Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  Think of Africa as a vast, three-star restaurant, to which some come solely for the entree (the usual big-game suspects—buffalo, sable, nyala, and so on). They forget that there is a complete menu, including appetizers, fish, dessert, even cheese board, that should not be overlooked. I had “done” Africa with alacrity (gemsbok on Sunday, eland by Tuesday) enough. So this time I wanted to indulge assorted flavors of sport: guinea fowl on the wing at Ant’s large family ranch, the Triple 13; big game from horseback at Ant’s Nest; and later, trout on the fly in the Drakensbergs. In short, the complete bill of fare.

  Now we drove past herds of copper-hided impala on our way to the first course. We had only three “guns” this morning—two Germans winding up a safari with Ant, and me starting mine—and could have done with eight or more. We tried to walkup guineas, nonetheless, and tried some extemporaneous beats. Driving to the end of a narrow valley, Ant gave the beaters yellow vests and white flags, and we trekked off into the thorn bush.

  It was more than good to be walking in Africa again after seven years; but I soon saw that trying to drive helmeted guinea fowl can look a great deal like an episode of the popular BBC herding-dog show, One Man and His Dog, with the blackface sheep on acid. Spotting a bustling flock of guineas (maybe 100; for all I knew, 200) in the distance to the south, we spread out in our ragged line of guns, deploying the beaters in the classic “horns of the bull” encircling maneuver of the Zulu impis, and then watched the birds run deliriously off to the north, out of range of even 50-caliber rounds.

  So we walked on, hoping to put guineas up—which is a little like hoping to make a brick float. I was also carrying a borrowed Sauer-AYA, stocked (pistol grip, cheekpiece, and all) exactly like a Nitro Express, and choked about the same. So I was doubly surprised when a band of guineas flushed from a field of rocks and passed to my right, and I swung the awkward gun on one, saw it fall, then on another, and watched it drop, too.

  Ant’s black lab, Rufus, quickly fetched my entirely unexpected right-and-left. Definitely an eye-of-the-beholder bird, the guinea: stooped and agitated on the ground, its head naked blue and red, topped by headgear presumably filched from the pope’s Swiss Guards, its grey feathers spangled with pointillist white dots. A big bird, and fine eating, particularly in curries, it is deceptively hard to hit, especially when truly driven. As I learnt that evening.

  At sunset, Ant put out more flags and organized a proper drive on a huge flock in a field of winter wheat. He sent me out along a line of scrub at the edge of a stubble field, the green wheat just beyond it. The sun was starting to drop, like something ripened from a tree. Beaters began moving through the wheat, and the guineas began flying. When guineas fly they come en bloc, like one dark, solid wave of birds. So getting off two shots before the wave crests is good, four outstanding, six memorial. I managed four shots at the high birds, killing one on the third. Then they were gone, landed in the scrub behind, back to running on the ground where they were most comfortable, as night fell like the mouton of Les Bois de Justice.

  The second dish came the next day when Ant, his hired hand, Tracy, and I mounted up and rode off from the whitewashed, thatched ranch house at Ant’s Nest, I on Ant’s tall bushveld horse Saladin. Along with giraffes, eland, kudu, gemsbok, blesbok, steenbok, bushbuck, wildebeest, hartebeest, impala, zebra, warthog, bushpig, duiker, the odd leopard, et al., Ant also had a pair of white rhino on the place, their scent on the wind making Saladin skittish. Still, he was fine to ride into a giraffe herd, carrying me much closer than I could ever get on foot, let alone by vehicle. As we rode on in the cool breezy morning, I could see the merit of Orwell’s dictum of four legs good. The animals we rode among saw only hooves on the ground; and we saw Africa in a way, and at a pace, better known to animals than men.

  We sighted a herd of wildebeest and followed, hidden in the protective coloration of horses, trying to get a look at a blesbok bull traveling with it. In a while the wildebeest with blesbok in tow moved into thorn too thick for us to penetrate, so we circled away, pulling up for a moment near a dry wash to plot our next gambit. Fresh rhino spoor was upon the ground, and I noticed the way Saladin carried his head—craning and nervous. This was my first occasion on this horse, and I did not quite know what to make of his cues.

