“Yini lo skati?” I asked him, blearily squinting at my watch in the shadows.
“Skati ka fo busuku, Bwana,” he answered. Jesus! Four A.M. I had better get moving if we were to be in position before first light. I shivered into the shorts and bush jacket and stepped into the sockless shoes, almost bumping into Mason on his way to the chimbuzi. He muttered something sleepily about idiots and disappeared into the toilet hut. I had finished my third tea and, while he swilled some coffee, I checked the rifles, deciding to go back to the big guns. If we got a shot this morning, it would be barndoor stuff and the .375 and .404, with their express sights, would be better over the dimly lit short range with their express sights. If necessary, their big slugs would also penetrate water better.
Leaving the hunting car a full half-mile back on the track, I led the way toward the bluff in the velvety darkness, our bare legs and shoes soaked by the dew-wet grass before we had walked ten yards. A trio of waterbuck clattered off, caught in the slender beam of the electric torch, and an elephant could be heard ripping tender branches from a grove a hundred yards to our right. Somewhere in the night a hyena snickered and was taunted by the yapping of a black-backed jackal. Eyes sharp for the reflected sapphire of snakes’ eyes, we sneaked closer until we were only fifty yards from the bluff. I kept the beam well covered even though I realized that the crocs on the carcass were deep in the hill’s defilade and could not see it. After another twenty feet, I eased it off completely, slipping slowly forward in complete silence, the sugary river sand hissing beneath the soles of our shoes. Dully, from ahead, came the disgusting, watery sounds of crocs feeding on the hippo—the tearing rip of meat, the muffled clash of teeth, the hollow, retching, gagging sound of swallowing the big, bloody lumps of flesh. Ten feet from where I guessed the lip of the bluff was, Paul and I squatted and froze in the darkness awaiting enough light to slip up for a shot if the man-eater was there. If.
With maddening slowness, like a low fire heating the inside of a heavy steel barrel, the gun-metal sky began to blush. As we waited, cramped, listening to the crocs, the light swelled from mango to cherry to carmine tinged with thick veins of wavy gold and teal-wing blue. My outstretched hand began to take shape before my face. I nudged Paul to move with me to the edge of the overhang. The river was still black, but after a few seconds the darker blob of the hippo carcass loomed dimly, pale feathers of water visible as dozens of crocs swirled and fought over the meat. Behind a light screen of grass on the lip, I got Paul into a sitting position, his rifle eased up to his shoulder. Seconds oozed by like cold caramel as the dawn strengthened, the bulk of the hippo more discernible. I thanked our luck that we were on the west bank and would not be skylined by the growing light.
As I stared through the felt-gray shadows toward the water, smaller dark shapes began to take form and outline; then I saw one, partially behind the hippo, that was much larger then the others. I felt a thrill of triumph as I realized that our plan had worked. He was there, just thirty yards away, unaware that in a few seconds lightning was going to strike. A few more seconds and Paul could kill him. My stomach tightened as the giant length moved, then again. God, no! He was returning to the water with the dawn. The loglike outline moved again, two feet closer to deep water and safety, his head already in the river. Couldn’t Paul see him? Didn’t he understand that in a few seconds he’d be gone forever? Frustration coursed through me. I could not risk whispering. A tiny sound snicked through the half-blackness, and I realized it was the safety of the .404. Shoot, I willed him. Shoot now! He’s still moving! He’s going to … A yard of orange flame roared from Paul’s muzzle, a brilliant stab of lightning that blinded me as the thunderclap of the shot washed over my arms and face. I was deafened, great, bright spots exploding wherever I focused.
“I think I got him,” Paul yelled over the ringing of my ears. Twice more, the big bore rifle fired as Mason opened up on the spot where the croc had been. Slowly, my vision began to clear with the growing dawn, the orange blossoms of light fading. I stared down at the dead hippo, my hope welling up as I saw the tremendous, dark shape beside it, half in the water. The great tail waved feebly as a shudder passed through the killer, then all was still. Paul knelt and put his last shot through the man-eater’s skull. It was over.
