by Ruark, R.
A baboon barked somewhere down the donga and followed it with an outraged squawk. A little later the leopard that had outraged him sawed at the foot of the tree, from which the nugu undoubtedly was swaying from a limber branch. “Bastard,” the baboon said. “Spotted, evil, ugly bastard.”
The leopard replied: “Just wait, nugu. I’ll have indigestion over you yet.”
It sounded strangely like the first opening bark of a .20-millimeter Oerlikon machine gun, followed immediately by the chattering of the smaller AA stuff and accented by the hollow grunt of the bigger weapons.
I recalled the same feeling of strangeness, some years before, when once again the workaday soul had not enjoyed an opportunity to track down its master. I was somewhere in the North Atlantic on an ammunition ship. I was wearing a scrubby beard. I had not washed for days. I had not slept for days. The convoy was under semiconstant attack by what the newspapers used to call a wolf pack of submarines. I stank—chiefly from fear, secondarily from lack of opportunity to remove my long-handled drawers and bathe. The smell of fear was separate from the smell of dirty body. The fear smelled worse than the normal filthy smell.
It had been seven days—seven days of other people’s ships sinking, the nights lit up by the snowflake flares, the brief explosion of a sister ship, and the sudden knowledge that there was one poker debt you were never going to collect. At least not in this world you weren’t going to collect it.
On the eighth day at 11 a.m. local time, I decided that a man who had worn the same clothes for that many days and nights needed a bath.
It was a gray day, just off the coast of Scotland, and we had had nothing to afflict us for the hours since general quarters. I took off the paper-lined arctic jumper and peeled off the sheep-lined coat and scraped off the long-handled drawers and unshipped the felt-lined shoes and tossed away the felt face mask and lurched into the shower across the deck from my cabin. The steam of the shower removed the smell of fear and the smell of the dirty body and cleared some of the red from eyes that had not closed for seven days in a normal fashion in a bed. The ship rolled as only a gut-heavy Liberty can roll, and I fastened my fingers to one of the handles the geniuses who build modern ships attach to the sides of shower rooms. A great feeling of lassitude stroked me. And then there was a crash and a boom and a hoarse screaming of the ship’s general alarm.
I streaked out of the shower room, naked, soaking wet, scooped up a pistol and a helmet, and clambered topside to my gun station on the flying bridge. A ship in the convoy’s center had copped it and was drifting back, sinking, smoking, dying. I looked around me. The AA guns were manned and ready. So were the bigger guns on the forecastle head and on the poop. So was I, too, I suppose. I had on a helmet and a pistol and a three-weeks’ beard. I screwed the battle phones to my helmet and checked in with fat old Donaldson aft on the five-inch fifty, and with Doughman forward on the three-inch fifty, and around me were Red and Plinsky and the Staley twins from San Francisco, all making technical noises like experienced warriors.
And then I looked at me, naked as any jaybird, goose-pimpled out, wearing only a helmet and a pistol and a battle phone to cover my shame. And I thought that in the last few days I had lost a couple of friends and every day we burnt off the machine guns with a blowtorch to kill the ice and that stuff in my whiskers was solid frost and under my fanny were seven thousand tons of high explosives and that only yesterday I was the meek morning city editor of the Washington Daily News. A German submarine surfaced in the middle of the convoy and a half-dozen ships blew him out of the water, making a god-awful noise about it. Depth charges plunked and thrummed and jostled against the bottom of my ancient bucket. It was cold up there with no clothes on.
What, I said to myself, in the name of Holy Christ am I doing out here?
The body was there, but the soul was somewhere between the Fargo Building in Boston and the whorehouse in Gulfport, Mississippi—the cathouse being the only place that naval ensigns with wives could find to live while they were training to be heroes. You had to say that the whores were wonderful. They babysat for the naval wives and lent the incipient heroes a little money before the Navy’s slatternly paydays, and they never, never made a pass at the boys in blue. They also looked most severe in the gambling rooms when the heroic husbands went up against the slot machines.
