But for those who enjoy hunting and wild places and the smell of burnt cordite and the thrill of stalking game animals, hang in there with me.
Karamojo Safari, Bell’s second book, covers a 14-month safari in truly traditional style – one young white man, aged perhaps just 20, buying up large quantities of copper and steel wire, bolts of coloured cloth and sacks of coloured beads and other trinkets, loading up dozens of “boys” and a fair number of donkeys, selecting a few head-men, and marching off into the African wilderness with several rifles and a stack of ammo for each.
The date was about the turn of the 20th century, and much of southern Africa was unexplored by Europeans. Bell went everywhere on foot – and he must have been a pretty tough customer, because he lived, ate and slept rough, covered huge distances, often running for several hours to keep up with fleeing elephant, and sometimes drinking the most putrid of water.
Yet he often notes how totally inferior his strength and stamina was compared to the black African men he hunted with and who carried his booty.
He was also a superb shot, using almost exclusively a little .275 (7mm) Mauser rifle firing long, slender, round-nosed solid projectiles. More often than not he needed only a single shot to instantly drop his prey. Occasionally he also used a .318 Westley Richards, but he really preferred his little 7mm Mauser because he reckoned it was more reliable and all he needed, even in the toughest corner.
Without any immodesty, Bell notes at the end of his story that he had amassed 384 tusks from almost 200 elephants (he traded for a few along the way), which gave him just over 8500kg of first-class ivory. This netted him a clear profit of £6000 after paying out about £3000 for all safari expenses.
He tells his hunting stories with an absolute matter-of-fact honesty, a style which would no doubt upset those for whom blood-sport in any form is anathema, but which is intriguing and hugely interesting to those who know and understand the intense enjoyment of being a hunter.
There will, of course, be those who suggest that hunting is so much different now – more modern firearms, easier access to hunting country, the animals or birds don’t stand a chance against it all. They rather obviously know not what they’re on about.
Bell hunted with a rifle little different from anything available today; most of today’s hunters climb into cold, wet boots every morning they’re in camp and spend six, eight, ten hours each day working through rough country, much like Bell did – and the local lads are usually pretty happy if they come home with one or two animals. Game-bird hunters likewise.
Only recently the duck and upland game-bird season ended, but when the season first began there were hunters out there, shoulders hunched and teeth clenched with that barely-suppressed excitement that grips all hunters when they know open-season is just minutes away. Tens of thousands of them were out there, and loving every second of it. Like Bell, they too needed to have specially-honed skills. The open skies are a heartbreakingly big slab of space, and a duck is an agonisingly small target when it’s doing 50km/h and is 30 metres out from your maimai. Knowing just where and how to lead that bird doesn’t happen by chance.
And whether others like it or not, every month of every year, there are hundreds, if not thousands of Kiwis out there enjoying hunting – chasing pigs, stalking deer, slipping along bush edges or around woolsheds after rabbits, sneaking up on hares in open paddocks, or quietly walking drains, sitting in maimais or frozen holes dug into the mud of crop paddocks, or walking up on a dog on taut point.
The roar was on a few months ago too, brought to a peak with the advent of some sharp, cold weather, and thousands of keen stalkers were out during that time, hoping to score a good trophy head. Every weekend pig-hunters in their scores are out with their dogs, many of them struggling back with a hefty carcase of their backs, and using it as much-needed meat to feed family and friends.
Theodore Roosevelt had no difficulty in being both a frequent hunter and America’s leading conservationist in his day, and at the turn of the twentieth century he said, with remarkable foresight: “In order to preserve the wildlife of the wilderness at all, some middle ground must be found between brutal and senseless slaughter and the unhealthy sentimentalism which would just as surely defeat its own end by bringing about the total extinction of the game.
“It is impossible to preserve the larger wild animals in regions thoroughly fit for agriculture; and it is perhaps too much to hope that the larger carnivores can be preserved for merely aesthetic reasons. But throughout our country there are large regions entirely unsuited for agriculture, where if people only have foresight, they can, through the power of the state, keep the game in perpetuity.”
That’s something this country needs to look at closely.
We already have good, strong laws on game-bird hunting and preservation, and they’ve worked well for a century. Perhaps we could more seriously focus on turning our deer, pigs, tahr, chamois and wapiti into a valued asset, ensuring the animals will always be properly managed, and that hunters will always have good reason to head into the bush and enjoy their chosen sport.
A young friend, Ben, who, like Karamojo Bell a century ago, uses a 7mm rifle, wrote of a hunt in the Whirinaki recently. He made a clean one-shot kill, and at the end of his story, revelled in the joy and the excitement and the sense of achievement hunters feel at being out in the bush or mountains.
“Only a hunter will know the feeling,” he said.
And I’m sad for those who don’t understand that.
Read more from Kinglsey Field here