Terry Wieland - A View from a Tall Hill

Copyright 2000, 2020 by Terry Wieland

Foreword copyright 2020 by Thomas McIntyre

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Tom Lau

Cover photo credit: Terry Wieland took the front cover photograph in the

Okavango Delta in Botswana, in 2008.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3712-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3714-3

Printed in the United States of America

Also by Terry Wieland

Great Hunting Rifles: Victorian to the Present
Dangerous-Game Rifles

Spiral-Horn Dreams
The Magic of Big Game

Spanish Best: The Fine Shotguns of Spain
Vintage British Shotguns
A Shooters Guide to Shotguns

To gallop up a hill in the sunshine and stand at the top gazing over the limitless spaces of Africa with the glorious wind blowing the delicious mimosa scent against my face and wonder if I havent got the best possible life after all.

Lady Francis Scott
Nanyuki, 1922

ROBERT RUARK
ESCRITOR

NACIO EN CAROLINA DEL NORTE
EL 29 DE DICIEMBRE DE 1915

FALLECIO EN LONDRES
EL 1 DE JULIO DE 1965

GRAN AMIGO DE ESPAA
E.P.D.

Robert Ruarks Epitaph
The Municipal Cemetery
Palams, Spain

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

BY THOMAS MCINTYRE

Famous before the internet (FBI), columnist, novelist, product of a Carolina boyhood, Big Apple roisterer, and big-game hunter, Robert Chester Ruark was the author of Horn of the Hunter (1953), Something of Value (1955), and The Old Man and the Boy (1957). He also, for better or worse, shaped at least some of my life. Now, my friend Terry Wieland is telling the story of Ruark in the book you are holding, A View from a Tall Hill.

Terry can explain why he was drawn to Africa, and in these pages why Ruark may have been drawn, too. My own obsession with Africa predated even my ability to read, to an indelible childhood impression of an actual person I knew who had come back from what must have been, based upon his tales of buffalo, elephant, and the people he met, the most enthralling place on earth. In time I did read about Africa, but before Roosevelt or Hemingway, before Pete Capstick became Peter Hathaway Capstick, it was Ruark I read first when I was barely a teenager and Ruark was still alive and something of a Papa manqu. One might take the position that it was the ruination of a young life. Or not.

Time has not been generous to Ruarks reputation. A country lad who learned a love of the outdoors from his two grandfathers, he was something of a prodigy, entering college at fifteen, then venturing from Chapel Hill to the bright lights and big city and newspapers. By the time of his far-too-early death in the mid-1960s he had become a fading ember, disarrayed philanderer, and victim of strong drink and guttering talent. Yet for some ten years from the start of the 50s to the start of the 60s he was a genuinely estimable bestselling author; had a money-losing A-list movie, starring Sidney Poitier and Rock Hudson, made from one of his books; was a one-shot actor in televisions Playhouse 90; and in what may or may not have been the golden age of magazine journalism, a certifiable celebrity of the first order, all of it accelerated by Africa.

Bestselling and author is a rather dismissive coupling of words today; but it was hardly a ringing endorsement even half a century ago. On top of that, Ruark found his subject in Africa and, worse, hunting, though far from entirely that. Only one writer of the day was, as we know, permitted to write about those two subjects with any hope of being taken seriously. Yet Ruarks coming to Africa can be seen as a direct-line product of an American tradition begun with Roosevelt and carried on by HemingwayRoosevelt in emulation of the British hunter-explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, Hemingway in emulation of Roosevelt, Ruark of Hemingway, and more of us than we might care to say in homage to Ruark. The three American men and writers came to Africa almost exactly twenty years apart, each after his own war, in Cuba, Italy, and the North Atlantic, each very much a product of his own generation. Today, the power in the kind of Africa the three were drawn to can be seen in its anti-generational attraction for many of us still, in the twenty-first century.

Though initially something of a lesser hunter than either of his predecessors, Ruark went on to spend more time in Africa than the other two combined, as well as hunting in more far-flung regions, including beyond Africa, and for more charismatic game, Hemingway never hunting elephant or tiger; Roosevelt never tiger or leopard; neither hunting Alaska, as Ruark did for brown bear. Of the three, Ruark wrote arguably the most vividly and entertainingly about Africa, Hemingway more intent on belle lettres pontificating around campfires, and Roosevelt a serviceable, utilitarian writer with a tendency to read like a penny-a-liner, yet not without agreeable grace notes.

Ruark, more than either, was a true working writer. Professional hunters, most now dead, recalling Ruark on safari, remarked on how the day would come when he uncased the manual typewriter from the looming massif of impedimenta he brought and, waving away all distraction, sat at a deal table in the yellowish shade of the fever trees, doubtlessly with a large glass of iced gin near at hand, producing a stack of manuscripts to be sent back to the offices of the Scripps-Howard syndicate par avion. With his bank balance thus on the way to being replenished, he could return to hunting with something like a clear conscience.

Ruarks being drawn to Africa and his sensitive insights into, and love of, it and Africans, black and white, would seem to belie his superficial biography. A product of the Depression-era Jim Crow South, Ruark would seem an overwhelming candidate for prejudice, yet was anything but. Roosevelt had a vexingly conflicted regard for black people, mingling progressive politics (he praised the buffalo soldiersWere fighting bulls of the Buffaloes-who reinforced his Rough Riders at crucial moments during their battles in the SpanishAmerican War, only later to say of them, Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go so far as they were led by white officers, and even later unjustly ordering the dishonorable discharge of one hundred sixty-seven black troops after a racial incident in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906, the troops being pardoned sixty-six years later when only one survived). Of the Africans he met on safari, he contended they were strapping grown-up children. With Papa, what I would deem affected hardboiled talk came all too trippingly to his tongue, along with his exhibiting an open disdain for many of the Africans working diligently and skillfully to find game for him. (In fairness, Hemingway did feel a genuine warmth for some Africans, in particular those he perceived as regarding him as the uber-hero he hankered to be.)