Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  With his ferocious temper, treacherous intellect, and stern indifference to the shocking power of all but the most outlandishly large-caliber rifles, the Cape buffalo is routinely touted as the most dangerous member of the African Big Five (which also includes the lion, leopard, black rhino, and elephant). Whether or not he is all that depends, as does almost everything under the sun, on what you mean. He is certainly not as sure to charge as a rhino, or as swift as the predatory cats; and in the words of a late well-known sporting journalist to me, “nobody ever got wounded by an elephant.” But the buff is fleet enough; and when he makes up his mind to charge, especially when injured, there is no animal more obdurately bent on finishing a fight. In open flat country he may present no serious threat to a hunter adequately armed, but you so seldom encounter him on baseball-diamond-like surroundings—rather more often he’ll be in some swampy thicket or dense forest where he is a clever enough lad to go to cover, and fierce enough to come out of it when it is to his advantage.

  The best measure of the Cape buffalo’s rank as a big-game animal may simply be the kind of esteem professional hunters hold him in. It is a curious fact of the sporting life that big, tall, strapping red-faced chaps who earn their livelihoods trailing dangerous game, all come in time to be downright maudlin about which animals they feel right about hunting. Most, therefore, first lose their taste for hunting the big cats, so that while they will usually do their best to get a client his one and only lion, their hearts will not entirely be in it: The predacious cats in their appetites for meat and sleep and sex are simply too close to us for absolute comfort. Then there is the rhino, the hulking, agile, dumb, blind, sad, funny, savage, magnificent Pleistocene rhino, that was run to the brink of the Big Jump we term extinction, only to be pulled back all too near to plummeting over. To hunt a black rhino lawfully today is a quarter-million-dollar proposition, involving diplomatic negotiations and something like an Act of Congress, and it seems questionable how truly wild and fair such a hunt might be, though none of that makes the black rhino any less unpredictable or hazardous.

  Of the Big Five, then, that leaves only the elephant and the Cape buffalo to feel at all right, in the long run, about hunting; and to my knowledge, hardly any real professional hunter, unless he has lost interest in hunting altogether, ever totally loses his taste for giving chase to these two.

  There is no easy way to hunt elephant or Cape buffalo. For either of them you must be able to walk for miles on end, know how to read animal sign well, and be prepared to kill an animal who can just as readily kill you without batting a stereoptic eye (it only adds to the disquieting mien of the Cape buffalo that its eyes look mostly forward, so much like a predator’s)—and this makes elephant and buffalo the two greatest challenges for taking good trophy animals, and the two most satisfying. Something about hunting them will get into a hunter’s blood and stay. To offer one further bit of testimony on behalf of the buff, consider the widely known piece of jungle lore that the favorite sport of elephant is chasing herds of Cape buffalo round and round the bush, and the buff’s position as one of the world’s great big-game animals seems secure.

  Which is why I wanted to hunt buff, and went to do so in the southwestern corner of Kenya, north of the Maasai Mara and east of Lake Victoria, in the Chepalungu Forest on top of the Soit Ololol Escarpment above the Great Rift Valley on the northern outskirts of the Serengeti, to arguably the loveliest green spot in all green Maasailand, and one which I dearly hated—to begin with, anyway.

  To find buffalo there we put on cheap canvas tennis shoes (because they were the only things that dried overnight) and slogged every day into the dim wet forest (filled with butterflies and spitting cobras; birdsong and barking bushbucks; gray waterbucks and giant forest hogs; rhino, elephant, and to be sure, buffalo), parting a wall of limbs and vines and deep-green leaves woven as tight as a Panama hat, through which one could see no more than 10 feet in any direction. On going in, the advice given me by my professional hunter, John Fletcher (who stayed on in Kenya when it all ended), was that in the event of my stumbling onto a sleeping buffalo (as well one might) I should try to shoot the animal dead on the spot and ask questions later. It took only a momentary lack of resolve at such a juncture, he assured me, to give a buffalo ample opportunity to spring up and winnow you down. And that was the root cause of my hating this exquisite African land: It scared the hell out of me, and I hated nothing more than having my imagination overextended by fear.

