by Ruark, R.
I am a hell of a fellow, I said to myself. I am a slayer of Simba, Lord of the Jungle. And anyhow, I didn’t run or fire into the air. Whisky is indicated.
We wrestled the corpse into the back of the jeep, on a matting of rushes so he wouldn’t bleed up the Rover. I talked a great deal on the drive back to camp and accepted congratulations freely. One of the camel flies bit me painfully, and I didn’t care. I was suddenly free of a great many inhibitions. Every man has to brace a lion at least once in his life, and whether the lion is a woman or a boss or the prospect of death by disease makes no difference. I had met mine and killed him fairly and saved him from the hyenas that would have had him in a year or so if one of his sons didn’t assassinate him first.
When we hit the camp the boys knew. They surged over the jeep and me and mauled us all and told us m’zuri sana, bwana, and waited for the money tip to the whole camp. They did a sedate lion dance and ran me for alderman of metropolitan Ikoma.
I went down to the tent to collect the hero’s bride. She was taking a nap. She bubbled gently as she snored.
“Get up, you lazy slut,” I said. “While you are sleeping your life away, I have been out slaying lions and protecting the honest poor. Come and see what Father done done with his gun. And bring your camera.”
Virginia came with the camera. We posed the defunct simba suitably, his chin arrogantly on a rock. The blacks told me again that I was one hell of a bwana. Then the lion’s eyes opened. Then his ears twitched. Then he uttered a grunt. Then I found myself alone with a lion and Mr. Selby. The admirers had achieved trees. I am not ashamed to say I shot my simba once more in the back of the neck. Like Harry says, it’s the dead ones that get up and kill you.
Chapter 4
THE night we got lost coming into the camp I looked at this brawny child who was going to run my life for me with a slightly new interest. I had lived in the same car, the same camp, with him for three days. We had had some drinks in the Queens’ bar in Nairobi and lunch together at the Traveller’s Club, and I liked the way he tackled the check, like a man used to reaching for it. He had no impediment in his reach, I thought, and snickered at the pun. I would have liked it better if it had been my pun.
I had seen him shoot the little Tommy, and I had heard a lot of tall tales about Selby. They told me how he could tie two rocks to strings and start them swinging, like counter-pendulums, and then dash off to fifty yards away and wheel and shoot the two twines as they passed in their pendulum swing. They told me how he took a Rigby .450 No. 2 and shot the two swooping kites, the swiftly sliding scavengers, with a right and a left. A man who shoots flying birds with an elephant gun shoots pretty good. They told me about the last buffalo too. The one that Bob Maytag shot, and they thought it was dead. It got up and Harry hit it over one eye and Maytag hit it under the other eye, and it still kept coming. So Harry shot it through the pupil. I presume he wasn’t aiming elsewhere.
He seemed the kind of kid girls might like to marry or mothers might want to raise. He was polite to excess, extremely courteous to Virginia, and he always offered a cigarette when he smoked one himself. He blushed rather easily, and when he swore it was self-conscious. Virginia after three days was just a little bit in love with him already. With the tumbled curly hair and the deep eyes and the self-confidence and the reputation behind him for being all man, and clean man, you would wonder how the women left him single that long. And shy, too. And modest.
He was a long way from the fictional idea of the professional. The popular conception of a white hunter, built largely in the American mind on film portrayals by Gregory Peck and Stewart Granger, is almost as erroneous as the movie and popular magazine accounts of African safaris. According to what you may have seen or read, the basic idea of a professional hunter is roughly this: He stands about six foot five, sports a full beard, and is drunk (off his client’s liquor) most of the time. He always makes a play for the client’s beautiful wife and/or sister, and always scores. He shoots lions with pistols and wrestles with snakes and buffalo for fun. When he is not out on safari, he hangs around bars in Nairobi, ogling the girls and thumbing the big cartridges he wears in the loops of his jacket. He does all the shooting for the client, while the client sits comfortably in the shooting car. He is always taciturn in a me-Tarzan-you-Jane manner. He has a secret sorrow that drove him to a life among the wild beasts. His business is regarded as butchery, and it takes a superhuman man to be a competent butcher.
