Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  I went hunting the next day with an assistant guide, while the W. W. H. and the Gent, mounted now on a rickety but remarkably resilient stallion led by a water bearer in a ragged shirt, went one way, and the Old Boy, his wife, and François another. On my walk I saw oribi, hartebeest, western bush duiker, a sounder of warthogs, an unforgettably blue rollier d’ Abyssinie (as it said in Serle & Morel), ground hornbills resembling grazing antelope in the distance among the trees, and killed my first game in the C. A. R., shooting a dove and a rock hen with a 22 rifle, the Africans desiring them for the pot.

  Back in camp the Old Boy came in with a nice duiker, a very small antelope whose Afrikaans name means “diver” for the way it plunges into the underbrush, which we would eat in its entirety for lunch. Then the W. W. H. returned to tell us that he and the Gent had heard poachers’ gunfire and even their voices, and seen no game. It would be wise for us to move on tomorrow. That night I heard hyenas crying for the first time in 10 years.

  As we were about to leave camp the next morning, the M. P. asked me how old I was. Thirty-two, I told him. Thirty-two that day.

  We made almost 20 game-less, hallucinatory miles to the south that day, getting lost for several thirsty hours until we back trailed and relocated the upper Ouandjia in an utterly exquisite grove of cool green trees. I spent the rest of my birthday sitting fully clothed in the river, that fell across large smooth rocks, drinking red wine from a foil pouch.

  “How’s the water?” the shirtless Patron Sans Souci inquired, a wet bandanna strapped around his head.

  “The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,” I said, taking one more sip of wine. For dinner we ate some small fish François trapped out of the river.

  On the trail the next day we found Arabic runes carved into the bark of a tree. It was the poachers’ newsletter and apparently warned of our presence in the country. The poachers, on camelback, had at first come over from Sudan for ivory; then after shooting out the elephant, they turned to poaching just for meat to sell back in Sudan. Because professional hunters, who are the de facto game wardens in most of Africa, never ventured into this area, the poachers considered it their private preserve. I did not know what it would take to dislodge them, but it would be a force superior to ours.

  Farther along, the Gent dismounted from his weary horse long enough to gut-shoot a big dog baboon in hopes of expanding his collection. He was well pleased with the full-body-mount one he already had on display at home, dressed in one of his young son’s old suits, seated at an old-fashioned school desk in the kitchen. The M. P. acted as Samaritan and finished the baboon off for him.

  We left the carcass beside the trail for the porters to pick up. They were supposed to skin it out but instead burned all the hair off it, then butchered it up and cooked it in the camp we made that day at noon after 13 miles of walking. We made that camp in a dense thicket of trees at the Ouandjia’s source, a deep hole in volcanic rock where the chthonian water sprang up cold and clear and reasonably pure. The Old Boy’s bowels, we now learned, had been malfunctioning for some days by, implausibly for the place and circumstances, refusing to function. He could see no alternative now but to walk all the way back to Jolly for the laxatives he had seen absolutely no need for and so had left behind. A bicycle trail used by diamond prospectors, that we had circled away from on our exploration, ran 30 miles from here back to the headquarters. Tomorrow morning he, his wife, and François, with the M. P. tagging along, would set out on it.

  The Patron Sans Souci and I were faced with the grim prospect of at least days alone with the W. W. H. and the Gent and their considered opinions of Africans, the Red menace, and the very end of the world as we knew it, or, rather, as they perceived it to be. Worse was the very real possibility that the Old Boy and his wife, who to the Patron and me had become nothing less than Ward and June to our Wallace and the Beav’, were fed up with the whole affair and would not come back at all. (Perhaps that’s why the M. P. went with them, so he, too, could go out if they left.) In the Old Boy and his wife we had found two people we could form an alliance with out here in Africa, while with the W. W. H., and even more so with the Gent, the most that could be hoped for were ugly recriminations. We were not happy.

  That afternoon I listened to the Africans making their camp in the open outside our thicket, singing lilting falsetto songs that I wished I understood, and felt this prefatory lonesomeness. That night at dinner, deciding there was no dishonor in eating it even if the Gent had shot it, I requested some of the baboon, to the perplexity of the chef de cuisine; and tasting primate for the first time, I found it delicious. I was put in mind of a story a famous Mexican big-game hunter told of the time he tried baboon on safari. He enjoyed it immensely too, so much so that he asked for seconds. To his dismay, he was brought on a platter a curled, charred, child-sized hand—considered the most succulent cut—and instantly expressed a loss of appetite.

