Death in the Long Grass

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  Modern lion-hunting techniques are somewhat diverse, dependent upon terrain and other physical considerations. Probably, most legally shot lions today are killed by stalking, usually after they have been heard roaring near dawn. There is no form of lion hunting that is not exciting, but this is one of the methods most likely to continue fluttering your stomach twenty years after you first tried it. It is chancy hunting, since the lion is on the move at this time of day, and, in thick bush, you are unlikely to see him until he is quite close.

  Another extremely interesting form of lion hunting is practiced mostly in arid countries such as the gussu Kalahari shield of northwestern Botswana, formerly the Bechuanaland Protectorate of South Africa. Botswana lions are generally among the largest in Africa. They are also, I can promise you, the most consistently nasty. It has been suggested that this may be due to the fact that Bushmen commonly taunt them off their kills for the meat, and their patience with man is therefore somewhat short. I couldn’t say for sure, but in my experience a Botswana lion is as likely to charge on sight at close quarters as not.

  Because of the loose, sandy texture of the soil, tracking is quite easy in this area. During the course of a safari, one or more lion kills of natural game are usually discovered. If they were made the night before, the standard procedure is to say your prayers, load your heavy rifle, and follow the tracks to the point where the lion has “lain up” for the hot daylight hours, usually sleeping in the thickest tangle of crud it can find until it cools off and darkness falls.

  The impossibly slow and hopefully soundless creeping through the blast-furnace heat of midday, with visibility often less than ten yards, is enough to rattle the nerves of a snake charmer. The average shot will be about fifteen yards, if you are lucky, and if you can determine which part of the lion the shadow-dappled patch of hide covers. At such a short range it is impossible to overestimate the degree of danger a hunter is subjected to. A lion can cover forty-five feet quicker than you can pronounce it. Also, there is the small consideration that he probably won’t be alone. One day, with a client from Philadelphia, we shot a very fine male lion at about ten yards after tracking him off the carcass of a wildebeest for three hours. At my client’s shot, six other lions appeared, none showing any particular inclination to move off. We looked at them and they looked at us. Discretion being the better part of lion hunting, it was we who cleared off, returning a few hours later for the old boy’s skin. I was almost positive that I was going to have to shoot our way out of there, but, fortunately, they let us back off.

  Baiting for lion is widely misunderstood. As opposed to leopard baiting, where the object is to actually kill the animal over the offering, the use of baits for lion serves mainly to draw a lion to an area and hold him so he can be followed up for a shot. Baits may be deliberately laid out and hung at chest height by wire from a tree or may take the form of previously killed large game such as elephant. Over the years, my clients have probably killed 25 percent of their lions off dead elephant carcasses or nearby, where the lion has gone to sleep off his meal.

  Although many harassed lions will charge unwounded, the vast majority of human maulings and deaths under hunting circumstances are, logically, from wounded lions. There are things I would less rather do than follow up a wounded lion into thick bush, but none come to mind immediately. I’ve done it nine times and I certainly hope it never comes to ten.

  There are several factors that make a wounded lion so incredibly dangerous. First among them is his inclination to charge from close quarters where only a brain or spine shot will anchor him. You may blow a hole in his heart big enough to accommodate a navel orange, but in his condition of hyperadrenia, there will still be enough oxygen in his brain to carry his charge for a surprising distance and enough moxie left over to turn you into something that would give a hyena the dry heaves. A lion with a bullet in his guts will do everything he can to repay the favor by lying in wait until the last moment before he charges.

