Death in the Long Grass

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  I flashed the light around the interior of the kaia. No blood. The walls seemed intact, as was the roof. The soft snapping of Silent’s fingers attracted my attention back outside the hut. In the beam of the light was clear evidence of a scuffle, the smooth earth torn by striations of long claw marks. Bending down, I defined the clear pugmark of a big, male lion. I went back into the hut. The man was still staring in horror, mumbling gibberish. Silent entered with my flask, and we were able to get a gagging shot down his throat. Finally, he calmed down enough to tell us what had happened.

  He had awakened when his wife stirred to a call of nature. He told her not to go outside, but she insisted. Anatomically unequipped, as was he, to perform the function through the door, she had stepped out into the night, and the lion had immediately nailed her. The man, named Teapot, heard the struggle and the first scream and bounded off his mat to the door. His wife had reached it and was gripping a crossbar that formed a frame for the lashed-on tshani grass. He recoiled in terror as he saw the lion pulling her by the leg until she was suspended off the ground between his mouth and the door frame. Suddenly, the upper hinge had broken, and the woman lost her hold. The lion immediately swarmed over her upper body and, with a crush of fangs, dragged her quickly off.

  I looked at my wristwatch. The scratched, old Rolex said two hours until dawn, perhaps just about right to permit the lion to feed and get careless. We might be able to stalk him while he was actually eating his kill or intercept him on his way to water before he went to lie up for the hot hours.

  “Chabwino, Bwana,” commented Silent. “It is good. I think we will find this eater of people this day.” I couldn’t share his enthusiasm. Rooting man-eating lions out of thick cover is not my idea of good fun. Still, we had our best shot at him yet.

  We took up the trail at half-past five as the false dawn began to turn the trees into gnarled monsters. I felt that just as the day before, the lion would travel a few miles, then stop to feed, although after the meal he had taken the previous day, he couldn’t have been terribly hungry. Silent ruled out the possibility of this being another lion; one glance at a set of week-old prints and my gunbearer could tell you that lion’s favorite color as well as his probable political leanings. The tracks showed definitely that we were on the trail of the right lion.

  The spoor led through thinning, winter-dry bush studded with thorn, scrub mopane, and towering ant hills for a couple of miles, then turned off to the dense riverine vegetation that bordered the shallow Munyamadzi for about 500 yards of depth along each bank. I had tried hunting lion in this cover before, harrying them through the jungles of waxy, green conbretum, a dense, house-high shrub that grows like a beach umbrella with the handle cut off, in hope of getting my clients a quick shot as the cats crossed the open channels between the heavier clumps. It was hard, dangerous hunting that I had quit rather than risk a client’s being chewed up. Half the time was spent on hands and knees peering under the dense growth for a patch of tawny hide, hoping, when you saw it that it wasn’t attached to a growing halo of teeth hurtling at you in a close-quarter charge. Everything was in the lion’s favor in this growth, and I hadn’t kidded myself that the man-eater had left it. After all, he had already proven ten times that he had no natural fear of man—the fear that can give the hunter an edge.

  I thought about Paul Nielssen’s mauling in the past year within this same strip of bush, about five miles upriver. A Spanish client, Armando Bassi of Barcelona, a fine hunter, had wounded a good-maned lion, but it had escaped into the thick conbretum before Paul could get in a finishing shot. As the professional, Paul was obliged to earn his $25 per day salary by following the lion and killing it. Nielssen put Bassi up a tree, as is standard practice, and went in alone after it with his double rifle, a .458 Winchester converted from a .450. The lion lay under a bush, after doubling back on his track in a short loop, and watched Paul track past. Nielssen later told me he heard a slight sound behind him, but as he spun to fire, the lion was on him and knocked him flat.

