The amount of game we saw was hardly overwhelming, and for several days I concentrated my efforts in finding good heads. I didn’t want to “waste” my trophy fees on camp meat. Then I thought that it wasn’t just me who was missing out on protein but the trackers and camp staff, too, who regretted the loss of the very good meat of porcupine. It was time to shoot something.
At last light a few days into the safari, darkness rushing on, I spotted a young, adult kob ram—its name, m’bada, sounding better in Fula—moving from bush to bush about 150 yards away. The antelope was by now nearly undetectable to the naked eye, the air filling with the obscuring dim of twilight. None of the trackers could any longer see it, telling me it was gone. I got the jury-rigged 375 onto the sticks and put the Zeiss on the kob. Even with that, the animal was something through a glass darkly, though still visible. I could get the crosshairs on the kob and watch it move between cover. At the very last possible instant of daylight, the antelope stopped, standing broadside. I pushed off the safety and pressed the trigger. The kob vanished, but a boil of sooty dust rose where it had been standing. We had fresh meat for camp.
There’s nothing to be explained about Africa. Either one has always known that he, or she, if finding the opportunity, would hunt there, or that it was a matter of no consequence, even if one were an enthusiastic hunter in other fields. Both stances make perfect sense without having to say why. Why, though, if one occupies the former camp, travel to Africa to hunt in the way I had chosen?
There were 40 years of Africa to answer that. Forty years of coming to Africa to hunt, from the Maasai Mara to the Matetsi, the Karoo, the Waterbergs, Qasserine, across the Sudanian Savannah; with cities like Yaoundé, Nairobi, Mombasa, Arusha, Khartoum, Bangui, Dakar, Tunis, Harare, Lusaka, Jo’burg, and Cape Town, and the little towns like Beaufort West, Loitokitok, Ouadda, to walk in; along the Gambia, Limpopo, and Zambezi, and lesser lights like the Rombo and Komati; to west of Tsavo and perhaps east of Eden; all of the hunting done in the company of professional hunters. Fascinating people, the sort of competent, skilled, confident ones who do their jobs well, like those characters in Howard Hawks movies, before he ever considered making Hatari! Adept at organizing and managing hunting operations and camps. Boon companions to share campfires and snifters.
In time, though, and not necessarily 40 years, you wonder at least a little what the professionals are really there for. To make the executive decision of whether to turn right or left onto the trail each morning? As a backup on dangerous game, of course; though if you have killed enough buffalo you might be forgiven the notion that maybe you could do it yourself—and if you honestly didn’t believe you could if you had to, you probably don’t want to be trying to do it at all. Then if you look hard enough, you will notice that the ones doing the true hunting are the trackers, simply far better at it than anybody else in Africa, and possibly the world. Which makes the PH’s task something like that of a tour guide-interpreter’s, with just a touch of a sommelier’s: If I might recommend the gemsbok. As a licensed professional he is obligated to stand between you and the game, but sometimes that can seem as if he is obscuring the view. And there can be in his job just a bit too much of a hand holder, leading to those most disheartening words from the lips of the returning safari hunter, “When I was in Africa, my PH told me …”
So just once in 40 years, perhaps for the final time in 40 years, I wanted to experience Africa free of anybody else’s interpretation and with nobody else in front of me if the time came to shoot. And discovering new country in Cameroon seemed the way to go about doing that.
Cameroon’s January weather was the best of the year. There were no bugs, except for the very last night when I wore shorts to dinner on the patio and wound up with milky pale legs erupting with strawberry welts. Under the nearly supererogatory mosquito net in bed I lay on top of an ultralight sleeping bag I’d brought, until it got too cool and I slept comfortably inside the thin bag.
At dawn it was cold riding in the back of the Hi-Lux as we drove out to where we would hunt. Through the gray light you sometimes caught the quicksilver line of a back or glint of horn among the scrub trees; and the brakes went on and the binocular came up, but it was usually a doe or cow or had already broken into a run. Or after we’d gotten out of the truck and made a stalk, Daniel or the trackers were saying, “Shoot! Shoot!”; but having no one to decide for me, I had to look it over and judge the head myself, and mostly held off.
