Isegoria

Paul Templar worked as a guide on the Zambezi river near Victoria Falls, and he knew the local hippos:

That day I’d taken clients out with three apprentice guides — Mike, Ben and Evans — all in kayaks. We were near the end of the tour, the light was softening and we were taking in the tranquillity. The solid whack I felt behind me took me by surprise.

I turned just in time to see Evans, who had been flung out of his boat, flying through the air. His boat, with his two clients still in it, had been lifted half out of the water on the back of the huge bull hippo.

There was a cluster of rocks nearby and I yelled at the nearest apprentice to guide everyone there, to safety. Then I turned my boat and paddled furiously towards Evans.

I reached over to grab his outstretched hand but as our fingers were about to touch, I was engulfed in darkness. There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf.

I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around — my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo’s snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.

I wriggled as hard as I could, and in the few seconds for which he opened his jaws, I managed to escape. I swam towards Evans, but the hippo struck again, dragging me back under the surface. I’d never heard of a hippo attacking repeatedly like this, but he clearly wanted me dead.

Hippos’ mouths have huge tusks, slicing incisors and a bunch of smaller chewing teeth. It felt as if the bull was making full use of the whole lot as he mauled me — a doctor later counted almost 40 puncture wounds and bite marks on my body. The bull simply went berserk, throwing me into the air and catching me again, shaking me like a dog with a doll.

Then down we went again, right to the bottom, and everything went still. I remember looking up through 10 feet of water at the green and yellow light playing on the surface, and wondering which of us could hold his breath the longest. Blood rose from my body in clouds, and a sense of resignation overwhelmed me. I’ve no idea how long we stayed under — time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.

The hippo lurched suddenly for the surface, spitting me out as it rose. Mike was still waiting for me in his kayak and managed to paddle me to safety. I was a mess. My left arm was crushed to a pulp, blood poured from the wounds in my chest and when he examined my back, Mike discovered a wound so savage that my lung was visible.

Luckily, he knew first aid and was able to seal the wounds in my chest with the wrapper from a tray of snacks, which almost certainly stopped my lungs from collapsing and saved my life.

By chance, a medical team was nearby, on an emergency drill, and with their help I stayed alive long enough to reach a hospital with a surgeon. He warned me he would probably have to take off both my arms and the bottom of my injured leg. In the end, I lost only my left arm — they managed to patch up the rest.

Evans’ body was found down river two days later. Attempts were made to find and kill the rogue hippo, but he seemed to have gone into hiding.

In 1903, the King of Chefs, Chef of Kings, Auguste Escoffier, wrote his 646-page cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire. When hunter Steven Rinella got a copy, he decided to plan a feast:

I scoured the pages of Le Guide, setting my sights on 13 dishes: smoked breast of goose, mincemeat pie, duckling à la presse (basically a roasted and flattened duck), abattis à la bourguignonne (bird giblets in wine), pigeon pie, rabbit à la flamande (rabbit thighs in a sweet, spicy stew), turtle à la Baltimore (a thick turtle soup with lots of liquor), freshwater matelote (a brothy fish soup with a crayfish garnish), truite au bleu (stunned and blanched trout), bird’s-nest soup, a sampler of roast birds, fried smelt, and milt (fish semen) butter sauce.

Luckily, I already had a good start from the past hunting season. I had elk, deer, black bear, and antelope meat. I had ducks, doves, pheasant, Canada geese, and a big tub of hearts and gizzards from grouse, pheasant, and waterfowl. The giant mule-deer neck on the bottom shelf of my freezer would make a large pot of game stock, which Escoffier used as freely as water. But even so, my “to get” list quickly grew to an intimidating length. I need perch, pike, crayfish, smelt, carp semen, and a live trout. I’ll have to find a way to breed pigeons and collect their eggs, and I need to get my hands on a bunch of rabbits and a couple of swallow nests. Time to get rolling.

In Escoffier’s day, wild-game eating was so commonplace that the term “wild-game chef” would have been redundant. Before his death in 1935, Escoffier made four journeys to the New World, where he surely dined on a wide array of American game. In 1903, at the time of Le Guide’s publication, you could walk into Delmonico’s Restaurant, in New York City, and order such favorites as diamondback terrapin (a small eastern turtle), whitetail deer, and canvasback duck.

Delmonico’s opened its doors in 1830 and enjoyed 93 years of business. But the same factors that finally brought the restaurant to its knees were to blame for the demise of wild-game eating in general. Prohibition, enacted in 1919, was a deadly blow: Without legal access to alcohol for cooking, many popular wild-game dishes were deleted from the Delmonico’s menu. The other problem was the wholesale wildlife slaughter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the most popular Delmonico’s dishes was the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914. By the time the restaurant closed its doors, on May 1, 1923, a proliferation of state and federal laws had banned the sale of wild game in the United States. These days, the game served in the “wild game” restaurants popping up in major cities has been farm-raised.

It’s surprising to me that faux wild game is gaining popularity in a society that is too squeamish and horrified to kill its own grub. We’ve become so removed from the reality of obtaining our food supply that almost no one knows how to wring — or would dare to wring — a chicken’s neck. If I’m going to eat something, I much prefer to kill it myself. I hunt elk and deer with a bow and arrow, I fish with hooks, and I take birds with a shotgun, then wring their necks if the shot didn’t finish them off. This may sound gruesome, but I can face the consequences of my need to eat. I limit my kills to what is sustainable and sound for animal populations, and I participate in efforts to protect wilderness and open lands. It may seem like my lifestyle is a holdover from the past, but to me it is a good plan for the future.