Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter

by Theodore Roosevelt

THE NORTH ROOM AT SAGAMORE HILL

In all these books the one point to be insisted on is that a big game hunter has nothing in common with so many of the men who delight to call themselves sportsmen. Sir Samuel Baker has left a very amusing record of the horror he felt for the Ceylon sportsmen who, by the term “sport,” meant horse-racing instead of elephant shooting. Half a century ago, Gordon-Cumming wrote of “the life of the wild hunter, so far preferable to that of the mere sportsman”; and his justification for this somewhat sneering reference to the man who takes his sport in too artificial a manner, may be found in the pages of a then noted authority on such sports as horse-racing and fox-hunting; for in Apperly’s “Nimrod Abroad,” in the course of an article on the game of the American wilderness, there occurs this delicious sentence: “A damper, however, is thrown over all systems of deer-stalking in Canada by the necessity, which is said to be unavoidable, of bivouacking in the woods instead of in well-aired sheets!” Verily, there was a great gulf between the two men.

In the present century the world has known three great hunting-grounds: Africa, from the equator to the southernmost point; India, both farther and hither; and North America west of the Mississippi, from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle. The latter never approached either of the former in the wealth and variety of the species, or in the size and terror of the chief beasts of the chase; but it surpassed India in the countless numbers of the individual animals, and in the wild and unknown nature of the hunting-grounds, while the climate and surroundings made the conditions under which the hunter worked pleasanter and healthier than those in any other land.

South Africa was the true hunter’s paradise. If the happy hunting-grounds were to be found anywhere in this world, they lay between the Orange and the Zambesi, and extended northward here and there to the Nile countries and Somaliland. Nowhere else were there such multitudes of game, representing so many and such widely different kinds of animals, of such size, such beauty, such infinite variety. We should have to go back to the fauna of the Pleistocene to find its equal. Never before did men enjoy such hunting as fell to the lot of those roving adventurers, who first penetrated its hidden fastnesses, camped by its shrunken rivers, and galloped over its sun-scorched wastes; and, alas that it should be written, no man will ever see the like again. Fortunately, its memory will forever be kept alive in some of the books that the great hunters have written about it, such as Cornwallis Harris’ “Wild Sports of South Africa,” Gordon-Cumming’s “Hunter’s Life in South Africa,” Baldwin’s “African Hunting,” Drummond’s “Large Game and Natural History of South Africa,” and, best of all, Selous’ two books, “A Hunter’s Wanderings in South Africa” and “Travel and Adventure in Southeast Africa.” Selous was the last of the great hunters of South Africa, and no other has left books of such value as his. In central Africa the game has lasted to our own time; the hunting described by Alfred Neumann and Vaughn Kirby in the closing years of the nineteenth century was almost as good as any enjoyed by their brothers who fifty years before steered their ox-drawn wagons across the “high veldt” of the south land.

Moreover, the pencil has done its part as well as the pen. Harris, who was the pioneer of all the hunters, published an admirable illustrated folio entitled “The Game and Wild Animals of South Africa.” It is perhaps of more value than any other single work of the kind. J. G. Millais, in “A Breath from the Veldt,” has rendered a unique service, not only by his charming descriptions, but by his really extraordinary sketches of the South African antelopes, both at rest, and in every imaginable form of motion. Nearly at the other end of the continent there is an admirable book on lion-hunting in Somaliland, by Captain C. J. Melliss. Much information about big game can be taken from the books of various missionaries and explorers; Livingstone and Du Chaillu doing for Africa in this respect what Catlin did for North America.

