The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [148]
Readers of Roosevelt’s diary of the hunt might wonder if by “excitement” he did not mean “carnage.” A list culled from the pages of this little book indicates just how much blood was needed to blot out “thought.” (Since Alice’s death his diaries had become a monotonous record of things slain.)
17 Aug. “My battery consists of a long .45 Colt revolver, 150 cartridges, a no. 10 choke bore, 300-cartridge shotgun; a 45–75 Winchester repeater, with 1,000 cartridges; a 40–90 Sharps, 150 cartridges; a 50–150 double barrelled Webley express, 100 cartridges.”
19 Aug. 4 grouse, 5 duck.
20 Aug. 1 whitetail buck, “still in velvet,” 2 sage hens.
24 Aug. “Knocked the heads off 2 sage grouse.”
25 Aug. 6 sharptail grouse, 2 doves, 2 teal.
26 Aug. 8 prairie chickens.
27 Aug. 12 sage hens and prairie chickens, 1 yearling whitetail “through the heart.”
29 Aug. “Broke the backs” of 2 blacktail bucks with a single bullet.
31 Aug. 1 jack rabbit, “cutting him nearly in two.”
3 Sept. 2 blue grouse.
4 Sept. 2 elk.
5 Sept. 1 red rabbit, 1 blue grouse.
7 Sept. 2 elk, 1 blacktail doe.
8 Sept. Spares a doe and two fawns, “as we have more than enough meat.” Kills 12 grouse instead.
11 Sept. 50 trout.
12 Sept. 1 bull elk, “killing him very neatly … knocked the heads off 2 grouse.”
13 Sept. 1 blacktail buck “through the shoulder,” 1 grizzly bear “through the brain.”
14 Sept. 1 blacktail buck, 1 female grizzly, 1 bear cub, “the ball going clean through him from end to end.”
15 Sept. 4 blue grouse.
16 Sept. 1 bull elk—“broke his back.”
17 Sept. “Broke camp … Three pack ponies laden with hides and horns.”73
Heading back to Dakota with his stinking cargo, Roosevelt killed a further 40 birds and animals on the prairie, making his total bag 170 items in just 47 days.74
So much for “excitement.” As to “fatigue,” he punished himself more severely, during these seven weeks, than ever before in his life. He covered nearly a thousand miles in the saddle and on foot, scorning a “prairie schooner” which accompanied him most of the way. The weather was often brutal, with winds powerful enough to overturn the wagon, and huge hailstones thudding into the earth with the velocity of bullets; but Roosevelt seemed to glory in it, once riding off alone into the rain. He camped in the Big Horns at altitudes of well over eight thousand feet, and at temperatures of well below freezing. Yet for all the thin air in his lungs and the chill in his bones, he pursued elk and bear with the energy of a hardened mountain-man:
We had been running briskly [after elk] uphill through the soft, heavy loam, in which our feet made no noise but slipped and sank deeply; as a consequence, I was all out of breath and my hand so unsteady that I missed my first shot … I doubt if I ever went through more violent exertion than in the next ten minutes. We raced after them at full speed, opening fire; I wounded all three, but none of the wounds were immediately disabling. They trotted on and we panted afterward, slipping on the wet earth, pitching headlong over charred stumps, leaping on dead logs that broke beneath our weight, more than once measuring our full length across the ground, halting and firing whenever we got a chance. At last one bull fell; we passed him by after the others, which were still running uphill. The sweat streamed into my eyes and made furrows in the sooty mud that covered my face, from having fallen full length down the burnt earth; I sobbed for breath as I toiled at a shambling trot after them, as nearly done out as could well be.
He kept on going until he had killed the second elk, and pursued the third until “the blood grew less, and ceased, and I lost the track.”75
Assuredly all this activity left Roosevelt little time to brood. Yet there was at least one final throb of grief. One night in the Big Horns, as bull elks trumpeted their wild, silvery mating-calls,76 he blurted out to Merrifield the details of his wife’s death. He said that his pain was “beyond any healing.” When Merrifield, who was also a widower,