  As we hunted the buffalo, though, a change began to come over me. We had unheard-of luck on cats at the outset of the safari, so that at dawn on my fifth morning of hunting in Africa, while concealed in a blind, I had taken a very fine leopard as he came to feed on hanging bait. And then, the evening of the same day, we had incredibly gotten up on an extremely large lion, Simba mkubwa sana in the eager words of the trackers, and I had killed him with my 375, establishing what may very well have been some sort of one-day East African record for cats, with the only two of my life, which we duly celebrated that night. When our hangovers subsided two days later, we moved off from that more southern country near Kilimanjaro to the Block 60 hunting area above the Rift, assuming we would take quickly from the forest there a good buffalo (a bull with a spread over 40 inches wide—ideally 45 or better, with 50 inches a life’s ambition—along with a full, tightly fitted, wide boss), then move on again to the greater-kudu country we had, until the luck with cats, not hoped to have time to reach.

  Instead of a good buffalo in short order, though, we had to go into that forest every day for two weeks, first glassing the open country futilely at daybreak, then following tracks back into the cover, trailing the buffalo who had returned to the forest before dawn, their night’s grazing done. In that forest where lambent light shafted down as if into deep water, we picked our way for two weeks over rotting timber and through mud wallows, unseen animals leaping away from us on all sides, we creeping our way forward until we heard low grunts, then the sudden flutter of oxpeckers (more euphoniously known as tickbirds) flaring up from the backs of the buffalo they were preening, and then the flutter of alarmed Cape buffalo flaring up as well, snorting, crashing so wildly away (yet also unseen) through the dark forest that the soggy ground quivered and the trees were tossed about as if in a windstorm, the report of wood splintered by horns able to be heard for hundreds of yards through the timber.

  That was the sound a breeding herd of cows, calves, and young bulls made as they fled; but other times there would be the flutter of oxpeckers and no crashing afterward, only a silence the booming of my heart seemed to fill; and we knew we were onto a herd of bulls, wise old animals who were at that moment slipping carefully away from us, moving off with inbred stealth, or maybe stealthily circling back to trample us into the dirt. For much of those two weeks, then, I saw things in that forest through a glaze of fear as ornate as the rose window in a medieval French cathedral.

  I discovered, however, that you can tolerate fear roaring like a freight train through your head and clamping like a limpet to your heart for just so long; and sometime during those two weeks I ceased to be utterly terrified by the black forms in the bush, and instead grew to be excited by them, by the chance of encountering them, by the possibility that my life was actually on the line in there. My heart still boomed, but for a far different reason.

  What was going on in that forest, I saw, was a highly charged game of skill: You played it wrong, you might be killed; you played it just right, you got to do it again. Nothing more than that. But when something like that gets into your blood, the rest of life comes to lack an ingredient you never before knew it was supposed to have. I believe it got into mine one evening when we chased a breeding herd in and out of the forest for hours, jumping it and driving it ahead of us, trying to get a good look at one of the bulls in it. Finally, we circled ahead of the buffalo into a clearing of chest-high grass where they had to cross in front of us. We hunkered down and watched them as they came out. The bull app
eared at last, but he was only a young seed bull, big-bodied but not good in the horns yet. As we watched him pass by, a tremendous cow buffalo, the herd matriarch, walked out, maybe 60 yards from us, and halted. Then she turned and stared directly our way.

  If she feels her calf or her herd is threatened, the cow buffalo is probably as deadly an animal as there is; and at that moment I found myself thinking that was just the most wonderful piece of knowledge in the world to have. It meant she might charge, and, may God forgive me, I wanted her to. Very much.

  “All right,” John Fletcher whispered, his William G. Evans 500 Nitro Express—with two 578-grain bullets in it and two more cartridges, like a pair of Montecristos, held not like cigars, between his finger, but together in his left palm under the fore-end so they would not separate if he had to jam them in an instant into the broken breech of his double rifle—carried it across his body like a laborer’s shovel, “we’ll stand now, and she’ll run off. Or she’ll charge us.” Nothing more than that.

