Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  I had followed the moon and rivers in a cycle through Africa, and now I was back among adobe and daub-and-wattle houses, with cities and the world just beyond the horizon. And the only thing I really wanted to do, I knew, was turn right around and take the long way back again.

  I had to fly out, though, in the DC-3 that had brought us in, village hopping back to Bangui. When we made a landing in Ouadda, the pilot in his crisp white epaulet shirt, his tightly cut hair steel gray, on his wrist a Rolex as a symbol of his office, came past me where I sat in the rear by the door, and climbed out. Mechanics came and took out two rows of seats across from me, then a Land Cruiser ambulance with a red cross painted on the canvas top backed up to the door of the plane. Two men from the ambulance carried a stretcher onto the plane and lay it in the empty space across from me. On the stretcher under a thin blanket lay someone very, very old, or brutally aged by disease, making semi-conscious rattling sounds. I studied the person for several minutes. Then the pilot came back onto the plane. Holding a folded handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Seeing me, he waved his Rolexed hand emphatically at me, motioning me to go forward, up the slanting deck of the airplane cabin. And I did, as far as I could get. That came later, though. For now, I had to say goodbye to Jolly.

  Bernal Diaz, writing (as a cranky yet obviously still noble old man in pinched circumstances, having ended up an insignificant magistrate and the owner of worthless estates in Guatemala) of his days half-a-century earlier, tells us that he and a number of his comrades after gaining the wild lands of Mexico, mostly because they had seen no better prospects in their lives, callowly abandoned them for someplace they thought would be much better. But, he says, “we were thoroughly deceived.” It might very well be that these wild lands of Africa, which I felt shamelessly were somehow more than ever “mine” alone, were for all the hard and hungry and thirsty parts—and in spite of the apparently failed attempt to relive the past of foot safaris; the certainly the failed brotherhood of all hunters—as good as it got for me. Yet now I was leaving it all.

  Then as we drove into the dusty yard among the whitewashed buildings of the safari company’s headquarters in Jolly, I saw the Sudanese camel drivers sitting around the cold ashes of their last night’s fire, and everything seemed all right. I remembered something that I had known for 10 years, since I last laid eyes on Africa, that it was a land that was always with you no matter how far from it you thought you had gotten. You never let it all go, not even in your wildest dreams.

  “As-salaamu alaykum!” the old Sudanese shouted to me above the accumulated clatterings of the motor vehicles, raising his bony arms toward me, the dirk bound to his upper arm.

  I raised my arms back to him, recalling that the soul travels at the pace of a camel.

  “Wa-alaykum-as-salaam!”

  Welcome to the wild.

  In Burnt Lands

  The 2010s …

  VICTOR IN BLUE vinyl shoes and a navy-blue sport jacket, and Theodore, the younger tracker, wearing a Breaking Bad knit cap, pushed through the tall brush as I followed, without benefit of a professional hunter. It was shaded and cool in the leaved tunnels, the foliage the leather-green of armchairs in dark club rooms, as we wound our way through, glimpses of round-bodied helmeted guinea fowl in their festive dotted plumage scurrying across the leaf cover. We came out at an arbored opening above the sandy bed of the Mayo Rey, the light in its last hour across the dry river, and sat on the bank to watch.

  I glassed with the 8X Zeiss Terra, looking under the canopy on the other bank. In a few minutes a sing-sing waterbuck walked out, making its way down to the small pool of water remaining in the far channel. I put my right hand on the camp rifle across my knees, holding the binocular in the left. The young waterbuck had small horns and was lame, moving with painful care down the bank to splay its legs, lowering its muzzle to the water. After it drank, it limped back up the bank and slipped from view into the leaves, awaiting the mercy of a leopard or hyena. Downriver a doe and fawn harnessed bushbuck, picking their way like deer, crossed the yellow sand to get to water of their own.

  We sat until the sun went down behind the filigree of treetops across from us, the light the so-well-remembered-over-so-many-years impatient twilight of Africa, then stood and started back through the bush. We wanted to be back in camp before night fell.

  After the chasse libre, His Highness granted us an audience.

