Although sable are exceptionally well armed and active when wounded, they are not the only antelopes that bear great care in following up. The roan antelope is also very determined, as may be waterbuck, oryx, and even wildebeest, not to mention the zebra, which is a holy terror with a kick like a pile driver and a bite like a hyena. But, when it comes to pure heart and determination, the bushbucks take the prize in the lightweight division.
Bushbucks are widely distributed throughout the heavier cover of most of Africa and are not herd animals, usually living in pairs. They range in size from the will-o’-the-wisp, 300-pound bongo of Chad, the Central African Republic, and the rain forest of Kenya to the smaller, striped and spot-marked harnessed and Chobe races, typical of the many moderate-sized members of the clan. There are more than forty species of bushbuck, and they are the smallest of the spiral-horned antelopes, which include eland, sitatunga, nyala, and the greater and lesser kudus. They range between seventy-five to eighty pounds and as much as one hundred pounds more than that, exotic-looking beauties that flit through the dense bush in shadow-mottled camouflage. A wounded bushbuck, despite his unimpressive size, can be hell on hooves to a following hunter or poacher. When I was in Zambia in the 1960s, there was a case of a native who had caught a bushbuck in a snare. As he approached it to finish it with his tomahawk, it lunged at him, breaking the worn snare and goring him in the stomach. The man died in about an hour, from all signs of internal hemorrhaging.
On another occasion a client hunting in the Luangwa Valley had wounded a fine male bushbuck, which disappeared like a flash into heavy bush. Before I could stop him, a new tracker I had hired took off after him, trying to impress me with his keenness, armed with his throwing spear. After quite a bit of shouting, we found him treed, the little bushbuck pacing below as determinedly as any lion, the tracker’s spear stuck in the ground where he had missed his throw. He looked like a wrestler treed by a Chihuahua and took such a ribbing from the rest of the men that he drifted away that night and went back to his village. The bushbuck, incidentally, spun around as soon as he saw us and started a charge, which I was obliged to stop at somewhat sticky range.
* * *
That dangerous animals are unpredictable is axiomatic. With roundhouse logic, it may follow, therefore, that the most unpredictable creature capable of sending you West is the most deadly. Humor me with the further conclusion that something that doesn’t itself know which way it’s going to jump can hardly be anticipated and therefore defended against. If you are interested in one man’s opinion—guess who’s—the most potentially dangerous item in Africa is a nervous client, anxious to make good, tiptoeing along behind somebody else with a cocked, unsafetied rifle in his sweaty mitts while semisuppressed fear plays a banjo solo on his intestines. As the blind hog stumbles over the occasional acorn, so have I developed the Professional Hunter’s Survival Axiom, also modestly known in very limited circles as Capstick’s Law, which says, “Never, but absolutely never, permit a person with a cocked rifle behind you.”
Sorry, nothing personal. I know you’ve been hunting all your life and know how to handle guns safely. So did the man who almost shot me.
It was an ordinary day during which we were hunting out of Mwangwalala Camp on the Luangwa, easing slowly through the bush in hope of cutting some fresh buffalo spoor. The client was a very likeable older American, a good shot with slathers of experience on North American game. He was following behind me with his rifle sling-slung over his shoulder, a potent .375 H & H Magnum borrowed for heavier game from another professional in camp. We had been out for three weeks, and I knew that he was extremely cautious in the way he handled firearms, so I didn’t think about it when I spotted a very fine, record-book-class waterbuck a hundred yards ahead. I sneaked ahead to find a shooting rest along a big tree and motioned him forward to get into position. I was kneeling as he edged in behind and to my right, and the world exploded in a smashing, white-hot, deafening flash.
I lay on the ground, numbed, sure I was dead, my head ringing like Judgment Day. Gradually, over the sound I heard voices and tried to open my eyes. So far, so good. Being dead wasn’t as bad as I had figured. Cautiously, I began to explore for bullet holes on the presumption I had not been struck by lightning. Except for a burning sensation growing on my neck, I was forced to the conclusion that either this wasn’t The Day, or my Sunday School teacher had been overpessimistic about where I would end up. Stupefied, I managed to wobble to my feet and saw the client, face white as a newly plucked chicken, staring at me open mouthed. The rifle lay on the ground, a wisp of cordite smoke still sneering from the muzzle.
