Part 1

Chapter 14,047 wordsPublic domain

The Happy Hunting-Grounds

Kermit Roosevelt

Author of “War in the Garden of Eden”

Illustrated from Photographs by the Author

London Hodder & Stoughton 1920

Printed by the Scribner Press New York, U. S. A.

TO THE MISTRESS OF SAGAMORE

Contents

PAGE I. THE HAPPY HUNTING-GROUNDS 3

II. IN QUEST OF SABLE ANTELOPE 53

III. THE SHEEP OF THE DESERT 71

IV. AFTER MOOSE IN NEW BRUNSWICK 103

V. TWO BOOK-HUNTERS IN SOUTH AMERICA 123

VI. SETH BULLOCK--SHERIFF OF THE BLACK HILLS COUNTRY 151

Illustrations

Arab sheikhs who had ridden in, camel-back, from the desert to pay their respects _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Sir Alfred Pease’s sketch of our first giraffe hunt 24

Father and R. H. Munro Ferguson at the Elkhorn Ranch, after the return from a successful hunting trip 34

Facsimile of a picture letter by father 38

Putting the tape on a tusker 42

Launching a newly made dugout on the Dúvida 44

A relic of the Portuguese occupation; an old well beside the trail 56

The Death Dance of the Wa Nyika children in memory of the chieftain’s little son 58

Across the bay from Mombasa; the porters ready to shoulder loads and march 66

A desert camp in old Mexico 78

Casares on his white mule 88

Making fast the sheep’s head 96

A noonday halt on the way down river, returning from the hunting country 106

Bringing out the trophies of the hunt 118

The Captain makes advances to a little Indian girl 152

A morning’s bag of prairie chicken in South Dakota 170

The Happy Hunting-Grounds

THE HAPPY HUNTING-GROUNDS

There is a universal saying to the effect that it is when men are off in the wilds that they show themselves as they really are. As is the case with the majority of proverbs there is much truth in it, for without the minor comforts of life to smooth things down, and with even the elemental necessities more or less problematical, the inner man has an unusual opportunity of showing himself--and he is not always attractive. A man may be a pleasant companion when you always meet him clad in dry clothes, and certain of substantial meals at regulated intervals, but the same cheery individual may seem a very different person when you are both on half rations, eaten cold, and have been drenched for three days--sleeping from utter exhaustion, cramped and wet.

My father had done much hunting with many and varied friends. I have often heard him say of some one whom I had thought an ideal hunting companion: “He’s a good fellow, but he was always fishing about in the pot for the best piece of meat, and if there was but one partridge shot, he would try to roast it for himself. If there was any delicacy he wanted more than his share.” Things assume such different proportions in the wilds; after two months living on palm-tree tops and monkeys, a ten-cent can of condensed milk bought for three dollars from a rubber explorer far exceeds in value the greatest delicacy of the season to the ordinary citizen who has a varied and sufficient menu at his command every day in the year.

Even as small children father held us responsible to the law of the jungle. He would take us out on camping trips to a neck of land four or five miles across the bay from home. We would row there in the afternoon, the boats laden with blankets and food. Then we would make a driftwood fire on which to fry our supper--usually bacon and chicken. I do not know whether it was the, to us, wild romance of our position, or the keen appetite from the row, but never since then have I eaten such bacon. Not even the smallest child was allowed to show a disposition to grab, or select his pieces of chicken--we were taught that that was an unpardonable offense out camping, and might cause the culprit to be left behind next time. And woe to any one who in clumsily walking about kicked sand into the frying-pan. After supper we would heap more driftwood on the fire, and drape ourselves in our blankets. Then we would stretch ourselves out in the sand while father would tell us ghost stories. The smallest of us lay within reach of father where we could touch him if the story became too vivid for our nerves and we needed the reassuring feel of his clothes to bring us back to reality. There was, however, a delicious danger in being too near him. In stories in which the “haunt” seized his victim, father generally illustrated the action by making a grab at the nearest child. After the stories were finished we rolled up in our blankets and, thoroughly permeated with sand, we slept until the first faint light of dawn. Then there was the fire to be built up, and the breakfast cooked, and the long row home. As we rowed we chanted a ballad, usually of a seafaring nature; it might be “The Rhyme of the Three Sealers,” or “The Galley Slave,” or “Simon Danz.” Father taught us these and many more, _viva voce_, when he was dressing for dinner. A child was not taken along on these “campings out” until he was six or seven. They took place three or four times a summer, and continued until after the African expedition. By that time we were most of us away at work, scattered far and wide.