  The second factor contributing to a lion’s dangerousness is the combination of his speed and strength and the small target he offers in a frontal charge. If I had to pick a common trait of all dangerous game, besides the fact that they can kill you, it would have to be that they are all so unbelievably fast. In times of stress their movements are virtually nothing but blurs, a very unnerving fact at a time when you yourself are probably scared witless. A typical charge by a lion from sixty feet takes a blinking of an eye. Add to this the blood-curdling vocal display that accompanies the rush, and you will see why there have been many men who never even got a shot off, let alone a winner. Many lion charges are successful because, considering the velocity, the gunner doesn’t hold a low enough lead factor. Also, the anatomy of a lion is such that he has no skull above the eyebrows, usually just a mass of fatty tissue and mane. I almost blew my first lion charge by not compensating for this, but luckily the slug passed through the scalp and broke the spine above the paunch. I didn’t miss the second time as he dragged himself toward me with his front paws.

  Lion charges are usually, but not always, preceded by a short grunt, which is a great aid in locating the cat. Leopards, on the other hand, almost never make a sound when charging. I do not enjoy following up either one, but if I had to make a choice between digging a lion or a leopard out of grass, I would take the leopard simply on the basis that although he was much more likely to chew a couple of sirloins off me, he probably would not be as likely to kill me. You get nailed by a lion with one good body bite and, brother, your problems are all over.

  I am absolutely delighted to tell you that, as of this writing, I have no idea whatsoever of what it feels like to be bitten by a lion. Jaguar, yes. But, I’ve had plenty of friends who are firsthand experts on the subject. There has always been something of a controversy about the pain experienced, some maulees claiming that there is little pain, mostly a dreamlike sensation caused by shock, others that the bite of a lion is extremely painful. Undoubtedly, both may be correct, depending upon mental condition at the time, location of the bite, and other such factors. David Livingstone was severely mauled in his early days by a lion he had wounded in Bechuanaland, the cat grabbing him by the shoulder and shaking him until he felt no pain at all. Others, such as Willy De Beer and Paul Nielssen say that the pain was excruciating.

  The fact that I have never been seriously injured by an animal, save a bite on a booted foot by a Brazilian jaguar, is owed both to luck of the purest form and an absolute dedication on my part to caution with any game. Some professionals show their assorted scars with pride, but I don’t feel that way. If you are a professional, every stitched seam on your body shows that you’re probably not very good at it. I am, however, a believer in the sooner-or-later theory, sort of an offshoot of Murphy’s Law, which, paraphrased, states that if you stick your neck out with the stuff that bites back enough times, you’re going to get it sooner or later. The only possible way to counter the odds of this happening is to be so incredibly careful as to forestall the inevitable as long as possible. Africa has no patience with careless hunters.

  Still, many of the really fine hunters from time to time get caught through flukes and plain bad luck. John Kingsley-Heath, a very well-known pro, was badly mauled by a lion he wounded with a light rifle while in a leopard blind several years ago. He followed it up with his .470, but despite two head shots that gave erratic bullet performance, was badly chewed up by the lion. His gunbearer, Kiebe, saved him by shooting the cat off him. Brian Smith, with whom I made several safaris, has been twice mauled by lions and once by a leopard. I believe that an educated guess would be that of those professional African hunters who have plied their trade for more than ten years, perhaps 25 percent go to their graves with lion scars.

  * * *

  Lions are intensely interesting animals to hunt, and to say that no two lion hunts are similar is nearly axiomatic. For example, let’s just take one season, May through September 1975, when I was a professional hunter in the Matets
i region of northwest Rhodesia.

  Since lions, like all other game, are allocated on a careful quota system by the Game Department to concessionaires of safari areas, lion licenses are only available to those clients who stay for long safaris. My first clients who had lion licenses were Americans on a thirty-day safari. Most clients consider their safari highlighted by the taking of a lion, so this is the species upon which we normally start concentrating. Also, the killing of a good lion early in the trip takes a great deal of pressure off the professional hunter.

  The clients arrived in camp late one afternoon and settled in. As we sat around the fire getting to know each other, a pair of lions started the evening serenade. By the sound of their calls they were probably at a bait I had hung some three miles from camp. Well before dawn had broken we were off, trying to get as close as possible to the last calls before first light to begin tracking as soon as we could see.

