Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  You might possibly have seen pictures of Selby and me, but I must describe Burrows, the vagrant fisherman. He looks like a cross between Brendan Behan and an Assyrian emperor, and when you deck him in shorts and the kind of floppy straw hat that Jamaican peasants wear the ensemble is, in a word, horrid. He is one of the truly brave people I know, and has the disposition of a baby lamb, or he wouldn’t be off in the wilderness with me and Selby in the first place.

  During the Mau Mau emergency a busload of nice old ladies arrived at Brian’s hotel just as a Kenya settler shot a running native across the street in front of the opera house. One of the horrified old ducks turned to Brian. “Tell me, young man,” she quavered, “is this a safe hotel?”

  “Great God, no,” the manager said, stripping off his jacket to display bandages. “Look what the blighters did to me last night!”

  And they had, too. Old Beebee got mashed up three times in the peaceful administration of his business.

  We proceeded to fish. Burrows got stuck into something we all decided was a rock, because nothing moved, even when the Cautious Captain gave the “Lady” full speed ahead. Aly, the only competent sailor among us—he’s a Swahili from Mombasa, and so knows boats—went over the side and into the dinghy to see if he could unsnag the line, and then the rock came alive. Burrows had been pumping steadily for fifteen minutes on what turned out to be a sixty-pound Nile perch that had merely decided to lie doggo.

  We caught fish, all right. I caught two: a tiger and a perch. I lost a mess, because these tiger fish have a way of digesting tackle. We caught more fish in the shallows. That was because we sent the local laddybucks, the Molos, fishing with nets. We wanted to freeze some fish to take home to various Mamas, and the freezer was working wonderfully.

  It was working wonderfully, because we suspended fishing the following day so that Selby and Metheke could dismantle the generator, which had become temperamental again. It does not take much to please Selby. Get him greasy to the ears and surround him with displaced bits and pieces of an engine and he carols like a lark.

  Once he got the generator sorted out we didn’t go fishing again, because of one thing and another in the pursuit of culture, such as literary talk and the adjustment of the windsock at the airstrip on the off-chance any pretty girls might fly in to visit us. This consumed the best part of a day, and nothing ever came of it. The only pretty girl I saw was on the way home, and she was wins. I started to buy both of them as a house present for Mama Selby, but decided against it. They were more or less naked Samburu maidens and entirely too pretty to be an acceptable house present.

  The generator on the boat—the “Lady” had a refrigerator too—was a bit dicky also, so that took some work, and one of the reels jammed and that took some work, and then I decided to go duck hunting and that took some work, and then we went croc hunting and that took a lot of work.

  I will tell you a thing about Selby. Passing a camel through a needle’s eye is child’s play alongside hunting anything with Selby. If he hasn’t got a mountain to walk you over he will take the year off and build one.

  You would think that croc stalking could best be done in a boat. That is not so. We landed the boat around the corner of a mountain and stalked carefully over the king-size cobbles until we were in a position to miss the crocodiles and still have a decent excuse to fetch back to Burrows, who was now flag admiral of the Lady of the Lake, as she tugged at her anchor and threatened to break up on a lee shore.

  I will say one thing for Selby, the Cautious Captain. He can shoot. He is currently in love with a tiny little toy, a Winchester .243, which has the flattest trajectory of any rifle I ever saw. Shooting well downhill off this mountain at a target area no bigger than a tangerine he nailed one croc under the bumps at a good five hundred yards. It made the water, but only barely, and surfaced at six hundred yards. Harry now had a target area the size of a small lemon, and when he squeezed off the croc turned over and showed a lot of white belly and a death thrash.

  Turned out not to be the same croc. The first one was sick enough to make the same lee shore the “Lady” was headed for. I took the dinghy and went away to dispatch him, and learned a cardinal truth in croc shooting. The real place to aim for is not under the bumps, but just behind the smile, where the wicked mouth turns up at the end of the long, lascivious grin.

