Since the African and Asian leopards are identical, one sometimes wonders why the Asians seem to have run up bigger scores of killed or maimed humans than the Africans. I suspect that the answer lies in several factors, including the fact that the human population concentration is lighter in Africa coupled with the fact that most Africans are habitually armed in game country. Also, Africa is broken up without the common government found in Asian areas; therefore, and also because of remoteness, a substantial proportion of successful man-eating attacks is not recorded.
Some leopards, especially consistent man-eaters, become as stuck on human flesh as do lions, although this is not normally the case. A classic example of the horror these animals can create is well woven through the history of one of the worst, the Rudraprayag leopard. In the 1920s, when Jim Corbett was hunting in the Himalayan foothills of his beloved Kumaon in northern India, this leopard actually interrupted and terrified 50,000 Indians who were on pilgrimage in the area. That it preferred human meat to any other was horribly demonstrated in the events of a single dark night in Uttar Pradesh State.
An orphaned goatherd boy (shades of the Little Match Girl!) was sleeping with his animals in a hovel in a small mountain village. To keep his charges from stepping on him as he slept huddled on the dirt floor, he had erected a flimsy barrier across the hut. The leopard, passing outside, caught the boy’s scent mixed with that of the goats and, with incredible strength, tore the door from its hinges. With complete singleness of purpose he climbed over and through the terrified goats to reach the boy, whom he killed and partially ate on the spot. Of course, it would have been much simpler to just grab one of the goats, but he clearly preferred the boy.
This same Rudraprayag leopard again demonstrated his sweet tooth for Homo sapiens, this time with Jim Corbett himself. The hunter had lashed thick bundles of thorn around the base of a tree in which he was waiting at night for the cat to come for a bait he had placed for it. Corbett was standing on the bases of the bundles, about fifteen feet up the tree in the pitch dark when the tree began to shake. The leopard was trying to knock Corbett from his precarious perch, completely ignoring the goat staked out for him. Despite the several unfruitful shots that the colonel fired, the leopard, with remarkable boldness, returned many times during the night, determined to get the man, but was unable to clear the thorn barrier. Corbett lived to settle accounts with the cat several months and many lives later. In all, the Rudraprayag leopard was credited with 125 human kills.
That leopards love to kill, often for the sheer hell of it, has been shown with crystal clarity on several bloody occasions. The weasel-in-the-henhouse syndrome surfaced in one case on the Ruvuma River near Masaguru, Tanzania, where a big Tom slaughtered, over a short period of time, twenty-six women and children, none of whom was missing an ounce of flesh. George Rushby, who killed it, reckoned it must have developed some weird Translyvanian craving for human blood. In the 1940s, when Zambia was still Northern Rhodesia, fifteen tribesmen were bitten to death through the throat by a leopard who simply slaughtered them, then walked away. Nobody ever caught up with that one.
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Dawn was a tangerine hint somewhere over the great Makarikari salt pan to the east when I tossed off the dregs of the tea, stuck some biltong into my pockets, and began to thumb the dull, brass cases of the British SSG buckshot loads into the Winchester Model 12 pump gun. I have always favored shotguns for close work with thin-skinned, light-boned, dangerous game like leopards. Close charges are so unbelievably fast and unexpected that a rifle could be less than useless. With the plug out of the magazine and one shell up the spout, the old tooth-scarred scatter gun could spew as much lead as a submachine gun if I held the trigger back and fired it from the hip like a trombone player gone mad, slamming the firing pin into the primer on the return stroke of the pump. In case I had a shot out of range for the shotgun, I decided to take along the .470 Nitro, whose twin barrels held more than 10,000 pounds of muzzle-energy persuasion. Carrying my twelve-pound rifle balanced across my shoulder by the barrels, I picked up the dry blood spoor and, with Debalo and Simone, eased into the enveloping bush.
Debalo is a Bushman—at least mostly so. Simone also has some of the blood, but he is much darker and closer to civilization than Debalo. Of all the fascinating ethno-racial groups of Africa, I find none so exotic and interesting as these people of the most remote areas. Probably the oldest racial group in Africa, if not the world, Bushmen once roamed in small, nomadic bands over most of the continent until the conquering Bantu advanced from the forest regions of the equator and drove them slowly into the vastness of their desert retreat, real estate so worthless that even their enemies didn’t want it. Living today in small family and clan groups in the desert and part of the Okavango Swamp—not a swamp at all but an immense delta of crystal lakes and channels formed by the only major river in the world that doesn’t flow to the sea—they are on the decline through interbreeding with the Bantu and continued encroachment on their territory by black and white alike.
