His Father's Son by Tim Brady

Author:Tim Brady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-02T14:50:44+00:00

Part of the agreement in letting their husbands make this journey was that the Roosevelt brothers’ wives, Eleanor and Belle, would get their own trip to India. At its outset, they made plans to greet Ted and Kermit in Kashmir in early November. Consequently, they traveled together to the sub-continent, following the same general route as their husbands, and arrived in Srinagar, in the northwestern Kashmir area of India, remarkably enough, on the same day that Ted and Kermit were just finishing their last leg of the expedition. In fact, they met their spouses on the road outside of Srinagar coming down the mountain from their three-thousand-mile journey.

Sporting sheepskin coats, boots, caps, and thick beards, Ted and Kermit were hardly recognizable. “After dinner,” Eleanor wrote, “Belle and I had but one idea, to get their beards off as fast as possible, as we made them sit one at each end of the table while we worked over them with sharp scissors. After twenty minutes of shearing the table looked as if we had been making over a rather poor quality mattress, and it was a great relief to see their faces again.”14

The two couples spent a reunion month hunting in Kashmir, where both Eleanor and Belle set out in pursuit of a native deer called barasingha. Shooting was a skill that each of the wives had acquired through years of being married to Roosevelts. They were hunting at six thousand feet “wearing all the sweaters we could find,” Eleanor would later write; Ted was with Eleanor in one party, Kermit with Belle in another. Eleanor’s excitement caused a missed shot the first time she spotted a stag; a second effort was no more fruitful.

On the third day out, word came from Kermit and Belle’s camp that she had gotten her barasingha that morning, an eleven-point stag, and Eleanor was determined not to be upstaged by her sister-in-law. They were leaving the next day at noon, which gave Eleanor just the morning to get her deer.

They fell behind the hunting guides on the start of the climb, and Ted gave her one end of his muffler and helped pull her up the hill until they saw the guides paused on a ledge with field glasses, indicating they saw barasinghas ahead. Eleanor hustled to get to their location but was too winded to shoot. “An easier shot could not have been imagined. But it was no use. I was still so winded by the climb that I could not even point by rifle, much less sight it. . . . The stag disappeared behind the rocks. Now I wished I had taken a chance when I realized that now I had to run uphill for some distance in order get another, much harder shot!”

Somehow they got up the hill, but the deer had spotted them and was running toward the crest of the hill. “It was now or never,” Eleanor wrote. She shouldered her rifle and fired off six shots “just as fast as I possibly could.

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