Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  We finally hit the top. Just before we stopped the jeep to wait for the lorry to come up, Harry pointed at an eagle. He was suspended against the cold, gray sky. His wings were churning furiously. He was headed into the wind and going exactly nowhere. I had on wool pajamas under my safari clothes. I was wearing a cashmere sweater over the pajamas. Over all was a heavy trench coat, and I was never colder in my life. It must have been somewhere around thirty degrees, with a sixty-knot gale going at nine thousand feet.

  Harry pointed down into the vast crater of Ngorongoro, the extinct volcano, the fifteen-mile-wide walled meadow in which thousands of head of game roamed, a reservoir achievable mainly by a meandering wildebeest trail in which you could see some fairly fresh droppings—a trail that twisted and tortured itself thousands of feet below to the lush green of the volcano’s floor.

  “This was once a hell of a place to shoot,” he said. “Used to pull lions out of this crater by the hundreds. It’s still a sort of Shangri-La. Not many people been down into the bottom. Some bloke was going to lower a hunting car down into the crater, piece by piece, but I don’t know whether he made it. Sometime, when I have time, I’d love to go down there and spend six months or so looking around.”

  “Next trip,” Virginia said. “Let’s creep down the side of this other hill and find a little warmth. This is more like Alaska than Africa. I’m froze.”

  “That’s what makes it so fascinating,” Harry said. “I’ll be showing you baobab trees and bananas in another few hours. We’ll camp tonight in a place so bloody Tarzany that you have to carry a Masai shield to shoo off the tsetses. Tropical butterflies and snakes in the bed.”

  “Snakes or not,” Virginia said, “if it’s warm, it’s for me. Here comes Annie, sneaking up the hill behind us. To horse, my good man, and let us dig up that resthouse you were mentioning a bit back and have one of Dr. Ruark’s nutritious deliciouses.”

  The grin on the author is three parts martinis. The grin on the memsaab is a pleased one, owing to having gotten the author to the plane at all. Leaving for a safari is far more difficult than making the actual trip because of last-minute complications and friends. (Photo courtesy of TWA)

  The boy is scraping a skin. That’s a typical jungle camp in the background. The car is not stuck now. It will be stuck later, and many times. Even this is simpler than getting out of town from New York. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  Now this is when it becomes worthwhile. That’s Kilimanjaro, snowcapped and lovely, in the background. There’s an acacia at the left, and the veld is peopled by zebra. This is as pretty a picture of Africa as you’ll see because there’s so very little nonsense in it. Or people. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  This is Pop, looking stern and noble and full of vitamins. A fairly decent buffalo can always bring out the ham in the city boy, or any other boy who has just shot one. This is a long way from the “21” [club] and just a page or so away. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  Mama is looking pleased with herself again because she has transported the old man all those miles and now is mixed up in a lion dance, where her own mane mingles with the headdresses of the other savages. They’re local kids from the Wa-Ikoma settlement, so far down into Tanganyika that you might as well not bother. It takes them longer to put on their paint than it takes a debutante, and they just let the paint wear off. Like debutantes. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  This is known as the authentication shot. The shabby character on the left has been in Africa so long he’s lost his health again and seems to be just leaving the local Chez Dave. Couple in the middle are Mr. and Mrs. Armand Denis, the famous explorer-moviemaker, and his bride, whom he calls Poochy. Babe with the glasses is Mrs. Ruark, who seems to have retained her health. (Photo courtesy of Phil Schultz)

  This is how a white hunter looks when he is working in the bush. He is very tall, very broad, and full of confidence and strength. This is the man who keeps the lions from eating you. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  Here is the same white hunter, but coming into New York now, where you have to keep the lions from eating him. Meet young Harry Selby, the best professional hunter in British East Africa, although he will not be thirty for a long time. When he left New York after this visit, he swore he was through with sidewalks forever and would take his chances with rogue elephants in the musth season. (Photo courtesy of Pan American)

