Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  The average knight, the Old Man went on, was nothing much more than a paid fighter when a local war sprang up, and in between wars he hung around the castles, tickling the ladies fair, getting plastered twice a day on some sort of moonshine they called mead, and lying his head off about all the brave deeds he performed last time out against the Saracens or mayhap the next-door neighbor.

  A knight-errant wasn’t anything better than a knight out of work. After his liege lord got sick of listening to all the gassing about how many dragons the knight had fetched with his lance and how many heathen he’d done in with his sword, after he got tired of the knight eating him out of castle and home and swilling down all the best liquor and kissing the prettiest maidens, the lord would spot weld the knight into his cast-iron overalls and gently indicate the drawbridge, with the suggestion that travel was broadening and that maybe King Theobald the Unwashed, down the road apiece, hadn’t heard all of Sir Bohort’s latest best stories.

  “A knight-errant,” the Old Man said, warming up at the mention of mead, which appeared to be some sort of nerve balm constructed mainly of fermented honey and malt and fit to blow the vizor off a headpiece, “a knight-errant was nothin’ better than a bum. Him and his squire—if he had one—rambled around the countryside beggin’ a hand-out here, stealin’ a shoat there, kissin’ the pretty milkmaids, and now and again moochin’ a meal and a night on a pallet in front of the fire in a castle or an abbey. Often as not they slept out by the crossroads or in a pigsty or a barn.

  “They had fleas in abundance in them days, inside the castles and out, and you can bet that the average knight-errant was pretty lousy too. You can imagine the fun a flock of fleas and cooties might have inside that iron undershirt, with no way for Sir Lancelot to scratch less’n he had a blowtorch with him.”

  Castles, the Old Man continued, were powerful short on central heating, inside toilets, and general comfort. They were drafty and kind of noisy, what with generally being overrun with the ghosts of all the people that had been locked up and died in the donjon keeps.

  “At best,” the Old Man said, “knights were a feisty lot, and would steal anything that wasn’t red-hot or nailed down. They were either chronic Mars or must have suffered from the D.T.’s, because they were always seeing bare hands clutching swords coming out of lakes or ladies rising up in the mists or evil sorcerers changing people into unicorns and such as that. They must of smelled pretty rank, too, as I believe they only washed every other year when the armor got rusty and they had to be fitted into another suit. You still want to be a knight?”

  “I’m losing my interest in the proposition,” I said. “But how did you get to be one in the olden days?” And then I could have bitten my tongue right off at the roots, because I saw he had me. The Old Man licked his chops, spread his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, and let me have it.

  “Well, good blood or bad, a fellow with a hankering to be a knight got sort of sold down the river at the age of seven. He left his happy home and got removed to the castle of his future boss or patron, as they called it in them days. And oh my, didn’t the fur fly for a spell! They called this little shirttail boy a varlet, which ain’t anything but a corruption of valet or servant. The varlet had to wait on tables and shine up the ironmongery and empty the slop jars. He only et what the master didn’t throw to the dogs. He fetched wood and drew water, and if he didn’t bow down to everybody he got a hiding. He also had to go to Sunday school every day. That was called teaching him politeness.

  “In his spare time he had to learn to dance and play the harp and sing and carry on. He had to learn to stick pigs and ride horses and work with falcons and boarhounds. He had to wrestle and tilt at other varlets with sharp sticks instead of spears.

  “When he come fourteen he graduated into being an esquire, and then the heavy work really begun. He was supposed to be able to fork a horse on the gallop, wearing a full suit of boiler plate, and jump streams and scale walls and such strenuous things as that, all under full armor. They used to lose a lot of esquires that way, because if a guy tried to jump a deep stream and didn’t make it he plumb sank. And when a wall-scaler missed his foothold, all you heard was clank! and somebody had to fetch the royal can opener to recover the corpse. Next to the king the most important man in the castle was the blacksmith. He was kept busy pounding dents out of the armor after they had subtracted the esquire.

