John T. McCutcheon

“ We usually camped near a river. Our first camp was on the Athi Plains, near Nairobi; our second at Nairobi Falls, where the river plunges down a sixty-foot drop in a spot of great beauty. Our third camp was on the Induruga River, in a beautiful but malarious spot; our fifth was on the Thika Thika River, where it was so cold in the morning that the vapor of our breathing was visible; and our sixth on a wind-blown hill where a whirlwind blew down our mess tent and scattered the cook's fire until the whole grass veldt was in furious flames. It took a hundred men an hour to put out the flames. ”

“ Whenever I shall think of Africa in the future, I shall think of my old friend, the kongoni, dotting the landscape and sticking his inquiring ears over various spots on the horizon. In four and a half months I think I must have seen at least a hundred thousand kongoni.
The giraffe is also a creature of most amusing actions. You are pretty certain to see a bunch of them as you come up the railway from the coast. They were the first wild animals I saw in British East Africa—a group of four or five quietly feeding within only a hundred yards of the thundering railway engine. ”

“ The air is fresh and cool, and you draw your woolen blankets a little closer around you. The tent is closed, but through the little cracks you can see that all is still dark. In a few moments a faint grayness steals into the air, and off in the half darkness you hear the Somali gunbearers chanting their morning prayers—soft, musical, and soothing. Then there are more voices murmuring in the air and the camp slowly awakens to life. Some one is heard chopping wood, and by that time day breaks with a crash. All is life, and the birds are singing as though mad with the joy of life and sunshine. ”

“ We rarely shot while on a march from camp to camp. We walked or rode along, watching the swarms of game that slowly moved away as we approached. The scenery was beautiful. Sometimes we wound along on game trails or native trails through vast park-like stretches of rolling hills; at other times we climbed across low hills studded with thorn scrub, while off in the distance rose the blue hills and mountains. To the northward, always with us, was the great Mount Kenia, eighteen thousand feet high and nearly always veiled with masses of clouds. ”

“ We started forth again, with a single tent, our guides and gunbearers, a cook and a couple of tent boys and twenty porters. This time we politely ignored all elephant trails in the dense bush and pushed on through the forest. Here it was infinitely better, for one could see some distance in all directions. We climbed steadily for a couple of thousand feet, always in forest so wild and grand and beautiful as to exceed all dreams of what an African forest could be. ”

“ With nearly every herd of game, or near by, will be found the faithful kongoni, always alert, watchful, and vigilant, and it is nearly always his cry of warning that sends the beasts of the plains flying from dangers that they can not see.
The sportsman swears at the kongoni because it so often alarms the quarry he is stalking. How very often it happens! The hunter sees afar some trophy that he is eager to secure and straightway begins a careful stalk of many hundred yards. At last, after much patient work, he reaches a point where he feels that he can chance a shot. ”

“ One of the most exciting phases of African hunting is the beating of swamps for lion. A long skirmish line of native porters is sent in at one end of the swamp and, like a gigantic comb, sweeps every live thing ahead of it as it advances through the reeds. All kinds of swamp life are stirred into action, and a fairly large swamp will yield forth the contents of a pretty respectable menagerie. Sometimes a hyena or two will be flushed and once in a while a lion will be driven out. ”

“ The details of those twelve days of adventuring in districts, some of which were probably never traversed before by white men, our experiences with the natives, our climb up the side of the mountain and our camp in the crater; our icy mornings, our ascent of the highest peak, and our explorations of the ancient homes of the cave-dwellers—all are part of a remarkable series of events that have nothing to do with an elephant story. ”

“ Doctor Rainsford, in his splendid book on lion hunting, describes this thrilling sport in such vivid words that you shiver as you read them. Mounted men gallop after the lion, bring it to bay, and then hold it there until the white hunter comes up to a close range and shoots it. In the meantime the cornered beast is charging savagely at the horsemen, who trust to the speed and quickness of their mounts to elude the angry rushes of the infuriated animal. ”

“ Above the bush belt comes the great forest belt, sublimely grand in its hugeness and beauty, and above this belt comes the encircling band of bamboo forest that reaches up to the timber line. There are probably five hundred thousand acres of forest country in which the Kenia elephant may live and wander and bring up his children. He has made trails that weave and wind through the twilight shades of the forest, and the only ways in which a man may penetrate to his haunts are by these ancient trails. ”