  “Listen,” the Gent, grinning rather primate-like himself, still incensed over the loss of his trophy but with a belly full of its rich meat, was boasting now, from the corner of his mouth, to the W. W. H., “I hate them as much as you.” François happened to be conveniently away from our newest table of sticks.

  “You don’t understand,” the W. W. H. explained with chilling, patronizing mildness. “Hate has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The simple fact is, they’re 20,000 years behind us.” I stared away from the lantern into the night, turning my back to the table.

  The next dawn, when the Patron Sans Souci and I walked with the Old Boy and his wife from our cove of leaves to say farewell, we found the Africans clustered around one of the sad camels. Branded with three scars on its flank, bent-necked on the ground, it remained where it had lain down to sleep in the night.

  “The camel,” said one of the Africans in French-accented English, “eez died.”

  We looked upon it, then at one another. Come back, Shane, I wanted to say to the Old Boy and his wife. Come back.

  Over the Divide

  Without knowing our way, we found some good meadows—which they call savannahs—on which deer were grazing.

  —Bernal Diaz

  THE NAMELESS WATERHOLE was all that remained of the river our map had no name for. It stood shaded in a hollow of leafy trees, looking brown and pestilential and smelling like an old bar towel.

  One of the trackers sank into it a round terra-cotta pot we had found that morning on the trail at the site of a poacher’s deserted camp and drew out some water. After letting the water settle awhile in the pot, he presented it to the white white hunter who, after drinking deeply, pronounced it “ice cold.” Then the Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown partook, followed by the Patron Sans Souci. When my turn came, I asked the Patron how it had been. If you strained it a little through your teeth, he allowed, it was not completely foul. Though I had long ago abandoned all pretense of drinking only totally purified water on this safari, the thought of schistosomes performing vigorous wee scissors kicks and synchronized backstrokes in my intestines was too much for me. I tapped the plastic container of warm filtered water (our last) set beside me, and finding it still half full, drank sparingly from it instead.

  We were now some 10 miles west of the last camp at the source of the Ouandjia River. After our dawn parting yesterday with the Old Boy and his wife beside the deceased camel, I lay down and slept through to dinner, arising only long enough to go off into some tall grass and, setting fire to my toilet paper afterward to help keep Africa beautiful, accidentally burned over not more than an acre or two of tall grass, the fire swift and cool, doing no visible harm to any of the trees. The Gent occupied his day with an unprofitable horseback hunt around the country, failing to slay a thing (though a duiker he wounded with his 375 did, heaven only knows how, manage to escape). Today, at least, his feet felt sufficiently healed for him to walk and spare the pony further abuse. We would lie here under the trees by this waterhole now until the sun passed its zenith and then, with our trackers, gunb
earers, porters, horses, and the remaining camels, move on to the next water that the Africans indicated, by snapping their fingers in the air to count off increments of distance, miles and miles farther on. It would take several hours, they showed us by pointing to where the sun would have lowered to in the western sky when we reached our destination.

  As I rested on a bed of fallen leaves and roaming ants, I recalled the lurid misfortunes, from arrow wounds to fevers to witnessing his comrades sacrificed by the Aztecs, that Bernal Diaz had described in his history. What we were enduring here, I realized, was in comparison a very rich slice of cake, with frosting. Then, almost before I knew it, it was time to go on again.

  The heat of the afternoon was baking and windless. The country, though, was beginning to be not so scorched and blasted looking as it had been before, showing green trees now and shady park lands. And when I became lost in the unbroken rhythm of my walking, there would also be animals to wheel me out of my daze: bounding triplets of oribi; herds of hartebeest; dark elk-looking sing-sing waterbuck; and equinoxial, or Nile, buffalo. These are an intermediary between the Southern, or Cape, buffalo and the dwarf buffalo of West Africa’s jungles. Though smaller horned than the Cape, the Nile buffalo is of about equal body size. We saw a large herd late in the day, and I got to watch the W. W. H. and the Gent put a sneak on the big-muscled animals who were every color from sleek black to bright red. As I watched from a crouching position, dreaming of oxtail soup and sincerely wishing the Gent all the luck in the world, it was as bracing as iced bourbon to see the wild cattle of Africa once more. None of these creatures seemed to measure up to the Gent’s trophy requirements, though, while I could only keep thinking over and over, my God, they’re meat. When he and the W. W. H. stood to break off the stalk, a lioness, who from the opposite side of the herd had been hunting the now stampeding buffalo as well, could be seen running away.

