Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  We trailed the ram for two hours across the rocky plain, my feeling the wounded-animal sickness with each step. He kept ahead of us, but we kept him in sight. At one point, with the utmost indulgence, Ralph advised, “I know you can tell me a lot about writing [I wondered]; but if you don’t mind, try to watch him drop in the scope with the next shot—don’t lift your head—or we will be walking for a very much longer time.” I knew all this already, but there seemed to be a disconnect between my consciousness and the motor skills controlling my trigger finger.

  We got to within 175 yards of the gazelle, making for another tough shot in the wind. This time I kept my head down. The 140 grain took him behind the left shoulder, coming out at the point of the right; and he was dead—at last—before he hit the ground.

  He was an older ram (one of the regular, “common,” buff variety), his horns over 13 inches long with 6-inch bases. Ralph told me to kneel and smell the pronk, the fan of white hair the springbok carried on the rear of its back and “everted” when bounding in excitement. I thought it was some sort of gag, but I figured it was my turn to indulge him. Kneeling, I put my face against the sheaf of hairs and smelled a candy-shop smell. It faded as the springbok cooled, and I felt as if something perfervid in me had cooled. It hadn’t.

  The French, they say, have a word for it; but it seems Afrikaners do, too. For my condition, it was a word I heard Ralph using in a phone conversation with his parents that night, talking about the new hunter. Bokkoors was the word. “Buck curse.” What we call plain old buck fever. Even though I had hunted big game since I was 16, I still got bokkoors, especially in Africa. And sometimes it seemed that the harder I tried to tamp it down, the more it wanted to push out of me.

  I suppose I could have taken consolation in considering the way Theodore Roosevelt had shot in Africa—as a friend put it, “A wounding we will go.” Robert Ruark was forthright about how badly he shot at the start of his first safari with Harry Selby; and even Hemingway, when not committing the “braggies” over some string of one-shot kills, reckoned as how his might not always have shot as straight as he could in Tanganyika. (While he admitted to missing a Grant’s with “shot after shot,” it was up to wife number two, Pauline, to record in her safari diary that something like 30 rounds were fired without effect at the gazelle by Ernest, whom she had never seen “miss so completely,” though he “behaved beautifully,” that grace-under-pressure thing.) I did want to shoot well (yes, a risible desire to have anymore); but I was not sure I wanted it at the possible total expense of ever knowing bokkoors again, to be filled with nothing at the shooting and killing of game.

  The next morning, cold and cloudy and spitting rain, we drove to the top of the 1,900-meter mesa beetling over the hunting area, looking for black wildebeest. On top of the mesa, breath formed itself into white billows. The temperature, though, was not my worry.

  Grinding up the rock-and-dirt switchback road bladed into the side of the mesa, we passed Cape kudu cows and klipspringer (Africa’s miniature chamois, called ko-ka in the language of the Khoisan, from which Ralph took the name of his hunting camp, Ko-Ka-Tsara, “small buck’s valley”) perched on the rocks. On the mesa top the land was more lush, with tufted grass and heavier brush, and rockier than the plains below. Almost at once we began seeing the tan saddled, blue-black flanked, belly, stockings, blaze, and rump white as a starched linen cloth, ring-horned bontebok. When the quagga and blaubok were being shot from existence in the 19th century, the elegant little bontebok (reduced at one time to a total of 17 known animals in the world) nearly went with them. Hunting-based conservation (please see above; it cannot be noted too frequently) in South Africa brought it back, to the point where, although technically listed as endangered, it could legally be hunted and the trophy imported into the United States with the proper permits. They were beautiful; but it’s an odd measure of game that some instills intense excitement, while others, perhaps not even so dissimilar, creates none. With bontebok, I could not muster much enthusiasm for taking one.

