My Mother Shoots Elephants

By Chris Kellogg

My mother shoots elephants

Short adventure Chronicles on African safaris in British East Africa. Nonnie ( Fernanda Wanamaker Munn Kellogg)who's pals in the 1960s included Robert Rouark, she was Kathie in his best selling book UHURU. Richard Leakey and George and Joy Adamson of born free were also pals . Many other notable's like Thomas Shevlin and Rip McIntosh from Palm Beach who were there during those golden years. Mom a department store heiress spent some 20 years on her farm call Treffos and in the jungles hunting and collecting specimens for museums. She raised funds for the first and second airplane for the game department plus antipoaching units for Meru and Tavo national parks. A 32 page report on her LAWANA FUND projects is also attached with each book.

My adventures and misadventures include growing up on the family farm in Bedford New York. Hunting and fishing from Palm Beach to Alaska and Russia. Stories of my hunts getting the BIG 5 in 1961-Lion ,Leopard, Buffalo,Rhino, and Elephant . On Safari where Mom,Uncle Gurnee and me the Kid at 18 -One of the most successful Safaris ever, with the story of bagging the largest Elephant taken in the past 60 years.Also why not,some Palm Beach society stories. Enjoy all the many adventures in My mother shoots elephants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667871899

Book preview

PREFACE

In this, my magnum opus, I’ve chronicled the most interesting and humorous events of my life as an outdoor sportsman. I have been exceedingly fortunate to have had some incredible experiences, that only a very few hunters and fishermen have had. For me, being close to nature is intoxicating, and I hope I have captured the transcendent feeling and the range of emotions that hunting and fishing evoke.

At the heart of this book is my mother, Fernanda Wanamaker Munn Kellogg, who was known as Nonnie. A quiet person who never sought the spotlight for her incredible contributions to nature and conservation, she instilled in me from an early age an appreciation for the joy and wonders of nature and wildlife. Mom sought to build on the ideas expressed by her close friend Robert Ruark in his book Something of Value. If you can show that there is economic value in the preservation of wildlife, he wrote, then it will be preserved.

Mom kept detailed logs of her hunting and outdoor projects and gave all of her findings to appropriate organizations. She even donated a movie: the first-ever recording of elephants copulating, which for some reason was of great interest at the time. The booklet she put together about the Louwana Fund, the organization she founded, sheds some light on her many efforts toward wildlife conservation (see Appendix, page 253). Thank you, Mom, for teaching me to be a hunter, fisherman, and conservationist throughout my life.

Since I am not a writer, I decided to read more than one hundred books on hunting and fishing to learn what ingredients make a good story and what pitfalls to avoid. Part of the answer lies in short, unusual, funny, varied, descriptive, colorful, emotional, and informative stories. Let’s see how I did with all of that. (I’ve included my complete reading list on page 253)

I had to overcome several obstacles in actually getting my words to page. The first problem is that I can’t spell. I can even write words that spell-check can’t decipher. The second problem is that I can’t type. So I wrote all this in longhand, and since some people can’t seem to read my handwriting, I also purchased a handheld digital recorder and recorded everything I wrote.

My next step was to hire a typist. I looked in the Yellow Pages, made some calls, and selected an independent legal typist. I dropped off my handwritten papers with the small, pinkie-sized flash drive. After about four weeks and numerous phone calls, my typist said she couldn’t get anything off of the drive and hadn’t done any of the typing, so I asked for the manuscript back. A few days later, she appeared at the house accompanied by a gentleman holding her arm. She held a white cane that she was swinging back and forth as she walked up the driveway. I had hired a blind typist!

Only you would do that, Vicki said.

When I told Bob, my hunting partner, my dilemma, he said, Zoie, my sixteen-year-old daughter, is terribly bright and is going to Cornell on a scholarship after her graduation. She has been taking college courses and works three days a week at a pet store. She wants to be a veterinarian.

So Zoie saved the day for me and typed this book. Three digital recorders, countless handwritten pages, and three years later, here we are.

On the 3rd edit after being unhappy with the first 2 professional edits I got Kenny Lymann t make over 473 corrections and changes in something like syntax (I get that part)spelling, grammar, style, structure.

After this book hits The New York Times Best Sellers list in the truth-and-fiction section, I am casting Dennis Quaid to play my part in the upcoming movie series, which you will hear about when I am a guest on the late-night talk shows.

