The next blind was a cavity cut into heavy brush. It was so big inside that four of us could stand and walk around, like those women coming and going, talking of Michelangelo. We hung the hindquarters of a Georges Braque kongoni in a small acacia in front of the blind. By the next day the leopard who left the pugmark was feeding on it. We were in the blind in the late afternoon.
The trouble with leopard blinds is that when properly constructed, not only can leopards not detect you in them, none of the rest of Africa’s dangerous game can either. This has led to everything from lions to elephant stumbling onto hunters who were minding their own business in leopard blinds. Fletcher, back when black rhino were numerous enough to be nearly a nuisance, had once had to kill one in full charge at the entrance to a leopard blind, while the gunbearers forcibly detained the hunting client as he tried to hare away from cover. This afternoon, I sat in the blind until it was too dark to shoot, careful all the while not to move even my eyes unless a flash of white could be detected, wondering what might stumble onto us.
As we waited in the darkness for the Land Cruiser to return at the appointed hour, I heard the leopard come to feed on the bait. I heard meat being torn from bone, then bone being cracked by teeth. Small bumps rose on my forearms. It was something primal, something heard 1,000 generations ago when the earth was so silent that sounds like that might carry across distance and transmit the information that a predator in the darkness had killed again, while we huddled together on rock ledges. Then the Land Cruiser’s lights began to play through the grass and trees and the leopard receded into the night and in a little while we were riding back into camp.
John hunched forward in his camp chair, a drink of rum in his hand, and stared into the fire, “dreaming” it, as the Maasai say.
“We could have had a light out there tonight,” he spoke to the flames. “A light doesn’t matter to a leopard. He’d have just gone on feeding. Lots of other professionals I know use lights,” he added, leaning back in his chair, a conclusion reached.
“I hope I never become that kind of hunter,” he said, swirling rum up the side of the glass.
We used no flashlights to cover the last half-mile to the blind on foot the next morning, still night under the bright equatorial moon, the two stellar bears, major and minor, lying beyond the northern horizon, replaced by the Southern Cross as the vicinity of a lodestar. Africa at night is true Africa; Africa at night, campfires and safari cars left far behind, is truest. It’s puzzling the way darkness strips the layers hiding the heart of the land: In daylight the dazzle and clarity are distractions, rather than enhancements. During the day, I might not feel my soul crouching as it did in Africa at night, ready to spring out of me with each step I took, no certainty whether that heart belonged to predator or prey.
Then we entered some brush, and I found myself inside the large blind again. In the darkness I felt for the rest for my 300 and set the rifle in place. I took a knee and waited. I did not see, so much as feel, the dawn spreading outside. The feeding sound came again.
“The leopard’s here,” Fletcher whispered. I took up my rifle slowly, like raising a shotgun on a turkey. The big male leopard, his head short and square, his thick muscles defined, was standing on his hind legs in the tree, his front claws in the kongoni and his jaws tearing at the flesh. He chewed, then took his claws out of the carcass and dropped back down onto the limb. He stood with his head pointed down and tail curled up. I laid the crosshairs on the center of his left shoulder, and gave the trigger a straight-back squeeze to break the sear, a dull yellow flame licking toward him.
When we return to camp that morning the Turkana tracker will sing a warrior’s chant that will echo in my heart, Jbwani will race around the tents to meet me with a glass of straight bourbon whiskey in his hand, the skinners will painstakingly scrape all the clean white fat from the cat’s hide and body so they can take it home to rub on their children’s throats in the rainy season when they come down with the croup, and there will be pale pink leopard meat to cook and eat. Now, though, as we drag the cat’s heavy body out of the deep grass at the base of the acacia and the PH and the gunbearers clap me on the back, I just want to look at this leopard, to run my hand over his warm fur, to spread open his sharp claws, to see that my single bullet passed through him, killing him on the way, and to touch my finger to the center of one of the black rosettes on the golden hide.
The PH, older than I, smiles and says, “Good shot, lad!” as I lift the leopard’s paw and hold it to the palm of my own hand. “Well done, lad!” There is no frisson now. We have already met.
