Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  We went in to say howdy to the Indian ducca keeper, an old buddy of Harry’s, a portly citizen with a handsome wife and pretty daughter. His stock was considerable. He had more good gin than you could buy in Nairobi, and better beer—imported Pilsen in gold-foil bottles—and any amount of wines, vermouths, candies, canned goods, and cigarettes. He had tennis shoes and dress goods and pickles and condiments and Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola and Kotex and English soap and hardware and Vienna sausages and hot mustard and bolts of dress goods made in England, of Indian patterns, to sell to the natives, and he had baskets and biltong and fresh vegetables and bananas and brandy and John Jamieson Irish whisky and a full stock of simple pharmacopoeia and shotgun shells and sweet tinned biscuits and hats and leather shoes and beads and copper wire and flashlight batteries and much, much conversation. It was only a wide place in the road, but the English, German, and refugee tea, tobacco, and coffee planters were always there in fair force along about dark for a quick beer and a packet of Virginia cigarettes. It seemed odd that the Indian Toots Shor was only half-a-dozen miles from Manyara, where the buffalo roamed and the rhino butted down the tent posts.

  The Indian Toots Shor said that so far as he knew there was nobody at Harry’s old campsite at Mto-Wa-Mbu; that there was another safari just pulling out that had shot a couple of buffaloes yesterday, and that there were mingi sana mbogo, likewise lots of elephants, also myriad rhinos. We bought a few staples, including a clump of sugar-cane stalks and a bunch of bananas, and headed past what seemed to be the local whorehouse, from the noise coming out of it, down a winding trail to the River of Mosquitoes.

  Two hundred yards away from the Indian and the local whorehouse and we were right back in the bush again—this time jungle bush. A million butterflies fluttered back and forth across the trail. Branches whipped at our faces in the open jeep. A couple of withes armed with thorns tore at my arm, and a branch bit me viciously on the ear. We drove two miles to a semiclearing, topped over by big wild figs, baobabs, towering acacias, all thickly woven with lianas. The clearing had filled with high green grass and short, shiny, broad-leaved shrubs. There was a strong stink of baboons in the air, and the high trees were full of baboons. Also monkeys. And birds.

  Annie Lorry was waiting for us when we got there. The boys had started to off-load her, and a couple of them were chopping at the underbush with pangas. While they were setting up the tents, we strolled a few hundred yards away down a well-defined track to look at what I called Mosquito Crick. Mto-Wa-Mbu was not the most impressive river I ever saw, being not much more than thirty feet wide, but it was swift and swollen by the rains.

  “Take a look at that bridge,” Harry said, pointing downward to what seemed more like a floating raft made of skinny logs and leaves than a serious structure. “Everybody who camps here builds a new layer on it. Once in a while it collapses and everything goes into the drink, so we haul out the vehicle and chop a few more logs and strap ’em onto the top. Surprising how much actual weight this thing’ll sustain.”

  A couple of black gentlemen with bundles of fresh-peeled sticks on their backs and another carrying about twenty-five pounds of just-caught catfish strolled by. They said “Jambo” tentatively. They said the place was overrun with rhino. Mingi sana faro. Doumi. M’kubwa sana. Manamouki, mingi, mingi sana.

  “Place is loaded with rhino,” Harry said. “Always was. They come down out of the hills for a little sunshine and to graze. Last time I was here I saw fourteen the first afternoon out. Shot a twenty-three-incher no more than three or four miles from the campsite here. Can’t tell, though, whether we find them in the mornings or in the afternoons. Never could figure it out, myself. Last time, nothing whatsoever in the mornings, but the afternoons would find them fair swarming. Around four o’clock you’d have to beat a path through them. We shouldn’t be here very long before we collect the faro and go up into the hills, about eighteen miles up yonder, and grab off the oryx. Ought to be herds of them come down to the plains, the high plains off the Rift, by now.”

