Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  Among Roosevelt’s most vital equipage, though, were his guns and books. He brought a custom Army Springfield 30-’06 (a rifle he was instrumental in having the military develop after facing the withering fire of the Spanish infantry’s Mausers with his Rough Riders), shooting army ammunition; a Winchester 405 (which he reported “did admirably with lions, giraffes, elands, and smaller game”); a 500/450 Holland & Holland double rifle (presented to him by a syndicate of English admirers); and a side-by-side 12 gauge compliments of the makers, Ansley H. Fox. For the reading he pursued as vigorously as every other passion in his life, Roosevelt selected 50 volumes and had them trimmed down for size and weight and bound in pigskin for durability. Packed in a “light aluminum and oil-cloth case” to make a load for one porter, the “Pigskin Library” ran from the Bible to the likelier more apropos than not Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Predictably, the expense of almost 11 months spent on safari in such a style was astronomical. Half of a one-million-dollar advance, at current values, that Scribner’s publishing house paid him for a series of safari dispatches and a book, African Game Trails, was used by Roosevelt to cover Kermit and his private costs. (Roosevelt was hopeless about money; and his finances, especially because there was no pension, yet, for ex-Presidents, were always precarious, to his wife’s constant anxiety.) Besides safari fees, these costs included (today) $5700 worth of licenses, apiece, entitling each hunter to some 50 head of game from elephant to rhino, hippo, buffalo, eland, other antelope, and cheetah (Kermit shot seven; Roosevelt, none), among others. Additional elephant were on license for $2000 each (Roosevelt took a total of eight; Kermit, three), rhino for something over $550 (again, eight and three), and $225 bought you another wildebeest or waterbuck. It was Roosevelt’s good fortune that because they were classed as vermin, leopards and lions cost nothing: The most poorly concealed wish of Roosevelt for his safari was to come face to face with a lion in the African bush, and Sir Alfred Pease meant to see that wish granted.

  Alas, lion hunting did not go off swimmingly. Never a patient hunter, Roosevelt was visibly frustrated after only a few days of potting antelope, with neither hide nor hair of a lion to be seen. At last, hunting with dogs down the thick cover of a donga on the spoor of lions, they “caught a glimpse of tawny hide” close by in the brush and fired into it, only to have two badly wounded cubs, the “size of mastiffs,” come out the other side to be finished off. Luckily for Roosevelt, and particularly for Pease, later that same afternoon two large maneless male lions were put up and Roosevelt killed the first one. After fruitless, and disconcerting to Pease, 600- to 800-yard shots at the second, unwounded one as it ran off, the hunters belatedly remounted their horses and galloped after the lion, overtaking it two miles later as it loped along behind a herd of kongoni, and Kermit and Roosevelt combined in some truly hapless shooting to bring this one down.

  The real moment of truth for Roosevelt came in June in the Rift Valley as he and Tarlton rode up on a “burly” and “savage” old lion with a yellow-and-black mane. Dismounting, Roosevelt fired at a distance of 200 yards, slightly wounding the lion, which ran off. Giving chase again, they caught up to it; and when Roosevelt once more clipped its hide, the lion came for them “steadily—ears laid back, and uttering terrific coughing grunts.” Due to a badly sighted rifle, the usually reliable Tarlton missed with a shot, to Roosevelt’s guilty “keen delight.” Now, as he knelt, the bead of his Winchester’s front sight solid on the center of the lion’s chest, it was all up to the Colonel. The soft-pointed 405 bullet went “straight through the chest cavity, smashing the lungs and the big blood-vessels of the heart,” the lion standing up, then pitching forward onto its head. It staggered to its feet, but could walk only painfully; and the two hunters put it down. This was the real dream that had brought Roosevelt to Africa, to be able to ride back to camp after dark, as he did that night, with “strange stars” shining “in the brilliant heavens, and the Southern Cross … radiant above the sky-line,” bearing the hide of a freshly killed lion.