In the afternoons as the day cooled we went out again. Eight days into the hunt we were traveling south on the two-track from camp. We’d seen doumsa, a waterbuck, from the road a few days earlier, but before we could go after it the bull vanished. Now there was another, a few hundred yards off the road.
When we crouch-walked forward and I got the rifle on the sticks, I saw the waterbuck’s left shoulder through brush, the dense winter hide maple brown, lyre shaped ribbed horns rising like stacks of bangles of keratin. The buck spun at the shot and went off in a half circle, starting to wobble before lurching to a stop and toppling. We got to it; it lay on its side, a small spume of lung blood welling out of its fur, the trackers shouting.
We ate waterbuck that night. They always say that waterbuck is tough and awful, unfit for consumption. Nothing went to waste here in camp, or in the field, though; and because they are wrong, as “they” so often are, the meat was perfectly tender and good.
I contemplated whether these might be my last walks in Africa. As we went toward the rising sun along the intertwining game trails through the black fields cobbled in kiibi I wondered if I should number my steps, keeping a record to memorialize each possibly final pace on the continent. Stride 6,000: stepped over a whitened snail shell the size of a small pine cone; 8,000: passed the wooden frame of a meat-drying rack, abandoned by poachers; 9,053: caught by a wait-a-bit in my shirt.
Trails divided, and Daniel in his olive-drab military cap caucused with Victor and Theodore about which to follow. I looked up, drawn by an Abyssinian roller landing on the limb of a thorn tree, head alert, breast and coverts the incandescent blue of a gas flame. Daniel turned and it flew. We walked on.
We side-hilled, past a salt lick hollowed gray into the slope. We were moving through rocks when I looked down and saw the cloven buffalo track in the ash. It was big as a Southern buffalo’s, with it the track of a smaller askari bull. We negotiated low rises now as we climbed higher from the flats, the wind favoring us, the rises able to conceal a buffalo on the other side. It was a quarter mile when we came to the elephant grass.
Seven-feet tall, as tight together as a shock so that Daniel pushing ahead of me would disappear within a step and it was impossible to see more than a few square inches of bare dirt under foot, this yellow grass is where the big bull and his askari had gone to ground, it seemed. If we pushed into it, we could not know if we were following the buffalo’s track. Or if we happened by dumb luck on its trail, we would likely drive it out ahead of us at a gallop, never to see it. Or it was lying up after feeding out in the night, meaning it was probably facing its back trail, letting the wind from behind cover that direction; and until we stumbled onto it we wouldn’t know it was there, giving us no chance of my getting a shot at a range of no more than feet.
The other matter is that if we went in, it would be Daniel in front with no rifle, not that he would have any way of getting off a meaningful shot even if he did, Daniel inexperienced with rifled weapons. Anyway you cut it, it would be a cluster.
The grass thicket covered half a football field. We circled it, hunting for tracks to see if the buffalo had come out; and the tracks were on the far side, moving uphill into the rocks.
We followed into a flat of rocks and gravel. It was clear that the buffalo, the Fula name m’bana, were some hours ahead of us; and now their tracks were lost on the hard ground. We broke off tracking and circled the hill, heading for the truck.
Step 11,201: this step around the skull of a doe bushbuck, djama thirga, lying ble
ached on the trail.
The tenth sunrise came, and already I was out from under the mosquito netting and washed at the sink. I had laced up my dusty boots and slipped the heavy worn-leather ammunition pouch onto my belt. Breakfast was another flat thin omelet and a packet of coffee in hot water. I filled the two Nalgene bottles from the purified-water cooler and zipped them into my fanny pack. The Hi-Lux idled in front of my boukarou where I picked up my borrowed rifle, checking that the chamber was empty, my binocular, walking staff, hat, and shemagh around my neck to keep the nape from burning. I climbed into the back of the truck, and we drove out of camp.
We traveled 30 minutes, spotting usual suspects, all does or young bucks, along the two-track dirt road. A flock of guineas ran for some distance ahead of us before they figured how to get out of the way. Coming to a halt, Daniel, Victor, Theodore, and I climbed down, leaving Joël with the truck.
