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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
1. Lion
2. Elephant
3. Leopard
4. Cape Buffalo
5. Hippo
6. Crocodile
7. Rhino
8. Snakes
9. Underrated Killers
By the same author
Copyright
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express his thanks and appreciation and admiration to the following persons who, in an astonishingly wide variety of ways, contributed to the production of this manuscript:
Col. Charles Askins, unquestionably one of the world’s greatest living hunters and firearms experts for his encouragement and companionship.
John W. Cox for kind permission to quote his reminiscences of a hairy night in Central Africa.
Tom Siatos, Howard French and Ken Elliott of Petersen Publishing Company for their aid, encouragement and generosity in permitting me to include material from GUNS & AMMO and Petersen’s HUNTING Magazines.
Malcolm C. A. Lyell and Carey Keates of Holland & Holland Limited for their help in the matter of record elephant tusks.
Robert P. Mills, my agent, for his efforts and guidance.
Les Pockell, my editor, who proved that 10 pounds of potatoes can fit in a 5-pound bag without mashing them first.
Alan Root, the intrepid wildlife photographer of Kenya, for kind permission to quote his episode with a killer hippo.
M. Philip Kahl, Ph.D., one of the finest wildlife photographers in the world, for making available some of his best work for this book.
Silent, Invisible, Debalo and Amos, my African family, who did yeoman duty keeping my tail from those snapping jaws.
Lastly, yet foremostly, my wife, Mary Catharine, to whom I can never repay the months of loneliness when I was in the bush or the hours of creeping uncertainty spent locked away from terrorists with only a pair of automatic shotguns for company.
To the memory of my good friend Dean Witter, Jr., who had to leave early.
“I speak of Africa and golden joys; the joy of wandering through lonely lands; the joy of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness, the cunning, the wary and the grim.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Khartoum, March 15, 1910
Foreword
I have often been asked how a Wall Street stockbroker and investment banker goes about swapping his chalk-stripe for camouflage, a change in life styles no less than polar. I suspect that the answer to that one is rooted in my early years, although it did not blossom into a decision until I was nearly thirty years old. Me and Gauguin.
Born in that part of New Jersey that strangers, used only to the ferro-concrete squalor of the New Jersey Turnpike, find hard to believe exists, my childhood I spent in the deep mountainous woods and waters around Lake Valhalla, Montville, in Morris County, where my father was an owner/developer of a club community. My infancy was centered in nearby Boonton, where my grandmother played Elizabeth Regina in a huge gargoyle of a Victorian house that today would give Vincent Price the crawlies.
From the start, the family suspected there was something a bit spooky about young Peter. From about age six, my whole world was centered on stalking and actually catching live songbirds with my bare hands on the lawn. They were healthy, adult robins, grackles, and the like, and I suspect the neighbors took to crossing themselves and wearing garlic as they watched me ease up with the stealth of a cat and grab them, then run off to show poor mother my latest prey, which I then released. I believe my high score was five in one afternoon.
When we moved to the lake in 1944, I found I had several thousand acres all to myself and, with only three playmates—one younger and one a girl—I lived the life of a young Abominable Snowman, hunting, fishing, frogging, and generally sweeping the countryside like a Zulu impi on a rampage. Nights were spent with pet opossums and raccoons devouring David Corey, Selous, Roosevelt, Baldwin, Harris, Baker, Stanley and the works of anybody else I could borrow or ransom that had anything to do with my new fascination: Africa. By the time I was twelve, I had a vocabulary of a couple of hundred KiSwahili words (a hell of a lot of good that did me).
