On our way back to the Toyota I made what I thought to be a rather modest and reasonable proposal, that in the future the Gent might consider taking advantage of a rest when one was available.
“Let me tell you, scribe,” he began, as he now always began in his prevailing snarl, going on to explain how he did not much care for my offering him advice. The W. W. H. sniffed, “He’ll probably be writing about some bloody theory of rests when he gets back.”
So when we spotted the decent Nigerian bohor reedbuck, with his forward-hooking Panic horns, a quarter-mile farther on, and I slipped down with Djouma from the Toyota and we snuck behind cover to where there was 150 yards of open grass flat between us and the animal standing quartered away, and knowing that the two back at the vehicle were studying me closely with their binoculars, I very pointedly rested the fore-end of my rifle in the fork of the shooting stick. I broke the reedbuck’s neck—even though I was aiming for his left shoulder—and Djouma, who had been subjected for weeks now to the Gent’s haphazard shooting, erupted in delight, pounding my back, giving me a thumbs-up salute, and pumping my hand as we walked to the buck. I heard the Toyota grinding up behind us (and the W. W. H. saying drily, “Nice shot; not quite as big a reedbuck as I had thought, though”), and knew I had shot for every wrong reason imaginable, for the worst of all reasons for killing any animal: to prove something. And hoped I would never do it for that reason again.
All this while, the Old Boy was dogging eland. He was pursuing herds of them around the rocky hills, sometimes 15 miles a day on foot, never able to overtake them. When he would return in the afternoon, he’d be so tired he would let me go hunting for roan antelope and buffalo with François while he rested in camp.
One long, exciting stalk François and I had after a very good hull buffalo was botched by one of his trackers, Alamine. We had dubbed him “The Torch” for the wooden match he carried at all times between his white teeth, ready to ignite every last blade of dry grass he encountered to clear the soil for new growth. Part way through our buffalo stalk, we told Alamine to wait behind, since fewer people had a better chance of closing with the buff. But as we crept up on the small group of bulls, here came Alamine looking for us, strolling right into them, scattering them like a busted covey of three-quarter-ton quail. C’est la vie was about the best light I could put on the incident, remembering the sight of a meter or so of sweeping buffalo horn.
The winter trade wind, the harmattan, had begun to blow down out of the Sahara, yellowing the sky with the fine dust it bore and tarting up the sunsets like carnival goldfish. Some call this dry breeze “the doctor” for the way it remedies the summer’s dampness, but harmattan has roots similar to harem in Arabic and describes something forbidden, the wind known to bear with it such diseases as meningitis. On one of these hazy dust-blown afternoons, François spotted a long file of grazing buffalo, and we went after them on foot to see if the herd held any good bulls.
We arced around the buffalo for a mile or two, trying to position ourselves where we could best see them without spooking them. With François’s chief tracker Tchekel in the lead, and François, me, my gunbearer Alamine, and the water bearer Amath behind, we climbed up onto a bare spine of rocks. We were beneath a large dead snag, craning for a view of the buff, when Alamine pushed past me, spit out his match, and began hissing Sango words at François. Which sent them all flying off for dear life, leaving me standing by myself, gaping, watching Alamine running away with my 375. For one second, as I snapped my head around, I could not discover what it was that was surely about to kill me—buffalo stampede? lion attack? tribal uprising? Then the furious swarm of African bees pouring out of the hollow honey tree engulfed my face.
I overtook and passed François and the team at about the 100-yard marker. At 200 yards a small band of hartebeest looked up with a start as one white man and four black ones were bearing down, howling and flailing their arms around their heads: a sight they hadn’t seen for at least several millennia, sending them racing off in half-a-dozen different trajectories. At 300 yards the bees gave up the chase and I could halt, miraculously unstung, while the others tallied their wounds.
