Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

… and yet …

  There is always something new coming out of Africa.

  —Aristotle

  THERE IS A yearning to romanticize the Sahara with images of white-kepi-ed Légionnaires and blue-cheche-ed Tuareg. And difficult not to, as behind you over the Tunisian sand dunes in the morning light glides a line of wild camels, about to break into their high-kneed, feet-flipping trot. Three things, it is said, cannot be hidden: love, the smoke of a fire, and a man riding a camel, or a camel without a man, for that matter. In such surroundings you want to add the words Balzac gave to one of Napoleon’s aged “Immortals,” who in campaigning around the world had never seen anything else like the desert, where there was everything and nothing, like God without people. But with wild boar.

  Much of “Libya,” the name for ancient Africa, would have been less new to Aristotle had he been more familiar with the rich panoply of wildlife along even the Barbary Coast in ancient times, and not so ancient. Until AD 1890 existed the formidable Barbary lion, with the last Barbary leopard reported to have been taken in 1949, though it is believed to carry on in vestigial numbers. Then there was, of course, the Carthaginian elephant of Hannibal, extinguished by Roman bestiarii in venatio performances in the arenas, and for the animal’s ivory. The Atlas bear, genetically closer to the polar than the brown bear, faded away in the 1870s. Yet very much remains today, including the addax, scimitar-horned oryx, and ariel gazelle, and despite Aristotle’s misplaced beliefs, the Barbary stag, the Barbary sheep (a sheep-goat), and the Barbary wild boar.

  It is said that the Egyptian deity Set loved the darkness in which evil things abound; and it was while hunting wild boar with his dogs by moonlight that he came upon the coffin with the corpse of his brother Osiris, the king who taught the Egyptians to worship the gods and abandon cannibalism. In the telling, Set took the shape of a wild boar and rent Osiris’s body into 42 pieces, one for every sepat, province, of Pharaonic Egypt. It was the (today) unfortunately named, heartbroken Isis, sister to both Osiris and Set, and wife of Osiris, who found the remains and knitted them back together so she could copulate with her brother and receive the seed of Horus, god of the sun. The wild boar then became the ritual sacrifice to the moon and Osiris, often offered up in the short days and long nights of winter, the death of the nocturnal boar forming a link to the rebirth of spring. Once roaming throughout the Nile Delta, the wild boar died out in Egypt over 100 years ago; and to find African wild boar, today, I went to extremes, in the form of Tunisia, North Africa.

  When I landed at Aéroport de Tunis-Carthage in the heart of winter, the name reminded me that the “New City,” founded by the Phoenicians, stood here from the ninth century BC, until sacked by Scipio Aemillianus in 146 of that era; and afterward the country that would become Tunisia was the breadbasket of the empire, thanks to Caesar’s aqueducts and irrigation, only to see its agriculture dwindle in the centuries after the fall of Rome, though it remained a haven for Sus scrofa.

  If I considered Africa as having four corners, then Tunis would have been my fourth, or close enough. To reach the east-west extremities of Africa, you journeyed to Pointe des Almadies on the coast of Senegal, then east to the headland of Ras Asir in Somalia, a distance of 4,600 miles. (For the life of me, having been to the former, I have never divined a purpose in venturing to Ras Asir, so I account Lamu on the coast of Kenya, a mere 4,100 miles from the point in Senegal, as my trek to the nearly-there easternmost reach of the continent.) From south to north would be the 5,000 miles from Cape of Good Hope, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans marry, to Le cap Blanc on the Mediterranean, a span which, upon my arrival in Tunis on a January day, I had at last accomplished as I came in search of wild boar.

  Splitters will contend that Africa major, with warthogs, giant forest hogs, red river hogs, and bushpigs, is bereft of true pigs; but northwest Africa retains a wealth of them. Nine-hundred miles west of Tunis, on December 6, 1942, General George S. Patton went hunting for sanglier at Sibi Sbaa, a forest ranger’s station in Morocco. “There were 250 natives to act as beaters,” half of them mounted; and the first drive “netted one pig and one jackall [sic].” On the second beat, Patton took two pigs and a jackal with what he acknowledged was exceptional shooting, with “a very fine over & under 12 gauge” belonging to his host.