  The long day went on until at sunset, my sore-footed hobbling come to resemble the pirouetting of a trained bear, we crossed the Galénguélé Ridge, the divide between the Oubangui and the Chari watersheds, and made a camp on the flowing Poto Poto River at the foot of a grassy hillside. This time, with the Old Boy’s wife gone, I stripped off not only my boots and socks, but all my clothes and lay down in the shallow stream.

  A delegation of the Africans, who had been subsisting for some days solely on cooked manioc, confronted the W. W. H. after setting up camp, and holding their stomachs for dramatic effect, implored him to make the Gent shoot something fleshy first-thing “Yesterday,” by which they meant “Tomorrow” or maybe they actually did mean yesterday, never mind about bloody horns! It appeared that I had not been alone in my carnivorous lusts.

  At dinner, while the Gent treated us to a tirade of appalling political and racial inanities as we sat in beerless paralysis, we four were served a single, very small can of cooked chicken, the absolute last of our iron rations. We sat before that chicken like Bugs and Elmer isolated in a cabin in the snow, contemplating the single boiled bean that will comprise their last supper. Above us on the hill one or two campfires flickered.

  A strong wind and a huge light awakened me at midnight from my hunger-filled sleep; and I saw the entire hillside no longer flickering but entirely engulfed, the tall flames whipping down onto us. The Sudanese poachers, to emphasize what was the Central African equivalent of “my beach, my wave,” had sent us a grassfire as an invitation for us to move on. As I stood in my slippers and underwear outside my mosquito net, feeling the heat on my face and unsure in which direction to bolt, the Africans lying near us at the foot of the hill arose and, yawning, adroitly ignited backfires. They then went back to sleep, leaving the three surviving camels tied down five yards from me to growl their outrage at this disturbance and the fire to consume itself. Les chiens aboient, la caravane passe, in more than a manner of speaking.

  The next morning was sheer bathos when after only an hour’s walk we discovered a maintained road, then a quarter-mile along it a hunting camp of round thatched-grass huts, called boukarous in Sango, with real beds inside. This camp was Pipi, and here I truly hoped the Old Boy and his entourage would rejoin us, driving down on the Ouadda Road from Jolly in a safari company vehicle. If they did, it would once again be time on this safari to adapt.

  The small staff at Pipi greeted us and offered us startlingly cold filtered water from a kerosene refrigerator and rank buffalo jerky that shimmered like verdigris. For luncheon they would prepare some tasty fillets of male lion the previous hunter left behind. (“We were pleased enough in camp with the very little food they brought us, for evils and hardships vanish when there is enough to eat,” wrote Bernal Diaz, all too rightly.)

  Still, the Patron and I waited in glum silence. Then around noon, just as the Gent was launching into a paean to gold and other “hard currencies” which he had gleaned from his reading of some deranged survivalist manifesto, we heard the unbelievable sound of a vehicle engine. The Patron Sans Souci and I fled from the Gent’s jeremiad in mid-screed to greet loudly the Old Boy, now purged and looking fabulously jaunty in a pair of motorcycle goggles, his wife, François, and the Missionary Photographer as they arrived in a total wreck of a windscreen-less Land Rover piled with trackers and food and fuel and beer and multicolored bottles of flavored syrups for soft drinks. It seemed as if everything might be all right for a time.

  Fixed as my mind is on the archaic, when walking across Africa made far more sense than it appears to today, I could not leave the camel-and-foot aspect of our safari so quickly behind. Now that there was a vehicle, a couple of hartebeest got taken in short order. The next day the camp staff cut the meat into thin eight-foot strips and draped it out like laundry on lines to dry. In the afternoon I found myself wandering up behind camp, past the lines of meat, to where the three Sudanese camel drivers sat around the ashes of their fire. The youngest was patiently dissolving some yellow lumps in a bucket of water, to medicate the camels with the minerals. The middle-aged one had a callous on his forehead from his five-daily bowed prayers in the direction of Mecca. And the eldest one was splitting a hartebeest shank with his steel dirk to free the raw marrow-for “power” as he explained through explicit pantomime.

