Word: eland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What interests Calvin Bentsen is wild animals, the stranger the better. About 15 years ago, he joined the growing number of Texas ranchers who are devoting some of their pastures to exotic wildlife. Now Indian axis deer, African eland, wildebeests, Grevy's zebras and sable antelope roam Bentsen's range. To help support his wildlife habit, Bentsen sells surplus animals. His ostrich chicks fetch $7,500 a pair. Several times a year he lets hunters take trophies from the surplus animals on the ranch. Bentsen is a lifelong hunter and also a dedicated conservationist...
...time, as if on the deck of a Cunard liner, or to dip into that biography of Abigail Adams you gave her (a lady for a lady), at manageable intervals. Television interests her not, except occasionally the nature shows that PBS specializes in. Motionless before the mating eland. The memory clicks on and off. The older the anecdote, the clearer in detail. Typical of her much analyzed years, she will forget the sentence before last but in the next will come up with a name from 1923 and a Gershwin lyric that, once sung, swims her back into a world...
...used a Dik-dik, that small lovely antelope, to thwart someone's plans. It works thus: he places charms upon the animal and then releases it in the direction of the person who is the target of the spell. For help with childbirth, he drapes the skin of an eland on the woman -- the eland being much like the cow, which possesses magic powers. In order to bring rain, the laibon places a dead frog on the ground, belly up, with a charm upon it. Within 24 hours, before the frog decays, the rain will fall...
Asked if he liked the wild animals, the laibon answered, "I like the animals, but they do not like human beings. That is the problem. But the eland is a friend. You can eat an eland, and use his skin for many things." Not long ago, the laibon dreamed that a spitting cobra bit him. He cried in his sleep and leaped out of his bed, shaking, and awoke...
...elegiac note. Ranches are being broken up into "ranchettes," absurd little parcels of land in the middle of nowhere. The owner thereby becomes a small parody of the land-holder, the cattle baron. Some ranchers are turning their land over to "exotic game safaris," importing African animals (gazelles or eland or Cape buffalo) and parading them over the range to be shot, for a handsome price, by city boys dressed up like Jeremiah Johnson...