  There were eland and gemsbok and blue wildebeest up here, too, in this dramatic hunting country; but we had come for black wildebeest. When the Dutch saw these absurd-looking antelope (bearded and hairy-muzzled with horse-maned neck and withers sloping Paleolithically to low hindquarters, a casque of a boss resting on its forehead as the horns grew down before turning up to long sharp points, and a light-colored flicking tail hanging nearly to the ground), they mistook them for a species of wild ox (wildebees), while the other name, gnu, also from the Khoisan, was imitative of their raucous snort. There was no doubt something off-putting to the Reformed souls of those early Afrikaners to see those animals cavorting on the plains in anarchic leaping circles, none coming forth to lead, and all refusing to follow. This impelled the Afrikaners to christen the black wildebeest “the old fool of the veldt.” In truth, they were hardly fools, just sometimes inquisitive; but mainly they were wild, wary, fast, capable of aggression, and hard to put down if not shot right.

  Ralph and I left the bakkie and stalked to the rim of a wide bowl. Ralph knew this place and that there was often a herd of black wildebeest here. When we crept over the rim, the herd was there, 400 yards away, with a very good bull in it. We made our way from brush to brush, then angled to a tree to cut the distance to under 200. Ralph set up the shooting sticks; and I tried to get a rest, remembering about seeing the animal in the scope all the way to the ground. I still felt rocky, but I got on him and tried to hold everything in as I squeezed off the shot. And hit him back, far enough for him to run off with the herd. More than an hour of blood-trailing and stalking went by before he could be caught up with and put down. He was an ancient animal with a massive boss and horns that ranked him high up in the record book; and I would have traded any ranking for a shot that was clean and quick, and not atrocious.

  After we got the wildebeest off the mesa and back to camp, we went out to sight-in the rifle again, just to make sure. It shot right enough, of course, as I suspected it would. Maybe I was the old fool of the veldt; to know that for sure, I had to go on hunting.

  In African hunting there is “new school” and “old.” New school involved picking up a hunting client at the airport and getting him five assorted flavors of representative animals, by whatever means were most economical and expeditious, then depositing him back at the airport in seven days and reloading another client. Or make that a group of clients. Hunting clients bought into this travesty because they were 10,000 miles from home and were loath to return empty handed; nobody in their town was likely to distinguish a springbok from Johann Sebastian Bach, let alone a good springbok from a mediocre; and who, other than they, was ever going to know the circumstances under which they hunted in Africa? PHs, for their part, resort to new school because they’ve lost interest in real hunting (if they ever had any to begin with), because they didn’t care whether or not their clients experienced a true safari. It was all about the money, it goes without saying.

  Old school was climbing down from the bakkie and going out on foot for however long it took to hunt the best animal you could. It meant turning down all the immature game and the gimme shots—such as when you drove down the bend in the dirt road and found a better-than-decent gemsbok standing in the middle of it, when what you were out for that day was hartebeest. It meant meeting the animal on its own ground and giving it—to use a phrase anti-hunters delight in sneering at—a “sporting chance.”

  Ralph hunted old school. Shank’s mare was what you rode to close the distance to game if you were going to hunt with Ralph, and he was not going to let you kill anything that was less than what he would want to put on the wall of his own home. Certainly, this was all quite admirable, though you did mull over if sportsmanship always had to be so damn bloody exhausting, not the least emotionally so.

  Today the bets were on red as we went back onto the mesa to hunt red, or Cape, hartebeest. It is large antelope that in closely related species and subspecies, such as the t
sessebe and topi, was once found almost literally from the Cape to Cairo. The Dutch settlers named it for its hardiness when they pursued it on horseback, flatly baffled that the dismal-looking 350-pound antelope could remain fresh during a long chase, when a hunter’s horse would be badly “blown” before the trekker could catch up to the wild animal. The hartebeest galloped in an easy, ground-covering lope, its long mule-faced head up. The red in its hide was a dusting of cinnamon, shading to brick in old bulls, with patches of steel blue on the upper legs and face. The horns were maybe some of the most remarkable, if hardly spectacular, in Africa, thick-based, thick-ribbed hooks like quotation marks. And few antelope in the world had better eyes.

