Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  We would crouch and let them almost in, and then stand straight up. They would veer and climb like frightened mallards, or they would bend into the wind and dart like blue-wing teals. They would swerve and swoop and simply lay back their ears and pour on coal. Under those conditions they made the toughest and sportiest shooting I ever saw. You led a passing shot a dozen feet and got his tail feathers. He took off so fast you had difficulty stretching a gun by him and still keeping him in range.

  In twenty minutes my gun was steaming hot. In between attacks I had scuffed my birds into a pile on my side of the tree. I was down to one cartridge from a box of twenty-five. I seemed to see two empty cartons on the Selby side.

  “How many birds you got?” I said rudely.

  “Eight,” said Selby. “Fast little buggers, aren’t they? How many for you?”

  “Twenty,” I said, with just the right degree of condescension. “I only got one out of that last double.”

  “How many boxes of shells?”

  “One,” I said.

  “Let’s go back to camp,” Harry said. “I give up.”

  “It’s only a matter of practice,” I said. “Not like shooting leopard. Any bum can shoot a leopard. Just a matter of keeping your wits about you.”

  “Go to hell,” said Selby. “And take your shotty-gun with you.”

  “When you write Harriet Maytag the next time,” I said, “tell her that you finally found somebody who could top her in something.”

  On the way back to camp we saw a flock of guinea fowl scratching at the edge of the wet woods. Harry stopped the jeep. I tumbled out and dashed after the flock. They flushed with a great beating of wings, and I nailed one. Another whirled and came over my head, flying high, going downwind like a driven pheasant. I took a half twist and belted him. He came down with a thump and barely missed Harry’s head as he tumbled dead alongside the jeep. I broke the gun and blew into the barrels, like the fancy pigeon shooters and skeet experts who wear chamois pads on their shooting shoulders and little badges on their hatbands do.

  I handed the shotgun to Kidogo. I lit a cigarette and looked at Harry. He looked at me and started the car for home. He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. I wasn’t mad at Harriet Maytag any more.

  It was a wonderful morning.

  We broke the camp and policed the site, burning everything that could be burned, burying the tins and sweeping clean the campfire area. The boys climbed aboard the lashed tarpaulin top of Annie Lorry, and I noticed now that burlap bags, wound round with light line, with horns sticking out, were tied securely just behind Katunga, the skinner. He looked happy. He had had a lot of labor lately and had been forced to enlist the services of one of the locals, a dude whose sole article of attire was a kilt made of brown-striped blanket. Katunga was a real shrewd bargainer. He gave his assistant the bits of flesh he was able to scrape from the hides as the skinners sat on their hunkers all day long, crooning softly and flensing carefully each tiny particle of fat from each headskin and from the zebra hides.

  Katunga had taken over the lions and the leopard himself and the delicate nostril-skinning of the antelopes. The cats are especially tricky. There is a plump drop of fat at the base of each whisker, and unless it is removed the whisker rots and falls out. It is also true of cats that unless the skinning is done immediately after killing, the hide slips—that is, the hair falls out. A slipped leopard is not much of a trophy for the library floor.

  If you could stand the hordes of flies, the skinning was fascinating. The flies buzzed round the heads of Katunga and his assistant, but neither seemed to mind. They skinned from early morn until late afternoon, working sometimes for as much as an hour around one nostril or eyelid, and removing every minute portion of flesh from the wrinkles and the crevices—slicing down the buffalo mask to reduce its bulk, and being very careful of the lions and leopards and the delicate antelopes. The headskins and hides were spread and salted and stretched under the shade of a low, umbrella-shaped thorn tree and a small boma of thorn built around the lowering branches of the tree. They were collected at nightfall, wrapped into small squares, and stowed aboard the lorry. The skulls were set to sweat in the sun after being flensed. The marabou storks ate the chunky, adhering meat. The safari ants picked the skulls clean, and the sun did the rest. In a few days the skulls were white, clean, and sweet smelling. The skulls, too, were always stowed in the truck at night and the apron raised. We had been living in a hyena heaven, and the skulls are necessary for final mounting.