  We picked up the spoor without any trouble and tracked for an hour, the lions, by the sign a pair of large males, not stopping as I thought they would after eating a good portion of the zebra bait.

  After the second hour, tracking in more difficult terrain, my gunbearer, a half-Kalanga, half-Bushman named Amos, suddenly stopped and held up his hand to listen. Perhaps a mile away a lion’s roar could be heard, although somewhat indistinctly. Instantly Amos diagnosed that the animal was in a deep valley at the base of a hill called “Insholoinyati,” Sindebele Zulu for a buffalo-horn boss because of its shape. Carrying rifles at high port arms, our party of five ran for the end of the valley and began to stalk up it, much as one would when trying to flush guinea fowl or francolin. We had not gone 300 yards when we froze at a low hiss from Amos and Rota, his apprentice tracker. An easy forty yards away, lying down and looking at us from the edge of a thicket, was a magnificent male lion with a full, auburn mane. I pointed at it and grabbed the nearest client saying in a whisper, “Lion! Bust him!”

  The man looked confused but raised his rifle and sighted. I held my breath as I waited for him to fire, praying it would be quickly since I could see that the lion had pretty well satisfied his curiosity and was about to melt back into the thicket any second. Still, the man did not fire. “Bust him! Bust him,” I kept urging, but he just kept looking through the scope at the lion. Finally, the huge lion sat up, yawned, and walked slowly into the grass. I was practically beside myself at having missed the chance to take a beautiful trophy like that the first morning, right out of the box.

  We chased further up the valley, hoping for another glimpse of the lion or the one with it, but it was too late. When, after a half-hour, I decided to give it up rather than risk scaring the lions out of the concession, we stopped for a smoke and I asked the man as gently as possible why he had not fired. To my amazement he answered that he thought I was out of my mind and that he was looking at a wart hog! By the time he realized that it was a lion, it was already mostly obscured by the grass and he was afraid to fire in case he only wounded it.

  Oddly, that was that client’s third safari, and he had never seen a live lion outside of a zoo before. Yet, he was to have another chance the third day.

  The original two lions had pushed off to parts unknown, and I had hung a series of other baits in strategic locations within reach. The morning of the third day we were driving slowly toward a bait I had near a wide, grass-choked vlei, an area swampy in the rains but dry in winter. Since the previous year had been a record one for heavy rainfall, much of the grass was twelve to fourteen feet tall and offered the visibility of minestrone soup. I have seen more attractive places to hunt lion. Except for a very small percentage of the acreage that the buffalo herds had knocked down, it was practically impenetrable. As we drove along, I felt an urgent tap on the shoulder from Amos, riding in the back of the old Land Rover. I slowed further and he explained in Fanagalo that he had seen the flicker of an ear beneath a small thorn shrub in the grass but wasn’t certain if it belonged to a lion or a hyena. Rather than risk spooking whatever it might be, I continued another half-mile down the road before stopping. Finally, we stopped and, checking the wind, swung in a wide arc to bring us as close as possible to the shrub yet offer us maximum visibility under the difficult circumstances.

  Finally, we came up to the thorn bush and, the three armed men leading the trackers and gunbearers, sneaked up on it. At twenty yards there was the familiar Whuff! as two huge male lions broke into a run across our fronts. I shouted to the client to take the second one since it seemed to have a better mane. He wing-shot it, though a bit far back, and it rose into the air with a terrible roar, rearing like a hooked tarpon. In a blink it was gone into the high grass, but not before I was able to stick a .375 into it with undetermined effect. Quivering with adrenalin we listened to it growling ferociously thirty yards in the cover.

  I led the men back a few yards to have a cigarette and hoped the bloody thing would die before I had to go in and drag it out. I was sure it was badly hurt, perhaps crippled because it stayed in the same position without moving away or attempting a charge. In the impossibly heavy grass, the visibility could not have been over ten feet, and I wanted to give it every conceivable opportunity to expire before I went in. Also, I knew there was more than one wounded lion in there, not forgetting the companion who had not reappeared nor shown himself after disappearing into the hardwoods that ringed the vlei. Finally an idea formed that would give me an edge. I sent Amos back for the Rover and my driver, Elias, who pulled up on the road shortly.

