“There is much mythic nonsense written about hunting but it is something that is much older than religion. Some are hunters and some are not,” said my favorite author and fellow hunter Ernest Hemingway in An African Journal. Hunting has been a fundamental human activity for over two million years. If we believe we are part of nature’s ecosystem rather than uniquely created in God’s image, then hunting was an essential means of survival. As a species, we have become more organized, less nomadic, and farming and agriculture have lessened the need to track, pursue and kill. Nowadays everything is commodified, packaged and mostly available on your local supermarket shelves. Something has been lost from the ritualized hunting practices of our ancestors where reaping nature’s wild bounty was part of the cycle of life. It would bind families and communities in common endeavor, and allow us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves, something that demanded respect, consideration and reverence to maintain a balance of life and death.
To the ancient Greeks hunting was a heroic act that signified a rite of passage, and its importance was represented by the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, or in Roman mythology by Diana. On ancient reliefs in Mesopotamia, kings are celebrated as hunters of big game, and in Assyria and Persia representations of the hunting expeditions of the rulers adorned the walls of their temples and palaces. By Roman times hunting was considered a sport and became a spectacle as big game imported from Africa was let loose in the Colosseum and other arenas across the empire to be pursued and killed by noble warriors. Over the millennia, codes of hunting were developed to formalize the rituals and give them meaning as well as to sustain the practice. As hunting with firearms developed—as early as the sixteenth century in Europe—the potential for widespread slaughter became a danger, and conservation as a means of protecting wildlife for future generations became an important concept.
Hunting and fishing were very much a family affair with Ernest Hemingway and so it was with our family. When I was young, I would sit enraptured as my Grandpa Courtney told me hair-raising stories of his exploits hunting the big five game animals: the African lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, African leopard and black rhinoceros. The skills and codes of hunting that he employed were passed to his son, my father Herbert, and from him to me. These were my first lessons in hunting, and I remember them even now. The hunter was not a man obsessed with killing. He was not a wanton predator, taking life for pleasure. The hunter was a vital part of the ecosystem of Africa, the same as any of the other big predators who stalked our land. And, when I was dreaming of hunting my first impala, first kudu, first lions and more, while I sat at my grandfather’s knee, I wanted to test myself like the hunters of old.
Those elephant hunters, my grandfather said, came for the ivory on which their livelihoods could depend, but they never took a female, only the old bulls who would die slow deaths by starvation as their teeth rotted and their frail bodies struggled with the burden of massive tusks. The hunters also returned the bounty to the local people who came to rely on them for their own survival. As the hunters were tracking the elephants, the rumors of their passing would spread and the local population would follow. With a successful kill, as the vultures circled overhead, the villagers, every man, woman and child, would appear from the bush with basins balanced on their heads. It was a celebration with dancing and singing, a triumph for the hunter and meat for the villagers. There could be fifty, sixty, even a hundred people gathered there, and, with the ivory taken, the festival would begin. Chunks of meat were carved, and someone might disappear into the belly of the beast, emerging to throw the choice parts—the heart, the kidneys, the liver—to his children, who would begin stoking up a cookfire. It was a carnival for the villagers, a rare feast of plenty and, by the end of the day, all that was left of the elephant was a pile of bones and the rib cage, left open on the veldt to be picked at by the vultures.
Those annual safaris led by my father were not only about the pleasure of being out in the bush for weeks on end. My father’s licenses allowed him to hunt unlimited buffalo, ten sable, and three elephants every year—all meat vital for sustaining the local villages scattered around our land. I learned from my grandfather that hunting was a noble tradition, a taking and a giving, that the true hunter is a true conservationist. I would carry these lessons with me throughout my life.
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A Time to Die, published in 1989, was not the first time I had confronted the realities of hunting in a novel—hunting had been a predominant part of my characters’ lives as far back as When the Lion Feeds—but, together with its companion volume, Elephant Song, published two years later, this would be the first time I approached the complex interplay between hunting and conservation in my fiction. My father had often lamented the modern world—there were no real men left, he would say; modern Africa belonged to a generation who had never had to hunt to survive, and for them the hunter was an abominable figure, a destroyer of nature. This public perception of hunting was so far from the truth that I felt compelled to contest it wherever I could, and there was no better showcase than in my fiction, which could, by now, reach millions of readers worldwide.
A Time to Die, closely based on a screenplay I had written in 1972, The Last Lion, is the story of Sean Courtney Jr., a veteran of the Rhodesian Bush War whose brutal origins I had myself witnessed as a police reservist. Accepting a mission to help his dying friend, Colonel Riccardo Monterro, hunt down Tukutela, a legendary bull elephant whose tusks outweighed any other, Sean finds himself building a crack team of hunters and trackers from men he fought alongside in the Rhodesian Special Forces, before following Tukutela over the Inyanga and into the chaos of the civil war then erupting in Mozambique. It was a contemporary novel, only nominally a part of the Courtney sequence, and allowed me to fully express my lifelong understanding of hunting. This was not a novel about indiscriminate killing. It attempted to capture the incredible highs and lows of the hunt, the excitements, the danger at every turn, and the ineffable sadness of finally shooting your quarry—the ending of the hunt, of the animal’s life, that always leaves a deep melancholy in the heart of the hunter but which makes him appreciate life more deeply. By setting the novel against the barbarism of civil war in Mozambique, I wanted to show hunting for what it is—an honorable activity compared to conflict and war, the bloodiest, most wasteful of human behavior.
