Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  On a morning drive out of the phragmites out onto a dry lakebed, the take of pigs was extraordinary. There was shooting going on all around; and as I stood on one side of a canal half filled with clear water, I heard behind me the barking of dogs that had run out of the reeds; and I turned to look. Lit from in back by the sun, the dogs were on an average-sized boar who dived into the canal and came out the other side with three of the dogs pursuing him, shaking off water and baying as they went. The boar was hobbled from a slug and the dogs kept worrying him as they ran together across an open plowed field, when the pig ran into a bush and squared around to face them.

  I started hurrying down the canal, looking for a place to cross, until I was opposite the dogs and pig. The pig was bristled up, keeping his haunches on the ground to prevent an attack there, and fought the dogs for many minutes, standing and turning and squatting down again, catching one dog with his snout and tusks so the pointer-looking dog cartwheeled end over end through the moted air. I was about 40 yards away, blocked by the canal; every time I tried to get my sight on the boar, he got into a dog, or another grabbed him from the opposite side. Finally, one of Ammar’s assistants, carrying his own shotgun, got up to the boar and finished it before any of the dogs were seriously hurt.

  By the last afternoon of the hunt, I was prepared to go home, satisfied with two large sows, though wishing I could have many of my missed shots back, especially on the large boar. We had spread out around another reed bed with the beaters coming toward us, the old man Ove visible off to my left and Richard to my right, Richard bent over to tolerate the pain. I could just begin to hear the beaters when the big boar came out of the reeds toward me, running on the sandy ground.

  I couldn’t help feeling excitement as he came, his ears straight up and hackles raised. Everything about him looked big. I shot too soon the first time and heard the sickening whine of the slug ricocheting off the soft soil like a stone skipping off water. Now I waited, and he turned; and I had a hard background behind him; and I hit him back, enough to break his stride. He angled past me toward a fence of palm fronds at the edge of a date grove, heading obliquely in the direction of Richard, when I led him enough and my third shot took him through both shoulders; and he rolled like a barrel, his trotters kicking in the air. I was reloading as he stood again.

  He was sick; but he kept running, and I took a fourth shot as he turned at the palm fence and began running directly at Richard. He may not have been charging, at first, just wanting to get away; but as he got closer to Richard, and could begin to make him out, he clearly meant, at the least, to run over him, rather than swerve around. Richard, watching the boar, reached onto the top of his over-and-under and detached the scope he carried on it from its claw mounts, dropping it gently onto the sand, then lifted the gun and lined up the sights. I yelled at him to shoot, but he kept waiting. He explained later that he had not wanted to damage my trophy by shooting too soon and perhaps hitting the tusks. Only when the boar seemed to be at his boot laces did he fire at the crown of its skull.

  The boar sommersaulted, and Richard went down. I was going to him, thinking he’d been struck, when the boar started to stand again. I yelled again to Richard who was trying to get up as the pain of the sciatica shot through him; and from his knees he managed to lift the over-and-under from the sand beside him, break it open, replace the empty 16-gauge hull in the top barrel, and shoot the massive wild boar in the head, once more, then collapse face down in the sand as the wild boar kicked out its last breath beside him.

  I made it to him as from somewhere one of the dogs came up and began tugging at the pig-scented hide on the boar’s ham. One of the boar’s top tusks was broken, but it was an old break and had nothing to do with Richard’s shooting. The pig had not touched Richard, but he had thrown himself out of its path and was now in excruciating pain. As beaters and hunters began to come up, I unloaded my gun and picked up his over-and-under and scope for him, breaking open the gun, noticing that it was a combination gun with the barrel under the top smoothbore chambered for a rimmed 30 Blaser, the reason he had stopped to reload being that he hadn’t wanted to “spend” a more costly rifle cartridge on the boar.

  I was feeling bad about Richard and ashamed about the ricocheted slug and apologized to everyone, even though I’m not sure there’s any way to do that after the shot’s gone off; and some accepted it right away, and others did not. It took Richard 20 minutes before he could stand and with help walk even the short distance out to the Land Cruiser on the highway shoulder and to our lunch, that Richard ate without getting out of the vehicle.

