I suppose, if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves – Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets – and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons and each other.
The elephant is a rational animal. He thinks. Blix and I (also rational animals in our own right) have never quite agreed on the mental attributes of the elephant. I know Blix is not to be doubted because he has learned more about elephant than any other man I ever met, or even heard about, but he looks upon legend with a suspicious eye, and I do not.
There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of these has ever been discovered. In support of this, there is only the fact that the body of an elephant, unless he had been trapped or shot in his tracks, has rarely been found. What happens to the old and diseased?
Not only natives, but many white settlers, have supported for years the legend (if it is legend) that elephant will carry their wounded and their sick hundreds of miles, if necessary, to keep them out of the hands of their enemies. And it is said that elephant never forget.
These are perhaps just stories born of imagination. Ivory was once almost as precious as gold, and wherever there is treasure, men mix it with mystery. But still, there is no mystery about the things you see yourself.
I think I am the first person ever to scout elephant by plane, and so it follows that the thousands of elephant I saw time and again from the air had never before been plagued by anything above their heads more ominous than tick-birds.
The reaction of a herd of elephant to my Avian was, in the initial instance, always the same – they left their feeding ground and tried to find cover, though often, before yielding, one or two of the bulls would prepare for battle and charge in the direction of the plane if it were low enough to be within their scope of vision. Once the futility of this was realized, the entire herd would be off into the deepest bush.
Checking again on the whereabouts of the same herd the next day, I always found that a good deal of thinking had been going on amongst them during the night. On the basis of their reaction to my second intrusion, I judged that their thoughts had run somewhat like this: A: The thing that flew over us was no bird, since no bird would have to work so hard to stay in the air – and, anyway, we know all the birds. B: If it was no bird, it was very likely just another trick of those two-legged dwarfs against whom there ought to be a law. C: The two-legged dwarfs (both black and white) have, as long as our long memories go back, killed our bulls for their tusks. We know this because, in the case of the white dwarfs, at least, the tusks are the only part taken away.
The actions of the elephant, based upon this reasoning, were always sensible and practical. The second time they saw the Avian, they refused to hide; instead, the females, who bear only small, valueless tusks, simply grouped themselves around their treasure-burdened bulls in such a way that no ivory could be seen from the air or from any other approach.
This can be maddening strategy to an elephant scout. I have spent the better part of an hour circling, criss-crossing and diving low over some of the most inhospitable country in Africa in an effort to break such a stubborn huddle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
But the tactics vary. More than once I have come upon a large and solitary elephant standing with enticing disregard for safety, its massive bulk in clear view, but its head buried in a thicket. This was, on the part of the elephant, no effort to simulate the nonsensical habit attributed to the ostrich. It was, on the contrary, a cleverly devised trap into which I fell, every way except physically, at least a dozen times. The beast always proved to be a large cow rather than a bull, and I always found that by the time I had arrived at this brilliant if tardy deduction, the rest of the herd had got another ten miles away, and the decoy, leering up at me out of a small, triumphant eye, would amble into the open, wave her trunk with devastating nonchalance, and disappear.
This order of intelligence in a lesser animal can obviously give rise to exaggeration – some of it persistent enough to be crystallized into legend. But you cannot discredit truth merely because legend has grown out of it. The sometimes almost godlike achievements of our own species in ages past toddle through history supported more often than not on the twin crutches of fable and human credulity.
As to the brutality of elephant hunting, I cannot see that it is any more brutal than ninety percent of all other human activities. I suppose there is nothing more tragic about the death of an elephant than there is about the death of a Hereford steer – certainly not in the eyes of the steer. The only difference is that the steer has neither the ability nor the chance to outwit the gentleman who wields the slaughter-house snickersnee, while the elephant has both of these to pit against the hunter.
The popular belief that only the so-called ‘rogue’ elephant is dangerous to men is quite wrong – so wrong that a considerable number of men who believed it have become one with the dust without even their just due of gradual disintegration. A normal bull elephant, aroused by the scent of man, will often attack at once – and his speed is as unbelievable as his mobility. His trunk and his feet are his weapons – at least in the distasteful business of exterminating a mere human; those resplendent sabres of ivory await resplendent foes.
Blix and I hardly came into this category at Kilamakoy – certainly not after we had run down the big bull, or, as it happened, the big bull had run down us. I can say, at once with gratification still genuine, that we were not trampled within that most durable of all inches – the last inch of our lives. We got out all right, but there are times when I still dream.
On arriving from Makindu, I landed my plane in the shallow box of a runway scooped out of the bush, unplugged wads of cotton wool from my ears and climbed from the cockpit.