  We stood, John Fletcher, I, and the trackers behind us, and the buffalo cow did not twitch. We saw her thinking, or at least watching with care, weighing the odds, her nostrils flaring. John Fletcher and I brought our rifles up at the same instant without a word and took aim; as soon as she started forward, I knew I was going to put a 375 into the center of her chest, exactly where my crosshairs were, and if she kept coming, as a charging buffalo always had the intention of doing, I would put in another; but I would not run. As the seconds passed, I felt more and more that, for perhaps one of the few times in my life (a life flawed and warped in so many ways, from when the wood was green), I was behaving correctly, naturally, no fear clouding my vision. To know absolutely that you are capable of standing your ground is a sparkling sensation (but then, I was young). Then the cow snorted and spun away from us, following the herd, her calculations having come up on the debit side. I took my finger off the trigger, then, and carefully reset the safety. And all the trackers came up and clapped me on the back, smiling their nervous African smiles, as if to say, “You did well.” I was glad we hadn’t had to kill the cow after all.

  When, at first light on our 14th day of buffalo hunting, we reached the edge of a small dewy field, though, and spotted three good bulls feeding 100 yards away and I got my first chance to kill a Cape buffalo, I did not kill him at all well. Though he was the smallest-bodied buffalo of the three, old and almost hairless, his horns swept out nearly 45 inches, much farther than the other two’s, and when I fired—low, near his heart, but not near enough—he began to trot in a slow circle as the two younger bulls came past us at an oblique angle, just visible in the edge of my scope. I shot him again and again, anywhere, and again, and Fletcher fired the right barrel of his 500, and at last the buffalo went down and I had to finish him on the ground. There was still, I had to admit, after the bull lay dead and all my ammunition was gone, enough fear left in me to prevent my behaving completely correctly.

  We went on hunting Cape buffalo after that right up to my last day on safari, John Fletcher looking for an even better trophy for me, and me looking to make up for the first kill, hoping there was still time. On the last morning of hunting we flushed a bushbuck, and I had only the briefest second to make the fastest running shot I have ever tried and took the sturdy little antelope through the heart as he stretched into full flight. Suddenly I was very anxious about having another try at buffalo before leaving Africa.

  We found the herd that evening when John and I and my photographer friend Bill Cullen were out alone, the trackers back helping break camp. The buffalo had been drifting in and out of the forest all that gray, highlands afternoon with us behind them, following their tracks—a bull’s cloven print, sizable as a relish tray, standing out from all the others in the herd. It seemed that we had lost the buffalo for good, though, until a small boy, no older than four or five, wearing a rough cotton toga and carrying a smooth stick, appeared startlingly out of the bush before us and asked in the Maasai language if we would like to kill a mbogo.

  A little child led us along a forest trail to the edge of the trees, where he pointed across an open glade to the bull. The Cape buffalo bull, his tight boss doming high above his head, stood in the herd of 10 or 15 other animals in the nearing dark, only a few yards from heavy cover, in which in no more than half-a-dozen running steps he could be completely concealed. John Fletcher, for one, was something more than uncomfortably aware of this. He remembered too well how I had killed my first bull, and though he’d said nothing, he knew how much the buffalo had spooked me. If I wounded this bull, now, and he made it into the forest with the light going, and the second rule they give you for dangerous game being that you follow all wounded animals in … well. …

  Fletcher looked at me sharply. There was no denying it was a good bull, and the trackers and camp staff wanted more meat to take home, and there was still a little light, and—and oh, bloody hell!

  We knelt at the edge of the trees, and Fletcher whispered to me, “Relax, now. Keep cool. Take your time. Are you ready? Are you all right?”

  I cut my eyes toward him, then back to the buffalo. I was, at that moment, as all right as I was ever going to get. This was where it counted; this was what it was all about; this was exactly what I’d come here for. It was in my blood now, only Fletcher might not know that. So, I told him.

  “Where,” I whispered, easing the 375’s safety off so it didn’t make a click, “do you, want me to shoot him?”

