Then in a narrow draw a klipspringer stood poised on the tips of its hooves in the rocks 60 yards away. One shot and the little antelope was dead; the problem, it appeared, was not the rifle. I decided I didn’t need to check the scope; I needed only to aim more precisely.
The next morning we found a good bull in a herd of blue wildebeest. They were moving among some trees; and there was something about the gray and blue-black of their brindled hides, their shaggy beards and manes, the Pleistocene profile of their heads that made them look more African than almost any other animal I had ever seen. I found another tree and got another rest; and again, at about 175 yards, the bull crashed to the ground with a grunting bellow.
This time, though, as the wildebeest lay kicking on the ground, dust rising around it, I knew at once the shot was off. I was running at it to cut the distance; but it was back on its feet and running, too, and my next shot missed, like a slow-motion, bad-dream replay of the day before. I was hunting with the other PH at Kwalata, Derick, who had not helped me sight in the rifle, who with the three trackers and me had trailed the hartebeest the day before and who must have been wondering if I was ever going to kill anything cleanly—anything bigger than a 30-pound klipspringer, anyway. Now we were trailing a wounded wildebeest at a half-jog, until the bull turned and moved up into a steep kopje. Derick thought of the day before and decided we should draw back, head into camp, and return in an hour or so with a good dog to help us find the wildebeest. I agreed with a nod, not feeling like saying much at all.
The dog was a black-and-white bull terrier, named, of course, Jock. Jock of the Bushveld—the tale of a prospector and hunter and his bull terrier, Jock, and their adventures (including adventures with wildebeest) in the Transvaal of the 1880s—is South Africa’s Old Yeller, and every “good” dog, particularly every good bull terrier, is automatically named Jock. I am not sure whose dog this was, maybe the entire camp’s, but he was famed for his nose: If Jock could not trail the wildebeest, it was said, it could not be trailed.
With Jock to aid us, we returned to the base of the kopje and started to climb through the bald rocks. I was beginning to ask myself again if the rifle could be off, but then I had to think more about avoiding the thorn brush and cactus that grew between the bald rocks. Once, when I started to put my hand down for balance on a rock, a tracker warned me away with a hiss: A circle of lichen the size of a tarnished silver dollar was in fact a tiny coiled adder warming in the sun.
Derick was ahead of me when we topped out, and as I looked up he snapped his 318 Greener double to his shoulder. The wounded bull had been lying in the rocks at the crest of the kopje and got up and began to run before Derick had even seen it, giving Derick no shot. We scrambled across the top of the rocks to where we could look down on the green trees and bush below us; and by then a roostertail of dust was drifting above the trees a seeming ridiculous distance away—it looked like a mile—where the wounded wildebeest ran.
Derick shook his head. It was hopeless. We’d never catch the wildebeest today. Maybe in a week it would circle back through here with its herd, and we would pick it up then. Better to send one of the trackers back for the safari car while the rest of us hiked down the backside of the kopje. About a mile across the flat, the direction the wildebeest had run, was a dirt vehicle track where we could meet the car.
Derick sent the tracker back, then we started down through the rocks. I remembered Jock. Looking around, I saw him trotting along, his jaws opened in a permanent terrier smile. But why hadn’t he found the wildebeest, I wondered, and why wasn’t he trailing him now?
On the flat we cut good blood spoor already drying in the sandy soil, and there was still good sign when we reached the vehicle track. We looked at a splash of claret on the ground there, and I thought of one animal I had already wounded and lost and now another we were proposing to let walk around for a week with another of my bullets in him. Derick looked at me and asked what I wanted to do. Keep going.
The next vehicle track we would cross was more than a mile farther on, so Derick left a second tracker to wait for the car and to tell the driver where we had gone. Then we went.
The blood drops started to space out, but the trail remained good enough for even me to follow. I looked around again for Jock; and he was at our heels, trotting and smiling but not even attempting to put his nose in a track. Halfway to the second rendezvous the blood was playing out, and the hoof prints became difficult to distinguish in the soft sand. By the time we reached the dirt vehicle track there appeared to be no sign at all. It was past noon and hot even in the mountain winter. We were hungry and had brought no water. Derick found what shade there was beneath the bare branches of a tree, and Jock lay in Derick’s shade. We would wait here for the car.
