Tales of the Gun II

The second gun I owned was a double-barreled .475 magnum, made by Watson Bros. in England. At that time ( 1959)I worked as a diamond prospector in the wilds of Tnaganyika in East Africa. I wanted to go elephant hunting and I needed something bigger than the 30.06 that I used to hunt smaller game. My Winchester had the velocity to kill an elephant but it lacked the punch to stop a charging elephant dead in its tracks. I needed a reliable big-bore elephant gun, preferably double-barreled.

As an employee of Williamson’s Diamond Mine, in Mwadui, I was registered as a resident in Tanganyika Territory. Residency entitled me to an inexpensive elephant license. For thirty English pounds I was allowed to bag 300lbs of ivory or five elephants, whichever came first. Elephant tusks in those days sold on the ivory floors of Dar Es Salaam for eight shillings a pound. Getting a license would give me the excitement of hunting big game and a profit to boot, but I needed to get the gun first.

On a visit back to the mine at Mwadui I heard that an old-timer had died and his widow wanted to sell his elephant gun. I got the Watson for hundred English pounds. It was packed in axle grease. Cleaned up and assembled, I found it in perfect condition, the rifling looked as though it had never been fired. The breech was beautifully engraved. The stock was a might short for me, but other than that, just what I needed.

Stalking elephants, especially if you are looking for a big bull, can take all day. You make camp near a waterhole and the next morning before sun-up you check for tracks in the mud, made during the night. A big bull will leave a rear-foot print that is more than two feet in diameter. Easy to see in the mud, but their soft pads are almost invisible on the hard-pack. On top of that, there is so much movement of the herds in any given area, following the tracks of a lone bull who is eight or nine hours ahead of you, while going through heavy thickets which have been crossed and re-crossed by dozens of other elephants during the day, is impossible without a skilled native tracker. Hard bargaining for more than double the shillings I originally wanted to give him, secured the services of an old Swahili tracker who had been stalking elephants all his life.

Old as he was, with naked legs no thicker than broomsticks, I found it hard to keep up with him. He was a Moslem and wore a dirty white dottie and a greasy fez that might also have been white at one time. . It was astonishing how clued up he was. He never once had to back-track, following a spoor that was mostly invisible to me. Now and then he would show me where the bull brushed a tree trunk, stopped to feed, or lay down for a mid-morning nap. The marks on the tree gave some indication of height, more than nine feet at the shoulder. The tusk grooves in the dirt when he lay down some idea of the size of ivory he was packing. The huge piles of dung he left behind gave us a reasonable measurement of how quickly we were closing the distance on him. Elephants are mainly browsers and eat young bark. They can strip a finger-thick switch as long as your arm, clean as a wick. The extreme tip of the trunk is prehencile. It has the grip of a strong hand. They eat up to four hundred pounds a day. If the dung beetles had already come and rolled balls of two inch in diameter, it meant that we were still two or more hours behind. Warm dung told us that he was nearby. Gases rumbling in his massive belly, sounded much like a tennisball bouncing around inside an empty fifty gallon drum.

I shot the bull in late afternoon on the edge of the escarpment that forms the Great Rift Valley. The mopane forest was so thick I could only see the top of his massive head fifty feet away. He saw me in the same moment that I saw him. His huge ears flared wide and his trunk searched the air for my scent. I was so excited I do not remember pulling the trigger. It was a clean brain shot. He dropped where he stood. When I came up to the massive body, a rush of atavism swept over me. I jumped up on the carcass and danced and hollered like a caveman. It took two hours to hack out the tusks. He carried 80lbs. each side. An old man, near the end of his lfe. I will never forget him, nor him me, I guess.

I shot three more elephants before leaving Tanganyika and sold just under 300 lbs. of ivory at the floor price. I sold the Watson to a friend for the same price I paid.

Fifty years later, when I told my children the elephant story, My eldest son got on the internet and pulled up a site that sells collectors guns. Right there on the screen was an exact duplicate of my old Watson. The price.. $29,000.00!!

Addendum:
Our collective consciousness has changed much over the past half century. And so has mine. I did my big game hunting at the tail end of the colonial era when Britain still ruled East Africa. People enjoyed different values about big game hunting in those days. Hemmingway's stories about hunting in Africa sold big time. Since the 1960's children have been trained to think more conservatively about Mother Nature and our responsibilities to Her. I was schooled in the 40's and 50's. in a consciousness about hunting that goes all the way back to Paleolithic times. Today I caution my children not to step on ants. Things have indeed changed.