Two Buffaloes

INTRODUCTION

THIS is the story of a hunter, Lois Worth Woodruff. He was a man who roamed the plains and forests of East Africa during the first half of the last century. He killed animals for sport and helped others to do the same. They collected ‘trophies’.

This story will enrage some people who call themselves ‘conservationists’, and raise again the old argument, which has been on the boil for many years: can the hunter be also a conservationist? Ask that in a crowded room and you will have poked a stick into a hornets’ nest!

There is truth in the answer that, yes, the professional hunter is indeed a conservationist. It is always in his interest to ensure the survival of the animals being hunted to guarantee continued hunting as both a sport and a livelihood. In Britain the deer which roamed the great estates were protected by the lords who, down the centuries, reserved the hunting rights for themselves. Indeed, my grandfather’s older brother, who cared for the horses and hounds of a lord, was not permitted to hunt, but was given two rabbits a week – hunted by the landlord or his gamekeeper – as part of his wages. Even primitive hunters, like Shaka of the Zulus, set aside the vast area between the Black Umfolozi and White Umfolozi rivers as his personal hunting grounds to ensure he would always have animals to hunt – and to eat.

Where animals were not protected by vested interests, animals went the way of the dodo of Mauritius, the blue buck of South Africa and, so very nearly, the bison of the American prairies.

And today, uncontrolled poaching, for which there are many reasons, is threatening wildlife throughout Africa.

I came across Woody, as he was known to friends and clients, in the late 1960s in Durban, South Africa. For many weeks a tape recorder freed me from taking notes while, enthralled, I listened to his stories of guns, animals and adventures. I transcribed the tapes and put them away because then and for the next few decades the groundswell of opinion was against hunting as a sport. Campaigners in Britain won their fight to ban fox hunting, while in South Africa a similar end to jackal hunts saw a population explosion of these animals and the decline of their food species.

Those campaigners are still out there, strident and vociferous as ever, but now, forty years after his death in 1973, I believe it’s time for Woody’s reminiscences to be published. They represent in a way an appeal for hunting, controlled and licenced as Woody’s hunting was, to be recognised as good wildlife conservation.

But more than anything, Two Buffaloes represents a glimpse into how it was then, a piece of East African history, if you like.

Vivian James

2013

Two Buffaloes

1

THE grass on the plains of Kenya near Juja was not tall. Its tawny stalks, no more than twelve inches high, did not pull at the legs and it required no effort to stride out. It was mid-morning when I left the farmhouse with my new rifle. The sun was nearing its zenith and there would be no shadow on the foresight. Looking back on those halcyon days I am always amazed that the small details have been retained; thoughts that were no more than flashes when they did occur.

About two hundred yards from the farmhouse I saw the ear of an animal protruding from behind a group of stones. I stopped. Waited. Watched. It was the ear of an animal not domestic, which meant that it could be shot for the pot. Carefully I raised my rifle and looked along its barrel, waiting until the head turned to present me with a shot which would enter the ear and penetrate through to the brain. The ear twitched again, and I knew that a bullet placed immediately behind it would bring instant death to my prey. I squeezed the trigger and the rifle cracked sharply. The animal’s head disappeared from sight behind the rocks and did not re-appear. I waited for several minutes, but there was no movement from my quarry so I strode forward to inspect the kill.

When I stepped around the rocks I froze in horror. Lying dead was a three-quarter grown lioness. In my hands I held the weapon of death, a .22 long-barrelled rifle.

I was only ten years old.

That was in July 1915.

Lois Woodruff and his trackers with a hartebeest

***

THE coming of electricity had a profound effect on civilisation. Power, light and heat came into the home and factory at the flick of a switch. But, before electricity, moths and mosquitoes on the warm East African coast would fly to their deaths on candles produced at the whaling factory at Mombasa. The invisible force which brought light to the world brought only darkness to those who had lived by the older methods of producing light. The need for candles went dim and the men who set out from Mombasa to hunt whales in the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea in the north, to the Seychelles in the east and South Africa in the far south, came ashore.

My father was an American in the Boston tradition. He had taken his Italian wife to Africa, first to the Seychelles where I was born the seventh of nine children, and then to Mombasa. In the warm waters of the Indian Ocean my father achieved a fulfilment in combining an inherent love of the sea with the thrill of the hunt. When, in 1909, electricity came to Mombasa and Nairobi, my father came ashore to rest like a stranded ship on the beach. He was out of his element and desperately unhappy, and he died soon afterwards.

