Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Africa Passing Relentlessly Beneath the Sun
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To Begin ...
The first story I ever published — when I was young and showed promise — with a hero with an unpronounceable name, is a text rife with overwrought, often personally distressing prose, the jejune insights of an insufferably callow youth with a magpie mind, besotted with Africa after one safari, and owing more than minor debts and revealing slavish devotion to better writers (a trait perhaps not restricted to this story). Whenever I am tempted to revise it, though, I remember that it is a snapshot, a schizzo, of when, returning from a week of hunting mule deer in Colorado, I was told I had a piece, after so many rejections, accepted for publication; and that night I lay in bed, staring at the tenebrous ceiling lit by reflected moonlight, dreaming that I might now be a writer, and dreaming all the other stories there would be to write. I could hardly know then that so many of them would be about something as arcane as hunting in Africa. If perhaps my first story had been about collecting Eurasian ghost orchids, you might now be reading an entirely other book.
PROINSEAS PADRAIG O'CADLA, long used to having things his way, was surrounded by such an uncontrollable dynamism as to make him long for the abiding acedia of his adopted and distant Dublin. A hard man to please, he condescendingly found the fatalism of the Irish Republic to be the perfect counterpoint to his own adrenal disposition. Thus, armed with his bespoke English firearms and enough preconceptions to qualify as excess baggage, he had come here to find something no less than an off-the-rack brand of satori. Instead, under this high, East African, bright morning sky in sight of white-capped Kilimanjaro, he had not found a single placid person he could feel easily superior toward. It was not, to be sure, what he had bargained for.
Mketi and Mmaku, for example, who were hunkered under the wait-a-bit bush, were laughing excitedly at the bwana as he missed too many convenient wingshots to be conscionable. They had, of course, seen him consecrating the previous day's windfall kill with glass after glass of French brandy and phonetic interpretations of Turkana war chants long into the night. Had they asked, and had he understood, he would have explained carefully the near impossibility of hitting sandgrouse while a hangover (the precise size, shape, and texture of a tennis ball) burrowed into your skull.
"Ndio, ndio," they told him, pointing to the flock of sandgrouse as the birds drew in their wings and began to fall precipitously toward the steel-colored river like a shower of arrowheads.
"Very well, gentlemen," he expressed in his high-priced English. "I have borne your mockery sufficiently long." Bringing the double purposefully to his shoulder, he took the first bird with the right-hand barrel and swung fluidly back to take the second with the left. Pleased no end with himself, he watched them make their feathered falls to the ground, like leaves drifting.
Mmaku was up at once and running with a natural grace any number of years of professional dance training could not impart. He collected the two birds and brought them to O'Cadla who handled them gently and approvingly, savoring their fading warmth. Here then, for a life deficient in very real moments, was one. And if that was a fiction, it did sustain him.
He noticed that the African was also smiling, and he wondered if it was for the same reason. For O'Cadla, the sudden deaths of animals were (he told himself) tragedies of a perfection no dramatist ever approximated; and to be the author of such a production invariably brought about in him emotions whose only outlet was a form of rictus. To wit: He just couldn't keep from grinning.
"We will go," he said, motioning with his thumb to the hunting car. Mmaku waved to Mketi who brought the other birds and shell boxes. The Land Cruiser for O'Cadla, as he climbed in, had that unmistakable odor of a car long used to the cartage of dead game animals: canvas and amino acids.
The camp by the river (dismissed as being too small for crocodiles until an old bull almost made off with the teenaged cookboy as he drew water) was nearly down by the time they returned. O'Cadla found Fisher on the big shortwave radio to Nairobi, making arrangements for the next hunting block. O'Cadla nodded to him as he passed, another destination in mind.
A hundred yards beyond the parked lorry the vultures were congregating like conventioneers, while the marabou maintained a Hudibrastic disdain. As O'Cadla drew up on them they began to back away suspiciously and finally were forced to lift ponderously off the ground to roost with hunched shoulders in the surrounding acacias. In their wake they left a dusty, gray, skinned, boned carcass that at first might have been taken for that of a large and muscular headless man. Who had a tail.
O'Cadla had been unprepared for it. They had found the spoor by chance and had trailed it a very short distance to a small grove of trees. He was waiting for them there, his head massive and sleepy and his coat tinted pale green by the shade. He stood, and O'Cadla took him down with a single 375 bullet, only to have him stand again. He was looking O'Cadla in the eye as he took the second bullet through his heart. It was not, somehow, how O'Cadla would have wanted or imagined it, and it only emphasized his growing sense of circumstances going beyond his usual ability to control them. As for the lion (even though, more than any single thing on the planet, he had succeeded in humbling this man, his killer), he had deserved better than he got.
