Ill Nature Page 4

  Eventually, Group B has to leave Moremi, as all groups must, and approach the Savuti camp. There is the sound of tent flaps being zipped and unzipped and the sound of film rewinding. They’ve found that gin and apricot juice doesn’t make a bad drink—the quinine cans have too much the odor of the spoiling sausage they nestle beside in the cooler—and some terrible jokes are told around the campfire. There are elephant-dick jokes and ostrich-dick jokes and even jokes comparing mice and pandas. Chunk doesn’t tell any jokes, but he tells a few stories concerning his charisma, his adventures in other faraway places, and his aplomb with wild animals. Someone sings. The clients seem to have found themselves, and what they’ve found is that they’re a rather shrieky lot. Giggling and chortling and laughing and chuckling, they endure the days in Savuti’s barren marsh and, after a brief, rollicking journey, arrive at the Chobe River. They go to the chic Chobe Game Lodge, where Elizabeth Taylor got married, not this last time but the other time, when she married Richard Burton the second time. They take a sunset river cruise. They see the animals come down to drink in long, eager lines. They see silent herds backlit by a big, cloud-streaked, solemn sun. Back at camp they find that baboons have broken into the tents. They’ve taken candy and prescription drugs. One woman, recently retired from the foreign service, is particularly upset. The baboons have stolen her nuts and scattered her cosmetics about. “I feel so violated,” she says.

  But this is Africa, this really feels like it could be Africa at last. The air is dazzling, and in the morning the hippos are honking in the river and the tawny fields fairly ripple with life. The trees are full of nests—weaver nests, vulture nests, eagle nests, the extravagant domed nests of the drab little hammerkop. The members of Group B set off on a game drive. They see trumpeter hornbills, a pair of them. Not at all common. They see secretary birds, which they’ve previously seen only in Birds of Botswana. They see magnificent sable antelope, with their sweeping horns. They are tearing around in their Land Rover, happy as can be, filled with Africa, giddy with it. Springbok, steenbok, grysbok! Kudu, eland, who can tell the difference? Rollers! Hoopoes! they call out. They are claiming and naming them all, chattering away, glossing and glassing everything, and then they come upon the elephants, and they fall silent.

  The elephants are fantastic. They’re mysterious, they have dignity. Over and over throughout the day, they see elephants. Families with youngsters. Baby calves that can still walk under their mother’s stomach. Young bulls. Groups, herds, hundreds of them on the move, swaying, silent, swinging their trunks. When a column of them crosses the road, a guard turns out and faces the vehicle, forefoot swinging, great ears flapping, prepared to do what’s possible to defend the family as it hurries past. The air is electric with elephant. The group takes pictures, shoots roll after roll, watching them. They could watch them for hours. They do watch them for hours, bathing in the river, feeding in the hills. The elephants enchant them.

  Many things are known about the elephant. For example, it’s known that its phalanges are embedded in a soft cushion of elastic fiber enclosed in cartilage, which serves as a shock absorber explaining the extraordinary silence of the animal’s passage through the bush, and that its trunk is one of the most versatile instruments in nature. It’s known that its gestation period is almost two years, after which a single young is produced. It’s known that this young suckles for three to four years and that sexual maturity is not reached for ten years. It’s known that elephants are led by a succession of mothers and daughters—that female elephants stay with their mothers all their lives. It’s known that the leader in a family is the oldest cow, whose great experience is the herd’s knowledge that protects it from drought and famine and sometimes humans. It’s known that aggressive elephant behavior is almost always bluffing. It’s known that so many elephants have been killed in the last decade that few of the remnant herds are guided by matriarchs old enough to have generations of memory in their heads. It’s known that there were two million African elephants in 1970 and about 600,000 elephants are left. It could be said that these animals, mostly young and frightened and with little access to the accumulated knowledge of the past, have lost Africa. That in their heads, their Africa has vanished.

  It’s known that it’s never been difficult to kill an elephant.

  In his book The Last Place on Earth, Harold Hayes tells of how a group of elephants broke into a shed where the ears and feet of elephants destroyed in a “cropping” procedure were being stored before being made into handbags and umbrella stands, removed the remains, and buried them.

  There are many stories like this—old, troubling stories. Elephants have a sense of propriety. They know grief and indignation. They are intelligent, they are telepathic, they can communicate across many miles through infrasonic sound. They are highly protective of one another and care for their young with exceptional tenderness. They know what death is. It worries and mystifies and upsets them. Or, as Peter Matthiessen says in African Silences, they “are increasingly being credited with the apprehension of death.”

  When elephants are “cropped” (as though “cutting back” their number was as bloodless and sensible as pruning a tree, strictly an agricultural procedure), whole families—cows, calves, and juveniles—are removed en masse by “highly efficient teams.” It usually takes a few minutes. The croppers employing their cropping tool, the machine gun, confine themselves to selected families in order to prevent panic from spreading throughout the entire elephant population.

  “That’s sad,” someone says, “really sad.”