At the time the ship sank that morning, I figured my soul had left Biloxi and was headed by slow bus to New Orleans, there to go by Naval Air Transport to Jacksonville, Florida, in order to pick up a scabby old scow named the Eli Whitney, of which God had decided that I was to be gunnery officer. Transportation being what it was in the war days, I reckoned my soul was a good three weeks behind me, maybe more, because all I could recognize in this gray cold waste of water was a civilian’s body. Certainly my curly civilian soul had no business there.
Certainly if I were there in physical person, my soul had too much sense to crowd into the act. I felt this considerably more strongly some months later in Bari, Italy, when I was forced to be competently heroic while wearing a face full of lather and no helmet at all, on top of a sitting ship during an air raid. By heroic I mean I quit shaving and climbed up to the flying bridge. Apart from the nakedness, I shall always remember that my crew had been holding religious services that day, and the Protestant chaplain was trying to crawl under the portable organ. As I attempted to direct antiaircraft fire—we never, ever hit anything—through a fluffy meringue of lather, I reflected idly that by now my soul had probably left London and was staggering aimlessly about Casablanca, a good six months behind me. I hoped my soul would check in at the Bar Nolly in Casa and inquire from Madame Gala if anybody named Ruark had been around looking soulless a few months ago.
The lion coughed now, quite close. The birds and the insects and the baboons set up a new symphony. By dead reckoning I estimated that my soul was just getting off the Ethiopia plane in Nairobi, where Donald Ker, a professional hunter, was waiting to greet me. Mr. Ker had been quite British. He had been British much as the bloke who came aboard the old Whitney in Gibraltar in 1943 had been British. That one was a wavy-navy lieutenant with a beard.
“I say,” the wavy-navy type had said as he climbed the Jacob’s ladder and shoved his beard over the rail. “Do you chaps have any cigarettes at all? Ah, wizard, wizard. I’ve got rather an interesting assignment for you. You’re to have the honor of leading the first convoy up the Adriatic. Germans still about a bit, that way, and I understand the Ionian Sea is simply infested with mines. No, old boy, we don’t have any charts. Just keep a sharp eye out for the mines, especially at night, and mind you well that the Jerries are still functioning across the street. Well, cheers, chaps.”
So we’d been met by Donald Ker at the Nairobi airport, and he had twinkled his chipmunk’s cheerful grin at us and said something like:
“I say, I am dreadfully sorry that your man Selby—your hunter, you know—isn’t here to greet you, but the Game Department just called and said a rogue rhino’s raising vast amounts of trouble with the natives outside of town, and so we’ve sent old Harry off to reprove it. Minds me of the early days when the department used to call me or Syd for us to come to the airport to shoot the wildebeest off it so the ruddy planes could land. We’ve cleared your bits now, so we might nip off to the Norfolk and have a spot of lunch before they close the dining room.”
In retrospect I am a great admirer of Donald Ker, a small man who looks no more like a professional hunter than he looks like Blackbeard the pirate. But Donald Ker killed his first elephant before his voice solved its adolescent squeak, and his first safari consisted of a can of beans, a gun, a bullet, and a blanket. He is one half of Ker and Downey Safaris, Ltd., and if you wish to book him you had better write a letter stating your plans some five years ahead of the moment.
“You know,” Donald said over a martini on the Norfolk veranda, “there’s a popular suspicion going the rounds that all professional hunters are nine feet high and drink petrol coc
ktails neat. I claim I disprove the point. I put myself through elementary school shooting elephants on holiday. I was smaller then than now. And that, chum, was never yesterday. Shall we push along to old Ahamed’s and get you and the memsaab suitably clothed for tomorrow’s exodus?”
“Jesus,” said I, “tomorrow?”
“I rather like to get the safaris in and get them out,” Donald said, twinkling his teeth. “And we do have to see to the boots and jackets and things. Also, the American consul wants you for dinner.”
“This I need,” I muttered. “This I need bad.”
“Come along, come along,” Donald said.
When your heart’s in the highlands and your soul is lost, maybe still sequestered in the Nouvelle Eve in Paris, you go to the local Indian in Nairobi. He measures you. You go to the next local Indian—the bootmaking one—and he measures you, and of a sudden you have completed an outfitting that would take you six weeks to perform in the United States. In Nairobi no suit is so fancy it can’t be delivered in a day. No boots are so special they can’t be rendered unto the owner by tomorrow’s noon. Under Donald’s hand I was finished with the flannel pajamas, finished with the drill bush jackets, finished with the mosquito boots and the crepe-soled half boots before cocktail time, so we checked in at the little offices of Messrs Ker and Downey, Ltd. The phone rang as we entered. Donald accepted the call. He listened a moment and turned to me.
