cellini's Diaryland Diary

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A bit of a ramble about the Tsavo lions

The January is creeping in now. Deer season over, Christmas & New Years Eve behind us. The best part of winter is gone. Now we're left with the long hard slog into the end of March, when signs of spring will arrive and we'll remember that there are things in the world to look forward to.

Winter is the best time of year for people who don't really have to deal with it. The people I've known who have said that they love winter best of all have been without exception individuals who were either not responsible for $600 a tank fill ups for an oil furnace or were rolling in so much money that the bill didn't mean anything.

Well. If worst comes to worst I can always poach deer for food and put the grocery money into fuel for the furnace.

This isn't what I ever really expect out of life when I was young. A bitter, cold January sort of life where everything is all held together with baling wire and duct tape and there's nothing in the offing to make it any better.

I'm not depressed exactly. Not moping around and hating life. Just confronted with the realities of my situation.

The one thing that I might be able to do without any money to speak of would be to devote more time to working on my book. I really don't think there is any way that I could finish it this year because I think important parts of it haven't happened yet. The book that's in me and wants to get out most of all right now is about hunting (big surprise). The process of hunting experiences affecting the whole way that I see the universe. The thesis is something that I am still not exactly comfortable with spelling out here. I don't know that there is really much of a market for this. But when I sit down at a keyboard, it's the book that I find myself writing.

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I finally got around to reading 'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo,' by J. H. Patterson. I am glad that I read it now rather than a few years ago because I've read quite a bit about lion hunting in the past year and was able to better understand the story.

Forget 'The Ghost and the Darkness.' That was the movie that was supposed to be about the man eaters of Tsavo. It was made by idiots who changed way, way too much of the story. The real story is so much worse than what the movie captures. What struck me about Patterson's book was the fact that he had no fucking idea what he was doing. I guess he'd done some tiger hunting in India and reckoned himself a big cat expert, although I wonder how much of that tiger hunting was the sort of thing involving 300 coolies beating the bushes and banging pots and pans while the Great White Hunter strides forward with a dozen other armed men around him. I've heard of tiger hunting in India being done in that manner and while I suppose that it is effective, it's not particularly good preparation for hunting down man-eaters in Africa.

What really made me cringe was reading about this idiot sitting in an ambush waiting for one of the lions with a double barreled 12 gauge shotgun loaded with solid slugs. Now I have messed about with 12 gauge slugs a bit. Within close range they are very, very effective on deer-sized targets. With modern saboted slugs they are even more accurate and effective than ever before. But with the very basic slugs in the non-magnum-length actions that were available in 1898, penetration was frankly shit. A lion is a very big animal. The lead slug that penetrates to a deer's vitals will probably do little more than crack the rib of a grown lion. Lions are big motherfuckers. Patterson let the lion have it with both barrels almost simultaneously from about a dozen yards away and naturally all that resulted was a flesh wound, creating a truly pissed-off man-eating lion who was then a little more educated about avoiding people with guns than he had been before.

This was probably the worst thing that Patterson could possibly have done at that moment, short of actually attacking the beast with his bare hands. In fact, a dumb-assed stunt like that would usually result in the hunter's death by the end of the day. Either in a charge at that moment or maybe an hour later the angry, wounded lion has doubled back on to his own blood trail through the long grass so that he can pounce on the Great White Moron as he attempts to follow it up. Only pure dumb luck allowed Patterson to survive.

What he should have done was used his rifle and left the shotgun at home. Shotguns have no place on a lion hunt. Sometimes a 12 gauge loaded with buckshot is just the thing for following up a wounded leopard in thick brush, but a leopard is a much smaller (though no less deadly) animal requiring less total penetration to kill.

Oh yeah, his rifle. Dude was often using a .303 of some sort with a magazine. I'm guessing an early Lee-Enfield action made into a sporter? I happen to have a later version of that same rifle that I recently gave to Trish to use as a deer rifle. That would have been a smarter pick than the shotgun for certain. It's easy to say that Patterson should have been using a serious big game rifle in .450 or something, since nowadays we think of cartridges with .303 type ballistics as being deer medicine at best. But at the time .303 was probably the best thing going in terms of a cartridge that was remotely accurate, offered adequate penetration and was commonly available in Africa. Karamoja Bell killed something like 100 elephants with .303 early in his career so it can't be all bad.

On the one hand, people like to boil it down to the fact that Patterson did in fact manage to kill both lions. He's given a lot of credit as a hero for that. Which is true in the sense that he took a lot of personal risk to kill these man-eating lions and eventually succeeded. Bravo. However, his constant fuck-ups led to these lions remaining at large for around 9 months, killing at least 135 people. The number may well be much higher than that, given the fact that not much was made out of a native, rural African dying by any means at the time. People disappeared all the time for various reasons and there was usually no official action or investigation.

Early on, Patterson should have called in a serious professional hunter with experience in sorting out lions rather than trying to do the job himself. Patterson was the foreman of a railway construction project. Not a seasoned African hunter. His clumsy attempts to kill the beasts only succeeded in educating them and making them even harder to kill in the future. Had he brought in a pro early on, scores of human lives could have been saved.

All of this is easy for me to say, given that the hairiest beasts I've ever personally had to worry about in the woods are black bear and coyotes. Hardly on par with facing down a known man-eating lion. Even though he fucked the whole thing up badly, Patterson did in fact repeatedly walk or crawl into the scrub with the full knowledge that a pair of man eaters could charge him, kill him and literally eat him before he could so much as flick the safety off. Someone can be reckless and ignorant while also being very brave.

2:27 pm - January 22, 2008

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