by Ruark, R.
All the sounds were fine, but the hyena symphony was the finest. Not even a hyena knows how many keys and registers and vibratos he owns. This was the last hour of the waking night and was generally devoted to question-and-answer having to do with the lives of the people and the animals that Selby knew and loved so well. He was taciturn by day. He was garrulous by night, and he loved to talk of what he knew. We were sitting by the fire, with a low-swung sickle moon over the swamp when a couple of dozen pairs of eyes came to within shoe-throwing distance of the fire. The symphony was now operating at close hand.
“Bloody cheek,” Harry said. “I woke up early this morning and one of the blighters was sitting in the entrance of the tent, looking at me and licking his stupid chops. I also noticed that one was in the mess tent last night, chewing on the camera bag. Buggers’ll eat anything.”
“One of them was whooping outside the tent and tripping over the guy ropes while Bob was snoring last night,” Virginia said. “He butted into the tent half-a-dozen times.”
At that moment a big dog hyena detached himself from the pack and sauntered over to the corner of the fire and sat there insolently, no more than fifteen feet away. He bared his big teeth and looked us straight in the eye.
“I’d say this was taking it a bit too far,” Harry said. “Cheeky big bastard. Bite off a piece of your face, next thing you know. I think I’ll just teach these gentlemen a little lesson in etiquette.”
He got up and went into his tent and emerged with his battered old .416 and a flashlight, which he clamped on the stock of the rifle.
“Be back in a minute,” he said, and strode off into the darkness. You could see the tongue of light licking here and there, and every time it steadied there was an explosion of the .416. I counted fourteen reports in as many minutes, and then Harry came back into camp, looking grim.
“I may’ve missed one,” he said. “And some of them took off. But the growls you’ll hear tonight will be the remaining cousins eating their own relatives instead of lounging about the camp. I don’t like to shoot them, but once in a while you have to. They eventually get arrogant enough to be dangerous. I’ve known them to come into a native hut and make off with a child. And they’re dreadful on the farm when the cattle are calving. Awful beast, and pathetic, too.”
We sat a long time in the moonlight, listened to the snapping and snarling, and Harry expounded on hyenas. I found them fascinating. So did Virginia. Harry talks well, almost as in a lecture, when he is talking natural history. This is roughly what he had to say.
The African native, no matter what his tribe, is generally a grave citizen, seldom given to jokes and even less seldom stirred to laughter by the life around him. The one never-failing source of mirth is the hyena—fisi—a ridiculous animal who could be called a dirty joke on the entire animal kingdom.
Anything a hyena does is funny to a native. Great humor is found in the fact that fisi, fatally shot, will eat himself before he is dead. He will snap and snarl at his own festooned intestines or chew greedily on his own feet. His voice is always a subject for merriment, whether he is giggling hysterically in homosexual whoops, chuckling sardonically, grunting, groaning, howling, moaning, or snarling.
Fisi is stupid, and fisi is smart. When he is smart, he arouses almost frantic laughter. When he is dumb—say, for instance, when some wild dogs make off with a chunk of fisi’s dinner, and fisi knocks himself cold running away by charging into a tree— the Africans hold their sides and scream with laughter, imitating fisi at his worst and noisiest. Fisi is so low on the totem pole of life that even the scraggliest aboriginal, flea-bit, diseased, and scrawny native can lose his own misery when he sees a hyena.
I discovered pretty early where the humor lay. You will come upon natives with a portion of their faces chewed off, with horrid scars and welts healed over into grotesque masks. You ask them how come. The answer is always simba—lion. It is seldom true. The truthful answer is fisi—hyena. There is an ingrained fear of fisi that is founded in all the dark hours of a savage existence. Fisi means death—meant it more, formerly, than now, but is still conceived as a symbol of the dark destroyer.
Many African tribes have such an overpowering fear of the spirits that attend death that they will not live in a hut in where death has occurred. A day’s journey in Kenya or Tanganyika will always point out a handful of ramshackle, deserted huts, with the cactus boma gone to seed and the rafters sagging under disheveled thatch. A death has occurred here; the survivors have moved to avoid the attending ghosts of the dead.
