I rather doubt that, after considering the hard facts of history, anybody would question that more human flesh has gone down hyenas’ throats than down those of any other animal. It is still the comforting custom of some tribes to drag out the old and weak to be taken, dead or alive, by prowling hyenas. Even the shallowly buried dead rarely enjoy their privacy; hyenas are very good diggers. Paleontologists tell us that this is why very ancient human remains are so rare. Hyenas crushed up and scattered the relatively light bones of our dim ancestors too frequently and badly for them to survive as fossils. The voice of the hyena has always been the reminder of finality to the Africans, and at one time to the Europeans as well. In Pleistocene Europe the cave hyena undoubtedly did as efficient a job of human disposal for Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons as he does for Africans today. Maybe that accounts for the strange feeling I get of “somebody standing on my grave” whenever I hear old mPisi tune up.
It has been suggested by several experienced writers that, in some areas, the hyena is a greater man-eater than the lion and the leopard put together. It may be true. Certainly, there is no lack of reliable reports of man-eating, as many as four or five deaths per month at one time in Nyasaland, now called Malawi, on Lake Tanganyika. The spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta, is the invariable culprit. There is a striped hyena ranging through parts of Kenya and Ethiopia and on through Asia, although he is not nearly so dangerous as the spotted variety.
The biggest problem with sharing the bush with hyenas is less that of being completely eaten than being partially eaten. It’s not all that rare to run across Africans with cheeks, noses, or even whole faces missing, wounds so horrible Homer wouldn’t have included them in the Iliad. Most tell you that the cause was lion; it’s not usually so. The risk a heavy native drinker takes in Africa is not his liver; rather, it’s having a hyena dine off his profile as he lies unconscious by a dying fire, stoned motherless on beer. Mpisi hangs around a camp or village, listening to his stomach rumble, smelling all the lovely odor of food, skins, and blood. Eventually, he can’t resist and sneaks up on a sleeping person. In one ferocious snap that shears bone and meat like a butcher’s cleaver, he removes somebody’s face. Or worse. Some, not so lucky, are gelded.
Hyenas, especially in areas where antelopes, zebra, and other prey have been eliminated, can live in symbiosis with man. Of course, this tends to reduce their fear of man and can lead to very dangerous conditions. Hyenas may greatly increase in numbers under plague circumstances and, when the sickness finally abates, be forced to turn to eating live people. An artificial example of this occurred near Nairobi after World War I, where huge packs of hyenas were living nicely on the scraps from a slaughterhouse that discarded the heads and bones of slaughtered cattle. When the war was over, the troops left and the slaughtering stopped. The hyenas, desperate for food, swarmed the place, eating everything that wasn’t red-hot or nailed down, including clothes, stained cooking pots, brooms, and finally several women working in the mealie patches.
The social order and adaptability of the spotted hyena have been explored quite a bit recently, especially in a fascinating book by Hugo and Jane van Lawick-Goodall, Innocent Killers (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). It especially points out that in many parts of their range, hyenas operate almost entirely as predators and not scavengers. This was also confirmed by the South African authority, F. C. Eloff, who reported that of 1,052 hyenas watched while feeding, 82 percent were eating only animals they had killed themselves. Yet hyena behavior seems to vary considerably from place to place, pack to pack, which may explain why man-eating may be highly developed in some parts of Africa and not in others. It still remains, though, that a hyena used to eating bodies would probably not show much reticence about taking a live person if he had the opportunity.
