A discussion of the large constrictor snakes such as the python could fill most of another book this size. Like so much to do with snakes, there has been no dearth of misinformation and hairy tales generated by travelers as well as misinformed “experts.” African pythons do reach very large size—up to the thirty-two feet mentioned by the very reliable and experienced Bernhard Grzimek for the rock python, although the biggest I have seen was about eighteen feet.
It would seem that not all tales of man-eating snakes are necessarily so much fiction; a few cases appear to be genuine, especially in the situation when the victim has been a woman or child. As Grzimek so accurately points out in Among the Animals of Africa, giant snakes do not kill by “crushing their prey to a pulp” as much fiction tells us, but by asphyxia, the prevention of chest expansion so critical to the breathing function. Also, no constrictor snake coils about its prey without first obtaining a solid grip with its jaws, which are studded with six layers of back-slanted teeth as effective as barbed wire or fish hooks. Therefore, if there exists any potential danger with the python, it’s that of a very nasty bite and possible later infection. That even a huge snake would attack a grown man unprovoked for the purpose of eating him is so remote as to rank with death by meteorite. It’s possible and it has happened, but I wouldn’t lose much sleep over the matter on your next safari.
9
Underrated Killers
The most disconcerting thing about living and hunting in remote African regions is the mathematical fact that you have to make so many right decisions to stay healthy, whereas it requires just one thin slice of bad luck or simple indiscretion to get yourself crippled or dead. In the long run the odds have an annoying way of winning out, not an especially comforting consideration to wake up to each morning, and a hunter, the longer he hunts, has more and more unfortunate friends each year to reinforce the validity of the hypothesis.
Odds are tricky, shifty little rascals. If you are going to make a living cropping elephants or hunting lions, it’s understandable to expect that one day you may run into that particular lion or elephant who is the personal representative of Kismet. Okay, that’s reasonable. But, somehow it just doesn’t seem fair to be so careful around the obvious dangers and then have Fate pull a switchblade one fine morning when you find yourself trapped between a Land Rover body and the slashing hooves of a screaming, biting, kicking, lousy zebra who was supposed to be dead and wasn’t, as a pal of mine found out a couple of years ago to the tune of six months on his back. Or, have a wrist-thick sliver of steel-hard, dried mopane wood somehow flip up under your car and impossibly come right through the metal floor like a lance, as it did through another friend’s leg. Or have a cocoon half-blind you when putting on spare glasses without checking them, driving spiky filaments deep into your pupil, as happened to Peter Hankin in 1969. Or be bitten by the fatal tsetse, the fate of Johnny Blacklaws. I, too, have learned the price of vigilance—more than 300 stitches, one cut femoral artery, and three severed tendons repaired with silver wire. All stupid, all useless. But I never got severely caught by a “dangerous” animal, which means any animal. They’re all dangerous if they get a chance and you’re just as dead from a bushbuck horn as an elephant’s tusk.
The only thing more abundant in Africa than life is death. It takes a thousand forms, each of infinite variety as opposite as the slashing lunge of a crocodile or the lingering tragedy of the bilharzia snail fluke. It walks, crawls, creeps, flies, swims, and runs in untold disguises, but in no shape is it so brazen, so completely polished, so jaw-snappingly efficient and universally loathed as in the Cape hunting dog or wild dog, Lycaon pictus. Even the great cats are but casually respected by their prey, who merely keep a distance just past the danger point. Only the presence of the wild dog in thick bush country creates the mindless horror of death unique among predators.
* * *
It was tea time at Khwaai Lodge, at the edge of the great Okavango Swamp. My wife and I were relaxing under the tremendous Ngamo fig tree, on the stone terrace that had been built around the base. As we chatted with Lassie Allen, who with her husband, Jan, ran the lodge at the time, we watched the constant stream of sable, impala, wildebeest, baboons, wart hogs, and other animals filing down to drink at the artificial pan we had created by sinking a bore hole and hooking up a pump which provided the only water for some miles at the height of the dry season. Over the months it had come to support a sizable population of assorted critters, most of whom were quite used to the lodge and reasonably tame.