So practical prudence in the past asserted itself, and when an aged and dying member of the family appeared to be on his last legs, he was lifted from his bed and taken out into the bush. He was left there, to be attended by fisi. The hyena became a walking symbol of the graveyard in the native mind. Many a mortally ill native was eaten by hyenas well before normal death came to claim him. Not a small percentage had the animal take a savage chop from his face and was cured, except for the wound, of whatever illness beset him—cured by fright alone. The native who laughs at fisi is laughing uneasily at the angel of death—he is giggling in the graveyard because the ingrown knowledge is ever present that one day fisi will have the last laugh on him.
The tremendous temerity of this stinking thief is such that many a man has not needed to be critically ill to suffer a snap of the most powerful jaws in the animal kingdom. Fisi grown bold is the boldest of all African animals. He will not only come into your camp, he will come and sit by your fire or stride into your tent. And if the mood strikes him he will bite off half your face.
The African makes a tremendously potent beer, a thin, gruel-like liquor that is only half fermented at the time of intake. It continues to ferment inside the drinker so that a native on a binge eventually accumulates a fantastic load. Instead of sobering, he gets drunker as the beer continues to work in his innards. The jag is only abated by prolonged and deathlike sleep, during some phases of which it is impossible to wake the sleeper. Here again is where the hyena is apt to relandscape your profile. A young native with hyena scars must have a record of drunkenness in his background—fisi took a chunk out of him as he slept in stupor before a dying fire. The natives laugh at fisi as the Europeans laughed at werewolves and vampires—from sheer uneasiness.
Of course the hyena is a ridiculous beast. God’s mind was absent the day he built fisi. He gave him a dog’s face and a lion’s ears and the burly body of a bear. He permanently crippled his hindquarters so that his running motion is a slope-spine, humping shuffle. He gave fisi the most powerful jaws, possibly, of any carnivore and then made him so slow and so ungainly that the living meat that fisi craves easily outruns him. With the potentiality of killing almost any creature with his enormous steel-trap jaws, the hyena has been forced to live off the stinking carrion of other animals’ kills—forced to kill the sick and the crippled and the very young. He himself stinks like the corrupt meat he eats— and the final joke is that the hyena is hermaphroditic—a frequent blend of both sexes with the manifestations of both. Carr Hartley, a wild-animal collector, once penned up two female hyenas that could not possibly have been with young at the time he turned them loose together. Both females dropped a litter of pups. The hermaphroditism seems to be the last quirk of a grim joke on a pathetic beast.
The sardonic humor about the hyena is that he’s so tragically, terribly awful that he inspires the kind of mirth that unfeeling youngsters derive from the presence of village idiocy or malformation. Fisi is such a terrible creature that he almost isn’t true. If you own a farm, you will hate him when one of your cows is found dying, hamstrung, or with an udder ripped off by one snap of those frightful jaws. You will despise him as you see him on the outskirts of a game herd waiting for a sick or lame animal to lag behind. You will loathe him during calving season when he attacks the female in the midst of birth pangs and makes off with the fresh-dropped baby. Fisi is an arrant coward nearly always, and anything whole and brave can chase h
im. Even a little jackal will drive him from a lion’s kill. But he will kill the lion if the lion is sick.
His persistence is the persistence of Uriah Heep. Shuffling apologetically, he will return after repeated rebuffs. And of nights he sometimes acquires an arrogance that is frightening in its very dumbness. That is when you fear fisi—he might be just dumb enough to walk into the tent and have a go at you.
But in a peculiar fashion, this unwieldy, unhappy ghoul is such a vital part of African life that you would miss him greatly if he disappeared. Very few hunters shoot fisi, although he is classed as vermin, except when he becomes so bold that he gets to be a dangerous nuisance around camp. For one thing, he is the head man in the sanitation corps. He will eat anything— you, his mother, himself. He will even eat a vulture, although sometimes the nonfinicky buzzard won’t eat a dead fisi, figuring that a deceased hyena is even beneath a buzzard’s dignity. But with the hyena, the vulture, the marabou stork, and the ants, the great rolling plains of Africa seldom smell of carrion. Today’s kill is clean bleached bone by tomorrow, a tremendous sanitation program that is part of the cycle of life-in-death of Africa.
