The next morning, the film of rotting meat on the lion’s claws and teeth had done its work. The wounds—the largest of which was actually on Harry’s back and not seen by him until reaching a hospital several days later—had turned septic, leaving him with a bonfire of a fever and unable even to stand. Staying in camp that day, he sent his men to skin the lion he had knifed, although not having seen the event they were understandably skeptical. Some time later, they returned with the skin, the skull and the heart, which clearly showed that the knife point had reached the vital organ with both stabs. Wolhuter also believed that he had cut the cat’s jugular as it released him, but the manner in which it was skinned apparently left this undecided. The reserve police also had Harry’s horse with them, none the worse for physical wear once salt had been rubbed into the claw marks on its rump but left totally neurotic from the attack. It would bolt at the sight of any game animal and Harry later had to sell him. The dead lion’s stomach was completely empty, which tends to confirm my own experience and conclusions that a lion will eat a man any time he is hungry enough and one is available.
After another terrible half-delirious night, Harry sent off to a village for some men to carry him on the long journey to the nearest help at a town called Komatipoort, five days away on the Komati River. Dying by inches in his hammocklike machila, a litter made of a blanket swung from poles, Wolhuter suffered hell on earth. By now, the bites and claw marks were so septic and rotten, swollen enormously, that the stench of his own decomposing flesh forced him to lie with his face turned away. Somehow, he was still alive at Komatipoort, but the doctor there could do nothing for his pain, as he was flat out of morphia. The following day, a friend went on the train with him to Barberton and the hospital, where he lay near death for weeks. Although several times not expected to last the night, he did survive, and his arm was also saved. For the rest of his life, though, he could only with difficulty lift it high enough to reach the trigger of his shouldered rifle. At that, it was a cheap enough price to pay for escape after being dragged a measured sixty yards through the dark by a man-eating lion.
Harry Wolhuter served the South African government for another forty-two years, retiring at last in 1946. Although he is the only white man I can find on record who killed a lion with a knife in single combat, he is surely the only man in history to have killed two lions with that weapon! Stevenson-Hamilton, his boss, wrote that Harry killed a second badly wounded lion by stabbing it in 1945, or perhaps the year before. The reason given by Harry was “to save a cartridge.” There may have been a war on, but that is true frugality!
The story of Harry Wolhuter and his knife fight with a lion would not be complete without a short consideration of the weapon itself. It was a standard wedge-shaped blade (sometimes used for the professional slaughtering of sheep and pigs), bearing the trade-mark “Pipe Brand,” manufactured by T. Williams of London, a specialist in butcher knives of various styles. This brand was very well thought of at the time, and how Wolhuter had obtained his knife is an interesting sidelight: he had stolen it!
Visiting a cheese shop owned by a friend in Komatipoort years before, he noticed a big wheel of Dutch cheese on the counter and idly picked up the knife left alongside to cut it. When he saw that it was one of the highly regarded and hard-to-find “Pipe Brand” blades, he was horrified that such a fine instrument should be condemned to an existence of cutting cheese. Removing his own knife from its sheath, he switched the two. The owner never noticed, as the two knives were nearly identical in size and shape, unaware of the change having been made until years afterward when Wolhuter told him, explaining the dark deed by saying that “fair exchange was no robbery.”
Some years after the stabbing incident, Harry was in London and dropped by the Williams shop to buy a dozen more of the good knives. Remarking to a young salesman that he had once killed a lion with the excellent Williams “sticking” model, the clerk thought he had never heard such an outrageous liar. Mr. Williams, who had heard of the feat, sent Harry an early version of what is today generally known as the “Swiss army knife,” a multibladed pocket model with all manner of doodads and gimmicks built into it. A pal of Harry’s once commented that it lacked only a small forge and an anvil to be complete.
The skin of Wolhuter’s lion and the knife that killed it were on Harry’s wall until his death some years ago and are now kept on display in South Africa by a relative, where they were inspected last year by a good friend of mine.
A man doesn’t have to be crazy to want to hunt big, dangerous game under the most challenging circumstances possible, but then, it wouldn’t be much of a disadvantage, either. Since I mentioned elsewhere in this book that I once killed a Cape buffalo with a spear—two of them, actually, but the first had been badly wounded by a deflected .375 H&H Magnum bullet and was not in much shape to contest the issue—I suppose the tale would bear repetition here. It is not offered as any particular example of the hairiness of my chest and is most certainly not to be construed as the most remote attempt to include myself as a member of the elite company of gentlemen between these pages. You will find no lingering legends in any African barrooms concerning my enthusiasm for deeds of derring-do, nor are you likely to unearth any in the future. I tell you this story because it happened and because I found the events quite nearly of fatal interest at the time.
The plane had stirred huge billows of henna Zambian dust as it raced down the little bush strip and sprang like a startled grasshopper into the heat of the colorless, vulture-punctuated central African sky. Piet, the Africaans pilot, swung the Cessna back over us and waggled the wings, showing the white hand flashes of the clients waving goodbye.
