Masailand, 2006.  A scene that could have occurred in 1906, or 1806, or… But memories are more real than any photograph.

By Terry Wieland

Dreaming, Remembering, Reliving

Three levels of fantasy

In a column for Esquire in 1935, called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter,” Ernest Hemingway reflected on the mechanics of writing and, in particular, how to recreate action so as to have your reader experience it as you did.

The key, he told the Maestro— “Mice,” for short, a young man who’d traveled to Key West to seek advice from the master—is to relive the event, isolate the specific thing that caused your emotion and, if you then describe it truly enough, you will evoke the same emotion in your reader.  Hemingway’s example was watching the fishing line strip as a big fish ran, and the line rising into the air and squeezing out the water so it hung in drops, refracting the sunlight.

I read that first in 1977—I can remember exactly where and when, but I won’t belabor it—and took it to heart as I attempted to write serious literature in the years that followed.  First, I learned that reliving, and simply remembering, are two different things.  Those who relive and then recreate, on paper, are a world away from those who merely remember and describe.

For the record, the former is exhausting.  At the end of a morning, you may be completely wrung out and have one short paragraph to show for it. The latter is considerably less taxing, depending on the writer’s determination to do it well, which is why we have good writers, bad writers, and those who should never touch a keyboard.

In 1988, I hunted Alaska brown bears on Montague Island and, some months later, attempted to recreate the incident in a magazine article.  It entailed less than 60 seconds of action as the bear came in fast, responding to a deer call, and finally dropped, five shots later, with its neck broken.  In attempting to relive that event, I learned that one can, through a process almost of self-hypnosis, relive something but (in my case at least) one can do it only three times.  After the third time, it becomes merely remembering.

Something similar occurred, attempting to relive a very hot few moments with a Cape buffalo high on Mount Longido in 1993.

Sometime in the early 1970s, Gene Hill, who wrote for Guns & Ammo and later for Field & Stream, made a safari in Kenya.  He loved Africa, and after he got home he kept his bags still partly packed with his Africa gear, just in case he got a last-minute invitation to return.  This remained in his closet until after Kenya closed hunting in 1977 and he knew he would never go back—not, at least, to the places he’d been and remembered with a fondness so fierce it resembled Humbert Humbert’s feelings for Lolita.

Hill, an extremely gifted writer, wrote about finally unpacking his things, surrendering to the reality that the dream could never come true.  Not now.  The Kenya he’d hunted, and experienced, and grown to love, was gone.  All he had left were dreams.  At least, he called them dreams.

Reading that piece, now almost 50 years later, I began reflecting on the difference between dreams—anticipation of things that may never come—and memories—recollection of things that really happened.  And, finally, the reliving of an event the way Hemingway described it.

As age has crept up on me, I find myself, usually in the early afternoon, feeling the need to sprawl in a nice chair and close my eyes, just for a bit.  Very rarely do I actually fall asleep, so this hardly qualifies as the much-storied “nap.”  I do, however, descend the cosmic stairs toward nap-dom, one step at a time, and occasionally enter a realm, in the infinitesimal interface between sleeping and waking, that is like time travel.

It’s not a dream and it’s never long; it’s a snatch, a snippet—a glimpse at a real place, that I really experienced, years before.  The glimpse is brief, but so intense as to be almost painful.  The water of the lake is real water, the smell of the juniper is real, and the ferns in the hot sun.  Rarely is there any action, just a vivid image lasting only seconds, after which I always jerk back to consciousness, and I am often panting.

Never having been hypnotized, I can’t say if this is similar.  From what I’ve read, it appears to be.  Sometimes I can sort of will it to happen, but more often as I drift off my mind wanders and suddenly, there I am—in a tent in Africa in the early morning, with the ever-present cooing of doves, or walking into a biltong shop in Pretoria and smelling the droewors.  And the smell of treated canvas, like old tents?  Back in the army, back in a campground at the age of eight, back in the Okavango.  Could be any of them.  Ah, but that old canvas smell!

