Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  I’ll wait till tomorrow to record what happened today.

  Sept. 22, 1974

  Yesterday: I killed the leopard in the morning, and then the lion in the afternoon. Big maned male. Spotted him late in the afternoon in the brush along the river bank. Fletcher and I dropped out of the Land Cruiser as it drove on, and crawled to an old log where we lay for hours, watching his maned head in the brush, ticks scuttling in over our belts and rambling inside our pants. At almost last light the lion stood and walked out into the open. When he got 75 yards from us, Fletcher said take him, and I felt all the tensed muscles in my face relax as I put the crosshairs of my “three-seven-five” on the lion’s shoulder. He went over with a roar and lay still and I jumped up to run to him, but Fletcher jerked me back, getting right in my face and hissing at me, “It’s the dead ones kill you.”

  Now, this morning after the night before, the sky is blue with high thin clouds, and my entire skull throbs like a purple bruise as I try to swallow some orange juice and aspirins.

  When we agreed to finish off the cognac bottle, I remember Fletcher saying, “Good you killed your lion now. Lions are for young men.”

  And today could be spent in good conscience shooting sandgrouse. Big fun on the Rombo!

  Sept. 23, 1974

  In camp by lantern light this morning the skinners and trackers are divvying up the lion fat that’s been scraped from the hide and carcass so they can take it home to rub on their watoto when they get the croup. Sandgrouse today for Fletcher and me under the most azure sky I’ve ever seen. The sun rises through the thorn scrub surrounding the water and the brownish birds come in high, laying back their wings and losing altitude, little feathered quanta of both kinetic and potential energy. It’s pass shooting along the vertical axis, and Fletcher shoots quite well, and I don’t shoot too bad, either, and we’re done in time to make it back to camp for breakfast.

  On the way in we pass an unburned manyatta, the sod roofs green with clumps of grass. A small pack of Maasai dogs comes out to bark at us, their leader a bony, scruffy bitch with nipples pendulous. In the afternoon we glass for lesser kudu from a hill and plan to hunt greater kudu somewhere up north—after we deal with buffalo.

  The tubes on the single sideband glow this evening as Fletcher runs through the dial, picking up random communiques from camps and ranches. He stops on one where a worker is listing supplies he needs brought out.

  “Tep,” the long-range voice says in his Kenyan accent. “We need tep.”

  “I am sorry,” comes back the English mzungu voice. “What do you need?”

  “I need tep. For the pipes.”

  “What is ‘tep’?”

  The Kenyan worker is raising his voice now.

  “‘Tep.’ Tay-a-pay-a. Tep!”

  “I am not understanding you, I am afraid. You are saying ‘tep’?”

  “Yes, tep!”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Tep. Tep. For the pipes.”

  “‘Tep,’ you said?”

  “Yes. Yes. Tep!”

  “Tep?”

  Fletcher snatches up the microphone and presses the key.

  “Tape,” he shouts, “you bloody jackass! Tape!”

  “I say,” comes the mzungu voice, “who’s that on the radio?”

  Fletcher has already hung the mic back up, and I toss the ball to ‘Because’ in center field.

  Sept. 24, 1974

  Pteroclididae (so my field guide calls them) once more at dawn when the air is soft as brushed suede. Back at camp, as we breakfast, three Maasai morani appear, having heard that I’ve killed a lion. Their polished spear blades are shards of light, their hair greased and plaited and ochred. They are all about my age or a little younger, but in their red togas seem as stately as praetorian guards. Nodding in approval when shown the lion skin, they grip our hands and then head off, waving as they go.

  Later a golden cloud of dust rises on the horizon, and in a few minutes a small Datsun, beaten into scrap metal, arrives. A tall figure contorts himself out of the car, and I meet another PH, Abdullah, grandson of the sultan of Zanzibar, who has come to scout the area for his next safari. After coffee, Abdullah, who speaks like an Etonian compared to Fletcher’s colonial-cowboy accent, departs on his “recky,” and I realize that it’s going to take more time than I have to get to know any of these Africans well.

  In the afternoon we spot three big crocs beached like driftwood on a river bank, and they vanish at the speed of saurian thought when they spot us. Hunt lesser kudu in the thick brush, finally spotting one. He’s in range, but after studying him carefully, Fletcher says his horns only make a little more than one spiral, instead of the two full turns we’re hunting for.