  We strolled back to camp, which was beginning to look pleasantly like home, with the underbrush chopped off and collected for burning. Katunga had been forcibly inspired by Juma to drag in an immense stockpile of dried logs for the fire. Ali had the cook fire going. Somebody had driven a wooden peg into the soft rough bark of one of the big yellow-mottled trees, and the banana bunch was swinging happily from the peg. The tents were up. Juma was setting the table, and the canvas water bag was hanging off a wildebeest-horn hook. The bag had bottles of gin and vermouth and beer in it. A baby baboon was peering through a lofty crotch, scolding. Gathiru and Kaluku, the personal boys, were sweating petrol tins of water up from the riverbank, placing them onto a separate blaze to heat up for the bathi. Kidogo and Adam were squatting on a blanket alongside the jeep, field-stripping the artillery.

  And the mosquitoes and the tsetses. They were there, too. In companies and regiments and battalions and divisions and armies. It was mutual-aid hour, the hour before the tsetses knock off and the mosquitoes take over.

  “Lots and lots of dudu,” Selby said. “That’s where the river gets its name, of course. I have seen bugs all over this bloody continent, but the dudu here are incomparable. The tsetses have a special awl arrangement on their bills. They can take a firm grip with their feet and bore through three thicknesses of canvas. All the mosquitoes are four-motored. There are varieties of little squishy, fuzzy caterpillars that roam into your shirt and leave their tread marks wherever they pass. They burn and itch like dammit for a while. Then they turn black and yellow and blue, and then they ache like you’ve been beat up by the flat of a buffalo’s horns. If you are interested in bugs, I highly recommend this place.”

  I learned about bugs at Mto-Wa-Mbu, hard by the lake called Manyara. Bugs do dreadful things to me. When they bite me, I swell. My face puffs, and my hands swell, and they always seem to bite me near to bone. They bite on the knuckles and the frontal bones and on the nose and under the eyes. They get me on the shins. And bugs never seek fresh territory once they’ve staked a claim on my pelt. They bite on bites. And then they rebite the bites they’ve bitten on the bites.

  We were lavish with the assorted mosquito and/or tsetse ointment I had bought, the stuff that Abercrombie and Fitch guarantees repellent to any creature smaller than a crocodile. Our dudu thrived on it. They got drunk on it. They whetted their spears on it. They went through layers of clothing like hot needles through vanilla ice cream. After the first evening at Mto-Wa-Mbu, I was a man no more. I was a walking welt.

  After dinner the first evening, we were sitting in front of the mess tent, washed, full, well-bitten, and just tired enough to dread the fifty-foot walk to the sleeping tents. Harry and I were talking idly of bullet weights versus something or other when he let out a shriek and started to fling off his clothes. He continued to shriek, shed clothes, and leap high into the air until he finally trapped something in his fingers and cast it to the ground, where he jumped on it.

  “One of those dreadful woolly caterpillars,” he said, and went shuddering, still near naked, off to bed.

  “Some hunter,” Virginia said. “Scared of an old caterpillar. Taking off his clothes in front of a lady, and him so shy.”

  “Each man to his weakness,” I said. “Let’s go to bed. We got a date to shoot a rhino in the morning, and I, personally, am afraid of rhinos.”

  Surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes—the tsetses had definitely finished—we staggered down the path to bed. Inside the nets, you could hear the mosquitoes banging against the sides like raindrops on a yielding roof. The whine was more drill press than insect, but I turned over and died.

  We were up early and excited; at least, I was excited. It was still gray when we got into the jeep and headed across the bridge on the River of Mosquitoes, a bridge that shook and shivered frighteningly under Jessica’s tentative wheels. The forest, dripping, thick, and poison-green, with knobby roots like cypress knees threading across the track,
lasted for about three miles, until we hit marsh, which was sopping still and impossible to cross in anything but a light four-wheeldrive job such as our Jessica. You could see the deeply bitten tracks where the last safari’s hunting car had gone just so far and then no farther. We put up a reedbuck and some sort of hog before we finished with the marsh and headed back into another patch of jungle—real jungle, this time, like Congo jungle in the bad television movies.

  This was not cheerful bush at all. It was sticky, butterfly-clogged, creeper-twisted, humid bush, with immense trees rearing out of the practically impassable underbrush. You could see the raw stump occasionally where the elephants had broken the top off a tree. The trail was very narrow, crossed and recrossed with streams, and at every stream we had to unload and push.

  “These’ll take some digging,” Harry said. “They’ve been washed out too steep even for Jessica, and she’ll go anywhere. We’ll shallow the banks some and cut some sticks for a tread at the bottom. Nasty bush, hey?”