  Little by little I was sorting out the aristocracy of my men. I noticed that Katunga’s assistant did not eat with Katunga. He ate with the porters, who rank lower on the social scale than anyone save the kitchen mtoto, who is the Oliver Twist of the group. Katunga ate where he pleased; Juma, the head boy, ate largely alone. So did Chege, the lorry driver. Ali, the cook, ate with the two personal boys, Gathiru and Kaluku. Chabani, the car boy, drifted from group to group. Owing to their respected jobs as gunbearers, Adam and Kidogo, the aristocrats, ate together. They sneered at Juma, technically their boss. They made elaborate jokes about getting him out of camp and exposing him to buffaloes and lions. Juma made no pretense of bravery. He was not a warrior; he was a factotum.

  The gunbearers, I noticed, got first whack at the thick strips of yellow fat around the haunches and entrails of the plump zebras and the hog-fat eland. They also dived headfirst into the viscera, carving the ribbons of fat from the stomach and around the heart, and finger stripping the dung from the large intestine to get at the fat-lined tube. They hacked off the best rib sections for themselves, and when we shot a kudu later, I observed great care in removing the tenderloin. I corrected this undue interest and commandeered the tenderloin for the bwana’s table.

  There was always an unholy squabble about the fat, but the gunbearers were on the scene of the killing and the others were not, and it was not long before their buttocks, where they store their fat, began to swell like those of zebras. But I noticed that old, mad Katunga got away with most of the lion fat and a good portion of the eland fat. Lion fat is highly treasured as a specific for arthritic joints and is almost priceless in a land where nearly everybody has a chronic gonorrheal arthritis. The natives sell it to the Indians for a high fee, and the Indians sell it to the village natives, who have no hope of ever acquiring any lion fat except for a price. This is one of the few instances in which the black gets mildly even with his sharp-practicing neighbor. Eland fat and lion fat look remarkably the same and have the same texture. An inch of lion fat over a bottleful of eland fat is about the right proportion, and the Indian ducca keeper pays innocently through his money-mindful nose.

  My boys got along wonderfully well, all things considered. They were an old, trained group, taken almost intact from the original safari crew of Philip Percival, the dean of the old-timers. When Percival retired, he turned over his string to Selby, who had been apprenticed to him for a couple of years. Selby believed in keeping his tribal strains balanced to prevent organized political action. Three of the boys were Kikuyu. Several were Wakamba. A couple were Swahilis; others were Nandis. Harry would have no Somali nor Masai in his entourage. He said he never saw a Somali whom he could trust, who would tell you the truth or not stick a knife in you in a fit of pique. He didn’t fancy Masai because they were too proud, too nervous, too individualistic, and too prone to wander off when the mood struck them. The pure Masai is still almost untouched by civilization, and the sensitive, haughty morani generally fit poorly into a safari.

  Katunga was Harry’s pet—and mine, too, I suspect. The old Wakamba was riddled by disease, and his age rode him heavily. He was utterly useless for general work around camp. He was even a demoralizing type to have around because he was not only content not to work himself but seemed unhappy when anybody else put on a great burst of energy around him. As an artist with a knife, Katunga considered gathering firewood and policing camp undignified. Katunga’s dignity was immense. He was called Bwana Katunga. Once, a
long while back, he had gone to Philip Percival with a grievance.

  “All white men are called bwana,” he announced. “They are lords and masters. I am a lord and master, too. I am lord of my knife and master of all hides that fall to my blade. Nowhere is there a skinner as good as me. I want to be called bwana too.”

  Bwana Katunga he became, and Bwana Katunga he remained, even to his safari mates. Sometime later, as the malady that afflicted his mind took a firmer hold on it, Katunga stopped crooning to himself and addressed the air.

  “I am an old man,” he said. “I have not long to live. But I have left my mark. I am called Bwana Katunga because I am the best skinner in the world. When the safaris pass my shambas after I am dead and gone, they will see my wives and my children and my grandchildren and my huts and my sheep and goats and cattle and corn. They will look at the things I have left behind me and they will say: ‘King-i Katunga once lived here.’”

  Katunga had not been content with a baronetcy. He had crowned himself king.