As we sat there in the cool of the late afternoon, a sudden shiver seemed to run through the herds, a signal we could not detect. Then, in an instant, every one of the several hundred antelopes swung about to face the thick bush bordering the vlei some 300 yards away. I grabbed my binoculars in curiosity and turned them on the area. From the distant shadows movement flagged, and a small herd of impala burst out onto the plain, racing and jumping in soaring bounds straight at us. Forty yards behind them a dozen wild dogs, big-eared and brindled, streamed in their dust, eating up the distance with inexorable certainty. We stared, open mouthed, as the moving tableau grew closer and one of the impala ewes with a half-grown calf at foot was wedged away from the rest of the herd, eight of the wild dogs swerving after her as four others continued straight for us, singling out a yearling for the touch of death. Fifty yards from the terrace, one of the lead dogs closed on the calf, snapped for a hind leg and dissolved into a boil of dust as it pulled the little fellow down. Realizing the inevitable end of her calf, the mother stopped short, another dog whipping past her in a twisting turn. In a split second the others were on her, her stomach and intestines spilling out, ripped into red flags and partially eaten even before she fell over, swarmed by the powerful, rending jaws. Within heartbeats, she was literally torn completely apart, legs, body, and head, some of the wild dogs dashing in different directions with scarlet chunks of her still-twitching flesh staining the grass. I tore my gaze away to the other four, pursuing the young ram, who sailed right past the edge of the verandah, smack at Jan Allen who was reading in a hammock along the sunny side of the building. To our astonishment, the desperate impala leaped straight over the hammock, startling the half-dozing Jan half to death. As it hammered off behind the lodge, the wild dogs also cleared the side of the building and braked to a screeching halt practically at Jan’s feet. He fetched them one hell of a shout, and they withdrew a few yards, making squeaking sounds. We were completely stunned, a hundred yards from the nearest rifle. Jan shouted again, clapped his hands, and took a step forward, to our unspeakable relief, while they turned and trotted past the porch and back out onto the vlei, which was as empty as a desert but for a lingering haze of hoof dust and the other dogs.
“Get your bloody camera, man,” shouted Jan, gesturing to my forgotten Pentax on a nearby chair. Not knowing what he had in mind, I cocked it and without thinking followed him off the terrace. To my growing panic, he was striding big as life straight for the still-feeding pack! As we got closer and closer, I began to wonder if old Jan had been into the aftershave lotion because he started making a wooo-wooo sound like a faraway train, softly under his breath. I should, in retrospect, have realized that he knew what he was doing, since he had been chief game warden of one of Kenya’s largest national parks before coming to Botswana. However, the idea of walking unarmed on purpose into a pack of feeding wild dogs (a 35mm. single-lens reflex camera being, in my humble opinion, a bit light for dangerous game) was not and is still not my concept of the apogee of applied prudence. But, what the hell. I couldn’t exactly turn tail in front of the memsahib, and so started woooing myself.
To my considerable interest, we were not eaten on the spot, although we approached to within about fifteen feet of the pack, which was somewhat involved tugging and chewing sundry tatters of the late lady impala’s anatomy, the calf being long gone. It was one hell of an odd feeling standing there, not overly helped by a close-up demonstration of those terrible jaws at
work. After five minutes among the wild dogs, during which they polished up the remains and drifted away, after giving us the once-over balanced on their hind legs, I snapped off a whole roll of film of the killers. They had treated us with more curiosity than either fright or aggression, not especially unlike the reception one would expect in a bad but cheap restaurant. I later gave the roll of film to a “friend” to have it processed and, since I never saw it again, presume the pictures were pretty exceptional. I assure you I never went to the trouble to obtain others like them, although Jan said he had pulled that stunt several times before.
The presence or pursuit of wild dogs can produce extraordinary behavior in some animals, completely eliminating their fear of man. There are many confirmed cases of animals hunted by wild dogs approaching a man to within inches, obviously using him as a bodyguard. After quite a few years in wild dog country, I finally saw a case of this in Zambia when a semitame, old wildebeest bull named Charlie actually walked into my safari camp at Nyampala, chased by a pack of wild dogs. I shouldn’t say I witnessed the event, but my nonhunting camp staff told me about it in great wonderment when I returned home from the field that day. Old Charlie had walked right up to the kitchen within a few feet of the cook and a waiter, who came outside and saw the wild dogs. They drove them off with clods of earth and Charlie hung around all afternoon until nearly dark, then went back to the bush.