In appearance Bushmen at first give an Oriental impression, with slanted, almond eyes and a yellowish, apricot skin tone. They are usually short, around five feet for the men, with tight, peppercorn hair and flattish faces. Yet, there are other characteristics that set them completely apart from any other of the earth’s peoples. The men maintain a semierection all their lives, and it is said that many of the women are born with a natural skin flap or apron that covers their genitals. The women are also subject, in times of plenty, to a unique condition called steatopygia, which is an ability to store fat in the buttocks until they reach the point where they resemble the afterdeck of the Andrea Doria. The Bushman language is one of the most difficult, having been mastered by only a very few whites, although the tsks, clicks, pops, smacks, and clacks are alive and doing fine in most Nguni-based tongues such as Zulu and Xhosa and are a basis of Fanagalo, the lingua franca of southern Africa.
Despite stories of the feared Bushman featherless, jointed arrows, poisoned with a concoction of beetle grubs, these little people are mostly very shy and inoffensive. In fact, a rough translation of the name of one of the desert tribes, the Kung, means “It’s Only Me.” Usually, in a family group, there will be one or two men who are responsible for hunting, and they are among the finest trackers imaginable. Civilized man has credited all Bushmen with great hunting skills, but, in truth, most are merely gatherers and scavengers, unable to track a wounded hippo through a fresh snowbank. I have usually had problems hiring pure Bushmen as trackers because, living so close to the land, they would only work long enough to earn some beloved tobacco and, after a few days, be gone without warning.
If you think there is racism in southern Africa between black and white, you ain’t seen nuthin’ until you watch the attitude of a Bantu toward a full or half-bred Bushman. Despised and hated as an inferior, the Bushman has one of the hardest lots in Africa today. In Botswana, it is cause for justifiable homicide to call another man a Bushman, and it is actually against the law! Incredibly, many Bushmen were murdered like animals for sport by early whites with rifles. I have been told by old-timers that some of this still went on into the 1930s when a strict law was passed that, in effect, classified them as certifiably human.
The Okavango Bushmen belong to a group known locally as Masarwa. They are not as pure as the desert tribes to the south, having intermarried to some extent with the black Batawana tribesmen of the area, which has resulted in a wide variety of skin tones and facial features. The most unusual-looking Masarwa I ever saw was Debalo. An odd, pale orange in color, he had the pronounced Oriental eyes of his mother, yet the height of his Batawana grandfather. A slender man, he had a reputation as a great hunter and runner. This became apparent one day, the same day I hired him. I was off looking for a wildebeeste for my staff rations and saw him trotting alone along a grassy plain. As I watched him through the glasses, he flushed a fleet serval cat, which he immediately began chasing with a short axe. Running
like a cheetah, he overhauled the cat and brained it with one deadly short throw, a feat I would never have believed possible. When I found that he could speak some Tswana, the local language, I hired him on the spot as a tracker, a move I was never to regret.
As we entered the chest-high tangles of bushveldt, I stopped to study the pug marks of the cat where he had sneaked up before his charge. He was a very big Tom, Debalo and I judged by the spoor, perhaps as much as 160 pounds and seven feet, three inches of velvet-sheathed murder that could take a man apart faster than you could pull off a sock. Debalo went ahead of me in his characteristic, low crouch, eyes strictly on the track while I covered the front, over his back, and the sides. In case of a charge he would fall flat, clearing my field of fire, a technique that had worked quite well on wounded lions twice that season already. Simone, a powerful and bush-wise young Batawana-Masarwa who had been one of the rising stars in the local poaching industry until he spent a year in the Kingi Georgi Hoteli, or whatever they called the local slammer in Gaberones, brought up the rear, his anthracite skin an odd contrast to Debalo’s. I watched the early sun glittering on the fresh, spiderweb hone marks of his spearhead.