  Within the first months of the safari, the hunters had taken so much of the game—black rhino (including the keitloa variation that’s rear horn is longer than the front), hippos, Cape buffalo, giraffes, leopard, waterbuck, wildebeest, topi, antelope, and gazelles—which they sought for themselves and the Smithsonian, that Heller in charge of preserving the specimens, and his team of native assistants could barely keep up with the workload. To give Heller some relief, Roosevelt and Kermit began to intersperse their hunting with intermissions in Nairobi. Incorporated in 1904, the town was not dissimilar to the frontier ones Roosevelt was familiar with in the Dakotas in the 1880s. Residents drank, shot up the night, galloped their horses in the seasonally muddy streets, and sought the comforts of assorted multiracial soiled doves, while on the outskirts hyenas attacked the invalids in the sleeping-sickness isolation camps and scores of settlers killed by wild animals lay in the cemeteries. The better element, though, tried to keep up appearances with stately villas, men’s clubs, foxhunting, cricket, polo, race meetings, cutaway coats and summer frocks, fêtes, and postprandial orations, of which the Roosevelts were obliged to be part. Roosevelt actually welcomed some of these hiatuses, though, after one-too-many meals of bush meat, and because they helped assuage the profound longing he felt for his absent wife, granting him at least the pleasant presence of women to converse with.

  From Nairobi Roosevelt was also transmitting urgent appeals to the Smithsonian for additional funds to back the work of the scientists through the rest of the safari. The institution had already solicited contributions in the amount of almost three-quarters of a million of present-day dollars for the naturalists; but these, it proved, would only support the expedition half the way through. Another three-quarters of a million was required. Ultimately, the philanthropic industrialist Andrew Carnegie provided most of the needed extra money.

  In August 1909, Roosevelt, with Cuninghame and Heller and their trackers, was following elephant trails and the rumbling noises of hidden pachyderms through the tangled wet jungles on the lower slopes of 17,000-foot Mount Kenya when he sighted a bull resting its heavy tusks on the branches of a tree, 30 yards away. When it turned its head toward Roosevelt, he fired to one side of the bull’s eye, missing its brain but stunning it for a moment. Roosevelt’s second 480-grain bullet from his 500/450 did find the brain, and “the great lord of the forest came crashing to the ground.” Before he could even break open his rifle, though, a second bull swept out from the thick cover, passing within a trunk’s length as Roosevelt dodged behind a tree to reload and Cuninghame fired twice at the elephant, turning it away to disappear into the bush.

  For the next several months the safari seemed to meander like a fly on a window in the country around Nairobi. A becalmed Roosevelt celebrated his 51st birthday on the trail without firing a shot that day. Various taka taka species like oribi, reedbuck, duiker, and steenbok were added to fill specimen checklists or for rations. Kermit did take sable, oryx, roan, and kudu and became the first American to kill a bongo antelope, a feat not to be repeated by another American for almost half a century but Roosevelt seemed to be killing game to kill time as he awaited what for him was to be the grand finale of the safari, which came at the change of the year with the crossing of the great African lakes of Victoria Nyanza and Albert Nyanza and sailing, as Roosevelt read Edgar Allan Poe’s demonic African fable “Silence,” down the Bahr el Jebel branch of the White Nile to the Belgian Congo and the territory of the rare, and now virtually extinct, northern white rhinoceros.

  On the west bank of the Bahr el Jebel lay the Lado Enclave, a portion of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan leased to King Leopold II of Belgium and to all intents lawless, making it a haven for slave traders and ivory poachers, such as the famed “Karamojo” Bell. It was here that Roosevelt went in pursuit of the white rhino, the last of the “heavy” game the continent had to offer him. Guided by the noted elephant hunter Quentin Grogan, Roosevelt and Kermit took nine of
the rather placid creatures, bulls, cows, and calves. Worse than the calves killed was a half-grown one orphaned, in the belief it was “old enough to shift for itself.” Roosevelt’s motives for such behavior are problematic, if not possibly inexplicable. He fully recognized the perilous thread of survival by which the white rhino even then hung, stating in Game Trails that “it would certainly be well if all killing of it were prohibited until careful inquiry has been made to its numbers and exact distribution.” And yet Roosevelt obviously felt this injunction was not applicable to his son and him. It can only be assumed that the putatively scientific significance of the safari granted him absolution in his mind for the “game butchery” he seemed to be committing, and in which he so strenuously denounced other hunters for indulging.

