Too Close to the Sun (32 page)

At this late stage in his progression from youth to maturity, Denys had learned to use his innate talents. It was a vital point on his journey of self-discovery. “I sure reckon I know about as much about the job as most of these folk who take parties out,” he told Kermit, evidently adopting his friend’s American phrasing. “So if you know of any pleasant people who want to shoot put them in touch with me. You know the sort of people I should get on with
and
the ones I should
not.
Don’t send any of the latter!” Several dozen white men in Kenya were already hiring themselves out as hunters, and their stories were the currency of the Norfolk. Everyone knew how a tusker at Masongaleni had skewered the legendary Bill Judd, smashed him to a pulp, and knelt on the bloody remains (it was news in London, such was Judd’s status). How a lion tore out Fritz Schindelar’s stomach near Mount Longonot, or how Charles Cottar’s wife carried on filming while a leopard attacked him. Or how Eddie Grafton had had his face ripped off by the horn of a charging buffalo and brave gun bearers had been sliced by a leopard’s dewclaw. Fabulous figures such as Alan Black, Philip Percival, and R. J. Cunninghame emerged from the bush every few months to slake their thirst at the Norfolk bar and add to the repository of hunting lore, second only to the fisherman’s in its fecundity. Many beasts, apparently, showed a Rasputin-like reluctance to die. One professional hunter reported that a client’s .275 solid bullet had gone clean through a buffalo’s arteries above the heart, his own four bullets from a .470 broke a shoulder and tore through heart, lungs, and guts, “and yet he came on until he was dead.” Like gambling, hunting involved risk, the challenge of outwitting one’s opponent, and the adrenaline-charged thrill of winning. Like golf and flying, it demanded total concentration, and Denys was bored by half measures.

While he was in England the summer his mother died, Denys had upgraded his arsenal in preparation for his new role. A serious East African hunter needed heavy-, medium-, and light-gauge rifles as well as a shotgun, as his quarry ranged from an eight-pound dik-dik to a six-ton elephant. To shoot the really big stuff, some favored a .505 Gibbs, which took three cartridges in the magazine and one in the breech and kicked like an ostrich, though overall, at that time, a .470 double was the most favored rifle in East Africa. One could get in two shots, as opposed to the single of a bolt-action gun, and it was therefore ideal for stopping dangerous game at close quarters. All doubles had side-by-side barrels in those days, not the vulgar over-and-under kind. Heavy barrels were easier to swing than light rifles, and they didn’t fly into the air with the powerful kickback. Blix shot with a .600 Jeffrey, which was loathed by his gun bearer because it weighed fifteen pounds. Everyone had his favorite handmade gun—Bill Judd his trademark .577 Westley Richards, Bunny Allen a double .470 Rigby, John Douglas a .500 double-barreled rifle that especially suited him, as he had only one arm. The published journals of explorers and travelers crackled with lists of their firepower, and when big shots gathered they never exhausted the subject of bullets (with copper jackets, or without?), drops, castoffs, stock measurements, and trigger pull pressures, and they never agreed on anything.

Denys had settled on a secondhand Rigby .350, a medium-caliber bolt-action rifle that used 225-grain soft bullets and could deal with everything up to and including lions. He already had a 6.5 mm Austrian Mannlicher for antelope, and for his big “stopper”—to fell charging buffalo, elephants, and hippos with solid bullets—he asked his gunsmith to rebarrel his existing Lancaster .450 No. 2 to an ordinary .450, as it was hard to find ammunition for the No. 2. For his shotgun, required on safari to shoot guinea fowl or other birds for the pot, Denys was able to carry on with his standard, Birmingham-made Army & Navy twenty-bore, the weapon he used in Lincolnshire to shoot pheasants and rabbits.