  We loved Katunga, but the man we admired most was Kidogo. The bowlegged, high-nosed Nandi was a black gentleman of breeding, discernment, and bravery. Great bravery. He was fairly new to Harry’s string, having come over from Frank Bowman’s disbanding group when Bowman went back home to Australia, but he had dug himself in immediately as a top professional. Some superhuman store of strength lay in reserve in his stringy frame. He coughed dreadfully, but he could go on and on forever, seemingly, with no sleep, small rest, and no encouragement. He was a fine tracker, an excellent driver, a fine mechanic (very rare in an African), absolutely dependable, honest, decent, and possessed of another rare African attribute, a sense of humor.

  He used to drive poor Adam, the Mohammedan Wakamba gunbearer, near to spiritual prostration with theological arguments in Swahili. Adam was a good and simple soul, renowned mostly for the vehemence with which he blew his nose between his fingers, and a practical bravery that did not spread much outside his stated duties. He was never any good against Kidogo when Kidogo was feeling ornery about Moslemism.

  They got into an argument one day about whether or not women possessed souls, which kept the camp in a state of high debate for a week. Kidogo’s logic was simple. He said that if a Nandi married a Wakamba woman, the issue was of course Nandi. Adam agreed. Well, then, Kidogo said, if you take a woman and a child is born, is the child a human if the child is a boy? Yes, said Adam. Well, then, Kidogo said, paring carefully at a zebra foreleg, the child comes out of the woman, and since he is half of the woman, does not that make the woman human, too, and if she is human, does she not have a soul? Adam said he wasn’t sure.

  “Have you got a soul?” Kidogo asked him.

  “Sure,” Adam said. “Of course I got a soul.”

  “Well,” Kidogo said, “unless your mother was a human and had a soul, you are only half human, with only half a soul, and will surely go to shaitani in Gehennum when you die.”

  Adam quit arguing. He was having a period of extreme devoutness, during which time he refused to sanctify meat unless it actually was still a little bit alive when he touched its eyeballs and then cut its throat. During his less devout periods, Kidogo accused him of halaling meat that even the buzzards took a second look at.

  Kidogo reached a point pretty soon where he would kid me about my bird shooting. One day I was blasting away at a particularly gaudy blue jay that Harry wanted as an ornament for his girlfriend’s hat, or dress, or some such. It was a beautiful jay, with a dark, red-crested head and feathers of a dozen shades of iridescent blues and purples. The damned jaybird would not die. I would take a belt at it with the little 16-gauge, and off it would fly to another tree. I chased after it and belted it again. And again. Feathers flew, but the bird flew, too.

  I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was Kidogo, who had taken the big elephant gun out of its case. He handed it to me.

  “Bwana nataka .470?” he asked softly and innocently. Fortunately the little blue jay decided to die at that moment.

  I was always impressed with the complete faith the men reposed in Harry Selby. Most of them were years his senior, but he treated them with the stern benevolence of an intelligent parent. He would take a sniff of snuff with Katunga, or lend him two bob to go to a nearby village to “get his back straightened,” Katunga’s euphemism for buying a piece of local affection. Harry would squat for hours around the boys’ cook fire, gossiping with them, and incidentally keeping abreast and ahead of all developments, political, social, and otherwise, of his safari.

  Some long experience with blacks had taught him when to joke, when to pitch in and help, and when to apply a swift kick in the pants. They accepted the jokes, the assistance, and the boot in the behind with equal relish. They were largely proud men and decent men, from Chege, who drove the lorry, to Mala, the porter. I liked my boys. I think in time my boys liked me.

  It was funny, when we lurched out of Campi Abahati to head back across the Serengeti for Lake Manyara and the rhino country, only two weeks had passed, and I knew something about all the people who made up my string—something about their wives, their diseases, their peculiarities, their bravery or lack of it, their industry. The faces were no longer just black faces, indistinguishable from each other. Their personalities had emerged from the shabby khaki and the shoddy castoffs that they wore over their black, dusty hides on safari. I knew already that Chege was the lady-killer and Chabani the sea lawyer, that Juma was the Machiavelli and Ali the venerable gentleman, Katunga the character, Kibiriti the thespian, and Mala the strong silent man. They had decided that the memsaab was not the complaining type of female and that the bwana, while he had bad legs and great fear, had so far managed to control both at important moments. In two weeks they were beginning to joke with me a little. I was very proud of that.