Pounding each other’s back in congratulations, we half-fell down the sandy bank and walked across the sand bar to the bodies, the odor of the dead hippo already sickly in our nostrils. Behind us came Silent and Stomach, their hands covering their open mouths in polite astonishment, muttering the usual, “Eeehhh, eeehhh,” over and over. When two more men arrived, we were able to roll him onto dry land and examine him with mounting awe. Paul’s first shot had been perfect, taking out the rear half of the brain as he faced away and below us. The rest hadn’t mattered. One thing was for sure; he was the biggest croc I had ever seen up close, let alone killed. I put the tape on the two pegs we ran between snout and tail-tip, even though we couldn’t get the tail all the way straightened out. The third unrolling of my six-foot measure totaled fifteen feet, two and one-half inches! We all guessed him at over a ton, perhaps quite a bit more. Crocs are very dense and heavy for their size.
After almost an hour had passed, the entire village of Kangani arrived to revile the dead reptile by spitting on him and kicking him in impotent frustration for the death of the woman. When Silent made two long incisions in the side and cut the stomach wall, we all gagged. From the slimy mass of hippo meat and crushed bones, slid the putrefacted arm of a woman, a copper bangle still tightly in place, gleaming dully from the croc’s stomach acid.
Mason and I sat, smoking slowly in the warm sun, watching the men skin the man-eater and place what they could find of the woman in a plastic bag. Her head and one arm and shoulder were missing, as best I could tell. Somehow, the killing of the crocodile had felt anticlimactic, and I wondered if there wasn’t something more to the episode than a woman being eaten and a croc being killed. No, I finally decided, it was exactly that simple. It had been going on for a million years and would continue as long as there were people, crocodiles, and water. But, at least, I thought on the walk back to camp, that’s one Ngwenya who won’t be waiting.
7
Rhino
It was a typical midwinter afternoon in late July, the sun warm and bright, yet the shadows oddly chilly in the dry Zambian air, when we broke for water and a cigarette under a Brachystegia tree near a vast ocean of tall, brown grass. We had been walking for two hours, hoping to cut the fresh spoor of a herd of evasive roan antelope I knew to be in the area. My clients, an American and his nineteen-year-old son, plunked down gratefully and the rest of my six trackers, skinners, and gunbearers hunkered, wrapping black shag tobacco in scraps of newspaper and smoking them with a smell like a hotel fire. Silent, laid up with a bad bout of malaria, was back in camp, and I was using a young Senga tribesman local to the area as a guide to the region, since we were many miles from my normal hunting grounds.
We all heard it at the same time, a strange sound like a distant locomotive chuff-chuffing, then another joined with it. I felt a shiver of apprehension as it dawned on me what the sound was: rhino, and coming this way fast. We got to our feet, straining to locate the noise exactly, the thudding of thick, short feet now audible with occasional squeals, muffled by the grass. Grabbing the rifles of the Americans, I handed them to my men and started them climbing with a boost up the tree. We had no rhino license, and I didn’t want one of my buckos belting one of them in possible self-defense. I kept the .470 and got behind the wide trunk as my men dispersed similarly. Fifty yards away the grass waved wildly, stirring as the surface of the sea would just over the back of a couple of big sharks. As I watched from behind the tree, the grass exploded with a cow rhino, then a big bull, then yet another bull. The first bull had a nasty gore wound on his flank and the second began to overhaul him, slashing at his rump with his thick front horn. I held my breath as the cow thundered right by the tree, oblivious to our
presence, followed by the males, snorting and foaming, to disappear into the bush thirty yards away. I mentally wiped my brow at our near involvement and was about to step back into the open when there was a particularly savage snort and a shout of fear from somebody in the direction the rhinos had passed. I immediately ran into the cover, the big rifle ready, hoping to hell I wouldn’t have to use it.