“The Game Department again,” he said. “Some bloody leopard or other raising ned with the native chickens on the outskirts of town. Says if I’ve a client handy who wants to shoot it, he won’t need a license and he may have the pelt. You?” He flicked an eyebrow.
“Not me, bwana,” I said, “Just got here this morning, and my huntin’ pants ain’t been delivered yet. Let somebody else go shoot the leopard. I got to go to dinner with Angus Ward.”
Ker shrugged and spoke into the receiver. I felt he was a touch disappointed at my lack of immediate spirit, but as I said, the soul must catch up with the body before you go into strange businesses, else the body is not competent to perform.
It is a long, long way, although short in miles, from the modern civilization of Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel to where we aimed in Tanganyika, because you have to go through little places named Narok and Loliondo and across a big plain named Serengeti. After you leave the Naivasha area, there aren’t any roads much, only tracks through grass and winding over and around mountains, and when you start across the Serengeti there is only a double-barrel peak to steer you sixty miles, and unless the day is clear you can’t see the peak. You drive the hunting car by guess and by God. The weary old lorry labors behind you, and now and again you pause to wait for her to catch up, the boys gray-faced with the dust and clinging to the tarpaulin top like a flock of baboons on a rocky kopje.
Much has been written about the profusion of game just outside Nairobi, and some sportsman once wrote a magazine piece called “They Hunt from Taxicabs in Nairobi,” suggesting that it was simple if you desired to have your wife or daughter shoot a leopard. All you did was to nip into a car and go and collect it before cocktail time in the New Stanley Hotel. He was wrong on only one count: The Athi Plain outside Nairobi is a game preserve, and they hang you for shooting so much as a dik-dik in its confines. Africa is a large plot of land. In relatively few of its areas are you allowed to shoot anything. Achieving those areas is difficult and dusty. And the kidneys moan in anguish from the punishment they absorb from a bucking jeep called Jessica or any other name.
After rescuing that tin tragedy of a truck from the muddy misery of Tanganyika’s trails a few dozen times; after Mama had surfeited herself with photographs of the odd Masai herdsmen we met; after a short call on the district officer in Loliondo, we pushed through a herd of spotted Masai cattle and rolled down a rocky hill and landed onto the vast plain that is Serengeti. It is a plain now, sere dusty grass for as far as you can see. It was a lake once, a lake beneath the lip of mountains. It is sixty some miles straight across it, and there is no road. There is no track. There is not much water and few trees and only a small, bitter alkali lake and a few damp patches of grass with treacherous soft cotton soil to stick you and, when it is dry, violent dust. And violent sun.
“This bloke I mention,” Harry was saying, “was one of the few real crackpots I’ve been forced to entertain on safari. He was an Englishman, and he thought he was Tarzan of the Apes. He wanted to sleep in trees. He ran around naked all the time. I couldn’t keep him from bathing in the streams, and the crocodiles were eying him appreciatively. He . . . My aunt! Look yonder. What a lovely lion.”
Apart from submarines boiling to the surface on a cold morning in the middle of a convoy, I do not believe there are many more impressive sights than a city man’s first glimpse at a live mane lion loose on a plain in strange country, sinister and far from home. This old boy was a movie lion. He had a luxuriant mane and tufts on his elbows, and he was right smack in the middle of a bare prairie. Him and his lady. She took off in a swinging lope. The old boy stopped cold and turned to inspect us with a cynical yellow eye. Harry swung Jessica about three feet past him.
“Jambo, Bwana Simba,” he said.
The lion grunted and scowled and began to move off. Jinny unlimbered the camera and stood up in the jeep. I placed both palms on her behind and braced her against the windscreen so she could take pictures. The lion, with heavy mane and very full in the paunch, swung off after his old lady. Then he stopped again, and Harry tooled the jeep to within six feet and halted. The lion looked at us. We looked at the lion.
