Aagaard African Adventures

I had little opportunity to hunt big game until 1948, when my father purchased a five-thousand-acre ranch and sisal plantation on the Yatta Plateau, thirty miles east of Thika on the Garissa road. The property had been neglected, and the living conditions were primitive. The house, built of local stone with walls eighteen inches thick, was solid and always very cool, but lacked running water. There was a galvanized iron tank rigged to collect rainwater from the roof, but it was rusted through, so our water for all purposes had to be transported by truck in fifty-gallon oil drums two miles and five hundred feet up from the Athi River. My mother soon insisted on having a well drilled and water lines installed, but for the twenty years we lived there we used an outhouse (called a “long-drop” in Kenya), and survived very well without a telephone or electricity. Both the refrigerator and the Tilley pressure lamps burned kerosene, and though we had no television, there were extensive and well-filled bookshelves. We collected our mail from the post office once a week or so, whenever anyone had to go to town.

The ranch lay on the border of the so-called settled area. Beyond it stretched a vast area of bush that was largely uninhabited because it was infested with tsetse flies that carried a fatal disease for cattle. The bush was full of impala, dik-dik, guinea fowl, and spur fowl, and sheltered a fair population of lesser kudu, bushbuck, and leopard, plus a few rhino. It included some open plains where there were kongoni (Coke hartebeest), zebra, and a large herd of eland. In the thick wait-a-bit thorn country around the Seven Forks of the Tana River, some twenty-five miles away, were numerous buffalo and rhino, and many elephant. Lion were no longer common on this part of the Yatta, but passed through every now and again, as did a band of African hunting dogs very rarely.

Lunch party during the Mau Mau uprising—note that everyone is armed. Finn’s parents are the second couple from left. Finn’s father is carrying a .45 automatic borrowed from Jan Allen (4th from right); Finn’s mother has a Browning. Lasse Allan is the lady on the right.

From a financial point of view the property was a disaster. My father bought it when sisal prices were at their highest; shortly thereafter they collapsed, and from then on it was a continual struggle to make the mortgage payments. He was not clear of debt until just before he sold it (to a cooperative society of local people) in 1968. But it was a great place to live, nevertheless, and any evening when I had an hour or two free I could pick up a rifle and walk out of the house to hunt impala or a bird for the pot, or just to watch them.

My uncle had brought home two 8x60mm Mauser sporters from the campaign against the Italians in Abyssinia during World War II. He gave them to us. One was an “African Model” with a 28-inch barrel and a long fore-end, while the other had the more usual 23.6-inch barrel. My father had shot out the barrel of his old 7x57mm, so he kept the long 8mm and gave me the other. It had the .318-inch-diameter “normal” groove diameter, but the only ammunition available at that time was Czechoslovakian and clearly marked “8x60s,” meaning that it was loaded with .323-inch-diameter bullets. What to do? I went ahead and used it, of course. I fired hundreds of rounds of it through that rifle without any ill effects whatsoever until the proper DWM ammo become available some years later. I used the 8x60 with perfect satisfaction from 1948 until 1962, finding its 196-grain round-nose softpoint bullet at a listed 2,560 fps to be utterly reliable on zebra and any of the antelope, including bull eland that could weigh up to a ton. It was a fine cartridge, but a .30-06 exactly fills its spot in my battery today.

Before Fritz Walter replaced him, the neighboring ranch was run by Jan Allan, a wiry, dark-complexioned Norwegian with jet-black hair who had served in the Norwegian resistance during World War II. He had several times parachuted into occupied Norway, and after completing his missions he escaped via neutral Sweden, where just across the border he met an attractive and tomboyish Swedish lassie nicknamed Lasse (which in Scandinavia is a boy’s name). She still did not know his true name when they got engaged, as he was not permitted to reveal it.

