by Iain Overton
But as I shook hands to say goodbye to Marc, I couldn’t dispel the suspicion that perhaps he himself was not entirely convinced by the need to shoot lions and rhinos. I certainly wasn’t. But, perhaps to challenge my own prejudices – if that was what they were – I had made a decision. After my visit to Cape Town, meeting medics and police squads, and before I flew to the United States, I would drive north, through South Africa’s flower-lined Garden Route, to the remote frontier towns of the Eastern Cape.
The lodge lay about an hour from Cradock, a town of over 35,000 serving the farmers and traders of the districts that ran along the Great Fish River. Cradock had begun its life as a military outpost and was lined with neat, modest homes and wood-fronted shops selling the basics to live in this hard land. I had come here, to the western region of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the poorest of all of South Africa’s nine provinces, to go on a hunting safari.
Cradock was the last town before the Veld, empty but for the endless grass and, for me, animals to hunt. The town had the feeling of a place once filled with people who would have fought for something passionately. Today, though, it seemed those who lived here could not recall exactly what they would have fought for. It was a forgotten place. Perhaps a sense of self-belief died with the killings of four young South African activists here in 1985 – shot by white security police in the darkest days of apartheid. I had meant to see a memorial commemorating them, but the rain had come down hard from nowhere, submerging the view of the city. Instead, I edged through the crawling traffic until I found a sign that read Route 61 and pulled over to get my bearings.
The name places here spoke of a Boer past: Graaff-Reinet, Hofmeyr, Sterkstroom. This land, with its rolling, fertile expanse, the sky huge over it, was to the Afrikaner God’s country. You could see why: here the winding light played across the plains, and the rain clouds could be seen for miles. I pulled out and drove on the empty road, a dark patch of sky approaching on the horizon.
The rain came harder this time, and then suddenly, through the water, a sign appeared: ‘Fish River’. I took its lure. Ten kilometres and eight cattle-grids later I reached my destination.
It had taken me nearly three days of solid driving to get here from Cape Town. But distance is a feature of all life here. The hunting ground for Richard Holmes Safari stretched for some 200,000 acres on either side, bordering the edges of the Karoo and Eastern Grasslands. And after much negotiation about hunting permits and emails that bounced back and forth, I had agreed that I would come to these spreading valleys and gentle hills to hunt two springbok, the national symbol of South Africa. This was no easy decision. In a very basic sense I was coming to hunt purely for this book. In order to understand the hunter’s allure, I felt I had to do this. I had but one caveat – that whatever was hunted would grace the table later.
Getting out of the car, I looked around. I was in a shallow valley, and far away the tips of distant mountain ranges could be seen. Glossy starlings lined the road, high on branches that still dripped from the downpour, and the air smelled clean. And then, through the slanting rain, the owner of the Safari Lodge came out to greet me.
Richard Holmes was not who I had expected. Perhaps I thought he’d have a Henderson the Rain King spirit to him, a man with endless tales of derring-do. But instead he was considered and measured and had more the appearance of an accountant than a hunter. Of course, hunting was in his blood – he didn’t have to dress for the part. He was seven years old when he shot his first springbok and had taken down birds three years before even that. He had run safaris now for over two decades.
In that way he was like many others throughout this country. At the turn of the twenty-first century there were almost no game farms in South Africa. Today there are over 12,000 of them, with 10,000 permitting hunting.27 It’s a big thing for these remote economies. The hunting industry generated 7.7 billion Rand – about $800 million – in 2011, with a third of that from the 15,000 trophy hunters who came here from overseas.28 A lion hunt can cost up to $70,000, and a permit to hunt a black rhino recently raised $350,000 at auction.29
But, unlike some others, Richard only hunted free-range animals that he could eat; he would not shoot a lion or a cheetah for its pelt and had only ever hunted in South Africa. His wife, Marion, had the same approach. They also ran a conservation trust from their lodge for servals, caracals, African wild cats and black-footed cats.