  “You use an expanding slug in the first barrel,” he wrote in his diary that day, “and buckshot in the second. The slug is very effective and has a range of 100 yds. I killed one running pig at 90 yds. with a brain shot. The French thought I did it on purpose of course [sic] I just shot the pig,” though ever the military tactician, Patton appears not to have disabused his hosts of their faith in him.

  Now, I had come to Tunisia to hunt driven wild boar myself, in much the same fashion as Patton, who once hunted bigger game here in the Qasserine Pass. In my case, rather than an over-and-under, I used a semi-auto shotgun, reflex sight, and saboted slugs. I hunted with a group of seven Scandinavians and one English gunsmith from Lancashire, north of Liverpool. Our outfitter was Eric Eckhardt. From Sweden, Erik, now 74, had been a professional hunter in Tanzania for nearly 50 years, while working for the Tunisian game department in the 1960s when the rainy season kept him out of East Africa, and for 45 years had run wild-boar hunts in the northern country (and was one of the last living PHs to have worked on the film Hatari!, with recollections of the alluring Ms. Elsa Martinelli).

  After clearing the firearms through customs at the airport, it was nearly sunset; and we drove 500 kilometers south in a small tourist bus in the darkness, stopping along the highway at a well-lighted cafe with tile floors, plastic chairs, oil cloths on the tables, and a photo of the head of state on the wall. Grilled whole fish (when in doubt, call it “dorado”), pommes frites, red-pepper relish, and the hallmark of civilization—warm flatbread. Then more hours on the road, until the hotel in Tozeur in southern Tunisia was reached, far from Carthage.

  Tozeur now staked the southern boundary of the wild pig’s range in Africa. In the daylight I found an oasis town where outside the butcher shops, from the awnings over the storefronts by way of advertising, hung the complacent severed head of a cow, or sometimes the doleful one of a fresh-killed camel. Many, but not all, of the women wore the hijab, but none the burka; you could quaff a beer in public without fear of incurring a fatwa; every sidewalk table with glasses of coffee was its own parliamentary assembly; and even the most civil of conversations resembled fistfights without fists.

  Tozeur sat on the edge of the Chott el-Djerid, at 7,000 square kilometers the largest salt pan in the Sahara. This was Lotus-eaters’ land where the wild ox, probably the Barabary aurochs that went extinct in the first millennium BC, had to graze backward because its long horns curved forward and downward and stuck in the ground if it tried to feed moving ahead. The chott may have been Lake Tritonis, named for Triton and described by Herodotus in his Histories. Around it, in almost every date orchard, every reed bed, every patch of scrub brush along a dry watercourse, lived wild boar.

  In a string of Land Cruisers we drove out of Tozeur toward a line of rocky hills, passing Tunisians on motorbikes, the riders dressed in brown burnooses with pointed hoods, based on the Roman paenula (traveler’s cloak) and billowing behind like sails filled in reverse. (In AD 850 Christians and Jews were required under sharia law to wear a white patch on their cloaks, shaped like an ape or pig, to distinguish them from Moslems.) After half an hour, out in the open desert, we met up with the Tunisian hunter Ghaouar Ammar and the beaters and dogs.

  Tall and sharp featured with what is commonly referred to as an aquiline nose, Ammar was dressed in disconcerting American blaze-orange camouflage, carrying a side-by-side 12 gauge on a sling (for coups de grâce on wounded boar) and a small brass hunting horn in his jacket pocket. The beaters looked like agricultural workers, which they probably were most days of the year, and joked in the rough private way of working men. Along with the eight men there was a rotating pack of four dogs, dogs with the brown and white and
black and white of pointer blood, the solid coats of retrievers, and the brindle of curs and terriers, all of them chased with the pink jagged scars of boar’s tusks. All together, they travelled in two vehicles, a small pickup Ammar drove and a compact SUV, hauling a trailer for transporting dead pigs.

  After meeting up with Ammar, beaters, and dogs, we fell in behind the two vehicles and drove to the base of the hills. Turning off the highway, we crossed open ground, dropping down into a large wash and climbing the other side. We came to a halt and Ammar got out and gestured back for me to follow him. We walked a quarter mile along a trail marked by scores of new pig tracks in the pebbly soil and came to an outcrop of rocks above a branch of the main wash. Ammar, who spoke no English, pointed to the ground at the outcrop, indicating that this was my peg, sweeping his hand across the slopes in front of me to show where the pigs would come. We nodded to each other, and Ammar left me to wait; and I took a seat on the rocks, loading the shotgun and switching on the red dot of the sight.

