“So this is why we’re here.”
Perfect Game
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow …
A FEW FAR from final words about Cape buffalo.
In a frame on the wall, the yellow stub has printed on it in black and red letters, “Field Box, $3.50, Chicago CUBS vs. Los Angeles DODGERS, DODGER STADIUM, THU. SEP. 9, 1965.” There was no place else on earth quite like Dodger Stadium then, especially for a 13-year-old. It was another day when Walter O’Malley owned the team and kept his rampant polar bear mount on display in the Stadium Club. With its wide band of upper-deck seats painted a shade of aqua, like seawater over a bottom of marled sand, and with banks of halide lights creating an artificial sun, stepping into the stadium somehow gave the sensation of venturing into a marine environment, like wading out onto the flats to fish. As unequaled as the stadium was maybe the team itself, with Drysdale, Wills, and the Davises. And that Thursday night in Dodger Stadium there was absolutely no other figure in sports even the remote rival of Sanford Koufax.
It wasn’t supposed to be a pitching duel, something you might expect from a, say, Juan Marichal–Koufax matchup. The Cubs starter was another southpaw, Bob Hendley, who would have only a seven-year career with lackluster teams, and a middling win-loss record; and he would be facing the “Left Arm of God,” even though Koufax was already experiencing the arthritis that would rob him of his meteor fastball. Hendley, though, would pitch the game of his life; regrettably, for him, so would Sandy.
In the stands the fans tuned in on their pocket transistor radios in the September night when the breeze off the ocean carried away the heat of the summer’s day. It wasn’t a Dodger game, even sitting in the stadium, without Vin Scully’s calling it. Hendley was losing 1-0 on a walked batter and an error, giving him a no-hitter into the seventh when Dodger left fielder “Sweet” Lou Johnson hit a bloop double that had no effect on the scoring. Now, at the top of the ninth, Scully was at his eloquent best. He was also violating the unwritten rule of never speaking the words “perfect game” before it was complete.
“Three times in his sensational career,” said Vin over the air, the tinny echo of his voice rippling, just audible, throughout the stands, “has Sandy Koufax walked out to the mound to pitch a fateful ninth where he turned in a no-hitter. But tonight, September the ninth, nineteen-hundred and sixty-five, he made the toughest walk of his career, I’m sure, because through eight innings he has pitched a perfect game. …”
Koufax had 13 strikeouts, five in a row through the eighth and into the ninth innings when he faced Cubs pinch hitter Harvey Kuenn, the potential last batter. Scully’s call: “You can’t blame a man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants leg. All the while Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in. Into his windup and the two-one pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike two. It is 9:46 p.m. … Two and two to Harvey Kuenn, one strike away. Sandy into his windup, here’s the pitch: swung on and missed, a perfect game.” A perfect game, and with one meaningless hit, considered the greatest game of baseball ever pitched.
So I’ve seen a perfect game, but I think I have also hunted it. For millions of hunters, perfect game is none other than the white-tailed deer, for them the ideal fusion of intelligence, senses, and guile. Others, though, might choose the bighorn, or one of the other wild sheep, in deference to the grandeur of its habitat, the severe challenges of the hunt, and the magnificence of the trophy.
Ernest Hemingway talked about this, in a way, in comparing bonefish to striped marlin. He was addressing anglers who thought the bonefish, pound for pound, the perfect game. “Your bonefish is,” he wrote to them in an article about Cuba and marlin, “a smart fish, very conservative, very strong too.” The bonefish, though, would never be seen in 1,000-foot water or require the kind of extreme tackle needed for marlin. Most of all, though, it is too “smart by far to jump,” and without jumping, Hemingway saw a fish that lacked a “patent of nobility.” Similarly, I would have to look away from whitetail and sheep because neither has the capacity to injure seriously, or perhaps kill, me, except by the most bizarre sort of freak occurrence. To me the perfect big-game animal needs to be dangerous by nature, not merely by unanticipated circumstance.
Is it some exaggerated sense of machismo—and we know what that hides, don’t we?—that makes me want my perfect game to embody the potential of risk? Or is there something, dare I say, existential about hunting an animal in which the odds may be drawn closer to a keen razor’s edge?