INTRODUCTION

Just like the Wild West, an era that spanned only thirty years or so, responsible big game hunting flourished in colonial Africa only during a relatively brief period of abundance, in the 1950s and ’60s. Today, all that has changed. African animals are used to the sight of lorries, and due to the human population explosion, they are no longer fearful of man.

But this book recalls another era, when the villagers considered these beasts man-eating rats and news of their killing brought great joy and excitement in camp. After I killed my first lion, I was carried on a chair and danced around the camp. Now, anyone killing a lion would be marched right up to the gallows. Today, you would never shoot one of the big five—elephant, cape buffalo, lion, leopard, and rhinoceros. Even fly-fishing is catch-and-release. The only trophy is a nice photo of your rainbow trout, taken before you throw it back.

Over fifteen years of summer trips to Kenya in the 1950’s to mid 1970’s, my mother returned from numerous safaris having witnessed the decimation of the herds. She shed lots of tears for the elephants and questioned her own morality in hunting them. But declines in game were also caused by Kenya’s human population explosion. As the country’s population soared from eight million in 1961 to forty-nine million today, Nairobi’s slums expanded and are now among the largest in the world. This concern inspired my mother to make one of the largest, if not the largest, contributions to the preservation of wildlife in Kenya. by creating the Louwana Fund which is dedicated to the conservation and scientific study of wildlife throughout the world.

The problem, of course, is people. The world has too many people, and we’re living too long and causing all of the world’s problems. We need pestilence, war, famine, and plague to cull the population down to pre–World War I levels. Doctors and meds are also to blame (but, of course, we’re grateful when we need them). Anyway, that’s my assessment of how humans create the problems that affect wildlife.

We know what happened to the American buffalo. In C. Stanley Mason’s book Voices in the Wind he describes in detail the historic decline of marsh and swampland. Beginning in 1849, the Swamp Land Acts reduced one third of America’s total wetlands, eliminating 80 percent of the buffalo’s habitat in both Iowa and Minnesota. Between 1950 and 1975, about half a million acres of wetland disappeared each year, and to this day, it continues to decline in North America at a rate of about a quarter million acres a year.

Thank goodness for organizations like Ducks Unlimited and conservation groups like Save the Quail (or snipe or grouse …), which focus on habitat restoration. The government has also stiffened up the protection of remaining wetlands. I am a member of numerous wildlife organizations.

I quit hunting ducks in Delaware for seventeen years, when the duck population there plummeted. But I can’t throw back the ducks and birds I’ve shot in the past. Hunting for food was a necessity until just two generations ago. And for those like me, who enjoy the shooting and eating, hunting offers, most importantly, an excuse to be out in the field and forests. Thank goodness for TV, air-conditioning, and football, which keep many people indoors, leaving the woods and streams less crowded. Just another selfish thought of mine.

Fortunately, today we can fly to remote areas to experience the unchanged wilderness and see wildlife that was unavailable to most of us just a generation ago. And while agriculture and population demands have taken a huge toll on wildlife, a growing interest in the outdoors has brought a shift toward preserving what is left, which is very encouraging.

This book is inspired by my interest in reflecting on a historical time that has changed rapidly over just a single lifetime. In it I chronicle the joy of being a part of the life cycle of nature as one who gives to it, one who takes from it, and one who wants to see preserved for the next generation the benefits of the outdoor life, which is rooted and grounded in the soul of man.

I

BEGINNING WITH MOM

MOM’S BUFFALO HUNT

Mom, tell me about the scariest hunt that you had in Africa.

Mom and I were in the Old Town canoe fishing for bass on our farm in Bedford, New York. I was about twelve when I first heard this story:

"Okay, Chris. Well, John Sutton and I were looking for a trophy buffalo. We were in the southern open plains district of Kenya in Block number 53. Matuka and Matua, our best skinner and tracker, were with us in the lorry. John stopped several times to glass a herd of buffalo.

"‘Nonnie,’ he said, ‘here is an old big buf that looks good, let’s get a better look.’

"So we stopped in this open area with rolling hills. It was warming up now at 10:30 as we got out of the lorry. John told the boys they’d better stay in the vehicle because there wasn’t any cover except for the knee- and waist-high dry grass. By the way, Chris, do you know buffalo are considered by many to be the most dangerous of all game?

"So we carried our own rifles, which Matuka and Matua would normally carry for us. I moved single file behind John, who stopped and scanned the herd every thirty-five yards before moving forward. He would check the wind by picking up and dropping some of the loose soil. There was a light breeze in our faces, and we wanted to be downwind so as not to spook the herd. We moved forward slowly, now crouching, and I remember the strong, sweet smell of hay in the dry grass as we moved on. Funny what you remember.