Sometimes it can be sparked by a whiff of gunpowder or, more usually, a spice.  The merest sniff of cumin and other, mysterious, spices can put me back in the open market in Kampala in 1971— a world that has truly disappeared—and the smell of creosote, well, we won’t go into that.  But if you can’t imagine creosote as an aphrodisiac, think again.

The most famous instance of this phenomenon in literature is Marcel Proust and his taste of a madeleine cake dipped in lime tea that brought forth all the memories recounted in Remembrance of Things Past—all seven wondrous volumes—and in the outdoor field, closer to home, Robert Ruark’s The Old Man and the Boy series in Field & Stream in the 1950s.

Memories sparked by an aroma are, of course, a different thing than the deliberate drawing of one’s self back into an event in order to isolate the emotional center, à la Hemingway.  In that case, I found, if you do it only twice, leaving the third and last time for a later date, then you always have it, like a diamond tucked away for safe keeping.  It’s always available to be taken out and relived, but you never do it, because then you wouldn’t have it anymore.

This is, I know, a long way from Gene Hill’s Field & Stream column about dreaming of Africa, and remembering, and—in his case—regretting that which once was and would never be again.

The truth is, and I hate having to quote Thomas Wolfe, who wrote only one memorable thing in his word-drenched life, and that a title, but you can’t go home again.  No, really, you can’t.  Many have tried, and maybe that’s why children today never want to leave home in the first place.  But once gone, we quickly learn that what we left ceased to exist the moment we left it.

My Kampala of 1971, or Nairobi of 1972, or even, most recently, 1999.  The Okavango in 1990?  The Rift in 2006?  Gawd, I even remember when downtown Johannesburg was a pleasant place, and the Carlton Hotel in the center of town, with its pinball arcade in the bottom floor, attracted the little black African kids off the street, and they would challenge us to pinball matches and always win.  They were pinball wizards worthy of The Who, and I learned a few words of Xhosa and Zulu, long since buried, and I wonder where they are now?

One time, I caught a whiff of woodsmoke and was instantly transported to a campfire outside Gaborone, grilling mutton on sticks.  I want to say the wood then was acacia, and there are varieties of acacia in America, so the firewood must have been some of that.  Where it came from I have no idea, and it passed as quickly as it came.  More’s the pity.

Speaking of wood, sand a piece of walnut and you’ll find me back in my parents’ basement in the 1960s, refinishing the stock on a Cooey .22.  Or melt some linotype for bullets and I’ll be in the composing room of the newspaper where I started out way back when, and everything will be bright in spring and everything will be possible, because that’s the way it is when you’re 19.

They say your sense of smell is the strongest link to memory, and I have found nothing to dispute that.  Hearing—music—is a distant second, while sight and touch do not figure at all.

What I’ve learned from all this is that our memories long outlast even the most pleasurable experience.  They are a world, however, that most people never bother to really, truly, explore.  Which is unfortunate cuz, I hate to tell you, eventually that’s all you’ll have, and a little practice ahead of time never hurts.  It’s all I have left of the Africa I knew.

By Terry Wieland

But what about snakes?

What about them?

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about snakes and, to be honest, I haven’t missed it.  Writing about snakes requires thinking about snakes and not being a snake guy, my mind prefers to dwell upon such burning questions as “Is a Mauser 98 better than a pre-64?” and “Rigby double, or Westley Richards?”  Hmmm.

But, the other day, the question came up yet again when, talking about Africa, my interlocutor fixed me with that familiar anxious look and asked, “But what about snakes?”

Snakes?  What snakes?  We were talking about living in a tent versus a house with walls and a door, and how sleeping in the open, under the stars, is preferable even to a tent.  No snakes involved.

“I thought there were always snakes,” she said.  “How do you keep them out of the tents?”

That’s a hard question to answer because it presumes that snakes are always trying to get into tents, surrounding them in the night, slithering about, probing for openings.  Such is not, in my experience anyway, the case.

But it brought to mind a tale I read when I was a child, about an expedition somewhere in South America.  The members had been together a long time, were thoroughly sick of one another and barely speaking.  As a result, they neglected basic camp chores like clearing all the grass away around the campfire— a measure to deter rodents and, hence, snakes.  During the night, a snake came through the grass, slithered into a sleeping bag, and curled up on the stomach of the sleeping man.