  These are two cheetahs, hunting leopards, taking off for fun. When they whip past sixty miles an hour, there is not much left to chase. They are an odd breed of cat since zoologically they are a good half dog and make loving pets when they aren’t biting you. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  These are impalas. An impala is a happy little bloke who is the color of a new-minted penny on his top side, brilliant white beneath, and black-barred on the sides. Sometimes, just for laughs, he will jump fifteen or twenty feet into the air. What makes this shot unusual is that you so seldom see so many so high in the air all at once. They aren’t going anywhere. In a moment they will turn and leap back at you—just because they feel so good. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  This is a nice old boy, this papa lion, sore at nobody and wishing you’d feed him. Can’t say the same for Junior. Mama is suspicious, but Buster is just plain sore. He will grow up to have ulcers, but the snarl is sincere, and the tiny teeth are needle-sharp. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  You might just call this one “lions at play or in love” because the lioness is plainly kissing Papa in the top shot. It is a remarkable shot only in that so few people get so close to lions in love. Harry Selby was the eavesdropper. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  Lions again, and an unusual Selby shot of four lads making a stalk against a herd of waterbuck. What you don’t see is the lioness who will kill one. These boys in the foreground are just window dressing, and the buck doesn’t care about them. Mama lion, downwind from them and off in those trees, will do the shopping with her claws. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  The foot on the neck is ham again. Always there is ham in a man who goes against a lion and wins. This was a gorgeous simba with a bright red mane and green eyes. The reason Kidogo and Chabani seem so pleased is that just a few seconds before there were five lions mixed up in this thing and the issue seemed slightly in doubt. Kidogo, at right, was on the ground with the bwana and remembers that there was one lioness we should have shot and didn’t, out of respect for females. But he’s as nervous now as I am. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  You can barely tell the man from the beast here, except the beast is prettier. Difference is the leopard’s dead. The man only looks that way. (Photos on this page courtesy of Harry Selby)

  Above and over at the left there is some unusual leopard stuff. You seldom see them at all. You very rarely see them with a camera. And then you never see them in the daytime unless you are lucky like Tony Henley and have a camera with you and remember to take the cap off it. There’s been one safari out fourteen of fifteen years now that still hasn’t got a leopard to call its own, and most of the times you never bet on seeing one, let alone shooting one with a gun first or a camera second. Bloke above is chewing on either an impala or a Tommy. He seems happy at his task. (Photo courtesy of Tony Henley)

  These are some more Wa-Ikoma warriors who have caught a slight infection from Hollywood about sunglasses. The sunglasses are phony. The lion manes that the lads wear on their heads aren’t phony. The boys collect their own headdresses. With spears. (Photos on this page courtesy of Harry Selby)

  There is something powerfully pleasing about baboons. Maybe because they think we look like them. And they smell terrible. Like we do. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  This lovely African plain with its myriad beasts is marvelous to see. Everybody is in love and happy and gamboling about on the flower-scattered meadows. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  Except when sex comes into the picture. And here we have two young Thomson gazelles slugging it
out, just like in the Stork Club, and for the same reason. The dame’ll go off with somebody else. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  Grant gazelle at the bottom, and this is the way you’ll most always see them, going away from you. Giraffe and some zebras up top, curious and alert. The giraffe is a real clown, and nobody bothers him much any more. But he has been known to kill a lion with his feet. We used to eat the Grant, but he has measles now, and his liver has its problems. I sympathize with the Grant. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  You have to love the rhino, his horn is so long, and he makes such pretty pictures. The only trouble with him is that he’s half-blind, mad all the time, and isn’t nearly so clumsy as he seems. He turns swiftly and smells well, and if he is as close as he seems at lower right, then he’s dead a few minutes later. Else he’d have the photograph of you. It’s a thing people don’t understand about photography. Somebody had to tell the animal it was time to quit charging, and it wasn’t the photographer. (Photos courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  Elephants are like this. Peaceful and happy and busy. (Photos courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  Elephants are like this too. Coming quietly first, and then with a bustle of dust and a squeal of anger, and then like the boy at lower left. The fellow with the gun is Tony Dyer, a youngster who was protecting the cameraman in a recent film. Tony shot this fellow at six yards. From necessity. The elephant disliked actors. (Photos courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  The big type on the extreme left was snapped by Harry Selby on a reserve. The reason this Cape buffalo was on the reserve was that he knew what he was wearing on his head by way of souvenir. That horn spread is enough to make a collector weep. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  You get some idea about how big a buffalo is. This one weighed a ton and scared us all silly. There is roughly as much room to sit on him as you will find in the average Pullman bar car. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  Above you see a fair example of the sanitation corps at toil. Nothing is wasted in Africa, and this is as fine a shot of vultures as Tony Dyer is apt to make. Or anybody. What he left out were the marabou storks, which will take the choicest bits away from the vultures. And the ants. They’ll clean up the rest of the mess. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  This is Memsaab Ruark proving that vanity can exist anywhere. Mama was steady set on staying blonde. Juma, the headman, got the local equivalent of an Antoine assignment.