  But as a character in Robert Ruark’s old, unclassic novel Uhuru remarks, “If you were there to kill, some unpleasantness was necessary.”

  Tourism is an avenue for political greed and limitless exploitation in Africa, it’s true, but there are fences and farmers too. There’s tsetse control and game control, dams and poachers and government croppers. There are the field biologists who tag and track things, and volunteers—they don’t want to be just tourists—who spend their adventure holiday tagging and tracking things for them. There are hunters who now pay to shoot rhinos with $7,000 tranquilizing darts so that conservationists can insert microchips into their horns to monitor their movements. It’s chaotic, all these people trying to keep up their interests. It makes the tourist—the safariphile—seem almost innocent.

  Some of the ladies in Group B have become quite taken with Chunk and tip him $100 at the end of the trip. The men tip him $50. The safari cost each around $3,000 plus airfare, but what an experience—hasn’t it been an experience? They’re all back in Victoria Falls now, and they decide to go to the bar for a farewell drink. Some hunters are there, and one of them is saying, “With buffalo the problem is not so much killing them as getting them to understand that they have undergone a change of status.”

  Another one is talking about hunting forest elephants somewhere in Africa the year before. He came across one and could have shot it easily, but he passed it up because he thought it was too small. Now he kind of wishes he had taken it. The days of the big tuskers are over. He decries their indiscriminate killing by poachers. “My six-year-old son, Joe, will never get the chance that I passed up,” he says.

  Is this macho pathos? Is it the new thoughtfulness?

  The safariphiles decide that they really hate this bar, that they’re going to go into town. Should they go to the snake park? Should they buy a crocodile belt? Do they really dare to have the future told? Some of them, on reflection, think they might have taken too many pictures. It’s easy to take too many pictures of the elephants. Someone worries that the shutter blades in his camera look a little off. I might have lost that last roll, he says. I could have lost all those elephants. I’ll send you some of mine, someone says; I know I took too many pictures of the elephants. But then they agree that it’s not the same. If you come on safari and take pictures of elephants, you want the ones you’ve taken and not someone else’s. But then someone says, Oh, pictures, they never co
me out the way you saw it anyway. And everyone agrees. They agree that Africa proved to be pretty accessible, actually. There wasn’t quite the astonishing number of animals they expected, but there were a lot. In Africa, wild animals still provide the opportunity to be seen. They’re still out there, in Africa, offering people the experience of their existence. Isn’t that nice?

  Wildebeest

  WILDEBEEST ARE A BIG STRANGE-LOOKING ANTELOPE, A GNU. Their shoulders are higher and heavier than their rumps. They have stringy tails, and manes, and beards on their throats and are dark with streaks of silver. They have horns and gallop like horses and have big Cubistic heads with mismatched features. They’re fabulously grotesque looking and they travel—they used to travel—in great migratory herds across Africa. In Botswana in the 1970s they died by the tens of thousands during the drought, and their populations have never recovered. It was not that there was no water. It was that the wildebeest and many other wild animals were prevented from reaching it by a fence. A cattle fence that angles and runs for hundreds of miles. A hundred thousand wildebeest which had been spread out across a vast wilderness were forced by the fence to take the same migratory route to water that they never would reach. Almost four hundred miles of river and lake shores that had once been available to them in droughts had been reduced to a few miles by the fence. The wildebeest plodded along the fence, dying all along the way until the fence turned away from the water they had been smelling for days, joining another fence and forming a corner in which most of the survivors collapsed. Their heads hanging, they tottered and fell, their eyes plucked out by vultures while they still lived, their ears and testicles chewed off by scavengers while their legs still moved, as though they were moving still toward the water. Suffer and suffer and die. Mythical biblical it almost seems. Well, that’s what happened to the wildebeest, and is still happening to them. There are still droughts, and the wildebeest die against the fence, but not in the great numbers of the ’70s because those great numbers no longer exist. When I think about Africa what I think is wildebeest—that wild, uncomprehending, incomprehensible thing that thirsts. And I think that when you’re talking about darkness, the blackness of darkness, you’re talking about wildebeest (not elephants, the monumental moral innocence of elephants, but wildebeest), for wildebeest are at the great empty heart of blackness, the heart of its nothingness, dying over and over again against the indifferent fence with the water just beyond it.

  The Killing Game

  DEATH AND SUFFERING ARE A BIG PART OF HUNTING. A BIG part. Not that you’d ever know it by hearing hunters talk. They tend to downplay the killing part. To kill is to put to death, extinguish, nullify, cancel, destroy. But from the hunter’s point of view, it’s just a tiny part of the experience. The kill is the least important part of the hunt . . ., they often say, or, Killing involves only a split second of the innumerable hours we spend surrounded by and observing nature. . . . For the animal, of course, the killing part is of considerably more importance. José Ortega y Gasset, in Meditations on Hunting, wrote, Death is a sign of reality in hunting. One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted. This is the sort of intellectual blather that the “thinking” hunter holds dear. The conservation editor of Field & Stream once paraphrased this sentiment by saying, We kill to hunt, and not the other way around, thereby making it truly fatuous. A hunter in West Virginia, one Mr. Bill Neal, blazed through this philosophical fog by explaining why he blows the toes off treed raccoons so that they will fall down and be torn apart by his dogs: That’s the best part of it. It’s not any fun just shooting them.