My eldest brother was married and so was one of my sisters, so my mother had seven children to care for. I was nine years old then, an age when one’s youthful resilience is capable of withstanding the shocks of life – probably through ignorance of their real import – and so it was with a sense of adventure that I readily accepted my mother’s decision that the family should leave Mombasa and settle on a small twenty-acre farm on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Now one of the most modern cities in Africa, Nairobi was then known as Tin Town or Japan Bazaar. Why Japan Bazaar I do not know because there were never any Japanese businessmen there then, or right up to the time I left, except the hairdresser who opened his shop in the dark days before World War 2.

When we first moved to Nairobi the main street was Victoria Street. The shops and houses were wood frames covered with corrugated iron. The New Stanley Hotel and the Norfolk Hotel, hostelries known throughout the world, were there even then. The New Stanley Hotel, when it was first built, was in Government Road. During World War 1 it burned down and it was rebuilt at the corner of Harding Street and Dellamere Avenue (now Jomo Kenyatta Avenue). Hunters coming to Kenya stayed at either when they arrived and while they were equipping for their safaris.

The farm on which we settled was too small to be viable economically. It did not make profits, but it did just give us a living. Everything in Nairobi was cheap – a whole ox cost only twenty shillings, and a hundred pounds of mixed vegetables fetched only a couple of shillings. But these were not the problems of a nine-year-old boy. How my mother managed I do not know, but the small farm twenty miles from the Nairobi Game Reserve was my paradise.

I had owned a Daisy air rifle for as long as I could remember, and with it I hunted birds. For my tenth birthday on 14 July 1915 I was presented with my first real firearm —a .22 long-barrelled rifle.

My primary school education was continued in Nairobi, with long days in the classroom looking forward to the freedom that the weekends would bring when our family would go picnicking at Mitchell’s Forest, about a mile from the town. Today that area falls within the city limits. Our old Model T Ford would grind its way out of the town with as many of the family as it could accommodate and still maintain a modicum of mobility, while the rest of the family would follow in rickshaws drawn the one mile to the forest by large, perspiring Africans. It was during these weekends that I learnt to use the rifle I had been given. I successfully bagged Thomson’s gazelle and dik-dik as well as guineafowl and doves.

During the school holidays I went to Juja, to the farm managed for Sir Northrup McMillan by my brother-in-law, David Bloem. In addition to his farm duties David was also responsible for animal trapping for overseas exports.

***

MY first lioness was only three-quarters grown, but she was magnificent. Her yellow-brown coat was still intact and had not been scarred by age, by fights at her kills, or by squabbles in the pride in which she was reared. I stood and looked, and after the initial feeling of horror had subsided, I was filled with mellow warmth which comes with pride in one’s achievements. I turned and ran back to the farmhouse where I reported excitedly to David.

‘I have shot a lion,’ I shouted.

He was not impressed, and with a certain air of contempt bred from disbelief, he asked: "With what?’

‘With my rifle,’ I glowed.

‘Do you call that a rifle with which to shoot a lion? Are you sure it’s not a buck?’

‘I have shot a lion,’ I repeated, my voice louder with excitement and to emphasise my point.

‘Very well,’ David conceded. ‘If it is a lion I’ll give you twenty rupees. If it’s not a lion I’m going to give you a damn good hiding.’

The twenty rupees was the bounty paid by the Game Department for each lion destroyed. The animals’ tails had to be presented to the bounty officer as proof when claims for payment were made.

David strode out to where the lioness was lying, with me following – walking tall and as proudly as I could. He took a quick look at the animal and turned on me.

‘That’s not a lion – it’s a three-quarters-grown lioness,’ he rebuked.

‘It’s a lion just the same,’ I replied.

Without further comment he cut off my lioness’s tail. My pride evaporated and added deflation came when David confiscated my rifle and marched back to the farmhouse. For the remainder of my holiday at Juja I never got my rifle back, nor did I ever see the twenty rupees I was promised. My annoyance I managed to suppress because I did not get the hiding either.

Later, when David took me home to Nairobi, I realised why he had been angry. He told my mother that he had taken my gun away to prevent me doing anything foolish, and he insisted that I was never to take it to Juja again.

‘Consider if that had been a full-grown lion,’ he said, pausing to let the significance of his statement impact on me.

‘Lois would never have killed a full-grown lion with this toy.’ His anger at me had long faded, and he was imparting his anxiety to my mother with remarkable success. I saw my chances of repossessing my .22 rapidly diminishing as he went on. ‘It is only in very rare circumstances that one kills a lion with a rifle of this calibre. And what would have happened to him if it had been an adult lion and he had only wounded it?’

He was right, of course. My rifle