  We were crawling along through a sort of open-topped tunnel in the solid mass of vegetation when Harry was struck by a happy thought.

  “I believe it was right here that Andy Holmberg and Chris Aschan were driving along when they ran head onto a bull elephant standing right in the track. Andy couldn’t drive around him, and the bull was walking steadily at them, and I do believe Andy slapped his Rover into reverse and set a new record for backward driving. I hear he was hitting sixty when he came assward out of the bush.”

  I could believe it. In that compressed wilderness of malignant growth there would be no place to go except backward, and that highly unlikely, since the trail twisted and contorted in constant S-turns. If Holmberg made any time backward, his jeep had a flexible spine.

  We burst out of the jungle suddenly, curved toward the lake, and passed through a sea of saw-edged grass that towered over the Land Rover by half-a-dozen feet. The showers of seeds added to general irritation of last night’s bites. The sun was coming up now, and while it was still cool, the tsetses had relieved the mosquitoes of their watch and were working lustily. It did no good to swat them. You had to pull them off and pinch their heads, as you did with the lion flies.

  We came out of the grass as suddenly as we had come out of the jungle. We rounded a point where some fishermen had erected a small palm-thatched lean-to, waved at the two scrawny locals who got up to stare at us, and passed through a point that looked exactly like the cedar and live-oak groves that grow, gnarled by the wind, along the Carolina coastline where I was raised. It had the same shaly beach, the same scrubby trees, the same damp projection of a wetter wood. A herd of impalas was gamboling under the grove. They stopped to stare. They were quite tame and moved off slowly.

  Harry killed the jeep on the point, crawled out, took his glasses, and scanned the shoreline. “Nothing that I can see for a couple of miles,” he said. “Anyhow, the wind’s this direction, and the sound of shot won’t carry. It’ll be late when we come this way again, too late to shoot. I think you’d best get out and wallop one of those impala. In case we’re entirely out of meat.”

  I took the .30-’06 and jumped out. The impala had worked into the thicker scrub, and the herd kept ambling tantalizingly just ahead of me. I could see the herd ram’s big lyre-shape horns pressing steadily through the bush as he drove his family ahead of him, but his horns were all I could see, and by the size, he would eat tougher than boot. I had all the impala I wanted for trophies, anyhow.

  There was a wind-blown tree trunk lying at a right angle to its stump, and I crawled up on it. The herd, about thirty or forty does and young ones, was no more than a hundred yards away in the bush. There was a bare place they seemed to be heading for. As they crossed it, one of the several two-yearold rams, with horns past the spike stage but not yet grown into the backswept wonder of maturity, stopped and looked stupidly back at the herd ram. I suppose he was questioning Papa’s right to hurry.

  He was fat and pretty and bright gold as he stepped into the open. Balancing like a toe dancer on the log, I held and squeezed at his fore-shoulder, shooting down through his back, and I managed to break his neck as he took a step away. He went over with a blat. Adam came running up with Mohammed’s knife to make the kill religious, and I have no way of knowing whether the antelope was dead. Adam cut his head clean off and pronounced him fit. We opened him up and tied him to the bumper and proceeded along the twisty trail that goes by Manyara’s shoreline.

  The lake was full. To the left, as far as you could see, it stretched with a peculiar flat, silver-dull sheen. On the right was a sheer wall of hills, dropping steeply to a few hundred yards of indented, sloping grounds so that at times you were riding along directly under the frown of the thickly forested cliffs, at other times half a mile or so away from them. Where it was flat or semiflat it was either thornbush on soft soil or grassy marsh. Only the shingle was sandy and shell-speckled. We stuck to the shingle.

  Up ahead was another headland, a sort of thumblike peninsula, which curved backward from its point to make a palm of ooze and heavy bush. Sticking out, farther on, as the inlet came around to another headland, was Maji Moto, the hot-water mountain. Steaming springs in the hills cut downward in small waterfalls, to gurgle their warm waters into Manyara. Something like six small rivers, all possible to cross with difficultly, were between us and Maji Moto. It was only eighteen miles from Maji Moto to camp. It took us, we learned as days passed, six hours a day to make the round trip of thirty-six miles.