Ian and I both gave a sigh of relief. It had been a good safari we had shared, and we both felt the lovely warm lump of traveler’s checks wadded in our bush shorts, an unrequired but appreciated gesture of gratitude for eleven new additions to the Rowland Ward record book. It had been five safaris in a row for us both, five months of bone-bruising hunting and thousands of miles of wrestling the long-wheelbase Land Rovers over the bush tracks and spring-snapping dried-mud elephant prints left over from the rainy season; up at four every morning, readying equipment, last to bed after the thirstiest client; five bloody months without a single break. We were ready for a rest, and now we had one. At the time, I didn’t realize how permanent mine might become.
Ian walked to the back of his battered Rover and fished under the tarp for the cool white jug. When he placed it on a fender and pressed the button at the base, a long, sparkling stream of his homemade giant killer splashed into the scratched, pebbled plastic “glasses.”
“I give you, Bwana,” he said with a sweeping bow, “our temporary emancipation.” He raised the glass. “One full week—seven days, count and savor each one—of the glory of gin and the character-building celibacy of the Natural Life. We are, had you not noticed, somewhat short of the gentle gender.”
I lifted my drink to match his salute, trying to keep my eyes from crossing as the clear liquid slid into my stomach like Maury Wills stealing home plate with a shiny new set of cleats. He swung the jug back to Silent, my old gunbearer, who stowed it under the worn dust cover of the hunting car. “Westward, ho, the wagons, Yank!” proclaimed Ian, who has something of a sense for the dramatic. He slid behind the English-drive steering wheel, and we began the fifty-mile bash back to camp, my kidneys feeling as if they’d been through a Cuisinart by the time we pulled up at our joint semipermanent hunting headquarters.
The bush around the little group of grass-thatched kaias was blacker than a hanging judge’s heart as we finished the platter of fried venison filets and fresh, hot bread. The campfire gleamed greenly through the glass carcasses of two dead bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild—’53, I believe—leftovers of the clients, while Martin, my majordomo, materialized with two snifters of Fundador and a box of Havana Claros Ian had picked up from a Congolese border guard.
We settled down in the canvas camp chairs an
d watched the blue-white of the mopane wood fire weave its eternal mystery on the soul of all hunters since man first learned to sharpen the stick. A hyena’s giggle floated up from the lagoon across the Luangwa River, and a baboon grumbled in his sleep in a nearby fig grove. The distant grunt of a lion blended with the watery adenoidal honk of hippos upstream. Ian held the snifter with both hands, slowly swirling the golden-colored liquid inside. I watched him from across the fire.
“I’ve got an idea for a few grins,” I said tentatively. “We can’t just sit around camp all week listening to our cuticles grow, you know.”
“We can’t?”
“Nope. Listen, chum, you remember my telling you about that pig-sticking down in Argentina?” He nodded and allowed that he recalled some such verbal chest-beating, dismissing it as just another of my usual postsundowner reveries. “Well, we’ve got a week off, so why not see if we can take a buff with a spear?” He looked at me as if I’d just announced I had found religion.
“Oh, Pedro, you have been working too hard! Have you put anything odd into the campfire or been tracking without your hat again?” I could tell he didn’t seem to like the idea. “You mean a Cape buffalo? With a spear? Who do you think you are, St. George?” He shook his head and took a big bite of the brandy. Speaking slowly, as if to a clear case of diminished capacity, he went on. “Thankee kindly, old boy, but no thanks. I don’t know about you, but my clients work hard enough at getting me recycled without any professional help from you. Anyway,” he sniffed, “I have a tendency to be biodegradable.”
“Now, just hang on a minute,” I countered. “I think it can be done, and without getting hashed in the process, either.” I topped up the snifters. “You don’t have to do anything but cover me, anyway. I’m positive, if I can get up close enough to a bull in enough bush for a good approach, I can nail him. How about it?”
Ian does not sway easily. “Look,” he explained with the same weary patience, “if you can get close enough to get him, then he will be close enough to get you. Try sticking some economy-size hatpin into one of those babies, and he’ll be all over you before you can say whiskey soda, please. Remember what happened to our old buddy Karl?”
I remembered, indeed. Karl (which is not his real name) was a professional in a neighboring country who had started believing his own publicity, which is a no-no if you wish to finish your career with the same general bilateral symmetry you were issued. After a wealthy client had missed a close, easy shot, Karl had made the usual comment concerning being close enough to hit the buff with a ten-foot pole. Angry at the unflattering observation, the client had bet Karl a large sum at excellent odds that the professional didn’t have the nerve to try just that. Karl did win the bet, but I don’t believe it came close to covering his hospital and doctor bills over the next couple of years he spent in traction and on crutches.
“Just the same, chum,” I continued undaunted, “I’d like to give it a go, anyway. If you’ll back me up with that self-propelled gun of yours, that is.”
Ian looked into the fire for a long time, then shrugged. “Okay, mate,” he said finally. “I don’t know where you got your Tarzan complex, but if you get mailed back to the land of the free in a manila envelope, remember who told you so.”
Two days later, I remembered who told me so and wished I had listened.
