Ionides’s celebrated snake catching career began during World War II as he returned from a patently Ionides-style military operation (hostages, threats of hanging, native retribution) carried out in Somalia when he rejoined the K. A. R. Shortly thereafter, it was concluded that he was of more (and possibly less savage) use to the war effort working for the Game Department in Tanganyika; and on his way back through Nairobi, he visited the Coryndon Museum where famed paleontologist L. S. B. Leakey asked him to help supply serpents for a new snake park attached to the museum.
Ionides’s initial catching equipment was of the crudest sort: forked sticks and his hat, which became an icon. It was described, in Snake Man by Alan Wykes, as having begun life as a double terai, handed down in 1923 by a District Commissioner to a game scout, who passed it along to Ionides 17 years later. By the time Wykes saw it in 1959, it looked like something that had been in a “garbage tip” for a century, the outer crown torn away, the “brim worn into a mesh of felt and dirt,” the inside “coated with a scabrous stiffening of grease.” Serving as a nauseating water vessel and cooking pot, it was also what Ionides used to capture his first black mamba, eight feet, three inches, that crawled over his thighs as he sat in quiet contemplation in his unlit outhouse one night, shortly after coming back to Tanganyika. He managed to get away from the snake, get a light, and catch the serpent with a forked stick and his hat employed like a pot holder to hold the head, astounded at the strength of a mamba. Needless to say, his African assistants began thinking of the vile headwear as dawa, “medicine,” an instrument of witchcraft. As for the mamba, like so many of the poisonous reptiles he shipped off to assorted museums worldwide, he punched some air holes in a box, packaged it up, and sent it through the mail, being sure to label the outside, “LIVE SNAKE.”
Before his retirement from the game department in 1956, Ionides accumulated vast uninterrupted blocks of leave time, which enabled him to hunt throughout Africa for months and even years at a time, including almost the entirety of 1946 and ’47 when he collected, his hunting then almost exclusively for museums, everything from mountain nyala to mountain gorilla. It had long been his ambition to take the rarities he discovered in H. C. Maydon’s Big Game Hunting in Africa, devoting 20 years of his life to the pursuit. He hunted yellow-backed duiker; sitatunga; giant forest hog; bongo, “the blue riband of Africa, the giant eland”; barbary sheep; scimitar-horned oryx; addax; northern white rhino (five today, or less, known to inhabit the wild); that silverback who was shambling toward him with a puzzled expression when he shot it; and his proudest rarity, one not even known to science prior to the year of his birth, the primitive, deep-jungle giraffe, the okapi.
Ionides would have gone after more—the Somali beira, giant sable, pygmy hippopotamus—but he was a lifelong heavy smoker (that pipe and tobacco at public school, those untold Crown Bird cigarettes); and what he thought to be rheumatism proved, just before his retirement, to be popliteal thrombosis in his right leg. Having already experienced an appendectomy, amoebic dysentery, strongyolodiasis (roundworm infection), relapsing fever, dengue fever, typhoid, hemorrhoidectomy, and malignant and benign tertian malaria, he asked his physician when he would be recovered enough from this ailment to continue with his safaris. He was informed that he would never again be able to walk more than a quarter mile at a time.
A man who considered his life one of “perpetual safari,” Ionides had to settle down, first in Liwale, just outside the Selous, decamping from there in high dudgeon when a neighbor felled all his trees and planted crops while he was away in the bush, making his final redoubt in Newala in (in the words of author Margaret Lane in her Life with Ionides) a “tin-roofed bungalow plastered like a swallow’s nest” on the rim of an escarpment on the Makonde Plateau, overlooking the Ruvuma River and Mozambique beyond. With his servants, recordings of Wagner played on his Victrola, and history books, he subsisted on a hideous day-in-and-day-out diet of potatoes and goat meat boiled to the consistency of tire tread, remaining gaunt but muscled throughout life. The Makonde country possessed a unique appeal for Ionides, when, while on a recky back in his Game Department days, he happened on six “beautiful and dangerous” (Lane) green mambas in a single day. Discovering that the country was also thick with gaboon vipers, he thought, according to Lane, “‘Well!’”
