Augusts in Africa

by Thomas McIntyre

  How can there be a time limit to Africa? To hunting?

  I want a room by the year at the Nylon Bar & Hotel and an open pombe tab there. I want to wear baggy shorts all the time, own a beat-up Land Rover, carry a double with the bluing worn where I’ve held it by the barrels over my shoulder. I might even want to wear a goddamn gardenia behind my ear. I want all of this to stay just the way it is.

  I have most definitely dined too well.

  Oct. 7, 1974

  I feigned sleep when one of the camp staff came to my tent at dawn yesterday to light my lantern and serve me my morning cup of chai. One look at me was all he needed, though, to sigh and turn off the lantern without attempting to wake me. But I had to get out of bed to pee and Fletcher called to me from the dining tent, “Feel fit to hunt?” Of course, I lied, feeling worse than death.

  The day was pure hell, but (luckily) we didn’t find any buffalo big enough to concern ourselves with. I am never going to hunt in this sorry condition again, he said.

  Today is immeasurably better. Pick up another moran guide and I take a good topi and one more black-and-white punda, again right through the heart. We drop the moran back at his manyatta, giving him the fat and some of the haunches from the two animals.

  In the afternoon we spot a large buffalo herd at the edge of a thicket, and as we are stalking them we hear a simba grunting, very close. The mbogo hear the lion, too, and quickly bunch up, edging into the bush. We move to an anthill near the bush, and we can now hear something going on in the thicket. The bush is shaking, leaves trembling, the cracking of trees and buffalo bellowing as two bulls battle, unseen. If they come out fighting, Fletcher says, he’ll tell me which one to take, and I am ready, elbows locked over knees, 375 at my shoulder.

  The sound moves away, dimming. We circle the thicket, then move in, twisting and winding on the buffalo’s trail through the dense bush. Very boggy and slow going. We hunt through the bush and back out into the open without finding the buffalo. Once we’re in the open, though, the herd emerges 30 yards behind us, and we drop to the ground and watch them pass, not a bull in sight.

  Fletcher tells me tonight that he thinks kudu are out now. I’m not sure I mind that much. I want to see this Cape buffalo hunting out to the end.

  Oct. 9, 1974

  One more camp, probably the last of the safari. A thin ribbon of a creek trickles through it, the water cold and drinkable, this creek absolutely too small for crocs.

  Hunt out of camp late yesterday afternoon on foot. Find a clearing with fresh buffalo sign, following the tracks into a muddy thicket where we soon hear the all-too-familiar ruckus of buffalo dashing away when we get close to them. It’s only a matter of time before one of these herds runs the other way.

  Last night there are mbogo walking through camp. A warm breeze washes over us as we hike out before daylight, heading back for last night’s clearing. We pass two manyattas, fast asleep, except for a couple of Maasai who come hurriedly out of the second one, wrapping their robes around themselves and telling us that three bulls feed every morning in a clearing just past the next thicket.

  We hurry now, and there are indeed three buffalo bulls, one of them very respectable, his horns 42 or 43 inches wide. The bulls are grazing away from us, but haven’t gotten our wind yet. Fletcher glasses them for what seems forever, then says, Yes, that one, the one in the middle.

  I sit and try to get a solid rest, try to watch my breathing; but in the end I just pull the trigger. And hit the bull. He starts to spin slowly, and the other two bulls turn and run in our direction, their hooves spraying the dew from the grass as they angle past us. There is altogether far too much shooting, all around, before the very old and wall-eyed buffalo is dead.

  Asante sana, the trackers politely say, thanking me for the nyama as they shake my hand. But nobody’s genuinely smiling.

  I have a buffalo, but everybody knows that this is not the way it should have been. Whatever way it should have been ought to be different from this.

  Oct. 10, 1974

  No time left for greater kudu now—just have to come back again (though who knows, as the herders expand the ranges they graze their herds in and the poachers step up their activity, and as this country and the whole damned world change, how much longer there’ll be any of this left to come back to?). There may still be time enough to do it right with buffalo, though.

  Chase a herd into a thicket this evening, circling around the bush to catch them as they come out, and have to stare down a cow. There are shouldered rifles and safeties off, until she lumbers off blackly into the spreading night with the herd.