I have seen wild dogs kill a variety of prey on perhaps six or seven occasions and their bewildering efficiency never fails to gag you. Whereas they will tear a smaller animal like a young impala completely apart in seconds, the slaughter of something the size of a zebra is an even more chilling spectacle. A large part of the basic wild dog technique, unlike that of the cats, who have claws to hang on, is to pull alongside the luckless animal and with a razor snap of their jaws bite through the flank or the thin skin near the genitals, exposing the internal organs, which fall or are pulled out and eaten. Obviously, nothing tends to travel very far after a dose of this treatment. In the process of one kill I saw, that of a zebra stallion, the lead dog grabbed it by the nose or lip while the others disemboweled it, not a cowardly act as zebras have tremendous fighting fangs.
Depending upon whom you listen to, or what terrain they are hunting, the estimate of percentage of successful hunts by wild dogs varies from about 50 percent to a reported 25 of 28 tries in Ngorongoro Crater in Kenya. Except for the case at Khwaai, where man interfered, I’ve never seen an unsuccessful wild dog hunt.
It’s quite likely that animals caught by wild dogs and dragged down are in a state of terror-induced anesthetization as they have never, in my observation, shown indications of pain, although they are literally being eaten alive for the first minute or longer of their ordeal, living slabs of meat ripped out of the backsides and bellies wolfed before their glazing eyes. Death is normally mercifully quick, but there have been many accounts of animals living as long as fifteen minutes, later displaying the unquestionable symptoms of agony as the shock wore off. This sort of performance doesn’t do a hell of a lot for the sensitivities of the Disney crowd.
I was surprised by the comments and photographs of Hugo and Jane van Lawick-Goodall, who have done extensive research on the wild dog in East Africa, showing that in their open, clear plains country, prey animals do not flee at the first sign of wild dogs, but treat the intruders much like lions. This is not the case in my experience in the thick miombo and woodlands of central Africa. Possibly because visibility is so much lower here, a mere whiff of wild dog is tantamount to a bomb warning. It may be that they can not keep a watchful eye on the wild dogs as they can on the plains. And, after all, an animal would have to run over the horizon to get out of sight with the type of visibility in Serengeti or Ngorongoro.
I find it interesting that any visitor who has seen African wild dogs kill is invariably affronted, revolted by them basically because of their extreme, somehow detached skill and the heart-wrenching violence of their methodology. Of course, this is just another example of humans labeling animals with supposed virtues or faults we value or despise in ourselves. On this reasoning lions are “noble,” elephants “wise.” Koala bears and bushbabies are “cuddly.” Wild dogs are “evil.” Well, so it goes.
In actuality, wild dogs have an extraordinarily complex and formal social structure, rich in elaborate behavior mechanisms and abstract ceremony. They are unquestionably very intelligent and much of their ritual has to do with submission and dominance of individuals arrived at by nonviolent means. They are one of the only wild mammal predators that will permit young pups to feed on a kill before adults do. Yet, for all their brightness, unless they have been shot at or molested, they display almost no distrust of man, which has led to the out-of-hand slaughter of untold thousands of them at the judgment of rifle-wielding idiots who believe they are saving other soft-eyed creatures from horrible death and thereby, through some hazy logic, assisting the balance of nature.
It is very good news for man that there has never been a confirmed case of man-eating among wild dogs. This strikes me as singularly strange because their diet includes any meat they can catch, even adult lions according to reliable sources in various parts of Africa. This being the case, what is it about man that incurs this gastronomic snub? It just might be that one of the oldest theories of the success of man, who has no natural physical weapons, is true: he simply smells too bad to eat to a sensitive creature like a wild dog. We’re ripe enough from any animal’s viewpoint, but you can bet that the early prototypes of our model were surely no bunch of lilacs! There have been a lot of reports of people supposedly treed by packs of wild dogs, but the fact remains that nobody has ever reliably been reported as eaten. I suspect the mere presence of the dogs was interpreted as an attack rather than their usual curiosity, and you may be assured that the story lost nothing in the retelling.
