EXPLORATION & FAREWELL
Ruark and Selby set off north, eventually reaching the new, virgin hunting territory they would be the first to explore. This part of Kenya is a stark contrast both to the lush plains of the Masai Mara and to the bright lights of Nairobi. It is a desert, populated by warlike tribes who live hard lives. The Turkana and the Samburu spend their days herding goats and raiding back and forth. Throughout history they have fought the Karamojong in Uganda to the west, the Ethiopians from the north, and the Somalis from the east. When not fighting intruders, they fight among themselves. Foremost among the animals that populated the NFD were herds of elephant, mostly gone now because of poaching. In Ruark’s day, however, it was famous for big tuskers. Very few people had even seen most of the NFD. Large sections of it were closed to hunting, and even to routine travel, because of tribal raiding and the depredations of gangs of armed shiftas. Today (1999) the NFD is again closed to almost all traffic, for these same reasons.
This was not the first time Ruark had undertaken a journey of exploration disguised as a safari. The previous year, he and Selby had mounted a major expedition into the Karamoja of northeastern Uganda. Together with professional hunters John Sutton and Don Bousfield, and accompanied by two other American couples, they hunted a region that had been closed to sporting safaris for half a century. The Karamoja is remote and rugged; whereas most of Uganda is tropical and green, the Karamoja is a land of bare rocks and far horizons, populated by a tribe — the Karamojong — noted for being unfriendly. The name, of course, is familiar to all hunters because it was the nickname of Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell. Karamoja Bell was one of the most famous elephant hunters, a Scot who ranged through Uganda up into the Lado Enclave of the southern Sudan in his quest for big ivory. Bell is particularly noted for preferring a smallbore rifle rather than a big elephant gun, and for shooting for the brain with pinpoint accuracy. Ruark’s safari into the Karamoja had special significance because he had bought Bell’s own rifle, a bolt-action .275 Rigby, in London. He described the rifle and the safari in some detail in an article in Field & Stream titled “Sentimental Safari,” which appeared in August, 1961.
Aside from the rifle, the article is noteworthy for its tone. Ruark’s descriptions of his safaris had begun a subtle transition in the late 1950s. Instead of dwelling on the hunting aspects, the killing, or the size of the trophies, he now emphasized the almost therapeutic value of safaris, the joy of just seeing new country or of showing country he knew intimately to people who had never seen it. In a 1958 piece in Field & Stream, “The Babysitting Was Just Fine Last Year,” he talked about conducting a trip for three youngsters, the children of Ricardo Sicré and Harold Matson. In “Sentimental Safari,” his American friends were seeing Africa for the first time, and Ruark set himself up less as a fellow client than as an unofficial extra professional hunter. In this sense, he was undergoing a transformation from the “Boy” of his stories to the “Old Man.” He was now Bwana Bob, the old Africa hand, who could have taken out safaris himself were it not for the technicality of not having a professional’s license. Although this tendency became more pronounced later, and rubbed many people the wrong way (even today, professional hunters insist he overstepped himself and was not nearly so knowledgeable as he made out), in his writing he came across as more appreciative of the finer aspects of safaris and less of the bloodshed.
One of the best articles he ever wrote was one about trophy hunting in which he looked at the philosophical aspects of the chase. Ever since Hemingway made the pursuit of greater kudu, in Green Hills of Africa, a metaphor for obsession (and for all the worst competitive aspects of trophy hunting), the all-consuming desire for horns an extra inch longer has been one of the sicknesses of hunting. Ruark pointed out that, as often as not, the biggest heads are killed by accident, by meat hunters looking for a steak or by natives defending their mealie crop. Rarely, he said, were the number-one heads shot by serious men who set out to do it. He cited several examples to prove his point, including one Kenya bongo, killed by a farmer, that was good enough for number two in the all-time records. Whether this ironic tendency is a little joke enjoyed by the gods of hunting, or just coincidence, Ruark wrote that the most important element of trophy hunting is not the horns you bring back, but the work you put into it.
If you have learned nothing else from hunting, you have learned patience and stubbornness and concentration on what you really want at the expense of what is there to shoot. You have learned that man can as easily be debased as ennobled by a sport...
