by Jay Cassell
In hunting, one is company and two is pushing it. Hunting with a cast of thousands, all arguing about what the tracks mean and debating whether we should go left or right, critiquing bwana’s shooting and generally having a hell of a time, is not my idea of a perfect hunting scenario. If the game scout insists on coming, though, you don’t have much choice.
Now we found ourselves, thanks to that blessed, wonderful, beautiful mist and rain and cold, allowed to leave camp unencumbered while Swai the Ungodly attempted to thaw himself out. And if Swai did not need to venture forth, neither did anyone else. For us, it was like being let out of school early.
The slopes of Mount Longido are cut by dozens of ravines carved by centuries of torrential rains. Some are so deep they could be called canyons, others are just dongas, but all are overgrown with vegetation and jumbled with boulders. We found a lookout and settled in, each watching a different valley. It was like being high up in an enormous stadium—or would have been but for the thick, shifting fog. We shivered and waited. A sporadic wind began to blow. The clouds came and went, clearing one minute, enveloping us the next. It was during one of these brief clear moments that I happened to catch sight of a grey-black object disappearing into some brush on a far hillside. Just a quick glimpse, and then the fog rolled back in.
“Duff, I saw one,” I said, not quite sure I really had. Maybe all I had seen was a rock. But when the fog drifted away again, there was no grey rock right there. It must have been a buffalo. He had shown himself in a clearing for a split second at the precise moment a window had opened in the fog, and I just happened to have my binocular trained on the spot.
We sat and willed the fog to clear. By now it was 9:30; the sun was well up and the rising wind made short work of what was left of the clouds. The slopes and the crater were all in plain sight, and for half an hour we studied the hillside across the valley. For Duff and Jerry, I pinpointed as best I could where I thought I had seen the buffalo disappear. There was the bare face of a large boulder just to the right of the spot. That was the only real landmark in the hodgepodge of brush. As the minutes passed, I became less and less sure. Had I really seen a buffalo? Had I really seen anything?
“What’d you see, exactly?”
“Just the back end, and just for a second.”
“Which way was he moving?” Duff is from Zimbabwe, and his Rhodesian voice was clipped and military as he gathered information. But he seemed to have no doubts.
“Along the hillside, from left to right. About halfway up.”
Half an hour went by. By that time I was almost convinced I had been hallucinating. When the buffalo did not reappear, Jerry wandered back to watch the other valley.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said to Duff. “Let’s have Jerry stay here to spot for us, and you and I go down and look for him.” Duff grinned. “Sounds good to me,” he said, and padded off to get Jerry.
“We’ll cross straight over to the hillside and use that tree as a start line,” Duff told him, pointing to a bare-trunked acacia that rose taller than the others. “When we get there, we’ll work straight along toward the big boulder on the right. If you see us get off course in that thick stuff, signal. Or if you see the buffalo . . .”
Jerry nodded a quick assent, gave me a clap on the shoulder, and a soft, Texan “Good luck.” Then we dropped down the steep hillside with Duff leading. Almost immediately we came upon a scraped-out hollow. The musky urine smell of buffalo hung in the air, and we found hoof prints the size of dinner plates. “Well, we know there’s one here,” Duff whispered. “Big old boy, too.”
We continued down along one of the bull’s established trails. There was a wart hog skull under a bush and, a few feet away, one of its ivory tusks, slightly rodent-chewed. I put it in my pocket for luck.
We were across a creek bed and climbing again. Now we could look back and see Jerry perched high on the rock opposite, watching us. Through the binocular, he gave a thumbs up. We were on course and almost immediately found the bare-trunked tree. A clearing stretched along the slope in front of us, and at the far end I could just make out the big rock face.
It was approaching 10:30. The sun was high, and the air had warmed. I was sweating in my goosedown shirt. Worse, it was noisy, catching on every thorn and twig. I tore it off and stuffed it into my belt. Duff, in shorts and khaki vest, moved through the brush like a leopard, and his cropped hair and compactly muscled shoulders reinforced the image. We were edging along the clearing now, a few feet apart, communicating by signs and instinct as if we had hunted together for years.