  Sa Majesté Bouba Abdoulaye Aboubakary, Lamido de Rey Bouba, six-foot-three—a former volleyball middle blocker—with a basso voice and booming laugh like that of the late actor-dancer-choreographer Geoffrey Holder (“crisp and clean, and no caffeine”), dressed in his traditional gold djellaba and kufi, was in residence in his compound in the capital city while the country’s National Assembly was in session. In the warm Cameroon January, he invited us to visit him in his home, begging that we not trouble ourselves with removing our shoes when we entered.

  We were back in Yaoundé, 600 train and truck miles south by southwest of His Highness’s lamidat (the Fulani sultanate of Rey Bouba, transected by the Mayo Rey, or the River Rey), where we had hunted for nearly two weeks in the lamido’s more than 100,000 acres of wildlife reserve.

  Lamidats or boubas such as Rey Bouba are scattered across the California-sized west-central African country of Cameroon, shaped like a dragon and named for the shrimp found by the Portuguese in rich abundance in the coastal rivers in the 15th century. Rey Bouba, coming into being 200 years ago with the Jihad of Usman dan Fodio, is, though seldom visited by travelers, one of the largest and most well-preserved lamidats, with crenulated dried-mud walls two-stories tall and—reminders of the kinder, gentler jihadists of days past when lands were taken by the blade and not the Kalashnikov: steel-and-brass shocks of curved cavalry sabers in their leather scabbards, stacked discreetly against the entrance gate. Rey Bouba is a small nation, or kingdom, within a nation, with the lamido its hereditary ruler.

  “So, Tom,” His Highness asked, sipping fruit soda as a breeze billowed the sheer white curtains through the open sliding door, “how did you find the hunting in my country?”

  This early in the year the grass stood more than head high; and the places to hunt were in the select patches that had been burned over, the tussocks, like stray fright wigs nesting on the ground, made black and the ashen blades still long and intact, not yet blown apart or broken down under a hoof. In the wet season millions of worms cast up mounds the size of golf balls that dry hard as golf balls and cover the ground so that walking on them is like stumbling across a field of so many … golf balls. The name for this ground is kiibi; and risking twisted ankles, I tried to keep up with Daniel, the head tracker, and the other trackers, who floated over the jagged ground. A gray scale of ash that fluttered upward from the ground when we stepped on it was the perfect medium for preserving tracks and for betraying when they had been imprinted.

  We hunted for three or four hours in a circuit leading back to the truck, going on foot in the first hours of the morning, feeling the heat of the day expanding exponentially around us, unbraiding lines of tracks and assigning them identities: Western kob, waterbuck, bushbuck, warthog, Western roan, Lelwel hartebeest; and ages: yesterday, last night, an hour before, minutes ago. Like a round cloven track the size of a coffee saucer, coined in the ash, heading toward rocks and long grass, a bull savannah buffalo.

  At the Gare Voyageur in Yaoundé—across from the row of shanties and stalls from which beer and soft drinks, broiled fish on sticks, flip-flops, and large woven-poly bags are retailed, and where men walk up and down, selling cigarettes by the one—to reach the country of the lamido I boarded the couchette on the overnight train to N’Gaoundéré (“Navel Mountain”—it’s an “outie,” goes the feeble joke among Lutheran missionaries). The equatorial days and insect-chirping nights in Cameroon, reside in perennial equinox, each span 12 hours with virtually no twilight between. So the railroad journey north-by-northeast through the bush, departing at sunset, was nearly
all in darkness, stopping at every milk-run station, but also in the hours when the cool air flowed in through the opened window of the wagon lits, making the trip without air conditioning tolerable. I rode the train with two other hunters, my friends Pam Cooper and her nephew Lance Crook. The fourth person with us was Daniel Sodea.

  Daniel was a Gbaya, the foremost hunting tribe in Cameroon. How great? Another of the Gbaya I met in the lamido’s area was one of the trackers, Adamou Davide. In his 60s, more youthful looking and rangy, Davide was the last of the python hunters. No young men, anymore, desired to take up his occupation of hiking four days from his village to reach python country. There Davide sought out aardvark burrows that female rock pythons had taken over. Binding one arm in antelope hide, and carrying a bundle of burning grass in the other hand, Davide burrowed into the hole himself, to face a 20-foot, 200-pound serpent coiled around either her clutch of up to 100 eggs or the live hatchlings. Letting the snake bite onto his wrapped arm, he dragged her out of her den and killed her, taking the skin and drying the meat. While he let the salted hide cure, Davide lived off python eggs, raising the bar on the standard of what qualified as a real man.