In 1959, Ruark’s friend Bob Lee was in Kenya hunting bongo, the elusive, reclusive spiral-horned antelope of the high Aberdares. Lee is a wealthy businessman today, but in the late 1950s he was a young man in love with hunting who was busy pursuing every animal on the African continent. He was also a noted Manhattan playboy, for lack of a better term. Around 1960 he started his own safari business in Nairobi, was the first outfitter to open up the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola, and took Ruark to Mozambique on the first major commercial safari a few years later. In 1959, though, the two were acquaintances who shared many of the same interests (wine, women, and bongo, mainly) and rubbed shoulders in some of the more exotic watering holes of the world. Lee tells the story of hunting bongo with Fred Bartlett, the famous PH, of “lucking into” a trophy animal and coming back down off the mountain, out of the cold and dripping bamboo forests, with a serious desire for a hot shower, clean sheets, and a good meal at the New Stanley Grill. Ruark happened to be in town at the time and undertook to organize a party to celebrate Lee’s bongo. In the hotel’s wine cellar he unearthed a cache of Chambolle-Musigny, Lee’s favorite wine, and Jack Block, the hotel’s owner, unleashed his chef on the backstrap of the bongo. The party that followed was small in numbers — just eight or nine friends — but large in quality. Having the best chef in Africa prepare one of the rarest cuts of meat, and washing it down with one of the finer French wines, is not an everyday occurrence.
In the case of the bongo, both males and females carry horns, and both are legitimate trophies. Lee, however, wanted a bull bongo, and since the animal he took was a large cow, he returned to the Aberdares the following year and the year after, trying to get a bull. He never succeeded. As Ruark wrote, however, “None of it is any good unless you work for it, and if the work is hard enough you do not really have to possess the trophy to own it.” For that insight alone, Ruark deserves to be regarded as one of the finest hunting writers of all time.
Ruark also began to write specifically about game conservation. The prospects for Africa’s game herds when countries like Tanganyika achieved independence were becoming a concern for the professional hunters and game wardens Ruark knew so well. Black Africans are not noted for their devotion to conservation or preservation of wild species, and more than one politician had stated bluntly that there could be no modern future for Africa until the hunters and the animals they hunted had been gotten rid of. To black socialist politicians with degrees from the London School of Economics, hunting was an anachronism and hunters were enemies of the state. The lions and the herds of wildebeest would go, to be replaced by communal farms in the best left-wing theoretical mold. Such a prospect moved Ruark to write about the animals, not as game but as a great natural resource Africans should cherish and protect. Once again, Ruark’s vision of the future was disturbingly, tragically accurate.
***
The safari into the NFD in July, 1961, was for Ruark more than simply a hunting trip after a big elephant. After the fact, he wrote that he had intended to use it as an opportunity to write an epitaph for the Africa he had known and loved, that was in the process of disintegrating. That may well have been. Ernest Hemingway’s death gave him an even more personal and immediate event upon which to hang a metaphorical eulogy. Ruark and Selby did find the elephant they were looking for, at a waterhole near the village of Illaut. He was an old, old elephant, eking out a sad existence by himself, waiting for death — from starvation or, as Ruark suggested, from “purest boredom.” The hunters were told of his existence by a young Samburu girl, and when Ruark shot him they paid her a reward. Ruark wrote an account of how her relatives, or at least those claiming to be close family friends, tried to defraud her out of the money, and the story works well as a microcosm of life in Africa — or anywhere else, for that matter, where people have older brothers and close family friends.
The old elephant of Illaut provided Ruark with everything he was looking for: a symbol of a passing age that became a metaphor for Africa, for Hemingway, and even for himself. His account of the elephant’s life and death appeared first in a newspaper column, then in several magazine articles, and finally — in its most eloquent and refined version — in The Honey Badger. One line from an earlier version is memorable, however: “When the green hills of Africa go brown and change afflicts the land, and the old good things are no longer as they were, there are worse memorials to a great life than a book or a tusk.”
***
The death of Hemingway and of the ancient elephant, and the impending death of Kenya Colony as Ruark had known it, marked the end of one chapter in his life. In New York another chapter was also drawing to a close.
Harold Matson’s negotiations with Holt and McGraw-Hill had reached a conclusion. After receiving a long and detailed letter from the editors at Holt about the changes they required in Uhuru before they would consider publishing it, Matson recommended that Ruark accept the alternative offer from McGraw-Hill. Oddly enough, the editors at McGraw-Hill had many of the same reservations — especially regarding the novel’s inordinate length — but they were lavish in their praise of Ruark both as a novelist and as an authority on Africa, and on the impact they foresaw for Uhuru as one of the “most important” novels of the latter part of the twentieth century. They wanted Ruark to cut about four hundred pages from the manuscript, however, and they knew the work would take time. They were prepared to wait and planned to publish the book in 1962. The delay, they said, would not lessen its value by any means. In fact, they pointed out, trying to have the novel coincide with current events actually diminished it. Matson wrote to Ruark in Africa, apprising him of the negotiations and recommending he accept McGraw-Hill’s offer, which was actually a multi-book deal that would allow him to construct the series of novels he had in mind. Ruark cabled his acceptance, finished his safari, returned to Spain to finish the revisions, and then went on to New York.