  The safari, in fact, ended on a rather more sporting note when it reached the Sudanese trading post of Gondokoro. With all the professional hunters and scientists suffering from dysentery and fever, Kermit and the Colonel, who both enjoyed preposterously robust good health while in Africa, climbed onto riding mules and with 60 Ugandan porters struck off “alone” on “an eight days’ trip after the largest and handsomest, and one of the least known, of African antelopes, the giant eland.” After long, full days of stalking, Roosevelt ended up crawling after a fine bull, his rifle barrel heated too hot to touch by the broiling sun. Closing to within a 100 yards, Roosevelt killed the magnificent eland with a single shot, taking his last major big game animal on the continent.

  On March 14, 1910, Kermit and Roosevelt landed in Khartoum, meeting Edith and daughter Ethel in a “hail of kisses,” and greeting hordes of raucous reporters. Originally, Roosevelt had envisioned Kermit and his taking perhaps 64 different head of game. In the end, they took 512, including large birds, crocodiles, pythons, and a monitor lizard—the scientists collected thousands more of smaller mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. Most of these animals were to feed the safari, and all but a select few went to museums, the two hunters retaining only a comparative handful of trophies for their walls. Roosevelt’s book on the hunt ends curiously with his noting that he had consumed a mere six ounces of brandy from the camp bottle during the entire safari. This may have been a defensive assertion in light of his younger brother Elliott’s premature, and tragic, death by drink.

  However the tale concludes, though, it begins with Roosevelt’s stating, through Shakespeare’s “Pistol,” that it shall be his purpose to “‘speak of Africa and golden joys.’” And in that he succeeded, his story becoming the iconic saga of safari. Although the scale of his hunt is beyond duplication, it nonetheless created the template for all the safaris that were to follow. And all of us who have ventured to Africa since must acknowledge it is in the ineradicable footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt that we are following.

  “A Suggestion of Grace and Poise …”

  The 2000s …

  A GAUGE OF the veracity of a hunting tale is a hunter’s freely admitting his poor marksmanship (“liars never miss”). Rigorous honesty is never an acceptable apology, though, for an aim that is not true. Shooting is not all there is to hunting, not by a considerable margin; but it is the one skill a hunter cannot be without. When I was in Africa again, I wondered if it was a skill I still possessed.

  At the start of another August in Africa, I began at the beginning, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans marry at the Cape of Good Hope. The headland was covered in heathery fynbos (“fine bush”), the unique flora of the Cape. The fynbos was inhabited by native species including zebra, eland, blesbok, mongoose, and the always-delinquent Chacma baboon, while here were once numbered buffalo (the Cape giving them their name), Cape lion (Panthera leo melanochaitus—for its black mane), elephant, two rhino, along with the quagga (a larger, partially striped zebra) and the blaaubok (a shorter-horned sable-like antelope), both now long extinct. Even without those other animals, I was seeing what was the premiere of Africa for many of the first travelers there, before the word “safari” entered the vocabulary.

  From the fynbos I traveled with my wife and young son 500 miles east-by-northeast to the Great Karoo with PH Ralph Köster. It is always preferably “PH,” rather than “professional hunter,” though that’s the meaning of the initials. In other parts of the world you may hunt with a shikari, ghillie, or guide, all of which cart about with them a certain air of something just a bit of the factotum.

  Look at a “guide” in the movies: Invariably he is unkempt, foulmouthed, cowardly, treacherous, and ultimately a rube. It is a part tailor-made for Walter Brennan, without teeth—character-actor territory par excellence. The African PH, though, in the legends and Hollywood, anyway, has occupied a position somewhere between World War I flying ace and Lord Greystoke. The role of PH falls to Gable or Redford (perhaps out of the jumbled grab bag of reasons why safari movies aren’t made anymore may be the absence of actors approaching the innate stature of anyone of the kind, above, Brennan included, perhaps especially so). In reality, a good PH is, rather than a matinee idol, a man of varied talents, from businessman to hotelier, never losing sight of his main occupation of reliable hunt organizer and practiced shot. When a good PH calls himself a “PH,” it sounds a little self-deprecating. When a bad one—phonies, crooks, and assembly-line “truck hunters”—calls himself that, it rings with bluster.

