Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  As we drove down the tar road a little later we sighted three mature kudu bulls slipping into the gusu woods. Sten, his tall tracker Richard, and I struck off after them. Sten’s elephant hunter’s legs ran me to a frazzle as we chased the braiding and unbraiding of the kudu’s tracks in the sandy soil. One set of tracks split off, and we kept on with the two that stayed together; and it all ended with my standing behind a tree, rifle braced against the trunk and crosshairs on a long gray neck, before passing up the bigger bull, that was only fair.

  The rains, having broken, fell constantly through the last days in Matetsi; and there was to be no last-minute 60-inch kudu bull for me in those particular green hills to “reward” me for the one I passed up—but then, I hadn’t expected there to be. I sat beneath the thatched roof of the dining patio in the afternoon, drinking tea, watching the rain mark the Zambezi and remembering Africa before I had even left it, savoring it while it was still embracing me.

  I remembered the heat of midday when all movement ceased with the finality of a fan engine seizing. I remembered the calling of a dove in the evening, and the softness of the chill-free dawns and the pleasant walking until the morning grew too warm. I remembered the flash-freeze of a gunbearer as he was about to put his foot into the disquietingly fresh track of a black rhino, and the feel of the sweat trickling down my spine. I remembered the ludicrously rapid trotting of helmeted guinea fowl; the high bounding of escaping impala; a young lion coming out of a dry donga, looking back over his shoulder, his jaw slack but eyes hard; and hippos with the jowly faces of middle-aged barflies—“Set us up another one! And they say this drought will last another 20 years.”

  I remembered Africa as the tartness of the sour plums I plucked from the bushes as we chased ghosting kudu, and as shit and blood and flies and striped-legged ticks and cobras and wait-a-bit thorns like no. 12 hooks and tremendous dung beetles whirring in like gunships when we gutted an animal, with the vultures still circling overhead, awaiting our departure from the scene. I remembered Africa as lightning over Zambia, the barking of poachers’ dogs in Botswana, and gin after sundown in Zimbabwe. And most of all, as the éminence grise of elephant striding round-footed through it all, a sight I traveled around the world to see once more.

  Finally, Africa was far more than memory. It was about being, the truest kind of being I ever knew. Is-ness. It was why I would continue to return, why I had returned before and would return again, each time leaving behind some incremental portion of myself—as I had with that buffalo and that kudu—until there came a day (I sincerely hoped) when I would dissolve entirely into Africa, consumed by it, run to an absolute frazzle.

  That was Africa. More than memory. Far more than a dream.

  As for that wounded buffalo, game scouts found a carcass some weeks later in the area, likely pulled down by lions and cleaned by hyenas, jackals, vultures, and storks. It looked like the head we had described. So they gave it to Green Torto, who put the other permit on it, and sent it to me. I’ve never quite known what to make of it, what kind of omen it may be. Whether of good, or bad. Or maybe something of both. Or neither.

  The Great Koodoo

  The 1990s …

  WITH KUDU, AS it is with Africa, first impressions are largely wrong. In Africa, in our minds, to begin with, it is all dangerous game, good ol’ nature red in tooth and claw. Our thoughts go first to lions, leopards, and those “thick-skinned” beasts whose entire raison d’être is, we have seduced ourselves into believing, to take our lives, even though they so seldom ever seem to (but thanks for thinking of us, all the same; and where the fatal threat comes from is where least expected—take that charging wild boar).

  In fact, the hunting of dangerous animals can be far less fascinating than might be imagined: Cape buffalo are hardly a threat until one sets out to kill them; leopard hunting condenses into sitting in silence, waiting for public transportation that seems to take forever to arrive; and hunting elephant is about the same as genius—99 percent perspiration. There is considerably more to Africa than death, in any particular length of grass. There is, after all, that greater kudu.

  With the kudu the misconception is one of fragility. In Venice, glassblowers craft miniature animals that must be packed in cotton-lined cardboard boxes and carried gingerly home where they are showcased on shelves behind the closed doors of vitrines, lest they shatter. And when you first see a kudu, in that fleeting glimpse he gives you, he makes you think of something delicate glass menagerie. Upon closer inspection, though, a kudu creates another impression altogether.

