Part 4

“I shall take the Springfield and the Fox on my trip, but I shall not expect to do any game-shooting. I think it would need the Bwana Merodadi, [My name among the natives in Africa] and not his stout and rheumatic elderly parent to do hunting in the Brazilian forest. I shall have a couple of naturalists with me of the Heller stamp, and I shall hope to get a fair collection for the New York Museum--Fairfield Osborn’s museum.”

It was at Rio that father first heard of the River of Doubt. Colonel Rondon in an exploring expedition had crossed a large river and no one knew where it went to. Father felt that to build dugouts and descend the river offered a chance to accomplish some genuine and interesting exploration. It was more of a trip than he had planned for, but the Brazilian Government arranged for Colonel Rondon to make up an accompanying expedition.

When father went off into the wilds he was apt to be worried until he had done something which would in his mind justify the expedition and relieve it from the danger of being a fiasco. In Africa he wished to get at least one specimen each of the four great prizes--the lion, the elephant, the buffalo, and the rhinoceros. It was the lion for which he was most keen--and which he also felt was the most problematical. Luck was with us, and we had not been hunting many days before father’s ambition was fulfilled. It was something that he had long desired--indeed it is the pinnacle of most hunters’ ambitions--so it was a happy cavalcade that rode back to camp in the wake of the natives that were carrying the lioness slung on a long pole. The blacks were chanting a native song of triumph, and father was singing “Whack-fa-lal for Lannigan’s Ball,” as a sort of “chant pagan.”

Father was more fluent than exact in expressing himself in foreign languages. As he himself said of his French, he spoke it “as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, having neither gender nor tense.” He would, however, always manage to make himself understood, and never seemed to experience any difficulty in understanding his interlocutor. In Africa he had a most complicated combination of sign-language and coined words, and though I could rarely make out what he and his gun-bearer were talking about, they never appeared to have any difficulty in understanding each other. Father could read Spanish, and he had not been in Brazil long before he could make out the trend of any conversation in Portuguese. With the Brazilians he always spoke French, or, on rare occasions, German.

He was most conscientious about his writing. Almost every day when he came in from hunting he would settle down to work on the articles that were from time to time sent back to Scribner’s. This daily task was far more onerous than any one who has not tried it can imagine. When you come in from a long day’s tramping, you feel most uninclined to concentrate on writing a careful and interesting account of the day’s activities. Father was invariably good-humored about it, saying that he was paying for his fun. In Brazil when the mosquitoes and sand-flies were intolerable, he used to be forced to write swathed in a mosquito veil and with long gauntlets to protect hands and wrists.

During the descent of the River of Doubt in Brazil there were many black moments. It was impossible to hazard a guess within a month or more as to when we would get through to the Amazon. We had dugout canoes, and when we came to serious rapids or waterfalls we were forced to cut a trail around to the quiet water below. Then we must make a corduroy road with the trunks of trees over which to haul the dugouts. All this took a long time, and in some places where the river ran through gorges it was almost impossible. We lost in all six of the ten canoes with which we started, and of course much of our food-supply and general equipment. It was necessary to delay and build two more canoes--a doubly laborious task because of the axes and adzes which had gone down in the shipwrecks. The Brazil nuts upon which we had been counting to help out our food-supply had had an off year. If this had not been so we would have fared by no means badly, for these nuts may be ground into flour or roasted or prepared in a number of different ways. Another source upon which we counted failed us when we found that there were scarcely any fish in the river. For some inexplicable reason many of the tributaries of the Amazon teem with fish, while others flowing through similar country and under parallel conditions contain practically none. We went first onto half rations, and then were forced to still further reduce the issue. We had only the clothes in which we stood and were wet all day and slept wet throughout the night. There would be a heavy downpour, then out would come the sun and we would be steamed dry, only to be drenched once more a half-hour later.

Working waist-deep in the water in an attempt to dislodge a canoe that had been thrown upon some rocks out in the stream, father slipped, and, of course, it was his weak leg that suffered. Then he came down with fever, and in his weakened condition was attacked with a veritable plague of deep abscesses. It can be readily understood that the entourage and environment were about as unsuitable for a sick man as any that could be imagined. Nothing but father’s indomitable spirit brought him through. He was not to be downed by anything, although he knew well that the chances were against his coming out. He made up his mind that as long as he could, he would go along, but that once he could no longer travel, and held up the expedition, he would arrange for us to go on without him. Of course he did not at the time tell us this, but he reasoned that with our very limited supply of provisions, and the impossibility of living on the country, if the expedition halted it would not only be of no avail as far as he was concerned, but the chances would be strongly in favor of no one coming through. With it all he was invariably cheerful, and in the blackest times ever ready with a joke. Sick as he was, he gave no one any trouble. He would walk slowly over the portages, resting every little while, and when the fever was not too severe we would, when we reached the farther end with the canoes, find him sitting propped against a tree reading a volume of Gibbon, or perhaps the Oxford book of verse.