He was watching for tracks and I was looking past his shoulder when the bull stuck his head out of the bushes about 150 yards in front of us, right beside the boulder. I hissed and pointed. We froze. The buffalo had not seen us. He swung his head from side to side, and the boss of his horns was so big it made his horns look stubby, but they were not. His boss was heavy and black and met on the top of his skull without a gap. He was, indeed, a big old boy.
The bull looked around, then slowly withdrew into his sanctuary. We breathed again and melted into the thick brush out of sight.
“He’s big, he’s wide,” Duff whispered. “You want him?”
“I sure do.”
We crawled along inside the screen of brush until we came up against a large rock, then crept back up to the clearing. We found ourselves on the edge of a deep donga jammed with a jungle of scrub. On the other side, 60 yards away, was the rock face where we had seen the bull. This was as close as we were going to get.
“Can you shoot from here?”
I nodded, found a clear spot to sit down, jacked the scope up to four power and wrapped the sling around my arm. Just as I leaned forward the big buffalo came out again, right on cue. He seemed to be going somewhere. I put the crosshair on his shoulder and squeezed. As the .458 bucked up into my face, the bull hunched and roared and dashed down into the donga, deep into the thickest of the thick brush.
“Shoot again,” Duff yelled, but there was no time, and then the bull was out of sight. We could hear him, moving around down in the donga a few yards away. Then the rustling stopped and all we heard was his breathing, heavy and rasping. We stood together on the lip of the donga, looking down into the undergrowth. I replaced the spent cartridge in the magazine of the Model 70 and turned the scope down to one. Then we waited.
“He’s hard hit,” Duff said. “He blew blood out his mouth as soon as you shot. Hear him?”
From the brush, the sound of heavy panting came to us. He was no more than 15 yards away, maybe less.
“Hear him? Can you hear him? He’s kuisha,” Duff said. “Finished. That was a good shot, bwana. You got him in the lungs. We’ll give him ten minutes, see what happens.”
We stood side by side, trying to pierce the brush with our eyes, listening to the harsh breathing, waiting for the long, drawn-out bellow that would signal the end. But the only sound from the donga was the rough grating of each painful breath, in and out, in and out, in and out.
The old bull had lived alone on the mountainside for many years. There was a small herd of younger Cape buffalo up there, too, cows and calves and bulls, maybe a dozen in all, but they wanted nothing to do with him and they avoided his valley. He bedded on a slope overlooking the crater and each day visited the creek that bubbled down the mountain, then browsed up and along his favorite hillside as he made his way toward his own special place.
There was a boulder there, and some thick acacias, and in the shadow of the boulder it was cool for him to doze through the heat of the day. On one side was a donga and a narrow trail that led down into it and back up out of it. He crossed through that donga each day. Although the brush looked as solid as a wall, with his four—foot horns he could force his way through.
On this day, as the clouds cleared (cleared as they did almost every day up here, away from the plain, away from the big buffalo herds) the old bull sensed there was something wrong. He caught a whiff of something—smoke, perh
aps—but there was no smoke on the mountain; the Masai stayed down in the crater, and the smoke from their fires rarely drifted this far up.
But there was something, something; once or twice he emerged to look along his backtrail before withdrawing back into his hideaway. Finally, he decided he would climb the bill to a better vantage point. As he came out he caught it again, that scent—not leopard, not Masai—a scent he had known only once or twice before in his long life, and just as he quickened his pace he was slammed in the ribs and a tremendous roar slapped his head and a cough was forced out of his lungs by the impact of the bullet and blood sprayed from his mouth.
Involuntarily he bucked and sprang. His trail was at his feet, the familiar trail down into the donga, and he let it carry him into the friendly gloom. Once there, he paused. His head was reverberating from the crash of the rifle and he could feel his breathing becoming heavy as a huge vise tightened on his chest. From the embankment above came the murmur of voices, and his rage began to build as his lungs filled up with blood.
