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40 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S sneaking after and then she breaks its neck. And brings home to father the spoils of her effort. We have reversed this technique in this country. The emphasis on sex is very simple in Africa, having little to do with the citified voodoo with which we have endowed it. Sex is not really a symbol, nor is it hidden, psychiatry-ridden, or obscure. There are two sexes—doumi, the bulls, and manamouki, the cows. They work and they breed and they die. There is no such thing as a sterile man, because the woman shops around amongst the village until she breeds. Breeding is thought to be highly important, since it begets Mtotos, and children of both sexes are highly regarded as both nice to have around the hut and valuable in an economic sense. Neither sex of animal nor human group seems overworried about morality as we know it, or the implications of sexual jealousy as we know it. They get sex, and are content, and do not need a Kinsey lecture to impress its importance on each other. They also have sun and rain and seasons, and if they take the sheep and goats into the hut at night it is to keep the sheep and goats from harm while simultaneously keeping warm. It makes as much sense as tethering a poodle to a restaurant radiator. What I have been driving at all along is an explanation of why I want to go back to Africa, again and again and again, and why I think Kidogo the gunbearer is more important to life than Einstein or Dean Acheson. It is because I discovered in Africa my own true importance, which is largely nothing. Except as a very tiny wedge in the never- ending cycle that God or Mungu or somebody has figured out. The Swahili say: "Shauri Mungu" meaning "God's business," when they can't figure out an explanation for why it rains or they lost their way to camp or there aren't any lions where there should be lions. In Africa you learn finally that death is as necessary to life as the other way around. You learn from watching the ants rebuild a shattered hill that nothing is so terribly important as to make any single aspect of it important beyond the concept of your participation in it. You are impressed with the tininess of your own role in a grand scheme that has been going on since before anybody wrote books about it, and from that starting point you know true humility for the first time. I believe today I am a humble man, because I have seen a hyena eat a lion carcass, and I have seen the buzzards eat the hyena that ate the lion, and I saw the ants eat one buzzard that ate the hyena that ate the lion. It appeared to me that Mungu had this one figured out, because if kings fall before knaves, and they both contribute to the richness of tomorrow's fertile soil, then who am I to make a big thing out of me? It was not so much that I was a stranger to the vastnesses of Tanganyika, which are not dark but joyous. It was not that I was lost in a jungle so much as if I had finally come home, home to a place of serenity, with a million pets to play with, without complication, with full appreciation of the momentary luxury of being alive, without pettiness, and, finally, with a full knowledge of what a small ant I was in the hill of life. I belonged there all the time, I figured, and that's why I say I had to go to Africa to meet God. n Editor's Note: "The First Time I saw God" originally appeared in the March 1952 issue of Esquire. Copyright 1951 by Robert Ruark; renewed 1979 by the Estate of Robert Ruark. All rights reserved. Permission granted by Harold Matson Co. Inc. thrown you again. When you cannot move he will jump up and down on you with feet as big as flat irons and as sharp as axes. He will butt you and kneel on you, and if you climb a tree he will stretch that big snout up and lick the flesh off your feet with a tongue like a rasp. When he is wounded and you are up against him there is only one logical development. You die, or he dies, because he will not run away. He just comes, and comes, and the brain shot sometimes won't stop him. Most wounded buffalo are killed within a hand's reach. The starkest fear I have ever known was given me by buffalo, until the fear became a fascination, and the fascinations an addiction, until I was almost able to observe myself as another creature, and became bemused by my own reactions. I finally courted buffalo as a hair shirt to my own conscience, and almost would have been interested objectively to see how many possible ways there are to be killed by one. O n this trip to Africa, and in my association with Selby, Kidogo, Adam, and a few lions, leopards, buffalo, and other vindictive insects, I had the opportunity to find out about courage, which is something I never acquired from the late war. I know now that I am a complete coward, which is something I never would admit before. I am the kid with the dry mouth and the revolving stomach, the sweaty palms and the brilliant visions of disaster. But cowardice has its points, too. There are all gradations of fear, and the greatest gradation is the fear of being known to be afraid. I felt it one day after a lengthy stalk through awful grass after a wounded buffalo. When I finally looked at him, and he looked at me, and there wasn't any tree to climb and no place to hide, I was the local expert on fear. At less than 50 yards a buffalo looks into your soul. I unlimbered my Westley Richards double-barreled .470 and let him have it where it hurt. Then I went off and was sick. And then for the next several weeks I had to force myself to inspect his relatives at close quarters. I was frightened of embarrassing Harry and Kidogo and Adam by my own cowardice, so my cowardice conquered the minor cowardice, which only involved dying, and so we went and sought the buffalo. Ditto lion, leopard, rhino. Likewise snakes. A small cobra is very large to a man who fears caterpillars. I learned, on this expedition, about such things as grass, and its relations to rain, and its relation to game, and game's relation to people, and people's relation to staying alive. There is a simple ABC here: When it rains too much, the grass grows too high. Also trucks get stuck, but the main point is that when the grass grows too high, you can't get there from here. You stay where you are, and all the frantic cables from home can't reach you. Also when the grass is too high the game is in the hills, and you can't get to the hills, and furthermore the carnivores that live off the game are out of sight, too, because there ain't no carnivore where there ain't no game. The lions and leopards and cheetah can't operate in the high grass because the Tommies and Grants and zebras and wildebeest know that the carnivore can't operate in the high grass. And it is an amazing thing that all the hoofed animals drop their young when it is raining so hard that nothing predatory can move much, which gives the young a short chance to stay alive. Me, I always thought pregnant animals went to hospitals when their time came on. I learned something of females on this trip, too. Such as how the male lion seldom kills. What he does is stand upwind and let his scent drift down. Once in a while he roars. While he is creating a commotion the old lady sneaks along against the wind and grabs what she is Ruark with a waterbuck taken in tanganyika on his first safari. couRtesy noRth caRolina southeRn histoRical collection, unc – chapel hill