“Come on, let’s go,” Bill said.
For about four miles after that I would see the bull’s trail every once in a while in the snow. They have a track shaped like the ace of hearts. I had seen fourteen head of game that day and before I got to the ranch I shot five more grouse with the pistol. At the ranch I got warm and read the mail and drank a whiskey sour before supper. It was a cold, sharp night, after a little thaw that day, and you could hear the coyotes starting to howl. The boys came in late. They hadn’t got the moose. He had come out of the timber again near where the hunters were camped on the river and they started shooting at him out of range and he got by them and down into the lower country.
It was fine at the ranch then, at the end of October, and I didn’t want to leave. Most of the game had pulled out but it was very pleasant and a good time of year. But I thought I had to go. So we started out and there was a blizzard. It lasted all the way across Nebraska and there is a special technique of driving in one that you have to learn. The trouble is to keep the windshield so you can see. You rig a candle in a can against the glass and that keeps the ice melted; for a little while. It is a technique that I haven’t mastered. Well, that was last year.
This year, at the same time, we are in Paris and it is a big mistake. If you want a Paris letter full of spice and detail and funny cracks you will have to get someone else to write it. All I do is go out and get depressed and wish I were somewhere else. It is only for three weeks but it is very gloomy.
This old friend shot himself. That old friend took an overdose of something. That old friend went back to New York and jumped out, or rather fell from, a high window. That other old friend wrote her memoirs. All of the old friends have lost their money. All of the old friends are very discouraged. Few of the old friends are healthy. Me, I like it better out on the ranch, or in Piggott, Arkansas, in the fall, or in Key West, and very much better, say, at the Dry Tortugas.
The painters are about the gloomiest. It seems that people buy modern paintings in good times for snobbism and as gilt-edged securities. In bad times they do not buy them at all. One dealer said that he had not sold a picture by a painter who is supposed to be quite successful, and who is under contract to deliver all his work to that dealer, since 1929.
Montparnasse has been discovered by the French respectable bourgeoisie, just as Montmartre once was. So the big cafes do a pretty steady business. The only foreigners you see are Germans. The Dome is crowded with refugees from the Nazi terror and Nazis spying on the refugees.
There was a very big retrospective exhibition of Renoir. I came away from it with the feeling of having seen many too many Renoirs. There can never be enough Cezanne’s or Van Gogh’s but I believe there were plenty of Renoirs before the old man died, all very fine, but plenty.
Food is as good as ever and very expensive. Because they could not sell it the vintners have not been bottling much champagne these last few years and there is good still champagne, that is natural champagne wine to which nothing has been added and which has not been processed in bottling to make it sparkle, on draft at the Café Regence for nine francs a wooden pitcher. This is the café where Napoleon used to play chess when he was the First Consul. They have the table that he used to play on in the café. For a while, during the boom, chess players were not encouraged at the Regence because they were not great consumers. But they are glad to see them again now.
Marcel Thil, bald, shuffling, seemingly muscle-bound and very durable, is still middleweight champion of the world to the French. He doesn’t want to go to the States to fight and I doubt if anyone could get a decision over him in Paris without knocking him out. He is a good fighter, but slowing up, and is smart to stay in France, where he is a great drawing card, rather than take a chance on what might be handed to him in the way of decisions in America. French fighters have always had bad luck in America.
Carpentier was long past the top of his form when he went over and not big enough for good heavyweights who were at the top of their form. Charles Ledoux was very popular in America and was a great little fighter; one of the best in-fighters that I have ever seen, but his career was interrupted by the war.
Eugene Criqui went out to Australia after the war a big bantamweight, his face horribly mutilated by a wound. He was not a heavy hitter but a good, sound workman. He came back a full-sized featherweight with a terrific punch in his right hand. I believe he could hit nearly as hard for his size as Charley White, the great Chicago left hook artist. Charley White, for me, could hit the hardest for his size of any man I ever saw in the ring.
Criqui knocked out Johnny Kilbane for the featherweight championship but signed a contract to fight Johnny Dundee within forty-five days, I believe, if he won. Dundee broke the metal apparatus that the plastic surgeons had made in Criqui’s face instead of a jaw in the first round and Criqui, smashed, cut, bleeding, took a sickening beating for fifteen rounds while he hunted Dundee’s jaw with that right hand. No one could ever hit Dundee squarely on the button with a right hand except Willie Jackson and he only did it once. Anyway Criqui lost his title the first time he defended it and before he had made any money from it.
André Routis had much the same style as Ledoux but was never the hitter Ledoux was in his prime. He won the featherweight championship in America from Canzoneri and made money in a number of overweight fights until he lost his title to Bat Battalino who turned out to be managed by the same outfit that was handling Routis. Routis came back from America with a certain amount of money, without his title and with his eyes permanently injured.
Kid Francis, who fought in the States as an Italian, was a French featherweight from Marseilles. As a fighter he ranks with Routis and Ledoux.
Emile Pladner had one great year as flyweight champion but he was too easy to hit. Sparrow Robertson nicknamed him Spider for no good reason. He was a chunky kid, as unspider-like as could be. When he outgrew the flyweight class the heavy hitters in the class above found where the alley was and Pladner was soon finished.
