by Robert Ruark
“What happened to Ruark?”
“Oh he was hit in the head with a bear. Always said he’d come to a bad end.”
Whoever might have made this snide remark would not have included the fact that in order to get hit in the head with a bear you have to push a skiff about half a league in shallow water, breathing the delightful aroma of rotting salmon, and then stumble another half a league onward over moss-slick stones, feeling the gruesome, fleshy squish of the same rotting salmon under booted foot, before you get to the base of the mountain you must climb in order to see the bears in a nine-foot jungle of lush grass.
A bear is not a bear; it is a far-distant black grubworm on a piece of ragged yellow carpet, and shortly it will go away never to be seen again. That’s if it is worth shooting. You fairly have to fight your way through the she-bears with half-grown cubs, each of which could throw a horse over its shoulder and gallop it a country mile. But the big boys are all mobbed up in the hills, eating blueberries and playing poker.
The thing most non-hunters don’t realize about the artistic pain that goes into filling four ounces of flesh-and-feathers or seven tons of elephant with the correct prescription is that when you walk out thataway you got to walk back thisaway. Non-fishermen don’t realize that the current is likely to run steadily in one direction, and if you float downstream, eventually you have to fight your way upstream. From rabbit to tiger, from bobwhite to buffalo, from sand perch to marlin, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
And the animals have us always stopped on a simple axiom: Nothing moves very much except in early morning or late afternoon, which means you leave camp in blackest freezing dawn and return—cursing, stumbling, bone-sore—in the chill of even blacker night. Except that now you are thorn-wounded, stone-bruised, ankle-wobbly, nose-running, lip-parched, bug-bit—and nearly always without the thing you went after in the first place.
I do not know how many dusty miles I have driven in Kenya and Tanganyika, in North Carolina and Texas, how many bogged-down vehicles I have rescued, how much mud I have slogged through, how many busted axles, how many tsetse-fly bites, how many wait-a-bit thorns, how much blazing sun or how much grinding monotony, aggravated by cracked lips and blistered feet. I do not remember the pain when I see a noble head on the wall, whether it’s a whitetail or a really good buff. I just remember the triumphal coming into camp with the horn beeping and the promise of a cold Martini before a hot fire.
But I do remember the aching agony of my legs on a little twenty-mile jaunt after elephant, when we had struggled through the highest, closest-clenched grass and past the ugliest, nearest rhino I ever hope not to see any more to finally achieve the blessed level calm of a railroad bed. I sighed and thought, Now we’re: home, but a sadist named John Sutton smiled brightly and said, “Well, we’re almost there. It’s only another seven miles.” I made it, God knows how, but the elephants have been safe from me since.
The most self-punishing hunters I know today are millionaires who have been and been and been, who’ve shot it all and don’t really want to shoot any more. They just want to see and to suffer. One is just back, after searching a couple of months for what is, in these times, the almost mythical grail of an elephant that will go a hundred and fifty pounds or better per tusk. I doubt he shot anything larger than a sand grouse during the trip, because he is not interested in killing just to hear the gun go off. But he must have been spending a minimum thousand a week just to walk in foot-sucking sand, following seductive tracks through razored dwarf palm, only to end up in daily disappointment and the long trek back.
What makes them do it? Why go to all that bother? It isn’t entirely curiosity, because the guy I have in mind has made at least eight safaris.
It must get back to the Old Man’s theory that you ain’t happy unless you’re hurtin’, and that somewhere in the hurt you cleanse yourself of a lot of civilized nonsense that spreads a thick veneer on the hides of people, like a scabby overpaint when what you really need first is a scrape job or a blowtorch. You scrape it off, you sweat it off, you walk it off. Your head gets clearer, your senses sharper, and when you do come back—blistered, thirsty, too tired to be hungry, too weary to wash—some of the nonsense of today has been burnt away.