  As we drove along, a dozen ostriches, including two albinos, broke out of the bush and ran foolishly ahead of us, splashing through the water, not pausing even to defecate, slapping along knee-deep in the lake on their big splay feet. They were joined by a small herd of wildebeests, who bucked up and down, meeting other herds, reversing their courses to run back at us, snorting and plunging and acting exactly like wildebeest. A few zebras, fifty or more, hooked up with the wildebeests, and our escort was joined.

  “Bloody reception committee,” Selby grumbled. “They’ll spook everything from here to Maji Moto. If they don’t, the bloody birds will.”

  “This,” I said, “is known in my country as public relations. You announce the arrival of the honored guests. You send out invitations. Then you run around, waving your arms and squawking, and bollix up the whole works. I’ve been trying to remember what we have in New York that these stupid wildebeests remind me of, them and the ostriches. It’s press agents. New York is loaded with their blood brothers, all running in circles, yelling and waving their arms and screwing up the entire bleeding issue.”

  Clouds of waterfowl were rising along the oozy edges of Manyara. The black-and-white Gyppie geese were squawking. The curlews and snipe and plovers were screaming. The secretary birds were sailing up and down, trying to make up their minds to leave permanently. The ducks were setting up a hell of a clamor, and occasionally a flock of guinea fowl would run out, look indignantly around, cackle, and scuttle back. A hippo grunted offshore. A flock of flamingos rose and went dipping over the lake in an indescribable, improbable pink cloud. Up on the sides of the hills there was a crashing in the bush and a small herd of elephants squealed in displeasure.

  “Christ,” Selby said. “What with one thing and another, any rhino worth shooting will be clean over the mountain by now, heading for Yaida Swamp. Look at those goddamned ostriches. They’ll run the whole fifteen miles ahead of us, picking up new chums as they go. I don’t remember it like this from before.”

  We spun along, back wheels slipping and sliding through little rivers, wheels spinning in the sandy dongas, and rounded the first headland. Cutting back, following the heavy, scored wheel tracks of another, earlier vehicle, we ran around the rim of the hills in a crescent course and came out to the point of the second headland before Maji Moto. Harry stopped Jessica and pointed.

  There was a shapeless lump a thousand yards away. It looked like a big gray anthill.

  “Faro,” Harry said. “Toa .4
70. Toa .450.” This to the boys. To me: “Well, first morning out and you’ve probably got your rhino. There he is, feeding down on the shore. Wind’s right, too. Blighter’s blind, and we can walk up close enough to take his pulse. This one’s easy enough, so I’m asking Virginia along. Virginia? Care to go and collect a faro?”

  “Better than that last time after the buffalo,” Virginia said. “You left me sitting all by myself in this jeep and when I asked you what to do if the herd came my way, you said, ‘Just stand up in the car and it’s likely they’ll run around you.’ Yes, Harry. I will go along to shoot the rhino. Do I take the camera?”

  “Sure,” Harry said. “Let’s go.”

  We walked along over the muck, not crouching yet. Harry and I were still letting the bearers carry the big double rifles.

  “This is very simple,” Harry said. “We’ll stalk up as close as we can. If you take him head on, go for that little sore spot at the bottom of his neck. You’ll see it. All faros have ’em where the armor plating rubs. If he’s lying down—and this one seems to be—you can go for the brain. If he charges, you’ll know because the tickbirds’ll jump just before he comes. Other shots, take ’m in the shoulder, about a quarter the way up. Heart’s a little lower on these blokes than on some others. Nothing to it, really. Up on the Northern Frontier, Harriet Maytag . . .”

  “Let’s not start that again,” I said. “Let’s go shoot this rhino without any assists from the fair huntress.”

  You may be a very brave man, and perhaps your breath does not begin to hurry in your chest when you walk up for the first time on three tons of antediluvian armor plating, but I am not a particularly brave man, and I was beginning to breathe jerkily although the going was fairly easy on the rough, fissured mud. The rhino had its head down. You couldn’t see whether the horn was worth it or not. Selby had taken his .450 No. 2 from Adam, and Kidogo handed me the .470. Virginia was just behind the gunbearers, carrying the Cine-Kodak. She looked a little pinched in the face. I noticed I was breathing with my mouth open.