The Bushman had tracked for more than two miles, stopping three times to point with a stem of grass to where the leopard had put the boy down to shift his fanghold, then lifted him again like a house cat with a dead mole. Except for a few tiny smears on the grass and the dry, gray bushes, the blood had stopped, only Debalo’s hooded, primitive eyes and intuition picking out the trail through the barbwire entanglements of thorn and scrub. Then, he stopped, pointing at a splash of fluffy green 1,000 yards ahead that was floating in the growing heat mirage over the silvery toupee of bushveldt, a deeply-shaded grove of sausage trees. “Kaha, Morena,” he whispered in Tswana. “He will be over there, Lord.” The lizards racing around in my guts made me believe he was right. When Debalo tracked leopard, he didn’t think like one, he was a leopard.
Softly, we crept to within 300 yards of the grove. At the edge of a tall termite heap I carefully glassed each tree with the little eight-by-thirty binoculars, looking through the gaps in the thin bush ahead. I probed each dark cranny of shadowy limbs for the giveaway of a lolling tail tip, but there seemed to be no sign of life at all, which further convinced me that the man-eater was, indeed, lying up in the trees. There should have been birds and monkeys. He had to be there, I thought; his trail had led directly to the place. Rifle ready, I inched forward a few more yards and my heart fell as a flowing dapple of ebony and amber drifted down the trunk of a big tree in an oily-smooth movement, then disappeared into the high grass like ground fog. “Christ,” I said between clenched teeth, “Blew it.” Our chance for a shot at the killer unawares as he lay up, digesting his ghoulish meal, was gone, but in spades. Yet, we might not have spooked him too badly; he might not have even associated us with the dead child. We moved closer, glassing the trees until I caught the flash of sunlight on a drop of dark blood, falling slowly to splat on the ground under the tree. Finally, I picked out the boy’s body, wedged tightly in an upper crotch, well obscured by foliage. Most of his buttocks and part of his side had been eaten away, I noted, trying to keep my breakfast from rising above my throat. Motioning the men back, we retreated to consider the situation.
The only chance now, we all agreed over a short smoke, was for me to wait in ambush for the big bastard to show up to finish his meal. There was an off chance that it might be before dark. He had seen us, I was pretty sure, but if he had had the boldness to kill the child right in our encampment, it probably meant he hadn’t been hunted and had very little wariness of man. In this remote part of Botswana, Ngamiland, he may never have even seen a person before last night. Quietly, hoping the leopard was still in the thick stuff and could not see us, we went back toward the tree until I noticed a small depression at the base of an old termite heap, probably an abandoned ant-bear hole that had caved in. Lying flat in it, I could see the dead boy about fifty yards away. I didn’t dare to disturb the area with the construction of a proper blind or hide, so this would have to do. Taking the light jacket of camouflage netting from my shooting bag over Simone’s shoulder, I put it on and pulled the hood over my head. There was also a flap of mosquito netting material that hung down and effectively covered my face from shine. Crushing a few lumps of termite earth, my men smeared it all over my bare legs and shorts until I looked just the color of the heap. I lay down in what I fervently hoped wouldn’t prove to be a shallow grave, and the men covered me over with a light layer of branches and dead grass, just leaving a wide hole for frontal vision. I took a last, deep swig at the water bottle, checked the rifle and shotgun, and instructed the men to make plenty of chatter leaving. Leopards don’t count too well, and I hoped he might get the idea we had all left together. Talking loudly, they walked back down the spoor the way we had come, leaving me with an odd, hollow feeling of loneliness.
The long, hot, afternoon hours crawled by like centuries as I scanned the tree and grass line for movement. Sweat sheeted into my eyes like battery acid, but I dared not move to wipe my face or shift away from the pain that was growing like twin, glowing logs along the spine of my lower back. At least, my mind wandered, the tsetse aren’t bad. Attracted by motion, they hadn’t noticed my camouflaged lump lying in the hole. I tried not to look at the face of the boy, his body now aswarm with irridescent green bottleflies. My body as stiff as a sjambok whip, I watched the sun start to slide down the slice of cobalt sky toward the treetops, the lengthening shadows reaching out to me across the hot, sandy scrub like an incoming tide. I stared at the bush, the grass, the trees, the patches of open ground until my eyes ached like hot, gritty marbles. I had left my wristwatch with Debalo, having found out the hard way how far away the bugging devices that are a leopard’s ears could pull in the tiny, metallic ticking, but decided it was nearly five o’clock. I started involuntarily as a troop of white-faced Verbit monkeys scampered into the grove, then erupted into shrieking, howling chaos as they saw the leopard’s kill. Minutes later, a sextet of red-necked francolin toddled their way by like bob-white quail, pecking only a few feet from my face, frozen into granite. If I flushed them, I might as well have blown a whistle and fired a couple of flares to let the man-eater know I was there. With a low sigh of relief I watched them move off into the grass twenty yards away and vanish.