  More elephant at the end of the day, and at last light I drop a decent oryx bull at 200 yards with my first shot, more meat for dinner and for the staff. We break camp tomorrow and head for buffalo country to take a couple of bulls quickly, then off for greater kudu.

  Sept. 26, 1974

  Sitting at the sidewalk cafe outside the New Stanley Hotel, amid the ugly city bustle of “Nairobbery” redux, trying to catch up this journal before lunch with Fletcher, who is out resupplying us.

  Break camp yesterday and drive to Amboseli to spend the night at a lodge. At the entrance a moran, dressed in photographic costume, stands with a spear polished to a quicksilver sheen. In English he asks Bill, seated in the left-hand passenger’s seat, if he would like to purchase a picture. When Bill declines, the moran goes back to polishing his spear with a cloth, smiling enchantingly as he says to Bill, “You are terribly white.”

  To the pool for a dip and find two European girls there, one very pretty. Am forced to enter the water to disguise my admiration. Then a neurasthenic-looking boyfriend appears. Spend the afternoon touring the yellow circumference of Amboseli with a game ranger. Against the snowy backdrop of Kilimanjaro the ancient lakebed is marked with herds of wildebeest and zebra, buffalo, rhino, elephant, and a lioness asleep on her back, paws limp in the air. Nice, but I believe what I most want to do is climb out of the Land Cruiser and walk among the animals, which is prohibited.

  At dinner Joy Adamson herself circulates among the tables, working the crowd. (“For Christ’s sake,” Fletcher advises, soto voce, “don’t tell her you killed a lion.”) Fletcher heads for his room after dinner, and Bill and I discover the two girls in the lounge, with boyfriend. Boyfriend (who is not surprisingly not feeling well) leaves, and we find ourselves in conversation with the girls. They are Swiss. Cousins. The pretty one is Ruth (“Root”). She does not like Switzerland—too restricting. She wants, she says, to be “frei.” What a coincidence, I tell her. Frei is what I want to be, too. I ask about the boyfriend. Oh no, she laughs, he is just a traveling companion.

  “I do not think he is very … suitable,” she says, smiling at me. Then he reappears, telling the girls that it is very late. Ruth shakes my hand as she goes.

  At daybreak as Fletcher and I are leaving, Ruth appears beside the Land Cruiser, smiling, bidding me goodbye. Fletcher stares openly. As we drive away from the lodge, I see the faux boyfriend in a gift-shop T-shirt, kowtowing to take a rock’s photograph.

  “You some kind of hero to her?” Fletcher asks, arching an eyebrow. I simply smile.

  Two miles down the tar road, outside the reserve, we pass the most magnificent lesser kudu ever seen, two-and-half spirals of horn. He stands on the shoulder, watching us go.

  Sept. 28, 1974

  Hyenas howl outside the tent tonight. First time I’ve ever heard them. Time to backtrack.

  Poisoned at lunch three days ago at a steakhouse in Nairobi. (Tip for Travelers: Think twice about sauce béarnaise in an equatorial zone.) As the dodgy whiff of the sauce boat passes by my nose, I note the Kenyan gold-medal miler, Kipchoge Keino, elegantly besuited, taking a seat at a nearby table. Spent the night in bed at Lake Naivasha hotel, clutching my stomach and flopping like a gaffed fish. Meanwhile, back at the bar, Fletcher w
as “chatting up” an American bird, inviting her to join us on our safari. Actually, to join him on my safari. Awfully decent of him.

  Yesterday we traveled past Maasai Mara and across the Rift Valley. An orphaned elephant calf ran in front of us before turning off into the grass. Lion meat.

  We climbed the Escarpment in a cloudburst and found a campsite in Block 60A, one of the most beautiful places in Africa. Ineluctable greenness and tangled bush (“Right sporty for buffalo,” Fletcher enthused). As soon as camp was up, I swallowed a handful of sulfa pills and went to bed.