  “Well done,” Fletcher says, resetting the safety on his 500, noting some unaccustomed grace under pressure on my part.

  As I thumb back the safety on my 375, the Samburu tracker offers his compliments. Only after it is all over does my heart begin to beat just a little faster.

  Oct. 11, 1974

  Hunt in the thickets again this morning with the usual results. Eat a cold lunch from the chop box in the shade of a tree. Another moran has joined up with us. While Fletcher retires with the bung wad, the Maasai and I engage in a contest of spear throwing. These six-foot lion spears are even heavier than they look. The moran dashes out to retrieve one of his extended throws and peers at the ground, waving to me. I walk over and he points to the thick, coppery body of a snake lying in the grass. Like little kids, we toss sticks at the snake, trying to get it to raise its head. Maybe it’ll even hiss at us.

  Fletcher wanders back and comes over to see what we’re up to.

  “Ah,” he remarks with the appreciation of an Ionides, “a spitting cobra.”

  Outstanding.

  In the afternoon we jump a bushbuck who plunges into a small patch of bush. When the trackers circle around, trying to push him out, I hear him break from cover behind me. I turn and he’s already 50 yards away, stretched out in a full run. In another 50 yards he’ll be behind more bush. I bring up my 300, thumb off the safety, and swing the sights through him, like leading a bird. When the sights are just in front of his chest, making sure not to halt my swing, I squeeze the trigger, and the bushbuck kicks out his hind legs as he disappears behind the bush.

  I hear an intake of breath beside me and Fletcher saying, “Good shot, lad!” I’m not so certain, but we run to where the bushbuck went out of sight and find a wide blood trail in the grass. A hundred feet along it we find the buck, shot through the heart. I kneel and run my hand over his white-marked brown hide, soft and long as dressed fur.

  “Right where I was aiming,” I tell Fletcher, who refrains from telling me exactly how full of shit I am.

  Oct. 12, 1974

  Tomorrow’s it, and this morning, just for laughs, we crawl after buffalo again. And guess what—they get away!

  Lunch in camp is the finest impala curry of my life. Then a nap. When I awake, I lie on my cot, staring at the leaf shadows dappling the tent canvas, and think how I could live 1,000 days like this.

  In the afternoon, Fletcher sends the trackers one way to scout for buffalo, while he and I hike back to where we saw the buff this morning. As we near the place, a Maasai watoto appears, asking us if we’re looking for buffalo.

  What comes of it is a tricky stalk, some tense moments, and a perfect shot that sends the bull collapsing like unreinforced masonry in an earthquake.

  After dinner tonight, Fletcher raises his glass of cognac and says, “Very well done, indeed.”

  This buffalo is the way they should always be.

  Oct. 13, 1974

  Spend this last day walking around the country, hunting with my eyes. Plenty of nyama now for everyone to take home, so it’s time to put up the guns.

  Tonight there’s no wind and the olive canvas of the tents hangs slack in the dark. It feels goddamn cold out here, even with hundreds of fireflies in the air. Funny how it could feel this cold in Africa. Everybody else is asleep, but I’ve pulled my camp chair close to the fire. The wood’s burning down, and
the smoke’ll probably shift into my eyes in a minute. But while yellow flames are still leaping from the wood, I don’t want to sleep, not yet.

  I don’t really know what else to write about what I’ve learned. I probably haven’t learned a thing (a “bloody” thing, Fletcher might say), at least not anything I can put into words, no wiser now than I was at five in my father’s friend’s house. As I watch the fire, I feel myself sort of falling into it. In Swahili, Fletcher says, they call it kuota moto, “dreaming the fire.” Swahili’s the trade language the old Arab ivory traders invented. I like the la-la sound of it. I guess there’s a lot of other things I like, too. But, as I say, I don’t think I can write them down. I guess I’ll just go on dreaming this fire until the flames all burn away. And wonder how I can bring myself to leave this place that seems to be where all the maps have led.

  No, this isn’t at all what I had in mind. And what I want is more of it. What else is there to write?

  Tiger, Tiger

  The 1990s …

  MOSIATUNYA, “SMOKE THAT THUNDERS.” Or is it “mouse that roared”? Either way it’s Dodge, so get the hell out of it.