The bottom of the donga was a tunnel through the vegetation, scoured clean of debris when the heavy rains came. The old bull slowly walked a few yards up the creek bed, then turned and lay down facing the trail. On each side of him were high earthen banks, and over his head was a roof of solid vegetation. They would have to come down that trail. He fixed his eyes on it, six feet away. Now let them come.
And there he waited as blood spurted out the bullet hole, his heart pumping out a bit of his life with each beat. Each breath came a little shorter, and the pool of bright red blood under his muzzle spread wider, and his rage grew inside him like a spreading fire. He heard them whisper “Kuisha . . . ” Well, not just yet. And he heard them say “Give him ten minutes . . . ” Yes. Ten minutes. He was old and he was mortally wounded. But he was not dead yet. The old bull fixed his gaze on the trail and concentrated on drawing each breath, one by one, in and out, in and out.
The minutes ticked by: three, four, seven, eight.
Duff and I waited on the bank. Only the wounded buffalo’s rasping breath broke the silence on the mountainside.
“I know you want to see . . . ” Duff whispered.
“Not me, bwana,” I answered. “I can wait here forever.”
“When you hear him bellow . . . ” he began.
The old bull watched as the pool of blood grew and he felt himself growing weaker. Ten minutes. They weren’t coming. Not much time left now. He heaved himself to his feet and a gout of blood poured from his mouth.
The bull could have eased silently down the donga and died, off by himself. But he did not want to go quietly. He wanted to take those voices with him. And since they would not come to him . . .
He bunched his muscles and sprang, charging up the trail. His horns plowed through the brush and shook the trees. He could not see them yet, but he was coming hard. There was not much time, and he had to reach the bated voices.
“He’s moving, get ready!” Duff yelled.
We saw the brush trembling and his hoofs rocked the hillside, but we could not see the bull. Not yet. He was only yards away and moving fast, but where would he come crashing out? We couldn’t see a damned thing. And then a black shape burst from the bushes five yards down and to my right.
“Shoot!”
I tried to get the scope on him, but all I could see was black. I fired, hoping to catch a shoulder, then worked the bolt and Duff and I fired together.
As we did, the bull turned his head toward us. His murderous expression said, “Oh, there you are!” and his body followed his head around. I was between Duff and the buffalo, and the buffalo was on top of me, and all I could see was the expanse of horn and the massive muscles of his shoulders working as he pounded in.
No time to shoulder the gun now—just point and shoot and hope for the best. I shoved the .458 in his face and fired as I jumped back, and the bull dropped like a stone with a bullet in his brain, four feet from the muzzle of the rifle.
“Shoot him again!” Duff shouted. “In the neck!”
“With pleasure,” said I, weakly, and planted my last round just behind his skull.
Duff and I looked at each other.
“We’re alive!”
We gave the meat to our Masai guides, and they brought the skull and cape down the mountain for us the next day. It took three hours to skin him out. They built a fire, and we roasted chunks of Cape buffalo over the flames as the skinner worked, carving off bites with our belt knives and tossing the remains to the Masai dogs. The meat was tough, but juicy and rich tasting. Duff and I ate sparingly and chewed long. If you are what you eat, we were one mean bunch of bastards when we came down off that mountain.
Then the reaction set in. For two days I did little except stay in camp, sometimes talking, but mostly just off by myself. I set up a camp chair in the shade where I could catch the breeze through the day and look out across the plain to the smoke rising off the slopes of Kilimanjaro. I had a well-worn copy of Hemingway that has travelled with me around the world, and it was then I discovered that there are times when you cannot read. Mostly I just sat and stared at Kilimanjaro in the distance, or rose and walked to the edge of our camp and looked back up the slopes of Mount Longido.
In the first split second when my buffalo burst from the bushes, I thought he was the most wonderful creature that ever lived, and when he dropped at my feet with a bullet in his brain and his eyes still open and fixed upon me, at that moment I knew a thousand times more about Cape buffalo than I had even minutes before.