It is uncanny how swiftly the legions of the cleanup corps appear. You will shoot a zebra for his hide and tallow, and almost before you have rolled the strips of yellow fat into the still dripping skin, a few round-eared, dog-faced, shambling fisi will be sitting, tongues lolling, a few rods away, while the vultures are beginning to slant down before you quit the carcass. The vultures and the hyenas snap and snarl at each other but seem to work together pretty well. More active competition occurs when a fleet of wild dogs come onto the scene, and the fight for the carrion becomes a personal issue between fisi and his cousin, the big-eared dog.
In addition to his value as a walking incinerator, the hyena is fairly handy to the hunter. He follows the game concentrations and, more important to the hunter, he follows the carnivore. A large incidence of fisi generally means lions about. I have noticed that his abundance also bespeaks cheetah, the hunting leopard who is nearly extinct today. The cheetah kills freshly and feeds once from his kill.
Fisi has his uses as a decoy, too. If you are trying to toll the most timid lion out of the bush with a kill, he will come like a shot when he gets a whiff of a hyena sidling up to that nice fresh topi or zebra you have thoughtfully supplied for simba’s lunch. If you are working overnight on lions with a kill, a concentrated, dedicated corps of hyenas screaming frightfully as they attempt to rip off a protective covering of thorns from the lion kill is almost guaranteed to attract the most reclusive simba in the area. The lion hates fisi—because, like the native, the lion knows that the hyena will eventually get him. It is cynically humorous that, one way or another, the king of beasts always finds his tomb inside the knave. It is the crowning indignity to a regal life that the aged and weakened lion is pulled down and consumed, while still alive, by a stinking, snarling, cowardly outcast who is neither true male nor female but an awful amalgam of both.
But without fisi’s admirable voice range and his ever-present attendance at camp, Africa would never pack the nocturnal wallop that makes night noises and a flickering campfire so wonderful. There is no way to describe accurately a dozen hyenas without the camp—the virtuosity of voices is too great. There is a bone-chilling insane giggle—the heeheeheehee of a madwoman—and there are enough roars and whoops and screams and growls to fill an album. Eventually you come to miss fisi if he is seldom in the area. He has become a part of your life, like the moon and the bugs and the baboons and the scorpions.
I finally got fond of fisi, and very sorry for him. He is such a dreadful fellow, hated by every living creature, loathed by all, shunned by all, laughed at by all, that I kind of adopted him. No living creature, I thought, should have so much bad luck and live so shamefully, so ignobly. All the other African animals have a dignity that lasts until fisi, the undignified, has the last laugh over their cracked and crunching bones.
And then my friend fisi betrayed my good will later on by eating up half my portable library, wrecking the booze supply out of sheer vandalism, and chewing up a perfectly good hat. He also made off with the skull and head skin of a greater kudu bull—as he once ate up a fine leopard Tommy Shevlin killed, leaving one wisp of tail to accent his gluttony. That is when you get all out of sorts with fisi, remembering that next time, no matter how sorry you are for this dreadful monster, he may decide to dine on your face.
We sat quietly for one last cigarette, watching the fire bank down into gray ash over red coals. The snapping and the snarling had finished.
“I think I’ll go to bed,” Harry said. “Night, all. See you in the early bright.”
“Good night,” Virginia said, and then turned to me. “I have to go to the ladies’ room tent,” she said. “This is one evening that a lady will require a gentleman to stand outside with a gun while she powders her nose. Honest to God, if I ever get home whole, I will never leave the 21 Club again. I might as well be living in a bloody zoo.”
When we went to bed and crawled under the mosquito netting, I couldn’t help thinking, before sleep crept over me, that a few shillings’ worth of net constituted no real obstacle to anything that was even reasonably hungry.
