Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  Were, he asked me, the Grateful Dead still performing? It was my painful duty to detail for him the pathetic spectacle of superannuated flower children in French-tailored blue jeans, work shirts, and bandannas, along with hordes of bike messengers, filling concert halls to hear them. What was Dylan up to? Who, in fact, could say? What about Hendrix and Joplin? Perhaps he should sit.

  Then we had spotted this dark-as-gun-bluing elephant, his short tusks clean white, and decided—as who would not?—to see how close we could amble up to him, solely to see how close we could. He looked wrinkled and myopic and drowsy. All the same, though, I chambered a 300-grain solid into my new 375 as Sandy did into his old 375, one with iron sights and a grip wrapped in black electrician’s tape, the previous owner having cracked it, literally, over the head of a charging warthog. As we eased uphill toward the elephant, who stood showering himself with dust thrown up by his trunk, I wondered how fast he could charge down on us, if he were to take such a notion. There was a photographer with us, my friend Dan Hernandez, and as we drew closer I kept a weather eye on the bull as the motor drive on the camera clicked, to my ear, as loudly as a hydraulic press in a stamping factory.

  We got to within two-dozen yards before the elephant suddenly stood alert, his ears fanning out, and stared in our direction. We froze. The bull raised the great pyramidal slab of his forehead, the effect evocative of a steam locomotive about to pull out of the depot. Then he came, splintering a rotten stump in his path, scattering us screaming like ninnies to the four winds. Some distance downslope, I threw a glance over my shoulder and saw him running away from us over the crest, and realized how lovely the rump of a departing elephant always was. Now this was the proper way to commence a safari, running from elephant one of my favorite things.

  In the kiln-hot days that followed, the tropic daylight seemed to mail everything in a thick metallic dazzle. We found no game, only their tracks, but got to see the country of the Matetsi. Its “Kalahari sand structure” soil was quite fertile, and decades earlier quasi-heroic efforts were made to turn it into something “beneficial” and “productive.” This meant trying to kill all the animals off thoroughly excellent game lands and turning that ground with the plow. Naturally, the animals tolerated such folly only so long and in the end reclaimed it all.

  Today what remained of the “improvements” were vague dikes and ditch banks subdividing the river flats, and in the hills overgrown tobacco patches and the ruins of drying barns and abandoned whitewashed farmhouses. In place of cash crops, the gigantic elephant-gray baobab grew. In dense brush that had once been cultivated fields impala bucks gave startlingly loud warning snorts. Atop the old earthworks on the flats stood waterbucks, with lyre-curving horns and the bodies of elk, all the plowshares gone long ago to rust, or perhaps beaten back into swords for the hands of war veterans, Mugabe’s useful fools.

  The camp and outfit was run by one Green Torto, a former alumnus of Rhodesian detention with the President, back in the day, making him a very important person for the time being. During my third night in Matetsi, a new-moon night, there had been the not-so-distant roaring of lions outside my green tent, and on the dirt road we followed from the camp the next morning we found the tracks of a large pride. This gave the day some promise.

  We crisscrossed the country in the Land Rover, seeing the requisite elephant or two (zhou or nzou in the native Shona language). Then there was a fine big warthog, njiri; and we set out after him on foot. He moved off, tail high, and the trackers trailed him across the broken volcanic stone, up a small draw, and over the brow of a rise where in the pale papery grass I saw his warty, ivory-tusked profile. I took a rest on my shooting stick and put a 270-grain soft-nosed through the grass and just behind the heavy boar’s left shoulder. He bolted across a dozen yards of broken ground before collapsing, and that night in camp we dined by lantern light on warthog chops.