Collecting the most-venomous snakes in Africa became for Ionides a satisfyingly adventurous substitute for the big-game hunting now denied him. He acquired a light-aluminum unicycle bush cart—a sort of push-me-pull-you sedan chair—on which with knees drawn up against his chest, he rode as two of his servants careered him along the jungle trails. Yet he was still capable, despite a distinct fear of heights and a gammy leg and nearly aged 60, of climbing through the tangled limbs of a 100-foot mango tree to capture a mamba and to bring it down in one hand as he held on with the other to the tree. Or to catch his first water cobra by camping for 26 straight days with virtually no sleep on the edge of Lake Tanganyika, watching the surface for any slight disturbance made by a serpent.
There was no textbook to teach Ionides the art and science of snake catching, and in the course of his self-education he endured 13 poisoned bites. He survived, of course, capturing over 1,200 gaboon vipers by hand and thousands more snakes of all types, also by hand and with forked sticks, grab sticks, snares, even butterfly nets. And his hat. He developed techniques that sounded like something out of World Wrestling: the Boomslang Hold, the Night Adder Sideways Grip. Some of his catches went to museums, others to serpentariums, and many were milked for laboratories for antivenin production, Ionides operating a kind of dairy farm for venom—which suited him, because he was loath to kill a snake once he had it in captivity.
Among his herpetological finds were new species and subspecies of snakes, and lizards, some named for him (Amblyodipsas katangensis ionidesi Loveridge, for one), the list relegated to a footnote in his autobiography. Something else relegated to a footnote was his paramount achievement, the carving out of Selous Game Reserve.
When Ionides arrived, the reserve was a mere 1,000 square miles, which he set about deliberately to enlarge. His idea was to create a vast reserve (now, as noted, some 21,000 square miles) without any permanent habitation, supported by the fees paid by safari hunters. After years of ivory shooting and responsible for the culling of thousands of elephant during his term as a Ranger, Ionides wanted a place exclusively theirs, where they wouldn’t be slaughtered for raiding crops and with enough thick, roadless country that they might be able to stay clear of systematic poaching. And into the 1970s, the Selous was the secure home of up to one-tenth of all the elephant in Africa.
Ionides’s methods of shaping the Selous were no less harsh than his reliance upon the kiboko to discipline his scouts. When tsetse-borne trypanosomiasis and the infertile soils moved large numbers of people away from wide expanses surrounding the original sanctuary, Ionides incorporated that land into the reserve and worked to keep the people out, discouraging their resettlement by ignoring pleas to deal with marauding elephant. (An exception to the rule was his efforts to return the Wagindo to Liwale after they had been evacuated by the government under a contrived threat of sleeping sickness; as with the hole the death of his cook left in his heart, Ionides’s personality was never less than contradictory, containing Whitmanesque multitudes.)
Ionides’s policy of evicting Africans from their native lands and traditional hunting grounds to take them over is what was employed in the setting up of game reserves and parks throughout colonial Africa, and to Africans it was a complete inversion of their belief that human lives should take precedence over those of animals. They saw wildlife succeeding, because of Victorian-based sentimentality, to the lands traditionally theirs to hunt and till; and this was among the grievances that welled up into the volcanic crater of independence movements of the 1950s, though Ionides probably would not have been able to acknowledge that. (‘Poacher’ was merely the label placed on traditional hunters when their hunting rig
hts were abrogated.)
For Ionides, the Selous was his work of art, as much as a classical poet’s epic, and created with as little regard for humanity. Had he ever heard William Faulkner’s indurate opinion that John Keats’s “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies,” he likely would have concurred. The sanctuary for elephant called the Selous seems as if it was worth any amount of African lives and suffering to Ionides.