Big-game hunting had been fashionable in the Protectorate since about 1906, and newspaper photographs of wealthy men crouched between an arc of ivory had thrilled boys of Denys’s generation, who were already devouring tales of African adventuring from the pages of Henty. Sportsmen from America, Europe, and South Africa converged on the Norfolk to be kitted out with hunting gear by Indian tailors who customized bush jackets with cartridge loops sewn to fit the sportsman’s barrel. Before the advent of motor vehicles, at least thirty porters were hired for each hunter, in addition to headmen, skinners, gun bearers, and the rest. Once assembled, the whole party vanished into the bush for three or four months. (“In those days,” Bunny Allen recalled, “people not only had money to burn—they had time to burn too.”) Until 1919, the wealthiest clients traveled with the firm of Newland & Tarlton, which had an office in Piccadilly and, on the ground, a limitless supply of mostly Swahili porters kitted out in dark blue jerseys with N & T embroidered on the front in red. (The porters were issued with boots but weren’t required to wear them, so they slung them around their necks and kept them for display.) Their safaris were luxurious affairs, featuring Jaeger blankets, proper beds, and vintage wines served by uniformed waiters over a dinner supplied from a Fortnum & Mason safari hamper. Trackers salted kills where they fell and heads were sent to Nairobi by runner and thence to London, where they were mounted by the taxidermy firm Rowland Ward, or to New York, where Jonas Brothers of Yonkers turned them into rugs with fanged mouths at one end. For Teddy Roosevelt’s 1909 safari from Mombasa to the Upper Nile, five hundred Africans were hired, porters carried four tons of fine salt, and Roosevelt personally shot 296 animals with his .405 Winchester or .450 Holland & Holland double. When Denys began to hunt for a living, he signed up with Safariland, the firm of outfitters that had replaced Newland & Tarlton. But by the twenties, the settlers’ attitude to game conservation had polarized. On the one hand, wild animals were a menace to the agricultural community and farmers wanted them culled, or at least controlled. On the other hand, big-game hunters who constituted an important source of revenue were opposed to any controls. The government’s job was to balance the conflicting demands of the two positions. By the early 1900s, licenses had been introduced throughout the empire to regulate the slaughter of big game, and reserves had been established well before the war, both reflections of a gradual dawning of awareness in the British consciousness. But still, every sportsman wanted his name in Rowland Ward’s book of game records.
^*35
The white hunter was paid to conduct licensed tourists through the bush within the confines of legislation. He was to lead his clients to trophies and ensure that the killing was “clean,” at the same time providing maximum thrill for minimum damage. He was a knight-errant, one of the most romantic figures in colonial history, combining a love of animals with a mastery of the natural world. Denys was perfectly cast.

At the beginning of 1925, Denys took out his first professional client, an American named Maclean. Piles of canvas and wooden crates snaked along the Nairobi street as Denys checked and rechecked an inventory in which tentage alone embraced mess tents, sleeping tents, lavatory tents, shower tents, and kitchen tents. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and John Ford hired Safariland to outfit the four-month
Mogambo
shoot in 1952 (the stars were Grace Kelly, Clark Gable, and Ava Gardner), they even had a jail tent in case anyone got rowdy. Furniture included tables, chairs, a fridge, and sometimes, as when J. A. Hunter took out an Indian maharaja, a piano. Many hours were spent adding, multiplying, and dividing to ensure that the commissariat would not be found wanting: a pound of tea lasted one man a fortnight, and a one-pound tin of marmalade a week. Each porter consumed three pounds of
posho
(maize flour) a week, and no porter would carry more than fifty pounds. Biblical hordes of porters, at least, were rarely necessary after the first war, when motorized safaris began to displace the pedestrian kind. But the early white hunters regretted the advent of roads, arguing that a real hunter should cut his own thoroughfare with a machete.

AT THE NGONG FARM
Tania’s mother, Ingeborg, was approaching the end of a long visit. The servants adored her; they called her Old Memsahib, and when she let her hair down
totos
gathered around to stare—it was so long she could sit on it. As for Tania, on her eleventh wedding anniversary she got a cable informing her that her divorce was final. Denys was away with Maclean, but at the end of January they broke for an excursion into the Ngong Hills with Tania. The slopes were green after unseasonal rains, and the valleys were crowded with buffalo cows and their calves. The nights were cold enough to turn hands blue, and the bearers sat around the fire until late, listening to the gramophone as brindled wild dogs
hoohoo
ed from the forest. On March 5, Tania followed her mother back to Denmark for another course of Salvarsan injections. After the satisfied Maclean returned to America, his bag overflowing with trophies, Denys remained at the farm on his own. He lived there for most of 1925, departing only for his safaris. Later, his friends told Tania that they couldn’t drag him away. He enjoyed his own company. He was reading Roy Campbell’s new poetry anthology,
The Flaming Terrapin,
and making his way through the latest consignment of music he had ordered from Europe.

