Here in the tourist market, the urgent “take-a-look” shop merchants assail you from all quarters, pitilessly hounding you to purchase execrable faux-tribal ticky-tack, although some handsome—and doubtless poached—leopard and python skins are on offer, until you are compelled to declare categorically that you would not accept any of these souvenirs if they paid you, eliciting from them, then, hissed accented-English tirades of “You f*****. Don’t come back. Don’t come back to my country, you f*****!” Such incensed attitudes are no doubt come by naturally when it is considered that the bulk of these peddlers’ tourist trade is composed of holiday-makers from France.
We didn’t get out of the country, but we did get out of Dakar. As Jean Allard, directeur of Africa Safari’s Campement de Mako, and I started east into the cool hazy January sunrise on the N1 bitumen highway, the road went to hell and the country went from coastal to urban to suburban to township to open low rolling savannah marked by the most African of prominences, massive baobabs whose bulk seemed to threaten to crack the crust of the earth. The trim iron-haired Allard, who had come to Senegal as a result of le virus de l’Afrique—the “African virus” that makes it impossible for its sufferers to stay away from the continent—got the Hi-Lux up to speed for 200 yards, then had to brake to weave around the potholes, resuming speed, then braking again, intermixed with brief slewings off the “pavement” onto the sandy shoulder for a journey of some 14 arduous hours. Broken-down lorries lay grounded on the side of the highway. Each village and town we passed through had its row of rough wooden stalls marketing peanuts in voluminous plastic bags; and if we halted for more than a moment, we would be mobbed by bands of rowdy little boys, palms thrust out, adamant that they be given “cadeaux, cadeaux.”
Late in the day we reached the large crossroads of Tambacounda, capital of eastern Senegal. Mungo Park passed through the “walled town called Tambacounda” a number of times during his two (one fatal) expeditions in search of the source of the Niger. Here we turned south toward the Guinea border and into the 3,500-square-mile Parc National du Niokolo Koba. The guide books wildly, if not deplorably, exaggerate the level of wildlife to be found in the park, with hollow claims of “hundreds of thousands” of animals including leopards, elephant, buffalo, wild dogs, hyenas, rare western Lord Derby eland, and Africa’s largest lions, perhaps relicts of the great and vanished Barbary Coast subspecies, while in fact a good day of touring might produce random sightings of coffee-brown roan, waterbuck, kob, hartebeest, oribi, harnessed bushbuck, red duiker, rumbling hippos, big sun-struck crocs, outsized warthogs, plus a lone leopard in an enclosure, along with guinea fowl, blue rollers, rock hens, and vast troops of baboons. Perhaps because of the park traffic, the road onward from Tambacounda underwent a noted improvement, and we up-shifted past the tall forests and into the evening.
As we drove farther from Tambacounda, the people we passed—pedaling black-tired bicycles, riding on horse-drawn carts loaded with firewood, elegantly slender women balancing bundles on their heads—seemed conspicuously more friendly and less distraught. At the village of Mako, with its own merchandise stalls along the highway, including quarters of beef hanging in the open air, we drew smiling waves and no demands for gifts. We crossed the Gambia River bridge, the water running fast and clear over smooth stones and the women gathered in the shallows with their skirts tucked up, washing their laundry, and just at nightfall drove in under the strings of bare light bulbs and onto the raked gravel of the camp’s parking area and found small neat bungalows with the names of animals on the doors—Buffle, Guib (“bushbuck”), Hippo—gathered around a tall anthill and under the large leaves of shade trees that rose into the dark and disappeared.
The concrete-floored thatched-roof dining area and bar lay toward the high bank of the Gambia and was decorated with batik paintings and the bleached skulls of hippos, warthogs, and crocodiles. Here we sat, road weary, sipping glasses of champagne and then having our first meal in the Senegalese bush, fresh francolin.