  “As-salaamu alaykum,” he greeted me, raising both hands into the air in a gesture of peace, still holding the greasy knife. He was tall and desiccated, and the sparse hair around his taut black scalp was white. His eyes were lidless slits that had stared at desert suns much too long. He wore leather sandals, a long white cotton djellaba, a white-and-red sheath for his dirk tied to his upper left arm, and a string of leather phylacteries containing bits of paper inscribed with Koranic passages bound around his upper right. I salaamed him in return and made a note to ask with him later, somehow, about caravans, bandits, and the crossing of burning sands, armed primarily with a faith in the Prophet’s words. In short, Real Life.

  That evening, still on foot after roughly 120 miles of walking in eight days, I shot my first antelope. It was a western bush duiker the Missionary and trackers and I spotted in a woody place five miles from camp. The Missionary whispered that the antelope looked exceptional. Remembering our duiker lunch on the Ouandjia, I crept up to a dead tree 50 yards from where he was feeding on fallen leaves, got a rest, and put a 300-grain solid through him. And watched him run.

  We took off after him, and the trackers soon found blood, then I found another dull dusty splash of it ahead, and another, until there the 30-pound animal lay 150 yards from where he was hit, dead. His orange-brown coat was graying and the ridges of his straight black horns had been smoothed with age. The Missionary enthused that these horns are real big, enormous in fact, rivaling the top-listed in the Old Boy’s Rowland Ward, now our camp bible. Later, various professional hunters from the safari company declared that after literally years in the Central African Republic they never encountered bigger. With all that, though, what we were talking about was an awesome 4⅝ inches of horned fury, and the praise was strikingly like bein
g congratulated on having just bagged the world’s-record cocker spaniel. My main concern was, How’ll he eat?

  What I had walked all this way for was a chance to hunt giant eland, Taurotragus derbianus gigas, the grander Central African version of the already grand-enough Lord Derby’s eland found in far-western Africa. The “largest and handsomest, and one of the least known, of African antelope,” according to Theodore Roosevelt, it is in a league with the bongo, the greater kudu, and mountain nyala as not only one of the continent’s most beautiful spiral-horned antelope, but most beautiful large wild animals, full stop, ranking alongside the royal elk, argali sheep, even the markhor.

  Called bosobo in Sango, its sandy coat is slashed by a dozen white stripes, a curly black ruff of hair surrounds its thick, dewlapped neck. Standing six feet at the shoulder and weighing nearly a ton with its heavy horns scrolling out to beyond four feet, it is acutely wary and virtually incapable of remaining still so that it will move all night and right through the heat of the day, browsing at a brisk walk on the large green leaves of young Isoberlinia doka (a short, faintly purplish-red vuba hardwood tree). I had yet to see a photo of a live giant eland when it was not on its feet, usually in midstride, nor heard of anyone who knew precisely when it was that the animal slept.

  Nonetheless, when I strode back into camp at dusk I was fully prepared to brag on the duiker one of the trackers now carried on a stick laid over his shoulder like a bindle. The Old Boy and his wife, François, the W. W. H., the Gent, and their trackers had all succeeded in wedging into the clunking Land Rover that morning and had seen, against all known odds, a truly fine giant-eland bull lying in the shade beneath a tree. The Gent was, by a previous cutting of cards, the one with the right of first shot (“I won the damned thing drawing lots. You can’t go against lots. That’s the only way the luck has a chance to even up, ever.”); but as he fumbled with his radically customized 375 (a “bells-and-whistles” gun the Patron, who didn’t know a Mauser from a muzzle-loader, had accurately characterized it), the Old Boy had sighted in on the animal with his own rifle. Matters became confused, then heated, and the eland managed to get up and lope off without a shot being fired at it. The Gent had then gone off on foot in a rage with François for many hours, never laying eyes on the eland again. The day ended with them running all the oil out of the Rover, scavenging the quarters of a young eland freshly killed and abandoned by a lion, and the Gent firmly convinced that everyone was out to screw him. They were all sitting around the oil-cloth-covered dining table now, powdered with red dust like gingerbread people sprinkled with cinnamon, drinking gin, and not speaking. No one seemed overly interested in hearing about my Colossus of Duiker.