As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
TL has gotten me a few books which were written by Peter Hathaway Capstick, and the first ones were interesting when I read them as a child, as they wowed allot of kids in introducing them to the Robert Ruark style of writing.
I have found over the years though as I grew up that Pat McMannus who I liked, just do not age well in time as you grow up and kid’s books just do not wow an adult.
Capstick had one good book on hunting in Africa. Then he got into kind of weirdo black voodoo stuff in tales, and the 3rd was about other adventurers, all with the same cliche shallow humor which ran out in 1950, but not with magazine editors.
I forget the last book he was working on which I read, but it was about planning a safari. It sucked, was finished by his liberal African wife and I started wondering why in the hell Capstick just did not lie and make up stories as that is the kind of fodder which ran in 1950’s Sports Afield as there simply were not allot of Jack O’Connor’s, Elmer Keith’s, Charles Askins and the legend of Guns and Ammo’s back page, whose name now slips my mind.
So I started reading another book in this series from TL pictured below.
Death in a Lonely Land. Kind of a good title, but there is no lonely land. The book starts out with BB gun stories, and is filled with shit like why you miss a shot at deer. See us writers give you the good stuff, but you always have to have filler to fill up the pages. I condense that in the main articles here, and the filler is the stuff about JYG, the Brier and the things I am Inspired by God on.
The one thing I do not do is lie in what I write.
So Capstick was boring as hell in nothing to say, and I get a story about killer baboons, which fared pretty good, and then we got to the jaguar story and then the pig killing story.
As I read the jaguar story, I just started looking at it as a bullshit writer. You got a guide who gets snake bit, survives by an Indian remedy, and the guide is the same name as Blackbeard. The reason Capstick is in the jungle is he has come home with a pile of cash, and ends up at a rich New York pad with a jag hunter who he insults for a canned hunt of a zoo animals, and a 5000 dollar bet is placed that Capstick can get a kitty in 10 days for real.
So the snake bites the the pirate, and now is too weak to go jag hunting, so Peter has to go it alone with his hairy chest. He leaves the cook across the river as the Indian is just a cook, not a kitty hunter, and stakes out the last pig, climbs into his hide and waits in the darkness…….and then the cat is there………..yes the cat is now hunting Peter, and Peter turns the light on just as the cat springs for Peter and Peter blows it’s head off as it hits the floor of the blind and all is well as they boys come home next morning, get drunk and collect the money in the bet.
Oh yes there are sodden undies in this too, as that is where the women come in, in New York listening to the story of jag hunting and Peter humiliates the guy. So this story hits on all cylinders, just like some shit made it up or had a jag hunt with nothing going on but bug bites and embellishes the other 90% for old men in North Carolina to spend their pennies on in Capstick books as we all get wow from Peter.
So that made me suspect of what kind of fabricator Peter Capstick really was. In the forward to this book, the editor of Outdoor Life who pushed Capstick onto the hunting literary scene, literally states that Capstick in scouting a lion hunting concession made up lion stories at night to scare the hell out of him, and put a chair between the tent and the Land Rover so a lion would not eat him that way through the fabric.
So let us look at the wild boar hunting story of Argentina, complete with a Basque superman rancher, the hunting dogs of Argentina bred for hunting these boars which can run 600 pounds, and the female bitch gets killed in the first duel, the boys come home and stick their knives into the soil never to use them again, as this is boar war, and off they go the next day to kill the beasty boar.
The old boar, hooks up with two sows, abandons them, they get stuck with knives and goes to hide across the river. Kind of cliche again, but it could happen. As I was telling TL this interesting tale, there was something the Holy Ghost pointed out to me which drew red flags on the bullshit meter that Peter Hathaway Capstick is a liar and makes things up.
So they kill the boar, after a circus comedy routine of Capstick holding onto the tail and getting kicked in the head by the hind hoof of a pig. I have been around lots of pigs and have never seen a porker kick anyone in the head like a bucking horse. Ok it could have happened, but it knocks out Pedro.
It was the little statement after this that is bullshit. So Peter says it took awhile to load the pigs onto the 3 horses, that is all they had riding after the pigs. The sows each were 300 pounds and the boar was almost 600 pounds, 596, I think Capstick says the scale read back at the ranch.
My old man weighed around 350. The little mare I rode almost bucked under his weight. There is no gaucho horse in Argentina which is going to be able to carry 600 pounds of pig. It would buckle and a dead weight 600 pound pig is not something 3 men are going to be able to load onto a horse back as it is dead weight.
No the pigs were not gutted as Capstick says the full weight, minus he says 4 pounds of blood which was covering his clothes. On the evidence, Peter Capstick made the story up. Now mind you, I’m pleased he could lie and was full of shit, but I would that he would have done it 7 books before this 9th one as he is boring.
Once you find a guy lying, and I do not mean Russell Annnabel embellishing a story, but lying like this, everything this dude has put onto pulp is suspect. Was there ever a tracker named Silent? Were his tales of adventures he heard about from the dead of Africa and made them his own? Not knowing a horse can’t carry a 600 pound pig or will 3 guys get it lifted over their heads is what a city boy would not figure out who was weaned on killing dragon flies and not lifting hay bales in 100 degree summer sun with 90% humidity.
So this is something which kind of needs to be looked at as apparently there was a Capstick award, as the wife did better than Limbaugh’s who just sold off hid ties and took the money and disappeared. Apparently the legacy is veddy important to the stiff British upper lip in how you do things.
I’m reminded in the closing of this in one of my favorite cartoons which I wrote of in “We’re calling We’re calling the Hunter”, which was what all British colonials were in being full of shit. Magnum PI based Higgins on this cartoon character of the British who are just full of shit in claiming to have lived the Forest Gump life of adventures.
It is going to be difficult to finish this book and I never want to read the originals again as I am certain that once my radar is up like this, I’m going to find dozens of statements which will just make me frown and question, that most likely did not happen either.
So Peter Capstick is a liar and he was like allot of coastal hacks from the 1950’s who wrote tales about things which never happened to get a paycheck so they could pretend and laugh all the way to the bank on easy street.
I wonder how many people who got that Capstick award would really want it after learning the stories were a bit not what they were. I know I would not want one as when Obama started giving the President Award to losers who hated America, the sheen on that disappeared.
Nuff Said
agtG
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