After the war he found Norway boring and confining, so he came to Kenya. My father met him and Lasse when they arrived in Nairobi, and helped carry the baggage. He was literally staggered by the weight of one box. Jan later opened it for him. It contained two U.S. M1 carbines, a silenced Sten gun, a box of hand grenades, a Colt .45 auto and several other pistols and revolvers, and assorted ammunition. Aghast, my father asked how he had managed to get it all through Customs. Jan just smiled, and replied that they had been taught how to get stuff like that past the Germans.

The .45 auto had a large red “X” cut and painted into both stocks to indicate that Jan used to carry it loaded and cocked, with the safety on. (The 1911 .45 semiautomatic has a wooden (or rubber or ivory) stock screwed to each side of the metal frame to form the grip.) During the Mau Mau unpleasantness that erupted a few years later (a relatively innocuous guerrilla war by modern standards, but not to a chap who lived with his family on an isolated farm), Jan lent it to my father (my mother wore the Browning), and I fired it occasionally. My Old Man did not carry it cocked or loaded, nor did he ever have to draw it in anger, but there is no telling how much trouble its presence on his hip averted.

Finn’s parents, Gerda and Yngvar, at Yatta Ranch.

I was attending agricultural college at Njoro at the beginning of “the Emergency.” Handguns were in short supply. One much-envied chap had a Colt’s New Service .45 Colt revolver, while I had to make do with a Beretta M35 automatic. It was a solid little gun that functioned with absolute reliability, but as it was chambered to .32 Auto it is perhaps fortunate that I never had to attempt to do anything serious with it. Nevertheless, the puny round did the necessary for one farm manager I knew. A young bachelor, he lived with the owner and his family. They were sitting at supper one evening when the house servant brought in the soup, and directly behind him came several terrorists with sharpened machetelike pangas at the ready. My acquaintance, who happened to be facing the kitchen, picked up his .32 Auto from beside his plate and proceeded to drop the two lead “mickey mice” with a shot apiece, whereupon the rest decamped.

Egerton College, situated close under the heavily forested Mau range, was a somewhat unique school at the time. Emergency regulations demanded that we carry our firearms with us at all times, mostly so that they could not be stolen by the Mau Mau. I well remember the incredulous outrage displayed by the chemistry professor, newly out from England, when he noticed that I was happily engaged in cleaning my rifle on the back bench of his lab while he droned on about amino acids or something equally fascinating. He was reduced to totally shocked, red-faced, stuttering incoherence, while I thought he was making an awful fuss about nothing.

The whole male student body—all fifteen of us—were members of the Police Reserve. Whenever a gang of terrorists (or freedom fighters if one prefers—they were, in fact, both) visited our area, John Toft, the local assistant superintendent of Police, would call us together with such local farmers as could get away, and we would gleefully drop our studies to harry the “Micks” through the Mau forest. We were a motley crew, and our armament was equally so. Besides the normal hunting rifles there was a pump-action .22 rimfire, a couple of sporterized Lee-Enfields, a .22 Hornet, and a Sten gun that Toft carried until it jammed on him once too often. One of the more affluent farmers favored a double-barrel .470. The best weapon for this fast, close-range work in thick cover, however, was Mike Hughes’s old Winchester M97 12-gauge slide-action riot gun loaded with British AAA shells that carried thirty-five pellets to the ounce. It was quite effective; with one burst of rapid fire from it, Mike once dropped five terrorists who were busily engaged in shooting at him.

The Mau Mau used many homemade guns constructed from water pipe with a firing mechanism consisting of a sharpened door-bolt powered by a strip of inner tube. Having no chambers, they worked best with rimmed cartridges such as shotgun shells or the .303 British. The shotgun version was about as effective as any single-shot cylinder-bore gun would be, except that the expended case had to be pried out, while the .303 rifle bullet tumbled wickedly when fired through a half-inch pipe. They also had sporting rifles and shotguns taken from farmhouses, and later acquired a supply of Lancaster 9mm machine carbines and a few Bren light machine guns by successfully raiding a couple of police stations.

