Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  The Low safari worked so well that I decided to test my luck a little more. I had a Spanish chum, and I thought I knew him pretty well. I’d take a chance on Ricardo and...Well, we’d see.

  The Old Man had some pretty firm ideas about friends in fresh circumstances. “A man,” the Old Man once said, “ain’t no built-in hero in the woods or on the water. I don’t care if he’s got ten million dollars and six yachts. He ain’t a hero to his dog if he shoots bad. And he ain’t a hero to his friends if he hogs shots. You give me just one weekend in the woods or on a boat with a man, and I can tell you if he beats his wife or is likely to run off with the company’s money.”

  This was not the first time it had been said, but the truth persists. It takes anywhere from two days to two weeks to prove it, but in the end it always comes out. The city veneer wears thin, and the man who is a big wheel in his main line begins to whine over a visitation of gnats. The man who might appear to be a surly heel on his native heath suddenly exhibits traits of alarming humility and tremendous consideration of others in the party.

  Thinking back to when I was a boy, and the Old Man was not only younger but remarkably spry for his then considerable age, I can recall that we broke off diplomatic relations with one of his best friends. It was a simple matter of politeness involving quail. The friend was a shot-hogger, and he was always so close on the dogs’ heels that if a bird got up you had a simple choice: Don’t shoot or else shoot the friend in the back of the neck. When you walked into a covey past the pointing dog the friend would fire across your bows if the bulk of the birds went your way.

  “I spent half my life teaching dogs to honor a point and behave like decent human beings,” the Old Man said. “Now I got a friend who don’t even know how to behave like a decent dog. I think maybe we don’t hunt with Joe no more.”

  And we didn’t. We spoke politely to Joe on the streets, because we did not actively dislike Joe on the streets, but we didn’t hunt with Joe no more. Apart from his other unattractive habits he claimed every bird of dubious ownership, and never once, at the end of the day, had he made even a feeble effort to whack the bag fifty-fifty.

  Perhaps the greatest strain on personal relations I know of is a boat trip or a hunting trip of more than one day. Perhaps the boat trip is worse, because you are a captive guest in an alien sea. However, a safari, which can stretch into weeks and months, almost invariably winds up in strife. The communion is too close, the community too big, and, generally, the people too small.

  I have usually come out pretty even with the people I have taken on safari, because they have been more or less pretested under other circumstances. That’s to say I’ve hunted and fished or visited with them before, and that way you get a pretty fair idea of what you’re liable to buck.

  But you still can’t plan on the outcome. I’ve known people, who went out only to photograph, suddenly to develop a blood thirst, and people who started out wanting to shoot the entire list to wind up as bird watchers. Africa, as any reader of Ernest Hemingway will know, has a tremendous effect on personalities. The brave become cowards, the cowards become brave, the bore becomes interesting, and the practiced charmers become bores.

  And it doesn’t really need Africa to dredge out the true insides of a man or woman. You can do it as easily in North Carolina as on the Northern Frontier of Kenya. Somehow even the birds and animals seem to sense it too, and certainly the natives know. I was on a grouse shoot in Scotland a couple of times, and after the first day or so the local gillies could give you a pretty fair run-down on the general character of the clients involved. It would not surprise you to know that it was only a matter of time before Margaret would divorce Peter, or that Ian would abscond with his bank’s funds.

  And you can’t depend on precedent or type or previous condition of servitude. We’d been lucky with Bob and Jane Low. Now I was taking out this Spanish friend, Ricardo, with Harry Selby and John Sutton. Again I wasn’t shooting anything but birds and camp meat, and so this Spaniard had the rare opportunity of having the two best professional hunters in Africa (in my opinion) at his personal beck.

  If you can meet the right people Spanish shooting is fabulous, and these people like to keep a brace of guns hot and a loader busy. I just kind of wondered if Ricardo would want to shoot the first elephant he saw or a maneless lion or a lousy buffalo, just to hear the gun go off and collect a batch of flesh.

  I should not have had the reservation. Selby and Sutton said later that this was the best safari—and Ricardo Sicré of Madrid the best client—of their combined experience.