  We made one more drive in Tunisia, my peg on the edge of a date grove and the beaters coming out of the phragmites. We were a long time, waiting on stand, the drive taking over an hour, without seeing a pig, until I figured we were done, the beaters long past, and walked out through the cool shaded orchard. I met up with Richard where he had been standing at his position, and he came over to me and shook my hand. I saw he was standing upright, and smiling.

  “You don’t know why I’m shaking your hand, do you?” he asked in his Lancastrian accent.

  I had to tell him that I did not.

  “Jumping out of the way of the boar,” he said, giving his feet a little tap in the sand, “cured my sciatica.”

  The hunting part of the trip ended after that, with tips handed around in dinar, a currency based on the 2,200-year-old Roman coin, the denarius, hands shaken, and shukrans spoken. For me, a further ending came some weeks later, back home in a dentist’s chair, an oral surgeon breaking off pieces of the shattered tooth, drilling, probing, pulling, until he had all the fragments out, to his satisfaction.

  You’d be just a little crazy not to wonder about traveling these days to the Maghreb to hunt. You don’t have to be Prufrock to worry about bad things happening, even when you only dare to eat a peach, or a date. I guess I could have played it safe, or anyway what I thought was safe, by staying home and not going to Tunisia, not to touch this extreme of Africa, to have avoided any threat—from wild animals, the kind of people armies are hunting now throughout the region, or stone fruit. But then, I would have never seen a tusked wild boar charging, or tasted the sweetness of a ripe deglet noor, fresh from a palm tree and filled with light.

  De Rebus Africanis

  The 1970s …

  Sept. 14, 1974

  Welcome to the wild. How did it come to this?

  A clearing’s being hacked from the bush and all these black guys, blacker than any black guys I’ve ever seen before, are pitching these olive tents, and this lividly white guy, with blond curly hair and a nose broken into about three incongruent planes, is pouring gasoline down all these holes in the ground, then squinting into them. I’ve already been warned about the oleaginous little creek behind camp, that they call the Njugini River. Crocs.

  So I ask the white guy, whose name is John Fletcher—who has been a professional hunter since the 1950s, after he was a volunteer in the “pseudo-gangs” during the Kenya Emergency, prepared to disguise himself as a Mau Mau and infiltrate the insurgents, seriously—about the gas; and he says, “Cobras.” Is this what I had in mind?

  “Nasty piece of business,” he adds, dropping lit matches into the holes. The whooshing flames should drive them out, though I am tactful enough not to inquire where they might be driven to from out of dark holes in the ground, in which I am happy for them to remain.

  This evening in Kenya I’m 22 years old and throwing money at a problem by taking all that I have, and probably ever will, and throwing it directly at Africa. My friend, Bill Cullen, is along with me, not to hunt but to see. We have driven all day in the Land Cruiser, followed by the green Bedford lorry, seeing towering giraffes off the tarmac, then on dirt roads through small villages, all the roads evaporating into trackless cross-country journeying, sticking the lorry at a ford of the bigger Rombo River and winching it out, coming at last to where a camp can be raised.

  In the hotel room the day before
—after having picked up thousands of Kenyan schillings in bundles of dog-eared bills from an Indian jewelry duka in a sketchy neighborhood, part of a highly speculative transaction over discount airline tickets that began with a phone negotiation to somebody with a Punjabi accent in Vancouver, Canada, caught up with us in London, and came to a dubious settlement in a shop in Nairobi with an enormous truncheon-wielding African guard at the door and wide drawers stuffed with flimsy currency filed like documents—not realizing we were on the verge of nervous collapse from our abrupt advent in Africa, we were rearranging our “kit” to take what we required into the field, and to leave behind what was unnecessary, when we heard the woman’s screams coming from the street below through the open window.

  Looking out, we saw a white woman floors below being hurried onto the sidewalk out of the crosswalk by her companion, his arm around her shoulder, a genuine mob gathering about an isolated black man, pleading his complete innocence. Deadly violence seemed preordained, but the man made his desperate case and was released, hurrying off with his head down and not looking back. Leaving us lurching around the room in the grips of savage panic, some monkey demon having flapped its invisible way through the room on leathern pinions, its scent of sulfurous corruption filling our nostrils and triggering near hysteria. By morning we were calmed, and hungover, enough to leave Nairobi gladly behind.