The lodge was modest and neat. A section for butchering and refrigerating stood beside the Holmes’s house, and beside that were a few thatched huts for the shooting guests. To one side was a flower-lined garden, filled with red and yellow blazes, the purple starlets of the African lily and the tight orange heads of gerbera daisies: an oasis of contained beauty in this wilderness. Further along was a dining room and kitchen. There was a filled fridge with vodkas and tonics, and outside was a fire-pit for a braai – a South African barbeque. I was told a dinner of game meat and vegetables would be served at dusk and was left to fall exhausted onto my bed.
That evening I went out to meet the other guests. There was one couple here: John and Doris White. John was a big and bluff American in his mid fifties, Doris fifteen years his junior. She was from Córdoba in Argentina, and he was from Minnesota – he had an identical twin who had also married an Argentinian. This he told me within a minute of meeting me, because like many Americans he was generous with his facts. I liked him. They had already paid for their hunt – four springboks, two blessboks and three ostriches – and both their faces were flushed with excitement at being here.
John had been raised with guns, like many American hunters I had met. He had been taught to shoot a .22 rifle by his grandfather, but years in the American Air Force flying Lockheed C-130s out of Panama, Spain and Greenland meant he had only recently returned to this passion. Now, with Doris, he was set upon taking down an ostrich – a hell of a bird to get up close to. The two of them, in matching camouflage T-shirts and trousers, were in hunting heaven.
The other guest that night was Jéane Grieve. He was a local taxidermist – in the trade for ten years after quitting his job as an aircraft engineer. American hunters like John made up almost all of Jéane’s clients, and that explained why he was here – to drum up some more trade. Americans like to commemorate their hunts. Between 1999 and 2008, two-thirds of the 5,663 lions killed in Africa ended up being shipped out to the US.30 And when it came to their trophies, the Americans wanted them big.
‘They like full body mounts,’ Jéane said. ‘The rest of the world, except possibly the Australians, prefer bleached skulls.’ I had never met a taxidermist before and knew nothing of his art. So I asked which was the hardest animal to work on. He was quick to answer.
‘The porcupine. A full mount would be one of the hardest; the skin’s paper-thin, particularly around its backside. It’s a real pain.’ Sometimes the issue is not the detail, but the time it takes to prepare an animal, he said. Elephants take two years to mount – his company has to outsource the task to others, they are so big. His own outfit has a warehouse with thousands of carcasses in it that are being treated. One client had 146 mounts ordered in one go. Many others want to have the big five mounted – the lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros.31
I looked a little shocked that anyone would want all five in their home, but he had a straightforward attitude to the animals that were hunted. ‘I don’t see a difference between hunting a kudu or a leopard, as long as it is properly managed.’
Hot plates of meat and potatoes were brought through, and we sat down at a long table to a dinner of hearty red Cape wine and freshly hunted springbok – imbued with a taste so far from farmed meat you cannot call them the same thing. The conversation turned, naturally, to hunting.
Each flowing idea was to some degree bold and, to an urban creature like me, previously unconsidered. Why not have a rhino farm where you could shave the horn annually, like shearing a sheep? Condemning the hunting of rare animals is myopi
c. In any pride there would be ageing females and males no longer fit for breeding, so why not license those for the hunt? ‘They’ll die anyway.’
‘Human beings have caused the decline of predators,’ said Richard. ‘Now you have wild animals that need to be controlled. They need to be killed anyway. What is the difference between natural culling and a trophy hunter? You can’t put a wild springbok in an abattoir anyway. By the time you did, if you could, you would stress them out so much that you’d have to tranquillise them.’
He said that their reserve helps protect habitats for wildlife, on land that would otherwise be turned over to agriculture. ‘Sheep and cows create a farming monoculture of grazing that is deeply destructive.’ Safaris have revitalised the land. In the 1950s, there were 500,000 game animals on South Africa’s plains. Today there are 20 million, bred for hunting and conservation.32 The gun did that, he said.
What about guns, I asked. Didn’t all these guns increase the likelihood of people being shot?
‘People kill people,’ Richard replied. ‘Guns don’t kill people.’ And, from his perspective I could see why he might believe this – farm murders are few and far between out here. But I had not come here to talk about gun murders – at least, not the killing of people. Besides, it was late, and I was due to get up before the dawn.