  Although this particular car was open, a raised plank on a pipe framework over the pickup bed had been built for photography and better visibility in heavy cover. Installing the two clients atop this with me, I had Elias carefully drive toward the continuing growls, the bumper of the car’s front flattening the grass ahead of us.

  As we came closer, perhaps seven or eight yards, we saw some movement at the place from which the growling was coming and instantly fired. The lion thrashed and roared for several minutes, then seemed to die. For good measure, we both shot it again until I was sure it was dead. As if I was walking on a pile of sleeping mambas, I dismounted and approached the lion. It was still breathing. I had refilled the magazine but was afraid to shoot since I did not know where the other lion was and dared not risk a zero-range charge while working the bolt. It was an interesting few minutes. My nerves were further jangled when the second client screamed, “Watch it! Your right!” I swung around a half-turn and looked smack into the puss of the second lion, who uttered a low sound that you didn’t have to speak lionese to understand. Through all the firing, he had stayed not ten feet from the wounded one and, if the American had not spotted his creeping up on me, I would likely have been given the New Look. I put a shot into the ground right between his legs and he did a back flip and disappeared, finally showing himself again as he cleared the grass 200 yards away. I aimed carefully and paid the insurance on the first one.

  Although nothing to write home about in the mane department, these two were extremely large and heavy lions, probably about 500 pounds, and in their prime. Hell, I’m in my prime, and I don’t have much of a mane! He taped out at a bit over nine feet, one inch, a very fine trophy.

  * * *

  The man I worked with in Rhodesia, a concessionaire of about 800 square miles of hunting grounds adjoining the Wankie National Park, had another typical experience on a safari the month before. Hunting with a Southwest African, he climbed a low hill the first day and, just across a small valley, saw a very good lion resting under a shady tree.

  They made the stalk very well—too well in my opinion—getting to within ten yards of the lion, but they were unable to see him because of intervening brush and thorn scrub. Trying to find a passage to shoot in the cover, the hunter almost stepped upon a second, unseen lion, which, happily, was as surprised as he was. Of course, it spooked the other and the chance was lost.

  The two men hunted from long before dawn until last light for the next twenty-nine days, often arriving
back in camp chilled to the bone from the long, icy rides in the open car as late as 10 P.M. Aziko Silwane. Nikis. No lions. At all. No spoor, no roaring, no kills. Yet, they kept at it until, almost at dark the last day of the safari, they heard a lion roaring a mile away. Since the sun was already down, they ran as fast as they could toward the sound and actually caught up with a big lion within shooting distance. The client fired, but because he was so blown and shaking from lack of breath after the long run, he just creased the forepaw. The lion ducked into a thicket, raising vocal murder.

  The professional, muttering unprintables, bulled in after it to save his reputation for never letting a client with a lion license go home empty-handed. It was so dark that he could hardly see, but he heard the short Chuff! that the lion coughed before beginning his charge. At ten feet he put his .458 bullet into the center of a growing, dark shape that seemed to float up at him and was fortunate to remove the top of the lion’s skull.

  As they built a fire to skin the cat, two men had to stand guard against the other several lions and lionesses who came practically up to the fire. Finished, they backed away to the truck and got out of there.

  Lions do very odd things to otherwise stable, sober people. I had a client in Zambia once, who shall go unnamed, who had a great chance at a lion that was very well known in the area, a tremendous black-maned monster called the Mwangwalala lion. As lions go, he was a real beaut, well over nine feet and with an anthracite neckpiece that grew down to his cuticles. We were checking a bait one morning when I caught a movement out of the corner of an eye and saw this lion walking sedately across a small dambo, or flat, as casually as you please.