  There was no telling what initiated it—a gust of wind, a breaking branch, a fragment of underdone potato, but most likely a warthog, scenting only horse, poking its snout out of a nearby hole—but as I sat with wrists crossed on the domed saddle horn, Saladin erupted, 1,100 pounds of equine muscle translating 10 feet laterally, leaving me twixt heaven and earth without warning, some 17 hands high, time dilating to allow me to consider the approaching impact. I hit with an overfed thud on dirt rather than rocks and on that portion of the anatomy best constructed by the Creator for such a collision.

  Ant was off his horse at once, questioning me about whether I was all right. After a moment of speechlessness, I got to my feet. I dusted myself off and shrugged.

  “It’s Africa,” I said, as I remounted.

  We rode on, into the wind among red-bush and velvet-leaved willows, past bridal bush in unseasonable bloom. We soon caught up with a herd of impala drifting through the bush and followed the oblivious antelope for a quarter-mile before we got to a place to take a shot.

  The old elephant hunters might have shot from horseback; but after my recent experience with Saladin, I thought better of it. Tracy caught the reins as Ant and I dismounted, and I pulled the borrowed 308 from the “bucket,” bolting a round and setting the safety. We stalked on foot now, closing to within 50 yards of a ram with short, gnarled horns that Ant wanted removed in the name of eugenics. Kneeling, I steadied the crosshairs on the shiny coat behind its front leg. Safety off, smooth squeeze, but no thwunk as the ram bucked. Ant knew, though; and we found the impala 30 yards from where he’d stood.

  “Good to have someone who can shoot,” said Ant, obviously a professional hunter easily pleased. I accepted his handshake all the same.

  A week later, having taken a record-book blesbok, a cull wildebeest, and a gloriously grotesque bushpig, and after game viewing (leopard at six feet) at a reserve next to Kruger Park—and with a bruise spreading like a late-period Rothko study in blue across my rump—I moved on to the final African course: trout.

  I met up with fishing guide Jonathan Boulton in the capital of South African fly fishing, the faux Tudor village of Dullstroom in the northern reaches of the Drakensbergs, the “Dragon Mountains,” with a far better Zulu name: uKhahlamba, “Barrier of Spears.” We were going to fish the Spekboom River, but first Boulton took me to one of his 15 still-water leases to take care of a small matter—for me to catch the biggest rainbow of my life.

  Born and raised in California and introduced to fishing by rainbows, I came to South Africa to find the pure McCloud River strain, more likely to be discovered here than in their native range, where generations of hybridization have diluted the genes. They were brought from California in the late 1800s, fertilized eggs packed in ice in chests in sailing ships. Introduced initially to the Cape, they were eventually transplanted to flowing waters, and still-water ponds, throughout the country.

  On a farm lake, one of Boulton’s leases, we broke through shore ice; and I began casting and stripping in a green bead-headed Bunny Leech dressed on a no. 6 hook, Jonathan politely but firmly tutoring me on technique.

  “Like the Interflora man,” he’d say repeatedly, describing how he wanted my pose to look at the end of a cast, until he had me laying out lovely, looping 70-foot lengths of line. And before breakfast there was a six-pound, kyped buck in the net, a pound better than my previous best from Alaska.

  Before supper we’d travelled 60 kilometers north of Dullstroom to a secluded manor on the Spekboom. The hills around were perfect leopard haunts and refuges for kudu; the river, filled with wild ’bows and browns, ran clear and cold below red shale cliff faces and abandoned gallows frames from old mines. The plan was first to bushw
hack fish from cover, dropping a white attractor, with a bead-headed nymph dangling 18 inches below, on to their heads. If nothing fell for that, we’d switch to the “big gun,” a Thomas & Thomas 5-weight with a heavy bead-head and a red-orange floating strike indicator.

  The first night I landed only one fish using this latter method, but the next morning we had it down to a fair science. Action was slow on the dry, but at each pool I’d get three, four slashing, devastating takes on the big gun, turning the water to froth, before the trout caught on and clammed up. So onto the next pool, repeating the process until I’d taken 20 trout, including a four-pounder.

  At the last pool of the morning, Jonathan had a go with my 3-weight G. Loomis, casting to one of the alarmingly large rainbows cruising in the lambent water. For a second the line was still, then it was unzipping the river, something rugby-ball sized airborne at its end. As Jonathan hooted, the trout slapped back into the water, making straight for a submerged limb to dally on it and break free.

  “It’s not whether you’re going to land a fish like that,” Jonathan philosophized as he wound the backing and line back onto the reel, “but how long you get to keep it on.”