O'Cadla turned and walked back to the diminishing camp, his self-image and worldview changing in ways unknown to him. The vultures returned warily to lavish their attentions once again upon the lion.
They drove north that day through the dodgy splendor of Nairobi and spent the night at Lake Naivasha. The next day they crossed the Rift Valley. The road took them through the Mara Game Reserve, the plains peppered with wildebeest. A cloudburst hit as they climbed the Soit Olol Escarpment into Block 60. On top the brush was thick, and Fisher said it would be right good and sporty for buffalo. They rounded a bend and had the bonus of finding a lone elephant bull lumbering monumentally across the road. The fissured soles of his feet turned back as he lifted them, his tusks thick and curved inward at the tips, his hide oily black from the rain. He took no notice of them whatsoever.
"Pity, that," Fisher said. "I had hoped the season would be reopened by your arrival.
"There is nothing really quite like walking up to one of those old brutes with malice aforethought," he continued, coming down himself with an attack of excitement. "As you get closer, he gets bigger and your gun gets smaller. Finally, you are absolutely certain that you are facing a 40-foot, ironclad monster with only a 22 short in your hands. It is one sensation the theater does not offer. And I should imagine that it is a sensation which has changed only slightly from when the first bloody hunter went up against his first bloody mammoth. Once you've done it, nothing is quite the same again either — except doing it again. Odd thing, that.
"Christ! but I sometimes do think you are the finest creatures on the planet," he shouted out the window, snapping off the wheezing windshield wipers for punctuation, the rain having ceased.
During all of this, O'Cadla unaccountably experienced a tingling in the back of his neck that was something very new to him. He would have been at a loss to explain.
The sunlight was falling between the clouds as they pulled up in front of the whitewashed game department office. The young scout who handled the registration book was enthusiastically official. He, personally, had seen a 50-inch buffalo just yesterday and would be most happy to take them directly to it. Fisher thanked him and promised without fail to look him up at the very first opportunity.
As they stepped out onto the covered porch, an old man stood there. His white hair and beard and black skin gave him the disembodied appearance of a photographic negative. He wore an army sweater and tattered shorts and kept his feet in tire-tread sandals. He was leaning motionlessly against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching the rainwater as it steamed off the grass. Fisher halted and with genuine feeling greeted him as "Mzee." The old man turned his head slowly and shook the white's hand politely; but it was obviously a thing of no importance to him, as they had been of no importance to the elephant. Fisher spoke to him and the old man nodded vaguely, wanting to get back to his watching. As they left, O'Cadla shook his hand also (trying to affect the old man's nonchalance) and was shocked by the weight of the serenity he felt. Its atomic number would have been something in excess of gold's.
"That chap," said Fisher as they got back into the car, "was one of the first game scouts out here. When they found he could shoot and knew a bit about elephant, they put him on control work. For 40 years he lived with the tembos, slept with them, moved when they moved, knew them by name. And when they would wander into some poor bugger's shamba and raise a ruckus, or some old boy would get stroppy and start chasing people about the bush, he would kill them. He has killed more elephant than any man living. He loved them and he killed them well. Paradoxical, that. But, to be able to kill them as they deserve, you must love them. He hasn't held a gun for 10 years. He's become very much like an old bull himself, standing there in the shade all day, staring off at something none of us can see."
O'Cadla, whose eyes had not left the old African who saw only sunlight and wet grass and no necessity of a smile, knew then that he was undone. He would be doomed to come again to this place that offered such a peace at a cost so far beyond the present means of his heart. He would have to make himself worthy. The land, that he had had every confidence of escaping from uncharmed, had charmed him — in a way that was by no means benign. There remained only one last question.
"But he must do something else?"
"I doubt," Fisher said, clashing the gears, "that there is anything else nearly so pressing."
CHAPTER 2
Running Scared
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The 1970s ...
I WAS AFRAID it would be gone if I waited. I was certain that if I did not go at once, it would in some not-so-very-mysterious fashion disappear, or be confiscated. Obsessed, I have never been so absolutely certain of anything else.
So at 22, with no evident prospects and against the better judgment of just about everyone, I invested a minor inheritance in a post office box I had located in a Nairobi phone book and asked to be shown the sights.
The reply arrived in an envelope with lions on it. They would be looking forward to seeing me.
