Death in the Long Grass

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  But many of the “Great” hunters (meaning any hunter who is either dead or retired and not competing with you for safari clients) considered the elephant numero uno for solving all of life’s problems. Certainly, there are enough lonely little rock-piled bush graves, with inscriptions stating simply that the occupant was guilty of indiscretion with jumbo, to give plenty of credence to their opinion. This came home to me recently when I ran into a friend from Zambia while hunting in Rhodesia last year. Over a couple of tall ones at the Vic Falls Hotel, he told me that six people I had known and hunted with had been killed by elephants since I had left the country five years before.

  Dangerous as they are, elephants sometimes produce the most unlikely stories. One young man, for several years a professional hunter in the Luangwa (until he mistook the parked car of a high government official for that of a poacher and sabotaged it), had a client who shot an elephant one day with a frontal brain shot. The animal collapsed convincingly and the white hunter leaned his rifle against a tree, cut off the elephant’s tail and was sitting on the carcass. The next he knew, he was flying through the air into a thorn bush, his men disappearing in all directions. The elephant got up as if unhurt and roared away through the bush before anybody could do anything about it. The hunter kept the tail as a souvenir and was a good enough sport to tell the story on himself. I’ve had clients shoot two tailless elephants, the healed wounds seemingly made by a knife, which may point up the fact that stunned elephants are often mistaken for dead, especially with brain shots which pass close enough to that organ to stun but not kill.

  * * *

  The current ecological status of the African elephant, as well as his eventual fate, is, like that of most of the Pleistocene leftovers of that great continent, lost somewhere in between the teary, oversimplified emotionalism of the preservationist foreigners and the stupid if-it’s-meat-then-kill-it attitude of many Africans, black and white. In a place as unbelievably vast as Africa, it’s impossible to slap a valid label on a species as widely distributed as the elephant and decree it in danger or not. Whereas there may be, by way of example, extreme poaching pressure on jumbos in Kenya’s Tsavo District, this has little to do with other areas of the animal’s range, which might be dangerously overpopulated.

  The greatest professional compliment of my hunting life came when I was offered a position as a full cropping officer in the Luangwa Command under Bob Langeveldt, who ran the herd reduction “scheme” for the Zambian government. It was a compliment because elephant herd cropping or reducing was considered very dangerous work and was usually offered only to men who had achieved some reputation in skill at arms and reliability in a touchy situation. Obviously, in my case there had been some mistake, yet it was nonetheless flattering. As things turned out, I spent quite a lot of time cropping but eventually turned down the job as it required a three-year contract, which other obligations would not let me fulfill. Also, I decided I would rather live.

  I was no stranger to the biggest wildlife problem in Africa today: elephant overpopulation. Since the 1950s each year had worsened the conditions that were crowding the great herds off their ranges and into the national parks from eastern to southern Africa. Each season had seen more and more land that was once available as elephant habitat fall to the ploughs and cattle of the tribes, and now the reserves were so overcrowded with elephants that they were literally eating themselves—and other species—into destruction. It wasn’t so much that there were a hell of a lot more jumbo than there used to be; rather, they had become so compressed and jammed into the only habitat left for them that there was no way for the land to support them.

  The basic cause of the problem is the vastness of the elephant’s stomach and the methods he uses to fill it daily with the average 600 pounds of forage necessary to keep his bulk going. Principally existing on bark and leaf shoots, elephants destroy trees in unbelievable numbers to reach the higher branches by simply smashing them flat or by stripping away long ribbons of bark for the soft, inner lining, leaving the tree to die. The situation is very uncomplicated if you face it head on: overpopulations and over-concentrations of elephants kill trees faster than they can grow back, knocking the entire ecosystem of a huge national park into a cocked hat. Shade is lost, which affects grass and predator-prey relationships. The symbiosis of many species is destroyed. Great amounts of soil are lost in the rains. If permitted to continue, elephant concentrations would destroy whole areas, turning them to deserts and effecting a death sentence on the elephants themselves. The situation resembles the tragic starving winters of deer and elk in America produced by overpopulation because game control has been blocked by sincere, genuinely concerned, but hopelessly misguided “preservationists.”

