Safari

(an excerpt)

Look

JANUARY 26, 1954

The never-ending monsoon was breaking the sea white over the roof outside Mombasa as we came in through the channel. The hills rose green beyond the harbor and the white town and that night the rain beat on the roof of the hotel and there were pools of water in half-finished streets when we started out in the morning for the upper country.

But when the hunting car had climbed the red road through the green of the coastal hills we were in a thorn scrub desert and after the desert was the high plateau where the rains had failed for two years. This had been a green or tawny land when I had known it in the old days. Now it was gray or red with dust that dragged in clouds behind the cars or trucks that moved along the road and soon our faces were masked by it.

Across the plains were hills that were blue from the timber on their slopes. It looked like Wyoming west of Cheyenne. But over the land dust devils whirled and rose in high flat-topped pillars that moved across the plains and around the foothills. The wind never stopped blowing and no living thing, not even a bird, could change position without showing its movement by a rising dust. I watched a partridge run with dust rising from his feet and when he flushed, whirring, you could not see him in the dust he raised.

“I know how you feel, Pop,” Philip Percival said, “but we’ll find some places.”

“I think it’s lovely,” Mary said. “It’s rather like the Bible in the part where Lot’s wife looked back and they turned her into a pillar of salt.”

“Don’t think about Mombasa,” Philip said, “nor about Paris nor Gomorrah.”

“Look,” Mary said, “look at that odd formation. It looks exactly like a giraffe.”

“It is a giraffe,” Philip said.

“I’m sorry,” said Miss Mary, “but I’m new here.”

“Dust gets in your eyes,” Mister P. said. “Ruined mine years ago.”

It was not all dust although there was dust every day. There was Nairobi with certain bars as self-consciously heroic as Tombstone, Arizona. There was a war on upcountry where it was necessary to bear arms. Often it was necessary for people to be armed in Nairobi. But in Nairobi many people were bearing arms at high noon in bars which seemed highly defensible and whose defense already appeared to be entrusted to the competent authorities. You go to prison for six months, quite properly, if you lose a pistol or have it stolen. So it is an excellent idea to keep your weapon firmly attached to your person. There is no law, however, as far as I know against concealed weapons and I saw one very well turned out lady, definitely the very social type, who was prominently displaying on her person two pistols of the type which was designed to be worn up your sleeve and only displayed in the event of the production of five aces or some other such error of taste.

No visitor need bring a pistol to Nairobi. In spite of anything you have read it is still not good form to shoot your way into or out of either Torrs or the New Stanley. It is even frowned upon in Woolworths and it might be misinterpreted in Barclay’s Bank.

Someone asked me why we were studying the animals rather than the Mau Mau. I answered that something might happen to the animals but that I believed the Mau Mau might be going on for a considerable time. I hoped, I said, to return to study them. If I were unable to return I would entrust their study to my second eldest son who is a settler in the country.

Nairobi and the basic long-term problem of the Kikuyu war, the upcountry war and the war in the passes, the borders and the marches are no part of this picture story. The war which is being fought each day is a long complicated and ugly story and we know something of it. You may be sure that it will continue for a long time. But know truly that no one coming to Africa who is interested in the kingdom of the animals need worry about it personally except as it affects the Bongo, Giant Forest Hog, and the big Forest Rhino and Buffalo of the north where the Mau Mau have gone into the hills. Nairobi for a foreigner with no one with a grudge against him is safer than New York, five times safer than parts of Memphis, West Memphis or Jacksonville, infinitely safer than many parts of Chicago and most certainly safer than Brooklyn, the Bronx, Central Park at night or Cooke City, Montana, on the date of the celebration of the Old Timers Fish Fry.

The bush is perfectly safe with a white hunter. He has to belong to the White Hunters Association and after being apprenticed and qualified he is licensed and disciplined by them. After that he must present himself personally to the Game Department who can issue him a license or refuse it without explanation. If he ever had anything happen to you he’d never work again. (Interruption by Mary: “This seems to be excessive emphasis on safety, a fickle friend.”)

If you should ever hunt without a white hunter you are just as safe as the degree to which your knowledge, your experience, your speed when it is needed, your ability to track, to size up a bad situation, and your absolute ability to shoot cold when the chips are down protects you. I do not advise hunting without a white hunter. To photograph dangerous game at close range without a white hunter is doubly dangerous.

The pictures in these pages show where Philip Percival our white hunter took us when the country was blowing away in the drought and he said, “Don’t worry, Pop. We’ll find something better.” We found it and this is a small part of the oases we found in the different deserts and a little about the animals and people who had the right to live there.

Philip Percival took us to the dry sand river camp where the elephant came every second night to drink at the Masai watering hole. You could lie in bed and hear them blowing water with their trunks. Mary said that when they came through camp they sounded like men walking very softly in rubber waders.

There was a flock of more than six thousand guinea fowl and we shot only what we needed for meat. The sand grouse came to drink at the water in the mornings in pairs, singly, and in scattered bunches. They also came in flocks that were dense as the passenger pigeons around Petoskey before Michigan ever was a state.

He and our best friend, a game ranger who according to the traditions of that service does not wish his name used, took us to the swamp camp where one hundred and fifty, counted, buffalo lived in the papyrus and fed out at night. It was there that Mary saw them all looking at us in a most unfriendly way when it was too late to take pictures and heard the ranger, whom we call GC, say, “Don’t let them cut us off from the river, Pop.”

People have written that herds of 150 buffalo can stampede over you with no risk at all. Neither to you nor to them. But I do not think these people ever stood on their own two feet and looked at the buff head-on when the tick birds have flown and thought that truly. It is a very beautiful theory, though, and photographers who fake or photograph from armored trucks in national parks love to state it.