Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (12 page)

Rejoining Mearns and Loring at Lake Naivasha, the party trekked sixty miles northeast through Kikuyu country across the high plains of the Aberdare range to Neri in the foothills of 17,000-foot Mount Kenya, eighty miles north of Nairobi. Their last camp, at an altitude of 10,000 feet, was so cold that the water froze in the basins. At Neri, they were greeted by the District Commissioner, who organized a great Kikuyu dance in their honor. Two thousand naked and half-naked warriors took part in the celebration. Some carried “gaudy blankets, others girdles of leopard-skin; their ox-hide shields were colored in bold patterns, their long-bladed spears quivered and gleamed.” Many wore head-dresses made of a lion’s mane or the black and white pelt of a Colobus monkey. Their faces were painted red and yellow. Those of the young men about to undergo the rite of circumcision were “stained a ghastly white, and their bodies fantastically painted.” The women, “shrilled applause, and danced in groups by themselves.”
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The next day the clouds lifted and they were able to see the high rock peaks of Kenya, one of the rare glacier-bearing mountains of the equator. Mearns and Loring stayed in the area to make a thorough survey, while Roosevelt, Heller and Cunningham spent a week tracking down elephant. This hunt was carried out in a great forest, from which a thick screen of wet foliage largely shut out the sun. It was only passable, single file, on the elephant paths that wound up hill and down and on which the men had to duck under flower covered vines and scramble over fallen timber. The rain-soaked ground forced Roosevelt to wear his hob-nailed boots. On the second day they came upon the fresh trail of a herd of a dozen or so elephants, including two big bulls, which it took another day’s tramping to overtake. First came their “savage” ‘Ndorobo guides, then Cuninghame followed by his gun bearer, Roosevelt and his own, with Heller and a dozen porters and skinners bringing up the rear. They left their first night’s camp intact and traveled with food for three days and carried two small tents.

Before they could see them, they could hear the elephants as they moved through the forest, the boughs cracking under their weight. TR was also struck by the clearly audible and “curious internal rumblings of the great beasts.” He tried when possible to step in the footprints of the huge animals where there were no unbroken sticks to crack under his feet. It “made our veins thrill,” he wrote, “thus for half an hour to creep stealthily along, but a few rods from the herd, never able to see it because of the extreme denseness of the cover.” Finally, thirty yards in front of them, the head of a big bull with good ivory, resting its tusks on the branches of a young tree, came into view. Using the Holland & Holland, TR aimed a little to one side of the left eye, hoping for a brain shot and a clean kill. The first bullet, however, only stunned the bull, and it took the second barrel to dispatch it. Before he could reload, the thick bushes parted before him and “through them surged the vast bulk of a charging bull elephant” so close he could have “touched me with his trunk.” TR dodged aside as Cuninghame opened fire, driving the wounded bull into the forest. He “trumpeted shrilly, and then all sound ceased.”
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Pursuing the wounded animal would have to wait as they had first to preserve the skin of Roosevelt’s bull, which would take some time and had to be done immediately. The tusks of his first elephant weighed a respectable one hundred and thirty pounds and the gun bearers and porters wildly celebrated the kill. The workers were soon “splashed with blood from head to foot” by the skinning which continued until stopped by darkness. One of the ‘Ndorobo trackers took off his blanket and “squatted stark naked inside the carcass the better to use his knife.” All the men cut off strips of meat for themselves, hanging them in “red festoons from the branches round about.” Until late that night, around the camp fires, the men feasted and sang “in a strange minor tone.” The flickering light left them “at one moment in black obscurity, and the next brought them into bold relief their sinewy crouching figures, their dark faces, gleaming eyes and flashing teeth.” In a primitive rite his own Pleistocene ancestors would have appreciated, the Colonel feasted on slices of elephant heart roasted on a pronged stick. He found it “delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold.”
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Leaving Cuninghame and Heller behind to finish the preservation, and to track down Cuninghame’s wounded bull, Roosevelt returned to Neri to organize a hunt of his own for the first time. It took several days to find enough Kikuyu porters, and in this he enlisted the help of two young Scots who spoke the language. While he waited, Acting Governor Jackson arrived at Neri and Roosevelt was able to tell him of his bull elephant as well as the birds and mammals they had trapped. A great “ingowa” or war dance was organized in Jackson’s honor, the sight of which TR found “one of interest and a certain fascination.”