We were driving back into camp late one afternoon when a brightly clad Masai elder flagged us down. A roving trio of lions, two young males and female, had killed a cow that afternoon. The dead animal was in the brush, guarded by four morani who had driven them off the kill with spears. Could we help them get the cow back to their village?
By the time we got there, nosing gingerly through the brush with Duff at the wheel and me riding shotgun with my now thoroughly beloved .458, it was pitch black. Our headlights picked up a Masai, waiting for us in the bush beside the dirt track to guide us in. The Land Cruiser forced its way through and over the thorny acacias to a tiny campfire beside the dead cow and four heavily armed Masai, standing in the darkness with three hungry lions somewhere nearby.
They hauled and heaved the carcass up into the back, and Duff put the Land Cruiser in gear. As the headlights swung in an arc, they picked up three pairs of eyes in the bush not 20 yards away. The lions had not gone far. As we pulled out onto the track, we met two Masai youngsters swinging along the road, armed like their elders with tiny spears and scaled down swords, driving two donkeys ahead of them, coming to start ferrying the beef back to camp if we had not shown up. Two little boys with two little spears, driving two tiny donkeys through the darkness, with three hungry lions lying up somewhere in the bush nearby. Three hungry and bitterly disappointed lions who, to the best of our knowledge, never did get a meal that night. Standing up in the back with the .458, I suddenly felt a little foolish.
The door of the Lion was still open and beckoning when we pulled into Longido the next day. Beer crates still reached to the ceiling, and the propane refrigerator was still not working. We had a beer anyway.
Three Masai in full regalia sat in the bar with their spears against the wall, drinking Tusker and discussing stock prices. We bought them a beer, and they gravely returned the favor. A few days later, bribing my way back out of the country at Namanga, a scarlet-robed native pawed at me and begged for alms, all the while proclaiming, “I am Masai!” To which I replied, “Like hell you are, bucko.”
Epilogue
About a year later, an envelope arrived in the mail with a Houston postmark. Inside was a newspaper clipping from The Daily Telegraph with the headline, “Peer’s Son Killed By Charging Buffalo,” and the story of how Andrew Fraser, the youngest son of Lord Lovat (of World War Two commando fame) had been charged and killed while on safari near Mount Kilimanjaro.
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p; “Mr. Fraser shot and wounded the buffalo, but it took cover in thick bushes from where it made its charge, tossing him and causing severe injuries,” it read. The clipping was dated March 17, 1994—one year to the day after our encounter on Mount Longido.
In the margin was a note: “ Terry, does this sound familiar? Jerry.”
The Classic Fall-on-Your-Arse Double
ROBERT F. JONES
As I write this, it’s dead, dreary winter in Vermont—a foot of squeaking, crusted snow on the ground, with the barn thermometer registering well below zero at sunup and rarely topping 20 degrees on even the sunniest days. Gloom prevails. The bird season is quits until next fall and my major outdoor activity is lugging in cartloads of frost-crusted logs to feed the insatiable woodstove. As always during these bleak times of year, my memories turn to warmer climes and skies full of fast-moving gamebirds. Some of the best shooting I ever enjoyed occurred in Kenya, back in the 1960s and ‘70s, the last years of East Africa’s golden era as a hunting venue. Here’s a taste of it:
The big Bedford lorries had arrived the day before, so by the time we wheeled into the campsite along the Ewaso Nyiro River the tents were up—taut, green, smelling of hot canvas and spicy East African dust. It was a sandy country, red and tan, and the river rolled silently but strong, dark almost as blood, under a fringe of scrawny-trunked doum palms and tall, time-worn boulders. Sand rivers cut the main watercourse at right angles, and the country rolled away to the north and west in a shimmer of pale tan haze. The fire was pale and the kettle whistled a merry welcome.
This was the last camp of the month-long shooting safari through Kenya’s arid Northern Frontier Province, a hunt that had begun three weeks earlier at Naibor Keju, in the Samburu country near Maralal, then had swung northward through the lands of the Rendile and Turkana tribes to Lake Rudolf and back down across the Chalbi and Kaisut deserts past Marsabit Mountain to the Ewaso Nyiro.