There was one particularly black night; one of our best men had been shot and killed by a useless devil who escaped into the jungle, where he was undoubtedly killed by the Indians. We had been working through a series of rapids that seemed interminable. There would be a long carry, a mile or so clear going, and then more rapids. The fever was high and father was out of his head. Doctor Cajazeira, who was one of the three Brazilians with us, divided with me the watch during the night. The scene is vivid before me. The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth under foot; for a few moments the stars would be shining, and then the sky would cloud over and the rain would fall in torrents, shutting out sky and trees and river. Father first began with poetry; over and over again he repeated “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,” then he started talking at random, but gradually he centred down to the question of supplies, which was, of course, occupying every one’s mind. Part of the time he knew that I was there, and he would then ask me if I thought Cherrie had had enough to eat to keep going. Then he would forget my presence and keep saying to himself: “I can’t work now, so I don’t need much food, but he and Cherrie have worked all day with the canoes, they must have part of mine.” Then he would again realize my presence and question me as to just how much Cherrie had had. How good faithful Cajazeira waked I do not know, but when his watch was due I felt him tap me on the shoulder, and crawled into my soggy hammock to sleep the sleep of the dead.

Father’s courage was an inspiration never to be forgotten by any of us; without a murmur he would lie while Cajazeira lanced and drained the abscesses. When we got down beyond the rapids the river widened so that instead of seeing the sun through the canyon of the trees for but a few hours each day, it hung above us all the day like a molten ball and broiled us as if the river were a grid on which we were made fast. To a sick man it must have been intolerable.

It is when one is sick that one really longs for home. Lying in a hammock all unwashed and unshaven, suffocating beneath a mosquito-net, or tortured by mosquitoes and sand-flies when one raises the net to let in a breath of air--it is then that one dreams of clean pajamas and cool sheets and iced water. I have often heard father say when he was having a bout of fever at home, that it was almost a pleasure to be ill, particularly when you thought of all the past discomforts of fever in the wilds.

Father’s disappointment at not being able to take a physical part in the war--as he has said, “to pay with his body for his soul’s desire”--was bitter. Strongly as he felt about going, I doubt if his disappointment was much more keen than that of the British and French statesmen and generals, who so readily realized what his presence would mean to the Allied cause, and more than once requested in Washington that he be sent. Marshal Joffre made such a request in person, meeting with the usual evasive reply. Father took his disappointment as he had taken many another in his life, without letting it harm his usefulness, or discourage his aggressive energy. “In the fell clutch of circumstance he did not wince or cry aloud.” Indeed, the whole of Henley’s poem might well apply to father if it were possible to eliminate from it the unfortunate marring undercurrent of braggadocio with which father’s attitude was never for an instant tinged. With the indomitable courage that knew no deterrent he continued to fight his battle on this side to make America’s entry no empty action, as it threatened to be. He wrote me that he had hoped that I would be with him in this greatest adventure of all, but that since it was not to be, he could only be thankful that his four boys were permitted to do their part in the actual fighting.

When in a little town in Germany my brother and I got news of my father’s death, there kept running through my head with monotonous insistency Kipling’s lines:

“He scarce had need to doff his pride, Or slough the dress of earth, E’en as he trod that day to God So walked he from his birth, In simpleness and gentleness and honor and clean mirth.”

That was my father, to whose comradeship and guidance so many of us look forward in the Happy Hunting-Grounds.

In Quest of Sable Antelope

IN QUEST OF SABLE ANTELOPE

It was a bright, sunny day toward the end of October, and I was walking along the streets of the old Portuguese town of Mombasa on the east coast of Equatorial Africa. Behind me, in ragged formation, marched some twenty-five blacks, all but four of them with loads on their heads; the four were my personal “boys,” two gun-bearers, a cook, and a tent-boy. They were scattered among the crowd, hurrying up those that tried to lag behind for a last farewell to the wives and sweethearts who were following along on either side, clad in the dark-blue or more gaudily colored sheets that served them for clothes.

At length our heterogeneous assembly reached the white sands of the harbor, and amid much confusion we stowed away into a couple of long, broad dugouts and were ferried out to a dhow that lay moored not far from the shore. We set sail amid the shrill cries of the women and a crowd of small children who, on our approach, had scurried out of the water like so many black monitor lizards.