"I was excited, since we had been looking for a trophy buf for several days now. ‘Nonnie, see that one on the left? That’s the one,’ he said as he handed me the binoculars.

"‘Yes, that’s big,’ was all I said.

"John was closely eyeing the herd to make sure they hadn’t spotted us. We moved only when we were sure they weren’t watching. We didn’t have scopes on our rifles and needed to be close to get a clean kill shot to take down this trophy bull. I was right behind John when he raised his hand up, a sign for me to freeze. He whispered, ‘Wind shifting around,’ and I could feel the change of the breeze from my face to my side to the back of my head.

"The herd was on alert as their heads came up from grazing. They bunched up together as they caught our smell, and then I heard their feet just stomping in place—they were nervous. All of a sudden they all charged us as they caught our scent from what they thought was behind them. The wind had come around 180 degrees. They were trying to run away, but coming straight for us, only a hundred yards away.

"John shouted, ‘Nonnie, drop your gun!’ and stood up, yelling ‘Run, run!’ as he waved his arms and ran toward the charging herd. I followed, screaming and waving my arms. No choice, nowhere to hide or run to, no trees to get behind. We were going to die; we were going to be trampled to death. Couldn’t stop the entire herd of some thirty buffalo with our guns. I remember—euphoria, adrenalin, heart pounding—as we charged them. It was unreal; my mind couldn’t grasp this nightmare in what felt like slow motion. But it was real, and thoughts of what I was going to miss in a few mere seconds when trampled to death—the pain, but sad at the goodbyes to friends, family, loved ones, and my life—all this flashed through my mind. The thunder of the hooves shaking the ground grew louder as they came for us. Terror, that’s what I felt, simply terror. At forty feet and two seconds away, the herd split in half and came thundering past. My knees felt weak and I sank to the ground, my hands going to my face as the tears fell. I looked at John, and his face was flushed—but with a big smile, or maybe a grin.

"That’s it. We went back to camp for lunch and spent the rest of the day in recovery. I’ve never been so scared. There was no choice, no running away!

Chris, there were other close calls, but that was the most frightening one.

* * *

TEACHING ME TO HUNT

My mother taught me gun safety. Her first lesson was to tell me about her instructor in Scotland. He said never point a gun at anyone, she explained. Then he took my sixteen-gauge loaded Dickinson shotgun and slammed the stock on the ground. Even though the safety was on, both barrels went off!

When I was thirteen, Mom said, Let’s sight in the Sako 243 rifle.

We went up to the barn and used some old sofa pillows to set up a gun rest on the hood of the Jeep. I placed the target a hundred yards away using the upward-sloping field as a backstop. This was before there were adjustable power scopes, so it took forty-five minutes to sight in the four-x fixed scope. But we were soon hitting thumbtacks in the bull’s-eye at a hundred yards.

Well, Mom said, now we’re ready to shoot a deer.

We decided to set up a bench rest next to the pool, because the grass in the fields above it was often a favorite grazing area. We had numerous sightings of deer early and late in the day. The next day, we were up early and took our stand at 7:00 a.m. Soon, we saw some bucks and does milling about. Mom took the binoculars and scanned the field for several minutes.

Finally, she whispered, I want you to shoot the doe on the bottom left side of the field.

I whispered, Why a doe?

It’s young and tasty, she said. We’re not after a trophy rack.

So, I put the crosshairs of the sight on the spot Mom had told me to, and aimed for the heart like she taught me: Take a deep breath, let half out, and slowly put pressure on the trigger. Bang! The shot seemed extremely loud to me, and the deer went right down. We waited some five minutes before approaching because, in Mom’s African safari hunts, dangerous animals could jump up again and charge.

All was okay, and Mom said, Now we will need to bring the Jeep up and field dress the deer. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought the deer would be sent to the butcher just like the cows on the farm. Mom was very proud of all she had learned over many safaris in Kenya, and she wanted to teach me how to prepare the deer.

Christopher, make a long cut with your knife down the belly; that’s right. Now open up the stomach area but don’t cut into it.

Okay, Mom.

Now, son, reach in all the way around the innards and pull them out.

I began to do as she said but soon stopped. This is awful, I said. Do I have to put my face right in its guts? Agh!