  In the late morning we spotted a bachelor herd of six bulls, and in the herd Ralph sighted one of the best hartebeest he had ever seen. We went after the herd, but by the time we got around the side of the hill that the herd had walked over, the animals had run almost 1,000 feet above us, near the top of a high ridge on the mesa. There was really no way to approach the hartebeest without their spotting us, and the only thing was to wait for them to come down.

  We made a braai, a barbecue, and ate lunch in acacia shade, and by half past one the hartebeest had fed down onto a small plateau a long way from us. We had to go on foot if we were going to stalk them without being seen.

  It took almost two hours for Ralph and me to work our way up to the hartebeest. We were able to use the rolling terrain to hide our approach, the hartebeest preternaturally alert to movement. It was this alertness, and not as much about the horns, however admirable, or the size of the animals, that made them worth hunting. At one point we lay behind a rock pile for half an hour to keep out of the herd’s sight while we waited for it to bed down. The winter August sun came down from the clear sky and beat on us as we waited. Then we got up and went on. The ground was a rock garden of oxblood stones shining in the heat. They could only be stepped over or on, never simply walked around. More than once I wanted to pick them up and smash them together into dust.

  More than once, Ralph, perhaps sensing my frustration and tiredness, turned to say softly, “Let’s keep on. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  When we were 500 yards from them, we waited for a short while behind some more rocks, then crouched our way down to a draw and followed it up to the edge of a little plateau that sat on the big plateau of the mesa like an added layer, with the red hartebeest bedded on it. There was no cover, and we had to move slowly onto the little plateau to get in sight of the herd. We had a few seconds, once the hartebeest spotted us, for them to get to their feet and stand before starting to run. We eased forward, doubled over the tall grass that hid even more rocks underfoot, Ralph carrying the dreaded shooting sticks that I never seemed able to get the rifle settled on, but here the only possible rest from which to shoot.

  As we went ahead, first we saw their horns, then their red bodies. Ralph set up the sticks and I lay the 7mm on it. We waited. A full minute passed, then another. A smaller bull stood and looked at us. Then the big bull stood—hindquarters first, then the front—just to the right of the smaller one, 200 yards from me.

  I took a breath, eased off the safety, and held behind the bull’s shoulder. At the shot, he leaped and the herd was up and running. The big bull swung wide to the right of the others and went straight away.

  All I felt was anger. I already had another shell chambered and put the crosshairs on the base of his tail. The 160-grain bullet (switched over from the 140s for the heavier game) hit where I aimed; and the bull went down with a kick and lay still, the remaining hartebeest loping away.

  “What the hell was that?” Ralph asked, shocked to see the bull lying on the ground.

  “Portuguese brainshot?” I suggested. “Texas heartshot?” I wished I’d had a cleverer response at my fingertips, but I was just relieved that the bull was not still running with the others. And I let the anger bleed off.

  When we got to him, Ralph was stunned. It was the biggest red hartebeest he’d ever taken with a hunter—23½-inch horns with 13-inch bases—good enough to blow past the Rowland Ward minimums. This hartebeest was definitely old school. The hunt had been old school. It was the school from which no hunters should ever let himself matriculate. Now I wanted one more shot to make it right—one shot only, at a kudu.

  “There is nearly always a sardonic touch to the story of a kudu,” wrote Ruark. Late on a bright afternoon, Ralph, his tracker and skinner Abram, my son Bryan, and I went off to the far north of Ralph’s hunting area, to his “kudu haven” to see if we could find that touch of sardonicism. In the band around his hat, Bryan wore a white ostrich feather I’d found and given him, making him look like a definite Captain Kidd. He rode in the open back of the bakkie with Abram, plume fluttering, all of us looking for kudu. It was past four o’clock, and the sun was falling swiftly. This was when, according to Ralph, the kudu “let down their guards,” as much as they ever did. As we drove slowly along a sandy road lined on either side by heavy thorn bush, Abram leaned down from the back and softly said to Ralph that there was a kudu.