  It takes a long time of looking to see the kudu as it is in real life. And what you do see, instead of something frangible and gazelle-like, is an animal sturdy as an elk. One of the largest antelopes in Africa, second only to the eland, greater kudu bulls weighing 700 pounds are not unheard of, the tops of their high-crested withers reaching to over five feet. Blue gray and white-striped, a white chevron marking the face, a fringe of hair hanging beneath the almost too-long neck, ears too big by half and shaped like the spade on a playing card, the kudu carries above all this the greatest spiral of dark-brown horn carried by any animal on the continent (among the very greatest in the world, as it happens), mirror helices in some cases exceeding 60 inches in length. “Elegant” is the commonly accepted word for the kudu—a kudu standing still, perhaps, in a certain light. An actual kudu on the run—who when pressed can take a 10-foot barrier in a bound—moves like nothing so much as a sack of used auto parts tumbling down a ravine. “Gawky,” or “disjointed,” would be the most generous characterization—though obviously that is another false impression, the kudu nimble even on rocky slopes.

  In my real life it took me quite some time to be able to look carefully at a kudu. But then, it seems to take everyone a fair amount of time. The English explorer and hunter Frederick Courteney Selous had been in southern Africa for several seasons before he killed his first “koodoo,” judging it to be possibly “the handsomest antelope in the world.” Theodore Roosevelt never killed one of the (for him) “stateliest and handsomest antelope in the world,” while his son Kermit managed to kill two of the “great koodoo” during their 11 months in Eastern and Central Africa.

  Ernest Hemingway famously spent the final two of the 10 weeks of his safari in Tanganyika in 1934 hunting kudu (somewhere between Roosevelt and Hemingway the spelling was streamlined), not taking one until the very end, when he found his bull in “country the loveliest that I had seen in Africa”; and all he wanted, afterward, was to come back so he could “hunt that country slowly, living there and hunting out each day,” to “lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed out and never fire a shot” unless he saw a better head than the one he took. By the time he did come back to that country it was too late for him to save himself; but he did write a book about the first time, Green Hills of Africa, for which his hunt for kudu was both armature and beating heart.

  Robert Ruark also wrote a book about his own first safari to Tanganyika, titled Horn of the Hunter. The 15 days he spent hunting kudu on that safari were not, though, the centerpiece of his book. They were, instead, an interim of comic exasperation in which kudu eluded him at every turn. In the end, kudu for Ruark were no more than “an impression … a gray blur, partially seen, swift to vanish.”

  “A kudu,” wrote Ruark, “is definite only when he is dead.”

  It took me quite some time to learn that was not precisely true, but it does seem to be the case that kudu hunting owes more to vagary than most other forms of the chase. There never seems to be any such thing as a kudu hunt that qualifies as “typical.” Either kudu slip away again and again, ghosting through thorn bush that leaves pursuing hunters tattooed from cheek to shin, or at dawn a bull beyond imagination is standing beside the ashes of the campfire. I met one hunter who just happened to shoot a bull (whose horns went some impossible length beyond 60 inches) while he was in Africa on a bird hunt; while a friend of mine, after weeks of hunting kudu almost desperately,
at long last took a bull with one horn well over 50 inches, with the one on the offside barely 40 inches and curled tight as a pig’s tail. Even when you “win” with kudu, the victory is often illusory.

  My own history with kudu extends back over four decades to Kenya in the early 1970s. There I went through, as I’ve said, the requisite business with the big cats in a great tumble of luck, and so the plan then called for us to move north to the mountain terrain near Isiolo, where we would have to use horses to get into the kudu country. All we had to do first was stop off in the western Maasailand on the way there and pick up a Cape buffalo. That was all. So of course, what should have been four or five days of buffalo hunting turned into over two weeks; and with all my time and all my money gone, I never got to see the kudu country of Kenya.