This is about as accurate as the average movie presentation of high life in New York, or the general supposition that all Englishmen have no chins and sport monocles. In some respects the white or professional big-game hunter, African variety, is the toughest man in the world, and in others he is as gentle as a dead dove and as unsophisticated as Huck Finn. He is competent at his job, which is why he is alive, but you will see more rugged types on the dance floor at El Morocco. And he is the last of a breed of men who have such a genuine love for the wilds and such a basic hatred of civilization that they are willing literally to kill themselves with backbreaking work and daily danger on a nine-months-per-year basis for less pay than a good waiter in New York draws.
They forswear matrimony, generally, because no wife lasts long when the old man is off twisting the tails of leopards for most of the calendar year. They save only a little money, for the upkeep on their hunting cars largely outweighs their income, and they blow the rest in Nairobi between safaris or in the rainy seasons when hunting is impossible. They are referred to as a vanishing breed because there are somewhat less than thirty practicing top pros in British East Africa today, and in a very short time there will be little big stuff left to practice on. It is thought by most of the smart ones that the next three or four years will see the last of safari in the old sense, when a man went out to kill a lion, a leopard, an elephant, and the more elusive big antelopes with some feeling of certainty.
Harry Selby is possibly the best of the current bunch—certainly there’s no better about—and his popularity is such that he is booked up five years ahead. He was not yet twenty-seven at the time I write but has been an able pro since he was twenty. He was born and raised in East Africa, on a cattle farm in Nanyuki, Kenya Colony, and he had killed his first elephant before he was fifteen. He looks like a public school boy and speaks an impeccable British English in such a gentle voice that even an occasional “damn” sounds very wicked.
Tony Henley, whom I had met, was raised on the slopes of Mount Kenya and was an old pro at twenty-three. He is a blond youngster who looks like a substitute end on a high school football team. Tony Dyer, at twenty-six, looks like the valedictorian in a junior-college graduation exercise. Donald Ker, a partner in the firm of Ker and Downey, is a small, thin, mild-seeming man in his forties who put himself through school shooting elephants for ivory when he was a 110-pound stripling. His partner, Syd Downey, looks like an ordinary businessman, is pushing fifty, and still is rated one of the best in the business. Andrew Holmberg, the expert on mountain game, is a strapping, rosy-cheeked six-footer who might very well be a junior advertising executive. And the now-retired dean of the bunch, Philip Percival, who raised Harry, is a plump old gentleman with stubby legs who looks about as fierce as Colonel Blimp.
Yet all these men have made a business of mingling daily with lions, leopards, and the most dangerous trio—buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos—and have managed to stay alive, although nearly all have horn wounds and claw scars, and all have considered death as a daily diet. They have a tremendous respect for dangerous animals. When they are hurt, ninety-nine times out of a hundred they are injured trying to protect a client who has just shown arrant cowardice or complete stupidity. Yet no client is ever publicly branded a coward. No client is ever tagged as a kill-crazy meat hog. No lady ever misses her lion—not for the record, anyhow. The code says that the hunters don’t talk once the safari is over. That is ridiculous, of course. They talk plenty, mostly among themselves, and occasionally to customers they have c
ome to know and respect.
The function of a professional hunter on safari is almost godlike. He is responsible for the safety of the whole shebang— you, himself, and the black boys who make up your shauri. He is the guide over trackless wastes. He is the expert on finding game and seeing that his dude is in the best possible position to shoot it. If you ask him, he will shoot it for you, but he will quietly despise you as a man, and the contempt he feels will be mirrored in the black faces.
If you wound an animal, it is the hunter’s responsibility to go into the bush and finish it off, both out of humanitarianism and caution since a wounded lion or buffalo is bound to kill the first unlucky local who crosses his path. At all times he is the servant of the Game Department whose laws are strict and in whose employ are many spies.
The hunter stands at your side to backstop you on dangerous game. His idea of the pleasant safari is one in which he is not forced to fire a gun once. But if the going gets nasty, his big double is your insurance.