We hunt game for food, and that can be enough. But we could also garden or raise tilapia without ever engaging in bloodsport. Today, outside the few subsistence cultures, and individuals, hunting is an option, not a true necessity for survival. So what could compel us to travel to distant lands to pursue the animals of our desire? A land like Africa?
Critics will call it “cultural arrogance,” but there is the romantic (or is it maudlin or vainglorious?) philosophical belief that “the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them with certain means and rituals,” which is a notion so far out of the 21st century as to give the word “atavism” the ring of a neologism. And to those words, I would add, and certain places. Such as Africa.
You go there for exotic game to be found nowhere else. It is a matter, to a large extent, of esthetics. A sable, among the most exquisite game animals on earth, cannot be hunted under native conditions anywhere but in Africa, and not for the absolute intention of eating it, although it will be. Now add big game that has it in it to run both ways. Which brings us to buffalo.
I could offer the rationale for why the other dangerous game—from brown and grizzly bear to lion, leopard, elephant, and rhino—fall short of perfection; but it may be preferable to talk about what makes the buffalo perfect. Democracy is one very key factor. It is within reason for many if not most people to be able to hunt buffalo, if they really want to. In addition, and this is extremely important, they can usually hunt it again if they do it and like it. The simple economics of the day make it doubtful that anyone will hunt several lions or elephant or black rhino (especially at $350,000 for a permit) in a lifetime. Since taking my first buffalo at age 22, I have hunted them since. No, not in the scores or even the dozens, but enough to know how much it appeals to me. Not that buffalo didn’t take some getting used to.
What you come to realize is that the buffalo is a creature of darkness—dense cover is its milieu. Elephant and lions, though they can be found in many habitats, seem to prefer ones that are relatively open. And for the leopard you almost always end up hanging a bait.
The thing about buffalo is having to go in after them, to where they live, not counting on them to come out and meet you on level ground. For buffalo, that is the 1,000-foot depth. Until you get used to that you carry the taste of brass in your mouth as you hunt, something that it takes more than one buffalo to cleanse away.
There is also the kind of weapon that seems called upon for dealing with a buffalo. Buffalo have been hunted, and killed, with any number of calibers (there is likely no calculating how many have been taken with the British 303); but there is never any sense that in carrying a 450 or 500, one is over-gunned, or that there is anything less than a buff that truly demands such inordinate calibers. It is the 15/0 reel of hunting rifles, and you are never unhappy to be carrying such a gun when you are stalking buffalo in cover that reaches above your head and that you have to shoulder your way through.
I won’t pretend that hunting Cape buffalo is a “gamble with death” every time, or even most of the time, when you go out to do it; but somewhere in the back of your mind, as you are hunting buffalo, it remains an idea with a particular piquancy that is not likely to be found in hunting ducks in a heated blind. It may also be noted that you do not, or only under the rarest of circumstances, hunt purely solitary buffalo: There is almost always another set of eyes and ears,
if not more, ready to detect an unwelcome approach. And that approach can be through the thickest of bush, making a big rifle all the more interesting to carry because a hunter could actually find it of some utility and not mere affectation. There is, in short, nothing like hunting Cape buffalo, short of knowing you are to be hanged in a fortnight, to concentrate the mind wonderfully.
Out of 300,000 major league baseball games played, 23 have been perfect, making the odds of my ever seeing another overwhelmingly against me. The thing about that other perfect game, at least my notion of it, that one in Africa, is that there is always a chance that I may still yet find a day when I will hunt it again.
Iodine
Before …
IT’S NOT CERTAIN if the true eccentrics of Africa are a vanishing breed, or already vanished. Described as a baggy-shorts-wearing cadaverous man with a large aristocratic nose, C. J. P. Ionides, nicknamed “Iodine”—game ranger, hunter of singular big game, poacher, a bachelor who valued ivory over marriage, fascinating conversationalist, and Africa’s most renowned field herpetologist—may very well have been among the last, delighted to live in glorious seclusion in the bush in his own always peculiar way. Ionides was every inch an eccentric, but among the most consequential that Africa ever knew, even if a man not without the disfiguring pall of colonialism, and more than a touch of misanthropy, shrouding his spirit.
