Frederick Courteney Selous was a big-game hunter, naturalist, explorer, collector, and writer whose life followed a pattern of adventure, courage, and bravery that many men held as an ideal. The adventures Selous recounts in his books were models for those of H. Rider Haggard's fictional character Alan Quatermain. Establishing a pattern for his life in which Africa was always to be as important as England, Selous first went to Africa at the age of nineteen and returned only briefly to England for visits. On one of his trips to England when he was forty-two years old, Selous married Gladys Maddy, the vivacious twenty-year-old daughter of a Gloustershire clergyman, and the two became parents of two sons.

The Selouses briefly tried life as settlers in Rhodesia, but Selous was destined never to settle anywhere for long. In Surrey they were to own one home, to which they attached a...