I know they will all tell you that so long as you stay in the car you are completely safe, but it is of small comfort on your first live lion. You keep wondering if maybe you won’t meet an individualist someday who dislikes automobiles and suddenly find him in your lap. (I met a lady lion later who did not like jeeps, nor the people in them. She charged it three times, and the last time her jaws snapped a touch closer to my trousers than I like to remember. She remembered her hatred months later and charged another car. And then another month after that. She is going to surprise some camera tourist one of these days by removing his face from his Rolleiflex.)
A lion, loose, and six feet away, with no bars in front of him, is bigger than the lion you remember from the zoo. His teeth are longer. He is scrubbier, perhaps, but loses no dignity and no ferocity. I was not displeased when he sauntered off. Neither was Jinny. She had not yawned back when the lion yawned at her. She was not bored.
“He’s just off a kill,” Harry said. “Look at his belly. Full of zebra. No trouble from this type. Let’s herd him off after his bride and proceed. We’ll see another dozen or so before dusk. Yah!” he said, and slapped the door of the Land Rover. “Shoo! Scat! Begone!”
The lion sneered, curling his lip and grunting. He got up and humped away, his shoulder blades moving angularly under the loose hide. Harry put on a burst of speed and we chased him a few hundred yards, the lion looking sarcastically over his shoulder as if to say, Christ, more tourists out to play. He stopped one more time, faced us, opened his mouth, and roared. It wasn’t a very serious roar, but it seemed rather loud to me. Harry swerved the jeep and we bade him good-bye.
“Lovely beasts, lions, you know,” Harry said. “Live and let live. Not the king of the jungle, though. Never makes the effort. Elephant. He’s the king. Buffalo’s the prince, and the leopard is the knave. The lion is a gentleman—a lazy old gentleman. Makes Mama do all the work. He stands upwind and lets his scent drift down to some poor punda or other and roars once in a while to amuse himself. The old lady, betimes, has sneaked around downwind from the zebras and they gradually work toward her. She makes two jumps and lands on the zebra’s back. She hooks her hind feet into his stern and takes a mouth hold on his neck. Then she reaches around with her arm and grabs him by the nose, and crack! Chacula. Dinner. The old boy saunters up and they dine. Then they sleep. Then they dine again. Then they sleep some more. And then Mother bestirs
herself and goes to market once again. Be nice being a lion on a reserve. Nothing to do but eat and sleep and pose for pictures and fight with your sons when they’ve got big enough.”
I will never, possibly, forget that first day on the Serengeti. We saw fourteen lions—one pride of five drinking peaceably and serenely at a water hole with half a hundred Grant and Thomson gazelles only a few feet away from each other, and each animal serenely aware that nobody was going to eat anybody else. As we got off the plain and into bush, we began to see giraffes and ostriches, and the antelopes thickened into herds of several hundred. The first stirrings of the semiannual game migration was beginning, and the flocks of wildebeests, shaggy and high humped like American bison, were beginning to move, along with their friends and companions, the zebras. We saw bands of five and ten thousand, and coursed them briefly in the car. At one cutoff we paused for a few unforgettable moments while some five thousand zebras thundered past our bow, their hoofs thunderous even on the grassy plain, and the dust boiling behind them like the wake of an armored column in North Africa. And now the grass was high, towering over the windshield of the jeep and pelting our faces with the sharp grains from the heavy seed heads. Hundreds of coveys of tiny quail sprayed up from under Jessica’s hood. The seed heads got into her grille, and every so often we had to stop and clear them out of her front.
“Bloody Rover smells like a bloody bakeshop,” Harry said. “Grass. Nine miles high everywhere. Too much rain this year. Too much water on the plains. Too much water in the hills. Game all massed in the reserves or up in the hills—anywhere the grass is short and the cats can’t crawl unseen. I’ve high hopes, though, for where we’re headed. It’s freak country, a little strip about fifteen miles long by five wide, and the grass is never high there. I don’t know why. Unless I’m off my reckoning, we’ll find game in that area. We’ll find the game in any area that’s legal and isn’t covered with a forest of this bloody grass. Let’s stop for a bite of lunch and one of those delicious, nutritious martinis you’re always talking about.”