  Instead of monitoring animals—many animals in managed areas are tattooed and wear radio transmitters—wildlife managers should start hanging telemetry gear around hunters’ necks to study their attitudes and record their conversations. It would be grisly listening, but it would tune out for good the suffering as sacrament and spiritual experience nonsense that some hunting apologists employ. The unease with which the good hunter inflicts death is an unease not merely with his conscience but with affirming his animality in the midst of his struggles toward humanity and clarity, Holmes Rolston III drones on in his book Environmental Ethics.

  There is a formula to this in literature—someone the protagonist loves has just died, so he goes out and kills an animal. This makes him feel better. But it’s kind of a sad feeling-better. He gets to relate to Death and Nature in this way. Somewhat. But not really. Death is still a mystery. Well, it’s hard to explain. It’s sort of a semireligious thing. . . . Killing and affirming, affirming and killing, it’s just the cross the “good” hunter must bear. The bad hunter merely has to deal with postkill letdown.

  Many are the hunter’s specious arguments. Less semireligious but a long-standing favorite with them is the vegetarian approach (you eat meat, don’t you?). If you say no, they feel they’ve got you—you’re just an oddball attempting to impose your weird views on others. If you say yes, they accuse you of being hypocritical, of allowing your genial Safeway butcher to stand between you and reality. The fact is, the chief attraction of hunting is the pursuit and murder of animals—the meat-eating aspect of it is trivial. If the hunter chose to be ethical about it, he might cook his kill, but the meat of most animals is discarded. Dead bear can even be dangerous! A bear’s heavy hide must be skinned at once to prevent meat spoilage. With effort, a hunter can make okay chili, something to keep in mind, a sports rag says, if you take two skinny spring bears.

  As for subsistence hunting, please. . . . The subsistence line is such a cynical one. Your Pennsylvania sportsman might personally not want to shoot a whale, but he sure supports a Northwest Indian’s whim to do so, because any breaching or weakening of laws prohibiting any type of hunting is in the interests of all hunters. The subsistence/cultural/traditional argument is as egregious as it is canny. The Makah Indian tribe of Washington won the right to kill the gray whale in 1999 despite the US ban on whaling, and since the whales in Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula were used to being approached by tourist boats, a successful hunt was pretty much assured. A young whale was easily killed with high-powered rifles and hauled ashore with the assistance of some commercial fishing boats, but the community hadn’t a clue as to what to do with the two tons of meat that resulted, blubber not having been a part of the tribe’s diet for over seventy years. After dancing on the dead whale’s back for a while, everybody went home, leaving the meat to rot. Granted that there might be a few “good” hunters out there who conduct the kill as spiritual exercise and a few others who are atavistic enough to want to supplement their Chicken McNuggets with venison, most hunters hunt for the hell of it.

  For hunters, hunting is fun. Recreation is play. Hunting is recreation. Hunters kill for play, for entertainment. They kill for the thrill of it, to make an animal “theirs.” (The Gandhian doctrine of nonpossession has never been a big hit with hunters.) The animal becomes the property of the hunter by its death. Alive, the beast belongs only to itself. This is unacceptable to the hunter. He’s yours. . . . He’s mine. . . . I decided to. . . . I decided not to. . . . I debated shooting it, then I decided to let it live. . . . Hunters like beautiful creatures. A “beautiful” deer, elk, bear, cougar, bighorn sheep. A “beautiful” goose or mallard. Of course, they don’t stay beautiful for long, particularly the birds. Many birds become rags in the air, shredded, blown to bits. Keep shooting till they drop! Hunters get a thrill out of seeing a plummeting bird, out of seeing it crumple and fall. The big pheasant folded in classic fashion. They get a kick out of “collecting” new species. Why not add a unique harlequin duck to your collection? Swan hunting is satisfying. I let loose a three-inch Magnum. The large bird only flinched with my first shot and began to gain altitude. I frantically ejected the round, chambered another, and dropped the swan with my second shot. After retrieving the bird, I was amazed by its size. The swan’s six-foot wingspan, huge body, and long neck made it an impressive trophy. (The hunter might also ha
ve been amazed that he killed the wrong bird. When endangered trumpeter swans were moved by wildlife agencies from Wyoming’s Yellowstone to other western states in the hope they would learn to migrate, they were shot by hunters who thought they were just tundra swans.) Hunters like big animals, trophy animals. A “trophy” usually means that the hunter doesn’t deign to eat it. Maybe he skins it or mounts it. Maybe he takes a picture. We took pictures, we took pictures. Maybe he just looks at it for a while. The disposition of the “experience” is up to the hunter. He’s entitled to do whatever he wishes with the damn thing. It’s dead.