  Let me explain Ricardo. He is a millionaire and he made all the money honestly, while he was in his mid-thirties, from a standing start of two hundred dollars cash. He had a fabulous war record with the British and the Americans, when he ran the underground in southern France. He is a good writer, a fair bullfighter, a good horseman, a good shooter, an art connoisseur. He has an enormous yacht and he knows everybody of much importance from New York to London to Monte Carlo to Paris to Madrid. If ever a man had built-in possibilities to be a bum in the bush it was Ricardo.

  Not a bit of it developed. From the day he hit Nairobi—with his face beat up from an auto accident on the way to the airport in Madrid—Ricardo was a smashing success. My old friend Selby has a pair of perpetual pistons for legs and the burly body of a bull buffalo. Ricardo had been sick, apart from his accident, and wasn’t in the best of shape. Selby damn near worked him to death.

  They were up at 3:30 A.M. every morning to drive a couple of hours to make a morning approach to a lion kill. When each of these approaches proved abortive they spent the rest of the day tracking elephants. They generally arrived back in camp, where I was living in opulent ease, about 9 P.M.

  We were far north, in Kenya, and the sun smote mightily down. And the bugs bit and elephants invaded the camp and the vehicles got sick. But nary a word of complaint from Ricardo, who never had a decent lunch in camp the whole trip. He and Selby would shoot something, a bird of a small animal, and broil it on a green stick.

  We—they, mostly—looked at a hundred and fifty mature bull elephants before they finally decided to shoot one. If there had been more time they’d have looked at a hundred and fifty more, on the off-chance of finding a really superb bull. As it was they collected an eighty-pounder.

  They tended that lion kill and the leopard kills as reverently as though making obeisance at a shrine. They averaged two hundred rattling miles a day in the hunting car and about twenty on foot. Ricardo almost fainted from the heat one day, but he didn’t beef. He got up, mopped his pale brow, and went back for more.

  I confess shamelessly that most of us, when we are shooting guinea fowl or spur fowl for the pot, brass off into a clump of sitting birds with the idea of collecting meat, and we do the sporting thing with the other barrel when the birds take off. This is intelligent, because anybody who has ever hunted a running bird knows that you can’t run fast enough to flush them yourself. Not within gun range.

  But Ricardo would have none of this firing into a flock. He’d loose off one barrel into the air, and then take his chances with the fliers. (He was pretty lucky one day. Some birds crossed his pattern and he knocked off eight with one salvo. Flying.)

  It is possible to murder thousands of sand grouse if you let them come close enough, tornado-twisting like teal, to the lone water hole they are forced to patronize for their daily sip in a desert land. One shot and you’ve got ten, twenty, thirty grouse. Ricardo shot only at the high-flying doubles, triples, and quartets. And a sand grouse, flying high and jinking, is the fastest bird I know outside the peregrine family.

  Ricardo finally shot his leopard just at dark, and shot it through the left eye. He took his buffalo on the high slopes of Mount Kenya in the last half-hour of his last day. He shot the buffalo running and dropped it in its tracks.

  During the entire month there was no hint of impatience, no complaint about the tremendously hard work, no whining when killing
effort turned into failure. He could have shot a half-dozen lions, but none were good enough. So he didn’t shoot a lion. He could have shot up the countryside, and didn’t. He became so firmly fixed in the affections of the white and black hunters that Swahili is now being spoken with a Spanish accent. And we all laughed constantly, which is terribly important. I was very proud of Ricardo, and my old friends seemed a little proud of me for having produced him. I gained local status.

  It seems to me that the basic theme of hunting is that word exactly—hunting. Not killing. Whether it’s a good pair of tusks or a cloud-touching mallard or the quest of something special in any bird or beast there is a certain imponderable that separates the man from the boy. Call it a grail complex, if you will, but it sure shows up on the face of the hunter and the people around him.

  As the Old Man’s boy grows older he finds less and less fun in killing, and more and more fun in taking people hunting. We collected two magnificent lions in Uganda a while back on another safari, in a year when lion hunting was almost impossible in terms of mountable results. By safari rights both lions belonged to me, since they were shot on my kills—baits prepared by me and Harry. It was nice to give those lions away. It was nice to see that everybody finally had his leopard and buffalo and waterbuck and all the rest.