As we have said before, one great merit of these books is that they are interesting. Quite a number of men who are good sportsmen, as well as men of means, have written books about their experiences in Africa; but the trouble with too many of these short and simple annals of the rich is, that they are very dull. They are not literature, any more than treatises on farriery and cooking are literature. To read a mere itinerary is like reading a guide-book. No great enthusiasm in the reader can be roused by such a statement as “this day walked twenty-three miles, shot one giraffe and two zebras; porter deserted with the load containing the spare boots”; and the most exciting events, if chronicled simply as “shot three rhinos and two buffalo; the first rhino and both buffalo charged,” become about as thrilling as a paragraph in Baedeker. There is no need of additional literature of the guide-book and cookery-book kind. “Fine writing” is, of course, abhorrent in a way that is not possible for mere baldness of statement, and would-be “funny” writing is even worse, as it almost invariably denotes an underbred quality of mind; but there is need of a certain amount of detail, and of vivid and graphic, though simple, description. In other words, the writer on big game should avoid equally Carlyle’s theory and Carlyle’s practice in the matter of verbosity. Really good game books are sure to contain descriptions which linger in the mind just like one’s pet passages in any other good book. One example is Selous’ account of his night watch close to the wagon, when in the pitchy darkness he killed three of the five lions which had attacked his oxen; or his extraordinary experience while hunting elephants on a stallion which turned sulky, and declined to gallop out of danger. The same is true of Drummond’s descriptions of the camps of native hunting parties, of tracking wounded buffalo through the reeds, and of waiting for rhinos by a desert pool under the brilliancy of the South African moon; descriptions, by the way, which show that the power of writing interestingly is not dependent upon even approximate correctness in style, for some of Mr. Drummond’s sentences, in point of length and involution, would compare not unfavorably with those of a Populist Senator discussing bimetallism. Drummond is not as trustworthy an observer as Selous.

The experiences of a hunter in Africa, with its teeming wealth of strange and uncouth beasts, must have been, and in places must still be, about what one’s experience would be if one could suddenly go back a few hundred thousand years for a hunting trip in the Pliocene or Pleistocene. In Mr. Astor Chanler’s book, “Through Jungle and Desert,” the record of his trip through the melancholy reed beds of the Guaso Nyiro, and of his return journey, carrying his wounded companion, through regions where the caravan was perpetually charged by rhinoceros, reads like a bit out of the unreckoned ages of the past, before the huge and fierce monsters of old had vanished from the earth, or acknowledged man as their master. An excellent book of mixed hunting and scientific exploration is Mr. Donaldson Smith’s “Through Unknown African Countries.” If anything, the hunting part is unduly sacrificed to some of the minor scientific work. Full knowledge of a new breed of rhinoceros, or a full description of the life history and chase of almost any kind of big game, is worth more than any quantity of matter about new spiders and scorpions. Small birds and insects remain in the land, and can always be described by the shoal of scientific investigators who follow the first adventurous explorers; but it is only the pioneer hunter who can tell us all about the far more interesting and important beasts of the chase, the different kinds of big game, and especially dangerous big game; and it is a mistake in any way to subordinate the greater work to the lesser.

Books on big game hunting in India are as plentiful, and as good, as those about Africa. Forsyth’s “Highlands of Central India,” Sanderson’s “Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India,” Shakespeare’s “Wild Sports of India,” and Kinloch’s “Large Game Shooting,” are perhaps the best; but there are many other writers, like Markham, Baldwin, Rice, Macintyre, and Stone, who are also very good. Indeed, to give even a mere list of the titles of the good books on Indian shooting would read too much like the Homeric catalogue of ships, or the biblical generations of the Jewish patriarchs. The four books singled out for special reference are interesting reading for anyone; particularly the accounts of the deaths of man-eating tigers at the hands of Forsyth, Shakespeare, and Sanderson, and some of Kinloch’s Himalayan stalks. It is indeed royal sport which the hunter has among the stupendous mountain masses of the Himalayas, and in the rank jungles and steamy tropical forests of India.

Hunting should go hand in hand with the love of natural history, as well as with descriptive and narrative power. Hornaday’s “Two Years in the Jungle” is especially interesting to the naturalist; but he adds not a little to our knowledge of big game. It is earnestly to be wished that some hunter will do for the gorilla what Hornaday has done for the great East Indian ape, the mias or orang.

There are many good books on American big game, but, rather curiously, they are for the most part modern. Until within the present generation Americans only hunted big game if they were frontier settlers, professional trappers, Southern planters, army officers, or explorers. The people of the cities of the old States were bred in the pleasing faith that anything unconcerned with business was both a waste of time and presumably immoral. Those who travelled went to Europe instead of to the Rocky Mountains.