Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  We hunted that tiger for two days with buffalo, and never came close. He’d quit bleeding inside a hundred yards. The late Jack Roach of Houston, Texas, saw him a couple of weeks later, and Jack said that as far as he could make out, through the glasses, the cat had a fully healed scar a mere hair off the top of the spine.

  It did me no good to reflect that Karamoja Bell, the famous elephant hunter, once cut the tail off a brain-shot bull and returned a few hours later to find the bull had got up and gone, tailless, and that everybody who ever hunted has made at least one damfool mistake. All I could think of was that buck deer carrying on and blatting in the back of the Liz, and the Old Man’s rattan walking stick swishing on my backside.

  From that point on you could offer me a hairy mammoth and a saber-toothed tiger staked out and tied to a tree at night and get a very sharp, profane “No!” for an answer. Daytime hunting is for hunters, and night-time hunting is for animals. But wherever the Hunting Grounds the Old Man inhabits, I’ll bet he was laughing fit to kill the night when that big tiger got up and calmly walked away.

  25—Only One Head to a Customer

  This happened in the Suphkar Range of the Madhya Pradesh, also in the Central Provinces of India. The dak bungalow stood on the summit of a slight hill in rolling country, beautiful country, whose crisp greens and yellows and reds were reminiscent of Connecticut in the fall or of a bright autumn day in the Carolinas. You expected to hear quail calling as they mustered scattered ranks at sunset. Instead there was the raucous me-ow of peacocks, the croak of ravens, the belling of a sambar stag startled by a tiger, or the sharp, biting yap of the barking deer. In the dak bungalow, which the government kindly leases to tiger hunters who rent shooting blocks, there was a kerosene-operated refrigerator and a whole sideboard of tinned delicacies and condiments.

  In the main room guns were stacked aimlessly in a corner—a .470, a .308 with scope, shotguns, a scoped .220. Every time some Indian visitor would come to call—and, the good Lord knows, enough curious locals dropped in—somebody would pick up a gun and snap it at the floor or at somebody else’s foot. The camp was equipped with camp managers and secretaries and clerks and a variety of nondescripts who just came to rubberneck. They all were fascinated powerfully by the guns.

  The guns were not mine, but rented, and fitted tolerably well. I had already had some experience with them, especially with the .308, a really dandy little middle weapon. Dandy, that is, except I couldn’t hit anything with it. This is not unusual in my case, except that once in a while the law of averages says that you’re supposed to hit something if you blow off enough powder, and I was ringing up exactly nothing with the scoped weapons, including the .220. I asked the head shikari, “Anybody sight these scopes in? Graticules all checked?” And got a blank look.

  “You know,” I said, “scopes have to be checked—atmospheric pressure, joggling around in jeeps, too many rounds of ammunition fired, that sort of thing. They get out of alignment.”

  Blank look. Never heard of it. A scope is a scope is a scope. Tie it onto the weapon with a bit o’ string, and the scope will kill, just as in Kenya, where the natives still believe largely that the noise kills.

  “We’ll stick up a target,” I said, “and sight them in.”

  Wistful shake of head at European whim, but up went the target, a hundred paces off on a tree as big as a baobab. From a steady rest on the cushioned hood of a jeep I hauled down on the target and took a piece off the side of the tree. Repeated the shot and duplicated the hit. The gun grouped beautifully, if you liked it a foot high and two feet wide. I tried the .220 and missed the tree a couple of times.

  I unscrewed the sighting apparatus and looked at the downs and the ups on the graticules, and discovered that if you wanted to shoot around corners these were the most murderous weapons I ever saw. But unfortunately if you aimed at something close-hand you were likely to kill the shikari’s cousin in down-town Gondia. Evidently nobody had reshaped the sights since the scopes had been sewn on, possibly on the other side of an ocean voyage. I made the few adjustments on the screws, fired a few more sighting shots, and when the guns were on I set the sights solidly by rapping the pan with the butt end of a .470 bullet. This appeared to be magic, especially after I downed a peacock at a couple of hundred yards.