Constantine John Philip, called only “Bobby” for some inexplicable reason by his immediate family, was born, he tells us in his autobiography Mambas and Man-Eaters, in Manchester, England, in 1901 into a childhood he was not fond of recollecting. The fifth-generation of a prosperous English merchant family, his great-great grandfather having emigrated from Greece in 1817 saddled with the unpronounceable name of Ixplixis, which he changed to Ionides, meaning “son of the Greek,” and which Bobby’s “tongue” found even more unutterable, Ionides was hunting butterflies by four.
In preparatory school, remembered primarily for famishment and floggings, his penchant for doing taxidermy on small creatures in his dormitory earned him the titles of “dirty little brute” and “awkward young swine” from his instructors. At Rugby he was a “sinister foreigner”; a search of his study after a false accusation of petty theft produced a startling display of contraband, including a “sawed-off shotgun [carried in the lining of his jacket for pheasant poaching], two pistols, ammunition, six rabbit nets, a cosh, a knuckle-duster, a tobacco pouch and a pipe”—though no stolen property. Poaching money paid for his first alcoholic evening at Sandhurst, and to his swearing off whisky for life, sticking to a modest regime of gin and water thereafter. As he left for India with the South Wales Borderers to spend much of his time on shikar, his surgeon father gave him an uncommon piece of parental advice: “I’d be careful, if I were you. Remember, if you get VD it would interfere with your hunting.” Food for thought for Ionides: By the time he made Tanganyika his permanent residence in 1926, coming to British East with the Kings African Rifles, “hunting was all [he] lived for” (which partially explains his decision to go on safari in Sudan, rather than attend the bedside of his dying father).
Ionides, anti-authoritarian to his Crown Bird–stained fingertips, though capable of the sternest sort of rigidity toward those serving beneath him, found an Africa as wide open as that Roosevelt saw more than a decade earlier, the Africa reminding T. R. of his time in the Dakotas. Settlers carried guns on their hips in town, and drunken shootouts were hardly uncommon. Which all met with Ionides’s approbation.
Coming out of the army after two years in Africa, he went in for some minor ivory poaching in the Congo and elsewhere, which involved burning the carcasses so there were no large quantities of elephant meat showing up in the markets as evidence to give him away, which even for the day seems a rather unsavory, profligate practice, especially in the midst of hungry Africans. His ivory hunting amounted mostly to obtaining two official permits, then dropping additional bulls within the boundaries of assorted villages to make it appear that they were crop raiders killed legitimately by the villagers. The tusks he sold to an Irish black marketeer, with a percentage of the sale returned to the village chiefs. Elephant under 60 pounds a side were unprofitable, but 100 pounders were a regular take for him.
Unfortunately, the chiefs got “greedy,” there was an outbreak of cannibal uprisings, the bottom fell out of the ivory market, the Belgian authorities levied a 50 percent tax on legal tusks, which were easier to trade, his rawhide boots disintegrated, and he went barefoot before finding the ideal hunting shoe in a pair of plimsolls, which were all he used for footwear for the rest of his life.
Withdrawing from ivory poaching, Ionides ran into a professional hunter in Dar es Salaam, who was pounding the bar and cursing his vanished servant for having impregnated his favorite African “bint,” Ionides immediately attracted by his “diabolically criminal-looking face.” Ken McDougall was a superb hunter, when sober, which was irregularly. Worse, he was a fighting drunk, making him one of the most “difficult and dangerous” men Ionides ever met. So of course, they went into partnership as “white hunters,” with Ionides even giving McDougall his power of attorney to buy supplies, and whisky, in Arusha, the firm of McDougall & Ionides staggering from one brawling disaster to the next, Ionides learning that McDougall’s stock phrase was, to all partially recollected dustups, “Never before in my life have I done such a thing.”
Ending up £600 in the hole after a safari fell through, the American clients dissuaded by tales of McDougall’s violent antics, Ionides dissolved the partnership and went on hunting on his own, returning to ivory poaching on the side to pay off his creditors. About this time he suffered a severe “beat-up” from an elephant cow wounded by a native muzzleloader, admitting his reckless behavior had been a major contributing factor, the attack leaving him with weeks of nightmares and with deafness in his left ear for the rest of his life.