“ His sensitive nose is always alert for foreign and, therefore, suspicious odors, and when he smells the blood of an Englishman, or even an American, his tail goes up in anger, he sniffs and snorts and races around in a circle while he locates the direction where the danger lies—and then, look out. A blind, furious rush which only a well-sped bullet can prevent causing the untimely end of whatever happens to be in the way. That is the popular estimate of the rhino. ”

“ Instead of trying to escape, the animal turned and continued to attack in all directions whenever a man showed himself. When a man leaped behind a tree the calf would charge the tree with such force that it would be hurled back several feet, only to spring up and charge again. His squealing could be heard for a mile. After a long time the porters succeeded in capturing it and they conveyed it back to camp strung on a pole. If that little rhino was any criterion of rhino pugnacity, then surely the rhino is born with the instinctive impulse to charge and to fight as savagely as any animal alive. ”

“ Northward from Eldoma Ravine for days we marched, sometimes in dense forests so thick that a man could scarcely force himself through the undergrowth that flanked the trail, and sometimes through upland meadows so deep in tall yellow grass as to suggest a field of waving grain, then through miles of country studded with the gnarled thorn tree that looks so much like our apple trees at home. ”

“ The prevailing estimate of the rhino is that he is an inoffensive creature who likes to bask under the shade of a tree and watch the years go parading by. His thick skin and fierce armament of horns seem to make of him a relic of some long-forgotten age—the last survivor of the time when mammoths and dinosauruses roamed the manless waste and time was counted in geological terms instead of days and minutes. His eyes are dimmed and he sees nothing beyond a few yards away, but his hearing and sense of smell are keen, and he sniffs danger from afar in case danger happens to be to windward of him. ”

“ It is the constant expectation of the last-named animal that gives such keen and long sustained interest to the work of beating a swamp. One never knows what to expect. A suspicious stir in the reeds may mean a lion or only a hyena; an enormous crashing may sound like a herd of elephants, but finally resolve itself into a badly frightened reedbuck. Most of the time you expect reedbuck, but all the time you have to be ready for lion. As a general thing a lion will slink along in the reeds ahead of the beaters and not reveal himself until he is driven to the end of the cover. ”

“ But it is seldom hot for long. A cloud passes across the sun and instantly everything is cooled. A wave of wind sweeps across the hill and cools the moist brow like a camphor compress. An instant later the sun is out again and the land lies swimming in the shimmer of heat waves. Distant hills swim on miragic lakes, and if we are in plains country the mirages appear upon all sides. ”

“ The little gray monkey, with its venerable looking black face fringed with a sunburst of white hair, would be tied to an old umbrella of the Sairey Gamp pattern, and would sit upon it as the small boy carried it along the trails on his shoulder, like a musket. Sometimes when the sun was strong the umbrella would be raised to shield the monkey's eyes, which could not stand the fierce glare incident to a long march upon sun-baked trails. ”

“ From almost any part of the town one may look out on plains where great herds of wild game are constantly in sight. In an hour's leisurely walk from the station a man with a gun can get hartebeest, zebra, Grant's gazelle, Thompson's gazelle, impalla, and probably wildebeest. One can not possibly count the number of animals that feed contentedly within sight of the town of Nairobi, and it is difficult to think that one is not looking out upon a collection of domesticated game. ”

“ It is merely the record of a most delightful hunting trip into those fascinating regions along the Equator, where one may still have "thrilling adventures" and live in a story-book atmosphere, where the "roar of the lion" and the "crack of the rifle" are part of the every-day life, and where in a few months one may store up enough material to keep the memory pleasantly occupied all the rest of a lifetime. ”

“ If our lives had depended on it we could not have penetrated the dense matted barriers of vegetation on each side of the narrow trail. The bare thought of meeting an elephant in such a place sent a cold chill down the back. If he happened to be coming toward us our only hope was in killing him before he could charge twenty-five feet, and, if we did kill him, to avoid being crushed by his body as it plunged forward. Without question it was the worst place in the world to encounter an elephant. And I prayed that we might get into more open forest before we came up with the ones we were trailing. ”

