I told the gentleman to please place a large hole in it with all dispatch, and he got into shooting position. Five times he worked the bolt of his .338 custom Mauser, but the lion did not fall. In fact, he hardly hurried his stately exit after a disdainful glance at us. My client was doing everything right except for one minor item: he had forgotten to pull the trigger. As the saying goes, I kid you not. He was positive he was firing the rifle, in fact, became furious at me when I told him he had merely worked the bolt of the action. Only when I picked up his unfired cartridges and gave them back to him did he believe me. In the excitement he was positive he was actually shooting at the lion, and to this day I suspect he wonders if I pulled some sort of practical joke.
Another hunter friend of mine reports that, upon seeing his first lion at close range, his client threw away his rifle and ran like a lunatic straight after the big cat. The lion, fortunately, wasn’t having any, although what might have happened if the client had caught him might have made interesting reading.
I don’t know about you, but I still get a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach when I flip on the Late Show and see the poor old MGM bloke doing his thing. Even though most African lions are afraid of man on general principles, Africa is a mind-bogglingly big place, and it’s going to be some time before you can bet the beer money that the next lion you bump into won’t be the wrong one.
2
Elephant
Silent’s low hiss slithered through the dry, noon heat like a cold, thin blade. The old gunbearer stiffened and slowly passed the .375 Magnum back over his shoulder, edging to the side to clear my field of fire. To our front, deep in the bewildering tangles of second-growth mopane, a low, cracking sound could be heard blending with a soft, gurgling undertone. Silent’s muddy, malarial eyes probed the grove, then turned on me. “Njovu,” his lips quietly formed in Chenyanja. “Elephant.”
I retreated a few paces, motioning for Antonio, my client, to follow. When we had covered thirty yards, we stopped and I whispered in his ear, using the weird admixture of Italian, Spanish, and English we had developed over the first few days of safari to communicate. In this case the simple word “elefánte” was sufficient. His eyes widened, staring back into the wood as he wiped the sweat from his forehead and licked his lips. Gripping my arm, he whispered, “Pedro, for mee ees feerst wahn!”
I have always wondered what his reaction might have been had I leaned over and confided that, for me, his hairy-chested, smell-like-leather bwana, thees was feerst one, too.
Everybody has to start somewhere. I had never seen a live African elephant in the wild before this day on my first professional safari in Zambia. If this seems a bit inconsistent with the finest traditions of the hunting profession, let me explain that I had come to Africa from South America, where I had been a jaguar hunter, then, before arriving in Zambia, I had been conducting safaris in areas that were not in elephant country. Since I had a slight reputation as a “cat man,” specializing mostly in lions and leopards, nobody ever dreamed of asking me if I had ever seen an elephant. I had a professional hunter’s license, didn’t I? Who ever heard of a white hunter who’d never seen an elephant? Had the question come up, the most I could have said truthfully was that I had read a lot on the subject. That’s me, the correspondence school bwana. Since this sort of revelation doesn’t tend to put the paying clients aquiver with confidence in their intrepid guide, and since nobody had asked me, I didn’t volunteer the information. Nothing like on-the-job training to learn a trade, anyway.
I jerked my chin at Invisible, who padded over and fished out a five-pack of Kynoch nonexpanding, solid-bulleted cartridges for Antonio’s magnificent .475 No. 2 Jeffery’s double-barreled express rifle. It had, according to my pal, once been owned by a member of Mussolini’s cabinet. Antonio had picked it up from the man’s estate for a song, although these days such a rifle was worth about as much as a platinum-plated Maserati. He removed the panatella-length soft-point cartridges from the chambers and dunked in a pair of wicked looking blunt-nosed solids, swinging the action shut with the precision of a vintage Chubb safe. Since I always load with solids anyway, I just checked the magazine on the bolt-action Mauser, stuck a couple of hedges against disaster between the fingers of my left hand, and quietly hyperventilated to slow my heart down to 300 beats per minute. Well, I thought airily, let’s go look at an elephant.
