Roosevelt the Explorer by H. Paul Jeffers

Author:H. Paul Jeffers [Jeffers, Paul H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461734376
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2013-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

With so much game available he found that he rarely had to stalk. Shooting was from a long range, but by maneuvering, and never walking straight toward the quarry, he was usually able to collect whatever specimen the naturalist desired. Sometimes he shot well, sometimes he did not. Failures were confessed in his diary. One entry noted, “Missed steinbuck [an antelope], pig, impala and Grant: awful.”

Kills were noted in terms of the game, distances, his position when shooting, and where the bullet struck. On one very successful day the diary entry read: “Hartebeest, 250 yards, facing me; shot through face, broke neck. Zebra, very large, quartering, 160 yards, between neck and shoulder. Buck Grant, 220 yards, walking, behind shoulder. Steinbuck, 180 yards, standing, behind shoulder.”

Generally, each head of game that he collected cost him “a goodly number of bullets.” But the expenditure of a few cartridges was “of no consequence whatever compared to the escape of a single head of game which should have been bagged.” Because shooting at a long range required running, his proportion of misses was sizeable, and there were “altogether too many even at short ranges.”

As in his ventures in the West, he would have preferred to go out by himself, but he was not in the Dakotas or the Rockies. He was in Kitanga, and that meant being accompanied by natives who knew the land and the ways of the East African hunt that began before the tropic sun rose to flame over the brink of the world as strange creatures rustled through the brush or fled dimly in the long grass before the light grew bright and revealing.

Here, in the still heat of noon when he sat beneath a tree, with his water canteen, lunch, and a volume from the Pigskin Library at hand, he could peer through his pocket telescope to watch the herds of game that hardly any Americans had ever heard about, and very few had seen for themselves, lying down or standing drowsily in the distance. Then, as the afternoon waned and a red sunset paled to amber and opal, he returned to Sir Alfred’s home with whatever the vast, mysterious African landscape had provided in trophies.

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