Half a life on from that dawn in Kenya, a Zimbabwe professional hunter at a game convention is trying to sell me on a leopard-hunting technique he’s devised. In Zimbabwe, cat hunting at night with artificial light is legal. So he hung a shop lamp in a tree above a bait, wired it to a battery and a rheostat. When the leopard is heard feeding on the impala quarter in the darkness, the PH in the blind with his client, stealthily dials up the light until the cat is illuminated as if it were break of day, the leopard completely oblivious.
For some reason, I have stopped listening. Maybe because I have the only leopard I can ever want.
Something Borrowed
The 1990s …
IN THE END, you keep what you need.
“Ant” Baber had a ranch in Africa, “Ant’s Nest” in Limpopo Province—then the Northern Province, having been Northern Transvaal and the Transvaal before. Ant’s lay in Limpopo’s Waterberg Mountains, a massif of bluffs and buttes where on its highveld Homo erectus once scavenged game in the heat of summer. Afterward, Bushman came, then Bantu; and some of the first Europeans were Cape Dutch who reached it on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, miscalculating the distance and mistaking the Waterbergs for Egypt. And it’s where I borrowed a rifle to hunt a blesbok.
Seldom the object of safari tales, the blesbok is a horse-headed, medium-sized antelope, high-withered, bay-bodied with white belly and stockings, named for the white blaze (bles) on its face, and crowned by lyre-shaped ringed horns that curve back in shallow S’s with 15 inches being record class. It’s native to South Africa and found elsewhere where it has been introduced.
The blesbok’s larger, smaller-horned, and more dramatically colored cousin is the bontebok (the “parti-colored buck”). Much rarer, too, living in that Mediterranean fynbos habitat of the western Cape, where it was ranked a pest and shot near to extinction by white settlers. A few farmers and ranchers in the mid-19th century ultimately gave shelter to the remaining handful. The blesbok, that subsists on short grasses across a much broader territory, has enjoyed far greater success than the bontebok that survived only because of an 18,000-acre national park created for those final 17 of the animals placed there for preservation in 1931.
The first afternoon at the Nest, Ant ground the Land Cruiser up a treacherously steep and rocky road, the road named for his Kenyan-born wife, Tessa. She and Ant had a genuine Hollywood “meet,” Ant opening the door to his ranch house on a night when the rain was pelting down, to find a beautiful young blonde standing there, having come down in the lorry that carried a string of new horses to Ant. When a beautiful young horsewoman comes in out of the rain, you take it as a sign; and they were married and worked the ranch and stock and wildlife together, happy ever after.
At the top of the road, we ran along the ridge, rocks grinding under the tires, the sky, with the sun setting, that particular shade of Africa-orange from woodsmoke and obscured by the soft evening haze. Out on the plains of the ranch giraffes paraded like tall, mobile honeycombed beeswax candles.
Coming around a bend in the road, I saw a folding table caparisoned in a starched white cloth, bottles of brown and white liquor, small pebbled-glass bottles of tonic, beer, soft drinks in cans, ice, and plates of simple hors d’oeuvres set out on it, the table oriented to the sundown. Here we toasted the end of the day and that start of a hunt, returning to the ranch buildings in the dark.
It was chill
that night at dinner inside the boma beside the main lodge. As the servers brought out the different dishes, one slid a shovel into the red-orange embers in the fire ring and placed half a blade of them on the bare ground under each canvas camp chair, the warmth bathing the calves of our legs and rising to the seat, a trick worth remembering.
The next day, I went out to shoot with Ant’s rifle. A keen professional hunter who grew up on the large cattle ranch near Ant’s Nest, Ant began hunting when he was nine, purchasing his first rifle at 11. It was a Musgrave Model 80 308 Winchester, a push-feed rifle built in South Africa. With a plain wooden stock and three-position safety, it was nothing custom in the least. The scope was a fixed 4X Stirling—not the highest resolution scope ever built. From the bench with 150-grain bullets it grouped within two inches at 100 yards, or perhaps it was meters there in South Africa. In his early 30s, then, Ant had used the rifle for over 20 years, and it was a firearm, in a phrase from the honky-tonk stage, that was ragged but right.
