Sten’s job on the film included wrangling actors and crew for each day’s shoot, which meant his having to knock on hut doors and lift tent flaps at dawn. According to Sten, “Dhere was never a morning when anybody was ever in de same place.”
Sometimes, things going very right can also make for a good story for a PH to share around a campfire. As Sten told it … well, let him tell it.
“Tom,” he said with a twinkling smile, thinking fondly of a time years before when he had been a young, unmarried PH, “do you remember de actress Elsa Martinelli in dat movie?” He paused, watching the flames, and with a sigh said, “Ja, dat was de finest tree months of my life.” And like a true professional, said no more.
Dagga Boys & Monkey Oranges
The 2000s …
SEEING IS BELIEVING, though not always as persuasive as not seeing. It cannot be, for instance, adequately appreciated how accomplished the Cape buffalo is at the art of concealment until you fail utterly at 25 feet to see 1,700 pounds of one, a body as gray-black and substantial as some massive canyon boulder, lying behind sparse branches of a bushwillow.
That’s how it was with the first buffalo I didn’t see on my first morning with professional hunter Rory Muil. Muil hunted in a 4,000 square-kilometer (a million acres, give or take) concession in the Binga Communal Lands of the Tonga people in northwestern Zimbabwe. It is 2,000-foot-high country above the Kariba Lake shore, densely brushed and timbered with mahogany, mopane, duiker berry, and grotesque pewter-barked baobab trees towering like Gogs and Magogs across the landscape. The Sengwa is the main river running through it. Among the other rivers is the Songo, where Rory and I hunted from a camp with green wall tents pitched on concrete pads and covered by steep thatched roofs to hold in some of the night’s cool during the day.
Kapinda is an area in the concession where stands of mopane trees grow to the bottoms of rocky ridges, scattering their bronze leaves like foliage fallen from oaks across rocky whitetail woods in northern Missouri. There were thickets of bushwillow (jess) still holding up their green-but-yellowing leaves, and long-yellow-grassed woodland parks rolling out on broad ridgelines. It was a hard drive at first light from the Songo to Kapinda—a kidney-bouncing ride in Rory’s white Land Rover Defender, complete with stout brush guards wrapped around the front, a heavy rollbar with a rifle rack, steel ladders on the sides, and a high bench for the trackers to spot from in the back. The fabric covering the two front seats was bleached to the pallid blue of pool lounges, and there was not a door, mirror, or windshield to save your life. Rory figured it was worth the drive, because Kapinda was one of the best places in the concession for “dagga boys.”
To understand both Kapinda and dagga boys (and maybe Rory, as well—and me?), you should consider the monkey orange. In Zimbabwe, the spiked-leaved monkey orange hangs from a small evergreen tree, its turquoise peel ripening to golden brown. Its pulpy flesh encapsulates numerous seeds, the way a pomegranate’s does. The flesh is quite edible and by all accounts succulent. But the seeds of the poor monkey orange are in a paraphrase of Trini Lopez, impossible to eat, the Latin name for the plant, Strychnos pungens, denoting the genus from which strychnine is derived. Hidden in the seeds is nothing but poison.
Hidden in the wild and beautiful (to a hunter) Kapinda country was, if not quite poison, the distilled essence of Syncerus caffer caffer (the Cape buffalo): the dagga boy. Dagga1 is a corruption of the word in Shona (Zimbabwe’s native language) for “mud”; and a “dagga”—or mud—boy is an old bull who rules the wallows, coating himself in thick layers of cooling mire, metaling his hide against insects, and playing not at all well with others, as any cow, calf, or even lesser bull intemperate enough to wander into a mudhole with a dagga boy soon learns, to its regret. As many as half a dozen roguish dagga boys might run together, but it is more likely to find two to four at a time, or sometimes just one solitary, invariably truculent individual.
Tracking Cape buffalo on foot—as they should be hunted—was not a matter of going where the grass was trampled by the hooves of a 100-strong herd. It was, at its best, winding after a lone set of tracks, or two, the print half again as wide as a man’s boot, the toes scuffed out where the dagga boy flicked his heavy hoof as he lifted it. A good track had a sheen, like a newly struck coin, before dust blew into it. Luckiest was to find fresh dung, not crusted yet or oxidized to brown inside, but green when pushed apart and maybe still warm to the touch. If the matter was coarse, it could even tell you that it was from a very old bull, his teeth worn so that he no longer chewed as he ought.
