My
young friend Clayton is the only college freshman I know to have a partial set
of hippopotamus teeth in his bedroom. And in a shadow box too. Nicely
displayed.
The
best part is that it’s a gift from his great grandmother, who first saw the teeth
while they were in the hippopotamus’ actual head. Great grandma is still alive.
The hippo, not so much.
My
grandmother used to send me a dollar in a card on my birthday. Was I shortchanged?
I’d
always thought she was full of spunk. And I still think she was. She wouldn’t
have killed a hippo though. She might could have stunned one, if she’d hit it
in the head with a Bible, which she would have done if the hippo had walked in
and made any noise during her soap operas. Or while Jim and Tammy Faye were on.
I
know this from experience. Walking into grandmamma’s den while
“her shows” were on was like volunteering to be the random big game on a Den Safari. She’d shoot you and tag you before you could say “As The World Turns.”
“her shows” were on was like volunteering to be the random big game on a Den Safari. She’d shoot you and tag you before you could say “As The World Turns.”
Both
Clayton’s great grandmother and my grandmamma grew up in roughly the same era.
Mine has passed away, although she went down swinging, fighting the good fight
until about three weeks before leaving for the big “Search For Tomorrow” program
in the sky. What a lady.
Clayton’s
great grandmother was born about 10 years after my grandma and is in her 90s
now. She’s in a nursing home today; Clayton and several other of her family are
close by.
“She
hasn’t been hunting in a long time though, probably since the hippo,” Clayton
said. “I’m sure nothing could ever quite measure up to that anyway. But she always
loved to hunt, pretty much everything.”
Not
long after I met Clayton, he showed me a picture in his cell phone. It was a
woman sitting on a hippopotamus. She had a big rifle in her hand. And a big
hippo under her.
“Girlfriend?”
I asked him.
“Great
grandma,” Clayton said.
“You’ve
got to be kidding me. Does she have her own TV show? She must have hated that
hippopotamus. Get in her garden or something?”
“No,”
Clayton said. “She just likes to hunt. Always has.”
I
wrote about safari hunting not long ago, and it made me think of her, and pf how
some people who are drawn to safaris didn’t grow up playing football or chewing
tobacco or drinking hard, like the guys in the Ernest Hemingway stories. Some
are women who, if they are lucky, get to be great grandmas with some
interesting stories to tell.
Clayton
told me her great grandmamma had planned the safari with her husband when they
were in their 70s. Unexpectedly, her husband died. But since the trip was a
while off and planned, when it came time to grab the ammo and the plane
tickets, off she went with Pierre, the gentleman who’d agreed to take them.
The
photogenic hippo fell after a shot from a .300 magnum. The natives rode out in
a canoe, put two hooks in it and dragged it back to shore.
“She
gave them candy,” Clayton said. “She brought a bunch of candy.”
She
also gave them the hippo meat. The teeth were saved and given to her as a
surprise, all mounted in the shadow box, “about three feet by three or four
feet,” Clayton said. “It’s a big box, but if you think about it, a hippo has
pretty big teeth.”
I
had not thought about it, but when I did, I could imagine. A hippo tooth can
get to be more than a foot or two long. A dentist could send a kid to college
on just a couple of hippopotami. If one of them needed braces, he could send
the child to grad school.
A
regular Annie Oakley, great grandma also shot some chocolate-colored swirly-horned
animals, and this and that, including a rat monkey. She gave the skull to Clayton,
which is small and sits next to his TV set. Didn’t rate a shadow box, but still,
what a conversation starter.
“What?
You mean that little bitty skull by the remote control? Well, see, my great
grandmamma…”
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