The wild dog, because man in his infinite wisdom has declared him unworthy of life, is much reduced in numbers all over Africa. Over the last ten years, however, a few people have seen the light, and protection has been provided in many countries. That’s good news. For my money, he’s one of the great reminders of the facts of life in Africa: life feeds on death in the exact ratio that death feeds on life. One is the other and it is only one’s viewpoint that varies.
* * *
The sound of Africa is not the thundering rumble of a distant lion, nor is it the hollow trumpet of a bull elephant. If Africa has a voice, it is the hyena. Deep in the blackness of night it gropes through the bush in rising and falling echoes that come from nowhere, yet everywhere, insane choruses of whoops, chortles, chuckles, giggles, shrieks, and howls that have a way of reaching out into the guts of a man as he sits by a lonely, dying fire and of raising the hackles of ancient, long-forgotten apprehension. From the first, faraway wooooo-uppp of the pack gathering to the sniggering chitter of the kill, the hyena is telling you something you don’t want to be reminded of: you’re just meat after all and your day will come.
It may be the reluctance of man to admit to his protein mortality that has led him to his low opinion of the hyena. We call the animal a cowardly, sneaking, stinking, stupid scavenger. He is none of these except, possibly, a better sneak than we are. It’s not news any more that the spotted hyena is a predator of great efficiency, hunting with deadly dedication animals much bigger and stronger than himself. Certainly he’ll take the wobbly newborn and the broken-down sick and old. It’s easier fare. But he will also execute the strong and able with better technique than the big cats, who have a very low attack-kill ratio. As for being a scavenger, many lions live off the hyena’s leavings and if the latter’s taste for less than fresh meat is a character defect, remember the “high” Scottish grouse or woodcock, hung by the neck until the body rots free before cooking. Maybe you never thought of a pork chop as the flesh of a long-dead pig or two fried eggs as the unborn embryos of chickens. Tuna is nothing but dead fish, but humans don’t think in terms of a dead fish salad sandwich
. It would appear that scavenging is a relative trait.
If you consider the hyena cowardly or stupid, you have never seen him systematically brave the arched swords of the sable antelope with the discipline and elan of a squad of crack Green Berets. I know he doesn’t stink; I’ve sniffed him. He smells rather like a recently washed dog although he is more closely related to the cats than the canines, despite appearances. The hyena is one of the world’s most accomplished food processors. His jaws and teeth are as powerful as a steel scrap shredder, his bite worse than a tiger’s. He looks neither strong nor quick with his shifty, shuffling, cringing gait, an impression formed by his massive upper chest and head and his sloping, seemingly half-crippled rear. Yet, he can manage a confirmed forty miles per hour flat out or twenty-five while carrying a forty-pound young antelope clear of the ground in his jaws. I know it’s true because I’ve been passed by hyenas at night in a Land Rover.
Fisi, as he is reviled in KiSwahili in East Africa, or Pirri in Botswana, or mPisi in the Sindebele Zulu dialect of Rhodesia, can and will eat any bloody thing, dead, alive, or inanimate that might produce nourishment. The strange, white dung of the spotted hyena illustrates that he regularly crushes and eats the heaviest bones. He will also mangle binoculars into trash for their leather and glue coverings, taking a camera along for dessert. If you leave them out, he’ll gobble a rifle sling or even your shoes for the leather. He’ll actually chew iron spearheads from which the blood has not been cleaned until they look like bad objets d’art. I had a fine Randall-made knife that I used for skinning trophies, which had a leather handle. Of course, blood scent was well impregnated into the handle. One night it disappeared and was later found a few hundred yards away by one of my men, the handle completely eaten away by a hyena. In Botswana a fresh elephant tusk of some eighty pounds was taken one night from my camp. Debalo and I followed the drag track more than a mile, where we found the tooth in a thicket, most of the thinner base ivory crushed away and eaten. (This hyena damage didn’t exactly thrill my client, but a taxidermist was able to repair the injury to the ivory perfectly.)
Death in the Long Grass Page 25