We steered out across the bay toward a headland some two miles distant. There was just enough breeze to ruffle the water, but the dhow sped along at a rate that belied appearances. Sprawling among their loads the men lit cigarettes and chatted and joked, talking of the prospects of the trip, or the recent gossip of Mombasa. The sailors, not knowing that I understood Swahili, began to discuss me in loud tones. An awkward silence fell upon the porters, who didn’t quite know how to tell them. Mali, my tent-boy, who was sitting near me, looked toward me and smiled. When the discussion became a little too personal, I turned to him and made a few pertinent remarks about the crew. The porters grinned delightedly, and rarely have I seen more shamefaced men than those sailors.

In far too short a time for all of us the dhow grounded on the other side and we jumped out and started to unload. A giant baobab-tree stood near the beach; a cluster of huts beneath it were occupied by some Swahilis who fished, and ran a small store, where my porters laid in a final supply of delicacies--sugar and tobacco.

It is customary to have a native head man, but on this short trip I had decided to do without one, for though the porters were new, my personal boys were old friends. Accordingly, when all the loads were ready and neatly arranged in line, I shouted “Bandika!” Great muscular black arms caught the packs and swung them up into place on the head, and off we started, along the old coast trail, worn deep with the traffic of centuries, and leading on for several hundred miles with native villages strung along its length. Behind me strode my two gun boys, then came the porters, all in single file, their present regular order a strong contrast with our disordered progress through the streets of Mombasa. Mali and Kombo, the cook, brought up the rear to look out for stragglers, and help unfortunates to rearrange their loads more comfortably.

A little way from the shore we passed an old Arab well; some women were drawing water from it, but at our approach they deserted their earthen jars and hurried away with shrill ejaculations. Fresh from the more arid interior, I imagined that the men would fill their gourds, but they filed past without stopping, for this was a land of many streams.

We continued on our way silently, now through stretches of sandy land covered with stunted bushes, now through native shambas, or cultivated fields, until we came upon a group of natives seated under a gigantic wide-spreading tree. It was a roadside shop, and the porters threw down their loads and shouldered their way to where the shopkeeper was squatting behind his wares--nuts, tobacco, tea, bits of brass wire, beads, and sweetmeats of a somewhat gruesome appearance. He was a striking-looking old fellow with a short gray beard. Pretty soon he came to where I was sitting with a measure of nuts for the white man; so in return I took out my tobacco-pouch and presented him with some of the white man’s tobacco.

After a few minutes’ rest we set out again and marched along for some time until we came to a cocoanut-palm grove, where I decided to camp for the night. The natives we were among were called the WaNyika--the “children of the wilderness.”

Leaving the men to arrange camp under the supervision of the gun-bearers, I strolled over to a nearby village where there was a dance in full swing. The men were regaling themselves with cocoanut-wine, an evil-tasting liquid, made from fermented cocoanut-milk, they told me. The moon, almost at full, was rising when I returned to camp, and after supper I sat and smoked and watched “the night and the palms in the moonlight,” until the local chief, or Sultani, as they called him, came up and presented me with some ripe cocoanuts, and sitting down on the ground beside me he puffed away at his long clay pipe, coughing and choking over the strong tobacco I had given him, but apparently enjoying it all immensely. When he left I remained alone, unable for some time to make up my mind to go to bed, such was the spell of the tropic moonlight and the distant half-heard songs of the dancing “children of the wilderness.”

Early next morning we were on our way, and that night were camped a few hundred yards from the village of a grizzled old Sultani, whose domains lay in the heart of the sable country, for it was in search of these handsome antelopes that I had come. In southern Africa the adult males of the species are almost black, with white bellies, but here they were not so dark in color, resembling more nearly the southern female sable, which is a dark reddish brown. Both sexes carry long horns that sweep back in a graceful curve over the shoulders, those of the male much heavier and longer, sometimes, in the south, attaining five feet in length. The sable antelope is a savage animal, and when provoked, will attack man or beast. The rapier-like horns prove an effective weapon as many a dog has learned to its cost.

My tent was pitched beneath one of the large shade-trees in which the country abounds. This one was the village council-tree, and when I arrived the old men were seated beneath it on little wooden stools. These were each hacked out of a single log and were only five or six inches high. The owner carried his stool with him wherever he went, slinging it over his shoulder on a bit of rawhide or a chain.

There was trouble in the village, for after the first formal greetings were over the old chief told me that one of his sons had just died. There was about to be held a dance in his memory, and he led me over to watch it. We arrived just as the ceremony was starting. Only small boys were taking part in it, and it was anything but a mournful affair, for each boy had strung round his ankles baskets filled with pebbles that rattled in time with the rhythm of the dance. In piping soprano they sang a lively air which, unlike any native music I had hitherto heard, sounded distinctly European, and would scarcely have been out of place in a comic opera.