Tracking buffalo is much like ordering dance lessons by mail and having a stranger lay-out diagrams of the steps in only the vaguest order and across kilometers of ground, so that it can take hours to work out the routine (one, two, cha-cha-cha). You always have to maintain your poise, though, even when you get frustrated when the steps (the tracks) vanish and you then have to improvise by ranging out in widening gyres until you cut the tracks again—if you cut them again.
On the trail with me, or more correctly I with them, were three trackers—short dapper Tino, tall and slightly esotropic John who carried the water, and Mika with his shaved head and ragged hat, carrying a knobkerrie Tonga ax, made from a whittled mopane branch and hand-forged spring steel. And there was Rory, a tobacco farmer cum professional hunter, never without a Newbury Extra Mild smoldering between his fingers to repel mopane flies and to read the wind; a loaded .458 Model 70, the bluing polished away where he held it by the barrel, slung across his shoulder in a fashion that would induce a seizure in a hunter-education instructor; pale scars from the claws and teeth of a leopard, tattooing the precancerous skin of his forearms. He was a PH who really didn’t care much for taking game himself (“Maybe a crocodile,” he’d reckon, if pressed) but who took inordinate pleasure in guiding hunters to what they had come to Africa to find. I, of course, had come to find a dagga boy, or perhaps more so to see if I still remembered what a dagga boy was by hunting him on his own terms.
By 8:30 the first morning, after the drive to Kapinda, we left the tank-like Defender and set off on what looked to be the tracks of two dagga boys. Eventually we caught the tempo as the trail resolved itself into that of a single bull, leading us for an hour and a half below and around a grassy hill until we were going with the wind. We had to fall back to circle downwind, abandoning the concrete fact of the track, to get ahead of the bull, whom Rory thought had gone onto the hill above us, and—“slowly, slowly”—see if we could get onto his trail again.
We crested the level top of the hill and began a purposeful, searching meander through the tall grass and bushwillow. The August air was still cool and for a quarter hour we moved like a wary conga line, the five of us matching one another’s footsteps. Then Tino, in the lead, walked past a small clump of low bushwillow, and next John did, then Rory, and I, and then Mika at the back hissed emphatically through his teeth. We froze midstride and looked to the right at the dagga boy, no more than two-dozen paces away, who had just gotten to his hooves behind the bushwillow. He had lain motionless as we approached and nearly walked past him, and only stood when we got upwind, our scents at last intolerable. Before I could get my scoped 450 Nitro Express 3¼-inch Ruger No. 1 to my shoulder (the single-shot rifle holding a cartridge loaded with a 500-grain Woodleigh soft-point), and the duplex reticle on the buffalo, he spun and ran downwind, off the hill, agile as a fighting bull entering the arena. The sun was behind him, making a silver-nitrate tracery around his deep-curled horns and heavy boss as he escaped.
“Pity, that,” commented Rory, as dryly as a sip of brut.
Way cool, I thought, to my minor astonishment. This morning was the first time in 17 years that I had hunted Cape buffalo, and 28 since I first cut one of their tracks. Over time my memory of how large, fast, strong, and malicious they were had grown, magnifying them in my imagination to the point where I had been apprehensive about how I would react when I encountered one for real (i.e., would I dissolve int
o a puddle of ninnyhammer gibbering?). That was the anxiety hidden in me. Now all I felt was the parlous delight of simply being ticklishly close to buffalo again: I couldn’t tell if that scared me even more than the thought of being genuinely scared.
It is not the Cape buffalo’s manifest strength, ferocity, and tenacity during a charge (which are definite factors) that make it quite foreseeable that it might kill you as quickly as you it. More than anything else, what enables him to kill you is his bloody-damn genius for blending his great bulk in with a few leaves, twigs, and blades of grass and remaining as still and seemingly impassive as the faces on Rushmore—until he gets you to venture within a range where it is too close for him to miss, and where in a 4X scope he looks like a small patch of blurrily approaching bristly hair, which is why after we jumped that bull, I made sure that my scope was turned down to 1.75X.