Father always threw himself into our plays and romps when we were small as if he were no older than ourselves, and with all that he had seen and done and gone through, there was never any one with so fresh and enthusiastic an attitude. His wonderful versatility and his enormous power of concentration and absorption were unequalled. He could turn from the consideration of the most grave problems of state to romp with us children as if there were not a worry in the world. Equally could he bury himself in an exhaustive treatise on the _History of the Mongols_ or in the _Hound of the Baskervilles_.

Until father sold his ranches in North Dakota he used to go out West each year for a month or so. Unfortunately, we were none of us old enough to be taken along, but we would wait eagerly for his letters, and the recipient of what we called a picture letter gloried in the envy of the rest until another mail placed a substitute upon the pedestal. In these picture letters father would sketch scenes and incidents about the ranch or on his short hunting trips. We read most of them to pieces, unluckily, but the other day I came across one of the non-picture letters that father wrote me:

August 30, ’96. Out on the prairie.

I must send my little son a letter too, for his father loves him very much. I have just ridden into camp on Muley,[1] with a prongbuck strapped behind the saddle; I was out six hours before shooting it. Then we all sat down on the ground in the shade of the wagon and had dinner, and now I shall clean my gun, and then go and take a bath in a big pool nearby, where there is a large flat stone on the edge, so I don’t have to get my feet muddy. I sleep in the buffalo hide bag and I never take my clothes off when I go to bed!

By the time we were twelve or thirteen we were encouraged to plan hunting trips in the West. Father never had time to go with us, but we would be sent out to some friend of his, like Captain Seth Bullock, to spend two or three weeks in the Black Hills, or perhaps we would go after duck and prairie-chicken with Marvin Hewitt. Father would enter into all the plans and go down with us to the range to practise with rifle or shotgun, and when we came back we would go over every detail of the trip with him, revelling in his praise when he felt that we had acquitted ourselves well.

Father was ever careful to correct statements to the effect that he was a crack shot. He would explain how little being one had to do with success and achievement as a hunter. Perseverance, skill in tracking, quick vision, endurance, stamina, and a cool head, coupled with average ability as a marksman, produced far greater results than mere skill with a rifle--unaccompanied to any marked extent by the other attributes. It was the sum of all these qualities, each above the average, but none emphasized to an extraordinary degree, that accounted for father’s great success in the hunting-field. He would point out many an excellent shot at a target who was of no use against game. Sometimes this would be due to lack of nerve. Father himself was equally cool and unconcerned whether his quarry was a charging lion or a jack-rabbit; with, when it came to the question of scoring a hit, the resultant advantage in the size of the former as a target. In other instances a good man at the range was not so good in the field because he was accustomed to shooting under conventional and regulated conditions, and fell down when it came to shooting under disadvantageous circumstances--if he had been running and were winded, if he were hungry or wet, or tired, or feeling the sun, if he were uncertain of the wind or the range. Sometimes, of course, a crack shot possesses all the other qualities; such is the case with Stewart Edward White, whom Cuninghame classified as the best shot with whom he had hunted in all his twenty-five years in the wilds. Father shot on a par with Cuninghame, and a good deal better than I, though not as well as Tarleton.

I have often heard father regret the fact that he did not care for shooting with the shotgun. He pointed out that it was naturally the most accessible and least expensive form of hunting. His eyesight made it almost impossible for him to attain much skill with a shotgun, and although as a boy and young man he went off after duck for sport, in later years he never used a shotgun except for collecting specimens or shooting for the pot. He continually encouraged us to learn to shoot with the gun. In a letter he wrote me to Europe when I was off after chamois he said: “I have played tennis a little with both Archie and Quentin, and have shot with the rifle with Archie and seen that he has practised shotgun shooting with Seaman.”

When my brother and myself were ten and eight, respectively, father took us and four of our cousins of approximately the same ages to the Great South Bay for a cruise, with some fishing and bird-shooting thrown in, as the guest of Regis Post. It was a genuine sacrifice on father’s part, for he loathed sailing, detested fishing, and was, to say the least, lukewarm about bird-shooting. Rowing was the only method of progression by water for which he cared. The trip was a great success, however, and father enjoyed it more than he anticipated, for with the help of our host he instructed us in caring for ourselves and our firearms. I had a venerable 12-bore pin-fire gun which was the first weapon my father ever owned. It was usually known in the family as the “rust bore” because in the course of its eventful career it had become so pitted and scarred with rust that you could put in as much time as you wished cleaning and oiling without the slightest effect. I stood in no little awe of the pin-fire because of its recoil when fired, and as I was in addition a miserably poor shot, my bag on the Great South Bay trip was not large. It consisted of one reedbird, which father with infinite pains and determination at length succeeded in enabling me to shoot. I am sure he never spent more time and effort on the most difficult stalk after some coveted trophy in the West or in Africa.

