Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [10]
Calm returns to the lake. He waits for it to give up its dead. After an hour, to his surprise and shame, four carcasses surface. One of them is the bull he wanted, but the rest are cows, unneeded as trophies, undeniable as kills. He persuades himself that they will be a food bonanza for his porters, and for the natives of Naivasha.
Darkness falls as he supervises the laborious business of belaying, mooring, and towing tons of meat. The night grows stormy. Long swells roll through the reeds. He does not get back to camp until three the next morning. Before dawn, he awakes with an attack of acute despair. Alarmed at his haggard look, servants go to fetch Dawson. “Bwana Mkubwa kill mingi kiboko!” Many hippos.
“Warrington,” he says when the reporter appears, “the most awful thing has happened.”
He need not worry. Dawson is so touched to be confided in (“I don’t know what to do.… We shall have to let the papers know”) that the story goes out as an attack by, rather than on, the herd of hippos. It is released by a young man who can now style himself secretary to the former President of the United States. In his diary for 23 July, Dawson proudly notes, “Wrote letters for the Colonel.”
THE LETTERS, DICTATED with much snapping of teeth, pacing back and forth, and smacks of right fist into left palm, are in response to the first overseas mail the safari has received in nearly two months. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other politically obsessed correspondents report that President Taft is proving an inept executive, and that Republican insurgents now pose a serious threat to the unity of the Republican Party. But the immediacy of such bulletins fades in proportion to the distance they have come, and the leisurely pace of African “runners.”
There is, in any case, little that a former Party head can do, other than express polite concern. Lodge must understand that he has divorced himself from affairs of state. “Remember that I never see newspapers.… I am now eating and drinking nothing but my African expedition.”
He admits to Dawson that he would rather not hear anything about the Taft administration. Insofar as he will discuss his own future, he talks of returning to Oyster Bay for a quiet life of writing books and articles. He says he would like to become “a closer father” to his two youngest sons, whom he feels he may have neglected during his years as President.
However, he does dictate one startling remark that Dawson fails to recognize as news. It occurs in a message of sympathy to Henry White, whom President Taft has dismissed as American ambassador to France: “He said without any qualification that he intended to keep you. It was, of course, not a promise any more than my statement that I would not run again for President was a promise.”
HE IS NEARER DEATH, around midday on the nineteenth of August, than he was on Kettle Hill in Cuba, or when he battled for breath as an asthmatic child. An elephant bears down upon him in dense jungle, creepers snapping like packthread in its rush. There are no bullets left in his Holland & Holland rifle: both barrels were needed to dispatch another elephant, only moments before. He dodges behind a tree, ejecting the empty cartridges and jamming in two fresh ones. R. J. Cuninghame fires twice, with the hair-trigger reaction of a professional. The elephant stops in its tracks, wheels, and vanishes, trumpeting shrilly. A copious trail of blood marks its departure.
Hunters’ etiquette requires that it be followed. But the contrary duty of a collector is to begin, at once, the task of skinning the specimen already killed, a big bull carrying a hundred and