  This morning I feel well enough to hunt in earnest. We spot a bushbuck, brown as cocoa powder, who vanishes before we can even begin a stalk. See some eland later, and stalk them, too. We crawl the last 50 yards, lying behind a small hillock, the eland very close. A large aquatinted cow walks within 20 yards of us, staring hard at our motionless figures. She makes a loud, hoarse bark and moves off from us. Catching our wind, she trots away, drawing another eland cow with her; and we peer over the hillock, seeing the rest of the herd a few dozen yards away, but no big bulls. Just beyond the eland there is a good kongoni bull, and I take him through the shoulder. We skin and quarter him and hurry into camp ahead of more rain.

  After lunch the sky clears, and I go for a walk, unarmed. I kick up oribi and warthogs. Then something huge and unseen begins roaring in the heavy bush, the ground literally vibrating, so I mosey back to camp, making it in alive. Hot hors d’oeuvres (“toasties”) and whiskey on ice around the campfire at sundown, then kongoni fillets wrapped in bacon for dinner. Hope this buffalo hunting doesn’t take too long.

  Sept. 29, 1974

  At dawn three buffalo bulls are at the edge of a thicket. They spot us and move off. We follow on foot through tall grass and suddenly there is a rhino less than 100 yards away, drifting past. Everyone freezes, thumbs on safeties. The kifaru moves on by, and we creep forward until we come to a solid wall of bright green leaves into which the mbogo disappeared. We can hear them bedded in there, rumbling and grunting, and I pray, Please, don’t tell me we’re going in there. And without my saying anything, Fletcher says, No, we’ll come back in the late afternoon.

  Which proves to be something far worse, because I have all day to think about it. I hardly see the country we move through until we find our way in the last hour of light back to the thicket. The trackers pick up the spoor and we follow it into the bush.

  Inside it is not as impenetrable as I thought, 40 or 50 feet of visibility around us. Maybe this won’t be so bad. Then in the next instant there is a terrible crashing and grunting, the sound of trees splintering and limbs snapped off by horns and bosses. We can see nothing except the shaking of the bush, and nobody knows which way tons of stampeding buffalo flesh are headed. The noise begins to fade, finally becoming total silence, broken only by a soft, anonymously voiced, “F——.”

  There is lightning in the Rift Valley as we drive through the darkness. We come across a band of morani and they ride with us for a few miles, before jumping off to walk away into the night, giggling. Fletcher drives nervously, scared to death of running over bunnies caught in the headlights. I slump in the left-hand seat, scared to death of something of another order all together.

  Oct. 1, 1974

  Fletcher is displeased with the size of the buffalo we’ve seen (many very small—kidogo sana—bulls), so yesterday we broke camp and moved to another spot about 10 miles away. Here it is more of the same: mbogo in the open by the dawn’s early light, then they move into the bush and we follow.

  It is cool inside the bush, the ground covered in leaf litter. Enormous elephant tunnels drill through parts of it, the elephant tracks filled with muddy water; invisible bushbucks bark like dogs within feet of us; the sound of rhino entirely too close for comfort (“Be ready,” Fletcher whispers, nodding toward the 375 in my hands); 400-pound giant forest hogs mistaken for buffalo; and always buffalo when least expected, crashing off, or worse, slipping away warily, alert to us, but not in the least intimidated.

  I do kill an excellent warthog today, the curved ivory of his footlong tusks clean and white and clear, his mane of bristles draping thickly over his neck,

  Tonight Fletcher tells me that the trackers have a name for me, Bwana Cheka, the “laughing bwana” (Bill is Bwana Fisi, “hyena,” for his apparent willingness to eat virtually anything). They find me amusing, while mostly I’m sort of tired of getting the piss scared out of me.

  Is this what I had in mind?

  Oct. 2, 1974

  Early this morning I flat miss two easy shots at a good bushbuck before he springs back into the bush. I stand there in silence. Fletcher stares at me in silence. The trackers study me in silence. I don’t know which silence is the worst.

  Later in the cool, cloudy morning, from the top of a green hill of Africa, we spot four very distant buffalo bull’s, too far to stalk. Walking back to the Land Cruiser through a swale, we see a defassa waterbuck rear his magnificent head out of the tall grass as he moves uphill, away from us. He halts, skylined, about 200 yards away.

  “Take him,” Fletcher whispers.