  The problem of elephant control has long been handled by a good man with a big rifle, but in the past, control was largely a matter of removing a few troublesome animals from the area where they might be raiding crops or just generally being difficult. Not so today. With the reserves being overrun, whole new concepts and techniques of population control have had to be developed by trial and error.

  One of the finest places in Africa for number and variety of game, the Luangwa Valley National Park, had been losing hundreds of square miles of game-supporting habitat each year to the depredations of the estimated 30,000 elephants that had drifted in from as far away as East Africa. After several years of study by the Game Department and numerous international wildlife agencies, a “scheme” was developed to reduce the herds to safer limits as well as to benefit both the park and the protein-starved local people. At considerable expense an ultramodern abattoir and meat-processing plant was built at Mfuwe, across the Luangwa from the well-known tourist lodge of the same name. The plant has a capacity of completely processing 2,000 jumbo per year and wastes no part of the animals that are culled. The meat, inspected by a team of veterinarians, is canned or dried into biltong for consumption by laborers in the copper belt farther north; the skins, stripped off and thinned on special machines, are sold to leather companies in Britain and the United States. The ivory is auctioned internationally, and Mfuwe has its own bone meal plant. The offal goes into fertilizer; the feet end up as bar stools and umbrella racks, while even the lowly tail hairs are knotted into bracelets for the tourist trade.

  In Zambia there’s a pretty good case to be made that without the cropping scheme at Luangwa, there wouldn’t be a national park there today. The park had been used as a political crowbar for some factions who advocated turning the land over to the tribes for agriculture. However, the profits from cropping and the cheap protein thereby provided to the local tribes without poaching have proved that a park is probably the highest and best use for the thousands of square miles it occupies. Zambia is proving that game can pay its own way.

  Perhaps we had best get one thing straight right off: elephant cropping or herd culling has absolutely, unequivocably nothing to do with sport hunting. It is as different in purpose and practice from sport hunting as slaughtering steers for meat is from formal bullfighting. Certainly, nobody becomes a cropping officer for fun; it’s bloody, disgusting, depressing, and insanely dangerous work. The cropper usually lives in less than elegant quarters, often grass huts, and spends his rainy seasons on foot safaris after poachers who will cheerfully give him a half-dozen extra navels anytime they have the chance. Between bouts with almost certain malaria, he can count on lousy food, sore feet, thorn infections, and, if he’s the slightest bit unlucky, maybe a nice, fatal dose of bilharzia, that homey little snail fluke that may only quit living in your system when you do. Oh, yes, and then there are the elephants.

  Why would anybody do it? Certainly not for the money; the pay was equivalent to $320 per month, paid in Zambian kwatcha, which is worthless outside the country. Glory? Hardly. What glory is there in slaughtering mostly cow and calf elephants? Adventure? There’s not much adventure in amebic dysentery and athlete’s foot. So, why does a man like Langeveldt do it? The crazy thing is that Bob ab
solutely loved elephants, which seems a little incongruous if you remember that he’s killed well over 1,000 of them. I doubt even he would have been able to tell you exactly why. I think it is nothing but the only possible life for a man who is happy only in the bush with danger at his elbow. A lot more of Africa gets into your blood than the malaria, you know.

  My reasons for cropping were not nearly so complicated; in fact, they were downright selfish. I wanted to go home to the States some day and write a book about elephant cropping and the men who do it. A good, hairy, gut-pulling novel à la Ruark, out of Hemingway. After shooting something like 700 elephant, I came to the conclusion that (1) nobody would believe how scary it is, and (2) if I didn’t get the hell out of there, one fine morning I would make one of those teensy, tiny errors that elephant cropping does not permit. I went back to nice, safe white hunting in Botswana.