  Daniel was younger than Davide, small and neat and a fine dresser. He worked for “Mister Cam,” an American outfitter, arranging licenses and permits with the wildlife department, meeting the planes of incoming hunters, checking them into their hotel in Yaoundé, booking the train, traveling back and forth with them, getting them to the camp, hunting with them, returning them to the airport, and looking after the trophies following the hunt. What Daniel was not was a professional hunter, officially only the unarmed head tracker on the hunt.

  The morning after leaving Yaoundé we pulled into N’Gaoundéré, the terminus of the rail line. There, a hillock of baggage, and some (though hardly an oversupply of) provisions, were transferred to a white Hi-Lux mini-truck with a cramped crew cab. Crowding into the truck, we drove across the town, through zebu cattle being herded down a main street, past bare wooden tables standing at the intersections with plastic liter bottles of gasoline and loose change sitting on them, an honor-system self-serve gas station for the hundreds of motorcycles that made up most of the traffic; and after a short stop at Daniel’s modern house, a work in progress, the five of us in the vehicle began the seven-hour drive to the camp at Rey Bouba.

  In many of the former French colonies in western and central Africa exists the system of chasse libre, literally “free hunting,” though sometimes translated as “rough hunt.” Under this system a hunter can apply for permission to hunt without having to employ a licensed professional. The American outfitter handles, through Daniel, all the paperwork, hires the trackers, and has a cook and staff waiting in the camp of round, thatched-roofed boukarous set on the bank of the Mayo Rey, that in winter has fallen to green pools among the granite river rock erupting from the water like fiercely grinning occlusal surfaces.

  If you ignore certain anachronisms such as a motorized vehicle and solar-powered lights, you can almost imagine the way Burchell or Stanley or Selous organized their safaris two centuries ago—at least as close as you will come to it in the 21st century. And you need only go back a century here to find the famed, or notorious, ivory hunter, Walter Dalrymple Maitland “Karamojo” Bell, come to the “mysterious city” of Rey Bouba, meeting with the lamido of the day and hundreds of his mounted “knights” and foot soldiers draped in leopard skins and carrying bows and arrow-filled quivers, Bell never having “seen so many hideous men together.”

  It was night when we drove the last miles on the sandy two-track into the camp, tired and sore from the dusty road, when out of the dark from the backseat behind me, Daniel began yelling, “Allez, allez!” Past the hood, what looked like a parachute ball of a giant dandelion waddled in the headlights. The Hi-Lux sped up, and from the passenger seat I could see it was the behind of a crested porcupine ahead of us, its quills barred in black and white, like dashes of written Morse code, their tips shaking like a sheaf of pointed straw. The truck overtook it, and it either rolled under the chassis or off the road because we couldn’t feel the wheel going over it.

  Now Daniel yelled at the driver, Joël, to stop; and he, Daniel, was out of the truck with a lighted flashlight, shouting, “Very good meat,” and chasing after the vanished hystrix, with Lance following, the beams of their lights wigwagging farther and farther off into the bush and trees until they slowed and searchlighted among the branches and trunks, then lowered and moved back toward the truck, sweeping the dark ground ahead.

  “No porcupine,” said Daniel, hopping in the back door, repeating with regret, “Very good meat.”

  We had arrived.

  Cam prevailed upon me to use one of his rifles in the camp, rather than spend over $600 on a Cameroon import permit, with no guarantee I would even obtain one, or that I would not lose my fee money in the process. So I handloaded TSX 270-grain bullets for my Model 700 375 H&H Magnum, and some of my precious few Speer 300-grain tungsten African Grand Slams; mounted a Zeiss Victory HT 1.5-6x42 scope on the rifle with QD rings; and sighted in at the snow-blanketed backyard range of my friend Leroy’s in Story, Wyoming. Cam told me he had a Model 700 waiting in camp; so I unscrewed the mounts from my rifle, with the scope still in the rings, and carried it with me to Cameroon with solid-copper “softs” and a handful of solids.