  More sweltering game-less days came after. In Africa one can never say what any day may bring, but the uncertainty only adds to its attraction. It was the sixth morning, and as we came out onto the dirt road above camp again, heading for the “tar” road that slices across the upper rim of the concession from Victoria Falls to Botswana, Cape buffalo were in the tangled cover below us, returning from the river and their nocturnal waterings. Sandy, his tracker Enoch, and I went in to look at then, paralleling them as they moved in a black wall through the thicket, trampling trees and bushes. At first they went slowly, nervously, knowing we were there and uncertain yet which course to follow. Then they stampeded. Sandy, Enoch, and I ran with them, no more than 20 yards from the column. I could hear bovine grunts, horn bosses cracking against limbs, hooves splitting deadfalls, the continuous hollow thump of big running mean colliding with other big running mean, and above it all the beating of my heart.

  Then the stream of 100 or more low, squat, round-bellied herbivores, their square-muzzles thrust forward, broke uphill and headed for their home ground in the vast area of trees and savannah that spread to the south, coming almost near enough for us to put a hand on them as they passed. There was nothing “shootable” in all those buffalo—the best bulls tend to stay by themselves. Panting, I watched them running off into the trees, thinking, damn, that was fun!

  That same morning, some miles farther on, I killed an old sable bull. We had turned off the tar road and followed one of the sandy tracks that looped around the concession, when we sighted three sable ahead. One was worth a look, so Sandy and Enoch and I again mounted a stalk. We slipped from tree to bush to tree until we came to a downed trunk, the sable moving 100 yards in front of us. Mharapara in Shona, the big hippotragine antelope walked with his black-and-white-masked head tucked down, like that of the Darley Arabian’s in an oil portrait, as if an invisible bit were held by the reins in the hand of an equally invisible groom. This gave his neck, with its clipped ginger-and-black mane from which the finest of paintbrushes are manufactured, a bow whose line the arcing black horns carried on into the air—all of this creating in my mind the most fundamental of African antelope.

  He had a graceful substantialness not seen in the almost too aesthetic gangliness of the kudu’s fringes, spirals, and funny ears. The sable is a no-frills antelope. As he walked in the shaded gusu woods he was all clean lines and smooth power and one of the main reasons I was here. I steadied the crosshairs, and my bullet dropped him as he walked.

  When I came up to him I saw he was an old bull, his horns worn back to 39 inches, but the bases heavy and thickened by secondary annular rings. His head was marked by many old scars. He was the best kind of bull to have killed, in the last years of his life and past his breeding prime. Now with all the njiri eaten, we would have mharapara. I felt very good about this bull, the feeling lasting until I wantonly squandered it all in the heat of mid-afternoon.

  He was an old dagga-boy along the Botswana border, completely alone at 2:00 p.m., and his horns were respectable enough for Sandy to reckon that we could do worse than to use one of our two Cape buffalo permits on him. He moved off when we began to stalk, but halted out 90 yards from us, showing me the point of his left shoulder—the same target a giant eland had given me two years earlier in the C. A. R. I held on that point and, expecting the buffalo to collapse with the shot, squeezed the trigger.

  The bull bucked when the bullet struck, and he began to run. My first mistake was that I have obviously not hit bone. The second was that we did not give him time to lie down, but rushed after him, jumping him a few hundred yards into the brush and pushing him away before I could put a solid into him.

  For an hour-and-a-half we followed a trail of blood drops the size and bright color of salmon eggs. From behind every bush, tree, or tall termite hill, I simply knew he was going to rise up, the anger in him fiery as burning brimstone.

  Early on, Sandy whispered to me to breathe through my nose, not my mouth, to prevent dehydration. There was no telling how long we would be out here, and we had hurried off without water. The next thing he
whispered to me after an hour of my waiting to be murdered, or at least severely walked upon, was, “Oh yes—be alert.” He fairly twinkled from behind his beard when he advised this.

  Be alert? Alert? I am the Alert Man from out of the pages of Ortega y Gasset. I can see every movement, hear every sound, smell every scent. I feel like a walking satellite dish receiving all transmissions. I am not feeling the least drowsy.

  Then a lone bull was directly ahead of us in the direction the blood spatters led. He was 200 yards out, walking slowly with his head down, and neither Sandy nor I hesitated. He had gotten away once already, and we could not let him get away again. We both raised our rifles and fired almost simultaneously. Then, just like ducks popping up in a shooting gallery, buffalo come out of the grass and brush everywhere and charged off, the wounded bull falling behind.

