'Hunter's Tracks'

I'm back reading another of the books that's followed me round all these years. It's the second book written by JA Hunter, an aptly named Scots white hunter who's first book, 'African Hunter', I wrote about here. This is a rather better-written book - he had a writer to help him - but is full of the sort of African adventure stories which I so loved.

The inscription is interesting. This is my father's writing so I would guess that he had been detailed off to go to the Mombasa Book Shop in Kilindini Road, buy it, and get it in the post to reach England by sea mail in plenty of time for Christmas. Richard and I had been out in Mombasa during the summer of '57, when we had the beautiful Hoey House on the beach at Nyali built, appropriately, by another white hunter, Cecil Hoey - post here. I note also the 'best wishes' - my father loved us dearly but would never have written the word - and his use of 'Jon' rather than the 'Jonathan' I would have expected.

I cannot remember who we were spending Christmas with but the chances are that it was my Aunt Noel in London.

It's a very dated book so one has to read it in the context of its time. So, for example, on the one hand Hunter writes so admiringly and so knowledgably of the elephants, then on the next page he's out at night with someone holding a torch while....

....he shoots half a dozen which have been marauding a farm belonging to a friend of his. Sadly, this was his job as the Kenya Game Department employed him as a control officer, which meant he shot animals which were either causing trouble or to clear them from areas designated for farming.

It's dated in other ways. He describes the vast numbers of animals which inhabited the plains of Kenya and refers to the magnificence of Kilimanjaro, but look at its snow-capped summit in this picture compared to....

....how we saw it from a 'plane a few years ago.