The sky was the blue of a roller’s wing, no smoke from burning fields drawn across it yet. In the slanting early-morning light the reddish felsite pebbles sparkled among blades of new green grass sprouting from the ashes. There was surprisingly little kiibi on the stony ground, making for easy walking in the cool morning air.
We saw the small band of hartebeest after an hour on the trails. They were about 400 yards away in thorn bushes; and we paid them little attention.
For a quarter hour we wound among different sets of tracks—roan, warthog, postage-stamp sized duiker’s—the clean edges blown in, marking their age. The truth is that if this was my last walk in Africa, I was happy just to be walking it. I wasn’t really thinking about taking another animal, content only to be feeling Africa, when we came onto the hartebeest again.
They had somehow worked back around and were moving in front of us, 200 yards away. Three cows went past, then the big bull stopped, broadside, looking at us. I still had no idea I was going after this animal until Daniel began the hissing chant of “Shoot. Shoot!”
I asked Daniel if it was good, and he said yes.
The bull was fair enough; and the meat would mean a great deal to all the people in camp, especially after we left the next day. I got the jury-rigged 375 onto the sticks and the crosshairs on the hartebeest. Working the bolt, I fed in a cartridge. Now I pulled the rifle into the rest so it felt dead steady and pressed the trigger. Kira wa pura dropped like a sack of oats.
“Good shoot!” Daniel shouted as he and the other trackers ran toward the hartebeest lying motionless. “You good shoot!”
The bull’s horn formed a ribbed “S” growing out of the top of his head, then pointed straight back long and smooth and ebony. A perfect swirl of copper-yellow hair sat in the middle of his ludicrous equine face, and his winter hide gleamed in the morning sun.
“You good shoot,” Daniel said once more, admiring the neat hole in the base of the hartebeest’s neck, saving almost all the meat, not knowing that I’d been holding just above the elbow on the front leg. I said nothing.
My last hunt in Africa, perhaps for now, perhaps for always, ended like that, without my having to spoil it for Daniel.
We left the next morning at first light.
Back in Yaoundé as we were departing the lamido’s residence after a two-hour visit—Daniel and the driver having sat on the floor beside the chair of the lamido, consciously keeping their heads lowered the whole time—I was thinking, as I’d spent so much of my life thinking, of ways to get back to Africa, when I noticed a large travel trailer backed into a car port, the tongue held up by a cinder block.
“Yes,” said the lamido, “that is my caravan. Not good for over the roads between here and Rey Bouba.” He sighed a bit for comic effect and added, “I have always really wanted an RV.” His other dream was one day to visit Las Vegas. I dreamed something different.
The Trend of the Game
Afterword …
IT IS NOT the picture of the African safari that fills our dreams, but it may be the portrait of the safari’s brave new future.
Whoever considered hanging red plastic identification tags from the ears of 50-inch Cape buffalo? As an emblem of the most wild, free, and dangerous elements of the African safari, a buffalo should deserve higher regard than a Hereford; but there it was, as inconspicuous as that tarantula on a slice of angel food, a breeding bull on the cover of a spring 2014 number of The Wall Street Journal’s magazine, WSJ.Money, red tag and all, apparently just another head of livestock in South Africa’s burgeoning trade and industry in private game.
This buffalo was “Horizon,” notable for fetching $2.6 million at a wildlife auction (which is not even the record for a lone animal, another buffalo with two-inch-wider horns going under the gavel for $1.4 million more). Overall, prices for top species, such as sable, roan, buffalo, and wildebeest—particularly genetically selected mutations such as the “golden” wildebeest—had, according to the WSJ article, “Into the Wild,” by Patrick McGroarty, risen 50 percent in six years, while between 2009 and 2013 the amount spent at auctions went from $18.3 million to over $100 million, inspired by what is widely regarded, and aggressively promoted, as the salvation of “African hunting.” In all this, we are being asked to accept that what will save the safari is game breeding, husbandry, and enclosure; but if that is how it must be, it is clearly not how it was meant to be.