I found out how quickly these very intelligent animals learn at a water hole near Khwaai Lodge in Botswana when I ran it for a while between safaris. Around dusk, I would often drive a few miles, taking one or two of my men, to treat myself to a half-hour’s sand grouse shooting. There was an open field upwind of the water hole where the sand grouse came to drink at last light, and, still riding the wind like feathered blobs of ectoplasm against the darkening sky, they offered some of the most challenging pass shooting I have ever experienced. Inevitably, a bird or two would drop into cover and be lost to my men. Hyenas, coming in to drink, would pick up the scent of the birds and clean them up. After the third time I shot there, they had made the clear association between the sound of the shotgun and easy food. After I had a half-dozen “sandies” down, I was surprised to see four big hyenas galumphing across the field and even more so when they sat down with perfect nonchalance forty yards away watching me expectantly. Sure enough, the next bird I killed, two of them raced for it, far beating my human retriever. Being armed, I wasn’t worried that they would give us any trouble and so kept experimenting to see just how bold they would become. Incredibly, they would charge in and grab a bird as close as five yards, and that was after only three “lessons.” It’s no wonder they pull off peoples’ faces from time to time. At least one thing’s for sure: a pet hyena would make one hell of a bird dog!
Because, in older times, so many men ended up inside of hyenas, man shares a closer mystic relationship with them than with any other animal, particularly in the realms of black magic and witchcraft. Hyenas are traditionally, in many tribal cultures, the lovers of witches who are said to ride on their familiars’ backs on nocturnal journeys. The lion and the leopard are also quite mixed up in this macabre portfolio of spookies, but I think the legends of the hyenas are the most fascinating. In some places in Tanzania wild hyenas are not considered to exist, all of the local Fisi or Lipwereri being thought of as special, extra-big were hyenas, belonging to the local witches, mostly female, who rent them out for revenge murders. Witching and warlocking must be a very popular profession since there are a hell of a lot of hyenas around this location. The proposition doesn’t sound too convincing to an outsider, but then consider that good old George Rushby shot several hyena that had beads knotted into their fur as well as strange, symmetrical scars cut into them, marking ownership. One, if you are ready for this, was wearing a pair of khaki shorts! I wonder if they were Sanforized.
Weird? Sure. Impossible? I don’t think so. Too much of this sort of thing has been reported by people who know what they’re talking about. I doubt that we’ll ever know the truth of the matter, but as the hyena is such a bright animal, there’s no reason why “witches” could not tame them as has been done in many wild animal shows and zoos. Even if a witch was to catch several young hyenas and tie beads in their fur or cut designs into their hides and then release them, the discovery of these marks in later life would add a pile of credence to the witch’s claims to have hyena “familiars.” That a witch could train a hyena to kill on command is no less possible than our own training of German shepherds or Dobermans to do the same thing.
In a few regions witches are thought to be able to turn themselves into hyenas and back again—shades of Transylvania. The writer Peter Matthiessen, in The Tree Where Man Was Born (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972) tells his favorite tale of lycanthropy in which white hunter Bror von Blixen was asked to kill a marauding hyena, which the tribesmen were afraid to tackle because of retribution from the witch. Finally convincing a gunbearer to come along, he wounded the creature by moonlight and it crawled off into some bush. Following the blood spoor, the men flushed it out and von Blixen’s second shot killed it. When they got up to the carcass, there was no sign of a hyena. There lay, instead, a dead African with two bullet holes. It’s not an unfamiliar theme in our own culture, which you might know if you watch as much late-night television as do I.
Of course, all this magic business is just so much bull dust. Isn’t it? We civilized people know that such goings on are ridiculous gibber, don’t we? Sure we do: we don’t trust anything but our good, reliable horoscope.
One of the odder but most understandable legend
s about the hyena is that he, she, or it is hermaphroditic, having the sex organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics of both genders. The fact is that both the male and female hyena have organs extraordinarily similar in appearance, if such matters interest you. They are not, however, interchangeable, much to the relief, I’m sure, of the hyenas themselves.
I don’t know another hunter who doesn’t—even if quietly—share my affection for the spotted hyena. The wild savagery of the animal’s song is to me the symphony of the beauty, the horror, and the reality of life and death in the long grass, finally and at last, the truth. But, sometimes I think perhaps I’ve sneaked into the concert hall without buying a ticket. You see, I’ve decided to be cremated.