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Since the fifty Kikuyu finally assembled could not handle the loads of the regular porters, the Colonel hired donkeys to carry the food required to the elephant camp. Continuing the quest for elephant and other game, in the end he pushed almost a hundred miles further north to the headwaters of the Guaso Nyero River. Though it was supposed to be the dry season, the weather continued very wet and during one evening’s violent storm a funnel cloud snaked its way across the skies in sight of their camp, luckily moving away from them.

On this solo hunt they encountered no elephant but many antelope, in particular eland, the “king of the antelope,” and the “strongly built and boldly colored” oryx, with long, black, rapier-like horns. A good bull eland head was among the few trophies Roosevelt desired for himself and he was pleased to be able to shoot, at three hundred yards, a “magnificent bull” with a fine head of the variety called Patterson’s eland. Trying to find a similar specimen for the museum, Roosevelt came upon a herd of the large antelope, no faster than the range cattle he was used to, in open country. He galloped towards the herd on his brown zebra-shaped horse and, for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, felt as though he was a youth again in the “cow camps of the West, a quarter century ago.” Twice he rounded up the herd, just as once in Yellowstone he had rounded up a herd of elk for John Burroughs to look at. Among the eland, however, there were no big bulls, only cows and young stock. He nevertheless “enjoyed the gallop.”
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Next TR turned to oryx, which proved maddeningly elusive. Finally, after missing at four hundred yards, and feeling “rather desperate,” he unleashed a fusillade, emptying his magazine “on the Ciceronian theory, that he who throws a javelin all day must hit the mark some time.” This stratagem yielded an oryx cow with a handsome dun gray coat, long tail and horns, and bold black and white markings on its face. Roosevelt assigned four Kikuyu to skin the animal and carry in the meat. He was amused at the condescension with which his four regular attendants, his gun-bearers and sais, treated “their wild and totally uncivilized brethren” whom they called “shenzis,” savages or bush people, and would not associate with in any way.
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Though the Colonel claimed to thoroughly enjoy “being entirely by myself, as far as white men were concerned” for this period of more than two weeks, he was pleased when, on the afternoon of September 3, Cuninghame, Heller and the main safari caught up with his party.
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The combined expedition then set out for Meru boma, a small settlement in the snowy northeast slopes of Mount Kenya, directly under the equator, where three days later they were reunited with Kermit and Tarlton, who had been exploring the lower reaches of the Guaso Nyero. They also had found no elephant, but did kill lion, cheetah, oryx, and buffalo, and collected examples of several new animals including the aard-wolf, a miniature hyena; the gerenuk, a small giraffe-like antelope; and Grévy’s zebra, as big as a small horse.

Roosevelt wanted another cow and bull elephant for the National Museum and they were fortunate at Meru boma to receive a report of three cows raiding the fields of the local people that had charged when an attempt was made to drive them away. The party found the animals in a practically impenetrable jungle of ten-foot tall “rank growing bushes” which was not good ground for hunters. They could only travel on the elephant trails while their prey could move in any direction, “with no more difficulty than a man would have in a hayfield.” Luckily the party came upon the trunk of a great fallen tree and scrambled up it to a platform six feet above the ground. Balanced on this perch, TR was able to get a glimpse of the elephants. At sixty yards he opened fire at the largest with the Holland & Holland, the blast of which, he recorded, was “none too pleasant for the other men on the log and made Cuninghame’s nose bleed.” It was even less pleasant for the stunned animal, which he finished with his Springfield. The elephant turned out to be, not a cow, but a herd bull with forty-pound tusks. This specimen TR gave to the University of California.
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Back at Meru boma, Roosevelt repor ted to L odge t he “great comfor t” the pigskin library gave him. The same was true, he said, about writing his own book, which he must finish before he reached Khartoum, for “I am now too old to be able contently to spend a year living only as a hunter and with my brain lying fallow.” He told his friend that he and his wife Nannie would be amused to hear that in Africa he had “come into my inheritance of Shakespeare.” He had never before cared for more than one or two of the plays, but for some reason the “sealed book was suddenly opened to me on this trip.” Roosevelt supposed that when a man who was fond of reading was for long periods in a wilderness with but a few volumes he “inevitably grows into a true appreciation of the books that are good.” He still balked at three or four of the plays, but most of them he had read over and over again.