  So, too, this trip to South Africa; more about adventures had than animals taken, dishes sampled than meals eaten. That evening I hooked my own titan—silver-white in the cold blue shadows as it left the river again and again, making me hoot and holler, “Who’s your daddy?” and infuriating the hen into pulling free. Inspecting the partially straightened hook in the gathering dark, I thought how all the best things, whether dining, shooting, stalking, or angling, are always more recollection than possession.

  Jonathan started to commiserate, but before he could say a word, I smiled my own half-smile.

  “It’s Africa,” I said. And indeed, it was.

  The President and the Pleistocene

  Before …

  AFRICA WAS NOT his only choice, but it was the one that most appealed to what has been called his “vivid … romantic imagination.”

  Over a century ago, in 1909, the war hero, outdoorsman, conservationist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Theodore Roosevelt, after seven and a half years as the youngest resident of the White House, decided to honor the “wise custom” established by George Washington and declined to run for another term as President of the United States, an office to which he would have been handily reelected (and a decision he would regret). He had the opportunity, then, to run for the Senate or for mayor of New York or to become the president of his alma mater, Harvard College. But probably since at least 1906, based on his correspondence, he had been energetically cultivating the dream of going on safari.

  From the presidential desk, Roosevelt penned lengthy inquiries to such notable Africa hands as the über-taxidermist and explorer Carl Akeley; the legendary hunter Sir Frederick Courtney Selous; Edward North Buxton, author of Two African Trips; the Rev. Dr. W. S. Rainsford who wrote Land of the Lion; J. H. Patterson of the Tsavo lions fame and the chief game ranger in East Africa (and participant in the real-life liaison scandaleux Ernest Hemingway immortalized in fiction in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”); and the pioneering British East African colonial landowner and ostrich farmer, Sir Alfred Pease, 2nd Baronet of Hutton Lowcross and Pinchinthorpe and the holder of 6,000 acres of wildlife-infested land on the Athi Plains southwest of the newly settled town of Nairobi (more about that later). Pease is particularly notable because, having visited with Roosevelt in Washington in the last year of his presidency, he had offered assurances that he had a hunting lodge awaiting the president—except he did not. After Roosevelt decided his destiny lay in the British colonies of Kenya and Uganda, and the Belgian Congo’s Lado Enclave, Pease found himself faced with the daunting task of scrambling to construct an edifice worthy of tenancy by a former head of state, a task he did manage to fulfill.

  Seven weeks after the peaceful transfer of power to his handpicked (and later disappointing) successor, William Howard Taft, and after nearly a month-long ocean voyage disrupted by persistent seasickness, Roosevelt set foot on the shores of Africa in Mombasa during a torrential downpour. At his side was his “dreamy and interior” mandolin-playing second son, Kermit, having taken a break from Harvard to hunt with his father and act as the expedition’s principal photographer.

  Kermit, 19, was tall and slim, a lover of the Greek classics with a wide knowledge of languages. Roosevelt père seemed to believe that Kermit, who had never before hunted big game, needed a taste of the “strenuous life” that he, Roosevelt, so ardently advocated, to enable Kermit to “buckle down.” By the end of the safari, Roosevelt was depicting his son as “an exceptionally bold and hardy sportsman” who had become “responsible and trustworthy” and “fit to lead.” In fact, this may well have been wishful thinking on Roosevelt’s part. By firsthand accounts, Kermit was an abysmal shot and even according to Roosevelt, “altogether too reckless.” He may also have already begun exhibiting the distressing family tendency toward manic-depression, which later joined with alcoholism to lead Kermit to put a pistol to his head in an Army outpost in Alaska during World War II.

  As for Roosevelt himself, he was a rather shopworn 50 years of age. A hushed-up carriage accident in 1902 had left him with an injured left leg that was chronically prone to abscesses. A boxing match with his wife Edith’s cousin blinded his left eye. The arterial sclerosis that would ultimately precipitate his death at age 60 was well underway. And the physical inactivity of his presidential years swelled his waist to 47 inches and weight to 250 pounds, which, at his five-foot, eight-inch height, would classify him today as suffering from “severe obesity” (the Africans even labeled him Bwana Tumbo, “The Big-Stomach Master,” and one commentator noted that his “bulk and conversational powers somewhat precluded” his stalking ability). Nevertheless, he felt his toujour l’audace “bully” approach to life could overcome any and all disabilities.