Some beauty has been observed, some hardships overcome, some sympathies established, and there is a wondrous satisfaction about honest fatigue. I remember once I took a hard-core city slicker—a man who did not like dogs, who knew nothing of guns or game—on a pheasant hunt in Connecticut, which was blanketed with a light early-autumn snow. The fellowship in the snug cabin was excellent, the food fine, and the next day the dogs worked beautifully. The birds were plentiful. We had what is generally described as a magnificent day in the blazing autumn woods, and the bourbon was beneficent when we came in, beat, with a lovely bag of birds and memories to the beckoning fingers of the fire.
Our man had missed manfully; his Stork Club training had done little for his wind as we trudged the snowy hills. Finally, if only to vindicate himself to the dogs, he more or less accidentally killed a magnificent cock pheasant and insisted on carrying it personally all the weary way back to the lodge. He leaped immediately to the phone and called all his acquaintances—and they are widespread, including Europe and Mexico—to declaim his prowess over the rumpled bird that he still stroked mentally as he talked.
He finally sat down, emotionally overcome. “How long has this been going on?” he asked. “And where have I been all my life?”
I don’t know. Possibly somewhere beyond the point reached when the first cave man did in the first hairy mammoth for food and clothing, and then was constrained to scratch its picture on the wall. Something between gratification of the hunger pangs and some essential element of esthetic conflict between man and animal, man and bird, man and death took over to build hunting into an art form of appreciation and self-sacrifice, of a willingness to punish the hunter’s body to make a point of personal egotism; with, finally, a possible tangible reward at the end—a plume to deck the cave lady’s head, a fine tusk to turn into a rude plowshare.
And always the fire, the snugness inside to hold the elements aloof once the dreadful travail of the day was done. And then the old boy can sit down with the braggies to tell all the cave kids how good Papa done that day with his spear.
It is, I suppose the Old Man would say, a form of crawling back into the cave, but all I want ahead of it is a long, hard day’s work in the woods, so that I’ll feel I’ve earned it when the cave lady brings me some dinosaur broth or even a Brontosaurus hamburger. Quietly. On time.
10—Hang Your Stocking in August
“Christmas,” the Old Man once said, “is a damned dull day, and generally raining. But preparing for it is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” And as a Texas friend of mine once opined, “It ain’t gettin’ ready that’s the most fun. It’s the gettin’ ready to get ready.”
It is maybe August elsewhere—just plain August—but in England it is something else. You can throw away all those trite flights of prose about the trees being lushly heavy with August, the lazy buzzing hum of August. In England during August a lot of people are whetted to a fine edge and are busier than they were in the blitz.
There is a day in August that is called simply The Twelfth. Nothing more, but nobody ever asks, “The twelfth of what?” Because the Twelfth is when the grouse season opens in Scotland. Ever since the season closed last fall all the wine-purpled gentlemen with ersatz healthy complexions have been preparing for this day. Sherlock Holmes deerstalkers have been carefully rescued from the moths, tweed knickers and canvas gaiters have been hauled out of the attic, shooting sticks have been furbished to a high-silver shine, and the matched Purdeys and Greeners and Churchills have been exhumed from their plush-lined cases and searched suspiciously for a minute speck of dust. The square leather cartridge cases come out of the attic, and the state of the world is neglected. What the gentry wants to know is the condition of the heather, the amoun
t of the hatch, the abundance of the vital quartz; and Nasser can go and be damned, together with all the Russians. I rather like the idea.
All this came up because I more or less tore off an arm one time just before the quail season opened. A recent split finger, in the middle of a working project, fetched it back strong. Just before I was supposed to leave for a safari I helped Mama in the kitchen, and wound up with a hand that was grease-crisped to the bone. I had been preparing for that safari for eighteen solid months. During the first two days I had to shoot an elephant and a rhino under rather tense conditions, and the second finger of the convalescing right hand was split open like a frankfurter that had tarried overlong on the grill.