Halfheartedly looking for sign, I walked off the track 20 yards in the direction the wildebeest was traveling. And I found one large, shiny, dark-red drop of muscle blood. Derick saw me looking at the ground and asked if I’d found something. I nodded.
He said there was little chance of catching up with the wildebeest today, but what did I want to do?
Keep going.
All right, he sighed. He would wait here for the car. The last tracker, Poni, and I—and Jock—could go on. It was about two miles to the next vehicle track, and he would be there to pick us up. So we started off, having to whistle Jock up to get him to leave Derick’s shade. The next blood drop was over 30 yards from the last, and as we walked the drops spread farther and farther apart. By now I was convinced that Jock’s nose was some kind of myth: It seemed unlikely he could trail a line of Milk Bones across a kitchen floor. Every time Poni and I stopped to examine a track or cast around for blood, Jock found the least penumbra and lay in it, belly down and panting, until we walked on and he followed with reluctance. Perhaps, I thought, it would have been better to have left him with Derick.
We had been on the trail now for over two hours under the midday sun, and I was honestly no longer thinking about wildebeest. Mostly I was thinking about ice and water, or even water alone, and taking off my shoes and socks and then all my clothes and standing under a cool shower when Poni dropped to his haunches and pointed straight ahead.
Although it had brush to hide it, the wounded wildebeest, unlike yesterday’s hartebeest, broke from cover into the open, angling in front of us. It was about 120 yards, moving at a gallop, when I brought up the 300 and thumbed the safety off. I put the crosshairs just ahead of its chest and swung, and at the last moment, as I was already squeezing off the shot, I lowered the sights to the line of its belly.
With another grunting bellow the wildebeest stumbled into a somersault, shrouding itself in dust. As I fired I caught something in the corner of my eye, a black-and-white streak. Now I saw Jock diving headlong into the cloud of dust. When the cloud of wildebeest regained its feet, Jock’s jaws were locked on the bull’s muzzle as tight as the bite of a badger. The wildebeest lowered its head, as though trying to swing the dog onto its upswept horns, then threw its head straight back, cartwheeling Jock into the air. Poni and I were running, and the wildebeest spun and started off again. I bolted another round, and thinking, Low, I hit the wildebeest again, staggering it long enough for Jock to get up and charge into the bull once more.
This time Jock caught the wildebeest by the ear and hung there, oscillating back and forth as the bull shook its head, trying to fling the dog off, I saw then that I had let appearances deceive me: It would not have been better to leave Jock behind; it was clear now that his true calling was not as a trailing dog but as a gaze hound and, above all, one of the African continent’s great catch dogs. As violently as the wildebeest shook its head, Jock held on; I got to within 20 yards before I aimed at the very bottom of the wildebeest’s chest. I waited for Jock to swing out of the line of fire; then I shot the bull through the heart, and it sank to the ground.
The wildebeest’s wounds were, except for the finishing one, all high in the shoulder, leaving it glazed red lik
e a bull speared by a picador’s lance. (That afternoon, when I sighted it in properly—the way I knew I should—the scope proved to be over 6 inches high at 100 yards, and no doubt higher still at 200.) Jock, after sniffing the carcass and giving a satisfied growl, went to lie on his belly in the shade, sore but uninjured.
Poni came and shook my hand because we both knew we had done what we should by following this wounded animal all the way. Looking at the wildebeest again, I saw how wrong appearances could be, because this was in no way silly or foolish. It something very tough and very brave and in its own right magnificent, just like certain bull terriers, blue mountains, and so much of Africa that lay between the Vaal and the Limpopo. And there was a story about all this that appeared to be worth every bit of the telling.
But first we had to go back and look once more for that hartebeest.
Confluence of Memories
The 1970s …
I don’t remember that there were any houses or roads or people anywhere, just treetops and water and distance and sky and birds and confluence. It may not be so rare but I thought so then and I do now—it’s all so rarely the blessing falls.
