The telegram he ignored
Howard Hill did not ask permission.
He was 50 years old when he sailed for Africa with a 125-pound longbow, a quiver of hand-fashioned broadheads, and a dream he had been carrying since he was a boy growing up in Alabama. The dream was simple and completely insane. Track a wild elephant on foot. Stalk it through the grass. And take it with a bow the way it had never been done before in Kenya.
The world press ran headlines about it before he even left. Warner Brothers had turned down his film script. MGM passed too. The Kenyan authorities sent him a telegram before he arrived telling him it would not be allowed. An elephant had never been taken with a bow in Kenya, they told him. Not without poison darts. What he was proposing was impossible. At best he would only wound one.
Howard Hill ignored the telegram and sailed anyway.
When he arrived in Kenya and the authorities repeated their objections in person he did not argue with them. He told them he had a quarter million dollars to spend in their country making a film and killing an elephant. If they would not allow him to hunt his way he would take his money to India and shoot one there. He would sign whatever papers they wanted releasing their government from any responsibility.
The Kenyans relented.
The philosophy behind the shot
His heroes had always been Native Americans. Not necessarily the best shots, he said, but their ability to stalk and get in close and make clean kills set them apart. That philosophy shaped everything about how he wanted to hunt this elephant. The goal was never just to kill one. The goal was to track it, stalk it, and face it with nothing between him and the outcome but his own nerve and a broadhead he had made with his own hands.
No compromise. No shortcuts. No white hunter standing by with a rifle to finish what the bow started.
He found his elephant in the high grass
In his own words: "The moment of truth was at hand. There he was, the largest animal on land, and there I was, a man of 50, with a bow and arrow trying to take the elephant without being killed in the process. I crawled through the high grass and hid behind a large ant hill. Rising up on top of the mount, I took aim with my 125-pound longbow and let my custom arrow fly."
The arrow was a 41-inch aluminum shaft tipped with an enlarged version of his classic Howard Hill broadhead. It weighed 1,700 grains. It hit its mark and penetrated 33 inches into a 12,000-pound elephant, passing all the way through both lungs and hitting the back of the front shoulder.
The elephant fell over dead.
The film was called Tembo. It was eventually shown in 57 countries and released in seven languages. The opening credits included a signed statement from three crew members confirming that every scene was filmed exactly as shown. No trick photography. No tame animals. No compounds.
The controversy and what it doesn't change
It did not end without controversy. Critics later alleged that the elephant had been immobilized before the bow shot to get workable footage, a claim attributed to some of Hill's own camera crew. His defenders pointed to two other elephants he shot in Africa that were never filmed and would have had no reason to involve shortcuts. There is also a passage in his own book describing a failed shot at a bull elephant where the arrow deflected off a branch and struck the jaw, and that animal ran back searching for the source of the wound. That elephant was clearly not immobilized.
The full truth of it lives somewhere between the claim and the controversy, the way it often does with the boldest hunts ever attempted.
What is not in dispute is this. Howard Hill was 50 years old. He financed the expedition himself with money borrowed from Errol Flynn. He ignored a government telegram telling him it could not be done. He crawled through the African grass with a bow he had made himself and a broadhead he had fashioned by hand and he took his shot at the largest animal on land.
Most men never take their shot at all. They wait for permission that never comes, for conditions that are never quite right, for someone to tell them it's possible first. Hill already knew it was possible. He just had to go prove it.
The question he leaves every traditional hunter with is the same one he answered in that grass in Kenya. When the moment arrives, are you going to be ready?
Howard Hill hunted Africa the way traditional hunters have always hunted. On foot. Up close. With equipment made by hand and a standard that asked everything of the man holding the bow. That same standard is what we built the Trad Hunters Journal around, one volume at a time.
If you haven't started the collection, Vol. 1 Alaska is where it began.