ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS a very experienced and skilled lifelong hunter and shooter. He started early. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, noted that “Ernest was taught to shoot by Pa when 21/2 and when 4 could handle a pistol” (Hotchner, 49). His grandson, Seán Hemingway, specifies that by the time his grandfather was three years old, he “had learned to load, cock and shoot a gun by himself, and at four he was trekking as much as seven miles on hunting expeditions with his father, carrying his own gun over his shoulder” (xxiv). He adds that Ernest Hemingway received his first firearm, an inexpensive single-shot 20-gauge shotgun, from his grandfather, Anson Hemingway, on his tenth birthday, 21 July 1909 (xxv). In all this, Hemingway was typical of Americans of the first half of the twentieth century, whose familiarity with firearms derived from the settling of the West, two world wars, and a host of smaller armed conflicts. This knowledge began to wane as, for a growing portion of American society, guns devolved from useful and necessary tools in common use to symbols of cultural primitivism. In the twenty-first century, many if not most of Hemingway’s readers are strangers to the culturally and technically complicated world of shooting for sport or for food, firearms that are used for hunting, and the African safari.

Hemingway often remarked that he invented from knowledge. He acquired his knowledge of guns and shooting over decades of serious and varied hunting in North America, Cuba, Europe, and East Africa, and if we are to read his “inventions,” his narratives, we have to read from that knowledge as well. A few facts and definitions will help us to do so.

The Game

Dangerous game in Africa usually means the “Big Five”: lion, leopard, Cape buffalo, rhino, and elephant. Their body weight varies from less than two hundred pounds for the leopard to six or seven tons for a mature elephant bull. All of the Big Five can be killed with deer-size calibers, provided a well-made bullet penetrates the heart or brain. But if one misses the vital spot, the situation can become formidably dangerous, as the attacked or injured animal, suddenly fortified by adrenaline, looks for a fight.