  “These little chores occupied the squire until he was twenty-one, and when he wasn’t too bruised he had to learn to bow and scrape and kiss hands and wear handkerchiefs tied to his tin hat and carry on with the girls. Finally he became a knight. And no sooner did they smack him three times over the shoulder with a sword than they handed him his bonnet and said, ‘Git out there and play knight-errant. Go kill a dragon or something or don’t come back, because we’ve wasted a power of time and money on your education.’”

  The Old Man stopped talking and stirred the fire with his toe. He sat for a moment staring into the flickering flames. Finally he said, “You still want to be a knight?”

  “I don’t think so. It sounds like an awful lot of hard work with not much reward at the end of it, now that you’ve trimmed off all the feathers. Maybe I’ll forget it and take up some other line of work.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” the Old Man said. “When you’re as old as me you’ll generally find that when you trim the feathers off anything there ain’t much underneath but hard work and hard times, so you’d better kind of concentrate on what you got in the present and not go mooning around wanting to be an Injun or a cowboy or a lion tamer. Dogs and boats and guns and fishing rods and books—yes, I said books—ought to be enough to hold you for the present. Where do you think I learned so much about knights, for instance?”

  “Books,” I said. “I guess, books.” He had me, right and proper.

  “All right, varlet,” he said. “On your way up to my bed-room to retrieve a book called Bulfinch’s Mythology for your liege lord you might look in the closet and locate a bottle of mead. I think it’s stuck in the left leg of a hip boot. Mind you don’t drop it, and don’t you dare to sample it. Mead ain’t for varlets. It ain’t even for esquires. Mead is only for liege lords and kings, and for knights when they come in from playing hooky and fetch back their first legal dragon.”

  15—You Don’t Have to Shoot to Go Hunting

  The Old Man had kind of eased up on heavy hunting and fishing in his declining days. He would say, “I think I’ll send a boy to do a man’s work,” and run me off to the fields or waters, while he snugged himself with a dram in front of the fire. When the Boy would return, half-frozen or as wet as a drowned rat, the Old Man would smile benignly and say something cynical like, “Old and creaky as I am, I get my fun out of thinking about you freezing to death in the rain, missing those birds right and left, and wondering why I took so much trouble to teach you to hunt.”

  As I approach senility I find that now I’m the Old Man, and I get my kicks out of not hunting, but of making it possible for other people. Not that I sit by the fire, but I still receive more satisfaction in watching over people new to the business enjoy themselves—and incidentally make all the mistakes that I once made—than I used to when I was playing the lead myself.

  “The best thing about hunting and fishing,” the Old Man said, “is that you don’t have to actually do it to enjoy it. You can go to bed every night thinking how much fun you had twenty years ago, and it all comes back as clear as moonlight.

  “You can listen to somebody bragging about the fish he caught or the deer he shot or the day he fell in the duck pond, and it is a kind of immortality, because you’re doing it yourself all over again. In the meantime—and I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna—you actually do feel that it’s better to give than to get. Also, a little healthy sermon on game conservation creeps in here, because if you’ve done it once and done it twice and done it three times then what’s wrong with knocking off and leaving some of the ra
w material for the other feller?”

  The old gent’s sentiments kept coming back when Mama and I first took some tenderfeet to Africa. Apart from taking necessary camp meat and doing a little bird shooting I never fired a shot. Bob and Jane Low were the guests, and if you take a poll on Low I think he will sound off strong for the safari business. As for the blonde and beautiful Jane, a lady you’d more expect to see in a slim black dress at the 21 Club, well, you never saw a woman fall more speedily and permanently in love with African bush. Bugs, dust, rain, stuck vehicles, and all, the elegant Tia Juana never mouthed a complaint that I heard.

  Her husband was a daily delight. Nobody else had ever been to Africa before. He discovered elephants and lions and leopards. He was the first living man to see a green plain dotted with a million antelope and gazelle. Nobody else had ever laid eyes on a buffalo. Such a small thing as the taste of an orange squash became more potent than champagne. He was nearly incoherent for a week after he killed his leopard under rather unusual conditions.

  The leopard, it appears, went into a piece of bush in broad daylight, and Low and the gunbearers dived in after it. Then the leopard began to track Low (later I found its footprints atop Low’s big pug marks). They beat the bush three times, and finally the leopard tore out into the open—with the gunbearers just ahead of him.