  John Fletcher stared at me even harder then, but this time he whispered only, “In the shoulder.”

  You can see where a Cape buffalo’s shoulder socket bulges under his hide, and a bullet entering his body there will travel through into his spine where it dips down from his humped back to become his neck. That was where I laid my crosshairs, and when the 270-grain Nosler hit him there it broke his shoulder, then shattered his spine. And the bull was down, his muzzle stretched out along the short grass, bellowing his death song (what the professionals call “music” when they hear it coming from a wounded bull laid up in cover). The rest of the herd wheeled on us then, their eyes clear and wide and most uncattlelike, the smell of the bull’s blood in their nostrils. I finished the bull with one more round to the neck; and the herd was gone, vanishing as quickly as that bull could have vanished had my nerve not held and I had not behaved correctly.

  That last night in camp, while the African staff jerked long strips of buffalo meat over the campfire to carry back to their wives and children, John Fletcher, Bill Cullen, and I sat in the dining tent and ate hot oxtail soup and slices of steaming boiled buffalo tongue and drank too much champagne and brandy, and laughed too much, too. We finished breaking camp at dawn the next morning and returned to Nairobi.

  Perhaps I have gone on with this story at too great a length already, but I wish I could go on even further to tell you all the other Cape buffalo stories I know (maybe I’ll put them in a book someday; perhaps I have), such as how when you awoke in the middle of the night and stepped outside your canvas tent, you might make out, just there on that little rise at the edge of camp, the silhouettes of feeding buffalo against the cold stars as your urine steamed into the grass. Or the two bulls who came out of the timber with their horns locked, fighting with the crashing force of the crazed brutes that they were at that instant. Or how one of the many herds we chased out of the forest and across the green country led us into a majestic cloudburst, and the storm wind swirled around so that our scent was swept in front of the 50 or 60 funeral-black animals and turned them back on us, and as they started forward I asked John what we did now, and he said lightly, “Actually, we might try shooting down the lead buffalo and climbing onto its back.”

  There are other stories without buffalo: How a she-leopard in a tall tree battled a fish eagle over a dead impala. Or how when you killed an animal the sky was a clean delft bowl tipped over you and empty of birds out to the farthest horizon, but how in one minute a dozen naked-headed vultures were cir
cling lazily overhead, sprung from nowhere, waiting to come down to create bare white bones in the tall grass. Or how we could be crossing country in the hunting car at 30 miles an hour and one of the trackers in the back drummed on the cab roof, and when we stopped he leapt down and unerringly wove his way 200 yards out into the scrub, and when we caught up to him he would be pointing placidly at a bush where only then did we see the still-wet newborn gazelle curled underneath it in its nest, staring unblinking at us, the tracker seeming to have sensed its burgeoning life waiting out there.

  But the story I wish for most is the one in which I am back in those African highlands I grew to love, hunting the Cape buffalo I grew to love too, probably still scared, but only enough to make me sense my true heart nesting inside the cage of my ribs, beating, telling me, over and over, of what I am capable.

  August in Africa

  The 1990s …

  “IT’S AFRICA.”

  That was Ant Baber’s verbal shrug as he downshifted the open Land Cruiser through the mud of the yard of his cousin’s pig and cattle ranch, on the way to shoot helmeted guinea fowl. It was a cold August winter’s morning; and the cousin was standing ankle deep, surveying the cement rubble of the main water tank demolished by his parked lorry’s slipping capriciously out of gear at dawn and rolling backward into the tank.

  Ant gave his cousin a sympathetic wave as we passed. Half a smile was hoisted on the cousin’s face and his palms turned outward, his way of saying, “It is Africa.” South Africa, where Charles Anthony “Ant” Baber, licensed professional hunter, retired rugger player, early 30s, and his young, blonde, Kenya-born wife, Tessa, owned a private wildlife reserve, Ant’s Nest, outside Vaalwater, Northern Province (now Limpopo Province). This was where I was beginning two weeks of trying to do a little of everything, or at least a good deal of much, that can be done in South Africa.