Colonel Roosevelt (3 page)

Hence
this highly professional expedition organizing itself at Kapiti. It does so under the orders of his official guide and manager, R. J. Cuninghame,
a bearded, bowlegged Scot and slayer of many elephants. Burned nearly black by wanderings extending from South Africa to the Arctic Circle, Cuninghame affects a Viking look that does not quite conceal the cultured poise of a Cambridge man. Leslie Tarlton, representing a Nairobi safari agency, is assistant manager, a tense little Australian and virtuoso sharpshooter. Three American naturalists represent the scientific side of the expedition. Edgar A. Mearns, a retired army surgeon, began his zoological career by collecting “a most interesting series of skulls” on active duty in the Philippines. He is also a botanist. Edmund Heller is a field taxidermist from Stanford University, and J. Alden Loring a mammalogist from New York. Seventh and last in the ranks of command is the official photographer, Kermit Roosevelt, a willowy nineteen-year-old on leave from Harvard. Kermit is
Bwana Mdogo
(“Little Master”) to the safari porters.

As for
Bwana Mkubwa Sana
(“Very Great Master”), he congratulates himself on putting together a team of the kind of sinewy, well-bred, not overly scrupulous men he has always admired.
His son may not qualify. Kermit is handy with a Kodak, and also with a mandolin; he is a reader and lover of languages, sure to profit from exposure to Africa’s tapestry of cultures. But the boy needs, or seems to need, toughening, having a broody, mother-fixated quality that sets him apart from the rest of the family.

How Edith Roosevelt feels about consigning them both to a year in the wilderness is another matter. She accepts that her husband craves danger, perhaps in compensation for his own inclination to bury himself in books. He has proved to be practically indestructible. So has Ted, their grown son. Archie, halfway through Groton, is if possible even flintier. Quentin, the youngest and brightest, is currently a fiend hidden in the cloud of late puberty, yet promises to emerge from it a natural leader and risk taker.

Kermit is made of more fragile material. He, his brothers, and his sisters, Alice and Ethel, worship their father as a sort of sun-god emanating power and love. Edith trusts that in Africa, the aura will be protective.

BY NOW SHE SHOULD
have answered or destroyed most of the fifteen thousand farewell letters that had poured into Sagamore Hill before he left. He has retained just one, hand-delivered the day he sailed, along with a gold expanding ruler—just the thing a man needs on safari. The ruler is engraved
THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT:
Goodbye—Good luck—and a safe return
, and the letter, on heavy White House stationery, reads:

“K
ERMIT IS MADE OF MORE FRAGILE MATERIAL
.”
Kermit Roosevelt in 1909
.
(photo credit p.2)

Taft cannot find it easy to succeed the most confident executive in modern memory. “Mr. President,” in contrast, is happy to sacrifice supreme power—and along with it, a third term virtually guaranteed by the Republican Party and the American electorate. He waves aside token respect. “
I am no hanger-on to the shreds of departing greatness.”

That said,
there is one title he cherishes, and asks everybody to use from now on: “Colonel Roosevelt.” He feels that it is both valid, reflecting his rank in the Reserve Army of the United States, and merited through bravery in battle. He was, after all, briefly and gloriously commander of a regiment of volunteer cavalrymen in ’98.
If war ever comes again and finds him fit to serve, he intends to reactivate his brevet at once.

He is already “Roosevelt, (Col.) Theodore” in
The New York Times Index
. Reporters do not intend to drop him as a subject, even as he retreats into the wilds of Africa. For more than a quarter of a century they have pursued him, drawn by his “Teddy-bear” caricaturability, perpetual motion, heroic glamour, machine-gun quotes, and ricochet denials. Most attractive of all is his disaster potential—the likelihood that one day he will spend the last cent of his legendary luck, and be destroyed by either violence from outside, or hubris within.

This potential seems especially fraught now that he has elected to test his fifty-year-old body, and faulty vision, in some of the world’s riskiest hunting grounds. Aware of it himself, he has announced that his safari will be closed to all press coverage, save for occasional statistical bulletins that he may issue through cable facilities in Nairobi. Any attempt to follow in his footsteps will be “
an outrage and an indecency.” He does not want every missed shot headlined—or, worse still, captured on camera by the increasingly annoying phenomenon of news photographers.