  The infuriated cat grabbed Paul by the shoulder and sank his fangs through meat and bone, while shaking the puny human like a jackal with a mouse. For some reason the lion then turned on Paul’s legs and began chewing, as I recall, on his left thigh. Armando Bassi, hearing the mauling, jumped out of his tree and ran blindly after Paul. Coming up, he shouted and yelled at the lion to draw its attention and blew the cat’s head into pudding with his own .458. Lord, give us more clients like Armando Bassi! Paul owed the man his life and escaped crippling injury, although he suffered a broken femur and a collection of stitches that would have done a Bond Street tailor proud. An animal that can and does kill Cape buffalo with a single bite doesn’t waste much time sorting out a mere human.

  As we approached the thick cover, Silent and I stopped to peel off our bush jackets lest they scrape against a branch or thorn giving away our presence or position. We left them behind with the water bag after I removed the cartridges from mine. Entering the green tangle, Silent moved just ahead of me in a low crouch, his eyes on the spoor and his spear held in front of his body like a lance. It is normal between a hunter and his gunbearer/tracker that the first spoors while the other covers the possibility of an ambush charge. It’s impossible to hunt and track at the same time. The safety was off the .470 and the night sight, an oversized bead of wart hog ivory, which doesn’t yellow like elephant ivory, was flipped up for fast sighting in the deep shade. We drifted slowly through the bush listening for the crunch of bone or a low growl as the lion fed in the leafy stillness. The damp, soft soil muffled our stealthy walking on the outsides of our feet, the quietest way to stalk, as we slid through the mottled murk with pounding hearts, ringing ears, and stomachs full of bats.

  My mind went over the lion charges I had met before: the quick jerking of the tail tuft, the paralyzing roar, and the low, incredibly fast rush, bringing the white teeth in the center of bristling mane closer in a blur of speed. If we jumped him and he charged us, it would be from such close quarters that there would be time for only one shot, if that. Charging lions have been known to cover a hundred yards in just over three seconds. That’s a very long charge, longer than I have ever seen in our thick central African hunting grounds. In tangles like this, a long charge would be twenty-five to thirty yards, which gives you some idea of the time left to shoot.

  Ahead of me, Silent stiffened and solidified into an ebony statue. He held his crouch with his head cocked for almost a minute, watching something off to the left of the spoor. The wild thought raced through my skull that if the lion came now, the rifle would be too slippery to hold, since my palms were sweating so heavily. What the hell was Silent looking at, anyway?

  Moving a quarter of an inch at a time, he began to back away from the bush toward me. I could see the tightness of his knuckles on the knobby, thornwood shaft of the spear. After ten yards of retreat, he pantomimed that a woman’s hand was lying just off the trail and that he could smell the lion. The soft breeze brought me the same unmistakable odor of a house cat on a humid day. Tensely I drew in a very deep breath and started forward, my rifle low on my hip. I was wishing I had listened to mother and become an accountant or a haberdasher as I slipped into a duck-walk and inched ahead. I was certain the lion could not miss the thump-crash of my heart as it jammed into the bottom of my throat in a choking lump, my mouth full of copper sulphate. I could almost feel his eyes on me, watching for the opportunity that would bring him flashing onto me.

  I lifted my foot to slide it slowly forward and heard a tiny noise just off my right elbow. In a reflex motion, I spun around and slammed the sides of the barrels against the flank of the lion, who was in midair, close enough to shake hands with. His head was already past the muzzles, too close to shoot, looking like a hairy pickle barrel full of teeth. He seemed to hang in the air while my numbed brain screeched SHOOT! As he smashed into me, seemingly in slow motion, the right barrel fired, perhaps from a conscious trigger pull, perhaps from impact, I’ll
never know. The slug fortunately caught him below the ribs and bulled through his lower guts at a shallow but damaging angle, the muzzle blast scorching his shoulder.

  I was flattened, rolling in the dirt, the rifle spinning away. I stiffened against the feel of long fangs that would be along presently, burying themselves in my shoulder or neck, and thought about how nice and quick it would probably be. Writing this, I find it difficult to describe the almost dreamy sense of complacency I felt, almost drugged.

  A shout penetrated this haze. It was a hollow, senseless howl that I recognized as Silent. Good, old Silent, trying to draw the lion off me, armed with nothing but a spear. The cat, standing over me, growling horribly, seemed confused, then bounded back to attack Silent. He ran forward, spear leveled. I tried to yell to him but the words wouldn’t come.