Ruark’s visit to New York in September was very stressful both professionally and personally. Aside from ending a long-standing relationship with one publisher (Holt) and the elation of beginning a new one with McGraw-Hill, Ruark also resigned from Field & Stream. The “Old Man” series had run its course; in fact, in recent years that theme had been dropped as Ruark wrote more and more about his current-day adventures. Hugh Foster says that, ultimately, the decision to leave Holt was more commercial than artistic: McGraw-Hill demanded virtually the same revisions to Uhuru, but was prepared to offer a great deal more money to get them and to bag Ruark as an author for future books. According to Foster, the deal was worth a quarter-million dollars guaranteed for a five-book package, and Ruark would be able to borrow against the contract in the meantime. This, as it turned out, was a two-edged sword. Although the financial security allowed Ruark to slacken off on his magazine work, taking advantage of the loan facility bound him ever more tightly to McGraw-Hill regardless of what happened.
Ruark’s own expenses, always high, were about to get higher. In North Carolina, his parents were deteriorating physically and mentally. They had moved into the old Adkins house in Southport and received an allowance Matson sent once a month, but there was never enough money to satisfy their alcohol and drug addictions, to say nothing of the frequent hospital confinements and long-distance ambulance rides brought on by their illnesses, both real and imagined. They took to borrowing money from anyone and everyone, and never, ever, paid anything back. This tendency did not damage their reputations so much as that of their rich and famous son, who was seen by the residents of Southport and Wilmington as not fulfilling his filial obligations. Naturally, Ruark was enraged at receiving letters demanding repayments of his parents’ debts and being accused of leaving them to rot while he jetsetted the world. He was “bleeding himself white” supporting them, he rather hyperbolically described it. The problem was dealt with in typical Ruark fashion: He increased their monthly allowance to $500 but informed them there would be no further increase or extraordinary payments, and he followed this up with advertisements in the local newspapers advising that he would not be responsible for his parents’ debts. This was a shocking step to take in the old-fashioned world of smalltown North Carolina, and several acquaintances wrote to him, accusing him of shirking his responsibility to his parents. When Matson received a letter from the elder Ruark’s doctor advising him the old man was dying of lung disease, Ruark wrote a letter to his parents bluntly telling them they would have to get by on what he sent and nothing more. “I have discharged my responsibility as son and sucker,” he wrote.
***
The deal with McGraw-Hill was signed, the first checks were cashed, and Uhuru was scheduled for publication in June, 1962. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose the book as its main selection for July, and Harold Matson began scouting out a paperback contract. Even as the money and acclaim piled up, however, Ruark was facing some severe personal problems. He was back on the bottle in a big way, as was Virginia, and her alcoholism was becoming serious.
Kenya was now well on the road to independence. The British colonial office was hoping to have a constitution hammered out by July of 1962, with elections later that year and nationhood by the beginning of 1963. For Kenya’s 60,000 whites, the future was forbidding. Property values in the colony were depressed, and the majority of settlers had most of their assets tied up in their farms. Even if they could find a buyer, however, the government was making it extremely difficult for them to get their money out of the country. They were damned if they tried to leave and damned if they chose to stay. Ruark wrote a series of columns about the plight of the settlers and the colony’s prospects after independence. Needless to say, he was sympathetic to the former and not optimistic about the latter.
Having delivered the final manuscript of Uhuru, the Ruarks’ plans for 1962 were, first, a hunting trip in India, then on to Nairobi and down to Mozambique on a safari organized by their friend Bob Lee. What actually happened, however, was considerably different.
The main purpose of the trip to India was to hunt leopard, an animal with which Ruark fell in love in his later years in Africa. For Hemingway it had been the greater kudu; for Ruark, in Horn of the Hunter, it had been the Cape buffalo. As he spent more and more time in Africa, however, the clever and reclusive nocturnal cat had become his personal favorite. He killed many of them, almost all by the traditional method of baiting. Leopards like to feed at night, emerging very late in the afternoon as the sun goes down. Hunters hang a dead animal in a tree, hoping a leopard will come to feed. Leopards prefer their meat almost rotten, so a carcass in a tree will last several days. The hunters wait in a blind for hours, absolutely motionless, hoping a leopard will show itself while there is still shooting light. Even this description makes it all seem much easier than it is. Sitting motionless in a blind for several hours, with tsetse flies and mosquitoes, is far from easy, and there is never a guarantee the leopard will show, much less that the hunter will get a shot.
Ruark had become a leopard specialist, according to his own writing, and he boasted in print about his ability to pick a likely tree, hang a bait, and attract a big cat. He even went so far as to advise Harry Selby on the proper method of hanging a carcass, which did not go over well. At any rate, in India he would hunt his favorite animal, using different methods on new ground.