  Roosevelt’s initial intent was to hunt in East Africa in the rugged fashion in which he had, decades earlier, hunted in the American West. Then it had been a lone guide and he, sleeping rough on the plains under the stars. He had hoped to do something similar with Kermit. They were to have a light, waterproof silk tent with telescoping poles (especially designed by Ezra Fitch, president of the famous firm of Abercrombie & Fitch); and a relatively restrained trophy list of game for the day; a minimum number of porters; and absolutely no professional hunter (to ensure that the only bullets to be found in the animals would be either Kermit’s or his). It should have occurred to Roosevelt that for an ex-President of the United States this was an absurd and thoroughly adolescent proposition (and unfortunately reflective of his propensity for dashing headlong into adventures, which nearly cost him his life five years later on his ill-planned and outfitted Brazilian expedition). An English protectorate like Kenya would never allow such a potential diplomatic disaster—as the death or serious injury of anyone with the near-mythic worldwide stature of Roosevelt—to transpire upon its soil.

  Roosevelt, finally, acquiesced to the practical wisdom of his African advisors and let them dictate the equipment and scope of the hunt. In Mombasa, Roosevelt, already costumed in his khaki Willis & Geiger safari-wear and pith helmet, along with Selous, the American naturalist, and former army surgeon, Dr. Edgar A. Mearns for whom the Mearns’s or, “Harlequin,” quail is named, and the Lieutenant Governor of Kenya, and a noted East African ornithologist, Frederick John Jackson, mounted a bench bolted to the pilot on the prow of a locomotive and rode the Uganda Railway into “the late Pleistocene” through the wild heart of Kenya.

  When the train steamed into Kapiti Plains Station, 275 game-rich miles northwest of Mombasa, Roosevelt was greeted by his host Pease and a regiment of porters, trackers, and askaris (armed soldiers who were tasked with, among other duties, ensuring that the porters did not desert the safari), a 300-strong body of men second only in number to that which the “Colonel,” as Roosevelt preferred to be called, had served with in Cuba d
uring the Spanish-American War. And as with the Rough Riders, Roosevelt was again second in command, having accepted the services of a highly recommended Scots–South African “safari manager,” R. J. Cuninghame, an expert elephant hunter. Cuninghame in turn convinced Roosevelt that a second professional was necessary for so large an entourage; and the crack shot and, more importantly, a man certain to stand his ground in the face of danger, Australian born Leslie J. Tarlton of the pioneering safari company of Newland and Tarlton, was engaged. Completing the dramatis personae were three naturalists, the 50ish Mearns and two thirtysomething zoologists, Edmund Heller from the University of California and J. Alden Loring late of the Denver Zoo, which had dismissed him for holding too grandly ambitious plans for the institute, certainly an attitude upon which Roosevelt would have looked with favor.

  From a modest shooting party, Roosevelt’s safari had morphed, in the Colonel’s words, into “a full-blooded picnic,” wrapped in the mantel of a major scientific collecting expedition under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, which bridled at the repeated descriptions of the expedition as “Roosevelt’s,” instead of the “Smithsonian’s.” For the collecting, tons of salt, skinning tools, traps (for large and small animals), shipping crates and barrels, and assorted other items were parceled out in 60-pound loads per porter. The silk tent was replaced with 64 heavy green canvas ones, eight alone for the riding horses, most of which died from tsetse flies. The food boxes, padlocked to discourage pilfering, contained everything from pâté to sardines, chutney, lard and tallow for cooking the lean game meat that would be the staple of the safari, liquor from England (the local spirits deemed “mostly poison”), canned pea soup, and 92 pounds of jam.

  Among Roosevelt’s personal accoutrements were, with much more, nine pairs of eyeglasses; custom-made rope-, rubber-, and hobnail-soled boots for his surprisingly tender feet; “spine pads” to button onto the backs of shirts to negate the effects of the equatorial sun’s lethal “actinic rays”; complete changes of wardrobe for all possible weather conditions; six different hats, including a white military helmet in a tin case “for ceremonial occasions”; appropriate evening wear for formal dinners; and a lucky gold-mounted rabbit’s foot from “one-time ring champion of the world” John L. Sullivan. And yet for all his personal impedimenta, he was, recalling the manly rigors of his Western days, slightly disdainful of the hovering presence of two tent “boys,” two armed gunbearers, and two horse grooms, or saises, and especially of a canvas tub in his tent for regular hot baths.