Ill-suited to exchanging pleasantries with safari clients, Ionides sought a much less people-person occupation as a Ranger with the Tanganyika Game Department; and gaining it, in spite of his suspected past as a poacher, he went to work for the department on September 9, 1933, at £40 pounds a month, versus the £150 (over $10,000 today) he had raised his safari fee to. It was something of a Damascene moment for him, as he claimed never to have violated a wildlife regulation after that day.
Ionides listed the obligations of a Game Ranger of his time as conserve wildlife, protect human life, and control hunting. His instructions from the Game Warden of Tanganyika were, he said, “Go and be a Game Ranger,” without further elaboration. With that for him congenially inexplicit charge, Ionides went down to Kilwa along the coast, opposite what one day became the Selous Game Reserve.
Ionides, more likely to be found safari-ing on foot through his vast precinct rather than seated behind his desk at headquarters, went about reordering and retraining his cadre of native game scouts, firing and replacing as needed. He undertook a reeducation program to convince the local villages and chieftains that cooperation with him and his scouts, and an end to poaching, was essential if they hoped to rely on the Game Department to come in when the elephant trampled their crops or lions ate their livestock, or people, accomplishing this by withholding aid when asked for, or getting the elephant “driven into the cotton,” until the petitioners saw reason. With his scouts when they strayed and with villagers suspected of illegal hunting, his resort was often to the “traditional instrument of correction” in Africa, the rhinoceros hide strip known as the kiboko, until official policy outlawed its use, sometimes to the displeasure of his scouts who much preferred a half-dozen of the best to being discharged. At the same time, Ionides worked diligently to get his scouts better pay, refused to let them salute him, and deeply mourned the death of the multiple-wived, hard-drinking Issa Matundu who was his execrable cook for 20 years. As cringe-inducing as it may sound to our ears, he sincerely thought of them as his children and he their father.
In protecting human life,
Ionides and his scouts gave chase to man-eating lions, child-eating leopards, and marauding elephant. For Ionides, there was poetic justice in the lions’ taking of human beings because it was humans who were responsible for the dwindling of the great herds upon which the cats previously fed in contentment.
He felt most lions were capable of casual man eating; but it was the ones who got in the habit of it by realizing that humans were convenient prey—slow, thin skinned, light boned, ridiculously easy to kill once the trick of it was learned (go for the neck or head)—that were supremely dangerous. (In Ionides’s time in Tanganyakia, the reported worst case of man-eating was carried out by the Njombe pride of lions that was believed to have killed between 1,500 and 2,000 people before the lions could be hunted down.)
The lions Ionides dealt with could rack up tallies of over 90 kills by themselves; and he killed 40 of them before retiring from the game department, eschewing traps and poison and developing a technique of tracking them on hands and knees in nearly impenetrable cover during the heat of the day when they laid up, often sleeping off a meal of “the whole of a fat woman,” presenting him with only a swatch of tawny hide to shoot at pointblank through the undergrowth with his 470 double hammer rifle, admitting he was always afraid until the time came to fire. He never truly enjoyed the work, though, one reason being that he thought it unethical to shoot at some vaguely defined portion of a lion.
Leopards he found to be more ruthless killers, preying primarily on women and children and often attacking without real need of food. They were also far more difficult to hunt, causing him to resort to live traps and trap guns rigged along trails, and sometimes wounding natives passing by, in spite of his stern warnings. Leopards also seemed to bring out the worst anti-wildlife instincts in the colonial administrators, one who had previously seriously suggested machine gunning and depth charging hippos to reduce their numbers, and who had all leopards in the district classified as vermin in response to one particular child killer. Ionides succeeded, through subterfuge (he secretly convinced the local district commissioners to complain to the Provincial Commissioner about the damage wild hogs and baboons were causing without leopards around to curb their numbers), to have the vermin edict rescinded, noting that “intrigue,” using the Swahili word fitina, was needed for a Ranger to protect wildlife successfully.
Augusts in Africa Page 17