Through prep school at Morristown and college at the University of Virginia, I spent every spare moment either hunting and fishing or dreaming about it. Vacations were spent bass fishing with my brother Tom or prowling the grouse and woodcock covers. After college, a monument of mediocrity, and a short stint in the army, I bit the bullet and went into the securities brokerage business, learning the ropes as an order clerk and finally passing my examinations for customers’ man. To the intense surprise of anybody who knew me, I did pretty well financially, well enough to decide after five years of my life sentence that there just had to be something else in life besides commuter trains, slush, strikes, and muggings. Perhaps I had been overexposed to Thoreau’s “quiet desperation,” I couldn’t say. I simply decided that I wanted to be a professional white hunter and, as I wasn’t getting much younger very fast, determined to give it a go.
Perhaps a word of semantical direction is in order. The term “white hunter” is, with all due apologies to the Tanzanian government, not a racist title. It merely designates a non-African who conducts safaris for sport in Africa. The job is also called “professional hunter,” PWH, or PH, and has nothing to do with the use of the word “guide” as applied in North America. In Africa a guide is one licensed to drive tourists on photographic safaris only and has no bearing on hunting. More and more I hear myself referred to as a “Great White Hunter.” I have no idea where the term comes from, though I suspect it is probably an Americanism. So, to set the matter straight, there are Great White Whales, Great White Hopes, even Great White Ways. There are no Great White Hunters. Mediocre, at best.
To simplify the story I found myself in Central and South America as an apprentice jaguar hunter learning one side of the safari trade. A year later I started a travel agency for sportsmen, booking hunting and fishing trips worldwide. As president I was able to travel considerably, which widened my knowledge and experience quite a bit. I finally sold this firm and became hunting and fishing director of Winchester Adventures, Inc., a subsidiary of the famous arms manufacturers. After two years of traveling for them as a “professional” client, checking out the facilities of safari firms all over Africa and most of the world, I decided to go for broke. I resigned and joined the old Luangwa Safaris, Ltd., out of Chipata, Zambia, and soon gained my full professional hunter’s license. From Zambia I also became licensed in Botswana and Rhodesia as well as spending some time in Ethiopia, usually hunting six months per year and returning to the United States to write for magazines the other six. My wife, Mary Catharine, whom I met in 1970, was with me in Africa until 1975, when we finally left Rhodesia after political difficulties made booking clients too difficult.
That’s the how; the why may not be so simple. In these days of mouth-foaming Disneyism, with ten or more hours a week of thinly veiled, antihunting, network wildlife shows drumming into every twelve-year-old mind that man is slaughtering everything in sight in the name of horrid bloodsport, it is fashionable to look upon hunters, especially professionals, as depraved, moronic, insensitive buffoons. That the sport hu
nter is more responsible for wildlife conservation, through habitat preservation and species management (financed through donations, whopping fees, licenses, and stiff excise taxes on his equipment), than any preservationist group is not widely understood. If you doubt this, remember that the government brought out a special stamp a few years ago for $5, the proceeds of the sale going directly into wildlife and environmental conservation. The general public, who hoot and sneer at the hunter, didn’t buy enough to fill three S & H stamp books, a tiny fraction of the monies generated by the sportsmen who pay the bird watchers’ way. Of course, you can’t blame the networks; they’re selling dog and cat food and have learned to give the people who believe in such shows what they want.
My father once advised me, wisely, I think, not to waste time trying to change folks’ opinion about religion, politics, baseball, or redheaded women. That’s good advice for this book. If you are an ardent hunter hater, you’re likely to stay that way. If, however, you are simply a nonhunter and don’t have too much of an opinion one way or another, let me try to explain the sportsman’s thinking in the face of the negativism so popular these days.
Let’s try a domestic example. How about quail hunting? The nonhunter, if asked the purpose of quail hunting, would usually reply that it was to kill quail. Actually, it’s not. If the object was dead quail for the table, logically the cheapest, easiest, most practical method of achieving this end would be to buy a box of commercially raised, professionally cleaned, pan-ready birds for about $1.75 apiece. This saves one the bother of such matters as keeping and training bird dogs, securing licenses, risking snakebite, laying out for guns and shells, breaking teeth from biting into pellets, and paying for the hundred fringe items that probably cost the quail hunter an amortized average of at least $15 per bird per season, and possibly as much as $25. Yet, he chooses to spend the money, walk the miles, train and care for his dogs, all for possibly taking his limit while refusing to murder a bird on the ground, which, from a meat standpoint, would be many times more rewarding than wing shooting if the objective was merely dead quail.