  This had nothing to do with mechanics, of course. Magic. The aboriginal black Gonds and Baigas didn’t believe in guns anyhow. They were very heavy on rocks and trees and iron adzes and phallic symbols, but guns, no.

  “Oh my God, Old Man,” said I, “you told me one day I would go to shoot tigers, but you never said it would be like this.” (This was the shikari’s venerable .577, which was wired together with baling wire.)

  That business of the sighting finished, we shot some chital and sambar and pigs and one tiger. The guns were always carefully stacked in the corner of the room. One day I had a look at them and could barely fetch a mite of daylight through the muzzle.

  “For the love of the Gautama Buddha and any pagan gods we have handy,” I hollered, “don’t nobody ever clean no bloody rifles around here?”

  “Oh yas, sahib, we are cleaning immediately,” and off went the artillery. To the laundry, I suppose, because the caste system would certainly demand that a dhobi (professional washerman) have charge of the cleaning detail.

  Back came the guns, cleaned, to be stacked in the corner. I took them out of the corner and laid them on a table. I went to have a nap and read some enchanting fifty-year-old prose from Blackwood’s Magazine, and when I got up there were the guns, stacked in a corner again. About the time I was smiting my brow I spied a hawk circling over the trees in front of the bungalow, and suddenly it lit. Without taking my eyes off the hawk I snatched the .220 from the nest in the corner and stalked as best I could, using trees for cover, toward the hawk.

  Something of my African chum Harry Selby may have rubbed off, because I made it to easy shooting range without alerting the hawk. As is customary I started to snick the safety and discovered the safety done been snicked. I drew back the bolt to charge the magazine, and, bless pappy, I heard a tiny chink as a live round was ejected from the chamber. I didn’t even bother to shoot at the hawk, I was that rattled. I turned and dashed for the dak bungalow.

  Every gun in the cluster in the corner was loaded. Every rifle had a live round in the chamber. Every safety was off. The double .470 had two large cordite-charged softpoints in its barrels. I let out a scream that the Old Man must certainly have heard, Upstairs or Downstairs, wherever he be.

  I do not believe in raising hell except when it’s necessary, but the idea that anybody in the hunting business could be such a bloody fool as to stack charged weapons in a corner for any idiot to point at his foot and snap—boom-boom—made me so mad I went white and shaky. It was an affront to decency, as if a maiden of impeccable virtue had suddenly been accosted as an easy lady.

  “Grandpa, Grandpa!” was all I could think of to say, between curses in all the six languages I swear in. And who was cursing louder than me was my wife, who had been so painstakingly trained in safety with firearms that she was almost afraid to shoot when the critical moment finally came. I never quite forgave the Indians after that one.

  I went all the way back to Carolina, that first day of the gun, and remembered. The Old Man and I were out to shoot us a quail—my first. I was eight years old.

  “In a minute,” the Old Man said, as the dogs fanned out, “I aim to let you use this thing the best way you can. Your mother thinks I’m a damned old idiot to give a shirttail boy a gun that’s just about as tall as the boy is. I told her I’d be personally responsible for you and the gun and the way you use it. I told her that anytime a boy is ready to learn about guns is the time he’s ready, no matter how young he is, and you can’t start too young to learn how to be careful. What you got in your hands is a dangerous weapon. It can kill you or kill me or kill a dog. You always got to remember that when a gun is loaded it makes a potential killer out of th
e man that’s handling it. Don’t you ever forget it.”

  I never did forget it.

  During the course of my apprenticeship the Old Man ate me out. He put me through a course of fence climbing that would make the old Marine boot training look easy, and he was as mean as a drill sergeant.

  “Whoa!” he’d say, like he was calling a scatterbrained dog that had just run through a covey of quail. “Now ain’t you a silly sight, stuck on a bob-wire fence with a gun waving around in the breeze, with one foot in the air and the other on a piece of limber wire?”

  Or: “Now, what kind of a hunter have I got here, his gun propped against a tree for any fool dog to run against and explode in his face?”

  Or: “What kind of a damfool hunter stacks his gun in a corner when he comes in from hunting, so some young’un can take it to play with and blast a hole in his mama?”