To cut a rather frightening story short, he remained motionless and terrified throughout the night, and they were only able to persuade the snake to leave quietly the next day by taking away all shade and leaving man, sleeping bag, and serpent to slowly roast through the heat of the day.  Finally, hot and annoyed, the snake slithered out past his head—it was a bushmaster, and truly deadly—and was hacked to death with machetes.

That is one of the two childhood experiences to which I can trace my herpetophobia.  Reading that story, in the Reader’s Digest, when I was seven or eight, came after my first encounter with a snake wherein, around the age of five, I was walking down a trail and stepped on a garter snake under some leaves.  It writhed up around my ankle, I ran home screaming, and that was that:  Herpetophobe to this day.

Well, maybe not quite a ‘phobe’.  In the interests of journalistic accuracy, I looked up the definition and find that I’m on the cusp between actual phobia and mere fear and dislike.  I don’t like looking at photos of snakes, but I don’t break out in a cold sweat, have a panic attack, and refuse to leave the house for a week.

Given that attitude, though, you would think snakes would have been uppermost in my mind when I first thought of going to Africa, but they never were.  It may be because none of the African writers who dominated my teenage years—Robert Ruark especially, but also John Taylor and Stuart Cloete—dwelt on snakes at any length.  (It was years later that I read Cloete’s novel, Mamba.  Thank the Lord.)

Uganda is not what you would call a snake paradise, but it has enough of them.  Mambas, cobras, that kind of thing.  Pythons.  But it was three months after I first set foot on the tarmac at Entebbe Airport that I encountered my first snake, and that was in a guerrilla camp in the southern Sudan.  It was a green mamba, and it was dangling from a branch above a waterhole where we were having our first bath in a week.  It was, I suspect, just curious, because it turned and climbed back into the foliage, leaving us to lather and rinse.  The Anyanya with the Lee-Enfield just grinned and shrugged.

That was in 1971.  I didn’t encounter my next African snake until 1990, and that was after two more trips to Africa that had taken me to Kenya, Uganda again, South Africa, South-West Africa (now Namibia), and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  In 1990, in Tanzania, we were driving along a mountain track on the edge of the Rift, came around a bend, and there was a python curled up in the rocks.  We stopped and looked.  It raised its head and gave us that cool python stare.  We stared back, then decided it was up to us to move along, so we did.  I can’t say I shrugged, but at least I didn’t leap in the back and cover my head with a blanket or reach for the .450.

I’ve written this before, but if you are snake-sensitive, it’s a good idea to find out how your professional hunter feels about reptiles before you sign the cheque.  Most are indifferent, feeling about snakes the way most of us feel about poison ivy—best avoided but not life-threatening.  Others, however, mercifully rare, actually like snakes—like them—and want to introduce the rest of us to the joy of communing with serpents.

One such is Chris Dandridge, son of Darryl Dandridge, who was a noted snake admirer.  One time, reportedly, Darryl bet that he could stay in a large cage full of venomous snakes, naked, for a week.  He did and survived.  Or so I’m told.  Chris grew up with snakes.  We were wending our way north into Kwando one time, looking for a campsite.  No tents, sleeping under the stars, but this was something I’d grown to enjoy, memories of the bushmaster and the sleeping bag notwithstanding.

There was a clearing with a big old tree at the edge, which had a cavernous hole near the base.

“Better not here,” Chris said.  “There’s a black mamba that lives in that tree.”

A PH who knows the home address of a mamba?  At least he didn’t suggest we stop in for tea.

For various reasons, mambas seem to grip the imagination of African visitors more than any other snake.  Undoubtedly, they are dangerous.  According to the charts, their venom is right up there, they have the longest fangs and can inject the most venom, they can climb trees like a monkey and are so fast they can overtake a running horse.  Or so I’ve read.  Other accounts dispute the speed, and some insist they are not as aggressive as their reputation would have us believe.

My feeling is that if they are only half as fast, half as deadly, and as laid back as a hippie on weed, I’d still rather avoid them.