In the strange thinking process of a small boy August was the big month, because August prepared you for September. September whipped you into shape for October, and October was the trial run for the best of them all: November. After that December and January were a cinch, and all you had to do was sweat out February and March, and then the fish bit again and school’s recess was just around the corner.
In August I was sick to death of summer. I was weary of summer as a man tires of too many gooey desserts, and craves the peasant companionship of hard ham and hominy, the smell of wood smoke, the invigorating thrashing of a salt breeze, or the nip of frost that wrinkles the persimmons, browns the grasses, and pulls the leaves off trees so you can see the squirrels. Along about August summer took on the aspect of a pretty woman who had let herself go and was beginning to bulge over her girdle as a result of too much fudge.
Enough of those flowers, boy; let’s hear a little hound music bugling in the piny woods.
The Old Man had said that if you just confined life to preparation you’d never really be disappointed when the actuality arrived. This was soundly cynical, but it was true—if you can accept a poet’s negation of the harsh bitterness of reality. Stars in eyes have never been practical, but sometimes are more comfortable than a speck of actual grit.
It would not be very long before the bluefish were running close to the coast. One big norther in September would bring them along for you. So a man had better get up to the attic or into the closets, and see what shape the fishing tackle was in. It is amazing what manner of demons infest the secret places in which a man hides his fishing gear. They perform strange feats of tangling lines, misleading leaders, warping rods, and jamming reels. So if August had no other value it was a fine month for straightening out the mischief the leprechauns had wreaked on his salt water tackle over the winter.
The season for squirrel, marsh hen, and dove would suddenly be upon you, and the dogs had gotten awful lax. The bird dogs and the duck dogs had a little more time to be lazy in, but it certainly was time to ginger up the hounds and beat a little nonsense out of the utility crossbreeds, the squirrel-chasers and the rabbit-coursers that had done nothing but sleep under the house all summer and eat themselves out of shape.
Come to think of it, I know of nothing as shiftless as a working dog when there’s no work. The finest pointer in the world, the best-bred setter, the most dedicated hound, the infallible Chesapeake, all get to be bums over the slack months. Maybe they are like writers who make sudden money and don’t have to write for a while, for they sure do get out of the habit of earning their keep. When you finally kick them loose from lethargy they look at you as if you were asking them to stick up a bank or volunteer for a trip to the moon.
“You know,” the Old Man used to say, “I never knew anybody who really liked his work. I knew a lot of people who said they liked their work, but I disbelieved it. Take one of these dogs. The setters were created to find quail. The retrievers were made to fetch ducks. The fice dogs were accidentally provided to tree squirrels and jump rabbits. But damme, none of them are satisfied. The bird dogs want to run rabbits, and the junk dogs want to be pointers. The duck dogs want to sit in the blind and shiver and look at you with them appealing brown eyes, like Eliza being sent out into the snow and ice. Any man or any dog really needs a boot in the behind to set him about his appointed task.”
Part of August’s preparation was to take the dogs into the woods and cure them of laziness, rebellion, and the idea that the world owed them a living. It is possible that a whippy stick laid smartly on the behind is mildly brutal, but you could more swiftly reimbue a lazy dog with fresh interest in his work by use of a switch than by all the preacherly persuasions in the world.
At that time you really had to reindoctrinate the quail in the idea that they were not nightingales paid by the state to thrill the world with song, but five-ounce packages of dynamite that shortly were going to be working on their own time, and that men, dogs, and guns were portion to their soldier’s pay. I will entertain arguments, but I swear you could train a covey of quail to kind of behave at the same time you were schooling the newest puppy and informing the elder canine statesmen that they really were not Winston Churchill after a long stretch on the Riviera. You could accustom the bob white to use in a certain place at a certain time, and there were always some coveys that almost left you a note in a cleft stick if they decided to go someplace else to spend the afternoon.
Man, but that August was busy, and a lot of it was waiting for the drowsy heat to depart and the first bracing chill to come. It seemed like September would never arrive, and in the meantime you had to put up with all the people who cluttered the beaches and jammed the streetcars under some sort of mistaken idea that they were having a vacation. August was a time of strangers—sunburned, pink-blotched people, people you didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Strangers far from home, cluttering up the local facilities.