The aristocratically descended visage of the Baron von Blixen Finecke greeted me (as it always did) with the most delightful of smiles caught, like a strip of sunlight, on a familiar patch of leather – well-kept leather, free of wrinkles, but brown and saddle-tough.
Beyond this concession to the fictional idea of what a White Hunter ought to look like, Blix’s face yields not a whit. He has gay, light blue eyes rather than sombre, steel-grey ones; his cheeks are well rounded rather than flat as an axe; his lips are full and generous and not pinched tight in grim realization of what the Wilderness Can Do. He talks. He is never significantly silent.
He wore then what I always remember him as wearing, a khaki bush shirt of ‘solario’ material, slacks of the same stuff, and a pair of low-cut moccasins with soles – or at least vestiges of soles. There were four pockets in his bush shirt, but I don’t think he knew it; he never carried anything unless he was actually hunting – and then it was just a rifle and ammunition. He never went around hung with knives, revolvers, binoculars or even a watch. He could tell time by the sun, and if there were no sun, he could tell it, anyway. He wore over his closely cropped greying hair a terai hat, colourless and limp as a wilted frond.
He said, “Hullo, Beryl,” and pointed to a man at his side – so angular as to give the impression of being constructed entirely of barrel staves.
“This,” said Blix, with what could hardly be called Old World courtesy, “is Old Man Wicks.”
“At last,” said Old Man Wicks, “I have seen the Lady from the Skies.”
Writing it now, that remark seems a little like a line from the best play chosen from those offered by the graduating class of Eton, possibly in the late 20s, or like the remark of a man up to his ears in his favourite anodyne. But, as a matter of fact, Old Man Wicks, who managed a piece of no-man’s-land belonging to the Manoni Sugar Company near Masongaleni, had seen only one white man in 16 months and, I gathered, hadn’t seen a white woman in as many years. At least he had never seen an aeroplane and a white woman at the same time, nor can I be sure that he regarded the spectacle as much of a Godsend. Old Man Wicks, oddly enough, wasn’t very old – he was barely 40 – and it may have been that his monkish life was the first choice of whatever other lives he could have led. He looked old, but that might have been protective colouration. He was a gentle, kindly man helping Blix with the safari until Winston Guest arrived.
It was a modest enough safari. There were three large tents – Winston’s, Blix’s and my own – and then there were several pup tents for the native boys, gun-bearers, and trackers. Blix’s boy Farah, Winston’s boy, and of course my Arab Ruta (who was due via lorry from Nairobi) had pup tents to themselves. The others, as much out of choice as necessity, slept several in a tent. There was a hangar for the Avian, made out of a square of tarpaulin, and there was a baobab tree whose shade served as a veranda to everybody. The immediate country was endless and barren of hills.
Half an hour after I landed Blix and I were up in the Avian, hoping, if possible, to spot a herd of elephant before Winston’s arrival that night. If we could find a herd within two or three days’ walking distance from the camp, it would be extraordinary luck – always provided that the herd contained a bull with respectable tusks.
It is not unusual for an elephant hunter to spend six months, or even a year, on the spoor of a single bull. Elephant go where men can’t – or at least shouldn’t.
Scouting by plane eliminates a good deal of the preliminary work, but when as upon occasion I did spot a herd not more than 30 or 40 miles from camp, it still meant that those 40 miles had to be walked, crawled or wriggled by the hunters – and that by the time this body and nerve-racking manoeuvre had been achieved, the elephant had pushed on another 20 miles or so into the bush. A man, it ought to be remembered, has to take several steps to each stride of an elephant, and moreover, the man is somewhat less than resistant to thicket, thorn trees and heat. Also (particularly if he is white), he is vulnerable as a peeled egg to all things that sting – mosquitoes, scorpions, snakes and tsetse flies. The essence of elephant-hunting is discomfort in such lavish proportions that only the wealthy can afford it.
Blix and I were fortunate on our very first expedition out of Kilamakoy. The Wakamba scouts on our safari had reported a large herd of elephant containing several worthwhile bulls, not more than 20 air miles from camp. We circled the district indicated, passed over the herd perhaps a dozen times, but finally spotted it.
A herd of elephant, as seen from a plane, has a quality of an hallucination. The proportions are wrong – they are like those of a child’s drawing of a field mouse in which the whole landscape, complete with barns and windmills, is dwarfed beneath the whiskers of the mighty rodent who looks both able and willing to devour everything, including the thumb-tack that holds the work against the schoolroom wall.
Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the same sense that the 20th century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden. Even in Africa, the elephant is as anomalous as the Cro-Magnon Man might be shooting a round of golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland.
But with all this, elephant are seldom conspicuous from the air. If they were smaller, they might be. Big as they are, and coloured as they are, they blend with everything until the moment they catch your eye.