As the rest of my safari crew headed back out of harm’s way, I could smell the familiar barnyard, zoo-stall odor of big game on the edge of the breeze. Silent motioned for me to give him a cigarette, which I lit. He studied the wafting of the thin, smoky tendril and nodded. It was straight back into our faces. With Antonio gripping the Jeffery’s like the true cross, we started into the grove for a reconnaissance of the situation. I can think of things I would rather have been doing.
Since that day, it has always amazed me how anything as god-awful big as a bull elephant can be so hard to spot in cover. Possibly, it is the optical phenomenon of its very size not offering a recognizable view of the whole animal when the silhouette is broken by even fairly light bush. Elephants, under most close-range hunting conditions, appear as small patches of whatever color dirt they have been dusting or wallowing in. Even when he locates the animal, the hunter faces the problem of determining the size of the ivory, which way the animal is facing, and what portion of the anatomy the patch of hide showing represents. In any case, had something the size of a townhouse not stuck its nose into the air and snapped off an arm-thick branch to strip off its bark and leaves with a sound not unlike driving a Buick through a rotting picket fence, we might have stopped for a rest in the bull’s shade. He was just fifteen yards ahead, facing three-quarters away when we picked him out, his left tusk a lovely arc of sap-stained ivory.
As we stared chunks and pieces of his outline began to fall into place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The edge of an ear appeared, and then the shadowy lines of flank and back materialized. Beyond him, a slow movement betrayed something else big and gray looming indistinctly. I raised the binoculars and tried to gauge the ivory of each. From the pictures I had seen, the nearest bull was carrying about sixty pounds per tooth, a fair trophy. The second had slightly heavier tusks, although the right one was broken off two feet shorter than its mate. I looked back at the near bull and nodded to Antonio.
Now, the books I had read never got across how big elephants really are. It may be that the only way to find out for yourself is to walk up to one with a steel and wood toothpick in your shaking hands with the ridiculous intent of doing it harm. You suddenly note all sorts of details you never saw in the zoo: the dark patch from the temple gland, the ragged tatters and holes in the ears, and the strange, pale gray circle around the eye’s iris set between impossibly thick lashes. The burbling sound is still heard, which, according to all those books, is just fine. If it stops, prepare to repel boarders. As the ammonia of his urine slaps you in the face, like a public men’s room in Atlanta in August, you recall that this digestive sound is not what it appears to be, but just a low, communicative device elephants use to stay in touch in heavy cover.
Swell. So what’s next? You have the same feel of rising panic as realizing your fly is open while lecturing to your wife’s garden club. You can’t simply stand there and tell Antonio to shoot him in the arse. Just not done. Completely un-pukka. Think now. If you try to shunt your shivering carcasses around to the flank for a side brain shot, he’ll probably either see you or hear your teeth clacking out the accompaniment to Malaguenã. But, you had better think up something clever pretty quick, chum, because he’s too close. Way too close. And the wind may shift or he’ll take a look astern, and things may become intensely unpleasant.
Grabbing $50 worth of Antonio’s tailored bush jacket in one fist, you decide to back off a touch for more shooting room. You don’t like the unnerving way Silent is starting to show too much white around the eye, either. With the casual grace of a landslide, the bull shifts a few feet, openin
g the angle between you. You freeze. Look at the bloody size of him! He’s gained at least four tons and five feet at the shoulder in the past fifteen seconds. You see the great pads of cartilege in his feet expand with his shifted weight until they are bigger than coffee tables. If only you weren’t so damned close. Still ruining Antonio’s crease, you start to drift back with infinite care, avoiding each dry leaf and branch as if they were the wire trigger prongs of teller mines. You actually manage to cover five big yards before it happens.