  The boys turned right at flank speed, and the leopard turned left, also flat out. Low executed a snappy shoulder shot, and was back in camp by 11 A.M. with his Land-Rover full of lovely spotted cat. I had about five other toms feeding from trees, but this one had been reaped by Bwana Mkubwa Sana Kabisa Low on his own, all by his little self, and he was fit to bust. He broke out in a rash of babble, and I was looking over his shoulder to see how big the slain chui was.

  Low grabbed me by the collar and shook me violently. “You’re not listening to me!” he screeched. “You’re not listening to me! And then the boys went back in for the last time and fired some shotguns and the cat came...” And so forth.

  At the end of a conversationally leopard-drenched week the girls and I came to a solemn conclusion: that we wished the leopard had shot Low. But you must consider that while Low was having this high adventure, which has traveled verbally from Africa to Spain to America to London to Paris, I had more fun listening to it than if I’d committed it, having just shot a difficult chui myself the month before Bob arrived. I plain didn’t need any more leopards for myself. It still pleased me to know that if Bob hadn’t shot his cat on his own I knew enough about baits and the right trees to drape ‘em in to have had four or five big ones coming earlier and earlier every day, so drunk with power over that reeking big pig were they.

  I found that cutting down a stinking, maggoty, half-eaten wart hog can be fun. I knew that nobody else would poach on my tree, and that the leopard would be saved for another year.

  Possibly I inherited a malicious sense of humor from the Old Man, but I never laughed so hard in my life as I did on Bob Low’s hunting debut in Africa. I had sent the trucks and. jeeps on ahead, and we flew in to a makeshift airstrip, whose boundaries were marked by strips of toilet paper held down by rocks, and the wind direction indicated for the pilot by a green-wood smudge fire. Bob and Jane literally flew from starkest civilization into darkest Tanganyika bush country.

  The camp was made and ready in a beautiful new site I’d found a month before, and all the boys said, “Jambo, bwana; jambo, memsaab.” Low had on his new bush clothes from Ahamed Brothers and my floppy Texas Stetson with the leopard tail hatband, and he looked exactly like a white hunter as played by Stewart Granger with a mustache. The tables were set up in the mess tent with an array of bright bottles, and the refrigerators were humming happily, and the bantam chickens we used as alarm clocks—Rubi and Rosa—had already settled in, and Rosa had deposited another egg behind the refrigerator. The Grummetti River chuckled happily, the trees were green, and the fresh-mowed grass was a velvet carpet in front of the tents.

  Low was fairly panting to try out his—or rather, my—weapons; so we exposed him to a topi and a tommie, and after the usual trial and error he was blooded. He came back to cool drinks and dinner, convinced that somebody had made a mistake, that we had blundered into the Waldorf, which had suddenly been moved to the Bronx Zoo.

  The first serious hunting day was miraculous. We picked up fourteen lone buffalo bulls, all shootable. They galloped into a small piece of bush. Low went in after them like a little man, and he could not know that in that patch of bush were a couple of lions, a herd of buffalo, and a cobra. He also could not know that the bullets for my .450-400 double had gotten confused with the bullets from Don Bousfield’s .450-400, and that our guns were chambered differently. Low was forced to wait until one of the boys hared back to my vehicle for fresh asparagus, so to speak, leaving Low more or less naked in the presence of many large, hoofed, horned, fanged, toothy things—now wondering to himself if Africa was always this way.

  Eventually organization triumphed and Low shot his buff. But I shall never forget, as an innocent bystander, the picture of Low, all the buffalo, all the lions, and the cobra suddenly spouting from the clump of bush.

  I must say in behalf of Low, he quailed not and neither did he flee. He was a touch ashen at the end, but that sweet .450-400 spake happily, and Low managed to collect a better buff on his first day than it took me two safaris and six months and about a thousand miles of unpleasant walking and crawling to find. He was no good at all for anything the rest of the day, when the enormity of his achievement dawned.