  In a single bound, the great cat cuffed the spear aside and smashed the Awiza to the ground, pinning him with the weight of his 450-pound, steel sinewed body the way a dog holds a juicy bone. Despite my own shock, I can still close my eyes and see, as if in Super Vistavision, Silent trying to shove his hand into the lion’s mouth to buy time for me to recover the rifle and kill him. He was still giving the same, meaningless shout as I shook off my numbness and scrambled to my feet, ripping away branches like a mad man searching for the gun. If only the bloody Zambians would let a hunter carry sidearms! Something gleamed on the dark earth, which I recognized as Silent’s spear, the shaft broken halfway. I grabbed it and ran over to the lion from behind, the cat still chewing thoughtfully on Silent’s arm. The old man, in shock, appeared to be smiling.

  I measured the lion. Holding the blade low with both hands, I thrust it with every ounce of my strength into his neck, feeling the keen blade slice through meat and gristle with surprising ease. I heard and felt the metal hit bone and stop. The cat gave a horrible roar and released Silent as I wrenched the spear free, the long point bright with blood. A pulsing fountain burst from the wound in a tall throbbing geyser as I thrust it back again, working it with all the strength of my arms. As if brain-shot he instantly collapsed as the edge of the blade found and severed the spinal chord, killing him at once. Except for muscular ripples up and down his flanks, he never moved again. The Chabunkwa man-eater was dead.

  Ripping off my belt, I placed a tourniquet on Silent’s tattered arm. Except for the arm and some claw marks on his chest, he seemed to be unhurt. I took the little plastic bottle of sulfathiozole from my pocket and worked it deeply into his wounds, amazed that the wrist did not seem broken, although the lion’s teeth had badly mangled the area. He never made a sound as I tended him, nor did I speak. I transported him in a fireman’s carry to the water, where he had a long drink, and then I returned to find the rifle, wedged in a low bush. I went back and once more put the gunbearer across my shoulders and headed for the village.

  Silent’s injuries far from dampened the celebration of the Sengas, a party of whom went back to collect our shirts and inspect the lion. As I left in the hunting car to take Silent to the small dispensary some seventy-five miles away, I warned the headman that if anyone so much as disturbed a whisker of the lion for juju, I would personally shoot him. I almost meant it, too. That lion was one trophy that Silent had earned.

  The doctor examined Silent’s wounds, bound them, and gave him a buttful of penicillin against likely infection from the layers of putrefied meat found under the lion’s claws and on his teeth, then released him in my care. We were back at the Senga village in late afternoon, the brave little hunter grinning from the painkiller I had given him from my flask.

  I snapped a couple of pictures of the lion with the self-timer and began to skin him. I would later report that the hide had spoiled and was not taken, so I wouldn’t have to turn in more than the ears to the Game Department, which claims all unlicensed trophies. Actually, I had it salted and presented it to Silent, who believed that sleeping on it would bring back much of the romance of his youth. When I dropped him off at his village, near my safari camp, his fat, young wives seemed to concur as they bore him off to his hut with much giggling.

  The Sengas retrieved the body of the lion’s last victim, which was about half-eaten. That night, back in my own camp, I took a long bath and sat smoking in the tub, with a tall glass of man’s best friend at my elbow. Only now did I realize how close I had come to being the Chabunkwa lion’s eleventh victim. My side was starting to turn a lovely black and blue where the lion had hit me, but whether it was from a paw stroke or just the 450 pounds of impact, I didn’t know. Academic at best. In this kind of business you learn to remember close calls only for what they taught you, not for how they might have turned out. I took away one lesson for sure: the next time a district commissioner asks me for a favor, I’m going to have a severe attack of radio trouble.

