Patrick Spence, a real, old Anglo-Irish gentleman, who would have cut
your throat had you called him a liar, died not long ago at the age of
eighty-six and had a bottle of port with his dinner the day before he
took off. Those were Cassidy the old butler’s words. Cassidy said the
master was as sound as a bell and walking along by the rhododendron
bushes to have a look at the new wing they were adding to the stables
when he sprang into the air, cried, “Got me by glory!” and fell flat,
just as a buck falls when a bullet takes it through the heart. A fit
end for a big-game hunter you will say. A fit, anyhow, the doctors
said.
The ancestral home of the Spences, The Grange, Scoresby, Lincolnshire,
stands half a mile from the road. You reach it by an avenue of
chestnuts, and in Patrick’s time when the door opened you found
yourself in a hall hung with trophies of the chase; the whole house
was, in fact, a museum. Never in any man had the passion for
collection burned more acutely than in the owner of The Grange, or
shown itself in a more extravagant fashion. Here you found lamps
upheld by pythons, door handles cut from rhinoceros horn, tables
topped with hippopotamus hide, skins and masks everywhere of
everything from black buffalo to Burchell’s zebra. In the long
corridors where the hartebeest heads faced the elands and Grant’s
gazelle grinned at Bohm’s zebra, black bears upheld the electric
standards—black bears and apes.
The place was a mausoleum. To walk those corridors at night and alone
required a fairly steady nerve, especially when the wind of
Lincolnshire was howling outside like a troop of lost hyenas. There
were envious men who said that three fourths of this collection had
been bought and paid for, but that is the way of the world. No man
ever dared to say it to the owner’s face.
I was staying at a village ten miles from Scoresby and twelve from The
Grange, when one day I met the old gentleman, whom I had known in
London, and he invited me to a day’s fishing in the stream that runs
past The Grange to join the Witham. We had good sport, but toward the
end of the day the rain began—the rain of Lincolnshire driving across
the fens, drenching, disastrous, dismal. Spence insisted on my staying
for dinner and the night; he gave me a rig-out which included a
Canadian blanket coat and a pair of slippers and a dinner of the good
old times, including a cod’s head served with oyster sauce and a capon
the size of a small turkey.
Afterward we sat by the hall fire and talked, the light from the
burning logs striking here and there, illuminating horns and masks and
giving a fictitious appearance of life to the snow leopard crouching
as if to spring at me from behind the door.
“Are those slippers comfortable?” asked Spence, filling his pipe from
the tobacco jar—one of his infernal trophies, a thing made out of a
cross section of elephant shin bone drilled out, for the leg bones of
elephants have no marrow.
“Quite, thanks.”
“I got ’em in a queer way, didn’t pay a cent for them, either.” The
cherry-colored cheeks of the old gentleman sucked in and he made the
pipe draw against its will. Then, safely in the clouds, he went on.
“Not a cent, though they cost me the lives of several men and near
three hundred pounds of good ivory.”
“Mean to say you gave three hundred pounds of ivory for these old
slippers?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said he. “It was such a mixed business. I’ll
have to give you the whole story if you are to understand it, and
first of all I must tell you that though my yarn has to do with Africa
those slippers weren’t made in Africa.
“You’ve been to Cape Town, haven’t you?—and Durban and away up to
Pretoria by rail, maybe—and you’ve passed thousands of square miles of
country that I’ve seen crawling with game in my time—quagga, gnu,
rhinoceros, lion—all gone now, not enough left to feed an aasvogel.
Yes, I’ve seen that country when it was only to be compared to the
country south of the Orange toward Cape Town—one big-game preserve.
And it was on my second visit to it that the things happened I am
going to tell you of.
“I was hunting with Tellemark, a Swede, I think he was, or Norwegian,
I forget which, and we were traveling south of the Limpopo and close
on to Portuguese territory; we had a regular caravan—four ox wagons,
half a dozen horses, and about forty Kafirs; and we’d had good
hunting, waters buck, buffalo, rhino and giraffe, but little elephant.
However we were getting into the elephant country—a big rolling
country, broken by thick bush and mimosa trees, with great clumps of
forest sweeping away west where you could see the giraffes grazing
against the trees, looking like toy giraffes taken out of a Noah’s
ark.
“The place was thick with game. I’ve seen what looked like a moving
cloud shadow miles away—it was a herd of springboks, thousands of
them. I have seen twenty rhinoceros in five square miles of that
country, and buffalo by the hundred. But one day I saw something
stranger than all these. We had rounded a big clump of trees on our
second day after entering this country, when we came upon an elephant.
He was lying down, dead, a great brute thirteen feet to the shoulder,
with ears six foot from tip to lobe, and tusks weighing, we guessed,
close on three hundred pounds. The heaviest tusks ever taken in Africa
weighed four hundred and fifty, so you may guess we were on to a
pretty good thing. But the strange part of the show wasn’t the
elephant but the chaps that had killed him. Pygmies—little chaps not
five foot high.