I have one black mamba story that various witnesses swear is true.  In the early 90s, the editor of Outdoor Life, a noted herpetophobe, was on safari in the Okavango.  He woke up in the night to the sound of scurrying, but it stopped, and he thought nothing more of it.  They went out hunting the next morning and returned to camp around noon.  He went into his tent and out the back into the attached lavatory.  There, coming in through the shower’s drain, was a black mamba.

Our hero went screaming out the front, the mamba continued on into the shower—he had no choice— then turned and slithered out the way he’d come.  The PH gathered some folks and beat through the bush behind, flushed the mamba, and killed it.

They pieced it together afterwards and concluded the mamba had been in the tent the night before and caught the scurrying mouse, pursuing it under the bed, up onto the chair, and so on.  Our man packed his bag and was at the airport in Maun by nightfall.

That story went the rounds of hunting and shooting writers for years thereafter, and while we all laughed, we all secretly wondered what we would have done under the same circumstances.  I can guarantee you, for a few nights at least, I would not have slept well.

Superb trackers and valued friends, from left:  Lekina Sandeti, Momella Torongoi, and Abedi Shimba.  Lekina and Momella are both Masai.  Abedi, who died a few years ago, was part-Bushman, and taught both Roger and Derek Hurt about tracking and bushcraft from an early age.

By Terry Wieland

“Hurry, Hurry! Shoot! SHOOT!” 

(And other helpful comments) 

Towards the end of his career in Africa, Robert Ruark had one particular tracker named Metheke without whom, he wrote, “I feel naked in the bush.”  He does not make it clear exactly who Metheke worked for when Ruark was not around.  Presumably, it was one of the Ker & Downey professional hunters, but Metheke always seemed able to detach himself to accompany Ruark, no matter who he was hunting with at the time.  Or so Ruark would have us believe.  He was Man Friday to Ruark’s Robinson Crusoe.

Ruark was very adept at creating ideal situations that embed themselves in your mind, making you seek out such perfection on every hunting trip henceforth.  Alas, perfection in hunting — and especially in hunting companions — is a very scarce commodity.  On rare occasions I have met trackers in Africa who compare favorably with the sainted Metheke.  Lekina Sandeti, a Masai who works for Robin Hurt in Tanzania, is one.  Cuno, who worked for Chris Dandridge in Botswana, is another; I never did know Cuno’s surname.  Nor did I know Charles’s surname, who was Clive Eaton’s tracker and always dressed in a shirt and hat more in keeping with a beach in Hawaii than on the track of a Cape buffalo.  His attire belied his ability, however, which was second to none when it came to finding game and tracking it.

Books and stories from old Africa often depicted trackers and gun bearers in less than flattering terms.  Some were outright racist to a point which, in this day and age, causes even the most non-politically-correct to cringe.  Even those who purported to like and respect the safari staff were often condescending in their treatment of native people and their foibles.  Most wrote about their trackers the way a wingshooter writes about a particularly gifted bird dog.  Ruark, I hasten to add, did like and respect them.  At times he was critical, but never condescending.

I don’t claim to be any less inherently racist — or at least, race-conscious — than other men of my age and background, but I have always tried to write about Lekina, Cuno, Charles, and the others in the same terms I wrote about the white professionals who headed up safaris.  Perhaps this is because, 20 years before I ever went on safari in Africa, I went there as a freelance foreign correspondent and spent long periods living in grass huts, mud huts, and, on occasion, refugee and guerrilla camps.  (Grass huts, by the way, are the most comfortable, and you become fond of the lizards that scurry around.)