  Scanning the terrain, I was reminded me of the bare rocky desert of the Mojave. I drove out there in December many years ago to look for a sheep-hunting camp and not finding it before dark, I slept on the front seat of my truck; and during the night, I heard from beyond the ridges the far rumble of artillery practice at the Marine base. When I woke up at dawn I got out of the truck; and looking up on the cliffs, I was surprised to see a band of pot-bellied desert rams, staring down at me. It was hard to imagine large wild mammals living out in country as arid and barren-appearing as this, but there they were.

  I had, in spite of the evidence of the tracks, the same feeling in Tunisia, waiting on stand. I heard the beaters shouting as they were soon working through the hills, but was not expecting anything. And then there was a steam-engine chuffing; and over a crest, out of range, came a large boar, hobby-horsing down the slope and vanishing into a draw, leaving behind a kind of amazement that big game really did inhabit such seeming desolation.

  In a short while, two smaller pigs ran down the slope in front of me. I debated for a moment whether to shoot. Then I thought I had never taken a wild boar in Tunisia before, never in fact had a chance to, and thought of something else. “Naturally,” wrote Hemingway in the letter arranging his safari with Philip Percival’s Tanganyika Guide Service, “would like to get better things if we could but this is a first shoot.” This was a first shoot.

  As it happened, I was spared the mixed emotions of taking small pigs by missing the running animals again and again. Waiting for a wild pig, driven by beaters, to halt and offer a clean standing shot was as conceivable as stacking BBs in a hurricane; but that was hardly an excuse for the dismal shooting I was exhibiting. The pigs crossed the draw and climbed out the other side, being missed by me some more. Finally, one scaled the rocks above me and despite my certainty that he would not, paused to look down, 15 yards away. But he was skylighted; and besides, I was too disgusted with myself to consider any more shooting under any circumstances—at least at these pigs. So I watched him amble off.

  As the time passed, I heard away from me several hollow slams of slugs being fired, sounding like single, killing shots. After about an hour, I saw Ammar, the SUV towing the trailer, now sprouting hoofed legs, and the white Land Cruisers driving on the other side of the large dry wash. Unloading my shotgun, I headed back to them. When I got to the SUV, I saw the trailer with four pigs, three smaller ones and a genuine trophy boar taken by one of the Danish hunters, Per, the bristled hide dark and the long inches of ivory tusk curling out of the gumline. We had time for another drive before midday, and lined up across the bottom of a wide bank of alluvial stone just off the highway.

  It took time for the beaters to drive the pigs from the rocky gray hills spreading before us and out of the draws, but I could hear shots from down the line of hunters as the wild pigs came into range. At the end of the drive, a big boar was running toward me across the line in the slanting winter light. When the chunky pig trot turned to a full stretched-out run, the long hairs of the crest raised, there was something in the snout-forward profile that made a boar look like an arrowhead or some kind of chert spearpoint, and moving faster than it actually was, but fast enough. But still not that fast. The hunter below me fired twice and missed twice, then I missed with two shots, and Richard, the English gunsmith beyond me, emptied his over-and-under at the boar, and in his own estimation shot two rather gaping holes in the ground. Then the boar was gone in a trail of dust.

  We ate a late lunch at a long table in a date grove, sardines and salad, bread and cheese, stewed vegetables and grilled chicken, and sweet ripe oranges for dessert. Then in another part of the orchard we walked out on the grassy berms boxing the plots where the shading palms were planted and flooded, and Per killed a smaller pig that was driven straight to him at close range. The last drive of the day was under the high bank of a dry riverbed below another date grove. The beaters came on, unseen, whooping in the politically incorrect term of “like Indians,” or at least like Indians in old Western movies. I heard the pig coming before it dropped down over the bank and ran across a small ledge on the river bank, an easy shot; and it kept running after I missed, Per in line beside me killing it. In the distance, the keening note of Ammar’s horn signaled the end of the hunting.

