Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [9]
Then, curling up on the floor of the boat, he succumbs to his fever.
HE KNOWS THIS IS NOT African malaria, but the Cuban variety that has plagued him since Rough Rider days. Always the sudden convulsions, the cracking headache, then zero at the bone. And always, since he believes illness is weakness (like grief or fear or self-doubt), he fights it off until it fells him. Fortunately, attacks never last long. He is well enough after five days to go out looking for more hippos. This time he leaves Kermit behind, and orders two “boys” to row him alone across the lake.
Although he assures himself that he has spilled no more blood, so far, than is necessary to satisfy the Smithsonian and feed his safari, he is aware that his hunter’s luck has been extraordinary. It is the talk of the sundowner set in Nairobi. In just three months, he and Kermit have bagged multiple specimens of most of the major African species. Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, “a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip.”
The trouble with such luck is that it is bound to be perceived by critics of big-game hunting as indiscriminate slaughter. Local “bush telegraph” exaggerates the number of his kills, not to mention his profligacy with bullets. He is sensitive of being caricatured as anything other than the serious leader of a scientific expedition, and begins to regret his press ban. Perhaps he should do more than send the occasional scrawled trophy tally to the little pool of reporters in Nairobi. It is not the kind of “copy” they want.
Whenever he veers near the capital, he can feel their avid interest pulling at him, like magnetic current. The fact is, he is magnetized himself. Despite his pose of privacy, he remains irredeemably a public figure, obsessed with his own image, half wanting to confide in those he holds at bay. He misses the worshipful cadre of young scribes who took virtual dictation from him in Washington. That “Newspaper Cabinet” is now disbanded, and Taft’s self-deprecating envoi (“I have not the facility for educating the public as you had”) suggests that the White House is going to be a poor source of news for the next four years. American editors will have to look farther afield for good material. No story could be more surefire than that of Colonel Roosevelt daily risking death in Africa!
Hence the presence, this day in Naivasha, of F. Warrington Dawson, a young United Press correspondent who has pursued him all the way to Kapiti. Dawson—Southern, French-educated, the author of two successful novels—is obviously eager to serve him. They might discuss how in camp tonight. That hippo “bull” of five days ago turned out, embarrassingly, to be an old cow. The misidentification was excusable, for she was barren, and had developed male characteristics. But it is exactly the sort of thing he does not wish broadcast, as some kind of joke.
IF ONLY TO IMPRESS DAWSON, he wants to get a big bull, and get it cleanly—not an easy task with low-profile quarry.
The lake lies almost still. For an hour of stealthy progress, he cannot be sure what are mere strips of mud, wetly gleaming, and what the possible heads of hippos. At last he distinguishes a dozen flat foreheads. He fires at seventy yards, and they all sink without trace. He thinks he may have