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While the Colonel rested at Meru boma, a native runner brought the news that Captain Robert Peary had succeeded in reaching the North Pole. At Oyster Bay a year before, TR had gone on Peary’s ship,
The Roosevelt
, to wish him “God-speed” for the effort. Several months later the Captain had sent to the White House what young Quentin called “treasures” from the arctic. These included a narwhal horn for the President, “wonderful and beautiful” fox skins for Edith and whale’s ears for Quentin, who was, Roosevelt explained to Peary, the “first individual who recognized what those last treasures were.”
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On September 12, 1909 TR instructed Foran that if the news about Peary’s reaching the North Pole was “unquestionably authentic,” to have the following published for him: “I rejoice over Captain Peary’s great achievement. Too much credit cannot be given to him; he has performed one of the great feats of the age, and all his countrymen should join in doing him honor.” About the safari, Roosevelt added that since he had written last he had killed two more elephants and Kermit one. Soon Kermit was going off west towards Lake Harrington and across to the Guaso Nyero. He asked Foran to share this with the Reuters news service people.
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As Kermit and Tarlton traveled west, TR and Cuninghame trekked directly north towards the Guaso Nyero District where they arrived on September 25. To insure there would be enough food for the porters they again took a small donkey safari with extra supplies. Along the way, the periodic rattle of the tall dry grass in the wind reminded the Colonel so much of the rattlesnakes of the West that, even though he knew no African viper made such a noise, each time the sound brought him instantly to attention in his saddle. Among the new animals TR shot were reticulated giraffe and ostrich, whose heart, liver and eggs he found excellent eating. The porters brought in ostrich chicks and two genet kittens, “much like ordinary kittens, with larger ears, sharper noses and longer tails.” He became fond of the “dear” little cats, which perched on his shoulder or sat in his lap while he stroked them. He tried to raise them but failed and was very sorry when they died.
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Their picturesque camp on the banks of the Guaso Nyero was on the edge of an open glade in a shady grove of giant mimosas. The river ran across the equator, through a desert country eastward into the Lorian swamp where it disappeared. At their location it was a broad, rapid, muddy stream infested with crocodiles, which TR loathed as man killers and shot when he could. From this camp he collected a pair of gerenuk, the “queer long-legged, long-necked antelope” with the curious habit of rising on their hind legs to browse among the bushes, unlike any other antelope he saw. Roosevelt also had a remarkable encounter with a napping cow giraffe, which awoke and stared at him as he stalked within forty yards. When he stopped, she dozed off again and allowed him to come within ten feet. The giraffe then re-awoke from its slumber and reared slightly, striking at him with her left foreleg, but the blow fell well short. The others came up shouting but the cow would not run away. “She stood within twenty feet of us,” TR recorded, “looking at us peevishly, and occasionally pouting her lips at us, as if she were making a face.” They all found the whole situation so strange and humorous that shooting the giraffe was out of the question. In the end, after three or four minutes, it took a pelting of sticks and dirt clods for the animal to canter off fifty yards and then to take up a leisurely walk. No other giraffe had allowed them to get within two hundred yards and all four men found her “utter indifference” to them inexplicable.
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Back at Nairobi on October 20, Theodore was reunited with Kermit, who had his twentieth birthday while off hunting with Tarlton. Their bag included Neuman’s Hartebeest and the stately, handsome, and hard to get, great koodoo. En route TR had received a parcel of letters, including two from his sister Anna, who had written of the tragic death of Henry Cabot Lodge’s son, by which news he was “inexpressively shocked and grieved” and wished he could be on the “same side of the water” to console his friends. About their trip Theodore reported that Kermit was now a better hunter than was he, “for Twenty is hardier and more active and endowed with better eyes than Fifty One.” He hoped that in his articles he had been able “measurably to reproduce what we have seen, and the wonder and the charm of the life.” In two months they would be leaving for Uganda and the Nile, “and then our time of discomfort and trouble begins.”
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