All my life I had been fascinated by spear hunting, which I believe is the absolute apogee of sport. Before this particular exercise with Ian, my experience had been quite limited, totaling one Peter’s gazelle in Ethiopia, two wild boar in Argentina and the aforementioned wounded and mostly incapacitated buffalo I stuck on safari in Zambia in 1969 with a client from New York. True, I was able to kill the Chabunkwa man-eating lion while he was mauling Silent by cutting his spinal column with the edge of my gunbearer’s broken-shafted spear, but that was sheer good luck and not true spear hunting.
Now the choice of Cape buffalo as my prey was really a matter of elimination, since this was the only species of really big game permitted on my professional hunter’s “pot,” or ration license, which permitted me, over a full season, to kill ten for food for myself and my native staff. Except for buffalo, impala and wildebeest, no other species may be taken by a licensed pro hunter in Zambia, and these only for food.
I see no need at this point to get into the awesome stature, temperament and reputation of the African Cape buffalo, because, unless you just learned to read this morning, you are aware that he can be one of the toughest, nastiest and trickiest animals ever placed on earth to keep strains of lunacy from spreading through the genes of big-game hunters. (I also suspect that motorcycle racing and hang gliding will, sure as nature, take over where polio and the black plague left off.) Still, no matter how tough he may be, if you can stick a razor-sharp piece of steel two and three-quarter inches wide and seventeen inches long into his boiler room and through the lungs, you’re going to get his fatal attention. If great archer Fred Bear managed it with just one arrow in Mozambique, then the much wider wound channel of the spear would just have to be as effective. The only (and considerable) difference would be that old Fred can shoot an arrow a mite farther than I can throw a three-pound spear, and with a great deal more accuracy. I would have to be within ten yards. Ten yards is much closer in spearhunting Cape buffalo than it is at the goal line of the Super Bowl … .
A very bleary-looking Ian was already at the breakfast table of the dining hut with its wall-less vista of the Luangwa below. I ordered up scrambles and impala liver as the gaudy sunrise began to flood across the sparkling dewdrops of the African bushveldt. After breakfast, we drove over to the local village with a piece of broken spring from my Land Rover for the blacksmith to fashion into what I considered to be a proper spearhead. The style used locally was not to my liking: a tang formed at the base of the head which was set into a hollow at the head of the shaft male/female, and sweated tight with wrappings of native copper or a section of straightened bicycle handlebar. This prevented the spearhead from penetrating past the joint, and, brother, I wanted every inch of depth into that rocklike muscle I could beg, borrow or ransom. That afternoon, the smithy’s son came trotting into camp with it. Perfect! It was five feet, ten inches overall, the blade wide and tapering with a central ridge for strength and an eight-inch female socket fitted exactly to the shaft of tough, knobby, seasoned thornwood. A counterweight was shod to the butt in a similar manner. I praised the boy and gave him the extravagant fee of fifty Ngwee, roughly thirty-five cents in U.S. money. I went off to practice with it, using the pithy portion of an elephant-damaged baobab, or cream-of-tartar tree, as a target.
Remembering that by some freak I had hit the wounded buff exactly in the heart (which had done nothing to depress the value of my stock locally) and the heart had continued to beat for a mighty long time, I knew I would have to be able to hit an eight-inch circle without fail. My eye still being “in,” I found I could do this just about every throw from twelve yards; but baobab trees do not move or have long, sharp horns, so I decided not to try to throw from over ten yards, as I had previously calculated. Satisfied that I was up to my end of things and that the spear would do the job if I did mine, I went back to camp and sat down with Ian to cook up a plan of action.
We knew that there were several groups of buffalo bulls along this stretch of river fairly near camp, who watered at night and then retreated to the thickets a mile back from the water to feed and rest. In particular, there was one very large old boy with a boss corrugated like ancient oak bark that covered his head like a helmet. His once-long, immensely thick horns were now so worn with age they had lost their beauty, but if they now lacked the classic sweep of the mature bull, they were made even more impressive by the short, tent-peg points that looped low and deadly. Ian and I had both seen him many times but never let a client take him because the measurement was no longer there, yet we knew where he spent the hot afternoons, dodging the tsetse, and decided that, on the basis of one barrel of trouble a
t a time being sufficient, we would try him, rather than fool around with a small herd of bulls.
In cover of this thick type, I knew I was risking the shaft glancing off a branch or twig and had determined not to risk a throw unless I had a clear, broadside angle where I could be fairly certain of getting the long spearhead past the barrel-stave ribs and into heart, lungs or major arteries. I would go first, with the spear, and Ian would follow ten to fifteen yards behind and to my left, always keeping me in sight. If he was directly behind me, I would be in his line of fire in case of a frontal charge. “Of course,” he mused, “doesn’t really matter if I shoot you or that buff catches up with you. Dead’s dead.” Nice guy, Ian.
The next afternoon, right after lunch, we piled into my Rover and drove for the heavy bush about two miles from camp, cutting the engine halfway there. Ian fed four ugly, blunt-snouted, full-jacket rounds into his .458 Winchester Magnum Model 70 and slipped the bolt home with an oily snick.
Death in the Silent Places Page 28