In the course of that and later such expeditions, I learned enough Swahili to get by, or at least enough to show the trackers I was making the attempt, and this always seemed to put them on my side.  Earning the respect of your trackers is, of course, the best case.  Failing that, not incurring their enmity is something to be desired.  One time, I was told about a client in Botswana, hunting with some Bushmen, who made the mistake of treating them badly, constantly denigrating them and generally being a boor.  It has been my experience that people respond in kind, and that a little politeness goes a long way.  At any rate, the Bushmen determined on some revenge.  Knowing they could go long periods without water, while the fat American needed a drink every fifteen minutes, they took him out one morning and did a long, looping circle under the hot sun, with no water.  Hours later, dehydrated, hallucinatory, and almost dead with fatigue, they delivered him back to camp.  I don’t know whether he changed his ways, but the guides certainly got a bit of their own back.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of respect, mutual or otherwise, but simply competence.  For every superb Lekina or Cuno, I have met trackers and other staff that seem to have been hired at short notice out of the local saloon, and have no more idea about hunting than if they’d been hired to teach quantum physics.  One time, I was trying to locate a wounded wildebeest in the thick bush of Natal.  With no tracks or blood trail, going back the next day to search for it was like looking for the proverbial needle, but we had to try.

We split up, with the PH and one tracker going one way, and a tracker and me going the other.  By some miracle, a lone wildebeest bull appeared on an open slope about 200 yards distant.  We had no shooting sticks, and no convenient tree.  I was studying the bull in my binoculars while the tracker gesticulated wildly, insisting it was the wounded animal.  My only chance was an offhand shot.

“Hurry!” he shouted.  “Shoot!  Shoot!”

Already out of breath, nervous, I tried to place the dancing crosshairs somewhere near the shoulder, and yanked the trigger with predictable results.  The bull melted into the undergrowth.  My guide looked at me, practically in tears.  “Why you not shoot?” he asked, obviously thinking that killing an animal with a rifle required nothing more than pointing it in more or less the right direction and pulling the trigger.  The wounded bull — if it was our bull — was gone, then and for all time.  I should add that it was a hell of a head.

Guides like that make you even more nervous and likely to miss.  Others, like Lekina, know that their own chances of survival go up considerably if they keep you calm in a tight situation, and try to make things easier rather than harder.  Shouting “Shoot, shoot!” when the client is either not ready, or not in a good position to do so, accomplishes all the wrong things.

I’ve heard of, although I’ve never experienced, the extreme case of a guide running on ahead to try to spot a wounded animal, and then turning around and shouting to the hunter to “Shoot!” when he can’t even see it from where he is.  And, naturally, the shout then spooks the beast to make tracks.

On my first safari in Botswana, my professional hunter was a Tswana by the name of Patrick Mmalane, a Sandhurst graduate and captain in the Botswana Defence Force.  He had signed on as a professional hunter with Safari South.  Naturally, he being black as the ace of spades, I insisted on referring to him as my “white hunter,” which caused great mirth among the trackers.  Since Patrick and I both held the Queen’s Commission, we declared our end of the dining table to be the officers’ mess.  We became quite good friends, and I went back the following year for a four-week odyssey wherein we drove around Botswana, wingshooting, seeing the sights, and setting a number of local beer-drinking records.

Patrick eventually left hunting and rejoined the BDF, and the last I heard he was a lieutenant-colonel.  I mention all this because it was interesting to see his relationship with our trackers.  They were Bushmen, in whole or in part, and as at home in the bush as Patrick and I were on a drill square.  While Patrick was good with a rifle, and held command in an easy grip, he was not a tracker, and game spotting was not his long suit.  The trackers treated him with the same somewhat bemused respect that an experienced sergeant-major accords to a newly appointed young officer.

In the end, we all proved ourselves to each other — and earned whatever respect we had — through our own abilities, and by the end of the week, one Cape buffalo bull and several lesser species later, we all got along with a kind of easy familiarity.  Everyone did his job, no one screwed up, and we had a pretty happy ship.

It would be nice to be able to say that eventually I ended up with one tracker who did for me what Metheke did for Ruark, but those were other days.  A tracker/gun bearer/factotum of the Metheke stamp is either a distant memory or, more likely, an ideal that never really existed — certainly not for visiting client-hunters like Ruark, or me.

One of my most treasured memories of hunting in Africa, however, is when, on my second safari with him, Lekina Sandeti invited me to be a guest in his hut, and to drink a cup of the buttermilk-like concoction that is a staple of Masai life.  This was, I was told by my PH, a great honor.  Whether Metheke ever did the same for Robert Ruark, I don’t know.  As I say, those were different times.