  What the hell?

  Circling widely around us, the herd, 50 or 60 strong, slowed, then halted in a milling knot, trying to ascertain where the shots came from. The bull was moving very slowly now, and I crept up to a sapling to take a rest against it. I held the crosshairs on the knobby part of his shoulder, and the 300-grain solid sent his legs out from under him, his head twisting up and his huge black body slamming to the ground as the herd galloped off.

  Here was a dead bull buffalo, but was it the right dead bull? It certainly looked right, but to make sure we went back to the place where we had shot when we thought he was alone and followed out the blood trail. Its logical conclusion appeared to be none other than the dead buffalo, with blood leading to him and none continuing on with the herd. There seemed to be a tight fit to the pieces.

  I said that we should make one more cast, one last sweep to see if there were any other signs of blood at all. So we did; and in the opposite direction from that taken by the fleeing buffalo I heard Enoch, bent low to the ground, uttering distinctly what could have only been the Shona equivalent of “Uh-oh.”

  It looked as if the wounded nyati had led us into this herd and passed through, trying to lose his tracks among all the others. We three stared at the blood and one another. It was impossibly hot and there was no water and we had been chasing that buffalo hard now for seven or eight miles. We had one on the ground who was a good one, and no one would ever be the wiser. No one but us.

  As we trailed after him from there, the wounded buffalo’s tracks never slowed. At each increasingly infrequent, rusty, dime-sized drop of blood on the reddish dirt I considered what I was feeling. Pity for the bull, to be sure. Remorse for not having killed well. But what else?

  In hot pursuit of an animal widely known “to run both ways”—at you as well as away—particularly when injured, my most sensible emotion should have, as my thumb lay moist against the knurled safety of my rifle and my eyes bored ahead, by rights been one of witless terror. Yet I could not honestly say that it was. I assuredly had no desire to be maimed or killed, but in a rather baffling manner I was enjoying this nonetheless. I never would have intentionally created this situation—as much for the animal’s sake as my own—but now that I was in it, all the more prosaic concerns of life were cleared from the table. I did not have to worry about what bills to pay or errands to run; I did not have to think about dentist appointments or deadlines or being sure to behave engagingly. In this fierce state of freedom the only obligation I had was to stay tuned for the abrupt manifestation of something quite large, black, horned, and infuriated, and to kill it when it showed up. Yes, I was enjoying this, certainly more than I should; and the conclusive discovery of this fact scared me more than any buffalo ever could, with the thought of where such enjoyment might lead in life.

  We were swiftly losing the light when the bull’s trail meandered through a grove of trees and we found where he had stood long enough to bleed onto the ground a pool of blood the size of a saucer. It might be lung blood, but that might mean he was hit in one lung only, probably the left from the angle of the shot, and only one lung gone might not be sufficient to bring him down. Or he might be hit high in the shoulder, that shot probably not fatal. He had gone on from here, but we had to go back three miles or more to quarter up the other bull and fetch the Land Rover to load him into and carry him back to camp. As we walked out, Enoch broke off green leafy branches from the bushes he passed and tied the long grass into knots along the trail to show us the way back to the spoor. We would return in the morning.

  Back at the dead buffalo, we dismantled it as you would an old Ford and stacked the parts—protein-rich quarter panels, fenders, and front hood—into the Land Rover, filling it so we had to ride on top of the meat. In equatorial Africa the sunset had no denouement, light and dark a process of input and output. As I rode back in the night, seated on the buffalo’s polished horn boss, every jolt of the rutted dirt track was transmitted through it to me; and I wondered what I had lost out there on the trail of that wounded buffalo, or what I might have gained. These days one did not admit to feelings of bloodlust or the “thrill of the chase”—far too impolite and barbaric, far too “male privilege”—but there it was. I guessed I was going to have to find a way to live with it. The Land Rover bounced hard, and I held onto the curved horn tips for dear life.