From one gang we recovered a fully engraved Holland & Holland double 12-gauge, a beautiful Mauserwerke .22 rimfire sporter, and a Purdey .318 bolt-action rifle—quite a decent battery! In fact, though, the Mau Mau probably inflicted more casualties with their pangas than with any other weapons.

During the Mau Mau years the white settlers in the Kenya highlands went armed at all times. Normal crime—robberies, burglaries, and the like—dropped almost to zero. There were a few accidents, of course, mostly the result of damn-foolishness. Two fellows were practicing fast draw with empty pistols against each other on the porch of the Lake Hotel at Naivasha (thus violating the cardinal rule of gun safety). When they were through, they reloaded and holstered their guns, and walked toward the lounge. In the doorway one of them suddenly turned and cried, “Draw!” The other chap did so, and put a .45 “hardball” through his middle. It made a neat hole that the sawbones patched up quite easily, and he was out of the hospital in a week or two.

Nevertheless, I believe that if citizens were encouraged to go armed, and to resolutely resist violent crime, the incidence of murder, rape, robbery, mugging, and casual killings would be greatly reduced, and a significant number of innocent lives would be saved. Massacres by deranged killers in fast-food restaurants, post offices, office buildings, and the like would cease when would-be perpetrators realized that they would not be able to claim more than one or two victims before being shot down themselves. I would feel comfortable and secure in an armed society in which people were held accountable for their actions.

When I returned home at the end of the Emergency after service with the Kenya Regiment, I met a young fellow named Joe Cheffings, who had come out from England at the age of seventeen to work on a coffee plantation at Donyo Sabuk, not too far from us. He had a 9.3x62mm F.N. Mauser, a double-barrel .500-450 of German make, a big S&W revolver taking the .455 British cartridge, and boundless enthusiasm for the outdoors. We became friends immediately, and were soon going down to the Tana to hunt buffalo together, with varied success.

One weekend we went to visit Jens Hessel, a Dane who had a wheat farm on the edge of the Mount Kenya forest and who was plagued by buffalo devastating his wheat. Before dawn the next morning the three of us were running through the dew-wet forest with the stinging nettles burning our bare knees, trying to catch up with Stalin, Jens’s big German shepherd, who was on a hot trail.

As we burst into the little glade where Stalin had the animal at bay, the buffalo cow flung up its head and glared at us, completely ignoring the dog that danced frenziedly in front of it. Joe snapped the double to his shoulder and heaved on a trigger, but instead of the expected boom all he got was a click—a misfire. Jens got off a shot with his 10.75mm Mauser as the buffalo turned to go, and I noticed a burst of spray from the damp hide as the bullet struck the front of its shoulder. Then the buffalo was gone, and Stalin was after it.

Joe broke the double and extracted the dud cartridge. The primer showed some firing-pin indentation, but it was perhaps not quite as deep as it should have been. Both the rifle and the cartridges were old, and the .500-450 Nitro Express (which in British usage means a .500 case necked down to hold a .450-caliber bullet) was obsolete even then. Joe shrugged, and slipped another cartridge into that barrel.

Stalin was barking anew. Jens yelled for us to come on, and we started running again. We came to a little game path that seemed to lead toward the commotion, and followed it, with Jens about ten yards in the lead. Suddenly the buffalo appeared coming back up the path with the dog at its heels. Jens threw a quick shot at it, but it merely paused momentarily, shaking its head, and then came on. Jens stepped backward off the trail as he reloaded, tripped on a root, and fell flat on his back. As the hulking animal drew level with him, it saw Joe and me and stopped just as Joe pulled the trigger of the .450, which resulted in another click. I poked the barrel of my .375 H&H past Joe’s shoulder and fired at the same time as Jens got a shot into the cow from where he lay sprawled on the ground. The target appeared to be flung sideways, and lay kicking as Joe tried his left barrel. That one went off all right, and the buffalo was still.