They caught Blix’s eye and he scribbled me a frantic note; “Look! The big bull is enormous. Turn back. Doctor Turvy radios I should have some gin.”
Well, we had no radio – and certainly no gin in my plane. But just as certainly, we had Doctor Turvy.
Doctor Turvy was an ethereal citizen of an ethereal world. In the begin-ning, he existed only for Blix, but long before the end, he existed for everybody who worked with Blix or knew him well.
Although Doctor Turvy’s prescriptions indicated that he put his trust in a wine list rather than a pharmacopoeia, he had two qualities of special excellence in a physician; his diagnosis was always arrived at in a split second – and he held the complete confidence of his patient. Beyond that, his adeptness at mental telepathy (in which Blix himself was pretty well grounded) eliminated the expensive practice of calling round to feel the pulse or take a temperature. Nobody ever saw Doctor Turvy – and that fact, Blix insisted, was bedside manner carried to its final degree of perfection.
I banked the Avian and turned toward camp.
Within three miles of our communal baobab tree we saw four more elephant – three of them beautiful bulls. The thought passed through my head that the way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down. Elephant are never within three miles of camp. It’s hardly cricket that they should be. It doesn’t make a hunter out of you to turn over on your canvas cot and realize that the thing you are hunting at such expense and physical tribulation is so contemptuous of your prowess as to be eating leaves right in front of your eyes.
But Blix is a practical man. As a White Hunter, his job was to produce the game desired and to point it out to his employer of the moment. Blix’s work, and mine, was made much easier by finding the elephant so close. We could even land at the camp and then approach them on foot to judge more accurately their size, immediate intentions and strategic disposition.
Doctor Turvy’s prescription had to be filled, and taken, of course, but even so, we would have time to reconnoitre.
We landed on the miserly runway, which had a lot in common with an extemporaneous badminton court, and, within 20 minutes, proceeded on foot toward those magnificent bulls.
Makula was with us. Neither the safari nor this book, for that matter, could be complete without Makula. Though there are a good many Wakamba trackers available in East Africa, it has become almost traditional in late years to mention Makula in every book that touches upon elephant-hunting, and I would not break with tradition.
Makula is a man in the peculiar position of having gained fame without being aware of it. He can neither read nor write; his first language is Wakamba, his second a halting Swahili. He is a smallish ebon-tinted native with an inordinately wise eye, a penchant for black magic, and the instincts of a beagle hound. I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.
No matter how elaborate the safari on which Makula is engaged as tracker, he goes about naked from the waist up, carrying a longbow and a quiver full of poisoned arrows. He has seen the work of the best rifles white men have yet produced, but when Makula’s nostrils distend after either a good or a bad shot, it is not the smell of gunpowder that distends them; it is a kind of restrained contempt for that noisy and unwieldly piece of machinery with its devilish tendency to knock the untutored huntsman flat on his buttocks every time he pulls the trigger.
Safaris come and safaris go, but Makula goes on forever. I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have ever known – so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away, though I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: “White men pay for danger – we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.”
Makula always vanished. He went ahead in the bush with the silence of a shade, missing nothing, and the moment he had brought his hunters within sight of the elephant, he disappeared with the silence of a shade, missing everything.
Stalking just ahead of Blix through the tight bush, Makula signalled for a pause, shinnied up a convenient tree without noise, and then came down again. He pointed to a chink in the thicket, took Blix firmly by the arm, and pushed him ahead. Then Makula disappeared. Blix led, and I followed.
The ability to move soundlessly through a wall of bush as tightly woven as Nature can weave it is not an art that can be acquired much after childhood. I cannot explain it, nor could Arab Maina who taught me ever explain it. It is not a matter of watching where you step; it is rather a matter of keeping your eyes on the place where you want to be, while every nerve becomes another eye, every muscle develops reflex action. You do not guide your body, you trust it to be silent.
We were silent. The elephant we advanced upon heard nothing – even when the enormous hindquarters of two bulls loomed before us like grey rocks wedded to the earth.
Blix stopped. He whispered with his fingers and I read the whisper.
“Watch the wind. Swing round them. I want to see their tusks.”
Swing, indeed! It took us slightly over an hour to negotiate a semicircle of 50 yards. The bulls were big – with ivory enough – hundred-pounders at least, or better.
Nimrod was satisfied, wet with sweat and on the verge, I sensed, of receiving a psychic message from Doctor Turvy. But this message was delayed in transit.
One bull raised his head, elevated his trunk, and moved to face us. His gargantuan ears began to spread as if to capture even the sound of our heart-beats. By chance, he had grazed over a spot we had lately left, and he had got our scent. It was all he needed.