  I got a solid rest on my knees and popped the gentleman behind his smile, and you could see complete paralysis set in as his four legs spread and one long ripple went through his body. Even so he was far from being a pocketbook. I finally beached the boat and walked up and blew the top of his head off at a range of one foot, and now he was a pocketbook. We towed him home and gave him to the Molo to eat, and that was the end of another day’s fishing.

  The next day there were pictures to be taken and the rains were moving closer and the lodge had to be neated up and the provisions battened down and the generator secured and the local troops paid. All this time Juma and company were sulking because Ramadan isn’t any fun even when it’s cool, and Lake Rudolf is certainly not cool if you’re not drinking ice water. We had a freezer full of frozen fish the Molo had caught for us, and a few whistling teal, which make the most delightful eating of any fowl I ever tasted. I had caught two fish, Selby had caught none, Burrows had caught three, and the Molo boat boy, using a hand line, had caught several.

  The time had come to leave. We struggled painfully straight up the Valley of Death, made a camp outside of Baragoi, and it was in Maralal that we saw the twin Samburu chicks, and everybody said, “Wacha!” at the same time. “Wacha” means “No!” We had been away from home too long, especially the multiple-wived Moslems.

  We developed a blockage in the oil feed that caused several pleasant stops, and some years later we arrived at Harry’s farm in Limuru, magnificently filthy, bone-weary, and green-whiskery.

  Mrs. Mickey Selby met the heroes at the door. “Catch any fish?” she asked.

  “Some,” we said. “Enough.”

  Next day in Nairobi everybody said, “Where have you chaps been?”

  “Fishing,” I said stoutly, ready to swing on anybody who would say me nay. “And I never had a better time in my life.”

  It was true, because as the Old Man was often heard to say, “Fishing doesn’t actually happen. It just goes on in your head.”

  18—Voodoo in the Skillet

  Along about September, when the first tart whisper of coming autumn crisps the breeze and the dogs begin to stir restlessly, I always seem to get hungrier than usual. As Havilah Babcock says, “My health is better in November,” and my stomach starts to grumble a bit more vociferously when October beckons.

  It is not that summer’s butter beans and sweet corn are inferior to a pumpkin, even with frost on it, or that the stanch line of rich, red-fleshed tomatoes and an infinite variety of sea food are not nourishing fare, but they lack the tang of autumn, the crackling authority of anything that is flavored with wood smoke. There is still an excitement to camp cookery that cannot be counterfeited by all the back-yard barbecues in the world.

  “If I had it to do all over again,” the Old Man once said, “I would like to be born black and be a professional hunting cook. Seems to me that apart from being a dead pig in the sunshine there ain’t a healthier way to work your way through life. And it’s a heap more practical than being a pioneer.”

  They may possibly have disappeared from the scene, but there used to be a considerable fraternity of outdoor professional chefs. They worked only when fishing and hunting were at their height, which is to say about six months a year. They “laid up” the other six months and lived off their fat.

  The specialist was by no means a servant. His cook fire gave him as much professional recognition as attaches to a good guide in Canada or a professional hunter in Africa. He was an autocrat of his outdoor kitchen, brooked no interference, took no advice, and was likely to be severely critical of the hunting or fishing techniques of his clients.

>   The closest modern parallel is the seasoned African safari cook, like my Aly or Mwende of recent experience. Aly is a coastal Swahili, a good part Arab, and a man I would choose to be my father if I needed a spare. He’s as wrinkled as a prune, a sort of medium brown in complexion, and I should say is possibly the best cook for my tastes in the world. Mwende, who is a Wakamba, has been around so long that he was second boy when Philip Percival first took Ernest Hemingway safariing about thirty years ago.

  These are Africans of great dignity, professionally grave and almost winsomely charming, as opposed to that rogue Juma, who looks like a carbon of Mickey Rooney and is a kind of priest. He is currently wearing a new set of gold front teeth, shamelessly wheedled out of me on the last expedition. This was his due, he said, because when he went methodically through my box I had brought along nothing worth stealing this trip. At last count Juma owned more of my clothes than I did.