The plains were laid out below us, and above us thick clouds that never seemed to rain cast long shadows across the stretching emptiness. The wind was light, pushing the rough grass with jagged jerks. I clutched my rifle. Through my telescopic sight I picked out distant blesbok in the quivering crosshairs, but they were too far away. We had been out for two hours now and nothing yet.
Then, John Sihelegu, my guide, touched my shoulder and pointed to the right. There, above a rocky gully, stood a springbok female. Perhaps seven years old, she had not seen us and was high up, framed against the cobalt blue. Only her top half was visible. Fine thatching grass covered her legs and belly.
I turned and raised my rifle. It was an awkward shot; the red rocks behind me dug into my kidneys. I felt the smooth wood of the Finnish rifle’s stock on my face and closed my left eye. The sights lined up, and the crosshairs pushed down to the spot where I had been shown to aim, the best place to take her down: the heart, just beneath her shoulder.
My finger caressed the trigger, and I breathed in.
The shot rang out, and she fell. Then there was a flurry of noise as the staccato report carried across the plains and a push of pounding hooves as the herd rushed down the gulley before us, leaping over the ochre rocks in their fear and confusion. Five, six, seven young springbok flew in front, muscles taut. They sped out down into the plain. I reloaded.
All had fled down, except the one I had shot. She lay above, unseen. Then I noticed that a small springbok, the last down to the gulley’s exit, had stopped, her tail quivering. She turned and looked for a second back up the ravine. She was turning for her mother and then she too was gone, bounding after the others. I had a terrible, lurching feeling in my stomach.
I stood up, gripped the rifle and, pushing away from the jutting stones, turned up the hill. The springbok lay there, twitching. She was not dead. I hurried to her and she panicked through the pain and the sweat. She tried to run but she could not; her shoulder was no longer there, and she could not stand.
The guide said, ‘Take her. Quick. Put the sights to three and aim just there.’
I twisted the scope back from 6: 5 . . . 4 . . . 3. Then raised the rifle. I was five feet away and picked out the spot and again pulled the trigger. The springbok convulsed, and a small red dot appeared. Then she lay still, and that was it.
I felt nothing but sadness.
The guide told me to pick up the dead animal. ‘Time for a photo,’ he said. A large string of bloody snot was oozing from the beast’s nose. Her muscles quivered, and her eyes quickly glazed. I picked up the warm body and pulled her onto a termite mound. And in the flipping, saw what the bullet had done. It had left a small entry point, but the back of her shoulder had been blown clean open. A hole, a deep cavity was there, just below her spine, and all the bones and muscles were exposed in an open, bloody mass.
I shifted the antelope’s hind legs and placed it on the rust red earth. Then the guide told me to hold its neck. He wanted me to position it so that the best picture was possible.
‘That’s right. Just there. Take off your hat,’ he said. The muscles in the animal’s neck contracted. The picture was a good one. The scudding clouds behind me were full. The colours were vibrant, and the animal looked dignified. But my face in the photo was not one I had seen before: my eyes looked like the eyes of a killer.
I stood up, and we got to work on the felled animal. A slickened knife opened up its gut, and its entrails spread in a slurry over the stony ground. Then it was lifted and hoisted down off the peak, its head lolling to the side, and with each step down I thought of the sharp crack of the rifle and the calf that looked back for its mother, and I wondered what this journey was doing to me.
11. THE SEX PISTOLS
Interview with ‘God’, a porn starlet called Stoya, in Las Vegas, USA – sex and guns – things seen in a different way – a Brazilian gangster, armed with his gun and his ego – men as victims not violators – the Pakistan conundrum – the persecuted journalist and the male logic of being armed and dangerous – talking self-defence with a mother of six in Washington DC, USA – a lawyer’s interpretatioin of statistics – asking why liberals don’t talk much about guns in New York City
Perhaps it is not that surprising that at the same time the Shot Show – the largest gun show on earth – is happening in Las Vegas, so too is the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the self-proclaimed ‘World’s Largest Adult Trade Event’.