A track (plus dung) is often the only empirical evidence of a dagga boy’s existence in the material world, until you stumble onto, or over, him. Nothing else looks like his track, certainly not the sickle-padded four-toed splayed one of a hyena, the creased-pad pug mark of the leopard, or the lion’s track, identical to the leopard’s but super-sized. The print of an elephant is like a crazed porcelain platter. A kudu track is much smaller, more pointed and deceitfully delicate; a zebra has one that looks, not surprisingly, like a horse’s; and though the track of a big eland may draw a second glance, it is quickly dismissed. Misidentifications, though, do occur.
Late in the afternoon of the first day, after we gave up tracking the runaway buffalo, Rory stamped on the Defender’s brakes and leaned out, looking at the sandy dirt. He kept swiveling his head, uncertain about something. I looked to the left. Ten yards away, two bulls stood, gazing at us. One had a bell. Weeks before, we learned, cattle strayed from the herd of one of the trackers in camp. Now here they were, standing contentedly in the jess beside the dirt vehicle trail.
From his posture, Rory seemed on the verge of speaking, something he generally economized on, when I said, “Um …”
Rory sat up, staring at me from behind his wraparound sunglasses. I nodded tentatively toward the cattle.
“Oh hell!” he shouted in disgust. “Shoot the bloody things!” We didn’t but roared off, leaving them to go on dodging lions, as they seemed to have been doing with some success, thus far.
Tea with milk was brought to my tent at 5:30 a.m. by one of the camp waiters. I heard him when he drew back the flap, before he said, “Good morning.” I lifted the mosquito netting and sat up, taking the tea the waiter had poured milk into. We would be back in Kapinda early.
By 8:00 a.m. we were on another set of tracks, of a band of dagga boys. We stayed on the tracks for three hours, often losing the trail and having to range out until we picked it up again. The buffalo seemed as astray as young men in university jerseys and draped in ropes of multi-colored plastic beads, wandering the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday. Eventually they led us back in a wide inebriated circle to the road from which we had taken off after them, not far from where we had left the Defender.
We returned to the vehicle and ate chicken-and-mayonnaise sandwiches while Rory charted our course. The wind had freshened, gusting from the direction in which the buffalo tracks were going. That was good. We finished the sandwiches, checked that the magazines of the rifles were full, and went after them. We didn’t need to go far.
For a kilometer we walked through head-high bushwillow and tall grass, Rory absently breaking off a dry stem to twirl in his ear. Then everything stopped.
At first it was just Tino who halted and pointed, crouching. Then Rory halted and leaned far back to see where Tino was pointing. Rory gestured to me to get low. My legs felt like cement when he motioned me toward a bare willowbush and to look—there.
Forty yards in the shade of thickly leaved mopane was a gray-black canyon boulder, with the gleam of a curved horn growing from it.
“Can you see them?” Rory asked in a whisper.
I saw the one horn, then a gray face with deep wrinkled rings around the eyes, the eyes turned toward us. I slipped the 450 through the branches and got down on the scope. More boulders lay near the first.
“I see the one looking.”
“Not him. The best is the one on the farthest left, broadside.”
Now I saw that farthest boulder had a rump and withers, and a head with a profile reminiscent of the portraits of certain stately medieval pontiffs, a tall helmet of horn instead of a miter covering it. The dagga boy had come out of hiding.
“I see him.”
“He’s lying down.”
“Yes.”
Rory paused, glassing him, then said, “In the middle of the shoulder.”
I eased off the tang safety and lowered the crosshairs onto the bull’s shoulder.
“Got him?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
I took a breath and let it flow out.
The big rifle boomed and in the scope l saw four buffalo (including the one I’d fired on) up and running, short-tailed broad rears vanishing. I had not heard the echoing impact of the bullet, but maybe we were too close. I levered out the empty case and slid in another 500-grain Woodleigh, this time a solid. There was no chance for a second shot, though.
Rory had run to the left behind me, craning to see where the buffalo went.