On a hot day, with the asphalt oozing under bare feet and the air dripping humidity, the thoughts of autumn crispness became well-nigh unbearable. The dogs’ tongues lolled and they panted in the heat. The sea was a solid shimmer of sun, unlike your angry gray friend that crashed onto the beaches and communicated its leashed fierceness to you, promising lean, mean, undershot-jawed bluefish and solid silver slabs of sea bass, while the gulls screamed.
The flies all came into the house in August, as I recall, and the mosquitoes, sensing winter death ahead, tried to eat everybody before they died. While scratching bites you kept telling yourself that Labor Day would bring that norther and the mosquitoes would die and the people would go away and a man might breathe again.
August was really the night before Christmas. I was not seeing the steaming, traffic-cluttered city streets or drowsing to the hum of cicadas or hearing the plaint of the whippoorwills at night. The mockingbird in the magnolia bored me with his silvery night song, and I wished he would shut up. He sounded too much like summer, and I would have preferred to hear a turkey gobble.
What I was really hearing was an angry squawk as a marsh hen flapped ungainly from the tips of the marsh grass, almost covered by the swollen tides the full moon and the northeaster brought. I was hearing the harsh whistle of duck wings as they arrived from Canada. I was seeing the dark frieze of geese before a full moon, the night trembling with honking. I was hearing a coon dog belling in the woods, and my mouth was watering, because when you could hear the hounds hog-killing time was close, the frost was on the punkin, and oysters were fit to eat again.
Then I was thinking that the summer calling of quail changed, abruptly, and that the classic bob-white, bob-bob-white changed to a lonely who-he, who-he, as the scattered coveys remustered in the dusk. I was already cupping an ear for the snort of a buck whitetail powerfully overcome by nipping frost and his own importance, his neck swollen with lust and his eye walled for all the pretty girls in a twenty-mile area.
And all the time it kept on being August, August, August! Where was September, the golden month, the threshold of the fine times, the wondrous days when the leaves turned gold and red and the pine woods assumed dark, spicy importance again? Where are you, September? Possibly you don’t recall the frustration, the oil-smelling frustration, of cleaning a gun you know damn well you can’t use for anot
her month. Or you may not remember just how long it can be until the quail season opens in November. Time drags. The days, for a boy, never end, although the days end very swiftly in the three months you are allowed to shoot quail. Then it is barely morning before it’s dark. Weeks tumble into one another, telescoped like an accordion. This is not all boy feeling; some several hundred years later as a man I went on my first African safari, and I swear it was over before I got there. Or almost.
But in one way August may be the best of all the months. It holds the promise of autumn, the breathless excitement of what is just around the corner, and if autumn falls down on you you have at least experienced delicious anticipation. Even if it rains on a future autumn Saturday, even if it’s too calm for the ducks, even if the dogs’ noses go hot it has not happened to you yet. What you experience in August is a future millennium, where the ducks always decoy well, the geese always come in to feed before the legal shooting hour expires, and where no dog ever runs up a covey of quail because of a dry smeller.
Whether you are shooting grouse with a thousand-dollar Purdey in November or just whistling up a yellow fice dog to go look for a squirrel with your mail-order .22 it is always nice to remember one thing: No matter what happens that day, good or bad, you really paid for the day in August, the bridesmaid of all the months, the bridesmaid who will never be a bride.
11—Good-bye, Cruel World
My boy Mark Robert, godson to me and son to a friend, has a tent pitched in the yard outside his pappy’s house in Limuru in Kenya. Mark is six years old. He has his air gun and his cooking equipment and most of his lares and penates in the tent. But up to now he is afraid to pass the night in the tent, although Mummy is within easy hail and he has his lion dog, Sam (part dachshund, part cocker), to keep the carnivores at bay.