“I don’t care a damn about these people who can split a pea at three hundred yards,” old Phil Percival once remarked. “What I want to know about a man is how good he is on a charging buffalo at six feet.”
My man Selby, to that specification, seems excellent. I asked him about the last buffalo he was forced to shoot. The buff had gone down, and it appeared his back was broken. As Selby and the client approached cautiously, the buff got up and charged at about fifteen yards. The client let him have one in the chest and one in the face.
“The first bullet hit him here,” Selby said, “just under the right eye. He kept coming. About ten feet I hit him just here, over the left eye. He continued to progress.”
“What did you do then?” I asked him.
“Well,” Harry said, “at four feet I shot him again. I shot him through the pupil.” He rummaged through some photos and showed me the dead buffalo. There was a hole under one eye, a hole over the other, and where the left eye belonged was a hole as big as an egg. The buff had died and fallen on Selby’s feet.
The heavy work for a hunter is not so much the location of game and the supervision of the final kill as the camp routine. He supervises a tiny portable city—administers loading and unloading in exactly the right order, ordains the pitching of camp, selecting camp, looks after the water supply, supervises the skinners and trackers and gunbearers and porters and cooks and body servants. He must be an expert mechanic—he must be able to rebuild a motorcar from the spare parts he carries and improvise those parts he has not.
The hunter is responsible for correct victualing of an expedition that may be out of town three or four months; thus, he needs a dietitian’s knowledge of supplementary canned goods and a balanced menu. He is directly responsible for providing an average of ten pounds a day, per man, of fresh meat. In most cases the ordinary day’s killing will keep sufficient meat in camp.
As the head of a safari, the hunter finally combines the duties of a sea captain, a bodyguard, a chauffeur, a tracker, a skinner, a headwaiter, a tourist guide, a photographer, a mechanic, a stevedore, an interpreter, a game expert, a gin-rummy partner, drinking companion, social equal, technical superior, boss, employee, and handyman. The difficulty of his position is magnified in that he lives in the pockets of his one or two clients for long weeks, and unless he is a master of tact, nobody is speaking to anyone else when the safari pays off in Nairobi. The old-timers had a phrase to describe a safari gone sour.
“I’m still drinking their whisky,” the hunter would say, meaning that all social intercourse had ceased and the safari was operating on a basis of frigid politeness, with the hunter keeping himself to himself except during shooting hours.
More dangerous than an angry cow elephant with a young calf, Harry had said, is the woman on safari. She is generally rich and spoiled, old and full of complaints, or young and apt to fall a little bit in love with the hunter. In a tent community, this puts rather a strain on the young man who is accepting the husband’s pay to hunt animals instead of wives. Living à trois can be a difficult operation in the midst of Tanganyika when the memsaab has a tendency to cast goo-goo eyes at the professional and invent ways to catch him alone.
“Even the best of the sporting ladies,” Harry said, “even the most rugged of the female hunters, has a tendency to woof at the monotony of the food, the lack of toilet facilities, and the prevalence of bugs, snakes, and scorpions. Africa is dusty, and Africa is wet and hot and cold, and a tent is not the Norfolk, nor is a canvas tub a Grecian bath. Warm martinis can irk on a delicately reared lady. A girl gets tired of hearing incessant conversation of guns and game and grass. I know of no hunter who is delighted at the prospect of setting out with a lady who may turn out to be either shrew or nymphomaniac.” Some of the ladies can be fun, though, he said. Selby was out once on a more or less photographic safari with the Duchess of Grafton.
“We were taking some snaps of impala, or something tame,” Selby said, “when we spooked an old gentleman rhino who was very cross at being woken from his nap. As we’d no license for rhino, I didn’t like to shoot it, so I said to the Duchess: ‘Your Grace, you’d best make for yonder tree.’ The old girl took off at the speed of knots and went up the tree like a squirrel, camera and all. Then I entered into a delaying action.”
Back in Nairobi, however, the Duchess told the press a different story.