I assumed that would pretty much be that for the buff hunting today. Au contraire, said François, rubbing a sting on his neck, they have paid no heed to our capering. So we sneaked back toward them—this time I bore my own rifle—and finally closed to within dirt-kicking distance of the whole grunting, feeding herd. Hunkered down, we watched them for several minutes at this exceptionally unsettling range, seeing tickbirds pecking on them and the huge red and black animals tossing their heads and flicking their ears at the annoyance. They paid us no mind; but the herd held only one young bull, which was looking our way and slowly approaching.
When I pointed out to François that the bull was on a course to us, he dismissed it with a flick of his wrist.
“Too small,” he said.
“‘Too small?’” I asked with what might charitably be described as incredulity. “He’s going to walk over the top of us!”
In the end François merely stood and shooed all 50 of the wild oxen away, their running hooves making the earth vibrate like a drumhead.
As we made our way back to the Toyota in the dusk, François, the trackers, and I all began to giggle at the same time as we remembered the bees. I could not resist teasing François, noting that for a fellow with so little apparent fear of big, potentially obstreperous mammals, he certainly did let a few insects get the better of him.
“Well, Tome,” a teary-eyed François explained, “you can shoot ze buffalo; you cannot shoot ze bee!”
The Missionary, who through his command of the French language had monopolized François in conversation every night at dinner, each day on the trail, and in the Toyota until the Old Boy’s wife coolly but firmly asked him please to speak with François in English when we were all together so the whole class could share in the conversation, had to leave a week early to return to his ecclesiastic duties at his office in Europe. And after his departure, François’s English underwent a marked improvement. One night at dinner, while we were discussing wildlife conservation in his country, he mentioned a European “game expert” who was continually criticizing the Central Africans’ own honest efforts in this area. The expert was noted for his very vocal opinions that Africans were in general many years “behind” certain other, unnamed races.
Smiling in a private way as he carefully turned down Bob Marley on the Patron’s cassette player, François asked, in a precise, rhetorical voice that everyone could hear clearly, “Why does he come to Africa if he believes this?” The W. W. H. and the Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown spooned oxtail soup to their lips in silence, not lifting their eyes from their bowls, while François went on smiling.
The next morning I was out with the Old Boy when one of François’s trackers spotted a trotting herd of giant eland in the trees ahead. The Old Boy had been chasing eland for weeks now; and when he took off with the Africans, his wife and I waited behind, hoping that this would be one herd he overtook. We waited half-an-hour before we heard the distant shot. Then a minute or two later there was a second. It was an hour before the Old Boy returned.
I had walked off a few hundred yards into the cool trees, unable to bear the tension of sitting. When I looked back, I saw the Old Boy standing there with his wife. There was no reaction from either for a moment as he spoke beyond my hearing. Then the Old Boy’s wife put her arms around him, rising on her toes as he bent forward; and they kissed; and I knew he had his eland, the trackers now back in the trees skinning and quartering it. I jogged up to him and employed my last line from American Lit. on the safari.
“‘You god damned bull fighter,’” I said, shaking his hand.
Now all the hunters wanted roan. These horsy antelope (Hippotragus equinus) are the largest in Africa next to the eland, weighing over 600 pounds on the hoof. Their bodies are gray and with their long (more mulish than horsy, actually) tufted ears and thei
r faces painted in black and white, they resemble circus clowns nearly as much as they do their jet-black relative the sable. Their scimitar-curved horns give them a sturdy handsomeness, though, and they are among the most challenging antelope to hunt. They inhabit the same country as the eland, and if you start trailing them they can lead you on for hours. If wounded they have also been known, like the buffalo, to charge or to lie in ambush for the hunter.
There was an excellent bull in a large herd of roan very near camp, so near, in fact, that the roan had grown used to vehicles and hunters driving past them and would move off in the easiest of fashions when approached. At Koubo there was an unwritten rule (the most important kind for a hunter to adhere to) that these antelope were to be left alone. Even the Saudis, who had received a special dispensation to shoot an eland cow and who had all craved roan as much as we (and who all did not kill one) had not tried to shoot this bull. Then one afternoon the Old Boy went out with the W. W. H. and the Gent in their Toyota, and minutes later the sound of a shot came from just around the bend in the dirt road. Several minutes later the Old Boy came marching back down the road alone, his rifle laid across his shoulder and his face flushed with anger.