There were eight of us at dinner, plus the Senegalese driver of the rented van that had carried the rest of our group while I rode with Allard. Unlike in other parts of the continent I have hunted, where black Africans have, to my unease, displayed an almost obsequious (though doubtless affected) regard for white clients, the staff at Mako Camp and in the field demonstrated a distinct lack of disproportionate deference—which is not to say discourtesy. So the highly skilled and well-mannered Senegalese driver of the van, who would be returning it to Dakar in the morning, unselfconsciously sat down at the table with us; and I was more than a little ashamed to realize I found this remarkable.
The other people at the table had come to hunt birds and warthogs, or to accompany those who had come to hunt them. Geoff and Debbie were from Colorado, and Geoff had just returned from hunting partridge in Mongolia. David was an elk hunter from Nebraska—though for reasons known entirely only to himself he prefers the label of “cartographer.” Chip, Claire, and Elizabeth were from many places, most recently South Carolina. They had put the hunt together through their company, and in the last few weeks had traveled and hunted through Portugal, Italy, and Morocco with guns and falcons. With me was my legal counsel Carey—upon whom I relied to keep me from breaking out in severe cases of handcuffs. For more than 30 years Carey and I have traveled together throughout the world, since we went to the Central African Republic in 1984. Carey, who absolutely does not hunt, is often asked in camps what he’s doing there. And he always answers that hunters go to the best places before anyone else. And here in Senegal we were, as far as anyone could recall, the very first American bird hunters.
What we had primarily come to hunt were francolin, the double-spurred francolin or francolin à double éperon in français; but there were also four-banded sandgrouse (ganga quadribande), African mourning dove (tourterelle pleureuse), African collared dove (tourterelle rieuse), and Bruce’s green pigeon (pigeon à épaulettes violettes)2. Awaking under a mist of mosquito netting in the fresh pre-dawn the next morning, I had instant coffee and some baguette and butter for breakfast—the lone meal about which the French are utterly clueless—and we loaded the shells and guns into the Hi-Luxes and drove north back across the Gambia bridge.
For the first time after two days in Dakar I smelled the familiar sunrise odors of Africa, warming air, dew on dry grass, dust, cattle, wood smoke. In the village we picked up the secretarios and turned off the highway. There were fields of tall elephant grass, green-leaved bushes, and small cotton and peanut plots, lying fallow. Here and there a horned red cow pushed through the grass. The Africans beat the cover with long sticks, and almost immediately I heard the chuckling of francolin as they bobbed and weaved ahead, the bark of a baboon, and then a small cluster of the birds bursting upward with a record-scratching cackle, in tribute to their pheasant heritage.
I brought the Benelli SuperNova 12 gauge up and pushed off the safety. The first shot dropped one francolin, and I shucked in another shell and brought down a second. The Africans retrieved the chukar-sized brown birds. They had the chestnut heads with a “white supercilium” as the field guides described, and two spurs on each leg.
Geoff and David were ranged out from me as we swept through the grass and farm plots, flushing more francolin. The laments of doves were heard, and the occasional one winged within range. By midmorning the sun was starting to beat down and we had swung back around to the highway where the Hi-Luxes waited. As we gathered and compared game straps weighted with birds, we were all laughing and chattering—another lousy day in paradise.
Back at Mako, and after lunch, some napped, others swam in the camp’s pool, while still others strolled down to the Gambia to catch a glimpse of the floating hippos. The first evening we went south and turned off the highway to follow a sandy track through small groups of round thatch-and-wattle houses and past wattle fences. We parked the trucks and walked down a sloping rocky bank to the slow-moving green Gambia. A pirogue adzed from a teak trunk with f
ishing nets in it was beached on the gravel. We took stands by the thorn bushes and within a quarter hour African mourning and the smaller rose-gray African collared doves were coming in. By then dozens of young village boys had jogged down the bank and sat around us. The doves flew, we shot, the doves (sometimes) fell; and for the boys who sprang up to retrieve them we were the greatest show on earth that evening. Two boys even ran fully clothed into the river to fetch a dove, which distressed me somewhat. I guessed they knew what their river held; and Park wrote that somewhere very near to here he had, in 1797, “bathed myself … as the natives had assured me there were no crocodiles in this stream.” But I was not so sure, and it seemed a wiser course when one of the Africans from our camp launched the heavy pirogue and paddled out to bring back any birds that splashed into the Gambia. As the sun set, the gnats began to rise and shrouded the exposed backs of my hands. With the last hint of twilight, the sandgrouse came.