  But whether they come from Mombasa or Machakos or Southport, North Carolina, these outdoor African chefs have a special thing in common. They can take a tin cracker box, a shovel, and a heap of glowing coals, and turn out a meal to make a French chef commit suicide out of sheer envy. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.

  My old Aly, for instance, uses heaps of coal of varying intensity of heat, depending on what he’s cooking. He bakes a crusty, light-golden loaf in one cracker tin by heaping the coals on its top. He sears a piece of meat on a hot flame, then moves it to a back burner of damped coals, while he broils a fowl on another fire, cooks a game leg-enriched soup on a third, boils spaghetti on a fourth, or uses still another to render a chunk of fresh-killed eland suitably tender for tomorrow’s broiling.

  My wife is a good cook, with a lot of experience and a great deal of imagination, but she had only one try at reforming Aly’s kitchen techniques. When his version of her mother’s molasses-cum-bacon-cum-onion special beans turned out better than the old lady’s she tossed in her chef’s cap and left Aly to his own devices. In the screaming middle of Tanganyika Aly gives you breast of guinea under glass and has been known to produce a soufflé so light that you have to put weights on it to hold it to the table top.

  When I was a kid in Carolina we had a succession of Alys. One, I remember, was a paroled murderer, but what he did with fresh-killed venison chops over hickory coals was worthy of official pardon. He could also stick an unplucked duck into a clay mold and cook it until the clay cracked; you peeled off the clay, which took the feathers with it. He did the same thing with a fish, and its scales came off with the clay. I don’t know the details of this gentleman’s fit of ill temper that sent him to the jug for a spell, but given enough corn whisky and a free hand he could turn an aged shitepoke into a symphony.

  Several things distinguished cooks who worked only for sporting gentlemen. I never knew one, not one, who didn’t operate in a vapor of alcohol—except of course the Swahilis, who are Moslems and are not supposed to use booze. But mainly, the drunker they got off hand-hewn corn or home-stomped wine the better they cooked.

  Another thing: They couldn’t stand anybody in their alfresco kitchens. You went back to the cook fire and made some mild recommendation about the quail stew or the rabbit ragout, and you got a less-than-mild admonition to confine your energies to missing fewer quail or to bringing home a better brand of bunny. And there was generally some pouting crack such as:

  “Mah mouth waterin’ for some deer liver, but ah notice ain’t nobody fetched in no tender spike buck yet. How y’all gentlemen ‘spects me to cook what ah ain’t got ah is hard put to say....”

  Properly chastened, you went out and clobbered anything with horns, even a stray goat, just to keep the cook from sticking out his underlip.

  If you were hunting anywhere at all close to salt water oysters always figured heavily in the menu—oysters and any fish, like a blue or a mackerel, that was fat enough to sputter his own grease into the low-blue-tongued broiling fire. The oysters got roasted in a kelp blanket, and sometimes when I think about those oysters, drowned in a peppered sea of heat-bubbling butter, I just want to sit right down and cry. There’d be a fat mackerel, his hide cracked from the heat, much of his surplus oil dissipated in his own cremation, falling apart from the sheer thoroughness of his preparation, with only a sprinkle of pepper and a slight douse of vinegar....Brother, pass the plate.

  Somehow the coffee made from leaf-dyed branch water had an extra-special tang, and enough smoke got mixed up in the eggs and bacon—not these silly, slim strips of bacon, but a decent hunk of hog meat—to make an adventure of it. And the sowbelly that flavored the beans had enough character to transmute a string bean into an art form.

  Possibly the idea of a possum may revolt you, because he’s certainly a filthy beast and horrid to look at, but a Mose or an Ike had a certain talent for bastioning the rendered-down marsupial with enough sweet taters and onions to make an innocent believe that he was eating his way across France. In the same vein, I shunned wart hog for a long time until the white hunter Don Bousfield conned me into trying a young one. It makes American pork repulsive by comparison. Since the African wart hog is an active animal it doesn’t run to fat, so the meat is as lean as fowl.

