Big game

Elspeth Huxley

African Hunter James Mellon (Cassell £15.00)

Here is a wild animal book with a difference indeed. Instead of dwelling on their prospects of survival, or on details of their domestic lives, it is all about killing them, written by men dedicated to their pursuit and destruction. Lavishly illustrated, five hundred double-columned pages long, six pounds on the kitchen scales, this is an animal-killer's book to end with a flourish a genre which for a century and a half at least has enabled elderly gentlemen to savour the thrill of felling charging elephants from their armchairs, and instructed novices in the craft of finding, pursuing and killing their prey.

In the days of my youth, books of African travel were generally adorned by photographs of the author in bush-hat and leggings standing beside, or sitting on top of, a dead beast. I thought these had gone out completely, together with solar topees, spinepads and most of the hunted fauna. But no, here they are again. The sun-hat and the leggings have gone but not the smirk. There are also many first-rate pictures of living animals and their habitats.

Yet it would be stupid to decry this book because of a personal prejudice against destroying creatures of great beauty and increasing rarity. The sportsman's claim to be a conservationist, on the face of it rather like the proposition that the fox enjoys the hunt, is perfectly sound. Obviously the hunter needs a prey; no wild animals, no sport. It is to his interest to see that wild animals are preserved in reasonable numbers and generally he observes the rules laid down for their protection, unlike the poachers who most emphatically do not.

The real threat to animal survival comes firstly from expanding human populations, which are taking over from the beasts their former habitat; secondly from poachers who kill for gain and have a thriving market in meat, trophies, ivory and skins. When protected, or partially protected, in National Parks, numbers build up to a point where the animals so damage their habitat that, when the inevitable drought comes along, the vegetation takes such a beating that the Park may end up as a desert full of whitening bones.

The white hunter—the professional who bear-leads the rich sportsman—was, in African colonial days, a highly glamorous figure. Fearless, cool-headed, skilled in bushcraft, a crack shot, he was a much admired Hemingway character, sometimes hunted in his turn, with exciting results, by his clients' wives. In retrospect, it all seems

rather adolescent ; but the glamour has not wholly faded and evidently Mr Mellon succumbed to it at an early age. He is still only thirty-four.

At the age of eighteen, we are told—barely graduated from St Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire—he ied an expedition to East Africa for the Carnegie Museum which returned with 3,500 dead birds, mammals and reptiles. After taking a degree in philosophy at Yale he settled in Africa to devote his life to slaying more. Incidentally, one no longer kills an animal; it is 'taken', sometimes 'culled' or 'harvested', or 'given euthanasia' in the case of pets.

But Mr Mellon is a selective 'taker'. What attracts him is either an animal's rarity, or the size of its horns, tusks or skin. Such dedicated trophy-hunters will Ko anywhere to secure a rare or extra-large beast, and go, it would seem, to almost any length to get permission to do so, should it be under special protection on account of its rarity. The Emperor Haile Selassie suspended the Ethiopian game laws to allow Mr Mellon to hunt a walia on the Semein heights six hundred miles north of Addis Ababa, the only place left in the world where this mountain goat survives—a 'supremely covetable prize' ; no wonder, when (he reckoned) only about 170 are left. He got one, which fell over an immense precipice and was bashed to bits. The renowned herpetologist, C. J. P. Ionides, had to bribe the then chief game warden of Uganda, also a herpetologist, with rare snakes pickled in formaldehyde to get a permit to shoot for 'scientific purposes'—that universal justification—a single male mountain gorilla, of a species approaching the point of no return. Another 'enticing prize' coveted by Mr Mellon was the smallest of the ungulates, the West African Royal antelope, weighing less than seven pounds. The Diana monkey 'with its long graceful black tail and bright white bib culminating in a hint of a beard' has also 'an assured, if modest, place in my list of objectives.' The banded duiker, with its 'breath-taking array of gold and black zebralike stripes', came to his notice in a zoo and he knew that he would 'never rest until this gem of the forest was mine.'

It is a curious phenomenon, this passion to destroy beautiful and living creatures and then to gloat over their corpses. Curious— or is it ? In the trophy-hunter are combined two of the oldest and most deeply ingrained urges of man: to collect, whether works of art, precious stones, butterflies, bottle-tops or pot-lids; and to kill. A generation or so ago, we were inclined to believe that this latter urge was well on the way to extinction, mainly by sublimation—football and all that. This is hardly a hope we can entertain today.

Collecting is more complicated ; one-upmanship is obviously a major element. I suppose it seems nobler to collect wild animals, especially 'dangerous' ones— dangerous, almost always, only when they

are forced into self-defence: tigre est an mechant animal .. .'—than to garner match

boxes, vintage bicycles, Picassos or bottletops. The pursuit of a rare specimen of such artifacts may be just as arduous and thrilling to their collectors as, to others, the pursuit of a record tusker or lion with the longest mane, but lends itself less readily to stirring tales of derring-do. With collecting, as with killing, sublimation has its limits. The animalcollector's days are numbered, however, even of collectors for zoos.

Something will be lost, of course, besides the animals. From the time of the cavepainters, perhaps before that, a love-hatred relationship has existed between the hunter and his prey. To pursue it effectively, he must study its habits and enter, insofar as he can, into its mind, in order to anticipate its movements. This breeds respect for the creature he wishes to slay, and a kind of affection. 'Some of my best friends are lions,' writes George Adamson, with Joy a co-foster-parent of the famous Elsa; and here is his picture with one of his friends by his side, both wearing tufty white beards and looking very much alike. As a game warden, he has had to shoot some of his friends' relations in the course of duty, but for duty not for fun.

He is one of twenty-eight contributors, all experts in their fields, plus Mr Mellon himself who has written nearly half the chapters, to this massive survey. Everything is here: where to find the animals, regulations about shooting them, what to shoot them with and many hunting tales: an impressive achievement and beautifully produced. 'Very likely the last book of its kind,' say the publishers. Already parts of it are out of date and long before Mr Mellon, born at least half a century too late, draws the pension, he will 'glass' eroded hillsides to see nothing but goats. To others besides myself, I think, this will seem rather a sad book. All those corpses, felled by high-precision weapons equipped with 'scopes', stretched out at the feet of triumphant humans. To hunting addicts, without question, it will seem enthralling, recalling memories of heat soaked days, surmounted dangers, starlit nights at ease by glowing camp fires, a lost world.