With steam rising from the cavity, I finally pulled out the guts using a bear hug. We loaded the deer into the back of the Willy Jeep after sawing off the head and feet, another unpleasant experience. I spent the rest of the weekend skinning the hide and stretching it out on a board. I also got instructions from Mom on how to quarter the meat, which I packed and put into the icebox. The work was physically and emotionally exhausting. Fortunately, it was my only experience at doing this. But later, at eighteen, while on safari with Mom, I saw field dressing done so often that I still felt sick at the sight of so much blood.

I had gentler beginnings with Mom fishing on the lake for bass and perch out of the Old Town canoe. I learned a lot in those early days, listening to my mom tell stories of her experiences while we were fishing.

Mom and I practiced shooting snapping turtles from the back porch. They were killing Dad’s rare collection of ducks and geese. One time, Dad and I caught a large snapping turtle and stuffed it in an apple crate. The snapper was crossing from the lower lake to the upper pond. We took it several miles away in the Jeep and dropped it off at the lake next to the property of Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren, which seemed to delight my father, who was a friend of both of them.

The famous Mill Pond Farm pigeon shoot began after several of my father’s highbred pigeons with fancy feathered feet, fancy fantails, and fancy everything mated with New York City park pigeons, and the offspring lost their plumage. Then the pigeons multiplied and nested at the top of the barn, where they made a terrible mess. The answer was a pigeon shoot. Engraved invitations were sent out to a select few.

Dad caught the pigeons, with help from our friend Paul, crated them, then transported them in the Jeep to the upper fields, where we shot trap. Some were banded with different colored silk ribbons tied to their feet for extra prizes. Two of these events brought the pigeon population back under control, and everyone was delighted—except the surviving pigeons, who flew over our heads back to the barn below the fields.

I must say, this sort of thing is not for me. I enjoyed participating in an historic pigeon shoot at the oldest and most famous Philadelphia Gun Club, where pigeons were thrown into the air from a box in a sixty-foot circle. You had to kill the bird before it crossed out of the enclosed circle. But usually I find killing animals you don’t plan to eat unpleasant and less than sporting, much like the tower shoots of pheasant and ducks where the birds are launched off a tower to fly over you. For me, it’s all about the dog work, the hunt, the outdoors, the long walk. Least important is the shooting … although I do get very upset if I miss, and I really like to eat wild game birds.

* * *

IN MOM’S FOOTSTEPS

Mom and I spent many hours fishing at Mill Pond Farm. We caught smallmouth bass and perch out of the Old Town canoe while spending long, delightful hours talking about the shooting life, her love of the outdoors, and her concern for conservation. She was very conservative and naturally quiet and shy. She never bragged or gave herself credit for her accomplishments, pointing instead to the support and help she’d had from others. But when Mom spoke about how glorious the sunrise and sunset was in Okeechobee, Florida, and in Africa, her eyes sparkled.

I soon wanted that lifestyle for myself. My hunting logbook begins in 1957 when I was fourteen. Mom invited me to go hunting with her at my grandfathers hunting camp in Okeechobee. Before we went, Mom offered to give me Grandpa’s twenty-gauge English Purdey shotgun. I opened and closed the breech several times and said, Mom, this is still very stiff and hard for me to open and close.

Don’t worry, Christopher, she said with a faint smile on her face. We will find one that’s right for you.

The next week we went to Abercrombie and Fitch, an expensive sporting goods store that, at the time, had the finest line of guns and hunting equipment in New York. With the help of the gunsmith and Mom, I got a Bob Jenkinson English Boxlock made under a private label by a famous gunmaker as a better-quality field-grade gun. It cost $600. Much to my surprise, I discovered later that in turning down the Purdey, I had refused the Rolls-Royce of custom-made shotguns. Today it sells for $135,000 and takes a year to get.

Brilliant, my boy!

II

FAMILY HISTORY

MOM AND DAD

My mother, Fernanda Wanamaker Munn Kellogg, was known as Nonnie. Tall and slim-boned, she was an elegant woman and very beautiful. She was born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and went to school in England, where she received a strict education. After that, she lived in Italy for many years, where she played polo and tennis and went hunting and fishing.

Mom was the daughter of Marie Louise Wanamaker, whose father, Rodman Wanamaker, was the son of John Wanamaker, the founder of the Philadelphia department stores. With her father, Gurnee Munn Sr., she and her brother hunted for quail in Okeechobee, Florida, where Gurnee had started hunting out of a Model T around 1922.