  And I would say to the Old Man, “But Grandpa, it ain’t loaded.”

  “Who says it ain’t loaded?” The Old Man was scornful. He walked over to the gun, took it out on the back porch, and pulled. Bam! Bam!

  “Not loaded, huh? What was that, mice?”

  Of course the old monster had framed me again, and stuck a couple of shells in when I wasn’t looking, which was his way of making a moral lesson. He had done it before, the first day of my new gun, when he palmed a shell into the spout and told me to dry-fire to improve my aim, after I’d missed my first quail with both barrels. I cut down on a pine cone and “Blim!” the gun went off and near scared me to pieces. Then he took my gun—my gun—away from me, and killed a quail with it, just to teach me a lesson. I was so mad at him I would have liked to palm a shell in and shoot him, except for the fact that I loved him and knew instinctively that he had a point. In later days my wife confessed to a desire to shoot me in the pants for the same reason.

  But in my early pre-teens the Old Man made me uncouple the gun every time we moved from one hunting sector to another in the car. And the first thing I did when we came in, dead-beat in the evening, was to take down the piece, clean it, and stow it in its case.

  The Old Man, smiling smugly over his first snort of the day, would say: “Take a mighty clever young’un or a mighty pert dog to undo that case, snap the gun together, load it, and then shoot you accidentally with it.”

  It may sound old-maidy, all this caution, but I confess to a breach of it. I fix my safety catches on my big guns—the double rifles, that is—so they won’t slide back on to safe when the gun is broken, because I don’t want to worry about forgetting to slip the automatic safety catch back on if I am reloading again in a hurry to keep something large and ugly from stepping on me. For the same reason I don’t use automatic ejectors on a double express rifle. It’s just one more thing that might jam when a jam is not precisely what you crave at the moment.

  But one day I had to change crews and I forgot to tell the new gunbearer about this peculiarity. We were hot after an elephant and I told the boy to load the bundouki and he did, and when we came up to the jumbo he handed me the weapon. I automatically tried to push the safety forward and it seemed stuck, so I jerked it back and couldn’t fire, because now it was on safe. In a moment of panic that lasted a thousand light-years and took a sixth of a second I fought mechanics. What happened, he had broken the gun to load it, and the safety went forward and stayed forward on fire, as per arrangement. I had hustled five miles through bush with that loaded cannon pointing at my head over his shoulder, and all he had to do was step in a pig hole and “Karaam!”—richest widow in Palamós, Spain. So the next day I took the whole safety apparatus completely off. Now when that lovely little Jeffery is loaded it shoots, and it is in my hands, and I am in front of the bearer.

  It’s a far cry from the Old Man and BB shots in the eye and people blowing off their heads crossing fences, but shooting some grouse just the other day in Scotland there was such a fanfaronade of pellets falling in the butts that I got down in the bottom of mine and gave up sport for the moment. The week before, one of the more tempestuous French clients had loosed a load at a grouse crossing the nearest butt, and one pellet nicked a gillie less than a quarter inch below his eye. A quarter inch higher—being one-eyed is less fun than being two-eyed.

  That’s why I got so tarnal mad in India, I guess. If we’d have had the Old Man for a shikari I bet you there would have been a lot of sore tails in the Suphkar camp, because the Indians have a chastising instrument called a lathi, and if the Old Man could lay on a lathi as well as he could flourish a common American stave I’d feel a touch less afraid of the guns than I was skeered of the tigers. Come to think of it, I didn’t waste much time being afraid of the tigers. I was too busy keeping an eye on my friends and employees.

  26—Greedy Gut

  We have a shambling little orchard out in the back yard. It has an aversion to bearing anything much except spotty plums and the occasional fig, which the birds generally beat me to. But I noticed when the plums formed this year I was out there beating off the birds for a whack at the early crop. The same applied to the seldom strawberries that poke their heads up from the unwilling green around the drive. The house was a crying admonition of bellyache, but I was munching happily away. There is nothing really wrong with adolescent plums and pale pink strawberries. Even today I prefer them to their full-blown brethren. I guess it’s a childhood habit I’ll never kick.