Maybe he has felt the touch of all those eyes on him; perhaps the tiniest rustle of vegetation has alerted him. Whatever. With a trumpet so loud that it reverberates in your stomach, he spins around. It is a microsecond before he picks out your forms with those myopic eyes guided by the slick, metallic slide of the safety catches. The huge, raggedy ears swish open wide and the trunk coils up against the chest, a tensed, spring-steel pile driver, a 500-pound bullwhip neat and ready to lash out with irresistible power. Then, he comes, unbelievably fast for his looming bulk, great clumps of dirt and bush debris exploding from his smashing feet as he eats up the precious yards. You throw up the puny rifle, screeching for Antonio to shoot. The twin slaps of concussion from his muzzle blasts cuff the side of your face and deafen your right ear. A fountain of dirt blows from the ground in front of the elephant’s feet, a spurt of dust from a skull crease hangs bright in a shaft of sunlight. You had better do it, and do it now.
He is less than ten yards away when the ivory bead of the foresight nestles into the vee of the express leaf on your .375. The head, bigger than a Volkswagen, is tossing, the spot for the frontal brain shot shifting. Then, reflex takes over and the Mauser seems to fire by itself. You never hear the flat whiplash of the shot, never feel the slamming recoil. Somebody else is working the bolt automatically, your eyes stuck on the magical, white-edged hole that has just appeared in a puff of dirt in the middle of the forehead—a ridiculously small hole that is now red-rimmed. You never touch off the second round although it is ready, snug and deadly in its chamber as a mamba in its hole.
The tremendous, gray skull is lifting, pulled backward as the hindquarters collapse and the huge bulk crashes down in the same slow motion as an office building receiving a demolition charge. The thick, wet noise of six tons of blood, bone, and muscle striking earth sounds hollow as he rolls over onto his side, the top, rear leg stretching, stretching, then relaxing. If you are stupid enough to try it, you may take three medium steps forward and touch him with the muzzle of the rifle. But you are too clever for that. You’ve read too many books. Before the shakes start, you calmly walk around him, sight carefully, and drive another 300 grains of copper-jacketed lead through the nape of his neck—the same spot where the Matadores de Toros stick that nifty little leaf-shaped mercy knife. The elephant doesn’t seem to have any objection.
You finally get the cigarette lit at the proper end and the desire to festoon your lunch over the back of a muSassa stump has somewhat abated. Robert Ruark always said it was proper to cry upon slaying one’s first elephant. We’ll see. At the moment you’re still too scared. Antonio looks like one of those people you see wandering about roadsides near the sites of head-on collisions, although some of the color is creeping back under the tan. Silent slaps his back and pumps his hand. So do I. What the hell? He didn’t cut and run, and if his shooting was something less than exemplary, well, it’s not every day a Milan businessman gets charged from tennis-court range by a bull elefánte. Antonio had taken his bull the hard way, the honest way, with his life on the line against that of the elephant on the animal’s own grounds. Before the safari is over, he will collect better trophies than that 120 pounds of billiard balls and piano keys, but it will always be those stained, twin pillars of ivory flanking his den fireplace that will yield the strongest memories of an afternoon in the Central African bushveldt.
If you wonder why a sane man treasures memories of near-death by a bull elephant, I am not sure I can explain the sentiment to your satisfaction. Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that that bull elephant was Antonio’s Matterhorn or Everest, his swim with a Great White Shark, his win of the Grand Prix. It was Antonio’s victory over his own mortality.
* * *
The African bush elephant, Loxodonda Africana, is the largest extant land animal still open for business. Most people who have never hunted elephants tend to think of them as big, gray, good-natured slobs who spend their time running in terror from mice, vacuuming up peanuts, and remembering things. But, if you will spend even a short time in jumbo country, you will rapidly learn that there is as much in common between wild elephants in hunting areas and those park animals accustomed to man’s presence as between crocodiles and chameleons. Nothing, but nothing, is as overwhelmingly attention getting as an elephant that has just decided he doesn’t like you; and nothing in the animal world is better equipped to do something about it.
For sheer ferocity and determination to get you, he has no match. He will spread his ears in threat display like a windjammer in a line squall, screaming like a bass calliope with all stops lashed down. He will tuck his trunk up against his chest, and he’ll start coming. If you are very cool and lucky, and can get a shot through cover that could stall a tiger tank, a heavy bullet, precisely placed, may turn or kill him. Then, again, it may not.