The French have had some great fighters; those mentioned are only a few of the lot who fought in America, but Thil is smart not to go over. He is very smart not to go over. It is a different business over there, a very different business. Europeans are as unsophisticated in what goes on behind the scenes in sport as we once were, and may be still, about what goes on behind the scenes in politics.
What really makes you feel badly here though is not any of the things I mentioned earlier. People must be expected to kill themselves when they lose their money, I suppose, and drunkards get bad livers, and legendary people usually end by writing their memoirs. What makes you feel bad is the perfectly calm way everyone speaks about the next war. It is accepted and taken for granted. All right. Europe has always had wars. But we can keep out of this next one. And the only way to keep out of it is not to go in it; not for any reason. There will be plenty of good reasons. But we must keep out of it. If kids want to go to see what war is like, or for the love of any nation, let them go as individuals. Anyone has a right to go who wants to. But we, as a country, have no business in it and we must keep out.
Paris is very beautiful this fall. It was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a necessary part of a man’s education. We all loved it once and we lie if we say we didn’t. But she is like a mistress who does not grow old and she has other lovers now. She was old to start with but we did not know it then. We thought she was just older than we were, and that was attractive then. So when we did not love her any more we held it against her. But that was wrong because she is always the same age and she always has new lovers.
But me, I now love something else. And if I fight, I fight for something else. That seems to be about all for today.
A. D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter
Esquire • APRIL, 1934
TO WRITE this sort of thing you need a typewriter. To describe, to narrate, to make funny cracks you need a typewriter. To fake along, to stall, to make light reading,
to write a good piece, you need luck, two or more drinks and a typewriter. Gentlemen, there is no typewriter.
The air-mail leaves tomorrow night. Your amœbic dysentery correspondent is in bed, fully injected with emetine, having flown four hundred miles to Nairobi via Arusha from where the outfit is camped on the Serenea river on the far side of the Serengeti plain. Cause of flight, a. d. Cause of a. d. unknown. Symptoms of a. d. run from weakly insidious through spectacular to phenomenal. I believe the record is held by a Mr. McDonald with 232 movements in the twenty-four hours although many old a. d. men claim the McDonald record was never properly audited.
According to Dr. Anderson the difficulty about a. d. is to diagnose it. My own diagnosis was certainly faulty. Leaning against a tree two days ago shooting flighting sand-grouse as they came into a water hole near camp after ten days of what Dr. Anderson says was a. d. all the time, I became convinced that though an unbeliever I had been chosen as the one to bear our Lord Buddha when he should be born again on earth. While flattered at this, and wondering how much Buddha at that age would resemble Gertrude Stein, I found the imminence of the event made it difficult to take high incoming birds and finally compromised by reclining against the tree and only accepting crossing shots. This, the coming-of-Buddha symptom, Dr. Anderson describes as prolapsus.
Anyway, no matter how you get it, it is very easily cured. You feel the good effects of the emetine within six hours and the remedy, continued, kills the amœba the way quinine kills the malarial parasite. Three days from now we’ll fly back to join the outfit in the country to the south of Ngocongoro where we are going to hunt greater Kuda. But, as stated, there is no typewriter; they won’t let you drink with this; and if the reader finds this letter more dysenteric than the usual flow, lay it to the combination of circumstances.
The general run of this highland country is the finest I have ever seen. When there has been rain the plains roll green against the blue hills the way the western end of Nebraska lifts as you approach Wyoming when it has gone too long without rain. It is a brown land like Wyoming and Montana but with greater roll and distance. Much of the upland bush country that you hunt through looks exactly like an abandoned New England orchard until you top a hill and see the orchard runs on for fifty miles. Nothing that I have ever read has given any idea of the beauty of the country or the still remaining quantity of game.
On the Serengeti we struck the great migration of the wilde-beeste. Where they were grazing the plain was green after a nine months’ drought and it was black with the bison shaped antelope as far as you could see in all directions during a full day in the truck. The Game Department of Tanganyika estimates the herd at three million. Following them and living on the fringe of the herd were the lions, the spotted hyenas and the jackals.
Going out at sunrise every morning we would locate lions by the vultures circling above a kill. Approaching you would see the jackals trotting away and hyenas going off in that drag belly obscene gallop, looking back as they ran. If the birds were on the ground you knew the lions were gone.
Sometimes we met them in the open plain on their way toward a gully or shallow water course to lie up for the day. Sometimes we saw them on a high knoll in the plain with the herd grazing not half a mile away, lying sleepy and contemptuous looking over the country. More often we saw them under the shade of a tree or saw their great round heads lift up out of the grass of a shallow donga as they heard the noise of the truck. In two weeks and three days in lion country we saw 84 lions and lionesses. Of these twenty were maned lions.
We shot the twenty-third, the forty-seventh, the sixty-fourth and the seventy-ninth. All were shot on foot, three were killed in bush country to the west of the Serengeti and one on the plain itself. Three were full black maned lions and one was a lioness. She was in heat and when the big lion she was with was hit and had gotten into cover the lioness took up her position outside the thick bush. She wanted to charge and it was impossible to go after the lion without killing her first. I broke her neck with a 220 grain .30-06 solid at thirty yards.