  Ralph did not look like Robert Redford; more like a young and sunnier Sterling Hayden. He was a good PH. He’d been at it for 14 years, since he was 20. For the last five he had hunted near the outpost town of Beaufort West (whose claim to fame was as the birthplace of the heart-transplant pioneer, Dr. Christiaan Barnard) in the Nuweveld Mountains in the Great Karoo. Here Ralph had a 45,000-acre hunting area where the Lemoenfontein River ran (when the rains fell hard enough).

  Some 150 years ago (as this book is composed), a tubercular English gentleman, having made a long sea voyage to the Cape, made an equally arduous horseback-and-wagon trek inland and built a large wood-floored, high-ceilinged hunting lodge with wide verandas and wider sweeping views of the Karoo veldt, naming it Lemoenfontein Lodge. Each year he escaped the disaster that was the English winter to pass six weeks hunting the varied fauna of the area, before retreating to England. Over the years, the game faded from abundance and the lodge fell into disrepair. Not utter disrepair, though, because it still stood in Ralph’s hunting area, fully restored.

  Ralph’s area in August was a cool, clear, dry winter country of mesa and rimrock, aproned by scrub plains. It looked most like Coues’s deer country in the Mexican Sonora or the red Hole-in-the-Wall of Wyoming, with every bit as much wind (Ralph assured me this was an anomaly). The first morning we breakfasted—whole milk, passion fruit juice, haddock, eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese, croissants, toast, butter, marmalade, apricot jam: the healthy-eating menu—then went out to sight in the rifle, afterward to look for springbok.

  Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game describes the springbok as “the well-known national emblem of South Africa” and as “the only gazelle [as opposed to antelope] found south of the Zambezi and in former times its numbers were prodigious.” The word Selous used was “innumerable.” The vast herds would eat out the veldt and swarm over the Boer farmers’ lands in the proportions of biblical pestilence, in what the Afrikaners called the trekbokken, or “buck trek,” said to trample underhoof whatever could not get out of the way, including humans. To carry the Wyoming analogy farther, they are the pronghorn of South Africa (capable of elegant springs, inelegantly called pronking, while pronghorn seldom leave the ground).

  The farmers, of course, at one time did their level best to extirpate the springbok, in a fashion not dissimilar to the persecution of the pronghorn in the American West. The gazelle hung on, though, and today numbers in the millions across its southern-African range. (Worthy of note is that the two regions in the world where wildlife has increased on a large scale in the last century are North America and southern Africa, where conservation is built around hunting.) From among these springbok, Ralph wanted me to take a
best-quality ram, one with heavy-based horns, like percontation point and question mark set side by side, that hooked back at the tip—achieving greater length.

  After the rifle was zeroed, we had the luxury of looking at 1,000 or more springbok around the foot of the mesa. At about midday, Ralph spotted the one. We left the bakkie, as small utility trucks are called in South Africa, and stalked after the ram. Closing to within 150 yards, Ralph set up the tripod shooting sticks (the land is, again like parts of Wyoming, too flat to count on finding a natural rest); and I set the 7mm Weatherby Magnum on them. The wind howled, and I fought to get a steady hold; and there was the distinct sensation of opening-night (or opening-day-in-Africa) jitters. I should have backed off and waited to settle down, but I let off the safety and fired, instead. And missed. The springbok was unfazed, trotting off a little way and stopping; and I shot again and missed again. Matters continued in this doleful pattern for a troubling time, the ram after each plumule of dust spurted up near it drifting out to 200, 250, 280, and 300 yards, when something more troubling than missing occurred: I wounded the springbok in the hind leg.