Carl Ethan Akeley

“ If his sympathies had been on the human side he could not be the biographer of the African vanishing world who speaks in the pages of this volume, lost in admiration of the majesty of the elephant, the unchallenged reign of the lion, the beauty and grace of the antelope, the undaunted courage of the buffalo, and, last but not least, of certain splendid qualities in the native African hunter. We know of only one other sculptor who has immortalized the African Negro in bronze; this is Herbert Ward, whose splendid life work is now in the United States National Museum. ”

“ After all, perhaps the most impressive thing about a lion is his foreleg. The more you know of elephants the more you regard the elephant's trunk. The more you know of lions, the more you respect the lion's foreleg and the great padded and clawed weapon at the end of it. It is perhaps the best token of the animal's strength. It is probably two or three times as powerful in proportion to weight as the arm of a man. He can kill a man with one blow of his paw. His other weapon, his jaw, is strong enough to break a zebra's neck at one bite. ”

“ CHAPTER IV HUNTING THE AFRICAN BUFFALO
The buffalo is different from any other kind of animal in Africa. A lion prefers not to fight a man. He almost never attacks unprovoked, and even when he does attack he is not vindictive. The elephant, like the lion, prefers to be left alone. But he is quicker to attack than the lion and he isn't satisfied merely to knock out his man enemy. Complete destruction is his aim. The buffalo is even quicker than the elephant to take offence at man and he is as keen-sighted, clever, and vindictive as the elephant. ”

“ I like to think back to the day I saw the group of baby elephants playing with a great ball of baked dirt two and a half feet in diameter which, in their playing, they rolled for more than half a mile, and the playfulness with which this same group teased the babies of a herd of buffalo until the cow buffaloes chased them off. I think, too, of the extraordinary fact that I have never heard or seen African elephants fighting each other. They have no enemy but man and are at peace amongst themselves. ”

“ Here was I now, it seemed, on the point of meeting face to face that monster of whose ferocity, strength, and cunning the natives had told me so much; an animal scarce known to the civilized world, and which no white man before had hunted. My heart beat till I feared its loud pulsations would alarm the gorilla, and my feelings were really excited to a painful degree. ”

“ One night about dark, after a week or two of hunting, we heard the squeal of an elephant while we were sitting at dinner. A little later there were more squeals and occasional trumpeting—more and more, clearer and clearer—and by the time we had finished dinner the noise was only a mile or so away. It was a continuous row which suggested a tremendous herd. We went to bed early with elephants getting closer to camp all of the time. ”

“ I had the material for which I had come to Africa—material sufficient to make a correct group of gorillas for the proposed Roosevelt African Hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York—but I also had a great deal more, a vision of how to study this animal which is man's nearest relative.
As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man. ”

“ The world has no record of the knowledge of wild life that their experience should have given the ivory hunters.
It is for this reason that the camera hunters appeal to me as being so much more useful than the gun hunters. They have their pictures to show—still pictures and moving pictures—and when their game is over the animals are still alive to play another day. Moreover, according to any true conception of sport—the use of skill, daring, and endurance in overcoming difficulties—camera hunting takes twice the man that gun hunting takes. ”

“ In this, which we hope will be an everlasting monument to the Africa that was, the Africa that is now fast disappearing, I hope to place the elephant group on a pedestal in the centre of the hall—the rightful place for the first animal of them all.
And it may not be many years before such museum exhibits are the only remaining records of my jungle friends. As civilization advances in Africa, the extinction of the elephant is being accomplished slowly but quite as surely as that of the American buffalo two generations ago. ”

“ Truthfulness is the high note of the enduring biographer of animal life as well as of human life. "Set down naught in malice, nothing extenuate" is an essential principle in the portrayal of vanishing Africa as it is in our portrayal of the contemporary manners and customs of modern society; to know the elephant, the lion, the antelope, the gorilla as they really are, not as they have been pictured by sensational writers who have never seen them at close range or who have been tempted to exaggerate their danger for commercial reasons. ”

“ It is probably not true that the African elephant cannot be domesticated. In fact, somewhere in the Congo is a farm where fifty tame elephants, just as amenable as those in India, are at work. But taming elephants is not a sound proposition economically. Elephant farming is a prince's game, and Africa has no princes to play it. An elephant requires hundreds of acres of land, infinitely more than cattle and sheep and the other domesticated animals. So it is that as man moves on the land, the elephant must move off. ”

“ I ran up behind a bush at the edge of the clearing and peeked through it. There, not more than twenty yards from me, was my bull, partially exposed and partially covered by the other animals. I could not get a shot at his brain as he was standing, but the foreleg on my side was forward exposing his side so that I had a good shot at his heart—a shot I had never made before. The heart is eighteen or twenty inches long and perhaps a foot up and down—a good mark in size if one's guess at its location is accurate. If you can hit an elephant's vertebræ and break his back you can kill him. ”

