In Africa: Hunting Adventures In The Big Game Country - free ebook by John T. (John Tinney) McCutcheon

IN AFRICA

One Morning's Bag ...

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JOHN T. McCUTCHEON

This collection of African stories has no pretentious purpose. It is merely the record of a most delightful hunting trip into those fascinating regions along the Equator, where one may still have "thrilling adventures" and live in a story-book atmosphere, where the "roar of the lion" and the "crack of the rifle" are part of the every-day life, and where in a few months one may store up enough material to keep the memory pleasantly occupied all the rest of a lifetime. The stories are descriptive

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CHAPTER I

Ever since I can remember, almost, I have cherished a modest ambition to hunt lions and elephants. At an early age, or, to be more exact, at about that age which finds most boys wondering whether they would rather be Indian fighters or sailors, I ran across a copy of Stanley's Through the Dark Continent . It was full of fascinating adventures. I thrilled at the accounts which spoke in terms of easy familiarity of "express" rifles and "elephant" guns, and in my vivid but misguided imagination, I

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CHAPTER II

Lion hunting had not been fraught with any great hardships or dangers up to this time. The Mediterranean was as smooth as a mill-pond, the Suez Canal was free from any tempestuous rolling, and the Red Sea was placid and hot. After some days we were in the Indian Ocean, plowing lazily along and counting the hours until we reached Mombasa. Perhaps after that the life of a lion hunter would be less tranquil and calm. The Adolph Woermann was a six-thousand-three-hundred-ton ship, three years old, an

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CHAPTER III

In this voyage of the Woermann there were about twenty Englishmen and thirty Germans in the first class, not including women, and children. There was practically no communication between the two nationalities, which seemed deeply significant in these days when there is so much talk of war between England and Germany. Each went his way without so much as a "good morning" or a guten abend . And it was not a case of unfamiliarity with the languages, either, that caused this mutual restraint, for mo

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CHAPTER IV

Before Colonel Roosevelt drew the eyes of the world on British East Africa Nairobi was practically unheard of. The British colonial office knew where it was and a fair number of English sportsmen had visited it in the last six or eight years. Perhaps twenty-five or thirty Americans had been in Nairobi on their way to the rich game fields that lie in all directions from the town, but beyond these few outsiders the place was unknown. Now it is decidedly on the map, thanks to our gallant and pictur

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CHAPTER V

When I first expressed my intention of going to East Africa to shoot big game some of my friends remarked, in surprise: "Why, I didn't know that you were so bloodthirsty!" They seemed to think that the primary object of such an expedition was to slay animals, none of which had done anything to me, and that to wish to embark in any such project was an evidence of bloodthirstiness. I tried to explain that I had no particular grudge against any of the African fauna, and that the thing I chiefly des

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CHAPTER VI

Like every one who goes to Africa with a gun and a return ticket, I had two absorbing ambitions. One was to kill a lion and the other to live to tell about it. In my estimation all the other animals compared to a lion as latitude eighty-seven and a half compares to the north pole. I wanted to climb out of the Tartarin of Tarascon class of near lion hunters into the ranks of those who are entitled to remark, "Once, when I was in Africa shooting lions," etc. A dead lion is bogey in the big game sp

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CHAPTER VII

Down on the Tana River the rhinos are more common than in any other known section of Africa. In two weeks we saw over one hundred—perhaps two hundred—of them—so many, in fact, that one of the chief diversions of the day was to count rhinos. One day we counted twenty-six, another day nineteen, and by the time we left the district rhinos had become such fixtures in the landscape as to cause only casual comment. Perhaps there were some repeaters, ones that were counted twice, but even allowing for

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CHAPTER VIII

After one has been in British East Africa two months he begins to readjust his preconceived ideas to fit real conditions. He discovers that nothing is really as bad as he feared it would be, and that distance, as usual, has magnified the terrors of a far-away land. In spite of the fact that he is in the heart of a primitive country, surrounded by native tribes that still are mystified by a glass mirror, and perhaps many days' march from the nearest white person, he still may feel that he is in t

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CHAPTER IX

On the afternoon of November fourteenth, a little cavalcade of horsemen might have been seen riding slowly away from our camp on the Nzoia River. One of them, evidently the leader, was a well-built man of about fifty-one years, tanned by many months of African hunting and wearing a pair of large spectacles. His teeth flashed in the warm sunlight. A rough hunting shirt encased his well-knit body and a pair of rougher trousers, reinforced with leather knee caps and jointly sustained by suspenders

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CHAPTER X

The peril and excitement of elephant hunting can not be realized by any one who has known only the big, placid elephants of the circus, or fed peanuts to a gentle-eyed pachyderm in the park. To the person thus circumscribed in his outlook, the idea of killing an elephant and calling it sport is little short of criminal. It would seem like going out in the barnyard and slaying a friendly old family horse. That was my point of view before I went to Africa, but later experiences caused the point of