I had been to both. The two audiences were not dissimilar: single white guys. They shuffled, were modestly overweight, had unexplained stains on their checked shirts and sported beards. They were also very passionate about the subject matter. And 30,000 visitors to the latter of the two shows had been drawn towards this desert city in Nevada by the whiff of sex, making a lonely pilgrimage to gawk and take photographs.
There were other similarities. Like the Shot Show, the adult expo had the latest in accessories, each taking a basic concept to its logical consumer extreme. There was a dildo that you could strap onto your feet; vibrators that connected to your phone; and masturbating toys called Fleshlights made from moulds of porn starlets’ genitals.
But it was not the allure of bullet vibrators that brought me to a sex convention. I was here for Stoya – a raven-haired adult entertainer and the queen of alternative porn. I wanted to speak to her because she had – for reasons unknown – appeared as a sniper in one of her latest films.
I had first heard of Stoya on an arts website. She had starred in a series of films called ‘Hysterical Literature’. Its conceit was simple: a camera had filmed some of New York’s most liberal women reading from works of fiction while, off screen, they were pleasured with a high-speed vibrator. The camera whirled as each woman was brought to a climax. Stoya had orgasmed while reading aloud about death, from Necrophilia Variations – a monograph on the erotic attraction to corpses. It was an intriguing choice of fiction, and so I looked up her name and found that Stoya, as well as being a muse on New York’s art scene, also had sex on camera for a living.
She had joined the US porn scene at a unique moment. She was not a typical Barbie starlet: she wore Vivienne Westwood and had short hair. In her own words, she was gamine with small breasts. But clearly she had something about her, and awards for her sex scenes soon followed. In 2008 she won ‘Best US Newcomer’; in 2009 she won a gong for the ‘Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene’. But it was her role in Code of Honor, for which, in 2014, she won the ‘Best Scene in a Feature Film’, that intrigued me, because Stoya had been cast as a sniper, a character called ‘God’.
So here I was, in Vegas, waiting to interview Stoya, because I wanted to know why playing a snipe
r was at all sexy. I had no idea. And in a sense I thought that ‘God’ could tell me.
She had asked to meet me outside the Expo next to a restaurant called the Pink Taco in the Hard Rock Casino. I arrived early, sat down in the soul-sucking light that permeates all of Vegas’s casino floors and watched a series of enhanced blondes totter past on impossibly high heels.
Before our meeting I’d done some research and seen that Stoya had starred in another series called ‘Stoya Does Everything’. On first reading the title, I had imagined illicit pleasures, but it turned out the films were for die-hard Stoya fans who wanted to see her doing stuff that did not actually involve her getting naked – things like pinball, ghost hunting, cosplay. In one she had visited a gun range.
The clip began with her line: ‘Guns make me very nervous.’ Then – a heavy-metal soundtrack kicking in – she was shown putting on a bulletproof vest and holding up a T-shirt that said ‘Zombie Repellent’. She then headed down to the shooting range, and a man in military fatigues showed her a pistol. ‘Big,’ she mouthed, her fingers outstretched.
She opted to shoot the smallest gun there – the Mosquito.1 She seemed anxious; it was hard to tell if she was acting or not. But with her second shot, a projected shell casing spun out, knocked off the side of the gun range partition and hit her: ‘Son of a bitch!’ She left the range upset. ‘There’s a shell,’ she said, pointing at her breasts, ‘in my shirt.’ Later, dragging on a cigarette, she turned to the camera: ‘Now I am all freaked out and I don’t want to touch guns again.’
Stoya arrived at the coffee shop in the flesh. She was louchely smoking Parliament cigarettes and wore a demure smile, a safety pin in her ear and a black basque on her slim frame. It was all very porn chic. But she spoke softly and with consideration, and it was clear she knew how to put someone at ease. She showed me her Vivienne Westwood get-up (‘I live in New York and keep my shoes in LA’), talked a little bit about her cats and told me how she had a secret horror of Las Vegas (‘five miles of death’). It felt entirely normal to be in a badly lit coffee shop interviewing her next to a porn convention.