The sun was at the edge of the trees, now, flashing copper and crimson spears through the leaves. I cursed myself for not having drunk more water and was fighting down my starvation for a cigarette when, suddenly, I knew he was there. I felt my hackles rise like a fighting cock’s, and the blood began to pound in my ears as I held my breath, listening. It was the tiniest, dry, snakelike rasp on my immediate left, the most minute trickle of dirt slithering down the side of the dead termite heap into the branches that covered me. Adrenalin pumped through my arteries as I caught the lapping of a shadow across the dirt in front of me. It was the head and shoulders of a tremendous leopard, actually standing on my ant hill, in front of and above me to the left. I felt the smooth steel of the .470 under my hand and the shotgun paralleling it under the layer of dead grass. No way. Too close. He was within six or seven feet at the most. With my slightest movement or breath he would chop me into Cat Chow before I could ever cover him with one of the guns. He stood there for perhaps thirty years before I realized he was probably looking for me! He had completely faked me out by circling the whole grove and coming in from behind me, where the long grass covered him, instead of the far side, where I had expected. Only luck placed me just downwind so he didn’t scent me, although I must have smelled like a locker room in Yankee Stadium after a doubleheader on the Fourth of July after the hours I had spent in that hole. Basically, I felt like a gift-wrapped salami at the zoo. Then the shadow disappeared like an undernourished wraith, as silent as a puff of smoke as it moved across the ground in a short leap. I realized that if I was going to have a chance at him while it was still light, it would have to be
now or never. Infinitely preferring never, I decided on now.
In an explosion of flying branches and grass, I rolled stiffly to my feet, screaming the first thing that came to mind, certainly unprintable, counting on the shock effect of my voice to confuse the man-eater for the second I would need to round the termite hill and dust him off with the shotgun. As I cleared it, I was astonished to find the ground empty, not a trace of the big cat. Safety off, the gun pushed well back on my hip so Ingwe couldn’t come between me and the muzzle, I ran forward into the grass, trying to head him off. I have never been noted for my intelligence.
Fifteen yards away there was a streak of movement as something flitted between two thick clumps of thorn bush. Instantly I fired twice, the shots blending almost into one as the big pellets sleeted through the cover in a shower of clipped debris. Silence. Before the second, smoking hull pinged on the ground, I had the bush covered, finger on the trigger, slipping forward with something less than confidence. Was there a small swish of grass, or was that just the crash of the shots still ringing in my ears? I took another step toward the grayish, yellow clump and he erupted, catching me in midstride, a hurtling, gold and black blur of whitish claws longer than shark hooks and long, very long, yellow teeth floating straight at the bridge of my nose. He was six feet from me when the shotgun went off and I saw the concentrated charge of buckshot smash into his outstretched right leg near the shoulder. He actually swung in the air from the impact of the shot charge as I tried to work the pump; but I was too slow, as his side and pelvis caromed into the muzzle of the gun and caught me across the hips. I went down, scared fit to wet my pants, the shotgun twisting painfully in my hand, the trigger guard dislocating my right forefinger as I tried to shove at the cat with my left hand. On my knees, I finished pushing the pump forward, and, for the longest half-second on record, we stared into each other’s eyes across three feet of Kalahari gussu sand. He started to snake his hind legs under him, the pellet holes where I had clipped him with my first two shots bloody and covered with wet dirt. The shotgun fired again, the burst of lead like a solid chain ripping into his upper chest at the base of his neck. He looked at me, made a low, guttural sound, and sank down, his head resting on his forepaws like some Great Hound on a sabbatical straight from hell. The lights went out of his amber, dilated eyes, and he was dead. I drew the pump slowly back, ejected the shell, and clicked it shut. A final shot blew a fist-sized hole just under the last. That was one son of a bitch I wasn’t about to let get up.
Death in the Long Grass Page 12