After seeing how it shot off sandbags, I rested it on crossed sticks on the ground and fired it at lifelike animal targets Ant painted. He’d found that having his clients sight in on animal portraits gave them a far better notion of where to place shots in the field—especially when he had drawn vital organs on the reverse side of the target, to show his hunters where their shots landed.
After a few shots, I found I could hit where I aimed even if that (to my chagrin) didn’t always turn out to be where the heart and lungs happened to be on the target. Still, the next day, I made that very credible shot on the cull impala, and then the day after we went in search of a trophy blesbok.
Ant believed in hunting on foot. During the morning, we drove the dirt vehicle tracks to a couple of likely jumping off spots, then went out walking, even bringing Rufus, Ant’s big black Lab, with us. Toward the end of the morning, we were thinking of heading in for lunch, having seen only a few small blesbok rams, but struck off on one more walk.
Ant had no sling on his rifle, so I had to carry it in my hand, muzzle down to prevent glare. He preferred me to keep the rifle loaded, with the safety on, because there was no way of predicting what we might come upon at any given moment. As we walked, I looked down at the rifle and noticed the bolt handle had lifted up, and the bolt itself had slid back an inch, drawing out the cartridge with it. I asked Ant about this, and he assured me that while the safety was too worn to keep the bolt locked closed, it still served its function of keeping the trigger locked so the rifle could not fire.
A few minutes later, apparently in an effort to test Ant’s assurance that the Musgrave was entirely safe, I managed to put my foot wrong and twist my ankle (adding insult to the injury I’d already suffered in falling off Saladin), pitching forward in an unintended and far from graceful break-fall, the rifle muzzle jamming into the ground as I went. As I regained my feet and dusted myself off, Ant picked up the rifle, unloaded it, and examined the plug of red dirt up the spout. So much for this hunt. There seemed to be no choice but to return to camp and clean the rifle, then hunt again in the afternoon. We could still press on just a little farther, though, to see what we might see; which, a quarter mile farther, turned out to be an old, fine blesbok in the middle of a large plain of yellow grass.
We squatted in the tree cover and debated. The more we debated, of course, the more we knew there was only one answer: If we waited till the afternoon to come back to find the blesbok, we never would. Ant, therefore, set to the blocked muzzle of the rifle, picking out as much dirt from it as he could with a twig, then removed the lace from his boot and triple knotted one end, pushing the other end through the barrel and out the muzzle. Pulling the knotted lace through, he looked down the barrel and saw a bore clean enough to shoot. He reloaded the rifle and handed it to me.
By now the blesbok had drifted off about 300 yards from the edge of the trees, farther than I felt sanguine about trying to shoot with a borrowed rifle—this borrowed rifle. To close the range at all, we had to cross the open at an angle to the ram to reach another lone thorn tree out on the plain. We walked through the grass, not attempting to hide, pretending we had no interest in the blesbok or even noticed his presence, the rifle carried down along my leg. Reaching the tree, I quickly got a standing rest across one of the branches and found the blesbok, now about 150 yards out, in the sights. I flipped off the safety, and as I started to squeeze I leaned into the butt of the rifle, pushing the muzzle right, in front of the ram’s chest, the shot going wide.
The blesbok ran a dozen yards and stopped. Now I was starting to get flustered. I jacked the bolt and set the safety, then moved around the tree to where I got a clearer shot at the blesbok, forgetting in the process that I had reset the safety, then trying to shoot the rifle without taking the safety off, only to have the increasingly more nervous blesbok run back those several yards toward us.
I had to change positions again. Now I flipped off the safety, put my finger on the trigger, and hit the ram higher than I intended. Luckily, the bullet caught the spine, dropping the blesbok. But the ram kept trying to get up until Rufus, let slip by Ant, barreled into it well ahead of us and took it by the neck. Then it was over, the ram turning out to be something more than exceptional, his unusually wide, very white horns—no, translucent, like the nail on a finger—going well over 15½ inches.
Bringing back the bakkie, we loaded the bull into the back and drove it to the skinning shed. My young son Bryan was there to see the blesbok when it came in, and watch with determined fascination as it was skinned and quartered and hung up to cool before butchering. I brought him to Africa for the first time, and he would return.