  In the early days of the culling scheme cropping was done with dart syringes loaded with deadly poison for fear that rifle fire would have a bad effect on the rest of the park’s game. It was quickly discovered, however, that darting was actually a greater disturbance to all species because of the death throes of the stricken, panicked animals. The crash of an express rifle, oddly, didn’t disturb animals in the least; perhaps they thought it was thunder. But panicked flight by elephant or other animals sent a shock wave of nervousness through the reserve that could last for days. It was an odd phenomenon that I had noticed several times when a client would kill one of several bulls, even from close range, with an instant brain shot. The dead animal would slump quietly and his fellows would pay absolutely no attention to the shot. Often, if they did not move off, I would have to fire several shots over them and shout to force them to scram. But merely wounding an elephant causes the others to act like fleas in a frying pan, running madly in any direction in which they happened to be pointed. Because of this behavior, rules for cropping strategy were developed.

  Capsulized, the format for attacking the herds was based upon selecting family groups of up to sixteen or so members, well separated from other elephants. If a group had a good bull among them, they were spared. Elephants have a distinct matriarchal society, and the herd leader is always an old cow. Upon selecting an isolated group of animals, the inviolate rule was to sneak up on the herd and actually charge the leader, which brought an immediate return charge. When she was knocked down, the rest of the herd would mill in confusion for the few seconds it took to systematically kill every one. The object was that under no circumstances could a survivor be permitted. One escapee inevitably spread panic through other herds, which could result in such behavior as attacking tourist vehicles in other parts of the park. Perhaps you would get the picture better if you came along on a typical morning of cropping with Langeveldt and me.

  * * *

  The short wheelbase hunting car ground to a muffled stop, a cloud of reddish dust enveloping its bush-battered, doorless body. The engine windmilled in the afternoon heat for a few seconds, then gargled to a reluctant death. Digging the small binoculars from the breast pocket of his camouflaged bush jacket, Bob Langeveldt climbed from the right-hand driver’s seat over the dash and onto the bonnet, sweeping the gray, winter bushveldt of the valley for the movement that had caught his eye. He grunted, trained the dusty lenses for a long time on the clump of Brachystegia trees across a wide, open dambo, then stooped and passed me the glasses. I took them, stepped up alongside him, and placed the hot, black rubber of the eyepieces against the bones under my brows. I stared for several seconds, seeing nothing but the labyrinth of shadows and broken angles of elephant-damaged bush. Then a small, regular movement flagged from the thin shade of the stand and, as I stared, resolved itself into an ear—a great, dirty-gray mainsail of an ear that could only belong to an elephant dozing away the torpid midday hours. As if by magic another massive, putty-colored form materialized from the bush-striped shadows, then another, until I counted fourteen in all. I nodded to Bob and passed back the glasses.

  “I make it fourteen,” he said quietly. “Just about right.” Langeveldt glanced at the fine stream of thin, loose earth pouring from the scarred fist of Ricetime, his hawk-faced Senga gunbearer. It drifted smokelike away from the herd in the warm breeze. “Kipa mbumbulu,” muttered Bob as Ricetime lifted the flat, leather case, unsnapped the brass catches, and swung open the lid with its gold-embossed stampings. Sunlight gleamed on the amber and ebony grain of the Rigby’s Circassian walnut stock and on the obsidian bluing of the barrels, nested like twin, black cobras in their lair of faded, green plush. Expertly, the Senga hooked the softly scrolled action to the barrels and closed them with a glass-smooth snap. He clicked on the forepiece, rebroke the rifle, and handed it to Langeveldt.

  “Eeeh, na lo gamina,” I motioned to Silent. He unzipped the soft case and slipped out the silver-worn, Game Department issue .458 Magnum, a Winchester Model 70 African. I shook the cartridges from a box and dumped them into a pocket, then stuck another of the familiar yellow packages into the waistband of my shorts. Opening the bolt, I clicked three of the sinister, blunt, full-metal-jacket rounds into the magazine and, depressing the uppermost, chambered a fourth of the thick, steel-reinforced shells. Langeveldt emptied a supply of .470 Nitro express fodder into his pockets, the long, 500-grain solids clinking softly through the cotton fabric. I checked the safety, in the full ON position, and passed the rifle to Silent. Taking the flax-fiber water bag from him, I had a long swig, trying to wash away that slight, coppery aftertaste of fear from the back of my tongue. It didn’t work; fear doesn’t wash away. It’s hard to think about walking into a herd of elephants—on purpose—without considering the possible consequences.