Of the four-banded sandgrouse, the guidebooks report that it is a “sturdy compact” and “gregarious” bird with long pointed wings that breeds in a belt from Mauritania through Cameroon and east into Sudan and Uganda. It is “yellowish-green” on the neck and breast, and heavily marked with brown on the back, the males decorated with black and white bars on their foreheads. Their call is described as “a loud wulli wulli”; and I believe I recall hearing a haunted something like that in the outer dark beside the Gambia, although that is about as far as my species recognition of the four-banded sandgrouse reached in the field, owing to the fact that I really never got to see one in daylight.
It is an understatement that the sandgrouse is “largely nocturnal.” “Exclusively” might be more like it. By the time the wulli wulli was heard, the sun was well below the horizon and the birds were beneath a cloak of invisibility against the background of dim foliage across the river. The calm surface of the water reflected the lighter sky, though, and the sandgrouse hurtling through it. Somehow, it was almost possible to track the bird’s vector and anticipate where it would be in relation to your shotgun muzzle and to fire a flaming blast out over the river. And if on every eighth or ninth shot a sandgrouse actually dropped, you could honestly say it was all done with mirrors.
After the evening shoot we headed back for generous chilled green bottles of Dakar-brewed Bière La Gazelle and dinner of more gamebirds. Then long sleeps in the West African winter nights and waking up again before dawn. That was the routine of our hunting days, if you want to call bird shooting in Senegal “routine.” One morning we went out after warthog, I putting a Burris SpeedDot on the SuperNova and loading it with 300-grain sabot slugs. Geoff, David, and I split up; and I hunted around a large marshy meadow and except for a band of blithe chuckling francolin that marched around us while the tracker and I stood frozen beside a tree, didn’t see a thing—and honestly was not upset in the least. David was the one of us to get a shot with a 375 he’d rented from the camp, but missed a smallish warthog, just as a monstrous one came into view, and then as quickly vanished. Fortunately, a Belgian hunter brought in a warthog a couple of days later, inducing something akin to mass hysteria in the camp (Robert Ruark said that “Africans get excited about two animals, and two animals only”—lions and elephant—but apparently in Senegal, the warthog is a third); and the next night, absolutely exquisite wild pork was served.
After the last evening’s shoot, and the usual exasperation of trying to hit stealth-fighter sandgrouse, and dinner, a group of dancers and musicians came. The music was made with shekere gourd rattles, one-string kora-like basses, police whistles, and song. The barefoot dancers were women and girls dressed in yellow and pink T-shirts and long lime-colored skirts, and performed in pairs in a sort of dance-off to see who could outdo the other. Before the evening was over, Chip, who played electric bass for the ’90s band The Cartoon Factory, had commandeered one of the gourd basses and joined in; and we were up dancing, too. I went to bed with the party still in full swing and Chip playing on.
We were supposed to fly out of Tambacounda at midday—no more driving on the wretched N1—but for once it was good news that the weekly flight to the capital was delayed until night, giving us a chance for one more crisp morning’s francolin hunt. We hunted a new place around huts and small fields, “a woody but beautiful country, interspersed with a pleasing variety of hill and dale, and abounding with partridges,” as Park had written about the vicinity. The powdery dust was stamped with braided lines of francolin tracks, and the birds could be heard in the brush. We pushed them ahead of us, shooting through the branches as they flushed, like hunting ruffed grouse in the New England brambles. It was a Saturday morning, and it is doubtful there was much in the way of kids shows on the television, or much in the way of televisions; so we were soon being trailed by another dozen young boys, some in their treasured soccer uniforms and shoes.
