Prince Harry’s face was once shoved inside a dead animal’s carcass in a bizarre royal hunting ritual to mark his first big kill.
In his explosive memoir Spare, the Duke of Sussex recalled some of his earliest hunting kills, and shared how, after he managed to shoot down his first stag, his guide pushed his face into the dead animal’s belly in a strange ritual.
According to Prince Harry, after he had shot down the stag with one shot, the guide, Sandy, moved forward and ‘knelt before it, took out his gleaming knife, bled it from the neck and slit open the belly’.
Sandy then ‘motioned for Prince Harry to kneel’, which he did, thinking that they were ‘going to pray’, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
“I knelt closer… He (Sandy) placed a hand gently behind my neck, and now I thought he was going to hug me, congratulate me… Instead, he pushed my head inside the carcass,” revealed Harry.
He further wrote, “I tried to pull away… I was shocked… by the infernal smell. My breakfast jumped up from my stomach… After a minute, I couldn’t smell anything, because I couldn’t breathe. My nose and mouth were full of blood, guys, and a deep, upsetting warmth.”
Prince Harry then shared how, when Sandy finally pulled his face out from the belly of the dead stag, he was told to not wipe the blood from his face and instead let it dry, in some sort of an effort to complete the ritual.
Prince Harry’s memoir Spare was released on January 10, and included many bombshell revelations about his time in the British royal family.