Examination revealed that none of Jens’s shots with the 10.75x68mm— using “solid” full-metal-jacket bullets, mind you—had got inside. The one fired as the cow came up the trail at him had hit it in the upper lip, shattered on the teeth, and ended up as confetti at the back of its throat. The bullet he fired from the ground had exploded on the shoulder blade, blowing out a handful of hide and muscle but hardly marking the bone. Jens had taken an elephant or two with that cartridge, which used a 347-grain bullet of about .423-inch diameter at 2,200 fps velocity. It was not uncommonly used by African resident hunters, some of whom even liked it. I cannot imagine why, as for my money it was the most unsatisfactory cartridge ever produced specifically for large game, and was notorious for its lack of penetration.

I do not believe that Jens Hessel, who later became a successful professional hunter, ever used it again after this episode. Joe took the .500-450 and his 9.3mm into Nairobi the very next day and traded them both in on a Winchester M70 in .375 H&H, which served him faithfully for the next twenty years on everything from sixty-pound Thomson gazelle to lion, buffalo, and elephant.

It would have been illegal to use a dog to bay buffalo in sport hunting, but for “control” work it was quite legitimate. About five hundred buffalo a year were being shot around Mount Kenya in those days to keep their numbers in check and to protect crops. When whole herds invaded his wheat at night, Jens used to go after them in an old open Land Rover. His wife, Trudi, stood in the back with the spotlight. With the accelerator to the floor, he would drive at a range of a few feet, shooting a double-barrel .500 Nitro Express with one hand while steering with the other. It was somewhat reminiscent of running bison on horseback, and while it may not have qualified as pukka sport, it was undeniably exciting.

My kid sister, Grete, married Peter Davey, another coffee-plantation manager from Donyo Sabuk. He really preferred wingshooting and fly-fishing, and later developed into an outstanding wildlife photographer, but my father had given him the long 8x60 Mauser and we did hunt quite a bit of big game together. One afternoon we found fifteen eland with about the same number of zebra and a score of giraffe out on an open plain. There was no cover, so with the sun behind him Pete just walked slowly out straight toward a big, gray eland bull that was grazing a little apart from the rest. After a while Pete got down and crawled. Incredibly, none of the animals paid him any attention. When he was within about a hundred fifty yards he sat up and shot the bull, worked the bolt and shot it again, and it went down. It was a fat, old beast that probably weighed well over fifteen hundred pounds, and it had healed lion claw marks all down one haunch.

A young Joe Cheffings (standing) and friend with impala.

Then we discovered that we had only one dull knife and a panga between us, so it took us over two hours to skin the eland and cut it up. We filled the trunk of my Standard Vanguard sedan with meat, and had to put the rest of it on the back seat and on the floor between the seats. Blood soaked into the carpeting, of course. A week later Nils Andersson borrowed the vehicle to take his new girlfriend on a date, but they had not gone a quarter of a mile before she demanded that he stop the car and let her out. She said it stank.

In 1958 Pete replaced the 8x60 with a Czechoslovakian Brno Mauser sporter in 7x57, a delightfully light and sweet-handling rifle that I coveted then and now own. A few years later a leopard killed two of his calves. He recovered one of the carcasses and hung it in a big fig tree. After some days the cat started feeding on it. Pete drove by that evening and saw two leopard at the bait, a big male up in the tree and a smaller one, probably a female, on the ground. There was no cover between Pete and the tree, just a tangle of bush around the base of it, so he shot from where he was. The leopard tumbled out of the tree into the bush. Pete approached and circled the thicket, but could see no sign of the leopard, and because it was getting dark he wisely decided to leave it for the night.

The next morning he eased into the brush with a shotgun and soon found the leopard, dead. But the ground and vegetation were torn up all around it, so it may not have been entirely defunct the previous evening. Pete got quite a shock when he paced out the range and found it to have been one hundred fifty yards—an awful long way to be shooting at a leopard with iron sights. He had hit it a little too far back, through the stomach and the rearmost portions of the lungs, but the 175-grain softnose of the 7x57 had done about as well as any other cartridge could have been expected to do under the circumstances. The leopard, a huge tom with its stomach full of calf meat, registered 240 pounds on the scales.