It was perhaps the best shoot of all; and after we handed out candy, took group photos, bought the last-minute gifts we had refused to purchase in the Village des Arts, settled our bar tabs, and with skin inflamed and itching from gnat bites shook hands all around, we loaded our luggage and climbed into the Hi-Luxes and set out for Tambacounda and onto Dakar, a city which, upon further reflection and in comparison with the genuine country and people of Senegal, is a place Mungo Park might have been fortunate never to have seen.
2Latin names, in order: Francolinus bicalcaratus, Pterocles quadricintus, Streptopelia decipiens, Streptopelia roseogrisea, Treron waalia.
Blue Train
The 1990s …
IN SOUTH AFRICA’S Transvaal the bluffs of the Waterbergs are like the knuckles of a blue fist clenched on the long-dry land. In the Waterbergs, in a place called Kwalata, on the walls above stone ledges redolent of incontinent baboons, there are petroglyphs, the unmistakable, high-humped bison silhouettes of wildebeest rubbed with ocher; and beyond the rock walls are very much living red hartebeest (as in the drawing on the next page), waterbuck, gemsbok, bush pigs, warthogs, rhino, leopards, sable, kudu whose horns spiral out beyond 60 inches, the odd elephant or two, and marvelous, ghostly nyala that slip through the brush and away from sight like shadows sailing over the ground on a cloudy day.
Among the tall, coral-pink termite hills, red-bush willow and ironwood, the sand and bare rock, there are also the “blue trains.” These blue trains are not the world-renowned railroad that traverses the country but the blue wildebeest: a three-letter crossword-puzzle solution (“gnu”) to some, and to others the “mini buffalo” for its strength and hardiness, or maybe it’s the “poor man’s buffalo” for the lesser expense of hunting it.
The odd thing about the blue train is that there are so few hunting stories (so few of any stories) about it. If you search for a reason, what you find is mostly a matter of appearances. Because—to some—the wildebeest looks so silly (half-ox, half antelope, with the tail of a horse is how it’s described), or seems to behave so stupidly (with the black wildebeest it is lumped in as another old fool of the veldt) that it hardly merits attention. Wildebeest are certainly not among the glamorous “dangerous” game of Africa; and they are so ubiquitous that they can hardly be classed among the rare trophies. Perhaps there are so few stories about wildebeest because there seem few worth telling.
Appearances may be deceiving, though, and the wildebeest has more than enough of certain qualities (its durability, its distinctiveness, the way its absence turns the veldt as empty as the plains of North America are empty without bison) to make any number of stories about them truly worth telling.
I don’t have any great number of wildebeest stories, but I have one, although it may be more about a rifle that didn’t shoot right, about what a hunter owes his prey, and about a dog named … well, a dog named Jock. Or it may simply be about appearances, too.
The rifle was someone else’s. When I reached Kwalata on a bright winter afternoon in August, my hosts had a 300 Magnum they wanted me to shoot. It’s a good caliber, I thought, and it is. But then I let one of the p
rofessional hunters at Kwalata talk me into sighting in the rifle at 25 yards. It was, he said, the way he always did it; and even though it was the way I never did it, I went along. When the rifle shot a little low, the PH dialed the scope up the number of clicks he calculated to be the correct amount, and now the rifle hit just a hair above the bull’s-eye: perfect.
In the morning on a tableland overlooking a wooded plain, when I had slunk through tall grass to the base of a willow and gotten a solid rest on a tree, putting the cross hairs just behind the shoulder of not a wildebeest but a hartebeest standing broadside 175 yards out and saw the bull drop at the shot, it did indeed appear perfect. Until the hartebeest staggered to its hooves and clattered off after the rest of its running herd, my hurried second shot missing.
We trailed the tracks across miles of plateau and down through canyons and back onto the plateau again. A splash of blood every 10 yards led us on, and five times we jumped the hartebeest, the bull each time keeping brush between us and him as he ran off. After three hours there were no more splashes of blood, and the ground turned too hard to find tracks. As we headed back to camp, I tried to determine what had gone wrong. I thought I’d had a good hold on the heart and lungs, but I’d obviously shot high, above the spine, stunning the hartebeest to the ground. But was it me or the rifle?
Augusts in Africa Page 20