During the war, Mom had several jobs. She first tried working in the department store, which was by then headed by her grandfather Rodman Wanamaker, but she disliked the work. Then, because Rodman was also the honorary chief of police in New York City, Mom joined the New York Police Department, where she rose to captain. But she observed that the women in her department hated men and wanted to beat them with their billy clubs, so she decided to become a nurse at Presbyterian Hospital for the remainder of the war. She liked this work particularly well since several other family members were also nurses there.

As a side note: Because Rodman was the honorary chief of police, my grandmother had a siren mounted in her Lincoln. Several times when she took me to the train at Grand Central Station on my way to boarding school at the Fay School in Southborough, Mass., in fourth to eighth grades, flying down Park Avenue, she got her driver, John Doherty, to turn on the siren, so I would be whisked away in great style.

Mom married my father, Francis L. Kellogg, in 1942 and became a mother when I was born, on September 12, 1943, and again when my sister, Fernanda, was born in 1945.

What fascinated me were my mother’s beautiful hands. Her fingers were long, slender, and delicate. They complimented her tender, peaceful expression. She was very disciplined and careful. She thought before she spoke, knew what she wanted to say, and offered no rambling wanderings. Nothing was off the cuff. She didn’t run the conversation but, instead, waited for the opportunity to give her opinion, then delivered it in a clear, well-thought-out, soft-spoken, and nonthreatening manner. She rarely lost her point, and her solid rationale often won the day without anyone taking offense. In fact, her thoughts were often received with enthusiasm. Nonnie, people would say, that’s a great solution!

Mom was a very private person whose best friends were her family and relatives. She wanted to pursue her interests with no fanfare or notoriety, including her contributions to preservation of wildlife in Kenya. Mom collected all sorts of African objects for museums, along with rare specimens of birds and animals. She was on the first safari into the Sudan after the seventeen-year war, where John Sutton and Mom shot at the birds with powder, not pellets, to preserve the specimen for mounting. Mom even had a newly discovered bat named after her—the Nonnie Bat.

In midlife she had a problem with alcohol. When she finally stopped drinking, she lost a lot of weight and her slim figure made her appear even taller than her five feet nine inches. Like Mom, I, too, have had a drinking problem. I thank my wife Vicki for helping me overcome this problem. Thankfully, the drinking culture has dramatically changed today, but it remains a problem for many. Alcohol affected my father and mother, and it killed my uncle. Smoking and alcohol also killed my dear cousin Roddy Wanamaker, Bob Ruark and Ernest Hemingway.

In 1970, years after my mother introduced me to the joys of hunting and fishing, I returned from San Francisco with a master’s degree in business administration, and my mother turned to me for advice. She was nervous about running the Louwana Fund, the organization she founded that was dedicated to the preservation of wildlife. She wanted to know how to conduct a meeting using Robert’s Rules of Order, so we reviewed them and did simulated exercises in running a meeting. Mom would be presiding over prominent board members, and she didn’t want to be embarrassed. She disliked being the center of attention, so we practiced and practiced until she was comfortable.

Mom came from a family with warehouses full of stuff, including lots of framed certificates and medals. She said it was awful spending three months in Los Angeles after her mother’s death, dispensing with all her things, and she vowed not to encumber her children with stuff. True to her word, when when she died, Mom did not leave much behind. She left no albums or endless files of papers. However, I do have some of her father’s albums, which are filled with photographs of my grandfather touring Europe and hunting driven birds, from the moors of Scotland to the forests of Yugoslavia and the deserts of Egypt.

Mom even made her own burial arrangements and had the headstone inscribed, all of which was paid for in advance. She had been sober for most of her life, and many people she had sponsored in AA came to her service. The service at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea was packed with people she had touched during her life.

* * *

WHY CAN’T A WOMAN BE MORE LIKE A MAN?

—Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady

I’ve always been interested in Mom’s view of her role in hunting, which has always been considered a man’s sport. So, out of curiosity, I asked a number of women to share their thoughts on this question:

You are a psychiatrist, Priscilla, I said to one friend, so tell me what it would be like for my mother, physically and mentally, to live in a man’s hunting world?

All she would volunteer was this: You’re a friend, Chris, so I can’t treat you. But you know more about your mother than you think you do.

I then asked Caroline, a friend with three doctoral degrees. She said, after reading the first unfinished manuscript of this book, Great, interesting, and fascinating stories. Don’t give up—keep at it.

Then