  A decade and a half before, this town of Victoria Falls was mostly broiling tin roofs, stunned lizards appliqued to whitewashed walls, one very colonial hotel in which to take a gin of an afternoon, and Africans in shiny black pants and tire-tread sandals squabbling in broken English over who was to porter the bags out to the battered safari car. It was where ruddy hunting clients arrived to go a-whacking outsized quadrupeds and Katherine Hepburn doppelgängers materialized with Tilley hats and field guides. That was when it was still old Africa.

  This time around the decor was pastel, the new airport had arcade ceilings and indirect lighting; earth-tone knits and silk shirts had replaced shiny black pants and white shirts, and basket-weave Gucci loafers supplanted sandals. The English was decidedly unbroken, as was the French, Italian, and Japanese being spoken into cell phones no bigger than sparrows. With a Rolex on every wrist, Africans in Mercedes vans idled in the white zone (For The Immediate Loading And Unloading Of Passengers Only), waiting to collect their Banana Republic–clad, adventure-traveling charges come to Whitewater, Balloon, Honeymoon, all of which are capitalized verbs these days. Forty-five minutes of cooling my heels there in another August, searching for a bush pilot to enable me to escape new Africa, made me welcome that fact that I was packing only fishing rods and not my 375. This is how international incidents are averted.

  Africa this time meant tigerfish on the Zambezi River in Zambia. Salmon-shaped and silver-sided with broken black horizontal stripes, soft dorsal fins, a swallowtail the color of gill filaments, a hinged upper jaw the better to eat you with, and a toothed grin right out of Alien, the tiger, a relative of the South American piranha and dorado, is regularly acclaimed the “supreme sporting fish of African fresh water.” Various species of Hydrocynus (“water dog”) are found in rivers throughout the continent; the largest, the Congo’s H. goliath, grows to six feet and over 100 pounds, with the all-tackle record settling in at 97 pounds. Voracious, cannibalistic, and said sometimes to hunt in packs, goliaths will attack anything in the water, including crocodiles. They have even taken chunks from humans. British angling writer Jeremy Wade (who with the appositely named Paul Boote co-authored the renowned fishing book Somewhere Down the Crazy River before going into TV) has given goliath the title “the most horrifying freshwater fish in the world.” The somewhat smaller (all-tackle record, 35 pounds 7 ounces; the fly record, 22 pounds 8 ounces) and much more common H. vittatus of the Zambezi is also horrifying, just less so (the IGFA records book lists only “Vacant” under fly-caught entries for H. goliath, and rightly so).

  The primary thing I found horrifying about tigerfish was the insistence from my fishing companion, Jonathan Boulton, a well-known South African angler and guide, that we go after them with fly rods alone. Or at least he insisted he would. To me this fishing a fly for a heavily toothed fish, said to hunt in packs, smacked of the angling equivalent of not using anywhere near enough gun. At the least it meant work and wading; and given all those teeth and the various ill-tempered fauna that also call tigerfish country home, there was an element of risk as well, work and risk two attributes I generally prefer to exclude from my angling. However, if this was the only way of escaping Vic Falls International, I was nominally in favor.

  And escape we did when the bush pilot (definitely ruddy, the barroom tan of his forsworn drinking days still in evidence, someone definitely old Africa) appeared in the afternoon, loaded Jonathan and me and our gear into his Cessna and carried the two of us 250 kilometers northwest through the hazy air up the Zambezi, erasing 15 years and then some. We flew to where the silty Njoko flowed into the green of the Zambezi; where the thatched-roofed ronadavels were not tourist “chalets” but the real homes of real herdsmen and farmers; where the airport was a strip of dried grass without a control tower in sight; where during the dusty, open-car ride to Mutemwa Lodge, owned by ex-professional rugger Gavin Johnson and his wife, Penny, we passed basketball-size lumps of elephant dung and tracks as big as hubcaps; where the accommodations were canvas; where in lieu of a floral arrangement a croc’s three-foot white skull centerpieced a table in the alfresco dining area.