  Every Friday was hair day, and Juma got awfully arrogant about it. You know what will happen to this boy. He has got to wind up in a salon. (Photo courtesy of Phil Shultz)

  Nothing here but wildebeests, the bad-gag buffalo types who are really named gnu. Nothing stupider, uglier, or more prevalent. Their tails make fine fly whisks. Only hyenas prefer them as food. And I never shot one. Too much like shooting a relative. (Photo courtesy of Tony Dyer)

  Here we are finally in business. This baby is on my wall. It is a Tanganyikan waterbuck, and nobody you know has his peer on any wall. This is as noble a stag as you can find—if he were actually a stag. Harry Selby kissed him when we found him. So did Zim, the taxidermist in Nairobi, and Coleman Jonas, the taxidermist in America. So did old Katunga, the head skinner in camp. This is a hell of a waterbuck. That is why the author is weeping, at left, and so negligent of the skinning, at right. (Photos by Virginia Ruark)

  We ate pretty good out there, if you like breast of guinea fowl, top—in the raw—but available. Those are grouse and spur fowl Mama is flaunting at the bottom. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  Mama got overbearingly arrogant as a shotgunner. But she kept us fed while Father was slaving at the serious work. God only knows how many she missed because I have seen her shooting pheasant since. (Photo courtesy of Harry Selby)

  That’s a pretty good impala, and I expect his horns might buy him a place in Rowland Ward’s Hall of Fame. I couldn’t care less. It was a nice day, and the boys needed meat, and I hit what I was aiming at. I would rather for me to have this impala than for a hyena to have this impala—because my memory is longer. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  Here is a beautiful example of what the Marshall Plan has done to the natives everywhere and a great reaction to all peoples abroad. These kids are saying good-bye. To their first jeep. And to them it looks awful. (Photo by Virginia Ruark)

  The lorry lumbered up, stopped, and Harry sent it on ahead of us. We gave her a mile’s start and started down. About halfway down, or around, the crater, he turned off the trail into what seemed a picnic ground, a series of rustic huts overlooking Ngorongoro, with the grass green around them, the flowers bright, and such odd and miraculous things as taps with running water and stone fireplaces. There was even a three-hole latrine and what seemed to have been a shower bath before it rusted out of shape. A few citizens, white and black, had pre-empted most of the camping space. We pushed the jeep along to the lower end of the encampment and outspanned. It was still cool, as it is cool in the high hills of Australia in the wintertime, but not the freezing, blowing cold of the summit where the eagle hung suspended against the force of the gale. Chabani went off with the basins and found some water. We removed several pounds of lava dust, cut a bottle of gin three ways, and lazed back on the green grass. It was nice, there on the side of the volcano, seeing the tiny moving specks of game herds at the bottom, drinking the gritty warm martinis, and contemplating a hot bath no more than four hours away.