  We planned to go out late the next morning to give the vultures ample opportunity to ride the midmorning thermals into the blue sky and locate the buffalo for us. We wanted to find him down and as we approached to see the vultures around his carcass lift up in a flapping of wings that would have the dry sound of newsprint fluttering in the wind. We did not want to believe that he could still be going on.

  But he was. For four hours we trailed him, past dry pans where the baked mud was as white as newly cast aluminum; through thorn-bush coverts where he could have lain up and run amuck through us when we stumbled over him; and finally into a bachelor herd of buffalo, Sandy and Enoch, and I bellying to within 15 yards of them, our belt buckles scooping up dirt. We glassed them all fastidiously.

  One bull was sheer enormity, over 45 inches across the spread of his horns; but neither he nor any of the others showed any wounds. So we stood; and the bulls stood with their scenting noses held high, peering at us in the simmering shade the trees gave, then ran. In a few hundred yards they joined up with a breeding herd with hundreds of animals in it. We drove them all ahead of us, watching for a straggler, until we reached the tar road, having crossed much of that wide buffalo land of trees and savannah; and the buffs trotted across it and into the timber on the other side. Then there was no more spoor to follow.

  The Department of Parks and Wild Life (as their shoulder patches read) was notified of the dead bull and the wounded one who was still at large. Both, as they should have been, were marked down against my two buffalo permits. Then Sandy had to leave and the rains broke and the green became unbearable to behold.

  We drove into Botswana to spend the night in a game lodge in Chobe, to get away from tent camping for one day. There was a bar along the road for a beer, and at the end of the bar sat two Botswanans, both with watches the size of grapefruits on their wrists, half-a-dozen empty cans in front of each, holding the same conversation drinkers do around the globe: “I hear this drought will last another 10 years.”

  Back in camp, Dan for his first time on safari or in Africa was taking to it, perhaps too well. Seated in his canvas chair under a thatched-roof patio, he called out, “John! Pepsi!” And John promptly appeared and handed Dan an open bottle of cola, taken from the propane refrigerator positioned two feet behind where Dan sat, his maybe looking a little too close to Kurtz for comfort.

  Coming back from Chobe, we met a group of Irish nurses with backpacks, walking the road from the border crossing, and invited them to have dinner and spend the night in our camp. Despite the tawdry dreams of then-bachelors, there is little to report. Except Dan’s coming down with flu-like symptoms that left him prostrate on his cot, and which to this day he claims were the result of a mysterious bite inflicted by a deadly poisonous scorpion.

  I hunted out the re
st of the safari with another hunter, Sten. Born in Sweden 67 years earlier, he had for his life’s resume one much more audacious and far-flung than the progressively drearier regimentation of this century seemed to allow: officer in the neutral Swedish Army during World War II; gaucho in South America; merchant seaman; Green Beret in the U. S. Army during the Korean War; game catcher; hired to work on the filming of Hatari!; and a professional hunting career in Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. He had been tossed by buffalo and rhino, been shot at by armed men, could still walk down an elephant, and his greatest joy was rowing out into the Indian Ocean off Malindi in Kenya and fishing for big fish. I asked him how he could have ever devised such a fanciful life.

  “I read too many books,” he answered quietly, staring off into the gusu, his well-used 458 laid across this shoulder.

  With Sten I hunted greater kudu, but all we were seeing aside from a multitude of tracks heading into the densest of cover along the Zambezi were cows and immature hulls. One gray afternoon as we traveled along a ridge near the old tobacco barns, Sten spotted an exceptional impala standing out from all the leaves. We left the vehicle and stalked toward the buck. He was about 60 yards away, looking in our direction. I had to stand to shoot over the brush, working the bolt of my other rifle, the 270, as I rose from my crouch. I had not forgotten the wounded buffalo, and I wanted this shot to be right. Firing offhand, I took him cleanly through the shoulders. He ran a matter of feet and fell. His horns were ribbed and long and black, his coat a reddish-buff, and I knelt beside him to move my hand over his hide.