  Then one afternoon in the mid-1980s I was jogging through the gusu woods of Zimbabwe’s Matetsi, following the racing shadows of three kudu bulls, leaving bits of myself on the thorns as I went. It was a hot gray summer’s day in December, and as the trotting across the sandy soil stretched into miles, I wondered if I would ever get a chance to see a kudu in real life. When, on the move, we saw from their tracks that one of the bulls had broken off from the other two, so we guessed that the two together would be an older bull and his younger guard, the askari; and we stayed on their trail, moving deeper into the woods, until 250 yards ahead of us, partly hidden by the thick trunk of a tree, there were kudu legs and kudu ears, kudu eyes and kudu horns. We lowered to the ground and crept to the base of a tree where I got a fixed rest and put the crosshairs of my rifle’s scope on the farther tree, watching the elements of kudu shift nervously behind it, waiting for a kudu to step out whole.

  The air was absolutely still as the sky gathered into clouds of rain, and after about five minutes one of the kudu, the larger of the two, eased out from behind the tree so that I saw all of his head and neck and shoulder. And then I saw in what way Ruark had been wrong; because as indistinct as kudu may seem when you are in pursuit of them, at some point when they stop and you catch up to them, they are there as definite as a tree or rock or sunlight or the moon in a cold black southern sky. Some animals—nyala and giant eland are two—are almost never there, not even when you have them in your sights; but when a kudu stands he seems set in bedrock. And now here was one standing before me, and the professional hunter, Sten, was studying him carefully through his binocular as I watched him through my scope. After several seconds Sten whispered to me that this bull, a young one, was just fair, maybe 44 inches around the spiral; but he might also be the only kudu we saw before the seasonal rains hit and hunting would become almost impossible. So it was up to me.

  I watched the kudu for a few seconds more, then lowered my rifle. And then he and the other kudu were not there anymore; and I knew that while I’d seen kudu at last, I still needed to see more. The 1990s, then, found me in the Northern Transvaal for one reason, and that being that the Northern Transvaal is where the largest greater kudu in the world are.

  On the July day that I at last got to see kudu long enough in real life, I first got to see the sun rising redly through thorn trees, which is the logo Africa seems to stamp on every dawn to let you know where you are. Where the professional hunter Bruce and I hunted that day, the leaves of the red-bushwillow trees—one of the favored foods of the browsing kudu—were all brown when they should have still been bright green. This was the height of a dozen-year drought; and Bruce worried that there would be no feed left for the kudu by September, and that more kudu would die than would survive.

  Early in the cool morning, though, we spotted a pair of kudu cows moving off into the bush; and Bruce and I trailed after them on foot. The trailing was made difficult by all the dead leaves that had begun to carpet the ground, but through the bush we saw the gray, white-striped kudu, now become a small band, moving ahead of us. They did not know we were there; but when we tried to circle around them to see if there was a bull in the group, a cow gave a loud, hoarse bark, and with tails raised in white flags they were gone.

  There was a chance that the bulls might still be with the cows, even though the breeding season had been over for many weeks; or they might have moved back into the rocky hills, or kopjes, where the biggest bulls liked to live; either alone or in small bachelor herds, until the breeding season again sent them back to the cows. But except for one immature male, there were no bulls we could see with any of the cows we spotted or trailed after that morning.

  During the hottest hours of the midday, we ate lunch and rested in the shade of trees growing out of a concrete-hard termite hill, watching a waterhole 70 or 80 yards away. Kudu come to water, but only when it suits them, at any time of the day or night. Still, the majority of kudu are taken from blinds, and while we watched from ours, there was the sound of a woodland kingfisher calling, and doves, francolins, and guinea fowl; and warthogs came to the water. But no kudu, and in the afternoon we hunted on.