It took a while to put it all together. Somehow, the man’s rifle had gone off as he scrunched into position alongside me. The big 270-grain soft-point (soft-point!!) had bored and tugged neatly through both rolls of the collar of my bush jacket two inches up from the juncture of the right side of my neck and my shoulder, creased my neck—raising a welt like a sjambok stroke—and went on to blow a slab from the side of the tree the size of a beer tray. The bush jacket and a good bit of my neck and hair were scorched with powder burns, but I was so delighted that I could feel it hurt that I practically collapsed with relief.
In fairness, I don’t know who was the most frightened, the client, me, or my men. I really began to worry about the American having a heart attack, he was so pale and shaken, gasping like a stranded carp. Fortunately, no one has written a description of what I looked like. After a while the shock began to wear off us all, although the realization of the fact that the slug had whipped right across my jugular, a skin thickness away, was still pretty spooky. When the client and I were both coherent—I was too frightened to be angry—I asked him just what had happened, and he said he just couldn’t figure it out since his hand had not been near the trigger but just on the safety catch. I took the rifle and unloaded it for an examination. Cocking it on the empty chamber, I put on the safety catch and then slipped it off. An ominous click! sounded as the firing pin fell on the dead chamber. Jesus! Imagine a rifle that would fire when the safety was released without touching the trigger!
Thinking it was something he didn’t know, I brought it up to the white hunter who had loaned the gun and listened as he had the unbelievable gall to tell me that he was aware of the problem but had forgotten to mention it to the client. Forgotten? Perhaps it was the aftermath of the tension of the incident or simple frustration with his murderous stupidity that had almost got my sweet, young body wrapped in a blanket with a large hole in its neck, but I lost my temper, threw the rifle in the river and had to be pulled off him. It might be said we were never the best of buddies after that. Of course, you might know that although I had never seen the client with his rifle pointed carelessly, it would be the microsecond it was lined up with my neck that he awkwardly settled down for a shot and it chose to go off. Maybe the Chinese are right: machinery does have spirits.
Whose fault was it? All of ours. Mine for breaking my own rule and being in front of somebody with a loaded rifle, safety catch or no, the client’s for having the muzzle in my direction, and the lender’s for permitting the man to use a rifle he knew to be dangerously defective. After all, once somebody gets shot, whose fault it was takes on very little value to the shootee.
Many clients take personal exception to the seeming overcaution of professional hunters when it comes to firearms and their handling. Most of the pros I know choose a big tree or other landmark several hundred yards outside camp, where they stop the hunting car and all guns are unloaded and not reloaded until an equal distance from home. It sounds childish, I know, but I had three accidental discharges in camp by clients before I made it a rule early in my career. One man, excited over having killed a lion under hairy circumstances, was certain he had unloaded and to prove it, leveled his rifle before I could stop him and shot one hell of a hole in my water storage tank. It scared and embarrassed him so he didn’t hunt the next day. After that, he became a fanatic about gun safety. Also
remember that if your hunter prefers to have a gunbearer carry your rifle uncocked and with an empty chamber, go along with him. All he is trying to do is lighten up on the odds that the long grass doesn’t grow over his grave—or yours—any sooner than it has to. He’s seen too many close ones, unintentional little goofs by well-meaning and genuinely careful people, amateur and professional, to take the slightest chance.
Throughout this book, we’ve discussed a lot of the stranger things that seem to happen in the bundu world of central Africa as well as some of the not-so-obvious relationships between man and animal. It’s not my aim ever to embarrass any clients by betraying my professional responsibility to their privacy, but through the dark veil of anonymity of person and place, this book would not be complete without mentioning one of the strangest evenings of my life, perhaps best called the “Tale of the Man-eating Lady.”
It was a two-man professional safari of twenty-one days, the law not permitting a single white hunter to bwana for more than two shooting clients. The guests were European, a husband and wife and the husband’s brother, who was my charge, while the second professional, let’s call him George, was guiding the couple. We were quite a long way out, hunting elephant from a small fly camp, and had been getting along famously over the first few days. The sun had dropped like a hot rock and, after dinner and a few dollops to keep off the dew, George and I had said good night and bedded down in the small tent we shared a hundred yards from the larger clients’ tents.