Pete also took the 7x57 along on a rhino hunt we made near Makueni. This was the district where John Hunter had been ordered to shoot a thousand rhino to enable Kamba tribesmen to settle there. The government thought that there were still too many rhino, and therefore issued a number of rhino licenses to hunters at a reduced price. However, they were still expensive enough that we would have to sell the rhino horns to help cover the costs, so Pete and I agreed to pool our resources—buy two licenses and hunt together.

When we eventually found a suitable rhino, Pete had his .458 and I a .375 H&H, but Joe Cheffings, who did not have a license, was carrying the 7mm Brno in case we chanced on an impala or such for camp meat. Pete belted the rhino in the shoulder area, and I fired immediately after him. Unfortunately, I was standing to one side but a little behind him, and the muzzle blast from the .375 blew his hat off and painfully deafened him. There was a pause in the proceedings while he forcibly expressed an opinion. The rhino went into a spin, as they often do. It received a .458 bullet in the center of the chest and a .375 in the other shoulder, but still remained on its feet and turned away from us. Then Joe stuck a 175-grain softnose into its rear end, and it promptly fell down. He claimed that it was perfectly obvious that it was he who had killed that rhino with the 7x57mm.

They were good years, those on the Yatta. Joe, Pete and Grete, Fritz Walter, Miles Coverdale, Soren Lindstrom, and other friends often came down on weekends. Sometimes we would undertake a serious expedition to the Tana for buffalo; more often we would go out to look for an impala for the pot, or to fish in the river, or to shoot a few birds. Pete and his boss, James Walker, used to organize wonderful shoots for ducks or driven guinea fowl that were great fun and enjoyable social affairs as well, but I have never been much of a wingshooting enthusiast. Instead, I would let the dogs tree a bunch of guineas, whereupon I would endeavor to sneak close enough to bag a couple with a Smith & Wesson K-22 revolver my father had acquired.

One Sunday afternoon Fritz, Joe, and I were out enjoying the day when we spotted a bunch of guinea fowl scratching around in the dust just over a low rise. We had but one shotgun cartridge left, so we sent Joe to bag a mess of the birds for us. We expected him to sneak up on them, and to carefully line them up so as to get three or four heads in his pattern. Instead, he ran over to the rise waving his arms, got them airborne, and then missed. He heard about that for a long time afterward.

Once, a lion stampeded our cattle out of the boma where they were corralled at night, and killed a cow a couple of hundred yards from the house. I parked my Land Rover pickup by it, and stood waiting in the back of it that night. Konde, one of my Masai herdsmen who had himself hunted lion with a spear, was in the front seat to work the headlights. The lion came at 11:30 P.M., a pale gray ghost that suddenly materialized beside the Land Rover. Konde switched on the lights a little too soon, and it ran before I could get the bead of the .458 on it. The next time it came it wasted a few seconds trying to drag the carcass away as it turned to run. It flinched at my shot, but disappeared without a sound before I could shoot it again.

We came back next morning, Konde with his spear and I with a shotgun loaded with buckshot. We found a slight blood trail and followed it in a semicircle for a hundred yards into the sisal. I let Konde do the spooring while I kept my eyes swiveling alertly in all directions. Presently I smelled lion, and then we found it, lying dead behind some sisal a few paces to our right rear. It was a chilling realization that the lion, intentionally or not, had set a perfect ambush, and that if it had still been alive it might have been upon us before we could even have turned around. The .458 softnose had hit it just in front of the left hip, and exited some inches behind the opposite shoulder.

Eventually an effective drug against cattle disease spread by the tsetse fly was developed, and the country beyond our ranch gradually filled up with people who cleared the land, planted crops, and drove the game away. But there were still as many impala, kudu, leopard, and bushbuck on the ranch when we sold it as when we first came to it, and several rhino in addition that had taken refuge with us from the surrounding settlement. It is all gone now, no doubt, but because I never went back it still lives in my memory the way it was, and that is good.