  To return to the question, I don’t think I can truly say why I’m here except that I’ve always wanted to hunt something more than the deer and birds I’ve known at home, and that seemed to mean Africa—after years of dreaming the place, now’s my chance to meet it in the flesh, and blood. (No, I can say why, its having to do with the head of an African buffalo, even if only a dwarf forest one, seen hanging on a wall when I was no more than five and seeming unfathomably wondrous; and there it was, an ember that never was extinguished, our most lasting desires traceable back to such ages.)

  At this late stage of the game, though, exactly who goes on safari in Kenya anyway? Safari. What an odd sounding word in this day and age. A month of hunting. Hunting, hunting, hunting till hell will not have it.

  How had I wandered this far from home?

  Sept. 15, 1974

  Is this what I had in mind?

  I didn’t sleep last night, my first with only canvas between me and whatever the hell is out there in the bush of Africa. Either too many wild sounds and wild voices, or not enough, silence here as unnerving as roars.

  On the way out to sight in the rifles we find a very large, very fresh leopard pug in the dust of the two track, and I put my index finger into the center of its pad mark, feeling a shiver run through me clear to my foppish desert boots. Then, having zeroed in the guns, Fletcher and the trackers and I head out into this Rombo Kuku country to find camp meat, and I guess what for me could only be termed “first blood,” vis-à-vis Africa.

  We spot a herd of hartebeest (kongoni in Swahili)—a hypothetical animal designed by Cubists—and I fire my first-ever shot at the game of Africa. And sail it clean over the back of a big bull. The herd detonates and my second shot kills a cow through, it would seem, no particular fault of my own.

  Somewhere this side of Tanzania we come across some Grant’s gazelles, and I hit a fine buck too far back and the Samburu tracker and I have to run after it till it falls.

  Is this really what I had in mind?

  Sept. 16, 1974

  Eggs, tea, and toast and then we drive out in the morning past the manyatta where the Maasai live—only Maasai don’t live here anymore, rings of white ash the only evidence of their recent occupation. Fletcher says somebody died in this place and the Maasai burned down all the stick and cow-dung houses and moved on.

  Today I have to shoot a waterbuck again after it gets up after my first shot. Then I go on to miss a zebra clean, and another kongoni, too. Hear my first lion roaring, along with the trumpeting of elephant. These scrubby yellow plains are filled with animals; and most of the time they act as if we’re not here, like it’s a time before we ever appeared on earth. Until I open fire on them, of course, throwing lead as if it were rice tossed at a bride and groom.

  Sept. 17, 1974

  Today it’s a fringe-eared oryx’s turn in the barrel.

  Fletcher and I stalk to a termite hill and he urges calm deliberation—and for Christ’s sake shoot straight. I know, this time, that I will kill this animal absolutely. I squeeze the trigger … and squeeze … and squeeze some more. Nada. I am clueless. Fletcher sees that I’m starting to melt down and obligingly points out to me that I’ve neglected to take off the safety. Now I jerk the trigger and gutshoot the oryx. We trail the bull all morning until we lose his blood and tracks on bare rocky ground.

  At noon we meet up with another safari car. We lunch with a Mr. P., of a famed newspaper family, his entourage, including a young woman not his wife, and his professional hunter. While I turn away, pretending to be engrossed in peeling a hardboiled egg so no one will see my face, Mr. P., in his tailored Palm Beach accent, tells us all what a ball this hunting is. Just a ball.

  Running oryx are all I can see.

  Sept. 18, 1974

  What’d old Ortega y Gasset say, about how in our stupid time, hunting is not considered a serious matter? Serious as a heart attack’s what I say. Maybe more serious than I’m ready for.

  So here’s to a frivolous day. Callooh! And, to be sure, Callay!