I have rarely seen anything so calm as that bull elephant – or so casually determined upon destruction. It might be said that he shuffled to the kill. Being, like all elephant, almost blind, this one could not see us, but he was used to that. He would follow scent and sound until he could see us, which, I computed, would take about 30 seconds.
Blix wiggled his fingers earthward, and that meant, “Drop and crawl.”
It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. The problem of classification alone must continue to be very discouraging.
By the time I had crawled three feet, I am sure that somewhere over 50 distinct species of insect life were individually and severally represented in my clothes, with Siafu ants conducting the congress.
Blix’s feet were just ahead of my eyes – close enough so that I could contemplate the holes in his shoes, and wonder why he ever wore any at all, since he went through them almost in a matter of hours. I had ample time also to observe that he wore no socks. Practical, but not comme il faut. His legs moved through the underbrush like dead legs dragged by strings. There was no sound from the elephant.
I don’t know how long we crawled like that, but the little shadows in the thicket were leaning toward the east when we stopped. Possibly we had gone a hundred yards. The insect bites had become just broad, burning patches.
We were breathing easier – or at least I was – when Blix’s feet and legs went motionless. I could just see his head close against his shoulder, and watch him turn to peek upward into the bush. He gave no signal to continue. He only looked horribly embarrassed like a child caught stealing eggs.
But my own expression must have been a little more intense. The big bull was about ten feet away – and at that distance elephant are not blind.
Blix stood up and raised his rifle slowly, with an expression of ineffable sadness.
That’s for me, I thought. He knows that even a shot in the brain won’t stop that bull before we’re crushed like mangos.
In an open place, it might have been possible to dodge to one side, but not here. I stood behind Blix with my hands on his waist according to his instructions. But I knew it wasn’t any good. The body of the elephant was swaying. It was like watching a boulder, in whose path you were trapped, teeter on the edge of a cliff before plunging. The bull’s ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up and extended toward us, and he began the elephant scream of anger, which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand, like fingers clamped upon your throat. It is a shrill scream, cold as winter wind.
It occurred to me that this was the instant to shoot.
Blix never moved. He held his rifle very steady and began to chant some of the most striking blasphemy I have ever heard. It was colourful, original, and delivered with finesse, but I felt that this was a badly chosen moment to test it on an elephant – and ungallant beyond belief if it was meant for me.
The elephant advanced, Blix unleashed more oaths (this time in Swedish), and I trembled. There was no rifle shot. A single biscuit tin, I judged, would do for both of us – cremation would be superfluous.
“I may have to shoot him,” Blix announced, and the remark struck me as an understatement of classic magnificence. Bullets would sink into that monstrous hide like pebbles into a pond.
Somehow you never think of an elephant as having a mouth, because you never see it when his trunk is down, so that when the elephant is quite close and his trunk is up, the dark red-and-black slit is by way of being an almost shocking revelation. I was looking into our elephant’s mouth with a kind of idiotic curiosity when he screamed again – and thereby, I am convinced, saved both Blix and me from a fate no more tragic than simple death, but infinitely less tidy.
The scream of that elephant was a strategic blunder, and it did him out of a wonderful bit of fun. It was such an authentic scream of such splendid resonance, that his cronies, still grazing in the bush, accepted it as legitimate warning, and left. We had known they were still there because the bowels of peacefully occupied elephant rumble continually like oncoming thunder – and we had heard thunder.
They left, and it seemed they tore the country from its roots in leaving. Everything went, bush, trees, san-sivera, clods of dirt – and the monster who confronted us. He paused, listened, and swung round with the slow irresistibility of a bank-vault door. And then he was off in a typhoon of crumbled vegetation and crashing trees.
For a long time there wasn’t any silence, but when there was, Blix lowered his rifle – which had acquired, for me, all the death-dealing qualities of a feather duster.
I was limp, irritable, and full of maledictions for the insect kind. Blix and I hacked our way back to camp without the exchange of a word, but when I fell into a canvas chair in front of the tents, I forswore the historic propriety of my sex to ask a rude question.
“I think you’re the best hunter in Africa, Blickie, but there are times when your humour is gruesome. Why in hell didn’t you shoot?”
Blix extracted a bug from Doctor Turvy’s elixir of life and shrugged.
“Don’t be silly. You know as well as I do why I didn’t shoot. Those elephant are for Winston.”
“Of course I know – but what if that bull had charged?”
Farah the faithful produced another drink, and Blix produced a non sequitur. He stared upward into the leaves of the baobab tree and sighed like a poet in love.
“There’s an old adage,” he said, “translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages – ‘Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.’ ”
Note: “I May Have to Shoot Him” from West with the Night by Beryl Markham. Copyright© 1942, 1983 by Beryl Markham. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