Father’s hunting experiences had been confined to the United States, but he had taken especial interest in reading about Africa, the sportsman’s paradise. When we were small he would read us incidents from the hunting books of Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, or Samuel Baker, or Drummond, or Baldwin. These we always referred to as “I stories,” because they were told in the first person, and when we were sent to bed we would clamor for just one more, a petition that was seldom denied. Before we were old enough to appreciate the adventures we were shown the pictures, and through Cornwallis Harris’s beautiful colored prints in the _Portraits of Game and Wild Animals of Southern Africa_ we soon learned to distinguish the great beasts of Africa. The younger Gordon Cumming came to stay with us at Sagamore, and when father would get him to tell us hunting incidents from his own varied career, we listened enthralled to a really living “I story.” To us he was known as the “Elephant Man,” from his prowess in the pursuit of the giant pachyderm.

Then there was also the “Shark Man.” He was an Australian who told us most thrilling tales of encounters with sharks witnessed when among the pearl-divers. I remember vividly his description of seeing a shark attack one of the natives working for him. The man was pulled aboard only after the shark had bitten a great chunk from his side and exposed his heart, which they could see still beating. He said, “Master, master, big fish,” before he died.

The illustrations in Millais’s _Breath from the Veldt_ filled us with delight, and to this day I know of no etching that affects me as does the frontispiece by the author’s father. It is called the “Last Trek.” An old hunter is lying dead beside his ox-wagon; near him squat two of his Kafir boys, and in the distance graze herds of zebra and hartebeeste and giraffe.

Of the mighty hunters that still survived at that time, father admired most Mr. F. C. Selous. His books he knew almost by heart. Whenever Selous came to the United States he would stay with us, and father would sit up till far into the night talking of wild life in the open. Selous, at sixty-five, enlisted in the late war as a private; he rose to be captain, and was decorated with the D. S. O. for gallantry, before he fell, fighting the Germans in East Africa. No one could have devised a more fitting end for the gallant old fellow than to die at the head of his men, in a victorious battle on those plains he had roamed so often and loved so well, fighting against the worst and most dangerous beast of his generation.

In 1887 father founded a hunting club called the “Boone and Crockett” after two of the most mighty hunters of America. No one was entitled to membership who had not brought down in fair chase three species of American big game. The membership was limited to a hundred and I well remember my father’s pride when my brother and I qualified and were eventually elected members. The club interests itself particularly in the conservation of wild life, and the establishment of game refuges. Mr. Selous and other English hunters were among the associate members.

In the summer of 1908 my father told me that when his term in the White House ended the following spring, he planned to make a trip to Africa, and that if I wished to do so I could accompany him. There was no need to ask whether I wanted to go. At school when we were writing compositions, mine almost invariably took the form of some imaginary journey across the “Dark Continent.” Still, father had ever made it a practice to talk to us as if we were contemporaries. He would never order or even tell us to follow a certain line; instead, he discussed it with us, and let us draw our own conclusions. In that way we felt that while we had his unreserved backing, we were yet acting on our own initiative, and were ourselves responsible for the results. If a boy is forced to do a thing he often makes but a half-hearted attempt to succeed, and lays his failure to the charge of the person who forced him, although he might well have come through with flying colors had he felt that he was acting on his own responsibility. In his discussions with us, father could of course shape our opinions in what he thought the proper mould.

In like manner, when it came to taking me to Africa father wanted me to go, but he also wanted me to thoroughly understand the pro’s and con’s. He explained to me that it was a holiday that he was allowing himself at fifty, after a very busy life--that if I went I would have to make up my mind that my holiday was coming at the beginning of my life, and be prepared to work doubly hard to justify both him and myself for having taken it. He said that the great danger lay in my being unsettled, but he felt that taken rightly the experience could be made a valuable asset instead of a liability. After we had once finished the discussion and settled that I was to go, father never referred to it again. He then set about preparing for the expedition. Mr. Edward North Buxton was another African hunter whom he greatly admired, and it was to him and to Selous that he chiefly turned for aid in making his plans. It was often said of father that he was hasty and inclined to go off at half-cock. There was never any one who was less so. He would gather his information and make his preparations with painstaking care, and then when the moment came to act he was thoroughly equipped and prepared to do so with that lightning speed that his enemies characterized as rash hot-headedness.