“What?” I asked, knowing.
“They shot the camp roan,” he said matter-of-factly, placing his rifle with exaggerated care in the rack in the thatched-roof dining area and looking around for the Scotch bottle.
(Strangely, in spite of everything else, it was at this moment that the Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown and I ceased to be on speaking terms. I, for my part, was no doubt just being childish.)
The Old Boy finally found his roan far out on the bright river flats a few days later. He had missed a very good herd bull earlier in the day in the timbered hills, missed twice with his 375 at close range, and was disgusted with his shooting. As we came down out of the hills, he wanted to head directly in to lunch and forget about roan all together.
François and I were standing together in the back of the Toyota when we saw a large brown marsh mongoose rippling across the ground by the edge of a waterhole.
“Rikki-tikki-tavi, eh?” I said, acting insufferable.
“Ah yes,” François replied, savoring the thought. “Keepling.”
Then François sighted a good bull standing alone in the shade of a tree out in the open. The Old Boy slid out, with his 7mm this time, and slipped low across the open to a tree to get a rest. He killed the roan at well over 200 yards with a single 160-grain bullet, distant baboons barking in the heat of the day as the antelope collapsed.
“Shook one in,” the Old Boy said as he stood beside the roan.
Several toasts were proposed for the Old Boy that night, and I recall the Patron Sans Souci making mention as he toddled off to our boukarou about how red wine always made him so sleepy.
Those who have heard one will assure you that a tornado roaring toward you sounds like an approaching express train, and that is the way the lion sounded when his roar crashed through my sleep at one-thirty the next morning. Actually, trains and tornadoes probably sound much more like a lion roaring than the other way around. I sat up and found my 375 beside me, leaning against the aluminum carrying-case housing the Patron’s redundant movie camera. The lion was across the shallow stream of the Koubo, maybe 50 yards off, just seconds away if he charged all out. His chest-deep roar would come full, then trail off in a series of grunting coughs, but as long as he roared I knew where he was. Often there would be interludes of a quarter hour when he was silent except for the sound of his walking in the now-moonless dark of the lion hour.
Everyone else in camp, with the infuriating exception of the Patron, had been awakened, too, and from the boukarous spread out around the clearing I could hear rifle bolts being run home. The camp staff, sleeping around the campfire, piled more wood on it to send the flames high into the sky and illuminate the area around them. No one spoke.
Sitting in the blackness of a wispy grass hut, meditating on the possibly parallel fates of myself and Three Little Pigs, I was something more than apprehensive.
“For Christ’s sake wake up,” I whispered loudly to the Patron. I figured he would rather I woke him than have the lion do it by leaping onto his bed. Also, I’d be damned if I was going to sit here being scared witless all by myself. But the Patron, true to his name, just went on snoring, as free of worry as a newborn.
For an hour-and-a-half the lion roared, walking up and down beside the stream, meaning no harm, I suppose, merely being a lion. Then he unceremoniously wandered off, and I put down my rifle and fell asleep again. I woke past dawn, just as the Patron Sans Souci was opening his little eyes, rubbing his knuckles in them. He announced with a wide yawn that his uninterrupted night’s sleep had left him thoroughly refreshed. Right as rain. He was somewhat confounded, however, when I, bags big as Dopp kits under my eyes and my hair standing out in spikes, began shrieking at him, wholeheartedly.
The Old Boy and his wife and I drove off with François that late morning, planning to meet up with the others at Tini Falls at noon for a picnic and our swim in the waterhole. The falls was a famous, if remote, sight in Ouandjia-Vakaga, and we all wanted to visit it. Hunting our way there, we spotted an excellent roan bull by himself in the timber, and François and his trackers and I set off after him.