  Jonathan wasted no time getting us out on the river, even though I had no objection to sitting in a folding chair with a sundowner, contemplating the afternoon light and being back in Africa. But we got aboard a small pontoon boat with our Lozi guide Lifuqe (to be pronounced with some care), and motored upstream; and as soon as Lifuqe cut the engine, Jonathan was in the bow, barefoot, lashing the water with an 8-weight shooting head. He made powerful side-to-side false casts, then sent 90 to 100 feet of line out into the Zambezi, quickly tucking the rod grip under his arm and stripping line with both hands so fast it sang, a fine mist spraying from it. Lifuqe, nattily dressed in designer jeans, shirt, and cap, clucked his tongue at Jonathan’s curious behavior and handed me a spinning rod with a blue Rapala dangling from it. I wrestled with the fly-or-conventional-tackle question for the better part of three seconds.

  On my third cast I hooked the first tiger of my life, all 13 ounces of it. Held in the air, it looked far too mean for its own good. I slid it back into the water and returned to tossing the Rapala, while Jonathan kept casting his big streamer. Later he landed a seven-pound tiger and was, of course, thoroughly chuffed, as they say.

  The next morning, the tea tray was set outside the tent flap in the dark; and I sat outside with it, wrapped in a blanket against the soft chill, drinking tea while the sky behind the trees across the river lightened. At dawn we went with Lifuqe in a small outboard downstream to a set of rapids where hippos snorted and rumbled and blew and the white heads of Cape clawless otters bobbed out of the water. This was what Jonathan liked, scrambling out onto the farthest rocks to make the longest possible casts and, I suppose, to get closer to the hippos and crocs. His bravado shamed me into breaking out my 7-weight and an intermediate sinking line.

  With only a midday intermission for a shore lunch with Gavin and Penny, I spent the day trying to make long casts of my own (Jonathan, as he passed en route to some other half-submerged rock—ambulatory amuse-bouche for crocodiles, as I saw it—exhorting me to extend at the end of my casts so I resembled “the Interflora man,” his name for Hermes in that god’s classic, outstretched pose).

  By sunset Jonathan had caught several good tigers, while I had none. From some Lozi fishermen in a hollowed-out makoro we purchased red-breasted bream to cook that night over leadwood (more poetically hardekool in Afrikaans) coals. On the way back to camp the dark carried the fast-food scent of potato bush and the rotting-meat smell of a poached elephant’s carcass. Jonathan, who was young, insisted on spotlighting crocodiles all the way to camp, just so I would not forget they were there.

  We switched camps the next day. Jonathan was up again before light to cram in as much fishing as he could before the Cessna arrived, while I preferred t
o lie in bed and watch through the mesh the sun peeking above the trees on the other side of the Zambezi and hear the birds awaken. The bush pilot flew us nearly 1,000 kilometers downriver to Mwambashi River Lodge in Lower Zambezi National Park. Here the river flowing in was the Mwambashi, the Mombashi, or the Mushingashi, take your cartographic pick. Brobdingnagian concrete-colored baobabs grew here, their bare branches looking like root networks threading into the sky; tasseled phragmites reeds lined the shores; and we had to wait for the Cape buffalo to clear the dirt strip before we could land. The lodge sat in a grove of tall, shady winter thorn trees; hippos and buff regularly wandered among the tents at night; and a few days before a herd of 150 elephant had rambled through the grounds. Jonathan had us out fishing as soon as we put down our bags.

  The young guide, Kelly, born in then-Rhodesia and a member of the Anglo tribe, rigged me a spinning rod baited with fillets from a small tiger, while he plied his bait with a free-spooling center-pin English coarse–fishing reel mounted on a fly rod. Jonathan remained true to his fly fishing–only creed, hooking into a good tiger on a streamer and shouting “Inside!” (Saffa code, apparently, for “get into the net!”) as the fish came out of the water like a fanged tarpon. As he landed it a disgruntled elephant bull, standing nearby on a reed-covered island, flapped his ears and flung clots of mud at us with his trunk.

  Even bait fishing takes a certain finesse and patience, in that you must allow the tiger enough time to get the bait down deep before setting the hook, and my general lack of both virtues lost me several tigers. I did manage to land several more that first afternoon and evening, none of any real size. Then one hit, took, and proceeded nearly to spool me before straightening the hook and releasing himself. One in 10. That’s what experienced African anglers figure for the ratio of tigerfish landed to tigerfish hooked.