Colonel Roosevelt (4 page)

Disappointed as the day wanes without result, he allows one of his party to reconnoiter another ravine. More prints show in the sand, much larger this time, and at once he and Kermit are off their horses, alert to crashing, grunting noises in the brush ahead.

There is no time to exult over the carcass, because he sees a second lion escaping. He runs it down and fires. The lion rolls over, one foreleg in the air, then takes two more bullets before dying at his feet.

Three days later he kills a much bigger lion, plus another half-grown cub and a lioness. All are destined for the Smithsonian. He hopes that his trophy quota, set by Protectorate authorities, will eventually allow him to shoot a
simba
for himself. It is dark before the lioness is borne back to camp, swinging between two poles. A nearly full moon illumines the porters as they lope into view, intoning a deep, rhythmic song.
He tries to notate it phonetically:
Zou-zou-boulé ma ja guntai
.
They cluster around him as he stands by the fire, then begin to dance. Their chanting rises to a climax. He adds a descant of his own, obscurely derived from Irish folksong: “Whack-fal-lal for Lanning’s Ball.”

The firelight glows on the body of his prey, and on the white and ebony of his jostling celebrants. Around them, the plain lies pale under the moon.

LIKE A PYTHON TOO
enormous to shift all its coils at once, the safari begins to move while still based at Kapiti Station. By early May it is in full motion, carrying its own weight, hunting as it goes, sending out flickering forays in search of choice specimens.

As leader, he does his share of collecting and cataloging.
Dendromus nigrifons, Arvicanthis abyssinicus nairobae, Myoscalops kapiti heller, Thamnomys loringi, Pelomys roosevelti
.… Latin classifications come easily to him; he has been inscribing zoological labels since boyhood. He assists Heller and Loring in writing life histories, enjoying the precision of scientific description. Before politics, this was what he wanted to be: a naturalist in the field.
Coarse bristly hair
, he writes of the meadow mouse named in his honor.
The dorsal coloration is golden yellow overlaid by long hairs with an olive iridescence; the under parts are silky white
.

But his main literary labor, at night in camp after dinner, is to process pocket-diary jottings and fresh memory into serial installments for
Scribner’s Magazine
. By 12 May he has completed his first article, “A Railroad Through the Pleistocene.” Eight days later he finishes another, describing his wildebeest hunt and visit to a Boer ranch, not failing to quote
Trippa, troppa, tronjes
. With a storyteller’s instinct for pacing, he reserves his lion kills for installment three, betting that readers who stay with him that long will stay to the end—unless his own end intervenes. “During the last decades in Africa,” he reports, “hundreds of white hunters, and thousands of native hunters, have been killed or wounded by lions, buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos.” A unique
feature of his book is that it is being written on the march. The possibility of foreclosure adds an agreeable note of suspense to the narrative.

“A
PRECEDENCE AS FORMAL AS ANY LINE HE HAD LED AS
P
RESIDENT
.”
Roosevelt’s safari gets under way, May 1910
.
(photo credit p.3)

He writes it as he talks—superabundantly, always interestingly, with clarity and total recall. Elegance of style is not his concern. He sometimes repeats himself, relying on his sharp ear to protect him from cliché, not always with success.
He is aware of the page-filling benefits of purple passages, and scatters dying sunsets and brilliant tropic moons with a fine hand.

Beyond these indulgences, the power of his prose comes from its realism.
He is an honest writer, incapable of boasting, or even the discreet omissions tolerated by nonfiction editors. If he kills any animal clumsily, wasting bullets, he tells how, in detail. The same truthfulness keeps him from false modesty—the “my poor self” affectation of so many German and English memoirists. Being brave, he admits to acts of bravery; swelling with new experiences, he does not hide the breadth of his knowledge. As a result,
his indelible pencil gouges the capital letter
I
with a frequency tending to blunt the point.

Pressing down is necessary, because he writes with two sheets of carbon stuffed into his manuscript pad.
One copy of each article is sealed in a blue canvas envelope and dispatched to Nairobi by runner, thence to be sent down the railroad to Mombasa and shipped via two oceans to New York. To insure against loss, a duplicate goes by the next sea mail, and he retains the third copy for himself.

