The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [39]
In the evening Father and Mother dined at Mr. and Mrs. Blodged. I went to the gardens before dinner and wandered about for some time. The birds had all gone to their nests but innumerable bats were flitting over the surface of the water.38
Once the Roosevelt family left Cairo for a houseboat journey up the Nile,* the amount of writing T.R. produced about birds was staggering. He later stated that his “first real collecting as a student of natural history” began on this Egyptian holiday.39 Yet he never collected a truly rare bird of scientific value.40 The journals from this trip have titles like “Remarks on Birds,” “Ornithological Observations,” “Ornithological Record,” “Catalogue of Birds,” and “Zoological Record.” Now that they were in the Middle East, T.R.’s father gave him a French pin-fire double-barreled shotgun to use. That changed everything. Everywhere he went, his gun was close at hand. “The mechanism of the pin-fire gun was without springs and therefore could not get out of order,” Roosevelt recalled, “an important point, as my mechanical ability was nil.” 41
Although the Pyramid of Cheops enthralled him, he got a bigger thrill shooting for specimens along the riverbanks. When it came to identifying Egyptian wildlife, he put Darwin aside and instead listened carefully to the observations of local guides. Hunting with his father on December 13, T.R. shot his first bird—a warbler-like species. It was the first of thousands of birds he would kill in the name of taxidermy, science, survival and sport in the coming decades. Never before in his young life had he felt as vigorous and vital as in Egypt with shotgun in hand. Perhaps the dry desert climate, so rehabilitating for asthmatics, helped. Every day, it seemed his spirits kept lifting. “In the morning, we passed a large flock of about sixty Egyptian geese,” Roosevelt wrote on December 29. “They were wading in the shallows, but swam out into deep water, where they arranged themselves in an irregular long line and as we approached, divided themselves into several squads and flew off in various directions. At about 12 oclock we stopped and took a walk, during which I observed no less than seven species of hawks crows, stercho finches, and small waders in easy shot.”*42
Even though young Theodore flourished in the desert climate, his American chauvinism didn’t dissipate as the family moved on to the Holy Land. Everything was bigger and better back home. When he arrived in Jerusalem, his first instinct was to declare it “remarkably small.”43 Bathing in the Jordan River produced the lament that it was only “what we should call a small creek in America.”44 To the manger of Bethlehem in Palestine, where Jesus Christ was born, T.R.’s irreverent reaction was to shoot two “very pretty little finches” for his collection.45 Upon arriving in Damascus, the sacred ground where Paul became a disciple of Christ, Roosevelt went jackal hunting. “On we went over hills, and through gul-leys, where none but a Syrian horse could go,” Roosevelt wrote. “I gained rapidly on him and was within a few yards of him when [he] leaped over a cliff some fifteen feet high, and while I made a detour around he got in among some rocky hills where I could not get at him. I killed a large vulture afterwards.”46
The historian Edmund Morris pointed out the jackal hunt was the future president’s first attempt to hunt wildlife for “sport, rather than science.”47 Nothing has baffled Roosevelt scholars over the decades more than how Theodore, who vehemently opposed cruelty to animals, could nevertheless kill wildlife with such ease. Although T.R. often hunted for science (in the Middle East he was collecting for his Roosevelt Museum), one can’t escape the conclusion that he relished the thrill of the chase as a sport. Basically Roosevelt took his cues from Captain Reid in The Boy Hunters. The chapter “About Alligators” defended old-time naturalists like Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon against the overclassification of the laboratory school. By hunting their