We were just about asleep a half-hour later when cries of “Petair! George! Come queekly!” shot us bolt upright and snatching for rifles, flashlights, and snakebite kits. We threw on bush shorts and dashed barefoot for the tents, horrified at what we might find. As we pulled up puffing, the husband hunched out of the tent, his arms streaming blood, and stood alongside the brother, who was sucking a nasty looking laceration on his hand. George and I stared at each other in complete confusion, then at the tent as the husband switched to English. “Een there! Een there!” he shouted. I took the light, George covering me with a rifle as I threw back the flap, expecting at least a wholesale lot of lions to come boiling out into my lap. I looked around. Except for the diminutive wife, the tent was empty! She was in a nightgown, half-smiling at me. I walked over for a look under the bed and to ask her what in the world was going on, when she lunged at me, grabbed at my hand, and, growling like a honey badger, tried to bite me!
I shouted for George to get the hell in there as I struggled with her, trying to keep her jaws away with all my strength as she snapped, snarled, and bit like a certifiable banana, slippery as an eel and twice as fast. It was like one of those heavy-dessert nightmares in which you have a huge snake by the throat that keeps slipping away. The power of the small woman was terrifying despite the fact that I outweighed her by ninety pounds and was a good foot taller. George ducked in and gaped in amazement until I finally got him to get with it and grab an arm. Together, we struggled to pin her to the bed where she ultimately lay, hardly gasping. She closed her eyes and suddenly stopped trying to pull her wrists free, relaxing like a wet sock. Feeling a bit stupid, we released her, thinking she had come to her senses. She lay for a few seconds watching us through half-closed eyes as we tried to reason with her, then in a lightning lunge wrapped her arms around George’s leg and sank her teeth into his bare calf. He gave a most unprofessional bellow of pain and we peeled her off, George wilting the canvas with a spontaneous offering of very colorful Rhodesian idiom suited to the occasion. Switching from George, she then concentrated on gnawing off my thumb, an activity at which she was not entirely without skill. I yowled and shook loose, wrenching her wrists behind her until George worked up the nerve to dodge past her kicking feet, grab them, and lever her back onto the bed.
She stayed relatively quiet for several minutes although we knew better than to release our grip. After a long pause, having garnered her power, she slowly concentrated her supernatural strength on her right arm, which I was holding down. To my disbelief, she raised me right off the bed, forced my hands away, and tried to bite me again. To tell the truth, we were not a little frightened for her or us. She was clearly completely out of her skull, although it didn’t seem at all like a fit wherein I imagined she would foam at the mouth or do something else picturesque. Her actions seemed too deliberate, with too much strategy to be entirely wild, yet what could account for her unbelievable strength? I’d heard of women rolling cars off their trapped children single-handed under duress, but what could have caused this?
Bit by bit her attacks grew less frequent, and she slipped away for a few moments of sleep although she would still try to bite us any time she had an opening. Eventually, after three hours, she fell deeply asleep and showed no more signs of violence. We watched her for another hour and then suggested the brother and husband play bachelor in the second tent while George and I split the watch the rest of the night.
The next morning the lady was up and dressed by dawn, as rested and vital as if she’d had a full night’s sleep. She seemed puzzled when she found me outside the tent and the husband in with his brother, both of them looking like sheiks in Mercurochrome wrappings, yet she apparently remembered nothing of the night before. I left it up to the family to explain, but what in the world they might have told her I couldn’t imagine. The incident was seemingly ignored, if not forgotten. The best guess George and I could make was that it had been some kind of wild reaction to a combination of antibiotic, antimalarial prophylaxis and whiskey she had mixed that night after dinner. Whatever, it sure did a lot to shore up my flagging belief in possession by demons.
Maybe George summed it up best later, inspecting the wound on his leg. “Well,” he mused laconically, “that’s bloody Africa for you. Everything bites.”
By the same author:
Death in the Silent Places
Death in the Dark Continent
Safari: The Last Adventure
The Peter Capstick Library
Chosen by, and with introductions by, Peter Hathaway Capstick:
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, J. H. Patterson
Hunting the Elephant in Africa, C. H. Stigand
African Hunter, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke
Copyright © 1977 by Peter Hathaway Capstick
All rights reserved.
For information, write:
St. Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
eISBN 9781466803923
First eBook edition: December 2011
Death in the Long Grass Page 27