Then there was also the “Shark Man.” He was an Australian who told us most thrilling tales of encounters with sharks witnessed when among the pearl-divers. I remember vividly his description of seeing a shark attack one of the natives working for him. The man was pulled aboard only after the shark had bitten a great chunk from his side and exposed his heart, which they could see still beating. He said, “Master, master, big fish,” before he died.
The illustrations in Millais’s _Breath from the Veldt_ filled us with delight, and to this day I know of no etching that affects me as does the frontispiece by the author’s father. It is called the “Last Trek.” An old hunter is lying dead beside his ox-wagon; near him squat two of his Kafir boys, and in the distance graze herds of zebra and hartebeeste and giraffe.
Of the mighty hunters that still survived at that time, father admired most Mr. F. C. Selous. His books he knew almost by heart. Whenever Selous came to the United States he would stay with us, and father would sit up till far into the night talking of wild life in the open. Selous, at sixty-five, enlisted in the late war as a private; he rose to be captain, and was decorated with the D. S. O. for gallantry, before he fell, fighting the Germans in East Africa. No one could have devised a more fitting end for the gallant old fellow than to die at the head of his men, in a victorious battle on those plains he had roamed so often and loved so well, fighting against the worst and most dangerous beast of his generation.
In 1887 father founded a hunting club called the “Boone and Crockett” after two of the most mighty hunters of America. No one was entitled to membership who had not brought down in fair chase three species of American big game. The membership was limited to a hundred and I well remember my father’s pride when my brother and I qualified and were eventually elected members. The club interests itself particularly in the conservation of wild life, and the establishment of game refuges. Mr. Selous and other English hunters were among the associate members.
In the summer of 1908 my father told me that when his term in the White House ended the following spring, he planned to make a trip to Africa, and that if I wished to do so I could accompany him. There was no need to ask whether I wanted to go. At school when we were writing compositions, mine almost invariably took the form of some imaginary journey across the “Dark Continent.” Still, father had ever made it a practice to talk to us as if we were contemporaries. He would never order or even tell us to follow a certain line; instead, he discussed it with us, and let us draw our own conclusions. In that way we felt that while we had his unreserved backing, we were yet acting on our own initiative, and were ourselves responsible for the results. If a boy is forced to do a thing he often makes but a half-hearted attempt to succeed, and lays his failure to the charge of the person who forced him, although he might well have come through with flying colors had he felt that he was acting on his own responsibility. In his discussions with us, father could of course shape our opinions in what he thought the proper mould.