  I would like to insert here that I have eaten elephant’s heart, and found it nothing much but rubbery and tough. The foot tastes like pickled pig’s feet, and has the same gristly cellular structure. And when once I presented my idea of how to grill a kudu fillet to Aly, even the hyenas spurned the refuse. But roast grasshoppers ain’t bad; taste kind of like shrimps in batter.

  I think that the bread the old-timy hunting cooks used to produce was possibly the best flour or corn-meal combination I ever encountered. There was a large, plum-black gentleman named Joe, who worked for the late Paul Dooley in a snake-infested camp in the Everglades, and he could make a golden corn bread on an open fire—a corn bread that had the consistency of cake. Joe was kind of handy with hush puppies, too, and when you scraped off the ash they went away in a bite. A hush puppy (which ain’t nothing but a hoecake) dipped into the mud-and-oyster-flavored butter in which the oyster has bathed is a kind of gastronomic experience that is too good for most people and should be licensed.

  Joe, like most hunting cooks, was a lover of extreme scope, but instead of orchids he took rabbits to his ladies fair. We always went hunting at Grapefruit Gulch with a stem admonition from Joe to assassinate a mess of rabbits, because he had his eye on that fat gal over the hill.

  One day Paul and I, with Lee Hills and Walker Stone (the latter two sort of disreputable newspaper executives), went out in the swamp buggy and put the hounds onto an Everglades wild boar. They fetched him squealing by the ears, and we shoved him—he was only a shoat, really—into one of the boxes in the back of the buggy.

  Then we went back to camp and told Joe that we’d bad luck with the rabbits, but the dogs had caught one alive and he was in the beverage box in the back of the truck. Joe went out to retrieve his long-eared calling card, and came back stricken sore and almost gray.

  “Ah open dat box and de rabbit roar at me,” Joe said. “Ah don’t want no truck wid no roarin’ rabbits!”

  Joe had a hard time out of us ruffians. Dooley took him to the Bahamas on his boat one time, and the weather was awful. Joe got so sick that his normal purple coloration doubled.

  Later he said to me, “Ah swears ‘fo’ Gawd and three other ‘sponsible witnesses, ah ain’t nevah goin’ to sea wid Mistah Dooley agin!”

  Joe’s off-duty hours were devoted to romance, although in the Bahamas he had no rabbits to serve as entree. But shortly after he recovered from his mal de mer, a certain covey of comely maids were in evidence. I asked Joe how he arranged this collation of beauty so swiftly.

  “Ah tells you, Mistah Bob,” he said. “It so simple. Ah jes goes asho’ and makes a play fo’ de old, ugly gals, and in no time de word jes’ spreads.”

  The world is so full of nobility and stupidity and other “itys” these days that I have almost forgo
tten the wonderful simplicity of a hickory-chip-fire smell, the tiny beacon of light presaging a massive breakfast sandwich of hot egg and bacon on fat-fried bread, with a rich African voice singing something like “Go Down Moses,” and the dogs whimpering with eagerness to be off, the coffee bubbling, brownly inviting, the smell of greased gun, and the last star dropping in the sky. The whole promise of a great day was before you, the dew was wet and so were the noses of the dogs, and any one of fifty Joes was going to do something miraculous with the skillet by the time you’d come home, dead tired but almost blissfully, impossibly happy.

  You know, I think the Old Man had a good idea. I can’t wait to be reborn black, but I think I’ll get myself a job with some rich folks as a hunting-fishing cook and lay down this weary writin’ load.

  19—Dogs, Boys, and the Unspared Rod

  Every time I see in the papers where some young thug is up for casual murder or senseless assault and every time I see a picture of a man who has just made chairman of the board from a standing start of nothing I get the same sensation: a distinct tingling in the caboose or rear end. It dates back to being a boy and having a respect for law, order, and eventual achievement imprinted onto my behind with a stick, switch, or limber lath. I sometimes think we don’t beat our children, wives, and dogs frequently enough these days, or there’d be fewer creatures who mug strangers, get divorces, and jump onto gentlemen wearing blue suits.