—Eudora Welty
THERE WAS GUNPOWDER tea before dawn to erase sleep and an egg and a rasher of bacon for breakfast. Nareng and Kadatta took the over-and-under and the side-by-side from John’s tent and placed them in the gun rack in the Land Cruiser—along with the 375s for any acts of God—and we headed south into the Rombo country and to the river, the dust in our nostrils even at this cool hour.
The sky bellied up to gray as we came to the manyatta, and we heard the dogs howling. The fly-blown yellow bitch leading the pack ran stiffly into the headlights, snarling, her teats dangling. She leapt and snapped at John’s window; and he drew in his arm until we were past, on our way to sandgrouse.
John Fletcher had killed at least two charging rhino pointblank in his career, but he braked for small animals. Whenever hares ran in front of the Toyota, we slammed to a halt. Like that night we were coming in from a very long, very wet, and very unsuccessful stalk with the bed in the back filled with Maasai. Lightning stood out all around on top of the escarpment, and hares bounded everywhere. Every 100 yards John locked the brakes, peered anxiously through the glare of the headlights beyond the hood, and asked if the bunny had hopped out of the way yet. It looked as if it would take forever to reach camp, and the Maasai soon decided it was hopeless and set out on foot into the terrible night with their long, spade-bladed spears and ochered hair.
Or when a Maasai with an absurdly small dog appeared as we were skinning and quartering a waterbuck. After pro-forma praise of my one-shot kill, the Maasai got down to cases and asked for a hindquarter. John gave it to him, then threw the fresh liver to his dog. The liver was twice its size; but with a gulp of wonder and a tear of joy, the dog set earnestly to devouring a half of it on the spot, then dragged the remainder backward through the tall grass to a hollow beneath a bush, where it curled atop it and began to snore.
On the Simbair red-eye flight from London to Nairobi, my friend Bill and I bet on what Jacobean-named John Fletcher of Ker, Downey & Selby Safaris, Ltd., looked like. I took short and red-faced—like Wilson in Macomber (the story); Bill held out for tall and black-haired—like Wilson in Macomber (the movie). The hunter who negotiated us through Kenyan customs was red-faced and tall. He had high cheekbones and curly blond hair (one reason why he had been enticed to volunteer during the Emergency to blacken that hair with dye and darken his skin with walnut stain to join Mau Mau camps in the bush). Somewhere, I characterized him was a “blond Jack Palance.”
We made camps throughout the safari concessions, the Lowe & Bonner tents going up and coming down. At least one night in each camp we asked Fletcher to point out the Southern Cross. Thinking a moment, he pushed himself out of his camp chair, got another drink of rum, then marched away from the glow of the campfire into Africa. When he could make out the stars, he exaggeratedly scanned the sky, pivoting from foot to foot. Then he stopped, braced his legs apart, took a short sip of his drink and returned the glass to high port, shot his free arm toward the horizon, and announced, “Behind that tree.” Without another word he marched back to the campfire, leaving us in the dark to wonder how “that tree” always managed to obscure the astronomical observation.
The sun rose among the volcanic mounds of the national park on one side of us and glinted off snow on the tabletop of Kibo on the other. It was light enough by then to see without the headlights, and as my eye roamed the plain it was caught by the dark line of trees and water.
I knew the water, dull and inert now, would be sparkling like sapphire by eight o’clock. Then it would spring from the dry land around it and demand that you turn your head to look at it. But even in this gray dawn it attracted me by the impression it gave of being the most logical place on earth. Perhaps the eternal cycle of animals coming to drink (with the equally eternal cycle of predators lying in wait around it) was what gave it this sense of logic: the Reason of Waterholes, what the old philosophers had in mind when they talked about the Great Chain of Being.
The waterhole here was a wide ford of the Rambo River; and as we drew near, a majestically ugly warthog boar broke from cover in front of us, his mane of stiff copper bristles rattling against his neck. We saw a troop of black-and-white colobus monkeys scurrying from the water’s edge and taking to the trees. And from the pug marks we cut, there was probably more than one leopard watching us. John parked the Land Cruiser behind some wait-a-bit bush; and taking our shotguns and shells, we took our stands behind tall acacias with the other predators, around the waterhole.