  On the road out from the drives, I looked back at the desert in the late afternoon, counting four horizons stacked in lines of palm green, foothills of blue, to farther taller hills of gray, to the distant dim gray of a mountain crest, the northeastern rim of the Atlases. Returning to the hotel with enough empty hulls to have taken a limit of greenheads, I sat outside at sunset after showering, listening to the muezzins’ azan, the call to prayer, echoing from half-a-dozen minarets, each crier competing for recognition, creating a tournament of sacredness, a round robin of the devout, that was unanswerable, not ending until the last, most eloquent faded into silence. As I listened, I thought about what became of wild boar in a Moslem country. In this case, at least, there was a small local menagerie with lions, hyenas, and vultures; and since the qur’anic sura declaring the consumption of pork to be haram did not apply to lions, the animals would eat well for some time to come.

  For the next two days, I shot every bit as abysmally as I had the first day, just seeming incapable of learning how to lead the damn things and missing a very fine boar at ridiculously close range on the third afternoon, after which while eating a delicious deglet noor, the translucent “date of light,” fresh off a palm tree, I bit down cautiously to chew around the pit and still somehow managed to shatter a bicuspid with what seemed the slightest of pressures. Sigh.

  We changed areas the next day, driving on the road across the perfectly flat dried-up Chott el-Djerid to the ancient oasis town of Kebili, which humans had been inhabiting, it was estimated, for some 200,000 years. The first morning there, meeting up with Ammar and the drivers where they waited around a small palm-frond fire on the shoulder of the road, we went out to a dry wash with shoulder-tall salt bush and got on our pegs. Between leaving the vehicle and waiting for the drive to begin, I wondered if I were ever going to be able to hit a running wild pig, not realizing how many more opportunities there would be; and like that blind hog, I was bound to stumble onto at least one.

  I heard the dogs coming a long way away; and then there was the chuffing of the pigs, and a smaller one broke from the bush to my left. I waited until he was clear of the line and fired, and missed. Then a very big sow, as I later determined, running alone, came by; and as she passed and was quartering away, I fired, trying to hold the red dot a little ahead of her and following through; and she started up a large berm pushed up at the edge of the dry watercourse, then stumbled at the top and seemed to go down as she topped the berm; and I saw dust rising on the other side, but from one place, not the trail of dust of a running animal. I had reloaded then, and wanted to go over to see if the pig was down but knew I could not leave my peg until the shooting was finished. Then another big sow came out,
this time running back up the wash with the dogs behind; and I fired at her. She ran out of sight, but in a few minutes I heard the dogs barking excitedly and fading squeals coming from her. The drive and the other shooting was done after that; and I climbed over the berm to see the big sow on the other side, lying on her side, dead.

  I walked over to her, making sure she was finished before unloading the shotgun. She was over 200 pounds, and even had visible tusks. While I waited beside her, four of the beaters crossed over the berm, carrying the second sow, a little smaller, each beater with his hand around a trotter, leaning out as if he were counterbalancing a heavy bucket. They lay this pig down beside the first one. Looking at them, I saw that both sows were dry. We never saw piglets during the hunt; and though I assumed that wild pigs bred wherever and whenever the mood struck, it seemed as if we were probably in the pre-rut for the hogs.

  One of the beaters had a small tuber he had dug up and was brushing the sandy yellow soil off it. He cut slices from it and offered them around. I took one, and began to chew. It was like a watery piece of horseradish, and the beater made me to understand that it was good for the stomach. Then the SUV with the trailer came up, and we loaded the pigs.

  We hunted the rest of the days in and along washes, in salt-grass marshes, around beds of 10-foot tall phragmites topped with waving white tassels where you could see the progress of the drivers by the parting of the reeds, and in date groves where the windfall fruit stuck in the cleats of your boots, Sahara swallowtails fluttered, and the date flies circled your head. The beaters shouted, made their versions of pig snorts, swung sticks, drummed together empty plastic bottles like noisemakers at football games, and even sang as they drove the wild pigs, in the afternoon the muezzin’s call, from somewhere unknown, drifting eerily through the palms, punctuated by the sound of shotgun fire.

  In the first part of the hunt, except for Per’s trophy boar, all the pigs seemed to be sows and small boars. In the last days, though, we began to take one large boar after another. Ove, an octogenarian butcher from Copenhagen, took one boar that was better than 310 pounds, weighed on scales, with long curved tusks and black bristled winter hide you could bury a hand in. Richard made an excellent long shot on another big boar, despite being wracked with pain from a severe attack of sciatica running down his back and legs, so that he had to travel lying across the rear seat of one of the Land Cruisers, or not go out hunting at all. The other Scandinavians, too, started killing big wild boar, until almost everyone had one.