For the next year I trained. I went into the desert and shot jackrabbits, rolling tires, and rocks. I ran and sweated and did not consume alcoholic beverages (no small feat for a twentysomething). Damn, but I was proud of myself. And while I plotted, they closed, then opened, then closed elephant hunting on me. But I decided not to be dissuaded by even that and pressed on. Finally, one morning I stepped off a plane under an overcast, high-altitude equatorial sky and knew I was a long way from home.
The airport worker on the tarmac who held the stairs wore a black turtleneck fisherman's sweater and had a face carved from ebony wood — so startling, and yes, exotic, were his features — and the uniformed customs agent had tribal scars and stretched earlobes. There was talk of leopards killing family pets in the suburbs. And what I was experiencing was not the allure of faraway places with strange-sounding names. It was dread.
Later that day I sat in the lounge of the New Stanley Hotel with John and his friend Liam while they toasted a fellow professional. Who had recently been eaten by a lion (they said). In his camp bed while he slept (they also said). And though he had been a fine hunter, it was a most comical way to go, didn't I agree? It was a prank at the expense of a greenhorn — me — but I agreed.
The first dawn there was the trumpeting of elephant as they tore down trees to feed. It chilled me — knowing there was something even bigger out there when we were already tracking lion or buffalo. And God, how it terrified me to hunt buffalo.
We followed them into brush so thick that the longest shot possible would be at 20 feet. And it could not be a miss. Jumping a large breeding herd sent them off at a tear, trampling every obstacle ahead of them with a sound described in the words of a Yoruba hunter poem as thunder without rain. Other times, we could sense in the silence a small herd of bulls creeping away on the tips of their hooves, looking back for any sign of us — hoping, perhaps, to come up behind and have a spot of fun. And if buffalo weren't dread enough in those dark thickets, then it was the bushbuck barking suddenly and invisibly beside me, or the ominous thumping and John saying to be careful, bit of a rhino just over there — somewhere — or forest hogs big as heifers or the platter-sized hoofprints of secret elephant, swelling with water.
I could not help but be impressed, and at last I understood from what shadows might have arisen a harrowing mythology of dragons and demons and beasts of all manner of crimson-stained tooth and claw. But what really scared the bejesus out of me was that after two weeks of crawling on my hands and knees through that kind of stuff, I was acquiring a taste for it. Was this, then, why I had come so far and spent so much money, to end up viewing life — my life — as decidedly cheap? I had no easy answer.
In camp at night was a hot shower and a clean change of clothes. Then we could fix a drink and sit down with the plate of "toasties" and talk, though never, it seems, of what happened that day if it had gotten notably horripilant. And there was the fire. I don't think I was ever so infatuated with fires before. One night, after a week of hunting buffalo without firing a shot, I was wearing my woven-paper Hong Kong 98¢ beach sandals to which John had taken an immediate and obviously unwarranted dislike — a prejudiced offense to his aesthetics he never bothered concealing from me. Then, somehow, one of them was missing. It took me a moment to locate it.
"John," I inquired politely, "correct me if I am mistaken, but by any chance is that my flip-flop roasting on an open fire?" John admitted with an enchanting smile that it did, indeed, seem to be.
"And did you cast it there?"
That would be a fair estimate, he reckoned. Leaving me with no alternative, of course, but to feed in the other one. Rising with what dignity I could muster, I proceeded to walk unshod to my tent, without wondering too much where cobras went at night.
Since I couldn't hunt elephant, I settled for the photographing of a herd of cows and calves at an exceedingly close range. Now an elephant cow with a calf is probably the most intractable animal on earth, and I bore this in mind as we stalked to within a few yards of them, a tricky wind coming at us for the moment. John presented a brief tutorial on where to shoot to kill an elephant, and after I exposed several frames we backed out furtively.
When I was a score of yards from the herd I stood and began to walk upright to the car. Then John said five of the most riveting words I believe I've ever heard.
"Oh oh," he said. "You should run."
No need to ask why. I ran. But as I did, I looked back.
She was a large cow; and as she loomed above John, he took his William G. Evans 500 Nitro Express and two 578-grain solids from his gunbearer. She was coming on implacably, slate against the sun, her ears back and her head down. And John stood there, steadfast, fully prepared to kill her if she crossed a deadline he visualized ahead of him. And she as prepared to kill him if she made it across that line. Ah, but he looked brave. And she magnificent.
And as I ran, looking back, I wanted to yell at her to stop, lose our scent, change her mind. I wanted to yell, "Go back! Don't die! Because when I finish this run, I am going to run back here. And I want to find you." And that is Africa: Just when I thought I was out ...
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Augusts in Africa"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Thomas McIntyre.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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