And should he survive, he wishes to tell his own story. A lucrative publishing contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons calls upon him to write an account of his safari, in articles that will appear monthly in
Scribner’s Magazine
. After the safari is complete, the series will be edited for republication in book form. His payment for the articles is to be $50,000, and the book will earn him a 20 percent royalty. This is the most money he has ever negotiated as a writer. He could have gotten twice as much from
Collier’s Weekly
, but feels that periodical is too slick.
A touch
bon marché
, as Edith would say.

HE RIDES OUT
to hunt with Kermit, while Cuninghame, Tarlton, and the naturalists continue their preparations. Two local ranchers act as guides. The sortie amounts to a rehearsal for the big safari soon to begin, with gunbearers, grooms, and porters trailing in a precedence as formal as any line he had led as President.

Kapiti’s dry
veldt
, a word he recognizes as a particle of
his own Dutch surname, does not compare in fecundity with the well-watered Athi preserve he passed through on the train.
After two years of drought, it is largely depopulated of game. But the Intertropical Convergence Zone seems finally about to drift north across the equator, ahead of them as they ride. When it does, this plain will turn green, and masses of game arrive to graze. At present, ticks alone seem to thrive, attaching themselves like miniature grape clusters to the legs of the ponies. He is grateful for his leather-patch trousers, buttoned tight from knee to boot. A stiff sun helmet,
de rigueur
for all white travelers in the tropics, uncomfortably covers his large head. He yearns for his beloved slouch hat, but defers to the notion that solar rays are lethal in these latitudes.

He strains to adjust his one good eye to the veldt’s visibility, particularly illusive when the sun is overhead, and makes out the delicate prancings of two species of buck. He aims his custom-sighted Springfield .30 at a Grant’s gazelle, but undershoots and misses. Focusing on a small Thomson’s at 225 yards, he breaks its back with a bullet that goes only slightly too high. It is his first African kill, and he looks forward to venison for dinner.

What he really wants to shoot this afternoon, to set the right collecting tone, is “two good specimens, bull and cow, of the wildebeest.” It is the scientist in him, not the hunter, who first responds to a glimpse of brindled gnu moving blue-black and white across the plain, like shadows of the advancing storm clouds. He sees no evidence in that chiaroscuro of the fashionable theory of “protective coloration,” one of his pet biological peeves. How protective is a white throat mane, in angled light? How inconspicuous are zebra, to a lion? He notes, for his book, that Africa’s large game animals “are always walking and standing in conspicuous places, and never seek to hide or take advantage of cover.” Only the smaller quadrupeds, “like the duiker and steinbuck … endeavor to escape the sight of their foes by lying absolutely still.”

Wildebeest, duiker, steinbuck
—he is already picking up the Cape Dutch nomenclature that Afrikaans settlers have brought to British East Africa. Their language reminds him of the nursery songs his grandmother used to croon to him, in earliest memory:

Reminiscent, too, is the Paleolithic profile of a wildebeest, as he closes on it in a sudden squall of rain. His first big trophy was an American buffalo, hunted in similar conditions twenty-three years ago. Then, the rain was so dense on his spectacles, he could not be sure what was bison, and what mere beading water. This shape shrinks at four hundred yards to something more slender than massive. Nevertheless, it is a good-sized bull. He wounds it into
a run. Kermit, galloping with teenage abandon over rotten ground for more than six miles, administers the
coup de grâce
.

By “veldt law,” credit goes to the man who shot first.

AFTER A WEEK OF
hunting around Kapiti, he feels confident enough to stalk lion with dogs. They do not have to sniff far. The hair rises on their backs as they follow catspaw prints down a dry donga, and his horse boy hisses, “
Simba.
”

He follows the line of the pointing black finger. Just four yards away, something yellow moves in a patch of tall grass. He fires at once with his .405 Winchester. With nothing but color to aim at, he does not know if the movement will materialize into a lion. Kermit fires too. Presently two half-grown cubs emerge, both wounded. They have to be finished off.