  Traveling down one of the soft sandy roads, we saw a kudu bull appear 100 yards away in the bush on a hillside. In the afternoon light he looked ingot-like, bright as pewter or steel. Even his dark horns were silver; and as he stared at us with his head lifted, he carried those horns laid back so we could not see how far they spiraled. Then he turned his head and we saw that those horns, rippled like a set of polished Malay krises, ran back nearly the entire length of his body. And before I could get down and creep away from the vehicle and find a place to get a shot at him, before Bruce could even tell me what I already knew—that this was a good bull very worth taking—the kudu was gone, like a lantern blown out.

  We went on hunting as the daylight was going. In the sun of the late afternoon we spotted two aardvarks, “earth pigs” (looking supple and round as very large, very well-stuffed leather duffels), out feeding—a strange occupation for these highly nocturnal Orycteropodidae, but maybe another sign of the drought’s effects. There were also bushbabies in the trees, and then five kudu cows 200 yards away, jumping a fence, one at a time. We watched them jump, Bruce telling me I had to shoot the bull as soon as he stepped out, because he would not wait, but would jump the fence and disappear again into the bush at once. But after more minutes of waiting we decided there was either no bull with the cows, or he simply chose not to come out. With kudu there is often no plausible explanation.

  Now it was the very last light, and we had time to check just one more waterhole. As we drew near, kudu ran from the waterhole across a stretch of open ground. The kudu stopped at the edge of a stand of thorn trees about 150 yards away, and Bruce, glassing it, said, “Cow.” I glassed it, too, seeing the kudu-ness in the gray shadow. And to the left of it I saw another gray shadow, larger and even more kudu-like.

  “There’s the bull,” I whispered to Bruce.

  I sat on the ground at once, wrapping a hasty sling around my arm, elbows locked over my knees. When the bull turned, his horns stretched back the length of his body, and Bruce did not even bother to tell me that this was a good one.

  The kudu ran into the trees several more yards and stopped, quartering to the right, sharply away from me. I made myself not look at his horns, only at the spot behind the high, narrow, white-tufted withers created by the vertebrae of his spine. Ten long white stripes marked his flank, and sunset light lined his back and neck and horns; and I held the crosshairs of the variable scope behind those high withers, about halfway up his body from the bottom of his chest. I eased off the safety on the 300, and at the instant I fired the bull vanished.

  The cow, now joined by two others, ran off to the left; but none of us could see if the bull was with them. Not even Bruce, who had his binocular on the bull when I fired, was sure where he went, though Bruce was certain my shot was a hit. So we sprinted for the trees, Bruce ahead of me; and then he stopped at the spot where the bull was standing when I fired, looking at the ground; and in a step or two more I saw the spiral of black horn in the air, and when I was 10 feet from Bruce I saw the entire bull lying at his feet,
the hole where the 200-grain bullet entered showing no blood at all, the bull having fallen dead at the shot as if the earth had opened beneath him, not even staying on his feet long enough to bleed.

  Running up breathless, I shouted at Bruce, “Can you see where he went?” and he turned and smiled at me out of his red beard.

  Now I had time enough in this real life to look at this “fragile” kudu, which I saw was the toughest and oldest possible of bulls, a couple of inches broken off the tip of his right horn and a patch barked off the front of the lower spiral, all from fighting to keep his harems over the years, as were all the scars that jagged across his body like lightning strikes and formed an almost solid mass on his face. His left ear was split and his left hoof injured, the mane on his throat worn short, everything perfect.

  The sole signs of daintiness anywhere on him were his tiny hooves, made for carrying him awkwardly but quickly over rocky ground. And his body, though thin, was huge, like some great bony horse’s. The bases of both horns are 11 inches around, and the broken one was 51 inches long, while the perfect, ivory-tipped left one was 54 around the spiral. Aged and gaunt and relentlessly noble, he would not have seen another breeding season, with or without me.

  I hunkered down and put my hand on the longer horn, warm still in the spreading darkness. And that was where I stayed, seeing him, the great “koodoo,” as he really is, until there was no more light at all.

  That night in camp when we brought the kudu in, one of my friends who had come for the first time to hunt them stared at this bull I have been waiting 20 years to see, and running his hand along the horn, told me what the truest impression of kudu is.