"I cannot pretend," writes Selous, "I enjoyed my excursion in the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province. In the first place, I was unsuccessful in the main object of my journey. Then the deadly monotony of the landscape, the extraordinary scarcity of game, and the excessive heat of the climate, all combined to make my trip very wearisome and uninteresting." He came away, however, with a very deep admiration for the gallant band of young Britons who were doing the work of the Empire in the wilds of Africa.
At the end of this trying hunt he was far from well, and was unable to ride, so he had to tramp the whole way to the Nile on foot. Arrived at Rumbek the medical officer there discovered the cause of his ill-health, so, as soon as he arrived in England he saw Mr. Freyer, who recommended an operation. "I got over the operation," he writes to Abel Chapman, "wonderfully well, and simply healed up like a dog. In fact, I was the record case for healing up in ten years amongst Freyer's patients." I went to see him in a nursing home in London, and heard all about his Lado trip, which was rather a sore subject with him, but, with his usual determination, he was only full of ideas to go back again and make a success the next time. In August we both went again to Swythamley, as the guests of young Sir Philip Brocklehurst, and had a very pleasant time amongst the grouse on the Derbyshire hills. Afterwards Selous stayed for a time in the Isle of Wight, with his wife and boys, and later in the autumn he travelled to Turin Exhibition of hunting and shooting, as one of the British jurors.
Later in 1911 Selous again left for British East Africa, to go on another hunt to the Gwas N'yiro river, with his friend MacMillan. Before leaving he wrote to President Roosevelt, intimating that he feared he was now too old for the hard work entailed by African hunting, which called forth the following comfortable advice (Sept. 11th, 1911).
"MacMillan lunches here Thursday. I am very glad you are going out with him to Africa. He is a trump! I am rather amused at your saying that you will not take any risks with lion now, and that you do not think your eyes are very good. I would not trust you!—seriously. I always wished to speak to you about the time that you followed the lioness which crouched in a bush, and then so nearly got Judd, who was riding after you. I think you were taking more of a chance on that occasion than you ought to have taken. It is not as if you had never killed a lion, and were willing to take any chance to get your first specimen. That I could quite understand. But you have killed a great many, and you ought not to do as poor George Grey did last year, and get caught through acting with needless recklessness.[62] I know you will not pay any heed to this advice, and, doubtless, you regard me as over-cautious with wild beasts, but, my dear fellow, at your age and with your past, and with your chance of doing good work in the present and future, I honestly do not think you ought to take these risks unless there is some point in doing so.
"You say you are too old for such a trip as that with MacMillan. Nonsense! It is precisely the kind of trip which you ought to take. Why, I, who am far less hardy and fit, would like nothing better than to be along with you and MacMillan on that trip. But you ought not to take such a trip as that you took on the Bahr-el-Ghazal. It would have meant nothing to you thirty years ago; it would mean nothing to Kermit now; but you are nearly sixty years old, and though I suppose there is no other man of sixty who is physically as fit as you, still it is idle to suppose that you can now do what you did when you were in the twenties. Of course I never was physically fit in the sense that you were, but still I was a man of fair hardihood, and able to hold my own reasonably well in my younger days; but when I went to Africa I realized perfectly well, although I was only fifty, that I was no longer fit to do the things I had done, and I deliberately set myself to the work of supplying the place of the prowess I had lost by making use of all that the years had brought in the way of gain to offset it. That is, I exercised what I think I can truthfully say was much intelligence and foresight in planning the trip. I made it for a great scientific National museum (which was itself backed by private capital), and made it at the time when the fact that I had been President gave me such prestige that the things were done for me which ought to have been done, but were not done, for you last spring. Then I took along Kermit, who, in the case of the bongo and koodoo and Northern Sable, was able to supply the qualities that I once had had and now lacked. In consequence, while everything was done to make my trip successful and comparatively easy, I am yet entitled to claim the modest credit that is implied in saying that I took advantage of the opportunities thus generously given me, and that I planned the trip carefully, and used the resources that my past had given me, in the way of notoriety or reputation, to add somewhat to my sum of achievement. On your trip you also had genuine bad luck, and the trip was not long enough, and the opportunities were not sufficiently numerous, to allow the good and bad luck to even up, as they will on such a long trip as mine. For instance, it was simply luck in my case that got me some of my game; but then it was simply luck, also, that I did not get some other things; and so it about evened up.