  I felt like a hell of a fellow as the battered Land Rover clattered and bumped along ahead of Annie Lorry, who wheezed and lurched behind. I was sunburned and my nose had quit peeling. I wasn’t afraid of the guns any more, nor of myself when I shot one of them. I had always wondered what I would do when I was faced with dangerous and tricky game, and to some extent I now knew. My safari clothes were becoming weathered. So was my conversation. So was my knowledge of what I saw. I was speaking some small Swahili, and I knew a euphorbia cactus from a whistling thorn, a Tommy from a Grant, a dik-dik from an oribi.

  We swerved from course to say good-bye to the lion pride. The four females were still in the same place. The nasty lioness stood her ground while the other three gathered up the cubs and took them into the bush. We drove close aboard the nasty lioness, and her tail started to wave and her head went down again. At fifty yards she charged, and as Harry turned the jeep under full steam, her jaws snapped about three feet from my exposed rear end. Harry ran the camera with one hand and swerved Jessica with the other. A great many weeks later, when we saw the developed film, I wished that he had been driving with both hands and to hell with the photography. We have now a magnificent picture of a lioness with her mouth wide open, narrowly missing the well-padded rear of a visiting sportsman.

  “We might as well face it,” Virginia said as we headed for the game ranger’s house a few miles away. “There is one lady lion who is never going to approve of the machine age or anything in it.”

  The game ranger was home this time. He was a sandy little man in shorts, who asked us in out of the heat for a quick snap of brandy and a glass of cool water. It was blessedly cool inside his thick-walled, heavily thatched house. The sun was hitting hard on the dusty high grasses when we stirred ourselves and inched Annie Lorry down the treacherous hill, over the rocky streambed, and took a bearing on the devilishly distant crater of Ngorongoro. It was going to be a long and unpleasant, hot and tiresome two days. It was going to be distinguished by a series of balks and pushes and busted axles and off-loads and reloads of our tragic truck, Annie Lorry.

  Annie’s penchant for pig holes, soft cotton soil, red clay bogs, treacherous donga
s, and top-heavy loading kept her in a state of permanent contusion. She snapped the leaves of her springs as easily as other vehicles snapped sticks in their paths. She boiled the water in her radiator for no good reason. She cast wheels as horses cast shoes. She gobbled oil. She staggered and fell on her side. She was more animal than machine. She invited mercy shooting.

  She dropped nearly dead in her tracks well after dark two thirds of the way across the Serengeti, far from wood, far from water. We went back to her and made a makeshift camp. It was bitter, searing cold, with an evil wind that whipped the lava dust from the bottom of what was once a volcanic lake into the pores of your skin. Your teeth grated on it. It kinked your hair and tainted your cigarettes.

  We pitched the one tent only, its closed rear to the teeth of the wind, and dug a hole in the ground. Harry dripped a mixture of gasoline and crankcase oil into a dug pit, set it afire, and had Ali warm some soup over the blaze. We ate some gritty, cold Tommy cutlets, had a can of cold spaghetti, took a tremendous drink of brandy, and went to bed dirty.

  The next morning we noticed that the wind had pushed a shifting hill a few more feet away from us. A lonely pregnant rhino cow was all that we could see in the way of game, and what the hell she was doing out there in her delicate condition not even Selby could say. We fixed whatever was wrong with Annie Lorry’s cervix and started the hard, high climb up the shaly side of the serrated hills that led to Ngorongoro.

  Chapter 9

  THE sides of the mountains were talcumed with gray, choking lava dust, cobbled loosely with stones and small boulders, thinly wooded with starved thorn. The trail wound round and round on a slow, rocky pull, even with the jeep in low or second, her gearbox groaning. Annie Lorry was suffering terribly behind us. We were averaging a good four miles an hour as we crept up the slopes. It got a little greener as we climbed higher, greener and colder. The few semi-Masai we saw, mostly small children, were a mangy and miserable-looking lot.