As I got closer I could make out the form of a bull rhino dashing in figure eights around a buffalo thorn tree, in the very top of which was Charlie, the local guide. From twenty yards away, the rhino stopped and stared myopically at me, snuffling for my scent. Taking a chance before he took the initiative, I fired the first barrel between his front feet, stinging him with earth and pebbles from the slug. No good. He lowered his head and charged me with the speed of a polo pony. Close at hand was a climbable tree, so I took another chance and, holding carefully on the base of his second horn as he quartered toward me, I fired the second barrel. It caught the horn squarely and flattened the bull with the impact of the blow of 5,000 foot-pounds of bullet energy. In a few seconds he was back on his feet, wobbling around like a punch-drunk fighter until he finally took off straight through the bush and left for good.
When we got the party back together, I noticed that Charlie was not there, and we all went back to the tree where I had seen him roosting. When the rest of my men saw him, they collapsed with laughter, howling and rolling on the ground. In his haste to get away from the rhino, which had seen him and doubled back, he had chosen a very poor refuge. The buffalo thorn, or Umphafa as it’s called locally, is a solid mass of the cruelest thorns imaginable. Charlie, in his haste, hadn’t even noticed them on his way up; now it was a different story. Bleeding like a butchered hog, he couldn’t figure out a way back down through the barbed branches. Perhaps the essence of humor is the unexpected, and despite the fact that poor Charlie was obviously in pain and punctured like a pincushion, his ridiculous expression of misery soon had all of us laughing until the tears flowed. Finally, one of the men tossed him a panga, and he was able to clear his return partially, although he needed a quart of Mercurochrome by the time he reached terra firma once more. I saw the rhino with the shattered second horn a couple of times over the next few years, so he was no worse for wear from the incident.
* * *
Hunting in rhino country is rather like treading through an old minefield. If there is anything more innately stupid than a rhinoceros, then it has to be two of them. I cannot look at one without a wistful feeling for the days of yore, when he was a real game animal, a fair match for the flint-pointed javelins and arrows of our furry forbears. Today, he’s like an arthritic, old soldier, a one-too-many-fight boxer who is losing his battle for survival. He’s dimwitted right off the bottom of the scale, a nonachiever in the changing struggle for existence. As a legitimate member of the “Big Five,” he is marginal in the face of modern firearms. His only qualification for inclusion in that heady quintet is the fact that he can and will kill you.
The rhino has a very simple philosophy: If anything gets in your way, knock it down and gore it. In the heavy covers of central Africa, where it is not only possible but common to inadvertently bumble into a rhino, the intent of the bumbler has little influence on the rhino’s reaction. In fact, in the Luangwa Valley rhinos were by far the greatest threat as a species even when unwounded. They had been carefully protected for years in Northern Rhodesia and later Zambia until they had reached a local population density that made incautious poking around the boonies for other species very tricky fare. And, since hunters were limited to a total of five black rhino in a given country per year, the killing of one in self-defense became a nightmare of red tape and possible loss of one’s professional ticket. Ken Woolfrey, a hunter with whom I made several safaris, had to bust one under similar circumstances as mine above, shooting it from a matter of feet to prevent its killing him or one of his clients, Bob and Bim Gill of Florida. Jesus, but what a hassle he went through with formal hearings and the whole schmear. He was finally exonerated, but only just. I have been in on the killing of two legal rhinos, and frankly, they are the only critters that really give me a sense of sadness to hunt. Except in a charge, they are relatively easy to flatten with a bullet of proper size, and with the passing of each one, I have a terrible, hollow feeling of having smashed a priceless artifact.
The rhino’s biggest problem with staying on the program is his “horn.” From most ancient times, this weird mass of fused or agglutinated hair (not horn at all) has been attributed with a variety of supernatural talents. In medieval times a cup made of the stuff was considered to be able to indicate the presence of poison by turning the liquid milky. This has been poo-pooed by most writers, but I believe that it may have a solid basis in fact. Being a loose, animal substance, it could well be that certain of the more primitive poisons would indeed affect the horn, showing a reaction that impervious glass or pewter would not. Today the horn, which is not even attached to the bone beneath it but rides in strong, fleshy sockets attached to the skin itself, is still considered a powerful aphrodisiac in much of the Far East. Powdered, it sells for astonishing prices in Oriental apothecaries. I’ve tried it myself, but found no reaction other than, shall we say, the normal under circumstances in which such a substance might be called upon. Both sexes of the rhino have horns, usually two per customer, the front commonly the longer although there are some individuals with equal-length horns or, rarely, the second one longer. The female horns tend to be longer although considerably thinner than those of the bulls. Particularly in east Africa, poaching over recent years has hit the rhino harder than any other species, with the possible exception of the elephant; yet the elephant has much greater populations than the rhino to start with.