In the Selous, which has always lain across customary trade routes for poachers (the label placed on traditional hunters when their hunting rights are abrogated), the elephant have been drastically, nearly tragically, depleted in recent years; the Tanzanian government is, while earning millions from sustainable safari hunting in the reserve, returning only a fraction to its conservation; and the Selous is being challenged by schemes for oil exploration, uranium mining, and dam building (opening it up with transects and access roads), chugging ahead at full mindless bore like a decapitated male mantis completing its assigned task as its mate devours it. (The developed world is hardly in a position to hurl stones at any of these misdoings, by the way.) With all that, it’s hard not to see Ionides’s dream threatened with dissolution.
Without Ionides, though—even with the dark arts practiced to assemble the reserve (that hat, perhaps?), with all his colonial arrogance and paternalistic attitudes, with the kiboko, and all that is supposed to appall us today—the dream, the wonder, the creation of the place called Selous never would have occurred to begin with, making it perhaps worth the unavoidable cost (was Yellowstone worth the exile of the Sheep Eater Shoshone?) of a few old Tanganyikan ladies.
Ionides’s final dream, the one that would allow him to “die happy,” was an expedition to Thailand, where he wished to collect specimens of the king cobra, the longest poisonous snake in the world, though he also wanted to capture in Central or South America a bushmaster, the largest known viper, Ionides always seeming to harbor one further extravagant desire.
I can find no record of either adventure. What can be known, though, is that the severe thrombosis worsened, leading to amputation; and his end came in 1968, lying legless in a hospital not in England, where he was born, but in Nairobi in Africa, where he lived and which he would not abandon, Africa’s never abandoning him. There he died, anything but a saint, but in many ways a curious savior, all the same.
Sitting Around Campfires with PHs
The 2000s …
AT THE HUNTING convention, Joe offered to stand me to a drink. A well-known outdoor writer and editor, Joe was also working as a professional hunter for a safari company; and he invited me to come by the “booth.” It would have been just complete bad manners to refuse.
At 5:00 I swung by, and found a commissary-sized camp tent pitched in the middle of the convention-center floor, zebra skins spread out inside it. Joe was there, dressed in his going-to-town blue blazer and tie and elephant-hair bracelet, as were all the other professional hunters.
“Professional Hunter” is, as we’ve said, the official title, like labeling a cowboy a “livestock management specialist”; but professional hunters are still always “PHs,” written in caps; and as a job description it carries the same panache as “PI,” “DI,” or “pirate.”
One of the PHs, looking noticeably uncomfortable in a blue blazer, was a bear-like, bushy-eyebrowed old man. He seemed familiar; and when Joe introduced us, I understood why. It was Søren. We shook hands, and he said he was pleased to meet me. I told him we had met.
“Really?” he asked, arching a thatch of eyebrow, searching his memory.
“Block 60 in Kenya, in September, 1974.”
“Good God, no wonder I don’t remember you,” he said, the flicker of a smile almost disturbing his dour expression.
It was when I hunted with PH John Fletcher in Kenya’s hunting Block 60, and Søren was camped several miles from us, guiding a Danish hunter. One night we drove over to Søren’s camp for dinner; and the tension between Søren and his client, who did not speak English, was palpable. It turned out they had a leopard come into a bait late in the evening; and there was a bit of confusion, the client shooting before Søren could judge the leopard. Worse, the client had only wounded the cat; and it had gotten away, meaning that in the morning Søren had to crawl into the bush after it. On the drive back that night, influenced somewhat by alcoholic beverage, we had to brake for elephant as their eight-foot-tall backsides loomed up in the headlights.
The next morning we again crossed trails with Søren and his client, driving back to their camp. We asked how it was going, and Søren said fine, though he appeared particularly closed mouthed, and his client just stared straight ahead. There was no mention of the leopard, until one of our trackers got into a conversation in Kikuyu with one of Søren’s. Oh yes, Søren’s tracker said, they had gotten the leopard. It was right here. In a sack.
