Free Theodore Roosevelt Abroad by J. Lee Thompson Page B

identified. The Colonel would have preferred not to kill them, but he took no chances with lions, which both he and Selous considered the most dangerous African game. Some they spoke to thought the buffalo, rhino and elephant posed greater risks; however, wherever they traveled Theodore and Kermit took grim note of the graves of many more hunters, settlers and natives killed by lions than by any other creature. As additional reminders along the way, Major Mearns’s medical skills would also be called upon numerous times to patch up freshly mauled settlers and natives. Such predations had led the British authorities to categorize lions (and leopards) as vermin, which could be taken in unlimited numbers without any license needed.
    Their first efforts were disappointing, but finally, on another hunt, which included Lady Pease and her daughter Lavender, TR and Kermit were able to track down full-grown lion specimens, a female weighing 283 pounds and a male weighing 400. These Roosevelt took, with some help, dismounted at close range with his 405 Winchester, which he came to call his “medicine gun” for lions. He described the end of the male in a passage in African Game Trails representative of many others, that is colorful and lively, yet at the same time almost apologetic, in his respect for the prey:
    Right in front of me, thirty yards off, there appeared, from behind the bushs [ sic ] which had first screened him from my eyes, the tawny, galloping form of a big maneless lion. Crack! The Winchester spoke; and as the soft-nosed bullet ploughed forward through his flank the lion swerved so that I missed him with my second shot; but my third bullet went through the spine and forward into his chest. Down he came, sixty yards off, his hind quarters dragging, his head up, his ears back, his jaws open and lips drawn up in a prodigious snarl, as he endeavored to turn to face us. His back was broken. But of this we could not at the moment be sure, and if it had merely been grazed, he might have recovered, and then, even though dying, his charge might have done mischief. So Kermit, Sir Alfred, and I fired, almost together, into his chest. His head sank, and he died. 28
    The next day, after killing his first eland, the largest of the antelope, Roosevelt had his first opportunity at a rhinoceros, when a local Wakamba man came up to tell them one was on a hill nearby. The poor eyesight of the rhino allowed TR to walk within thirty yards of the giant beast, which he described as standing “like an uncouth statue, his hide black in the sunlight; he seemed what he was, a monster surviving over from the world’s past.” For the first time, the Colonel used the powerful Holland & Holland double-barreled rifle. After a first direct hit, the rhino nevertheless was able to get up and charge, and it took two more shots to bring it down, “ploughing up the ground” just thirteen paces from him. In a fashion that would be repeated many times over the next months, TR returned to the main camp to fetch a party of porters to skin and prepare the hides of his kills. One hundred men returned for the rhino and eland, which were within three quarters of a mile of each other. Heller soon complained of “rhinoceritis” (and later “hippopotamaiasis”) when he and his crew of six skinners, all Wakamba with their incisors filed to sharp points, could not keep up with the efforts of the hunters. The rhino kill had put the porters in “high feather” and they chanted to an accompaniment of whistling and horn blowing as they all tramped through the moonlight back to the carcasses. 29
    A man of his times, Roosevelt had a patently Darwinistic, paternalistic and racist view of the Africans on the safari. He and Kermit became very fond of several of the men who served them, but never really thought of them as “men” at all. They were children to be taken care of and guided. It was the responsibility of the British to protect and to raise them up to