  We walked slowly across the dambo toward the trees for 300 yards, impala and zebra watching us curiously but keeping their distance. A lion-scarred, old bull wildebeeste called at us with his comical cry of Woiink! and bounced a few yards, stopping to stare at us again. The brown grass crushed softly under our sockless hunting shoes, sending a dry, dusty smell into our nostrils. I ambushed a tsetse, his abdomen bulbous with blood from the white welt on my wrist, and crushed him between my fingernails. Clouds of mopane flies, as small as gnats, swarmed the sweat-moist places around our eyes and mouths. I wondered idly how Langeveldt could stand the little bastards crawling in his full, chestnut beard when he was in the field. At seventy yards from the still-unsuspecting herd, he held up a dust-frosted hand and we squatted down for a last smoke to study the herd’s position and plan our assault.

  “Watch out for that big bitch on the right, hey?” said Bob, exhaling a deep drag. He picked at an imaginary piece of tobacco on his lip and gestured at a huge, tuskless cow at the group’s perimeter, undoubtedly the herd leader. He didn’t have to tell me about tondos, tuskless elephants, or how they would sucker you in as close as possible before that shocking, surprise charge, tossing head held so high that you had to drive the bullet into the brain up through the top of the trunk, a very difficult angle. Tondos didn’t bluff. If they came for you, they always carried the charge through and would do everything possible to recycle you into a frothy little puddle of hairy bouillabaise. Tondos, I knew, were aggressive because of their very way of life. Lacking tusks to peel bark from trees for food, they had to wait until another elephant had a juicy strip almost free, then they would bull in and shove the other elephant away, taking the food for themselves. Usually, they were so threatening that their victims didn’t feel that a dispute was worth the trouble. Consequently, the tougher tondos grew even bigger than the normal elephants and were about three times more dangerous. Oddly, there are more and more tondos around these days because no hunter wants to waste an expensive license on an animal with no ivory. Therefore, they live to breed and pass on their genetic propensity for tusklessness.

  I sat smoking and watching the herd, mentally going over our plan of attack. In the dry, hot breeze that blew into our faces, we could hear their mutterings and smell the acrid-sweet waft of their droppings. I waved an air
y diagram, and Langeveldt nodded that he and Ricetime would come in from the left while Silent and I took the right flank in a short pincer movement. If possible, I would fire the first shot. Although we would normally provoke a charge from the herd leader and kill her immediately so the rest of the bunch would mill around while we executed them, I wanted to take no chance with the tondo and would try to drop her unawares with a side brain shot. I slipped the safety to the middle position for instant action, partially withdrew the bolt to check the chamber, and closed it again. I unsnapped the sling swivels and handed the leather strap to Silent. This was no place to get your rifle hung up on a piece of bush. We field-stripped the smokes and rose into a crouch, Bob and Ricetime moving silently off to the left, the white man flicking a quick thumbs-up sign for luck. I counted sixty seconds for them to get into position, then slid the safety to FIRE. As I began to move toward the herd, the giant Tondo loomed larger with each step.

  At fifteen yards I had a good angle on her, a clear shot at the line between eye and ear, slightly lower and closer to the ear. I had the front sight mated to the rear, perfectly lined up. The trigger crept slightly as I squeezed, and then suddenly all hell broke loose. She swung toward me with a bellow like a ruptured boiler, ears spread like billboards, her head waving high. As she charged, still trumpeting like a fury, I lowered the muzzle and touched off below her eyes, the slug impacting in a wallop of dried mud at the base of her trunk. She halted as if hitting a wall, and before she finished sinking in a rising mountain of dirt and dust, I ran up to her and paid the insurance with two more rounds in the chest. Instantly reloading the magazine, I started running into the herd as it erupted, jostling and shrieking, thick trunks high and twisting like immense, gray pythons in the choking dust. Over the thunder of pile driver feet and the terrified trumpeting, I could hear Langeveldt firing the .470—cool, spaced shots almost lost in the chaos of the slaughter.