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CHAPTER XI

The Mount Elgon elephants have a very bad reputation. The district is remote from government protection and for years the herds have been the prey of Swahili and Arab ivory hunters, as well as poachers of all sorts who have come over the Uganda border or down from the savage Turkana and Suk countries on the north. As a natural consequence of this unrestricted poaching the herds have been hunted and harassed so much that most of the large bull elephants with big ivory have been killed, leaving fo

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CHAPTER XII

On the night of December the twenty-third I sat out in a boma watching for lions. None came and at the first crack of dawn my two gunbearers and I crawled out of the tangled mass of thorn branches, and prepared to return to camp two miles away. We were expecting my sais to arrive with my horse soon after daybreak, and while waiting for him to come, and for my gunbearers to get the blankets tied up, I went across to a neighboring swamp in the hope of getting a bushbuck. I was about three hundred

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CHAPTER XIII

One of the most exciting phases of African hunting is the beating of swamps for lion. A long skirmish line of native porters is sent in at one end of the swamp and, like a gigantic comb, sweeps every live thing ahead of it as it advances through the reeds. All kinds of swamp life are stirred into action, and a fairly large swamp will yield forth the contents of a pretty respectable menagerie. Sometimes a hyena or two will be flushed and once in a while a lion will be driven out. It is the consta

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CHAPTER XIV

In the course of the average shooting experience in British East Africa the sportsman is likely to see between twenty and thirty different species of animals. From the windows of the car as he journeys from Mombasa to Nairobi, three hundred and twenty-seven miles, he may definitely count upon seeing at least seven of these species: Wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant's gazelle, Thompson's gazelle, zebra, impalla, and giraffe, with the likelihood of seeing in addition some wart-hogs and a distant rhino

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CHAPTER XV

While reading an account of the trophies secured by Colonel Roosevelt on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, I was mystified by seeing the name of an animal I had never heard tell of—a singing topi. For a time I puzzled over this strange creature and finally evolved a satisfactory explanation of how the animal made its appearance in the despatches. Briefly, "there haint no sich animal," as the old farmer said when he saw his first dromedary in a circus; it was merely a mistake, due to the telegraphic abbre

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CHAPTER XVI

Mount Elgon is one of the four great mountains of Africa. You can find it on the map of the dark continent, standing all alone, just a little bit north of Victoria Nyanza, and surrounded by names that one has never heard of before. The mountain is distinctly out of the picture-post-card belt—in fact, the only belt that one will find around Elgon is the timber belt that encircles the mountain, and perhaps also a few that the local residents wear on Sundays and national holidays. The function of t

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CHAPTER XVII

For days we had heard of wonderful places higher up in the mountain. The information had been so vague and uncertain we hardly knew whether to credit the reports or simply put them down as native folk lore or superstition. One night we interviewed Askar, one of the Somali gunbearers. He said he had been up the mountain a year or two before with a Frenchman who wanted to see the mysterious natural wonders of Mount Elgon. The Frenchman had to threaten to kill his native guides before they would co

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CHAPTER XVIII

Nairobi is a thriving, bustling city, with motor cars, electric lights, clubs, race meets, balls, banquets, and all the frills that constitute an up-to-date community. Carriages and dog-carts and motorcycles rush about, and lords and princes and earls sit upon the veranda of the leading hotel in hunting costumes. Lying out from Nairobi are big grazing farms, many of them fenced in with barbed wire; and the peaceful rows of telegraph poles make exclamation points of civilization across the landsc

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CHAPTER XIX

If some one were to start a correspondence course in lion hunting he would give diagrams and instructions showing how to kill a lion in about six different styles—namely: This list does not include the Ananias method, formerly popular. The tree and boma methods are much esteemed by those sportsmen who wish to reduce personal danger to the least common denominator—the sportsmen who think discretion is the better part of valor and a hunter in a tree is worth two in the bush. The sportsman who conf

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CHAPTER XX

Our cook was a dark-complexioned man between whom and the ace of spades there was considerable rivalry. He was of that deadly night shade. He was the darkest spot on the Dark Continent. After dark he blended in with the night so that you couldn't tell which was cook and which was night. His name was Abdullah, his nature was mild and gentle, and his skill in his own particular sphere of action was worthy of honorable mention by all refined eaters. He was about fifty or sixty years of age, five fe

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CHAPTER XXI

At last the day came for us to say good-by to the happy hunting grounds and return to the perils and dangers of civilization. Occasional newspapers had filtered into the wild places and in the peaceful security of our tents we had read of frightful mining disasters in America, of unparalleled floods in France, of the clash and jangle of rival polar explorers, of disasters at sea, of rioting and lynching in Illinois. Automobile accidents were chronicled with staggering frequency, and there were m

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CHAPTER XXII

When one returns to America after some time in the African game country, he is assailed by many questions from others who wish, intend, or hope to make a similar trip. Almost without variation the questioner will ask about the cost, about the danger from fever and sickness, about snakes and insects, about the tempers of the tribes one encounters, and then, if he be a specialist, he will ask about the rifles and the camp equipment. As these familiar and oft repeated inquiries have been made by fr

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