Chapter 7
THE NIGHT was cold and clear in the little camp at the Grumeti in Tanganyika. It was a sharp-flavored winy night, tangy like New England in the fall, with the stars distinct against the sky. The boys had reared a roaring blaze out of desert-dry thornbush logs. The dinner was responding graciously to a third cup of coffee and a cognac. Everybody was tired. Beat. It had been a day. It had been a hell of a day. There had been the big waterbuck in the morning and the redheaded lion in the afternoon, and the nasty business with all the lionesses and the cubs. Suddenly the wind veered.
A smell raced down on the breeze, a dreadful smell.
“Oho,” Harry Selby said. “Chanel No. 5, if you are a leopard. That delicious aroma would be your pig and your Grant gazelle. It may smell awful to you, but the bait has hit just about the right stage of rot to smell better than Camembert to our noisy friend of the fig tree. I was never able to figure why the cleanest, neatest animal in the bush waits until his dinner is maggoty before he really works up an appetite. Let’s see. We’ve had the bait up five days now. The boys say your pussycat’s been feeding since yesterday. He ought to be through the pig now and working on the Grant. He ought to be feeling pretty cheeky about his vested interest in that tree.
“I don’t know what there is about that tree,” the professional hunter said. “I think maybe it’s either bewitched or else made out of pure catnip. You can’t keep the leopards out of it. It’s only about five hundred yards from camp. I come here year after year and we always get a leopard. I got one three months ago. I got one six months before that. There’s an old tabby lives in it, and she changes boy friends every time. We’ll go to the blind tomorrow and we’ll pull her newest fiancé out for you—that is, if he’s chewed deep enough into that Grant. That is, too, if you can hit him.”
At this stage I was beginning to be something past arrogant. Insufferable might be the right word.
“What is all this nonsense about leopards?” I said. “Everybody gives you the old mysterious act. Don Ker tells me about the safari that’s been out fourteen years and hasn’t got a leopard yet. Everybody says you’ll probably get a lion and most of the other stuff but don’t count on leopards. Leopards are where you find them. We got two eating out of one tree and another feeding on that other tree up the river, and we saw one coming back from the buffalo business yesterday. They chase up and down the swamp all night, cursing at the baboons. You sit over there looking wise and mutter about if we see him and if I hit him when we do see him. What do you mean, if I hit him? You throw a lion at me the first day out and I hit him in the back of the neck. I got that waterbuck with one through the pump, and I knocked the brainpan off that second simba okay enough, and I break the back on a running eland at plus two hundr
ed yards. What have I got to do to shoot a sitting leopard at thirty-five feet with a scope on the gun? Use a silver bullet?”
“Leopards ain’t like other things,” Harry said. “Leopards do strange things to people’s personality. Leopards and kudu affect people oddly. I saw a bloke fire into the air three times, once, and then throw his gun at a standing kudu. I had a chap here one time fired at the leopard first night and missed. We came back the second night. Same leopard in the same tree. Fired again. Missed. This was a chap with all manner of medals for sharpshooting. A firecracker. Splits lemons at four hundred yards, shooting offhand. Pure hell on running Tommies at six hundred yards, or some such. Knew hell’s own amount about bullet weights and velocities and things. Claims a .220 Swift is plenty big enough for the average elephant. Already got the boys calling him One Bullet Joe.”
“So?” I said.
“Came back the third day. Leopard up the tree. Fired again. Broad daylight, too, not even six o’clock yet. Missed him clean. Missed him the next night. Missed him for the fifth time on the following night. Leopard very plucky. Seemed to be growing fond of the sportsman. Came back again on the sixth night, and this time my bloke creases him on the back of the neck. Leopard takes off into the bush. I grab the shotgun and take off after him. Hapana. Nothing. No blood and no tracks. Worked him most of the night with a flashlight, expecting him on the back of my neck any minute. Hapana chui. My sport quit leopards in disgust and went back to shooting lemons at 350 yards.”