- Aagaard, Finn.
Aagaard's Africa.
Washington: National Rifle Association, 1991.
ISBN 0-935998-62-4.
-
The author was born in Kenya in 1932 and lived there until 1977 when,
after Kenya's ban on game hunting destroyed his livelihood as a
safari guide, he emigrated to the United States, where he died in April
2000. This book recounts his life in Kenya, from boyhood through his
career as a professional hunter and guide. If you find the thought
of hunting African wildlife repellent, this is not the book for you.
It does provide a fine look at Africa and its animals by a man who
clearly cherished the land and the beasts which roam it, and viewed
the responsible hunter as an integral part of a sustainable
environment. A little forensic astronomy allows us to determine the
day on which the kudu hunt described on page 124 took place. Aagaard
writes, “There was a total eclipse of the sun that afternoon, but it
seemed a minor event to us. Laird and I will always remember that
day as ‘The Day We Shot The Kudu’.” Checking the
canon
of 20th century solar eclipses
shows that the only total solar eclipse crossing Kenya during the years when Aagaard
was hunting there was on
June
30th, 1973, a seven minute totality
once in a lifetime spectacle. So, the kudu hunt had to be that morning.
To this amateur astronomer, no total solar eclipse is a minor
event, and
the one
I saw in Africa will forever remain a major event in my
life. A solar eclipse with seven minutes of totality is something I
shall never live to see (the next occurring on June 25th, 2150), so I
would have loved to have seen the last and would never have deemed it
a “minor event”, but then I've never shot a kudu the morning of an
eclipse!
This book is out of print and used copies, at this writing, are offered
at outrageous prices. I bought this book directly from the NRA more than a decade
ago—books sometimes sit on my shelf a long time before I read them. I wouldn't
pay more than about USD 25 for a used copy.
July 2005 