“I was safely ensconced on my limb,” the Duchess said, “when I heard a small, polite voice below me. It was Mr. Selby, who was running round and round the tree, with the rhino’s horn just behind him. The small voice said: ‘If you please, Your Grace, would you mind moving up another branch? I may need the one you’re sitting on.’ ”
Selby denied this. He says it would never have occurred to him to address her as “Your Grace” under such trying circumstances.
Harry was talking on as he shoved the jeep along. “The sense of humor of these men is rather amazing. We have an old-timer, Murray Smith, who once dived into the bush with his client after a wounded rhino. The old rhino boiled out from behind a thorn tree, and as old Murray squared away to face it, he went tail over tip into a pig hole and sprawled flat. The faro came at him, and all Smith could do was seize its horn with both hands and hang on for dear life, with the faro bouncing him up and down. The client, I expect, wasn’t a coward, ran up and stuck his gun in the rhino’s ear, and saved old Murray from a very sticky finish. Later somebody asked him what he thought of when the rhino had him down.
“‘All I could think of,’ Murray said, ‘was that now I had hold of it, the horn seemed longer than I thought it was when I told the client to shoot.’”
Harry was saying that there are clients who are too brave, who insist on shooting everything themselves, and who also insist that the hunter not shoot under any circumstances. These are the people who generally get the hunters maimed since they are prone to shoot too fast and from too great a distance, wounding the game and making it necessary for the professional to go and collect it from the thornbush.
There are the too timid who shoot wildly, run away, drop their guns, and generally foul up the detail. They refuse to take advantage of the old safety axiom: “Get as close as you can, and then get ten feet closer.” They bang away from afar and gut-shoot the lion or merely annoy the buffalo, and the poor old pro has to make amends in the name of the Game Department.
There is the complete phony who gets out of the city limits and says: “Look, you shoot it all, but don’t tell anybody.” This is a fairly simple type to handle since a competent pro can round up the fraud’s complete bag, on reasonably mediocre animals, and send the fellow back to brag in his club in no time at all. But a hunter spits when he mentions a client of this sort.
From the hunter’s standpoint, the ideal customer is a man who is scared enough to be cautious but brave enough to control his fear. He follows instructions, knows and is frank about his own limitations on stamina, and quits when he has had enough of mountains and swamps and dust and
bumps for one day. He shoots his own game but is not averse to a little help when a buffalo or something else large and fierce needs some extra killing. I learned about this one later.
“You know,” Harry said, “there’s hell’s own amount of clients who carry on frightfully if the hunter collaborates. They won’t even accept the animal, won’t even let the boys skin out the head. Lot of bloody nonsense, of course, but there you are. They’re the chaps who get us killed.”
The true professional hunter has something of the bullfighter’s philosophy in that he has no guarantee he will see the bright lights and pretty girls of Nairobi ever again. In the final analysis he has to stand and fight. Each man I came to know has had a dozen slim squeaks, mostly from elephants and buffaloes. When the crisis occurs, there is no place to run, no tree to climb as a rule because the wounded animal usually starts his charge in thick bush from a few feet, and he nearly always sees you before you see him. Some remarkable escapes from certain death have occurred.
Frank Bowman, an Australian and a very fine hunter who is now retired, once sat on the ground with a twisted ankle and no bullets for his gun while a wounded buffalo got up and staggered, sick but still furious, toward him. Bowman screamed for a gunbearer to fetch more bullets, waited until the bearer had run to the car to get them, slapped two fresh bullets in his double, and shot the buff at a range of about one foot. It fell in his lap. The time between no bullets and two bullets must have been the longest recorded wait in the history of hunting, at least from Bowman’s angle.
“This gunbearer, Adam,” Harry said, “was elevated to the aristocracy in the following manner: Old Phil Percival, with an empty gun, was being chased round and round the hunting car by a wounded buffalo, and all the natives in the back— save Adam—panicked and went over the side. Adam was a porter then. He sorted through the dozen different varieties of cartridges in the back of the car until he found a couple of slugs that fitted old Phil’s gun. He handed them to the old boy as he went round the car for the umpteenth time. Percival loaded his weapon in full flight. He settled the animal. As of then Adam was promoted.”