At this point Dr. Anderson just came in and administered another injection of emetine and offered the information that when you take emetine you can’t think coherently. So this may be a good place to knock off. Had been feeling that too for some time.
In the next letter I will attempt to discuss whether lion shooting in Tanganyika is a sport or not; go into the difference between lion and leopard hunting, have a few remarks on the buffalo and try to get in a lot of facts. This letter has been pretty well emetined.
As far as bag goes, if anyone is interested, we have good heads of Eland, Waterbuck, Grant Robertsi and other gazelles. A fine roan antelope, two big leopard, and excellent, if not record, impalla; also the limit all around on cheetah. They are much too nice an animal to shoot and I will never kill another.
On the other hand we shot thirty-five hyena out of the lot that follow the wildebeeste migration to keep after the cows that are about to calve and wish we had ammunition to kill a hundred.
In three days we start out for rhino, buffalo again, lesser and greater Kudu, and sable antelope.
Dr. Anderson, a little emetine please.
Nairobi, January 18, 1934
Shootism versus Sport: The Second Tanganyika Letter
Esquire • JUNE, 1934
THERE are two ways to murder a lion. One is to shoot him from a motor car, the other, to shoot him at night with a flashlight from a platform or the shelter of a thorn boma, or blind, as he comes to feed on a bait placed by the shootist or his guide. (Tourists who shoot in Africa are called shootists to distinguish them from sportsmen.) These two ways to murder lion rank, as sport, with dynamiting trout or harpooning swordfish. Yet many men who go to Africa and return to think of themselves as sportsmen and big game hunters, have killed lions from motor cars or from blinds.
The Serengeti plain is the great lion country of present day Africa and the Serengeti is a motor car proposition. The distances between water are too great for it to have been reached and hunted in the old foot safari days, and that was what preserved it. The game migrations, which are determined by the food which is produced by an often casual and unpredictable rainfall, are movements over hundreds of miles, and you may drive seventy-five or a hundred miles over a brown, dry, parched, dusty waste without seeing a head of game, to come suddenly onto a rise of green horizon broken and edged with the black of wildebeeste as far as you can see. It is because of these distances that you must use the motor car in hunting the Serengeti, since your camp must be on a water hole and the game may be over half a day’s march away on the plain.
Now a lion, when you locate him in the morning after he has fed, will have only one idea if he sees a man, to get away into cover where the man will not trouble him. Until he is wounded, that lion will not be dangerous unless you come on him unexpectedly, so closely that you startle him, or unless he is on a kill and does not want to leave it.
If you approach the lion in a motor car, the lion will not see you. His eyes can only distinguish the outline or silhouette of objects, and, because it is illegal to shoot from a motor car, this object means nothing to him. If anything, since the practice of shooting a zebra and dragging it on a rope behind the motor car as a bait for lion in order to take photographs, the motor car may seem a friendly object. For a man to shoot at a lion from the protection of a motor car, where the lion cannot even see what it is that is attacking him, is not only illegal but is a cowardly way to assassinate one of the finest of all game animals.
But supposing, unexpectedly, as you are crossing the country, you see a lion and a lioness say a hundred yards from the car. They are under a thorn tree and a hundred yards behind them is a deep donga, or dry, reed-filled water course, that winds across the plain for perhaps ten miles and gives perfect cover in the daytime to all the beasts of prey that follow the game herds.
You sight the lions from the car; you look the male over and decide he is shootable. You have nev
er killed a lion. You are allowed to kill only two lions on the Serengeti and you want a lion with a full mane, as black as possible. The white hunter says quietly:
“I believe I’d take him. We might beat him but he’s a damned fine lion.”
You look at the lion under the tree. He looks very close, very calm, very, very big and proudly beautiful. The lioness has flattened down on the yellow grass and is swinging her tail parallel to the ground.
“All right,” says the white hunter.
You step out of the car from beside the driver on the side away from the lion, and the white hunter gets out on the same side from the seat behind you.
“Better sit down,” he says. You both sit down and the car drives away. As the car starts to move off you have a very different feeling about lions than you have ever had when you saw them from the motor car.
As the end of the car is past, you see that the lioness has risen and is standing so that you cannot see the lion clearly.
“Can’t see him,” you whisper. As you say it you see that the lions have seen you. He has turned away and is trotting off and she is still standing, the tail swinging wide.
“He’ll be in the donga,” the white hunter says.
You stand up to shoot and the lioness turns. The lion stops and looks back. You see his great head swing toward you, his mouth wide open and his mane blowing in the wind. You hold on his shoulder, start to flinch, correct, hold your breath and squeeze off. You don’t hear the gun go off but you hear a crack like the sound of a policeman’s club on a rioter’s head and the lion is down.
“You’ve got him. Watch the lioness.”
She has flattened down facing you so that you see her head, the ears back, the long yellow of her is flat out along the ground and her tail is now flailing straight up and down.
“I think she’s going to come,” the white hunter says. “If she comes, sit down to shoot.”
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 16