  “I am always surprised,” the Old Man said to me once long ago, “that there is such a thing as an adult. I am surprised any young’un ever grows up to votin’ age. Boy young’uns and billy goats, maybe, got less regard for their innards than anything I know of, including hogs, and a hog will eat anything, including its own pigs.”

  This homily was designed to justify a large dose of castor oil as antidote for the consumption of a large number of green peaches. Green peaches do not give you the bellyache as alleged; castor oil does. To my mind someone bigger than me was compounding the felony, with me as the victim.

  “Green peaches, green plums, green blackberries, green figs, green grapes, green apples, green pears,” the Old Man said in a sing-song voice. “Why do all boys have to eat things when they’re green? They can’t taste good and they tear up your stomach and you get punished besides. Why? “

  “I reckon I just can’t wait,” I said. “They always look so good when they’re green. I even like the way they taste.”

  The Old Man grunted in disgust. “It’s your stomach,” he said. “Go ahead and wreck it.”

  He stalked off, muttering. I knew what ailed the Old Man. The doctor had nailed him with some sort of light diet for a stomach disorder, and had put him plumb off fried foods, desserts, and almost anything else he liked. The Old Man wasn’t mad at me for eating the green peaches; he was mad at himself for not being able to do what he wanted to any more. He reckoned somehow that reducing him to an infant’s diet was a reflection on his age.

  Looking back, I expect I must have had a zinc-lined stomach, at that. I still have one today, and can only credit the early practice I had with inedibles, or a mixed bag of what was supposed to be inedible, in combination.

  As a man I have withstood the kind of food you get at cocktail parties—the kind of canapes that would gag a goat. In a restless itch to stride the world I have rambled Mexico without succumbing to what is commonly called “Montezuma’s revenge.” The tourist in Europe generally falls afoul of what the Spaniards called the turistas, and blames it on a change of water, a change of diet, the local cooking oil, strange sea food, green vegetables, bad ice, peculiar wine—anything at all.

  I really can’t say why nothing upsets my stomach, unless it was the early training of that poor repository of juvenile whim to expect and accept anything at all. I could and did chase sour pickles with ice cream. They said you shouldn’t mix sea food with sweets. If they had made a shrimp-flavored ice cream I would have been the first to ask for it. You supposedly couldn’t combine watermelon with certain things, and garlic with other things. I combi
ned watermelon with everything and I can still munch garlic by the clove. I have eaten sheep’s eyes with Arabs, raw sea food with Japs, fried grub worms with Africans, and all manner of strange exotic fruits everywhere. I do not recommend this as a diet for everyone. All I can say is that nothing I eat makes me sick.

  As a kid I had a sort of inventive mind. Nobody frowned on eating raw clams and oysters, fresh and salty dripping from their beds. If clams and oysters were sea food, I reckoned, then so were fish and crabs and shrimp. I never went to sea (going to sea was shoving the dinghy off the shingle and ramming home the oarlocks) without a plentiful supply of salt and a bag of fruit. The fruit nearly always included lemons and limes against the scurvy, because a solitary seafarer never knew when an exclusive diet of salt horse and hardtack would breed scurvy and inspire the crew to mutiny.

  I had not read at the time that lime juice would cook fish if left alone, in the Polynesian fashion, but it did not take me very long to discover that raw fish and raw shrimp and raw crab meat were delicious if well-salted, sprinkled with lemon or lime juice, and left a short while in the sun. I got particularly fond of mullet, which we used for bait when we were surf casting. The Old Man complained bitterly that I ate more cut bait than the fish did, but die half-dried, heavily salted mullet was delicious, particularly if accompanied by a chocolate bar.

  A quarter-decade later I encountered biltong in Africa. Biltong is made by slicing thin sheets of meat and spreading it on bushes to dry in the sun. It turns black and is almost unswallowable, but is a power of comfort to chew and is most nutritious. The old Boer voortrekkers used it as a staple, much as our coon-capped trail blazers dived into the wilds with a bag of pemmican or jerky, which is practically the same thing. A really well-cured biltong will break off in short sticks, like crumbly candy, and is delicious as well as sustaining.