* * *
The vast percentage of shooting done on a modern safari is centered about the antelopes, which vary in size from ten pounds to the ponderous eland, which may top a ton. For the most part these animals are no more dangerous than white-tailed deer, unprovoked attacks of any consequence almost unheard-of. Yet, when they are wounded, there’s not a one that can’t put you away if you get cute with them. They all have horns and know how to use them.
My vote for the noblest, fiercest, most handsome, horned game on the African continent goes to the sable antelope. The first time you see one, you won’t have to ask your hunter what it is. Although for many years the British favored the name Harrisbuck, in honor of the man who discovered the species, the term “sable,” descriptive of the glossy, anthracite black of the mature, bulls’ hides, has gained in popularity until these days it’s the only one used. Sable have an air about them, almost a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. With big, lone bulls it’s practically an aura. They are large animals, a bull tipping in at somewhere around the quarter-ton mark, 500 pounds of iron, rippling muscle from their deep, thick chests to trim, wasp-waisted hindquarters. The eight-ball black of their upper bodies ends abruptly with a switch to creamy bellies, the borderline of the two colors swinging up in the middle of the animals like an inverted bow.
Both sexes of sable have thick, bristling manes and facial patterns of chalky white probably better described as war paint than clowns’ markings. Both cows and bulls sport horns and are not shy in their use, although the females’ weapons are generally shorter and less massive than those of the bulls. The horns of the adult male sable are considered by a wide proportion of well-traveled sportsmen to be the pièce de résistance of African antelope trophies. And with good reason, too. Unlike the long spiraling corkscrews of the greater kudu, his most popular rival of the “glamor” game, sable horns show at first glance that they were not constructed for decoration. Close to the skull the horns are tightly knurled, these corrugations running like the carved grip of a giant sword to within a foot and a half of the heavy, rapier-sharp points. This last section of horn is nice and smooth to permit easy penetration into meat when the sable is goring. Sables’ horns are as functional as Samurai blades, making most other species of antelope seem as if they’re wearing a pair of butter knives in comparison.
The sable, joined by the oryx tribe and the little bushbucks, are the most aggressive of the antelopes. Try getting clever with a wounded one and you just might wish you’d stuck to duplicate bridge. A lone sable bull won’t back down from a lion; in fact I’ve seen small herds of sable chase lions from a water hole, so you will appreciate that they don’t hold too high an opinion of man, either. Perhaps that’s their great attraction, besides their wonderful looks—their raw machismo. They could care less.
One of the most attractive features of Khwaai Lodge was the rustic bar just off the patio under the Ngamo Fig Tree, the rear wall of which backed up to the swimming pool enclosure. It was an area fenced with very strong wire and bound with grass, surrounding the pool apron. So the tourists wouldn’t have to share the facilities with buffalo or hippo, a baffle door provided entrance, an arrangement set up like the burladero, or slab of fencing, painted with a bulls-eye that the matador can duck behind when inspecting a fresh toro. To an animal’s eye the fence would appear solid, humans just walking around the baffle into the pool area.
One evening about ten o’clock I was sitting with guests at the bar, tossing a few. Hyenas were carrying on outside like a floor show from hell. I had heard a lion grunt earlier, quite close, but since he had not called again, I figured he was stalking a kill, one of the many impala around the lodge. Five minutes later the pool enclosure began to sound like a hi-fi replay of the Barnum and Bailey train-wreck, wood crashing and splintering, lions snarling and roaring, and another heavy animal furiously grunting. Hooves rang against the flagstone accompanied by loud snorts, a strangled sound, and a heavy splash. I grabbed the .470 from behind the bar and stuffed in a pair of 500-grain soft-points, snatching at the flashlight. Safety off, I sneaked around the building and edged my head into the entrance past the baffle, swinging the light in a short arc. Two very bright green eyes reflected in the beam about fifteen feet away. There was a snort and a further rattle of hooves, so I ducked back out of the way behind the baffle. With a soggy crunch! 500 pounds of sable bull hit the barrier where I had been, his long horns sinking through the fencing and sliding by my midriff. With incredible strength he ripped back his head, tearing free the heavy staples that held the wire to the posts like buttons popping from a fat man’s vest. Trailing thirty feet of fencing from his horns, he trotted, muttering, out of the enclosure and into the night.