The African safari (and of course the word safari, meaning simply “journey,” has been around as long as Swahili has been spoken; but the word now, and for a long time, means more) blossomed from a broken heart. According to author Bartle Bull in his excellent book, Safari, when botanist William John Burchell’s fiancée, Miss Lucia Green, ended their engagement 200 years ago (she fell in love with the ship’s captain bringing her to wed Burchell on the remote island of St. Helena where he was schoolmaster), Burchell set sail for Cape Town, where he struck off on a four-year expedition throughout Southern Africa, collecting 50,000 plant and animal specimens and firing the wanderlust of hunters with the accounts of his travels and descriptions of the inconceivable amount and variety of game he found and hunted.
For two centuries after that the safari was the ultimate hunting adventure, the tales of Henry Morton Stanley, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark, Robert F. Jones, and Peter Capstick catching the fancies of generation upon generation of hunters, offering visions of savage yellow savannah, incarnadine sunsets, and silhouettes of giraffe marching with rocking gaits through impressionable minds, my own included. What hunters could find in Africa were the golden joys of vast, unbroken bush with herds of animals scattered over its plains. Olive tents were clustered in fever-tree clearings, then were struck so the safari could “up sticks” and pilgrim on beyond the next line of green hills, with no knowing what might lie on the lee side. There would be meetings with warriors with ochred hair festooned with feathers, whose tall spears had been blooded, and the mesmerizing fascination of sitting by a red-coaled fire under the constellations of an unknown sky—and the ultimate experience of hunting wildlife untamed, unfenced, and native to an exotic land. It was the best dream that money could buy.
Even well after the end of colonialism, the classic African safari would not have been unrecognizable to Burchell, with the major alterations being Land Rovers and Bedford lorries supplanting his ox-wagons, and centerfire rifles replacing 10-bore “baboon butt” flintlocks prone to exploding. The wind of change, despite the repellant philippics of those nostalgic for the days of white rule, did not by itself alter the face of safari. Far greater agencies have been at work.
Wilderness has been vanishing in Africa since we hominids dropped from the trees, adopted an erect posture, and began modifying the landscape in even the most primitive ways; but while for a million years the pace was glacial, it has now reached the stage of tsunami. Just a quarter of Africa remains wilderness (some figures go as low as 10 percent), while almost 40 percent of North America is; and that African wilderness is increasingly fragmented, exploited, and exhausted. While the population of North America has m
ultiplied four times since 1900, Africa’s peoples have nearly decupled. The single African nation of Nigeria is expected to have a population larger than that of the United States by 2050. When I hunted Kenya in 1974, there were 13 million Kenyans. Today, there are more than 44 million.
A billion Africans understandably want jobs, material possessions, better health, and representative government, and are no longer satisfied with being the supporting cast of hunting anecdotes. As well, they have diminishing contact with wildlife, which in their lives was once a force of nature to be welcomed, or endured, like the rains, as the game’s overall population contracts and the people migrate to the cities. (It is hardly reasonable to expect a street vendor in the Cameroon capital of Yaoundé to be concerned about, or even to record, the extinction, 500 miles away, of the Western black rhino—officially declared finished in 2013.)
Disappearing wild lands, growing human populations, mounting urbanization, the traffic in bushmeat, the Asian demand for ivory, and other factors leading to fewer animals in their native habitats—and add an ever-more sophisticated global anti-hunting movement—are conditions not likely to slow or retreat for decades to come; and they now threaten to turn the face of the safari into a mask of anarchy as they give rise to more restrictions and closures like that disastrously imposed in Kenya nearly four decades ago, devastating its wildlife in the years since; the suspension of hunting in Botswana; the effective ban on lion hunting due to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service’s listing of the two populations of African lion as threatened and endangered; and the rejection of trophy ivory from Zimbabwe and Tanzania for importation into the United States—all in effect at the time of this writing. Safaris are nonexistent because of continuing insurgency and chaos in two of the most massive nations, Angola and Congo, with over 75 million acres of nominal wild lands; and elsewhere the game is often restricted to obscure and limited species (one outfitter offers safaris on Zanzibar for rare duikers and giant shrews—no, seriously). And the solution that is to be found for all this is said to reside in South Africa, behind a 21-strand wire fence.
Augusts in Africa Page 30