  I do not know many of the details, except second-hand, of the good bwana’s achievements in the veld, as I was chief baby sitter for two girls, and it seems all I did was pour gin and tonics, explain whistling thorns and why they whistle, and whomp up birthday parties. Mrs. Low passed another milestone—I believe twenty-one is the accepted age for all ladies—and I laid on a flock of ex-cannibals to do her honor.

  It was quite a birthday party. First I had to explain the basic ingredients of “happy birthday to you” in Swahili to Matisia, the Low’s personal boy, who is a Wakamba. Matisia then retired to the bush to retranslate the ditty into Kamba, and emerged, beaming, with a series of grunts which ended: “Dear Janey to you.”

  Meantime, while the birthday toasts—Martinis, very dry—were being hoisted I managed to smuggle seventy-five Wa-Ikoma warriors into a patch of bush nearby without the knowledge of Memsaab Low. This is a very difficult feat, for the gentlemen had been painting themselves for three days past, wore lion-mane headdresses, had iron rattles bound to their legs, carried knives and spears, and were all slightly drunk and in a most festive mood.

  They erupted as a Masai war party descending on the Kikuyu, and for the first and only time in my life I saw the cool Madame Low shaken out of her calm. Seventy-five war-painted Ikoma lads in full fighting regalia is not a sight to sneer at, especially when it erupts into your lap. I suppose a birthday party in Tanganyika is as much a part of hunting as a fish fry or a picnic, as the lion Low did not shoot is a part of hunting.

  We had special permission on some lions for Bob, but after he made friends with a few of my leonine friends he flatly refused to shoot one. This suddenly raised him in the community concept from tenderfoot to a member of the old gentlemen’s club.

  We had been more or less shaking hands daily with a couple dozen of the gracious, lazy, blasé beasts, including two youngsters that were the most beautiful things I have ever seen on four feet—one so dark he was almost blue, and the other blond as Marilyn Monroe.

  “My God,” Low said, “how can anybody shoot one of these lovely things? Be like shooting your best friend. No, thank you very much, no lions for me.”

  To see a man go from gun-happy to conservationist in a week is quite a thrill. The average first-timer says something like: “How many of what can I shoot today?” and the professionals look at the gunbearer and shrug slightly. I couldn’t have been prouder as the father of twins than when Low turned down the easy lio
ns. The entire atmosphere of the camp changed so that you could almost taste it.

  It changed some more when John Sutton took Low on what John calls a “reccy-run,” to see what had happened to the elephant concentration that had been disrupted and widely scattered by unseasonable rains. Fifty miles over no track is a long journey in a Land-Rover. Sutton, a serious professional hunter, conducted Low on a jaunt of over six hundred miles with no camp and no sleep. If Sutton was a basket case when he veered the jeep into camp, Low was an uncomplaining corpse. I felt fine. I had been bird shooting with the ladies, and Rosa had laid another egg.

  But Low returned from the dead and got onto his shaky feet and took off next day with the other hunter, Don Bousfield. Living under a poncho on short ration, he didn’t come back until he had a beautiful pair of tusks. This was the diploma. We packed up and went to Mombasa and then to Malindi and simply went fishing.

  Low’s safari gave me more satisfaction than any of my own. He shot out the license in both Kenya and Tanganyika inside four weeks, and did not acquire an inferior trophy. He never shot once to hear the gun go off. As with ships, safaris can be difficult tests of friendship, and in the month we six white adults—me, Mama, Jane, Bob, Don, and John—were together there wasn’t a cross word. And I have known fast friends of years to cease speaking after three days in the bush.

  My most serious hunting throughout all this was a private vendetta with Rubi, the bantam cock. Rubi and I hated each other on sight. He would leap onto my camp chair, crow, and deposit droppings. Then he would crow sneeringly and swagger off to peck Rosa on the head. I armed myself with a siphon bottle and stalked him relentlessly. I may not have collected anything for the wall, but there is one bantam rooster that knows when he’s met a better man. I got him one day in full flight, using a duck-length lead with the soda bottle, and shot him down in extremely moist flames. Thereafter there was no doubt in Rubi’s mind about who was running the show.