Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [11]
Soon they were all splashed with blood from head to foot. One of the trackers took off his blanket and squatted stark naked inside the carcase, the better to use his knife. Each laborer rewarded himself by cutting off strips of meat for his private store, and hung them in red festoons from the branches round about. There was no let-up in the work until it was stopped by darkness.
Our tents were pitched in a small open glade a hundred yards from the dead elephant. The night was clear, the stars shone brightly, and in the west the young moon hung just above the line of tall tree-tops. Fires were speedily kindled and the men sat around them, feasting and singing in a strange minor tone until late in the night. The flickering light left them at one moment in black obscurity, and the next brought into bold relief their sinewy crouching figures, their dark faces, gleaming eyes, and flashing teeth.… I toasted slices of elephant’s heart on a pronged stick before the fire, and found it delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold.
BLOOD, NAKEDNESS, FLESHY festoons, music, moon, and fire, his mouth full of cardiac meat: after four months, he has arrived at the heart of darkness. He is at one with the mightiest of animals, its life juices mingling with his own, at one with all nature, with the primeval past. No longer a mere time traveler in the Pleistocene, he has become a virtual denizen of it. The pages of his safari diary, covered with sketches of every animal he has slain (usually shown in motion, extremities tapering off into blankness), uncannily recall Paleolithic art. Yet a part of him is repelled by much of what he observes: baboons tearing open newborn lambs to get at the milk inside them, a hyena suffocated by the very guts it burrows into, flies walking around the eyes of children. “Life is hard and cruel for all the lower creatures, and for man also in what the sentimentalists call a ‘state of nature,’ ” he writes. “The savage of today shows us what the fancied age of gold of our ancestors was really like; it was an age when hunger, cold, violence, and iron cruelty were the ordinary accompaniments of life.”
“THE PAGES OF HIS SAFARI DIARY UNCANNILY RECALL PALEOLITHIC ART.”
Roosevelt records his kills on 5 and 6 October 1909. (photo credit p.4)
The intense physicality of Africa so stimulates him intellectually that he has already read most of his Pigskin Library—some covers stained with blood, oil, ashes, and sweat till they look like saddle leather. He balks only at three or four of Shakespeare’s plays. The aphorisms of Omar Khayyám, Sir Walter Scott, Ferdinand Gregorovius, and Lewis Carroll are as apt to flavor his campfire conversation as ornithological data. He seems to register everything he reads, just as he mentally photographs everything he sees—the new moon reflected among water lilies, a clutch of hartebeest droppings, a mirage’s “wavering mockery,” ostriches “mincing along with their usual air of foolish stateliness.” His ear for sounds is just as acute, and he notes them down with extreme precision: the “batrachian” croaks of hyraxes, the “bubbling squeals” blown through the nostrils of a submerging hippo, the pack of a bullet hitting rhino hide, the “bird-like chirp” of a cheetah.
One sound falls with especial sweetness on his ear: Kermit playing “Rolling Down to Rio” on the mandolin. He is proud of his son, who despite a weedy physique has managed to emulate all his own hunting feats—even shooting an elephant. The boy has taken surprisingly well to the African wilderness—so much so, he would seem born for life in an alien environment. He has a linguistic gift, and has added a fairly fluent command of Swahili to the French, Latin, and Greek he learned at Groton. Socially, Kermit tries to be friendly, but is inhibited