  I hold just behind the waterbuck’s shoulder, just above the top of the grass. Now I shoot carefully, and at the sound of the rifle the waterbuck just disappears.

  “Safety on,” Fletcher commands, and we sprint up the hill. Just on the other side of the ridge we find him lying in the grass, his 30-inch horns wide-flared, the 300’s bullet having passed through the top of his heart.

  The afternoon is all buffalo stalking, all the time. Doubled over, stomach and back muscles aflame, I stalk two bulls with Fletcher through lightning and lashing rain, only to have them prove kidogo sana, their hides bald in big patches, as buffalo hides are wont to be. Then we cross the slick mud of a gully and go after a large herd on our hands and knees, crawling around an elephant cow black from the rain (which also soaks through our clothing), finally getting close enough to the buffalo to see that they are all cows, calves, and young bulls. The wind swirls our scent to them and the herd runs and wheels, then halts. For a moment the question is, Are they going to charge or not? as all the buffalo stare back at us with their heads held high, their hides shiny and wet, my heart thudding like a two-stroke engine. Then a flash of lightning lights up the world and at the thunderclap the herd gallops off, leaving us to head back to camp to warm and dry our soggy frozen asses. Or arses.

  Oct. 4, 1974

  Yesterday we moved camp again. Drove through a dusty village, Kilgoris, whose largest building is the Nylon Bar & Hotel, then many miles beyond it to a new campsite among tall trees. We’re becoming a bit like gypsies here in Block 60A, striking the tents at a moment’s notice and loading up the lorry to shove off in search of someplace greener, someplace we hope at last to call home. But all we seem to find is more of the same when it comes to buffalo.

  This morning, cool enough for a sweater, we crawl through tall grass and fresh steaming buffalo mavi to get up on a herd at first light, only to have them slip into the thick stuff on us. So, of course, we follow. As usual, we find ourselves in the middle of a whole damn herd, buffalo slowly lowering their heads beneath the leaves to glare at us, then the herd stampeding, the effect probably equivalent to having a line of boxcars derail around you.

  In the afternoon we find a couple of morani who’ll show us the country. They take us through a densely foliated draw where we find the day-old track of an enormous bugger. Then there is a deep ditch to be crossed, and the morani and Fletcher drop down and climb out of it; but when it’s my turn, I have trouble dragging myself out. Which is when our Samburu tracker, who has not crossed yet, begins to snap his fingers softly and whisper loudly, “Mbogo, mbogo,” pointing down the ditch. I look up at the morani, and they are holding their right arms cocked back, their left arms stretched out in front of them, preparing to hurl their spears, and all I can think is that I am about to be trampled to absolute death right here in this gully. Somehow or another I am up the sheer bank of the
ditch in a twinkling and standing ready, my 375 at port arms. The stampede does not materialize, though, and easing forward we find the hoof print of the giant forest hog at the root of all the commotion.

  I am disappointed, more than I might have expected. I’m beginning to feel that I’m getting the hang of this buffalo hunting, and that, all told, more of the same may not be so bad. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Oct. 5, 1974

  Regrettably, as I take pen in hand by lantern light, I find I may have dined somewhat too well.

  Get this close today to a huge bull. Mbogo mkubwa sana. Mbogo. Mbogo. Old Maasai tells us where some are. And there they are, feeding. In the open! Five bulls with one very big one. We crawl up on them through the wet grass, knowing that this is finally going to be the one, when they all turn and trot into the bush and keep going. We look around, and there, 50 yards behind us, is the old Maasai standing in the wide open on an anthill, craning to get a good look at the running buffalo. Fletcher goes up to him, furious, chastising him for spooking the big bull; but all the Maasai hears is “mbogo mkubwa sana,” and nods with satisfaction. I told you, he says. And what can you say?

  Hunt through some more thickets, but all we find is the rotting, vulture-shit-spattered carcass of a small elephant, the tusks chopped out.

  “They’re really starting to hammer things,” Fletcher says, meaning poachers.

  Get back to camp in early afternoon, and we decide to have a drink. Then decide that all this buffalo business, and the wasted elephant, is simply too much. One thing leads to another. Holding a glass of white rum against his chest, Fletcher worries out loud that if we don’t find a bloody buffalo soon, we won’t have time to make it over to the greater-kudu country.