  Ralph and I looked, the bakkie still rolling, and even without binoculars we saw him standing stock-still, the angled light shining on the hard mirror-image helixes of his horns. When we got farther down the road, putting more brush between the bull and us, Ralph braked the bakkie and we dropped silently out of it while Abram swung down and got behind the wheel, Bryan still in the back. Abram drove the bakkie away; and Ralph and I crouched behind the brush, me with my rifle, and Ralph without the shooting sticks.

  We had to stay in a crouch and move from bush to bush, Ralph expecting the kudu to ghost away at any second. But he stayed. Maybe it was part of what Ruark called the kudu’s “perverseness, his consummate genius for doing the wrong thing always,” except that it is almost always a wrong thing that inured to the benefit of the kudu. Ralph was able to glass him carefully and to tell me it was an old bull, his horns heavy and symmetrical all the way to ivory tips. There were longer horns in the world, he advised; but this was a fully mature kudu—past “mature,” truthfully—whose horns would never grow any longer. Was I sure I wanted to take him? I nodded, and we crouched farther forward.

  In the end we had to get on hands and knees and crawl through a gap in a bush so I could sit up on the other side and try to get the crosshairs on the bull. It was no good, too much brush in the way and not a steady-enough rest. I told Ralph I wanted to move to the next bush ahead of me, crisscrossed with thick dead branches, and see if I could get a shot from there. Ralph shrugged, telling me to go ahead, but more than ever certain that the bull would not stay. Ralph would sit where he was, though, where the kudu could probably see him, on the theory that even the wisest old bull antelope cannot count.

  I made it to the bush and got to my feet, trying to see the kudu without his seeing me, and trying to keep down all the thoughts of all the bad shots. It was the gleam of the horns that showed him to me again. I lay into the bush, letting it take my weight as I slid the rifle ahead and rested it on one of the branches. I could see the bull facing me, through a halo of bone-white acacia thorns in the scope. I felt, in its inevitability, the bokkoors rising; but this time I didn’t try to overwhelm it, increasing the pressure on it, just waited for it to ease and everything to feel right. I looked back at Ralph, sitting motionless, and he gave a little nod. I thumbed off the safety and held on the center of the kudu’s chest.

  I saw the kudu rock in the scope at the shot, then stumble and dive forward, the white of his scut curled convulsively over his rump, seeing it all in the ocular without moving my cheek from the comb of the stock. The bull went down behind big iron-colored rocks and green brush, and did not get up. When we got to him, the bright-white chevron of the Cape subspecies of greater kudu could be seen on his face, and he was gaunt and nearly toothless. He would not have survived the rest of the winter. The horns were far from “making book” but were what the antelope had spent a lifetime growing and were thi
ck, double curled, polished, and capped in white. I had taken better kudu “heads,” but none that meant as much. When Bryan got to us with Abram, I was glad for him to see that his dad could still shoot—sometimes, as atavistic as that may sound.

  There would be better trophies and more clean shots to come. One was a very long shot at a lechwe that would not get up from his bed. The angle looked impossible; but somehow I put the bullet into his heart and lungs, and he did not move. Another shot was on a beautiful nyala, all draping fringe of long hair on his neck and chest, crest of white hairs along the spine, small hooves, stocky brown, white-striped body, and spiral horns rising above his head. He came out as the sun went down into a field of vermillion cactus creeping across the ground, covering it in a needled carpet, the sky growing to match the color of the cactus, the nyala barely there in the fading light; but the single shot at 175 yards brought the heavy antelope down. It was the shot on the kudu, though, that I remember far more vividly.

  As an African sunset rivaling Capstickian prose—hemorrhaging “like a fresh wound”—painted the sky, I looked at this kudu bull and thought of the words of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, written in one of the best of all dog books, Jock of the Bushveld: “There is a suggestion of grace and poise in the movement of the koodoo bull’s head as he gallops through the bush which is one of his distinctions above the other antelopes.” Even in death, you could see that suggestion in this kudu, that had stood there just long enough so the bokkoors could dissolve in me; and I could have my own suggestion of grace and poise, if for only that moment.

  Arab Winter

  The 2010s …

  In the whole of Libya there is neither wild boar, nor stag, nor wild goat.

  —Aristotle