A MASAI THROWING HIS SPEAR. IX
After Elephants with Wandorobo
“Big game hunting is a fine education!” With this opinion of Mr. H. A. Bryden I am in entire agreement, but I cannot assent to the dictum so often cited of some of the most experienced African hunters, to the effect that Equatorial East Africa offers the sportsman no adequate compensation for all the difficulties and dangers there to be faced.
I cannot subscribe to this view, because to my mind these very difficulties and dangers impart to the sport of this region a fascination scarcely to be equalled in any other part of the world. It is only in tropical Africa that you will find the last splendid specimens of an order of wild creation surviving from other eras of the earth’s history. It is not to be denied that you must pay a high price for the joy of hunting them. That goes without saying in a country where your every requisite, great and small, has to be carried on men’s shoulders—no other form of transport being available—from the moment you set foot within the wilderness. I am not now talking of quite short expeditions, but of the bigger enterprises which take the traveller into the interior for a period of months. I hold that this breaking away from all the resources of civilised life should be one of the sportsman’s chief incentives, and one of his chief enjoyments. I can, of course, quite understand experienced hunters taking another view. Many have had such serious encounters with the big game they have shot, and above all such unfortunate experiences of African climates, that they may well have had enough of such drawbacks.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
A POWERFUL OLD HIPPOPOTAMUS ON HIS WAY TO HIS HAUNT IN THE SWAMP AT DAYBREAK. ONE OF MY BEST PHOTOGRAPHS.
Their assertions, in any case, tend to make it clear that sport in this East African wilderness is no child’s play. In reality, all depends upon the character and equipment of the man who goes in for it. The apparently difficult game of tennis presents no difficulties to the expert tennis-player. With an inferior player it is otherwise. So it is in regard to hunting in the tropics. It is obvious that experience in sport here at home is of the greatest possible use out there—is, in fact, absolutely essential to one’s success. Only those should attempt it who are prepared to do everything and cope with all obstacles for themselves, who do not need to rely on others, and whose nerves are proof against the extraordinary excitements and strains which out there are your daily experience.
I myself am conscious of a steadily increasing distaste for face-to-face encounters with rhinoceroses, and with elephants still more. There are indeed other denizens of the East African jungle whose defensive and offensive capabilities it would be no less a mistake to under estimate. The most experienced and most authoritative Anglo-Saxon sportsmen are, in fact, agreed that, whether it be a question of going-after lions or leopards or African buffaloes, sooner or later the luck goes against the hunter. Of recent years a large number of good shots have lost their lives in Africa. If one of these animals once gets at you, you are as good as dead. To be chased by an African elephant is as exciting a sensation as a man could wish for. The fierceness of his on-rush passes description. He makes for you suddenly, unexpectedly. The overpowering proportions of the enraged beast—the grotesque aspect of his immense flapping ears, which make his huge head look more formidable than ever—the incredible pace at which he thunders along—all combine with his shrill trumpeting to produce an effect upon the mind of the hunter, now turned quarry, which he will never shake himself rid of as long as life lasts. When—as happened once to me—it is a case not of one single elephant, but of an entire herd giving chase in the open plain (as described in With Flashlight and Rifle), the reader will have no difficulty in understanding that even now I sometimes live the whole situation over again in my dreams and that I have more than once awoke from them in a frenzy of terror.
Of course, a man becomes hardened in regard to hunting accidents in course of time, especially if all his adventures have had fortunate issues. When, however, a man has repeatedly escaped destruction by a hairs-breadth only, and when incidents of this kind have been heaped up one on another within a brief space of time, the effects upon the nervous system become so great that even with the utmost self-mastery a man ceases to be able to bear them. As I have already said, the total number of casualties in the ranks of African sportsmen is not inconsiderable.