So it is with elephants. Or lions. Or brown trout on the dry fly. Just as a man may indeed slaughter an elephant from a safe distance, he may also hunt a particular one under a code of rules that is part of the same ethic that forbids passing signals to a partner at bridge, shooting sitting ducks, or using night crawlers in fly-only trout streams. With elephants, however, the difference in playing the game honestly may have other consequences than the embarrassment of a card infringement, the missing of a whistling teal with both barrels, or the drive home troutless. It can get you very dead, which is what makes elephant hunting among the most moral of all sports when practiced honestly, with relatively equal risk to life of man and elephant.
What, after the fat is boiled away, is the essence of hunting dangerous game? In a word, it is challenge in its most elemental form, the same challenge that provided the drive that brought the hairless, puny-toothed, weak, dawn-creature that became man down out of the trees to hunt meat with his rocks, clubs, and pointed sticks. This daring still lives, in various degrees of mufti, under the flannel breast of the meekest shoe clerk although, like every other primeval drive that elevated early man, it has been watered down in direct disproportion to our rising self-estimation. We have ritualized every facet of our behavior that linked us to our bestial past. Our eating, procreation, and elimination habits have been vastly modified and closeted so we don’t have to face the fact that we once did things much the way the rest of the mammal world still does. Our greatest and most developed ability—our skill at hunting—has, in most Western cultures, been under attack. Well over 99 percent of the time man has been on earth, he has been a hunter by profession. Today, man does not hunt for food in modern societies as he did in his recent past. Today, he hunts for the vestigial, ancestral memory of the thrill of the hunt itself. Even though his basic weapon is the ability to make weapons through brain capacity, haven’t you ever wondered why human eyes face forward as do those of every other land predator or bird of prey? Think of the herbivores, the prey, the nonmeateaters such as deer or cattle or bluebirds. They have side-facing, defensive eyes. This alone is enough to qualify man, despite the denials of the Bambi-ites, as predators.
You may not like it, but it is your heritage. We hunt for the same reason an English Pointer puppy points before it can wobble: generations upon generations of evolutionary selectivity urge that course of action. Does this mean that you—yes, you—are an instinctive killer? In my opinion, hell yes, although you have covered it up so you can live with your own image of yourself, as that image was taught to you. We are all killers to the extent that we recognize it, in as much as the death of the prey in a humane manner is the logical conclusion to the modern hunt. We hunters have modified our behavior, too, in that most of us who play by the human ethic are classified under the heading of “sportsmen.” It is the hunt itself that matters rather than the kill.
Let’s try another tack. Take the example of the rock climber. Is his objective to reach the pinnacle of the rock? Only indirectly. What matters is how he achieves his aim. If the only point was to reach the summit, then why wouldn’t he save a lot of risk and energy and take a helicopter? What matters is that he places a risk on his life, the degree of which he alone determines, to achieve his aim the hard way—pitting his strength, skill, and endurance against the element of gravity. Getting the golf ball into the hole is the conclusion of the challenge; how one gets it there and how many strokes it takes is the challenge itself. The putt is to golf what the shot is to hunting.
The object of the sport of hunting big, dangerous game under adverse conditions is not to get killed any more than the object of the rock climber is to fall to his death. It is rather the deliberate exposure of one’s life to the real possibility of death purely for the sake of the experience itself. Sneer if you will, but you only will have half-lived your life if you never feel the icy clutch of danger for its own sake.
