HUNTING HEROES OF TO-DAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 April 1938, Page 5

HUNTING HEROES OF TO-DAY

AFTER WILD GOATS. What is your idea of big-game hunting’' Probably you picture roaring lions, snarling ligers, growing grizlies. and charging elephants as l he supreme trophies ( writes E. 11. Tatiersall in the “Daily Mail”). Xet fearsome and dangerous as are these animals, they have little significance to the expert hunter; lie treats them as you wonk! toy with your roll and butter at a restaurant' when waiting for the courses to appear. Sheep and .goats (not those you can see m (he fields, but (lie mountain variety with twirly horns) are his caviare, a luxury he certainly does not enjoy when he is hunting them. You should go some time to the British Sporting Exhibition at the Imperial Institute. even if you have never handled a gun.

Mr. Frank Wallace, famous artist as well as honorary secertary of the Shikar Club, has taken as much trouble in organising il as lie did with the British section in Berlin (for which ho was rightly praised).

Lock at one of those wild goats called Tien Shan ibexea, and think what Colonel John G’Rorke iiad to do Io get them. A journey to the Pamir Plateau ihrougli Russian Turkestan .s no picnic at any time —now it is an impossibility. A couple of native bearers as companions. intense cold, ehoeoluto ami dried food for all meal:', flea-bugs for bed for a month or iwo. ami all he gets, you may say, is :i ;-;o;H. But what a. goat in jhe eyes of ihe world of minters! And if you have bagged a Marco Polo argali (a sheep resident on the Pamir Plateau) your name takes its .ila.re automatically in camp-tire c.on- , vei: at ions. 'i'llis one lie.ntov whom i ll envy -I’apCiin IL-niy Broeklehnrsl. for many year:- Game Warden of ;ho Sudan. He ha", shot the most elusive animal in the world —the glum panda, in the Sze-Chuan district of China. 'i ii -. giant panda, which you can see 'at (lie- exhibit ion. looks like a black and white hetir: he happens to be of the racoon family, quite a harmless animal. There are plumy of iittlo pandas, bni only one giam iias ovei' been shot. t'uptain Br.'KT.lehii!st is (he !■'. G. Selous type of hniilc-r (the original o : . Allan QiiarPninain) -hardy, courageom;, amt actually enjoying iron rations and the solitude <nforced i>y such expeditions.

The Duke of Marlborough is one of the luckiest hunters who has ever visited Kenya— ho is in addition a (irstcltiss shot.

Other men spend live or six weeks 10.000 feet, up in bamboo forests south of Mount Kenya, with the Wandorobos (probably the world's oldest natives, who live in trees! and their weird dogs ns companions in search of the Bongo, the rarest African antelope. Yet (he Duke left camp one evening al 6 o'clock and was back at the Muthaiga. Club in Nairobi by noon next day with a Bongo head. Then he flew from Nairobi down to Dodoma, in Tanganyika, and was back within forty-eight hours With a Greater Kudu. This animal is as large as a Carpathian stag, has big, corkscrewlike horns, and is the king of all antelopes.

To get one usually means a fortnight’s safari, with luck; with no luck a month and no kudu. I am sure a giant panda would walk into the duke's tent on the Pamir Plateau if he were there. My own efforts in the safari world uro as those of Smith Minimus in the Lower Third compared with the hunters whose trophies you can see nt the exhibition. A moose in the Province of Quebec (you might, as well (Ire a charge at your cows in the back' yard lor the danger involved); some lions in Kenya, shot from a tree nicely protected by thorn bushes, the only thing a, lion will not face; and a butlalo head my list. But, there is so much more in hunting than just rhe shot that kills.