Father always claimed that it was by discounting and guarding against all possible causes of failure that he won his successes. His last great battle, that for preparedness for the part that “America the Unready” would have to play in the World War, was true to his life creed. For everything he laid his plans in advance, foreseeing as far as was humanly possible each contingency to be encountered.

For the African expedition he made ready in every way. I was at the time at Harvard, and almost every letter brought some reference to preparations. One day it would be: “The Winchester rifles came out for trial and all of them were sighted wrong. I sent them back with rather an acid letter.” Then again: “You and I will be so rusty when we reach Sir Alfred Pease’s ranch that our first efforts at shooting are certain to be very bad. In March we will practise at Oyster Bay with the 30-30 until we get what I would call the ‘rifle sense’ back again, and this will make it easier for us when, after a month’s sea trip, we take up the business of hunting.”

A group of thirty or forty of the most famous zoologists and sportsmen presented my father with a heavy, double-barrelled gun. “At last I have tried the double-barrelled Holland Elephant rifle. It is a perfect beauty and it shoots very accurately, but of course the recoil is tremendous, and I fired very few shots. I shall get you to fire it two or three times at a target after we reach Africa, just so that you shall be thoroughly familiar with it, if, or when, you use it after big game. There is no question that except under extraordinary circumstances it would be the best weapon for elephant, rhino, and buffalo. I think the 405 Winchester will be as good for everything else.”

“About all my African things are ready now, or will be in a few days. I suppose yours are in good trim also [a surreptitious dig at a somewhat lackadaisical son.] I am pursuing my usual plan of taking all the precautions in advance.”

A few days later came another reference to the Holland & Holland: “The double-barrelled four-fifty shot beautifully, but I was paralyzed at the directions which accompanied it to the effect that two shots must always be fired in the morning before starting, as otherwise from the freshly oiled barrels the first shot would go high. This is all nonsense and I shall simply have to see that the barrels are clean of the oil.” The recoil of the big gun was so severe that it became a standing joke as to whether we did not fear it more than a charging elephant!

Father gave the closest attention to every detail of the equipment. The first provision lists prepared by his friends in England were drawn up on a presidential scale with champagne and pâté de foies gras and all sorts of luxuries. These were blue-pencilled and two American staples substituted--baked beans and canned tomatoes. Father always retained the appreciation of canned tomatoes gained in the early ranching days in the West. He would explain how delicious he had found it in the Bad Lands after eating the tomatoes to drink the juice from the can. In hunting in a temperate climate such as our West, a man can get along with but very little, and it is difficult to realize that a certain amount of luxury is necessary in the tropics to maintain oneself fit. Then, too, in Africa the question of transportation was fairly simple--and almost everywhere we were able to keep ourselves and the porters amply supplied with fresh meat. Four years later during the descent of the Dúvida--the “River of Doubt”--we learned to our bitter cost what it meant to travel in the tropics as lightly equipped as one could, with but little hardship, in the north. It was not, however, through our own lack of forethought, but due rather to the necessities and shifting chances of a difficult and dangerous exploring expedition.

Even if it is true as Napoleon said, that an army marches on its belly, still, it won’t go far unless its feet are properly shod, and since my father had a skin as tender as a baby’s, he took every precaution that his boots should fit him properly and not rub. “The modified duffle-bags came all right. I suppose we will get the cotton-soled shoes, but I do not know. How do you like the rubber-soled shoes? Don’t you think before ordering other pairs it would be as well to wait until you see the army shoes here, which are light and somehow look as if they were more the kind you ordinarily use? How many pairs have you now for the African trip, and how many more do you think you want?”

Father was fifty years old in the October before we left for Africa, and the varied experiences of his vigorous life had, as he used to say, battered and chipped him. One eye was to all intents useless from the effects of a boxing-match, and from birth he had been so astigmatic as to be absolutely unable to use a rifle and almost unable to find his way in the woods without his glasses. He never went off without eight or ten pairs so distributed throughout his kit as to minimize the possibility of being crippled through any ordinary accident. Even so, any one who has worn glasses in the tropics knows how easily they fog over, and how hopeless they are in the rains. It was a continual source of amazement to see how skilfully father had discounted this handicap in advance and appeared to be unhampered by it.