The writer is the author of the new book This Will Make a Man of You: One Man’s Search for Hemingway and Manhood in a Changing World.
We had driven through the South African bush and the long, green grass filling in the ground beneath thorn bush and acacia trees in Kruger National Park. We stopped in a clearing on the west side of a small hill looking into the setting sun. We stepped out alongside an off-road bus to have what Africans call a sundowner — a beer — as we watched the day end. I was with a few writers, a ranger whose job it was to catch or kill rhino poachers, the president of the South African Wildlife College, and a professor who’d spent his career as a game ranger but was then teaching a dozen students how to be licensed professional hunters (PH).
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As we drank beer and listened to the ranger tell stories about rhino poachers, three elephants, all immature bulls in their twenties, began feeding up the slope toward us. We were laughing and speaking loudly, but the elephants, which aren’t legally hunted there, didn’t seem to mind. When the elephants closed to 100 feet, the game ranger said, “They won’t bother us. They know we’re here. They approached us.”
A minute after the ranger said this, the closest bull elephant stopped and all the muscles under his gray skin stiffened. One of the elephant’s rear feet actually froze in the air. Something had disturbed the bull. The bull was broadside to us. He was close enough to see the creases in his gray hide and to see the black eyelashes over his right brown eye. Then all that went blurry.
The bull broke from his frozen stance. He was coming. He turned his tons of flesh and bone toward us and charged with his ears out and his head high. He covered ground fast before he used his yellowed tusks to bulldoze over a small tree. The tree cracked and crashed into the grass. The bull stopped as dust washed over his long gray legs. When he stopped his charge he raised his trunk and head as high as he could. He towered over us and he knew it. He looked down at us from the bottoms of his eye sockets. He was so close I was looking up into his brown eyes.
I was standing next to the ranger and everyone was behind us. After a moment I wish I had a video of the ranger took off his hat and shook it at the bull while shouting, “Get outta here.”
The bull flinched like a dog someone is trying to kick and moved quickly off with the others and it was over.
The ranger had adrenaline reddening his face as he said, “That’s often how it is. I’ve had many of my closest calls just feet from the truck. Damn, I should have had my rifle.”
As my blood cooled I asked how many times he’d been charged, and he said he really didn’t know. He said hippos kill the most people, but they mostly do that at night when they leave the rivers to feed. He said Cape buffalo scare him the most. He said with elephants they’ll usually warn you. Rhinos don’t warn you, but they mostly run away and when they charge it’s almost always a bluff. He told us some stories about lions charging and elephants he had to stop with his rifle and we knew the ranger in his worn khakis and leather fedora was a man’s man all right.
We spent the next day at the South African Wildlife College, and I was shown something I doubt many of the college kids who need “safe spaces” and who want phrases like “man up” banned could handle.
A dozen students were there to take a course on becoming a PH. They were learning to track game, to shoot, to assess trophy size of wildlife, to survive in the bush, to deal with poachers, and other such real things.
Only two of the dozen students taking the 18-month course were white. The rest were black and one was a black woman, but they all wanted to be the PH ideal Ernest Hemingway had once written so much about, an icon played by men like Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, and Stewart Granger. Hemingway called the men who played this part “white hunters,” but like the best ideals this one is growing according to honest values and so is dropping ethnicity and even gender from its definition.
As part of their course these college-age students had to stalk to within 20 yards of dangerous game in Kruger National Park—rhino, elephant, lion, hippo, and Cape buffalo. And then they had to slip away unseen, knowing that at those distances a shift in the wind could bring an elephant or lion charging with death in its eyes. To do this they had to master their fear as they learned to move quietly and to read the body language of wildlife. They also had to learn to kill wildlife so they could defend their own lives or others.
Stalking dangerous game wasn’t even the scariest part. They also had to sit blindfolded by a watering hole where lions, hyenas, elephants, and more come to drink. They had to sit blindfolded for hours alongside rivers alive with crocodiles and hippos. Somewhere out of earshot their professor, a retired game ranger, was watching with a rifle, but he didn’t tell them that.
They had to sit for hours using their ears and noses to detect what was around them. One 20-year-old student said to me, “It’s deathly frightening, but you feel so alive. You start to smell things you didn’t know you could. You hear things and sort them out in ways you didn’t know you could. The primal fear sharpens you. There is nothing more terrifying than being certain you hear a leopard or a lion close and coming. But still you have to keep control. Running would only trigger a predatory response. You have to master the fear to pass this part of the course.”
All of the students in the course told me that sitting blindfolded on the bare ground where predators come to drink made them realize how serious what they were trying to do is. All of them said the terror made them feel alive and intensely ready for what would come next in their course. None of them thought it was insensitive. They all said it made them more humble, yet also more courageous. In other words, it matured them.
Real experiences do that—experiences in which you can actually fail.
When such an event also requires a person live up to something greater than themselves, well then, what you have is a real rite of passage designed to build character. Those are some of the basic tenets to what can make us into all we can be.