That is what is called to mind when I look at the head of that blesbok on the wall of my home, now years later. The rifle was borrowed, but the memories and emotions remain all mine.
Big Running Mean
The 1980s …
AT LAST, IN the entirely uncalled-for heat of December that hunkered down upon the northwestern horn of Zimbabwe and refused to leave until the wet season’s rains broke, there were elephant to see again. Black from the mud of the river, they glided together across the harshly green flats beside the Zambezi west of Victoria Falls, retiring to the relative coolness of the gusu woods above, moving as smoothly and steadily as large structures raised up on wheeled carriages and drawn in stately procession down the boulevards of a city in triumph.
This Zambezi River—whose upper reaches the Glasgow-born Dr. David Livingstone first saw very near here at the Zambian town of Sesheke in 1851, and the Portuguese slave trader Silva Porto saw some years before, and Africans had known about all along—came out of a bog near Kalene Hill in the far north of Zambia. It passed through Angola before re-entering Zambia, then constituted a portion of the border between Zambia and Namibia, flowing next past the single point where the maps of Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe converged. Establishing then the boundary between Zambia and Zimbabwe, it ran east to where the falls of Mosioatunya cut a 100-yard-high and 1,900-yard-wide slash across its bed. In late 1855 Livingstone, completely alone except for the presence of 114 African porters, came upon these falls and named them in honor of Victoria Regina. Farther east, today, there were hydroelectric dams, impoundments, Mozambique, and the Indian Ocean. Which paled in comparison to elephant black and glistening in their coats of river mud.
It may be one’s honest intention to see Africa just once in one’s life, to get the chasing of its game out of one’s system; but if you find yourself enthralled with hunting in Africa, it is an intention almost impossible to carry through on. Once seen, Africa demands to be seen again. And again.
Two years before—as I’ll tell you—during a rather long and quite curious safari in the Central African Republic, what I had missed most was the sight of elephant. Other than their tracks, all I had seen of them there were their skulls every so often, white and massive and smooth as polished marble, the milestones of poachers. But here, encamped beside the Zambezi in the 1.2-million-a
cre Matetsi Safari Area in the Wankie District, one of Zimbabwe’s largest safari concessions, there were elephant galore, along with Cape buffalo, sable antelope, greater kudu, lion, leopard, southern impala, warthog, bushbuck, and numerous other species. I felt myself, not against my will but perhaps against any possibility of my ultimate control, sliding in that burning December back into Africa, like an apostate returning to the faith with new-found zeal.
That I was there in December to begin with was fair measure of just how badly I wanted to see Africa again. Only a certifiable lamebrain or a hopeless addict knowingly ventured after game in Zimbabwe then. December is an appalling time to hunt there, first, because of the shimmering mad-dog heat; second, because all the bush as far as the eye can see is leafing out into a verdant curtain impossible to spot animals through; and third, once those rains—already long overdue—did break, they would fill every pan and depression, allowing the wildlife to spread out over the land in a thin, almost transparent film, instead of forming huntable congregations around a few permanent waterholes. All this I knew; yet when offered even this imperfect opportunity to see Africa again, I went for it like a trout for a fly that matched the hatch …
… And so found myself on my first day of hunting stalking a young elephant bull standing in the shade of a tree at the brow of a hill. We had driven along one of the concession’s dirt tracks in an ancient pumpkin-colored Land Rover—branded with those resolutely British names, “Solihull, Warwickshire, England”—doing all those things you do on the first day of safari. At the margin of a waterhole we found the tracks of a “dagga-boy” buffalo, one of those old mud-caked bulls who chart a solitary, disgruntled course through life. In a long valley of beige grass we saw two giraffes galloping, as they always galloped, like building cranes making a break for it. Standing together in the Land Rover’s open back, hanging onto the roll bar, my professional hunter, Sandy, and I got to talking. In his mid-30s and bearded for the very pragmatic reason that it lent him an air of authority, a touch of the patriarch in dealing with his trackers and staff, Sandy had left his native Canada years before and spent the time since in wild locales where the important cultural headlines of the West were not readily available.
Augusts in Africa Page 14