When I was sure he was gone, I went into the pool area and picked out the corpse of a large lioness on the pool bottom in the beam of the light, her diffusing blood turning the water a rosy pink. Another blood trail ran across the stone apron and over the fence at the far side of the enclosure.
I called several of the lodge employees to lend a hand, and we fished out the dead lioness, a heavy, mature animal. A four-inch section of sable horn protruded from the top of her head like a small antenna. The sable’s riposte had caught her charging, and the point had penetrated from below the jaw up through the bottom of the skull, through the brain and out the top of the head. The horn had broken off when the bull tossed the 325 pound cat into the pool. There was no question that she had died instantly.
Two days later the hyena- and vulture-tattered scraps of a male lion were discovered two miles away. After the garbagemen had finished with him, it was not possible to say definitely that it had been sable wounds that killed him, but it’s almost beyond question that his was the blood trail leading over the fence. Except for a series of claw marks on one shoulder, the sable was doing admirably the last time I saw him, although his humor had not much improved.
Frederick C. Selous, the great naturalist and sportsman-explorer who wandered thousands of miles through central African sable range in the last century, was a great admirer of the animal. Traveling along the Umniati River in the 1880s, a lovely stream I have also hunted in central Rhodesia, Selous’ Boer companion fired from his wagon and wounded a fine male sable his men wanted for meat. At the shot Selous’ pack of experienced lion dogs took out after the hard-hit bull, who made for a depression near the river bank. By the time the men could run the 200 yards to finish off the sable, he had killed four of the ten powerful dogs stone dead, wounded four more seriously (one of which soon died), and torn open the throat of Selous’ favorite bitch. Nine out of ten lion dogs dead or disabled within seconds gives some idea of the sable’s ferocious swordsmanship, even when badly wounded. Selous also records, about this same time, the death of a Zulu warrior from the village of Churchin who had wounded a cow sable with his assegais—short throwing or stabbing spears. The cow killed him with one sweep of horn, placing his kidney neatly en brochette.
Sable are among the more difficult, pound for pound, of the African antelopes to kill, sharing the trait of the buffalo if merely wounded by the first shot. Their systems produce large amounts of adrenalin, which goes a long way toward immunizing the animal from further bullet shock effect. Sometimes they will almost shrug off wounds that would floor a bul
l elephant.
To demonstrate the principle, let me call again upon the late Mr. Selous. He and his native helpers were elephant hunting when they spotted a grand sable bull. Although reticent to fire because of fear of disturbing the jumbos they were following, Selous decided that the superb length of horn was worth the price of a shot. Taking the most accurate of his two elephant guns, he had his men lie down while he stalked the bull to 120 yards, when the sable sensed or saw the man and turned to stare at the bush behind which Selous was hiding. Realizing he could get no closer, Selous rose slowly to his knees and fired the huge 4-gauge at the center of the chest. The sable staggered to his knees at the strike of the four-ounce ball but rebounded instantly and galloped full speed for a hundred yards, where he fell. Selous’ bearers speared the bull to death. Selous was pleased with the shot:
“Considering my weapon, a smooth-bore elephant gun, carrying a four-ounce round bullet, backed by fifteen drams of coarse powder … the ball, after entering the chest rather low, and passing through the whole length of the body … made its exit by the left thigh, grazing the heart on its passage.”
If the ability to travel a hundred yards after having had a .93-caliber ball driven completely through the body lengthwise isn’t a fair demonstration of resistance to bullet energy, I’m sure I don’t know what is!
Death in the Long Grass Page 26