We chased him through the green Isoberlinia trees for two hours on foot, getting up on him once and having him stare us down, then snort, like a steam locomotive getting under way, and gallop off before I could get a shot. The trackers and François were able to follow the trail in the volcanic dirt, over rocky lava ground, across every terrain until we saw him again and once more he snorted, running away through a stand of timber with his neck-mane erect, like the knight’s on a chess board. I followed him in my scope but would not risk a shot through the trees. We went on tracking him, the Africans always locating his track until he entered a large grove of trees whose fallen leaves blanketed the ground deeply for an acre all around so he could no longer be trailed. He was gone now, and we went out and found the road again.
Alamine, perhaps just nostalgic for flame, immediately built a small fire and sat in its smoke. The rest of us simply sat covered in sweat bees while Amath ran back to bring up the Toyota. As I waited for the vehicle, I believed I could be content if this long safari were to end on this spot, after that last fine chase.
It went on, though, up the road to where we crossed the Oumyawa River, the route posted with an old eland skull-and-horns hung in the fork of a tree, to the Tini River branch and its falls and waterhole where I floated. For our picnic we had cold roan meat, bread, and beer. Then I floated some more until I was ready to leave, seeing at last that you have to let go of it all sometime.
The final days slipped by impossibly fast. The others were ready for home; I was mostly ready to be away from the Gent’s unique brand of “sport.” Back at Koubo after the picnic, the Old Boy, his wife, François, his trackers, and I decided to go out on foot, to make a long circle around the country and once again put one foot, astonishingly, in front of the other. I took a spiral-horned harnessed bushbuck on the walk, giving the camp workers more meat for them to dry and take home.
There was a lion kill in a burnt-over piece of ground; and François, the Old Boy, the trackers, and I went there one morning, to see if the cat was on it. As he climbed out of the vehicle to head in, the Old Boy handed me his over-and-under and the double-aught cartridges his wife never used on the road.
“Back me up if we get into a charge,” he said, the words leaving me impossibly pleased. When we went in, and there was no lion, I was seriously disappointed.
A day or two later the Gent, of course, killed the de rigueur, almost maneless, young male lion while standing in the back of a Toyota. Then on the next to last day, I got to chase with the Old Boy and François after a buffalo the Old Boy had wounded, and to put in the last round when the old bull, who had been waiting for us in the shade of a bush, refused to go down from an assortment o
f 375s and 458s from the other two’s rifles, and was gathering himself for a charge. (“Uh,” I asked, “may I shoot?” absurdly standing on etiquette as they struggled with the bolts on their rifles and the standing fierce buffalo rocked from side to side 30 yards from us; please do, they replied, please do. I did and the buffalo lurched forward with a bellow, lying still and black on the ground.)
The very last day, after circling the country with François all afternoon without seeing any game, we were on our way in when at one minute to six in the African evening we spotted a very decent roan bull in a herd. I stalked toward him in the twilight, then raised my rifle and squeezed the trigger, harder and harder—the way you do when hunting the animals who migrate through your dreams—until I realized I hadn’t taken off the safety. The roan bull started to drift off with the herd, and I followed in a slink until I came to a big tree with the roan standing out at 70 yards in the dimming light. This time I remembered the safety but crept up on my scope. When I shot the rear of the eyepiece ringed my forehead and the herd ran. I saw through the blood running into my eyes the bull walking very slowly, then lying down. And at the very last minute, as I stood marked with my own blood, the hunting was done.
The next morning, the lion roaring off a ways from camp, we began to make our way back to Jolly. Along the way I watched all the running herds of ancient game and could feel the sun on their hides and the air in their lungs as if their hides and lungs were my own, just as I could feel within me the motion of their strides. It felt like a promise, and I hoped not a false one. I was going on, but the running animals would remain, with luck and care, for a long time. There were even to be seen round shallow tracks and broken trees along the road, fresh signs of elephant. Then we saw the naked stone of Kaga Moumo rising above the village of Ouanda Djalle.
Augusts in Africa Page 28