  It was also nice to know that I, too, collected a magnificent trophy. It was a rather large rabbit, and I had to give him both barrels, but it had been a long time since I had shot a rabbit, and at least it was something to have my picture taken with. The satisfaction I got out of this rabbit fetched back acutely a remark the Old Man once made: “It’s twice as much fun to see others do it if you’ve done it yourself, and done it well enough to where you don’t have to do it again.”

  It occurred to me that I had had enough tigers and lions, and that I would rather watch the elephants than shoot them. Unfortunately, this does not apply to quail. Concerning quail I am still as bloodthirsty as the day my first bobwhite scared me so bad I threw up and had to be put to bed for two days.

  Well, now I had two down, and another upcoming. Bob and Jane Low had departed with our friendship still firm, and Ricardo had passed all the exams. Now we had another kettle of conditions coming hard after Ricardo. Now it would be Mike and Jill from the Middle West, and a fairly difficult one to run a test on, because Mike knew a lot about his own bush country. The simon-pure amateurs put themselves wholly in your hands, and if anything goes wrong it’s your fault. Sometimes the people who know a lot about their own back yard try to convert that knowledge to Africa, and in the process they do foolish things. Everybody makes mistakes, but they seem to hurt more in somebody else’s country.

  On this one we were in the high hills of the Masai country of Kenya, where the tame, wild lions keep you alert at night, the hippos splash in the Mara River, the tsetse flies engrave their initials on your hide, and the hyenas remind you of Saturday night in a madhouse. It was a happy camp until that day when one of the jeeps rolled in bearing a tale of tragedy of the highest order.

  The Old Man had quite a few trenchant things to say about hunters, and one thing that sticks in my mind was, “No man can call himself a pure hunter until he has committed the damnedest mistake a man can make at a time when he least wants to make it.

  “They laugh and carry on a lot about the big fish that got away,” he’d elaborate, “and they kid you about having buck fever or forgetting to load the gun or forgetting to slip off the safety catch. But if you will prowl into the life of any man who has spent considerable time hunting and fishing you will find that everybody, at one time or another, has made a mistake that caused him to kick himself in the behind for the rest of his natural life. And it’s never a big mistake. It’s some damn silly little blunder that the average backward child wouldn’t make, and it always happens to people that ordinarily know the hunting and shooting business backwards.”

  I believe I mentioned at the time, with the arrogance of youth, that so far this boy hadn’t made any such stupid mistakes, and didn’t think it was likely that he ever would.

  The Old Man grinned his shark’s grin and blew on the inside of his mustache. “You ain’t home yet, son,” he said. “You got another sixty years or so for the law of averages to catch up with you.”

  It turned out he was right, but this is not my story. It is die story of this friend whom we are calling Mike.

  Mike is a man of middle years, and most of those years, since he comes from the West, have been spent hunting and fishing when time allowed. He says he does not shoot until he knows he can kill, preferring not to shoot at all rather than wound. He also wears Apache moccasins to ensure quiet stalking.

  As a matter of fact, Mike is more a maniacal fisherman than a possessed hunter, and one of our more adept dry-fly flingers. But he likes bird shooting, and he has killed his elk and his mule deer and antelope, and he has caught very large angry fish on very fine thread. Mike, largely because of me, became deeply bitten by the Africa bug, and this bite festered when his charming wife Jill expressed a desire for a leopard to spread in front of her fireplace.

  This Jill is a very determined woman, being of Nordic extraction, and when she sets her mouth for something to happen it had better happen. This is how Mike and Jill came to go on safari with a fiercely determined aim: Mike would shoot a leopard and Jill would unfurl it in front of the fireplace for the puppies and the children to roll on, and occasionally a Martini might be mixed to recall the good old days in the African bush. Then Jill would tell all and sundry how her man Mike dragged this lovely spotted pussycat out of the bush by his tail, just because Jill wanted a rug for her tepee.