“As far as I can make out there are several tribes of Pygmies
lingering about in the African forests, and dying out so quick that
to-day they are there and to-morrow they are gone. This lot we struck
were evidently the stump end of some tribe worn down just to twenty or
thirty members; they had killed the elephant on the edge of the forest
and they were on him like flies. The trunk and feet had been cut off
and the stomach cut open with a big stick stuck to keep it so; half
the tribe was inside the elephant and half on top and round about. But
when they saw us they dropped everything and made off, running for the
woods—reminded me of a lot of sparrows flying from a cat; but one chap
failed to get away, he tripped on something, fell flat on his face,
and before he could get on his hands and knees, I had him.
“He kicked and fought, but only from fright, and after a while he
quieted down and Tellemark gave him some sugar. You should have seen
his face when he tasted the sugar! It didn’t seem a bad face, either,
round and chubby. And that and the small size of him, together with
his plumpness and the bow and arrow he had dropped, made us call him
Cupid. The bow was the smallest I have ever seen, not a foot from tip
to tip. The arrows were wrapped round with a piece of hide—kind of an
attempt at a quiver; there were dozens of them, not thicker much than
knitting needles, and without barbs.
“We thought at first that the arrows were used for killing small
birds, but our Kafirs knew different; they pointed to the elephant;
and, sure enough, there was an arrow sticking in the great ear of the
brute, and three or four more sticking in the skin. They were poisoned
arrows, and what the poison could have been, Lord knows, but something
pretty powerful, for a rifle couldn’t have done the business better.
We gave the arrows back to the chap, and the bow, expecting to see him
make off to the woods after the others. Not he. The first fright over
and seeing that we weren’t dangerous, he hung on, staring at the
wagons; it was plain he had never seen anything on wheels before, and
when Tellemark got one of the wagons on the move for a few yards to
show him how it was done, he cried out like a bird chirruping, and
laughed with one hand on his pot-belly till the laughter took the pair
of us and doubled us up. But the Kafirs didn’t laugh; didn’t seem to
see anything funny in him at all; and they didn’t call him Cupid; they
called him Gombi.
“Our head man said he was no good, belonged to a bad lot and that we
had better get rid of him. But Gombi had his own ideas about that. He
seemed to have attached himself to us as a stray dog does and he hung
round while the boys were taking the tusks, chirruping to himself and
dodging about looking at this and that till the funniest feeling got
hold of me that he wasn’t human but some sort of being from another
world that had come across humans for the first time and was taking
stock of them. But I hadn’t long to think about him, for all of a
sudden round us the air was becoming filled with a stench worse than I
ever smelled before.
“It was the elephant. The thing had been new killed and warm when we
struck it and now it was going like this, decomposing right under our
eyes, for great blisters were rising on the skin—and I won’t go into
details. “The poison has done that,” said Tellemark. “Looks like it,”
said I. “Let’s shift and get beyond the wagons. The Kafirs won’t
mind.” We got away beyond the wagons and lay down on the wire grass
watching the boys at work and Gombi hopping round them. Right up above
them was a vulture waiting till we had cleared off. I watched him
coming down and going up again. Sometimes you couldn’t see him at all,
then he showed like a pin point, then he’d get bigger, then smaller.
“Now a vulture even when he is so high as to be beyond sight can see
the body of a dwarf antelope, let alone an elephant, so this chap
wasn’t coming up and down to prospect; it was sheer impatience,
hunger. And I was thinking how full of hunger that sky was when
Tellemark shifted his position, and looking up I saw a bull rhino that
had broken out of the thick stuff on the forest edge and was coming
toward us moving quick, but unflurried. The wind was coming with him
so he couldn’t scent us and being half blind he couldn’t see us. Two
rhinoceros birds were with him, but they weren’t on his back, they
were flying about here and there, following him, and they didn’t seem
alarmed. That’s funny, isn’t it, for if those birds had been on his
back when he was standing still or moving very slowly they would have
cried out at once at the sight of us. Seems to me sometimes as if the
animal and bird world is driven by clockwork, not sense. Then, other
times, it seems as though there were a big genius behind their
movements. Anyhow, the rhino came along unwarned and Tellemark let him
get within thirty yards before he dropped him with a shoulder shot,
dead as mutton.
“The boys working on the tusks had been looking on, so had Gombi; and
when the dwarf saw old pongo graveled like that he came running for
all he was worth, skipping round the dead brute, plugging his finger
in the bullet wound and sucking it same as a child might with a pie.
And then, when he’d done with the rhino, he fastened on to the rifle,
looking down the barrels, sniffing at them and evidently connecting
the smell with the smell of powder in the air. Then he examined the
locks, as interested as a magpie with a marrow bone.
“When he’d done he seemed to have come to the conclusion that a Purdy
eight-bore was a weapon he would like to have further acquaintance
with, for he pointed to the elephant, then to the gun, then to himself
and then away to the west. Then he opened and shut the hand that
wasn’t holding the bow, about a dozen times. What he said was clear
enough. There were many elephants to the west and he would lead us to
them if we would take the gun and shoot them.