“ In this respect animal nature is like human nature—we may take our choice. The decadent sculptor and the decadent writer may choose the wrong side in human nature, and the sensational writer may choose the wrong side in animal nature; Akeley has chosen the ennobling side and does not dwell on the vices either of the animals or of the natives but on their virtues, their courage, defence of their young, devotion to the safety of their families—simple, homely virtues which are so much needed to-day in our civilization. ”

“ Without a sight of what I was shooting at, I shot hastily into the bush. The snarl of a leopard told me what kind of a customer I was taking chances with. A leopard is a cat and has all the qualities that gave rise to the "nine lives" legend. To kill him you have got to kill him clear to the tip of his tail. Added to that, a leopard, unlike a lion, is vindictive. A wounded leopard will fight to a finish practically every time, no matter how many chances it has to escape. ”

“ One time in Uganda I was using Bill as a gun-bearer in preference to the regular gun-bearers, because I had by that time realized that Bill was the best tracker as well as the most keen and alert hunter, black or white, that I had ever known. We had followed a small band of elephants into some dense forest, and for a long time had been crouching beneath some undergrowth where we could get an occasional glimpse of the elephants' legs, but nothing more. ”

“ An elephant can shoot a stream of water out of it that would put out a fire; lift a tree trunk weighing a ton and throw it easily; or it is delicate enough to pull a blade of grass with. He drinks with it, feeds himself with it, smells with it, works with it, and at times fights with it. Incidentally, a mouse that endeavoured to frighten an elephant by the traditional nursery rhyme method of running up his trunk would be blown into the next county. There is nothing else like an elephant's trunk on earth. ”

“ I have spent many months studying elephants in Africa—on the plains, in the forests, in the bamboo, up on the mountains. I have watched them in herds and singly, studied their paths, their feeding grounds, everything about them I could, and I have come to the conclusion that of all the wild animals on this earth [Pg 21] now, the African elephant is the most fascinating, and that man, for all the thousands of years he has known of elephants, knows mighty little about him. I am speaking only of the African elephant. He has not been domesticated as his Indian cousin has. ”

“ I confess that I never was more excited in my life. For years I had heard of the terrible roar of the gorilla, of its vast strength, its fierce courage if, unhappily, only wounded by a shot. I knew that we were about to pit ourselves against an animal which even the tiger of these mountains fears and which, perhaps, has driven the lion out of this territory; for the king of beasts, so numerous [Pg 195] elsewhere in Africa, is never met in the land of the gorilla. ”

“ It may not even be accomplished by several men in the span of one man's life. But the future will show concrete results, for the slowest and most laborious stages of preparation are now in the past. Years of experimentation have perfected taxidermy, years of observation in the field have made a true conception possible, the American Museum of Natural History has committed itself to the plan—in a word, I am about to realize my dream. ”

“ There are antelope smaller than hares and antelope larger than oxen. There are creatures which are the embodiments of grace, and others whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful animals whose like is not known elsewhere; and with others even stranger that show both in form and temper something of the fantastic and the grotesque. ”

“ While I have found but little enjoyment in shooting any kind of animal, I confess that in hunting elephants and lions under certain conditions I have always felt that the animal had sufficient chance in the game to make it something like a sporting proposition. On the other hand, much of the shooting that I have had to do in order to obtain specimens for museum collections has had none of this aspect at all and has made me feel a great deal like a murderer. One of the worst of my experiences was with the wild ass of Somaliland on my first trip to Africa. ”

“ The truth is that people know little about the habits of the gorilla. Really to know about an animal requires long and intimate study. Comparatively few people have even shot gorillas. Gorilla skeletons, even, have not been common for study like those of other animals. The avidity with which the doctors of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York seized upon the body of John Daniel shows both how rare and how important the opportunity to study the gorilla is to the science of medicine as well as to that of comparative anatomy. ”

“ The animal weighs no more than seventy-five pounds. It is the most beautifully developed antelope I have ever handled, with muscles and loins rounded out like those of a prize fighter. These gazelle never have any fat and never drink any water. In fact, there is no water to be had except that in the vegetation, which is very little in a country where it has not rained for two years.
Unlike these sporting animals, the gazelle of the plains remind one of great herds of sheep, so gentle where they have not been hunted that one may come close enough to throw stones at them. ”

“ An elephant's scream is loud and shrill and piercing. And it is terrifying, too—at least to any one who knows elephants—for it means an angry animal and usually a charge. Then came a series of grunts and rumblings. A second or two later he came in sight, his ears spread out twelve feet from tip to tip, his trunk up and jerking fiercely from side to side. There is no way of describing how big an elephant looks under these conditions, or the speed at which he comes. At about thirty yards I shot, but he took it. ”

“ There was the same vegetation, except that the trees were smaller. There were elephant trails, but only a few and with small tracks. There were no great forest trees like those of Kenia, no bamboos seventy-five feet high with five-inch stems. There was just little stuff, but still it was all reminiscent of Kenia. One thing, the slopes were just as steep and just as slippery, and the mud in the level places just as deep and sticky as Kenia's.
Through this forest there are native trails or game trails almost everywhere. ”