AN ADVENTURER NONPAREIL

There is a community out there in far western Nepal that suspends matrimonial bonds for one week during the festival of Holi, the ageless festival of colors and gaiety Lord Krishna enjoyed with his gopinis in an age before ours. Anything goes, new loves are pursued, new ties are created for a brief period until the festivities end and life comes back to its mundane self. Now don't raise your hopes too high, I did not find this community; I am not an anthropologist. Dana Brown did, or so he claims in voice recorded tapes that have now been digitized to mp3 and available over the internet!

Dana Drown is the epitome of the great, male, white hunter. In school we read about Allan Quatermain the protagonist of "King Solomon's Mines", the quintessential explorer and Africa lover forever overcoming overwhelming odds in the dark heart of Africa. Dana Brown was the latter day Quatermain exploring the jungles of Africa and South Asia in search of the great big trophies and even bigger stories. He was a coffee baron from St. Louis, Missouri and he came to shoot the tiger with my father no less than three times in the sixties.

Dana Brown with tiger bagged in Nepal

Nepal Shikar Private Limited was founded by my father to allow international trophy seekers to hunt big game in the Nepal Terai, the greatest hunting trophy of them all being the Royal Bengal Tiger. No, the Rhinos were prohibited to take back as trophies even then. Jungles were thick and man-eating tigers were always on the prowl to prey on helpless villagers living at the edge of the foreboding wilderness. The sixties witnessed the borderline period before the hunters became the hunted, before humans started annihilating those magnificent beasts for monetary gains rather than for self-defense.

Dana Brown with Major Tula Bahadur Karki

Dana Brown with shikari Malla Babusahev

There were many rich Americans and a few European royalty who came to shoot with Nepal Shikar. I remember Ralph Scott a Texas oil man who hunted in Nawalpur in 1966 and he was at the time rumored to be the 19th richest American. Another hunter was a one-legged U.S. Air Force veteran pilot who trained to become a lawyer after he lost his leg when his aircraft was shot down in WWII. I have forgotten his name. He had morphed into one of the highest earning lawyers in the D.C. area. But among my father's big game hunting clients, Dana Brown stands out as the person who fell in love with the Nepal Terai. I remember him cramping himself in tree tops sleepless all night to record the jungle sounds. He even recorded sounds of tigers mating! He was very interested in the Tharu Community, endlessly shooting films on them, their rapidly disappearing habitat and their insular culture. One story tells us that the Tharus are people of Burmese descent who came to the Nepal Terai in the middle ages and survived the blistering heat, the ever present threat of wild animals and, most importantly, the malarial parasite having slowly built immunity against it.

My father General Kiran, Dana Brown and a shikari

Dana Brown shot a tiger each time he was here, including a near record size male and another that was a proven man-eater. Dana Brown claims in stories I have read of him that he was personally invited by the king of Nepal to shoot a man-eater, a claim for fame aimed more at his own gullible community in Missouri rather than any historical fact, but who would not romance the Himalayan kingdom of the fifties and sixties? But, yes, kill a man-eater he did with my father cleverly laying the trap to the gratitude of the terrorized Tharu community. The tiger had already taken seven lives.

Dana Brown was a coffee magnate and he started a new line of coffee, the "Tiger Brand" in memory of his Nepal shoots. He has a huge collection of hunting film footage from his exploits in Africa and Nepal gathering dust in a warehouse in St. Louis. An article published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dated 24 November 2006 states, "The silver-gray metal canisters and reels of 16" mm films inside have been carefully stacked on the shelves of a fourth-floor storage room in south St. Louis. If the film has not deteriorated - and a brief inspection recently indicated that it remained intact - it offers a potentially amazing look into the lives of the people and wildlife that inhabited some of the most remote corners of the world at that time. The film also provides a glimpse into the life of a local icon, whose Safari brand coffee line commercials and documentaries entertained generations of St. Louisans. Many of Brown's documentaries began with 'This is Safari Land, and I am Dana Brown'."

Dana Brown passed away in 1994. The savvy businessman and globe-trotting outdoorsman has left behind the Dana Brown Charitable Trust that has pumped U.S. $ 40 million into local institutions, from St. Louis Children's Hospital to Forest Park and the St. Louis Zoo. We shall now never know more about the community in Western Nepal that celebrated Holi with such wanton abandon but Dana's legacy lives on.