  Well sir, the safari traipsed all around, up from Kenya to darkest Uganda and then back to Kenya—long, dusty, tail-wearying miles—just to see if somehow we could not collect a leopard for Mike. Animals were dispatched and slung into trees and left to ripen enticingly. Blinds were built. Drags of defunct animals were made, the better to diffuse the scent. Water holes were inspected for leopard tracks. We constructed morning approaches and evening approaches, and crawled miles through safari ants in the blackest, bone-freezing predawn, and sat up untiringly, bug-devoured, for three hours in the afternoon, each afternoon, to jounce home, kidney-shaken, murderously weary, and fantastically filthy, ready only to stagger off into bed dirty and arise with the waning moon to do it all over again.

  Weeks passed. Foot-loose lady lions climbed trees and ate Mike’s leopard baits. Once a surly rhino—the only one in the neighborhood—chased a leopard off a kill and evidently scared it so badly that the chui never returned. But Mike was a dauntless leopard hunter, and a dauntless leopard hunter is at least one part idiot. He crawled out of bed in the freezing Masai dawn to go and inspect a couple of feeble, tawdry kills to see if any mentally retarded leopard might be feeding, and he cruised the country endlessly on the off-chance—a one-in-a-million shot—that a nocturnal slinker might stay up too late some night with the boys and go wandering home to his lair in the bright morning sunlight, when all good dues-paying leopards should be snugly abed in a thorny thicket.

  Mike had been shooting a .318 Westley Richards of mine very well. It’s a very flat rifle that throws about two hundred and fifty grains of lead. He had come to trust this gun, for it had killed him a fine lion. He was not really interested in the lion until he saw it sitting underneath a leopard bait, and I do believe he shot the lion so it would not hamper the leopard’s chances of coming to the tree-strung kill.

  The story might meander on, but I will shorten it. Clean living and high purpose paid off, and the day came when Mike had been riding along the flat top of the Trans-Mara escarpment, checking to see if any leopards (faint hope) had been feeding on a couple of topi kills. And then the million-to-one-shot hit.

  A big, very big, dog leopard—an eight-footer, perhaps—meandered across the track and sauntered into a small patch of bush in broad Masai daylight. Now the search for the spotted grail was at an end, because the patch of bush wa
s very small indeed, and the leopard could easily be driven out of it. Mike’s professional hunter stopped the car, and they strolled along to the piece of bush.

  Inside the bush they could hear the leopard growl. The hunters stood with guns ready, and the gunbearers began to fling chunks of wood into the clump. Out came the leopard, broad on, not hurrying but more of less meandering, presenting a target (for a man who shoots as well as Mike) as big as a spotted house. Up came the trusty .318. Jill, who was watching the show, already saw herself serving Martinis in front of the fire while sitting on this splendid, very dark, golden leopard skin.

  Mike held the leopard firmly in his sights at about twenty-five yards and squeezed. The logical sequence was the sharp bark of the .318, a final growl, and a mighty leap of the leopard; then conjugal kisses, hearty congratulations, and the triumphant end of the hunt. Jill would have her rug and Mike would stand proud and tall among his clan brothers.

  There was a dry half-click. The leopard melted into thick bush and was no more seen, because a leopard melting into thick bush is untrackable unless he is wounded and spraying a blood spoor. Kuisha chui. Leopard finish.

  Mike stood there looking, as at a stranger, at the gun in his hand; this trusty gun; this marvel of rifled craftsmanship by one of the best gunsmiths in London; this burled walnut-stocked gun whose prototype has been known to speed a solid bullet all the way through an elephant, penetrating completely from stern to bow.

  What had happened was simple—one of those little mistakes the Old Man had mentioned. Some years back I had affixed a very low-mounted scope to this rifle. The scope interfered with the Mauser-type safety catch, so I had the catch taken off, intending to install another type of safety. But time passed, and it scarcely seemed worth the trouble, because complete safety could be maintained when a bullet was in the chamber by leaving the bolt handle only half-thrown. All you had to do to shoot was to slap the bolt handle firmly into its bed, and she would be in vicious business.