  Spend a whole bunch of it moving lava rock from off the unbeaten path to make way for the Land Cruiser. Run across our first black rhino, kifaru—which is one animal I don’t think I can, in good conscience, shoot anymore—who squints in amorous prehistoric dimness at the Cruiser while the trackers whistle and snort invitingly. See where the Maasai goats and sheep have grazed the land down to bare dirt. Even spot one herdsman and his goats across the line in the national park, Tsavo, illicitly helping themselves to the grass there.

  Kind of fun playing tourist all day, not having to fire a shot. Not having to be serious about hunting anything.

  Not watching anything run away, wounded.

  Sept. 19, 1974

  Another day when nothing gets hunted.

  Spot a herd of elephant standing like red-gray boulders this afternoon in the shade of an acacia tree. Fletcher carries his 500 Nitro double, and I my 35mm single-lens reflex camera, determined to be just a neutral observer. We stalk to within 30 yards of the herd. All cows and calves. Elephant hunting is closed, but Fletcher shows me where you shoot to kill an elephant, as a point of interest. I snap a few pictures as quietly as I can, and we duck-walk our way out. About 100 yards from the elephant we stand, and I take maybe three steps before I hear, behind me, Fletcher say that I should run. I look back while running to see him leveling his double at a cow as big as the Ritz, coming at him with her ears flapped out. Fletcher doesn’t even twitch, and things sort themselves out with no shots fired.

  I’m not even hunting and I can still get killed, and an elephant almost killed, because I wanted to take her picture! Somehow that possibility is never mentioned in the brochures for photo safaris.

  After barbecued lamb for dinner tonight, Fletcher informs me we’re almost out of meat, which is something that hasn’t occurred to me: that we will be living off what we (I) hunt. He says the “lads” were looking forward to me hunting more so they’d have plenty of meat (nyama) to dry and take home after the safari. Wives, kids (watoto), that sort of thing. Says he can radio Nairobi and have them send out more meat. Or we can buy some sheep, or perhaps a goat, from the Maasai. Or I can hunt something for us all to eat. Entirely up to me, of course.

  Of course.

  Sept. 20, 1974

  Woke this morning with fever and chills. Not life-threatening, just a pain in the ass. Or arse.

  Heading back toward where we saw Mr. Kifaru day before yesterday, we sight a herd of zebra (punda milia, “the donkey with stripes”) in the distance. Fletcher says we should take one and gets his 375 and tells one of the trackers to hand me my “thr
ee-oh-oh.” He tells me to carry my rifle across my shoulder, like a Maasai carries his lion spear, and we can walk up close to the zebra. About 300 yards from the herd we go behind some brush and use it to stalk within 150 yards. Fletcher looks over the herd and tells me to take the big stallion with his head turned toward us. I’m having trouble holding the crosshairs on him; but I take a breath, let a little out, and when I have the two wires crossing over his heart and lungs, fire. The zebra’s tail shoots straight out, and as the rest of the herd gallops off through the heat waves, the stallion runs with them. Fletcher just turns and walks away, whistling.

  I call to him in distress, “I couldn’t have missed,” wondering to myself how the hell I must have. It’s then that the stallion peels out of the running herd.

  “No,” Fletcher says, putting on his sunglasses. “You killed him.”

  The zebra raises dust circles as the herd vanishes, then falls, stands, falls, brays, and is still.

  “Lady of Spain, I adooore you,” sings John Fletcher, lying on his back on the hood of the Land Cruiser, one bare leg crossed over the other.

  Sept. 21, 1974

  I try to puzzle why I am here. What I have is the child’s memory from when I was five. It is night and there is a small wood-paneled den and the smell of tobacco and bourbon. On the walls are the head of an elk, a wild boar, a red dwarf forest buffalo, and a pair of rose-ivory tusks, the last two having come from French Equatorial Africa. The man whose den it is will teach me to hunt and come to mean more to me than my own father, whose life is mostly self-inflicted torment I had every desire not to replicate. And those animals on the wall, especially the buffalo head and the elephant tusks, map the trail that has brought me here. Somehow it’s not always great trauma or spectacular events that map us. Sometimes, it’s a head on the wall of the house of a man you know.