"My own physical limitations at the moment come chiefly from a perfectly commonplace but exasperating ailment—rheumatism. It not only cripples me a good deal, so that I am unable to climb on or off a horse with any speed, but it also prevents my keeping in condition. I cannot take any long walks, and therefore cannot keep in shape; but I am sufficiently fortunate to have a great many interests, and I am afraid, sufficiently lazy also thoroughly to enjoy being at home; and I shall be entirely happy if I never leave Sagamore again for any length of time. I have work which is congenial and honourable, although not of any special importance, and if I can keep it for the next seven or eight years, my youngest son will have graduated from college, so that all the children will be swimming for themselves, and then I am content not to try to earn any more money.
"Fond though I am of hunting and of the wilderness and of natural history, it has not been to me quite the passion that it has been to you, and though I would give a great deal to repeat in some way or some fashion, say in Central Asia or in Farther India, or in another part of Africa, the trip I made last year, I know perfectly well that I cannot do it; and I do not particularly care for smaller trips. If it were not for our infernal newspaper-men, I should go off for a week or two this fall bear-hunting in the Louisiana cane-brakes; but I know I should be pestered out of my life by the newspaper-men, who would really destroy all my pleasure in what I was doing. I have found that I have to get really far off in the wilderness in order to get rid of them, even now, when I am no longer a person of public prominence. I never cared for the fishing-rod or the shot-gun, and I cannot afford to keep hunters. But you, my dear fellow, are still hardy, and you can still do much. I have never understood why your 'African Nature Notes' did not have a greater financial success. It is a book which will last permanently, and will, I am sure, have an ever-increasing meed of appreciation. I re-read it all last winter, and Sheldon, as I think I told you, mentioned to me the other day that he regarded it as the best book of the kind that had ever been written.
"Kermit is, at the moment, in New Brunswick getting moose, caribou, and beaver for the National Museum. I think I told you that he got four sheep, three of them for the Museum, on his recent trip into the Mexican desert. He made it just as you have made so many of your trips, that is, he got two Mexicans and two small pack-mules, and travelled without a tent, and with one spare pair of shoes and one spare pair of socks as his sole luggage. Once they nearly got into an ugly scrape through failure to find a water-hole, for it is a dangerous country. Kermit found that he could outlast in walking and in enduring thirst, not only the Mexicans but the American prospectors whom he once or twice met."
The reference in his letter to the lioness "which crouched in a bush, and then so nearly got Judd," refers to an incident that happened in the Gwas N'yiro bush in Selous' former hunt with MacMillan (1909), and this little adventure was related to me by William Judd himself. It appears that Selous and Judd were out together one day and disturbed two lionesses, which disappeared in thick forest. Selous at once galloped after them and outdistanced Judd, who came somewhat slowly cantering behind, as he did not wish to interfere with Selous. All at once, from the side of the path, Judd saw a great yellow body come high in the air from the side of the game-trail. He had no time even to raise his rifle from the position across the saddle-pommel, but just cocked it up across and pulled the trigger. One of the lionesses, for such it was, had apparently crouched and allowed Selous to pass, and had then hurled herself upon the second hunter. By a fine piece of judgment, or a happy fluke, Judd's bullet went through the lioness's eye and landed her dead at his feet. His horse swerved. He fell off, and found himself standing beside the dead body of his adversary. Selous then returned, and was astonished to find Judd standing over the dead animal in the path he had so lately passed. I saw the skin of this lioness in Judd's house, near Nairobi, in 1913, and noticed the little bullet hole over the eye. If the missile had gone an inch higher it is doubtful if the hunter would have escaped with his life, or at any rate without a severe mauling.
After the trip with MacMillan, 1911-1912, Selous writes (June 23rd, 1913):—