As he falls into the cross-rhythms of riding and shooting, collecting and writing, he becomes in effect a hunter of Africa itself, seeking to capture it whole—alive or dead—and process it into food for mind and body. His pursuit is not for the squeamish. Each new animal fixed in his sights poses a different combination of danger and documentary interest, whether in the number of bullets it absorbs, or the sounds it makes as it dies, or the inches it registers on his tape measure, or the browsing habits he deduces from the contents of its stomach. A bull rhino, shot through lungs and heart, bears down with such momentum that it skids to death just thirteen paces away, plowing a long furrow with its horn. A lion, nine feet long and copiously maned, comes on even faster, only to be hit in the chest, “as if the place had been plotted with dividers … smashing the lungs and the big blood vessels of the heart.” Two swamp buffalo bulls, black and glistening in the early morning light, fall to his biggest rifle, and two giant eland, heavy and dewlapped as prize steers, to his smallest. A lioness yields not only herself, but two unborn cubs. Three giraffes topple over in a single morning, followed by a whole family of rhinos, the bull needing nine bullets to finish off, the cow performing a “curious death waltz,” and the calf dropping with “a screaming whistle, almost like that of a small steam-engine.” His kills become repetitive. Yet another rhino, then another, and another, and another; two more lions and a lioness, somersaulting left and right in her final agony; more buffalo, more eland, more giraffes.

In a sudden translocation to a world of water, he finds himself in a rowboat with Kermit, gliding among purple and pink water lilies. Delicate jacana birds race across the pads, treading so lightly the flowers barely dip. His ornithologist’s eye and ear rejoice at a wealth of other bird life: tiny kingfishers coruscating in the sun like sapphires, white-throated cormorants, spur-winged plover clamoring overhead, little rills threading the papyrus, grebes diving, herons spearing, and baldpate coots resembling the kind he collected as a teenager, except, he notes, for “a pair of horns or papillae at the hinder end of the bare frontal space.”

But he is looking for hippos. The prodigious beasts prove surprisingly fast and difficult to kill in the water. He hits one, this first day on Lake Naivasha, and another the next; but they submerge at once, and decline to float up dead. On the third day, just as he feels an attack of malaria coming on, he encounters a big bull wading. He fires shakily, breaking its shoulder, whereupon it flounders at him with open jaws. He fires again and again, trying to control his tremor, and finally shoots right down its throat. The tusks clash like a sprung bear trap. At point-blank range, the hippo swerves a little, and he drills it through the brain.

Then, curling up on the floor of the boat, he succumbs to his fever.

HE KNOWS THIS IS NOT
African malaria, but the Cuban variety that has plagued him since Rough Rider days. Always the sudden convulsions, the cracking headache, then
zero at the bone. And always, since he believes illness is weakness (like grief or fear or self-doubt), he fights it off until it fells him. Fortunately, attacks never last long. He is well enough after five days to go out looking for more hippos. This time he leaves Kermit behind, and orders two “boys” to row him alone across the lake.

Although he assures himself that he has spilled no more blood, so far, than is necessary to satisfy the Smithsonian and feed his safari, he is aware that his hunter’s luck has been extraordinary. It is the talk of the sundowner set in Nairobi. In just three months, he and Kermit have bagged multiple specimens of most of the major African species. Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, “a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip.”

The trouble with such luck is that it is bound to be perceived by critics of big-game hunting as indiscriminate slaughter. Local “bush telegraph” exaggerates the number of his kills, not to mention his profligacy with bullets. He is sensitive of being caricatured as anything other than the serious leader of a scientific expedition, and begins to regret his press ban. Perhaps he should do
more than send the occasional
scrawled trophy tally to the little pool of reporters in Nairobi. It is not the kind of “copy” they want.

Whenever he veers near the capital, he can feel
their avid interest pulling at him, like magnetic current.
The fact is, he is magnetized himself. Despite his pose of privacy, he remains irredeemably a public figure, obsessed with his own image, half wanting to confide in those he holds at bay. He misses the worshipful cadre of young scribes who took virtual dictation from him in Washington. That “Newspaper Cabinet” is now disbanded, and Taft’s self-deprecating envoi (“I have not the facility for educating the public as you had”) suggests that the White House is going to be a poor source of news for the next four years.
American editors will have to look farther afield for good material. No story could be more surefire than that of Colonel Roosevelt daily risking death in Africa!

Hence the presence, this day in Naivasha, of F. Warrington Dawson, a young United Press correspondent who has pursued him all the way to Kapiti. Dawson—Southern, French-educated, the author of two successful novels—is obviously eager to serve him. They might discuss how in camp tonight.
That hippo “bull” of five days ago turned out, embarrassingly, to be an old cow. The misidentification was excusable, for she was barren, and had developed male characteristics. But it is exactly the sort of thing he does not wish broadcast, as some kind of joke.