The rhino, if we want to bite the bullet and face it, is an unsuccessful species in the face of modern encroachment by man. Even a hundred years ago, he was very common over nearly all of east and south Africa, but as soon as the blacks got guns, he was one of the first to start to wane. As a species, the animal will not become extinct because we have enough of them under management in game parks and reserves, yet the familiar sight of lone bulls and small family groups dotting the bushscape with archaic regularity is becoming a thing of the past.
When white men first came across African rhinos, they took the differences between individual animals to indicate that there were many species rather than just two. The more common is the “black” rhino, who is perhaps 1,000 pounds smaller than his cousin the “white” rhino, although infinitely more dangerous and aggressive. Of course, both “black” and “white” rhinos are the same color, the “white” coming from the Boer word for “wide” (weit), which referred to the different structure of the mouths of the two types. The black has a pointed, prehensile upper lip, which suits his needs as a browser, whereas the white has the flat muzzle of the grazer. Because of their relative docility and tractability, the white rhinos took the brunt of much of the early, indiscriminate shooting of the first explorers and their armed gangs. In fact, so severe was the shooting pressure that in the 1850s, the white or Mahoho rhinos was considered by William Cotton Oswell, one of the early hunters in central Africa, to be extinct. Happily, it was rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century and now enjoys fair numbers in controlled habitats in parts of Rhodesia and South Africa.
The word “unpredictable” applies well to most of Africa’s dangerous game, but the black rhino certainly demonstrates this trait to a greater degree than any other animal. It’s likely that the problem lies in their very poor eyesight as much as with their rattle-brained IQs. I cannot recall a single instance of meeting a rhino that suspected my presence in which the animal did not advance, often in a series of half-circles, to test the wind with their excellent noses. The slightest sound, such as the click of a camera or rifle safety, will be heard and will precipitate a full charge. The rhino is gifted with astonishing speed and incredible grace for an animal that may weigh three tons, the se
cond largest of the land animals. I have always enjoyed reading the fanciful renderings of people like Jean-Pierre Hallet in his Congo Kitabu, in which he smugly tells us how simple it is to sidestep a rhino’s charge. It may make nice reading, but this is one boy who knows better! A full-charging rhino can stop in his own length and change direction faster than a mongoose. If you don’t want to get hammered, you had better get up a tree, throw him a jacket or other piece of clothing to gore, or kill him. If you are armed, rhinos rarely follow through with a charge in the face of fire. A horn shot will turn most charges and a shot over the head or into the ground often will do the same.
Of course, it would be rididulous to presume that all advancing rhinos are actually warming up for a charge. The problem is that you just can’t tell; probably the rhino doesn’t know itself what it’s going to do. If bluff tactics don’t work, you’d better start measuring some handy trees.
The utter destructive power of a rhino’s charge has been exhibited frequently in east Africa, where several railroad locomotives have been attacked and occasionally derailed! In most cases the rhino was killed—small compensation to the railway company. For the most part, the rhino is a tosser, lacking the freelance finesse of the elephant. I have the impression from experience that they tend to close their eyes a few feet from their target, although it may be that they are just squinting with concentration like a rifleman over his sights. At any rate, if one connects, you are probably not going to be very happy with the situation at all. Colonel Patterson, the great bwana who bungled his way to success with the coolie-eating lions of Tsavo, mentions a case that, if true (and I see no reason for him to fabricate here when having been fastidious with the veracity of his other tales), unquestionably accounted for the largest loss of human life by a rhinoceros of a single go. Twenty-one slaves were chained together by the neck on their way to the coast to be shipped. Passing through a thick stretch of bush, a rhino boiled out of some cover and spitted the middle man of the string, the impact of the charge breaking the necks of the remaining twenty men.
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