Being good is terrifically demanding—except for those who are born to it—therefore, we settle for being correct and sometimes for just remembering what it was like to be correct. I think that I behaved with John Fletcher very nearly as I ought to and learned a thing or two in the bargain. The things I learned from John, however, are probably not what most people would classify as significant. I know for a fact that moving silently through brush, keeping downwind of elephant cows with calves, winching a lorry out of the mud, and shooting Cape buffalo absolutely dead, are not lessons that those who handled my helter-skelter higher education would consider vital. Yet these lessons had more profound effect on me than the ones learned from humanities class. And ironically, these were lessons learned from a man who didn’t purchase a book unless its garishly illustrated paper cover promised at least a dozen episodes of gratuitous violence. And a little sex.
Sandgrouse are columbiformes of rare adaptation—pigeons built like grouse. The female of the ground nesting species has learned to wait for the pink leaves of particular deciduous trees to fall before laying her matching pink eggs in their camouflage. Male and female will fly 40 miles to collect water in their crops and alimentary canals and hollow abdominal feathers, and transport it back to their nestlings. They have also learned to drink up in five to 10 seconds to prevent being consumed by predators who have learned their daily watering schedule (but even so, a Nile crocodile once in a while manages to shag a sandgrouse out of the blue if it sails too low over the water, a falling blessing). This centrality of water to their existence makes sandgrouse seem more a variety of waterfowl in the desert lands they inhabit than any greenhead or honker along the Pacific Flyway in a wet year.
Now the sandgrouse would be on time for John and me today. They had shown up every day between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. for some 25 million years, and today would be no exception. We slipped no. 6 high-brass shells into our 12 gauges and locked them up.
They arrived in small clusters. We crouched behind the trees until they set their wings, then we stood and shot. They came so fast it was something of a surprise to see them die—like burning lights suddenly winking out. Then the sandgrouse came in for real. It was shooting into a plague of locust or standing on a stream bed underneath a run of salmon. It was too intense to last for very long, but for many minutes black men were dancing around to ga
ther birds as guns discharged high over their heads. Then it ended.
I stood there blinking, maybe trembling a little. Damn about summed it up. I broke my over-and-under and walked unsteadily over to John. He was blinking some too. He grinned. I grinned. Everyone in Africa grinned.
Once in Mexico for no lofty motive, I took in a mixta bullfight featuring the rejoneador who had hunted with John for three full months; so before his fight I went out to the corrals to pay him John’s respects. The rejoneador was wearing the breeder’s traditional traje corto and was mounted on a tall, excitedly pawing white parade horse caparisoned in leopard and jaguar skins. He instantly offered me a courteous but rather chill smile when I mentioned John’s name, his mind, perhaps, on the bulls he would soon have to kill.
“A dear friend of mine,” he said. His plumed horse’s shod hooves cracked on the cobblestones. “He must be getting a bit mzee by now, though,” he added abstractly, gentling the stallion with his knees and reins.
I mumbled reflexively about Fletcher’s being young enough (he was fortysomething at the time, 20 years younger than I am now), accepted another of those practiced smiles, and went to find a beer.
The mention of John getting old disturbed me—raising the very real possibility of his quitting the game before I amassed the outlandish sum required to hunt with him again (having had the money, once, at the right time, to hunt in Africa the way it should be hunted); and I was disturbed enough by the rejoneador’s words to wish I could say that he did not give a particularly grand showing of his talents that Sunday afternoon. And lo! he did not.
It’s been over now in Kenya for generations, of course—no, Kenya and Kenyans carry on; but without safari something not unimportant is missing. And the last I heard, John after the closure had packed up for Sudan and within a few years retired to grow avocados, or maybe onions, on a farm, quite possibly at the foot of the Ngong Hills, a line Fletcher was not likely to have been intimately familiar with. And I would be happy to know he was still alive. Luckily for me, he left behind my good memories of him and the country that once was.
Augusts in Africa Page 21