  Cam kept the rifles and a few rounds in a padlocked storage room in one of the boukarous, and Daniel brought them out for us the first morning. The Model 700 I was handed left something to be desired—apparently painted matte black at one point, the coating had worn off to bare steel; the battered synthetic stock had lost its original recoil pad and had a torn lace-on leather boot on the butt with a loose pad that slipped inside, and soon fell out on the trail and was gone, leaving me to stuff the space with wadded toilet paper and wrap silver duct tape around it, creating a recoil falsie, and a thoroughly stylish-looking firearm.

  Sitting in the outside dining area under the thatched roof, I screwed the barreled action into the stock, then mounted the bases and the scope in its rings. It took entirely too many cartridges to sight in, but finally, using the rock wall around the patio as a bench and shooting at a target set out on the bank of the river behind camp, I got it hitting where I wanted.

  There is no escaping the nervous anticipation of the first shot on a safari (and I was getting to that). And that shot so often dissolves into tsuris and chaos, at least for me. In Cameroon in the late morning on the second hunting day there was a fair-sized herd of Lelwel hartebeest, kira wa poura in Fula, shining like new-minted copper out on the open savannah under the towering sun. I got on the sticks and got a horse-faced antelope bull in the crosshairs and proceeded to flock shoot, sailing the bullet over one and all and sending them off at a gallop, not hitting anywhere near where I wanted, flashing me back to the initial shot I ever took in Africa, some 40 years before. At least it scrubbed the first miss out the barrel of the borrowed rifle.

  The Black Meat of Interzone, Soylent Green, freeze-dried ice cream: the three courses of the Apocalypse. One existed on the bill of fare in Cameroon.

  Daniel’s betrothed, Hawa—in her twenties, with children from a previous marriage, very attractive with a sparkling laugh, set to be Daniel’s second Muslim wife—cooked eggs for breakfast, invariably turning out wafer-thin and paper-dry omelets with tomatoes if there were any, or maybe sardines. No bread. Packets of instant coffee. Cold fresh fruit regularly. After several days on a diet of omelets, though, I strongly desired my eggs a different way before dawn and tried to explain to Hawa that I must have a runny yolk, or two.

  As she listened, I mimicked breaking eggs, œufs, into hot oil in a skillet, making p-ch-ch-ch-ch frying sound effects with my mouth, trois minutes, then making my hand a spatula to demonstrate the turning of the eggs, one minute more and onto the plate.

  Hawa nodded in eager comprehension of my demonstration.

  “Ah oui,” she said, beaming. “Omelet.” And
another yellow roundlet of eggs, no thicker than a sheet of vellum, appeared on the breakfast plate.

  In the 25-page checklist cum dossier that Cam sent us before the chasse libre, he recommended including plates and forks, seasonings, and freeze-dried meals to supplement the food in camp. We three hunters consulted the website of a trail-food manufacturer and picked out assorted pouches for at least one meal a day. Boiled up at lunch, slid out onto a plate like molten magma, they proved entirely—edible. Pam went so far to as to bring desserts, which were generally, to my surprise, good. Then there was the freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream that started out as sugary tricolor chalk and as it was chewed took on the mouthfeel of ice cream thoroughly melted and warmed before swallowing. It seemed hardly worth the candle.

  All the real protein in camp was restricted to what we hunted or we caught from the Mayo Rey. Lance was relentlessly tracking roan, wading barefoot with two trackers across the cold river every dawn and walking up to six hours straight. On the days he came back in the noontime heat, he would fish religiously, providing us with wonderful Nile perch (esteemed as le capitaine in Central Africa) and good tigerfish to be fried up nicely for dinner by Hawa. I only fished a little at midday, managing to strike a substantial tiger that detonated out of the opaque green water like some thrashing ingot and tore the treble hook completely out of the lure. I did not provide any fish for the table.

  There was a single-barreled shotgun in camp, and I had brought a box of no. 6s along with my rifle cartridges; and one day out in the noonday sun, Victor and I walked through the bush along the river, following a flock of helmeted guinea fowl. I might not have landed any fish, but I could try to supply some game bird. The guinea fowl stayed ahead of us on the ground as we were in pursuit. Finally, they flew into a tree and perched. And yes, creeping to the edge of a fringe of leaves, I sluiced one, the bird flapping from the limb. Let he who has ever been reduced to stark omelets and freeze-dried ice cream cast the first stone.