India did not have the same strict hunting regulations as Kenya or North America. There the leopard was vermin, to be found and dispatched in the most effective way possible. For a nocturnal animal that usually means jack-lighting — the practice, abhorred in most of North America, of hunting in the dark with a spotlight, which you shine in the animal’s eyes. The animal freezes, you aim between the eyes, and that’s that. As a North Carolina boy schooled in hunting ethics by the Old Man, Ruark was not a jack-lighter, but when in Rome you do as the Romans do. As his later accounts suggested, what went on in India in the name of hunting in the twenty years immediately after independence was not ethical by modern sport-hunting standards, but when dealing with carnivores like tigers and leopards, which lift cattle and eat human beings, ethics are not an issue. The line becomes considerably blurred, even when the game involves young healthy animals that eat antelope shot by fee-paying tourists with rifles.
Ruark was driving along a dirt track at night with an English hunter, Hugh Allen, when they spotted a large female leopard. Allen caught it in the headlights, and Ruark promptly drilled it with his .30-06, which just as promptly jammed. It did not seem to matter at the time: The leopard was down and motionless with a large hole in her. Having learned the hard way always to put in a finishing shot, Ruark took a shotgun and gave the leopard two blasts of buckshot. According to him, the rifle jammed because of faulty Indian ammunition. The buckshot he used was also of Indian origin, and later examination showed it had barely penetrated the leopard’s hide. All of this was unknown at the time, but it accounts for the strange sequence of events. The seemingly dead leopard was in the bushes, and Ruark and Allen were struggling to unjam the rifle, when the leopard emerged at high speed, snarling and very much alive. Ruark raised his arm to guard his face, and the leopard sunk her fangs into it while furiously scrabbling at his belly with her hind claws. Ruark’s description of the action was simple and direct:
As a hunter of big-toothed stuff, I have often wondered about the sensation of close work with a wounded, angry animal. There are no sensations, not even of fear. It is all reactions...
Allen eventually managed to choke the animal with the barrels of the shotgun, leaving the two hunters to bind each other’s wounds and make an excruciatingly painful return to their camp eighteen miles away, where Virginia Ruark was waiting. Among the supplies, Ruark says, were a vital bottle of Dettol, and an equally vital bottle of gin.
His wounds, however, were no joke. The next day his arm was swollen and red, with the skin lacerated and stretched as tightly as a fresh blood sausage. A Swedish missionary pumped him full of penicillin and antitetanus, and he and Virginia caught a plane for Nairobi, where the doctors had ample first-hand experience dealing with the results of leopard hunts gone wrong. Ruark was immediately admitted to Nairobi Hospital and stayed there for the better part of a week. Virginia, who was never a really enthusiastic hunter, had had enough. Rather than wait for him to recover and continue on to Mozambique, she returned to the United States to spend some time with her family. She was also ill at the time, and as soon as she got home she saw a doctor, who diagnosed a variety of ailments related to nerves. The real problem, however, was alcohol.
For his part Ruark got himself out of the hospital, repaired his nerves (if not his liver) with several days of “wild partying,” then continued on to Mozambique. People who saw him at the beginning of the safari there, in the hotel at Beira, describe a man who was near the end of his rope — whether from the after-effects of the leopard attack or the cumulative effects of overwork and alcoholism.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the psychological scars of the leopard attack. A serious brush with death of that nature has lasting effects, and Ruark could well have been killed had it not been for his own instincts and the actions of Hugh Allen. The word “trauma” is overused in modern life, but the overwhelming adrenalin rush of such an incident seems to bring on a strange psychological state that takes weeks, if not months, to overcome. Ruark’s natural reliance on gin would not help, either. Sometimes, the victim never completely recovers. There are instances of professional hunters surviving serious animal attacks, but being unable to hunt that particular animal afterward. The same is true in bullfighting. A matador is trained from childhood to face bulls in the ring, and he accepts the possibility of being gored with a matter-of-fact fatalism. Each cornada, however, tears away a little more of the psychological fabric that allows him to go on doing it, fight after fight. One day, a matador wakes up to find his courage gone, if not his valor.
It would be remarkable if something similar did not happen to Ruark — if the attack did not leave deep psychological scars. During the final few years of his life, several traits emerged which made him difficult, if not unpleasant, to be around. Most people attribute this to a combination of ego and alcoholism, but that seems unfair. As became his practice, he bestowed the leopard incident on his alter-ego, Alec Barr. He gave him the scars on his forearm and the scars on his stomach where the hind claws ripped, and he also gave him the scars on his psyche that prevented him from really thinking about the attack, keeping it locked away in a hidden vault like a rare and deadly gem.