Elephant Song, my novel of 1991, went a step further, exploring the dark side of the hunting industry. While A Time to Die had been, in many ways, my homage to Ernest Hemingway’s hunting memoir, Green Hills of Africa, Elephant Song was that novel’s converse—an exploration of the underbelly of legitimate hunting: poaching and the viciousness, waste, cruelty and, indeed, the pointlessness of it all. I did not want the novel to be about the subsistence poaching many local Africans must do to survive, but about the link between big-money foreign demand and local supply. In ranging from the African bush to the world of high finance in London, it dissected the world’s insatiable appetite for ivory and what it meant for the people of inland Africa.
I began hunting as boys of my age often do, with a pellet gun and tin cans lined up on a wall. Soon I had moved on to hunting birds and small rodents and, once my father had gifted me Grandpa Courtney’s fabled Remington, I was able to go after bigger prey. On the annual safaris we made into the bush, my father would let me follow the hunters if I kept quiet, didn’t trip over anything and under no circumstances opened my mouth to speak above a whisper. Of course, when you are eight, nine, or even ten years old, you are like a grasshopper and you keep up well enough, and silently.
I was so excited to be joining the men with their heavy rifles, expert knowledge and serious demeanor. I could take the wisecracks they made at my expense if it meant I was one of them. I would watch and learn their bushcraft, how they picked out spoor, knew the behavior of all the animals, navigated the vast wildness, were sure-footed on the most precarious of ascents or descents of ravines and valleys, and understood when to safely rest, take food and water and smoke a pipe. They would hunt hard, pacing for miles as they walked down the elephants. They knew that the most effective and humane way to kill an elephant is with a brain shot. It results in instantaneous death and no thrashing movement or alarm will unsettle other animals in the area. An elephant that drops from standing to its knees or lying on its side doesn’t spook his companions who show the merest of curiosity. A heart shot however can send the elephant crashing through the bush for fifty to a hundred yards before it stops, scattering everything before it, and in thick bush it can be extremely difficult to find the fallen animal. My father and his hunters and trackers would know this from hard won experience. They were my all-conquering heroes.
My grandfather told me tales of one of his heroes, Karamojo Bell, a legend amongst elephant hunters for the amount of ivory he harvested during the golden age of hunting in East Africa at the turn of the century. Bell shot 1,011 elephants during his career, all of them bulls except for twenty-eight cows. He made meticulous records of all his hunts, how many shots he fired and how much money he made on every trip. On a single day, he tracked down and hunted nine elephants, and earned £877 from the ivory. On one expedition, he came home with ivory worth over £23,000, an eye-watering sum in today’s money, although a modest haul in comparison with modern-day poachers. Bell was a fearless hunter, sighting his elephant at eighty yards, but preferring a close range of thirty to forty yards. As he wrote in his book The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter: “He [the bull elephant] knows the game and will play hide-and-seek with you all day long and day after day. Not that this silent retreat is his only resource—by no means—he can in an instant become a roaring, headlong devil. The transformation from that silent, rakish, slinking stern to high-thrown head, gleaming tusks and whirling trunk, now advancing directly upon you, is a nerve test of the highest order.” Having shot the first elephant, Bell would climb on top of the animal to avoid being trampled by the rest of the herd and to get clear shots of the other elephants. He was an exceptional marksman and could shoot cormorants out of the air with a rifle and was once seen shooting fish that were leaping from a lake. His success as an elephant hunter was not just about a good shooting eye, but also because of his careful cultivation of and diplomacy with the local people. At that time, huge parts of Africa were uncharted, and for some of the natives he would be the first white man they had set eyes on. Bell would bring gifts for the kings and tribal chiefs and would pay them for the right to hunt on their land. The respect he showed was amply rewarded as they would guide him to the location of elephant herds and the bulls with the biggest tusks. It was a relationship of trust rather than exploitation.
When we returned to our camp at night, my mother—who had spent the day making sketches of the landscape and wildlife around her—would have the fire going and the stock-pot boiling. After drinks we’d sit under the stars, listening to the hyenas and lions roaring in the distance, eating the fresh meat of the day’s hunt and preparing the rest to be hung out and dried as biltong to feed the camp and take back for our farm workers.
The best hunters of the world are also the greatest conservationists. It is why there is no contradiction in me being a trustee of the World Wildlife Foundation. The reality is that there is a competition between man and game for land and water, and it must not be ignored—for, in Africa, if the animal pays, it stays. If the idea abhors you, if you believe no animal should ever be touched by man, then you are condemning the animal to potential extinction. If an elephant is not hunted, if it dies naturally, only the vultures and hyenas have food. Yet, if the animal is shot as part of a sustainable animal management program, then the entire community benefits. When a hunter pays $250,000 to hunt an old elephant, the local people realize that there is real value in the animals who they see as taking land away from them, destroying their crops and threatening their safety. Rather than destroying animals, hunters are contributing to their continued existence—without the money hunters are willing to pay to go into the bush, the animals would be left to the mercy of poachers, discontented locals, and the ravages of industry and urbanization as man spreads himself ever more widely across the world.
When it comes down to it, man and beast must find a way to live together and share this planet we all call home.