Denys was an odd mix—a charismatic loner with an immense capacity for friendship and a powerfully independent spirit. He liked a “rip” at the club, especially after a long session in the bush, but he could take or leave a party (“You know that Denys will never normally go out,” Tania complained to her mother). When they were invited to a function in Nairobi, she often went on her own. If they did socialize together, they behaved formally to each other. “When you saw them in a group you never for a moment would think that they were having a love affair,” Bunny Allen noted in the late 1920s. Above all, Denys hated small talk and had an intolerably low threshold for boredom. But the streak of frivolity had not vanished with the years. On the rare nights out at Muthaiga, he still lobbed bread rolls across the dining room or somersaulted over the cretonne-covered armchairs. On one occasion, when he was out on safari, Geoffrey “Tuppy” Headlam, an Eton master, sent him a cable asking, “Do you know Norman Tod’s address?” “Yes,” Denys cabled back.

He was a loyal friend once he recognized a kindred spirit like Hugh Martin, the head of the Land Office. A near-contemporary at Oxford, Martin was a career civil servant who had transferred to Kenya from the Malayan service. Inscrutable and Buddha-like in appearance, he was a committed cynic with a well-stocked mind, and came to Ngong with his wife, Flo, and their eight-year-old daughter, Betty. Once installed, he seldom stirred from his armchair, contemplating the world with Oriental detachment and swigging copious quantities of whiskey. But it was a bad year for friendship. Berkeley’s health had continued to deteriorate. Toward the end of March, he went down to Soysambu, Delamere’s farm, to collect fifteen rams that had been shipped over from Australia. He fell ill there and was obliged to retire to bed. “My rotten heart has got very dicky,” Berkeley wrote in exasperation to his brother John. The doctor advised him to go back to Naro Moru and stay in bed for a month. This he refused to do, settling instead to drink Falernian wine and smoke the finest cigars. The situation at Naro Moru had improved and Berkeley at last had in view “a vista of success.” The farm was running profitably, he had acquired more land, and his old friend Tich Miles had agreed to abandon the lonely job he had taken as a consul at Mega, in southern Abyssinia, and move south to work as Berkeley’s estate manager. In addition, Berkeley was part owner of the fabled White Rhino hotel in Nyeri, and was involved in a promising local dairy scheme as well as a butchery business in Nairobi and a timber concession and mill. On April 21, he was back at Naro Moru, working as usual. He had breakfast and had just set out on his morning tour when his heart finally failed. He was forty-three. Denys was in the Maasai reserve with Maclean when he received a cable from Hugh Martin. He rushed to Naro Moru for the funeral. Above the farm, the Diamond Glacier hung matte on the sloping black shoulder of Mount Kenya, and the scent of witch hazel lay light on the air, like a top note. Berkeley was buried at a spot he had chosen on a bank of the river, in the fretwork of a thorn tree’s shadow. The water there, he liked to say, glacier-cold and filtered through peat and black basalt, was so soft that you could work up a lather just from the oils on your skin. Martin cabled Berkeley’s eldest brother, John, at home at Florence Court in Ireland. “Funeral everything you all could wish stop denys finch hatton came with me and all his friends came all together stop cannot realise yet what a loss we have all sustained stop deepest sympathy coming from all quarters.” Galbraith was in Britain when he heard the news. “The more I reflect on the loss of him, the more I find how inevitably the world has changed for me,” he wrote to their brother John. “We have been to each other the background of every thought or action all our lives and it is as if I had been cut in half.” Perhaps the African Galbraith had killed had also had a brother. Profound love and random cruelty coexist more often than many care to recognize.