being first on the very long list of whites killed by African elephants, the profession of ivory hunting has been considered one of the most dangerous and romantic vocations open to the adventure-minded of the recent past. Many were drawn to this tenuous way of life by t
he early classic writings of Captain Sir William Cornwallis-Harris and Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, both of whom hunted southern Africa in the 1830s and 1840s and produced some very colorful tales of their exploits. By the 1870s, commercial elephant hunting in southern Africa was, from a practical standpoint, a thing of the past. Since East Africa had not opened up at that time, and would not do so to any great degree until the building of the Uganda Railroad near the turn of the century, things looked mighty bleak for would-be ivory hunters who had the bum luck not to be even born until 1880.

  Through the entire fabric of legend that wraps the elite who comprised the ivory hunters, there is one name woven with a bolder thread than that of any other. Absolutely determined to succeed with unorthodox methods others thought insanely perilous; admired for his toughness, bravery and skill by some, while hated by competitors for the same reasons; that name is still guaranteed to provoke as much controversy today as it did in 1923, after the publication of his first book, The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter. That name was Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, but the world would know him as “Karamojo” Bell, for the Karamojo region of northeast Uganda where he hunted for five years, ending in 1907.