Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [6]
And should he survive, he wishes to tell his own story. A lucrative publishing contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons calls upon him to write an account of his safari, in articles that will appear monthly in Scribner’s Magazine. After the safari is complete, the series will be edited for republication in book form. His payment for the articles is to be $50,000, and the book will earn him a 20 percent royalty. This is the most money he has ever negotiated as a writer. He could have gotten twice as much from Collier’s Weekly, but feels that periodical is too slick. A touch bon marché, as Edith would say.
HE RIDES OUT to hunt with Kermit, while Cuninghame, Tarlton, and the naturalists continue their preparations. Two local ranchers act as guides. The sortie amounts to a rehearsal for the big safari soon to begin, with gunbearers, grooms, and porters trailing in a precedence as formal as any line he had led as President.
Kapiti’s dry veldt, a word he recognizes as a particle of his own Dutch surname, does not compare in fecundity with the well-watered Athi preserve he passed through on the train. After two years of drought, it is largely depopulated of game. But the Intertropical Convergence Zone seems finally about to drift north across the equator, ahead of them as they ride. When it does, this plain will turn green, and masses of game arrive to graze. At present, ticks alone seem to thrive, attaching themselves like miniature grape clusters to the legs of the ponies. He is grateful for his leather-patch trousers, buttoned tight from knee to boot. A stiff sun helmet, de rigueur for all white travelers in the tropics, uncomfortably covers his large head. He yearns for his beloved slouch hat, but defers to the notion that solar rays are lethal in these latitudes.
He strains to adjust his one good eye to the veldt’s visibility, particularly illusive when the sun is overhead, and makes out the delicate prancings of two species of buck. He aims his custom-sighted Springfield .30 at a Grant’s gazelle, but undershoots and misses. Focusing on a small Thomson’s at 225 yards, he breaks its back with a bullet that goes only slightly too high. It is his first African kill, and he looks forward to venison for dinner.
What he really wants to shoot this afternoon, to set the right collecting tone, is “two good specimens, bull and cow, of the wildebeest.” It is the scientist in him, not the hunter, who first responds to a glimpse of brindled gnu moving blue-black and white across the plain, like shadows of the advancing storm clouds. He sees no evidence in that chiaroscuro of the fashionable theory of “protective coloration,” one of his pet biological peeves. How protective is a white throat mane, in angled light? How inconspicuous are zebra, to a lion? He notes, for his book, that Africa’s large game animals “are always walking and standing in conspicuous places, and never seek to hide or take advantage of cover.” Only the smaller quadrupeds, “like the duiker and steinbuck … endeavor to escape the sight of their foes by lying absolutely still.”
Wildebeest, duiker, steinbuck—he is already picking up the Cape Dutch nomenclature that Afrikaans settlers have brought to British East Africa. Their language reminds him of the nursery songs his grandmother used to croon to him, in earliest memory:
Trippa, troppa, tronjes,
De varken’s in de boonjes.
Reminiscent, too, is the Paleolithic profile of a wildebeest, as he closes on it in a sudden squall of rain. His first big trophy was an American buffalo, hunted in similar conditions twenty-three years ago. Then, the rain was so dense on his spectacles, he could not be sure what was bison, and what mere beading water. This shape shrinks at four hundred yards to something more slender than massive. Nevertheless, it is a good-sized bull. He wounds it into a run. Kermit, galloping with teenage abandon over rotten ground for more than six miles, administers the coup de grâce.
By “veldt law,” credit