“ Captain Dickinson, in his book, Big Game Shooting on the Equator, tells of a rhino that charged him so viciously that he threw down his bedding roll and the rhino tossed it and trampled it with great emphasis, after which it triumphantly trotted away, elated probably in the thought that it had wiped out its enemy. A number of fatalities are on record to prove that the rhino is a dangerous beast at times, and so I must conclude that the rhino experiences we had were exceedingly lucky ones, and perhaps exceptional ones in that respect. ”

“ Here the ground is clean and heavily carpeted with dry bamboo leaves. The bamboos grow close together, all seemingly of the same size, and are pervaded with a cool, greenish shadow that is almost sunny in comparison with the deep, solemn shades of the great forest.
Then we struck a trail. The old Wanderobo guide said it was only an hour or so old and that we should soon overtake the elephant. It was evidently only one elephant and not a large one. It is fascinating to watch an experienced elephant hunter and to see how eloquent the trail is to him. ”

“ The shooting of animals merely for the sake of killing them is, of course, not an elevating sport, but the by-products of big game hunting in Africa are among the most delightful and inspiring of all experiences. For weeks or months you live a nomadic tent life amid surroundings so different from what you are accustomed to that one is both mentally and physically rejuvenated. ”

“ There is no treasure to search for any more, and the golden age of the splendid clipper ships, with their immense spread of canvas, has given way to the unromantic age of the grimy steamer, about which there is so little to appeal to the imagination. Consequently, lion hunting is about the only thing left—except wars, and they are few and far between. ”

“ The next day a Martian sitting upon his planet with a powerful glass might have seen the amazing sight of three horses, one mule, two bullocks, a goat, and a sheep, preceded and followed by over a hundred human beings, painfully creep over the rim of the crater and breathlessly pause before the great panorama of Africa that lay stretched out for hundreds of miles on all sides. ”

“ After that we went up in the elephant country on Mount Kenia, but that is a story all in itself.
Lion hunting is the best kind of African hunting in one respect. One feels no self-reproach in having killed a lion, for there is always the comforting thought that by killing one lion you have saved the lives of three hundred other animals. Every lion exacts an annual toll of at least that number of zebras, hartebeests, or other forms of antelopes, all of which are powerless to defend themselves against the great creature that creeps upon them in cover of darkness. ”

“ Zebras, hartebeests, Grant's gazelles, Thompson's gazelles, impalla, giraffes, wildebeests, and many other antelope species cantered off and stood to watch the train as it swept past them. It was a wonderful ride, perhaps the most novel railway ride to be found any place in the world. On each side of the Uganda Railroad there is a strip of land, narrow on the north and wide on the south, in which game is protected from the sportsman, and consequently the animals have learned to regard these strips as sanctuary. ”

“ That was my point of view before I went to Africa, but later experiences caused the point of view to shift considerably. If any one thinks that elephant hunting is an occasion for lightsome merrymaking he had better not meet the African elephant in the rough. Most people are acquainted with only the Indian elephant, the kind commonly seen in captivity, and judge from him that the elephant is a sort of semi-domesticated beast of burden, like the camel and the ox. Yet the Indian elephant is about as much like his African brother as a tomcat is like a tiger. ”

“ Sometimes, as happened two nights before we reached Nairobi, a lion will chase a herd of zebra and the latter in fright will tear through the town, destroying gardens and fences and flowers in a mad stampede. We met one man who goes out ten minutes from town every other day and kills a kongoni (hartebeest) as food for his dogs. If you were disposed to do so you could kill dozens every day with little effort and almost no diminution of the visible supply.
Dressed to Kill
The Balloon Ascension
The Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi
Nairobi is new and unattractive. ”

“ Roosevelt made African hunting the vogue invariably describe the rhino as being one of the most dangerous of African animals. A charging rhino, a wounded lion, a cape buffalo, and a frenzied elephant are the four terrors of the African hunters. ”

“ The zebra's chief charm is its colt, for there is nothing alive that is prettier or more graceful than a young zebra a few weeks old.
The only Grant's gazelles that I saw were those along the railway at Kapiti Plains and Athi Plains. This animal is graceful and beautiful, with a splendid sweep of horns. With them, and in much greater numbers, is the little "Tommy," or Thompson's gazelle, a graceful, buoyant, happy, bounding little antelope with an ever active tail flirting gaily in the sunshine. The Tommy is small, about twice as big as a fox terrier, and is of a fawn color. ”