As he gets closer, it will dawn on you that there is simply no place you can go to avoid his six tons of murder. He can easily outrun the fastest sprinter with his deceptive shuffle, and if you’re thinking about climbing a tree, don’t bother. He’ll either knock you out of it personally or toot up a couple of chums to share in the festivities. If 12,000 pounds of screaming, screeching, infuriated elephant bearing down on you has somehow rattled your nerves to the point that you miss that six-by-four-inch spot on his forehead, or your bullet fails to penetrate the two- and one-half feet of tough, spongy, honeycomb bone that protects his brain, then you may as well forget it. The most talented mortuary cosmetician in the world couldn’t rewire you so your own mother would know if you were face up or down.
Angry elephants are highly inventive and develop quite individual modes of operation in their sorting out of careless bwanas and locals. After all, there’s a lot to the old saw that the black stuff between an elephant’s toes is really the remains of slow natives. A favorite procedure is to grip the victim firmly by an arm or leg (experienced elephants prefer the leg as being sturdier) and methodically beat him to furry guava jelly against the handiest solid object. A convenient tree trunk is favored as a mortar by many, but a few show a marked preference for a concrete-hard termite heap. Either way, it’s academic as far as the victim is concerned after the first swing or so. One uncoordinated gentleman I used to know in Kenya was brought home in three plastic buckets after a prolonged session of this type.
One of the most popular variations on the theme is the traditional stomp-and-stick technique. This method is fairly self-explanatory, especially if you have ever had a good look at an elephant’s feet and tusks. Recipients of this treatment are often difficult to repackage owing to the amount of topsoil that inadvertently gets mixed up with their tatters, making the whole remains a good deal heavier than the original hunter. In execution, the S & S system involves thorough kneading with the forefeet, followed by rolling with the knees, and judicious stirring of the whole mess with the tusks. Results are most impressive.
Other jumbos, outfielders at heart, have a marvelous time throwing their victims in graceful arcs above the trees, then running over to see if they can smash them with their trunks before they hit the ground. An imaginative, creative elephant can stave off boredom for hours with these games.
Although I doubt that personal consideration is a motive, it has often been recorded that elephants will “bury” their victims when the fun is over. The reason for such behavior is unknown, but apparently they will gather grass, leaves, and branches, piling them on the body until it is completely hidden. George Adamson recalled an elderly Afri
can woman who had fallen asleep beneath a tree being interred, unhurt, in this manner. This practice may be one reason for the circulation of strange tales of man-eating elephants, in that some victims of the animal are never found.
Elephants are, of course, supposed to be strict herbivores, but truth can be stranger than fiction. Many supposed cases of man-eating can be traced to the occasional playful habit of a frolicsome rogue carrying around a limb or torso of his last victim in his mouth. Perhaps he likes the salty taste of the blood. I have personally seen this “Yorick” syndrome in the species: a jumbo may take to wandering thoughtfully around with a bone from a dead relative or, in one case in Botswana, the twenty-pound tusk of a dead cow clenched in its teeth. I do not, however, believe that elephants are inclined to eat people or any other meat, for that matter. At least, I didn’t until I came across the case of Bertha Walt. The incident is hardly representative of field conditions, yet conclusively proves that one elephant did eat one person.
Bertha was a typist at the zoo in Zurich, Switzerland in which sported a docile Asian elephant named Chang. We don’t know much about Bertha, but it would seem that quite a rapport grew between the girl and the elephant, grew to the extent that Bertha was permitted to sleep in a room alongside Chang’s stall. (I suspect that even Playboy would consider that something of a bizarre relationship.) One morning in 1944 Bertha didn’t show up for work. The fact that the stall area was doused in blood and littered with sundry fingers and toes raised some eyebrows, but the stolid Swiss authorities didn’t jump to any half-cocked conclusions until Bertha’s frock, or half-digested pieces thereof, were fished out of Chang’s droppings. Even they had to call that conclusive.
Death in the Long Grass Page 7