Part 10 (1/2)
On hearing this story I remembered that the thick-skinned rhino is sometimes used by cartoonists as a symbol for ”the trusts,” and the story seemed doubly appropriate as applied to this particular ex-president.
Some member of our party then modestly advanced the suggestion that the colonel might some day be back in the White House again. He laughed and said that the kaleidoscope never repeats.
”They needn't worry about what to do with this ex-president,” he said.
”I have work laid out for a long time ahead.”
Another member of our party then told about the Roosevelt act in _The Follies of 1909_, in one part of which some one asks Kermit (in the play) where the ”ex-president” is. ”You mean the 'next president,' don't you?” says Kermit. When Colonel Roosevelt heard this he was immensely interested, not so much in the words of the play, but in the fact that Kermit had been represented on the stage--dramatized, as it were.
And as we left for our own camp the colonel called out: ”Now, don't forget. Just as soon as we all get back to America we'll have a lion dinner together at my house.”
CHAPTER X
ELEPHANT HUNTING NOT AN OCCASION FOR LIGHTSOME MERRYMAKING. FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES OF FOREST IN WHICH THE KENIA ELEPHANT LIVES, WANDERS AND BRINGS UP HIS CHILDREN
The peril and excitement of elephant hunting can not be realized by any one who has known only the big, placid elephants of the circus, or fed peanuts to a gentle-eyed pachyderm in the park. To the person thus circ.u.mscribed in his outlook, the idea of killing an elephant and calling it sport is little short of criminal. It would seem like going out in the barnyard and slaying a friendly old family horse.
That was my point of view before I went to Africa, but later experiences caused the point of view to s.h.i.+ft 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.
[Photograph: The Hyenas Had Feasted Well]
[Photograph: By courtesy of W.D. Boyce. Great Stretches of Dense Forest]
[Drawing: _Being Killed by an Elephant Is a Very Mussy Death_]
Many African hunters consider elephant hunting more dangerous than lion, rhino, or buffalo hunting, any one of which can hardly be called an indoor sport. These are the four animals that are cla.s.sed as ”royal game” in game law parlance, and each one when aroused is sufficiently diverting to dispel any la.s.situde produced by the climate. It is wakeful sport--hunting these four kinds of game--and in my experience elephant hunting is the ”most wakefullest” of them all.
In my several months of African hunting I had four different encounters with elephants. The first two were on Mount Kenia and the last two were on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, near where it merges into the lower slopes of Mount Elgon. The first and the fourth experiences were terrifying ones, never to be forgotten. An Englishman, if he were to describe them, would say ”they were rather nasty, you know,” which indicates how really serious they were. The second and the third experiences were interesting, but not particularly dangerous.
Mount Kenia is a great motherly mountain that spreads over an immense area and raises its snow-capped peaks over eighteen thousand feet above the equator. The lower slopes are as beautiful as a park and are covered with the fields and the herds of the prosperous Kikuyus and other tribes. Scores of native villages of varying sizes are picturesquely planted among the banana groves and wooded valleys on this lower slope, each with its local chief, or sultan, and each tribe with its head sultan.
In a day's ”trek” one meets many sultans with their more or less naked retinues, and every one of them spits on his hand, presses it to his forehead, and shakes hands with you. It is the form of greeting among the Kikuyus, and, in my opinion, might be improved. These people lead a happy pastoral life amid surroundings of exceptional beauty. Above the cultivated _shambas_, or fields of sweet potatoes and tobacco and sugar and groves of bananas, comes a strip of low bush country. It is a mile or two wide, scarcely ten feet high, and so dense that nothing but an elephant could force its way through the walls of vegetation. Most of the bushes are blackberry and are th.o.r.n.y.
[Drawing: _Following the Trail_]
The elephants in their centuries of travel about the slopes have made trails through this dense bush, and it is only by following these trails that one can reach the upper heights of the mountain. 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.
Mount Kenia, as seen from afar, looks soft and green and easy to stroll up, but no man unguided could ever find his way out if once lost in the labyrinth of trails that criss-cross in the forest.
For many years the elephants of Kenia have been practically secure from the white hunter with his high-powered rifles. Warfare between the native tribes on the slopes has been so constant that it was not until three or four years ago that it was considered reasonably safe for the government to allow hunting parties to invade the south side of the mountain. Prior to that time the elephant's most formidable enemies were the native hunter, who fought with poisoned spears and built deep pits in the trails, pits cleverly concealed with thin strips of bamboo and dried leaves, and the ivory hunting poachers. In 1906 the government granted permission to Mr. Akeley to enter this. .h.i.therto closed district to secure specimens for the Field Museum, and even then there was only a narrow strip that was free from tribal warfare. It was at that time that his party secured seven splendid tuskers, one of which, a one-hundred-fifteen-pound tusker shot by Mrs. Akeley, was the largest ever killed on Mount Kenia. And it was to this district that Mr. Akeley led our _safari_ late in October to try again for elephants on the old familiar stamping ground. We pitched our camp in a lovely spot where one of his camps had stood three years before, just at the edge of the thick bush and on the upper edge of the _shambas_. News travels quickly in this country, and in a short time many of his old Kikuyu friends were at our camping place. One or two of the old guides were on hand to lead the way into elephant haunts and the natives near our camp reported that the elephants had been coming down into their fields during the last few days. Some had been heard only the day before. So the prospects looked most promising, and we started on a little hunt the first afternoon after arriving in camp.
[Drawing: _The Old Wanderobo Guide_]
We took one tent and about twenty porters, for when one starts on an elephant trail there is no telling how long he will be gone or where he may be led. We expected that we would have to climb up through the strip of underbrush, and perhaps even as far up as the bamboos, in which event we might be gone two or three days. In addition to the porters we had our gunbearers and a couple of native guides. One of these was an old Wanderobo, or man of the forest, who had spent his life in the solitudes of the mountain and was probably more familiar with the trails than any other man. He wore a single piece of skin thrown over his shoulders and carried a big poisoned elephant spear with a barb of iron that remains in the elephant when driven in by the weight of the heavy wooden shaft.
The barb was now covered with a protective binding of leaves. He led the way, silent and mild-eyed and very naked, and the curious little skin-tight cap that he wore made him look like an old woman. As we proceeded, other natives attached themselves to us as guides, so that by the time we were out half an hour there were four or five savages in the van.
[Photograph: He Was a Very Important Sultan]
[Photograph: Saying Good-bye to Colonel Roosevelt]
[Photograph: A Visiting Delegation of Kikuyus]