Fletcher overheard the conversation and shot a glance at Søren, who slumped visibly behind the wheel of his Land Cruiser. So we climbed out and went to look at Søren’s hunter’s leopard, which turned out to be an adult, a very, very small adult.
“As I recall,” I said to Søren four decades later, “all Fletcher said was, ‘Nice spots.’”
“No,” Søren corrected me, pursing his lips, still chagrined almost 30 years after the fact. “I remember exactly what he said: ‘Very pretty.’”
Later that night those many years ago, the client, crimson-faced in the gas-lantern light after a brandy too many, began poking Søren in the chest. Do not do that, Søren told him in plain Danish. But the client persisted until Søren, whose clenched fists were large blocky blunt instruments, had no further use for words.
Sitting in tents, or better by campfires, with PHs and listening to the old stories is at least part of the pleasure of going on safari. And the best stories are the ones in which something, sometimes most things (though never everything), goes wrong.
John Fletcher had his stories, all those years ago in Block 60. One was about hunting with the famous Mexican matador who wanted to kill a Cape buffalo with a sword. The first bull they faced, though, ended up running through the barrage of fire they put up. Fletcher had his 500 Nitro Express broken open, trying to stuff two more cartridges into it as the buffalo swept past the matador who pirouetted with practiced grace away from the bull’s horns, and as the bull went by, swung the muzzle of his rifle up and shot the buffalo in the neck. The bull was dead on the wing; but momentum carried him on into Fletcher, knocking Fletcher down. And there he sat, flat on the ground, a dead buffalo’s head in his lap.
“And how is that,” asked the matador, raising his hand in a flourish practiced in crowded bullrings, “for a client?”
“Do you still want to try to kill one of these with a sword?” Fletcher asked, looking up.
“Absolutamente no,” replied the torero.
Another PH I sat around a campfire with, later in Zimbabwe, was Sten. Some years before, he had been taking a hunter into tall grass after buffalo when a flock of tick birds flared up ahead of them. Tick birds live on big mammals like buffalo, but something seemed wrong to Sten. And at that moment, with a sound like a tea kettle whistling, through the grass toward them charged not a buffalo but a black rhino. Sten stepped in front of his client and got off a shot from his 470 NE, but the rhino kept coming; and before Sten could fire the second barrel, he was on the ground, the rhino butting him with his muzzle.
At some point that prehistoric flesh tank was going to start stomping on Sten, so he threw his arms around the front horn, and wrapped his legs around the head as the rhino bucked up and down, trying to throw him off. Sten’s hunter ran in and shoved his 340 Weatherby into the rhino’s ear and pulled the trigger, the bullet nearly kneecapping Sten when it came out the other side. Except for a fractured pelvis, though, Sten was fine, and went on hunting for the remaining four weeks of the safari, hobbling around on a hand-whittled crutch.
“So what do you think about when you’re being tossed up and dow
n by a rhino?” I asked. “Does your life pass before your eyes?”
“You know,” said Sten in his heavily accented English, “dat’s a funny ting. All I could tink about when I was hanging onto dat horn was, ‘By golly, dis one is long enough to make de record book.’”
Sometimes, the stories even have an odd confluence. Both Fletcher and Sten worked as technical advisers on the movie Hatari! back in the early 1960s. Fletcher remembered how John Wayne really was bigger than life, unfazed by anything. One shot, as Fletcher told it, called for Wayne to face a charging elephant. All morning Fletcher and the other PHs worked to haze a herd of wild elephant into camera range while Wayne sat in his canvas chair, smoking, reading, drinking coffee. Finally the elephant were rampaging properly toward the camera; and an assistant director went up to the Duke and said, “Mr. Wayne, your elephant is here.”
Wayne put down his book, picked up his 458, walked out, turned back to ask if he was standing on the right mark, and then shot a bull elephant head on as it was bearing down on him (if you watch the movie, you can see the scene, and it looks as if Wayne was using some kind of non-lethal round, or shooting over the bull, to halt his charge). Wayne then coolly turned back to the director and asked, “That good?” and went back to his canvas chair.
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