  Harry puttered around in the chop box and came up with some cold francolin and cold beans, coarse cold bread, and rock-hard butter. It had melted and frozen and looked like yellow lava. The taste was not unsimilar, either.

  “You’ll like Manyara,” he said. “It’s the real movie jungle, tropical, big trees, thick bush, and steamy-hot kind of Africa. The lake is a big soda deposit. When it’s dry, you can rip up and down on its bed at ninety miles an hour, if you’ve a vehicle that’ll do ninety miles an hour. The shores are stiff with rhino and a kind of smallish, reddish buffalo. We ought to pick up a good rhino first day out—second day, anyhow. Then we’ll have a look up in the hills around Kitete for an oryx, kiss Manyara good-bye, and shoot up past Kondoa to have a look-see at the kudu. We’re over the hard part now, except maybe for the kudu. Might get a nice one the first day. Mightn’t get one at all. But the rhino I can almost guarantee. Lion and leopard are the tough ones, and we breezed through lion and leopard. Luck holds, we’ll have a chance to get in at least a couple of weeks at the N.F.D. Then you can shoot your bloody birds to your heart’s delight, and pull in an elephant as well, if you’re so minded.”

  The Manyara side of Ngorongoro was considerably more cheerful to look at than the Serengeti side. The earth was a dark maroon clay, still slippery and treacherous from the recent rains. The vegetation was thick alongside the narrow roads. The grass we saw was dark green against the clay. These slopes were farming country. The road was fairly populous with both vehicles and strolling natives. It seemed strange to see Europeans again after a couple of weeks of complete solitude, and stranger still to see automobiles and busses with yelling natives hanging out of the rear end. The wet road, deeply torn with skid marks, crowded the lip of the sheer drop, and we could see where Annie Lorry had slewed seriously on several bends. We could also see a straight plunge down the side, dripping green and thick with baobab and creepers, verdant thorn and fleshy-looking underbrush. This was wet country—and there didn’t seem to be any bottom to where you could fall if the jeep skidded too enthusiastically. I was beat from the night before and a little stupefied from the heavy lunch and the generous gin. I slept going down the hill and woke up just as we came into the little settlement off Mto-Wa-Mbu, the River of Mosquitoes. I had seen the town before, in Cuba, in Spain, in North Africa, in Mexico.

  The bunches of bananas hanging outside the general store with its dobe walls and corrugated-iron roof, the potbellied kids and the starved dogs playing in the middle of the dusty streets, the stacks of sugar cane leaning against the sides of the shops,
the busy sewing machines on the clay verandas, the smoke and smells coming from the shabby mud huts—this was the kind of country I knew. I knew the people, too. Tanganyika comes from the word tanganya, which means mixed up. These were mixed-up folks. Negroes with a heavy strain of Arab. Pure Arabs in fezzes and turbans. Indians, Sikh, and Parsi and lower grades of babu, in robes and swaddling-cloth pants and jodhpurs under caftans. The women with the saris and the caste marks, alongside plum-black local ladies with floppy bare breasts over cheap curtain-material wraparounds.

  All the local ladies were very brightly dressed, and very conscious of their high style, but no more style-conscious than the two or three effeminately surly Masai morani leaning arrogantly on their spears, smeared red with ocher over coppery hides, their long hair greased and plaited into thick pigtails. Maybe someday when I know them better I will learn to love the Masai as today I love the Wakamba and the Nandi. But every time I see one of those elaborately got-up, sneering dandies with all the cheap-john jewelry, the heavy-lidded eyes, and the supercilious sneer, I think of fagot parties I have stumbled upon, and the toe of my boot itches. A young Masai moran knows he’s hot stuff, and he has a way of flirting his goatskin cloak at you, of shrugging insolently, which leads you to believe that he’s been practicing hours before a cheap hand mirror before he comes to town to give the locals a break.