In hunting big game, facing danger is the height of the hunting ethic. Any bloody fool can, without encountering the smallest modicum of risk, murder a bull elephant at 200 yards with a lung shot. This is not elephant hunting, but elephant killing. Yet, to walk for a week, thirsty and footsore over hot, dry, thorn-spiked terrain, disappointed a dozen times by small or broken tusks, frightened witless by the female of the species or seemingly unshootable bulls, and then finally to track down a big tusker in heavy cover for a confrontation at less than fifteen yards—well, that is elephant hunting. That is man against himself, the last and purest of the challenges that made us men, not animals.
Peter Hathaway Capstick
Naples, Florida
April, 1977
1
Lion
It is nearly three o’clock in the sweltering morning of September 2, 1974. In four hot, still hours dawn will hemorrhage like a fresh wound in the sky over the eastern Muchingas, the great, towering walls that confine the upper reaches of the Luangwa River in Zambia’s Eastern Province. In the anemic wash of a dying Central African moon, three canvas tents gleam bluely in a sparse grove of sausage trees near the water’s edge. One of them, older and more weather worn, is pitched fifty yards from the others. Behind its bleached cloth and netting walls, a slender white man sleeps fitfully, tossing in the humid spring silence as greasy sweat darkens the sheets of his camp bed. On the dirt floor beside the tent’s walls, a watery moonbeam glows on the scratched white stencil of a footlocker: Peter Hankin, Box 72, Chipata. Inside the travel-dented locker lie three flat five-packs of Kynoch 300-grain soft-point cartridges for the battered, silver-worn, old rifle, a Cogswell and Harrison, .375 Holland and Holland Magnum in caliber. But the rifle, as bush-scarred as the face of its owner, is not leaning in its usual place beside the bed. Operating in a photographic safari area, professional hunter Peter Hankin has had to leave it at his hunting camp, Chitangulu, forty miles downstream. His friends will later decide that even if he had the rif
le now he would still have less than one minute to live.
Fifty yards from Hankin’s tent, in the shadowy skeleton of a fallen muSassa tree, there is a tiny, silent movement. Dilated wide to gather the pale light, two hard, amber eyes flicker across the broken ground and lock on the indistinct form of the man sleeping behind the netting. Seconds pass, then the lioness rises and begins to ooze forward, gliding like a tawny wraith between deep clumps of shadow. There is no sound as she slips along on thick pads, the white sickles of her claws sheathed, the aching throb of hunger hollow in her chest and loins.
At twenty yards she freezes, the thick, acrid man-scent dank in her nostrils. She stifles an involuntary growl, her black upper lip curled back to show thick, long fangs. For a moment she hesitates, but her ancestral fear of the smell is washed over by the desperation of her hunger. At five yards she gathers her hind legs beneath her flattened, lean body, the hind claws gripping the earth for purchase. The man-thing is still asleep, unaware of crouching death so near, his breathing deep and regular in the cat’s lain-back ears. In a flash of dark motion she is in the air, claws extended like naked linoleum knives, the light mosquito netting shredding before her charge. Her impact hurls the man from his bed and onto the ground. Before he is even awake, there is the soggy snap of crushing vertiebrae, then silence. For Peter Hankin, one of central Africa’s most experienced professional white hunters, the last safari is over.
It is light before Hankin’s clients, unarmed and cowering in their tents while listening to the wet feeding sounds, can escape and seek help. In a few hours Joe Joubert, a professional hunter employed by Hankin’s safari firm, a Zambian game guard, and Joubert’s safari client, Samuel Lenher of Wilmington, Delaware, are driving hard along the bush road from Joubert’s camp at Zokwe to the scene of the tragedy. When they arrive, the lioness is still feeding on Hankin’s corpse, which has been dragged a few yards out of the tent. Before Joubert can come up with his express rifle, the Zambian foolishly wounds the man-eater with a blast of SG buckshot from his single-barrel-issue Greener shotgun/carbine. The big cat runs off into the bush where Joubert takes up the blood spoor.
Death in the Long Grass Page 1