  * * *

  A very strong case, both historically and morally, can be made that the lion is the classic big game animal. Because of the great personal danger inherent in sport hunting for lions under modern conditions, it might be said that hunting lion on foot in the thick covers of central Africa is the purest expression of the honest sport of hunting. I use the term “honest” because there are many ways to get a cat to skin; to safely bust a Simba across 200 yards of cover such as the putting green grass of the Kenya flats is a much simpler proposition than rooting one out of the scrub miombo of central Africa, where eyebell-to-eyeball confrontations are as common as not. Crawling into the nightmare tangles of thorn on your hands and knees after a big male lion may have very different consequences from kicking a cottontail rabbit out of a Connecticut brush pile, although in each case the sport is called hunting.

  But for his skin as a personal trophy, the lion is hunted entirely as a personal challenge. He has no prized ivory or horn; you cannot eat him, although there are some tribes who do so for sympathetic magic; his pelt is not made into coats. Lions are hunted for the same reason people skydive, race cars, or, in extreme cases, play Russian roulette. They are hunted for the oldest of motives: the challenge of man against a fast, deadly animal on the animal’s terms. When you pick up a rifle and take the first step on a lion hunt, you know that you are taking a fair chance of being maimed or killed. It is the clearest case of not just the ancient confrontation of man against beast, but also of man deliberately putting himself in harm’s way. It is, in fact, man against himself.

  Over the incalculably hoary ages, lion hunting has been considered one of the most noble sports, and the lion the most respected adversary of the hunter. From the time of the interglacial Pleistocene, the period in which, incidentally, Africa still finds itself zoologically, man has had a direct relationship with the lion. Panthera leo once roamed throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and, of course, the whole of Africa. Certainly early man confronted him in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods, and the tradition of lion hunting as one of the most respected pastimes continued well into the earliest civilizations, which have left us records of early hunts.

  Many of the first advanced cultures’ monarchs must have concentrated a great deal of their time on perforating lions for fun and profit. I have seen the scarabaeus in the British Museum, dating from approximately 1400 B.C. and bearing the cartouche of Amenhotep III, progenitor of Ikhnaton, or Amenhotep IV, which records his killing 102 “fierce-looking” lions during the first decade of his pharaohship. Of course, a pharaonic lion hunt must have made a duke’s Scottish grouse drive look like a girl scout outing. Huge bands of beaters concentrated the game while the pharaoh shot them with arrows from his chariot. I think, considering the number of lions killed, that the pharaohs’ personal bodyguards must have formed quite a rank, or surely, inevitably, a wounded lion would have caught up with somebody’s royal hindside.

  Tiglathpileser I, a Middle Eastern monarch in a later time slot, is recorded to have made Amenhotep III look like a beginner by smiting “120 brave-hearted lions in heroic battles on foot [I’ll bet!] and 800 lions from my chariot.” Assurnasirpal II claimed to have d
one in “370 lions like caged birds” with a spear.

  In ancient Greece, lion sticking was all the rage. Surviving illustrations appear to demonstrate that warriors surrounded their lion in much the same manner of the Masai or Nandi of East Africa, throwing spears or javelins and then relying upon the tall shields they carried for protection when the lion charged.

  Most early European sportsmen hunted lion from horseback with muzzle-loading rifles in Africa, not quite as safe a proposition as one might immediately presume. Many of them, at one time or another, were severely mauled or killed through failure of their primitive arms or foolhardy pursuit of wounded lions. I have never decided in my own mind which animal, the elephant or lion, has killed more people. Hippo is is at the top of the list for herbivores, and crocodiles lead the category of man-killers in the carnivore section, yet neither are true sporting animals in the classic sense. At any rate, lions certainly have a creditable record for killing the famous. Nairobi has an impressive cemetery of lion-killed white men, including Sir George Grey, brother of the then prime minister of Great Britain early in this century. In the 1920s it was fashionable for young British bloods to amuse themselves lion hunting on horseback in such areas as the Athi Plains. Sir George made the last mistake of his life by trying to stop a determined charge from a big lion with a little .280 Ross rifle, firing a 140-grain bullet. He bravely held his ground and made the shot nicely, only the bullet broke up in the massive chest muscles of the lion, who proceeded to chew Sir George into small, easily digested chunks before anybody could come to his aid. The nobleman joined a double carload of other defunct sportsmen who learned the hard way that you only make one mistake with a lion: your last.