“Did you have a good picture?” he asked, looking at me sharply,
“Yes.”
“All right,” he said, relaxing. “Let’s see.”
We waited five minutes then went to the tree where the bulls had lain. There was no blood there. Rory and the trackers were studying the ground.
“I thought I had a good picture,” I found myself weaseling, worried because there was no blood.
Rory looked at me.
“No,” he said, reading my thought. “It won’t have started here.”
It started several yards away with one small spatter, already dried on the dirt. We moved forward, following more drops. They turned into bright red splatters of blood, big around as coffee saucers. Everyone was silent, looking at the trail, but looking up, too, watching ahead. Then Tino, John, and Mika all spoke out, in calm conversational tones. They pointed. I moved up and saw the gray-black shape on the ground ahead. Rory and I circled toward it, rifles up.
The bull had gone 250 yards, without a bellow, and was lying, legs folded, with his muzzle pushed forward on the ground, as if resting. Lung blood trickled from a disconcertingly small hole in his shoulder. We walked up to the buffalo, and I backed Rory as he extended the muzzle of his 458 to the bull’s staring eye. When the muzzle touched it, the eye did not blink.
As we unloaded our rifles, Rory looked back at where the bull had come from and in his mind looked back on the tracking, the stalk, and my (for a change) decent shot.
“That’s the way to hunt buffalo,” he said with blunt satisfaction. And at least I hadn’t been a ninnyhammer.
Tino, John, and Mika sharpened their spring-steel Tonga axes and knives on stones on the ground and working hard for most of an hour, cutting the bull in two. Rory drove the Defender in from the road and somehow we managed to wedge every edible—and some less than edible—scrap of the buffalo into it.
We made our way back to Songo Camp from Kapinda, the long trip lengthened by the heavy load. When we came in late that afternoon, we turned in a swirl of dust toward the skinning-and-butchering shed. The camp staff came out and saw the horns and hooves rising from the back of the white Land Rover, and offered a polite round of applause. Even that embarrassed me.
To cover the rush of feeling, I lifted my hand and gave a stage bow.
“Thank you, thank you!” I called. “You’re too kind. I’ll be appearing here all week. Don’t forget your waitress. And try the veal!”
No, make that dagga boy.
1Like the Inuit’s supposed lexicon of 26 words for snow, Zimbabweans do have w
ords in various dialects for different types of mud, such as dope for thin watery mud; dhaka for mud used as mortar; and madhaka, sticky mud created by rain-soaked earth; and although madhaka would seem to be the most accurate word for the type of mud frequented by Cape buffalo, dhaka looks to be the word from which dagga is derived. Dagga also carries the connotation of “crazy,” the word synonymous with marijuana in many parts of Africa.
Not Far to Africa
The 2000s …
Now since I have seen the ocean with my own eyes, I feel completely how important it is for me to stay in the south and to experience the color which must be carried to the uttermost—it is not far to Africa.
—Vincent Van Gogh
IT IS NOT far to Africa across the ocean, particularly to Pointe des Almadies, the continent’s farthest dusty western reach, stretching out into the Atlantic just northwest of central Dakar in Senegal. One who sailed past the Pointe was the Scots surgeon Mungo Park. For all his travails—imprisonment, hunger, thirst, tropical fever, routine stripping from him of his garments, robbery of his effects, a trio of “very large” lions that “came bounding over the long grass” toward him, and ultimately having “lances, pikes, arrows, stones, and missiles of every description” rained down upon his canoe by natives, resulting in his drowning in the Niger River—the youthful and ill-fated early 19th-century African explorer who wended his way through Senegal to satisfy “a passionate desire to examine into the productions of a country so little known” never saw Dakar, the modern capital of the nation, which was not established by the French colonial governor Louis-Léon-César Faidherbe until a half century after Park’s untimely death.
By dying—or rather, by failing to survive into the 21st century—Park was deprived of a life in full because he was denied the remarkable opportunity to encounter present-day Dakar with its sheep tethered to manhole covers on the city sidewalks, the towering red-hatted Republican Guard manning the wrought-iron gate of the presidential palace with a tarnished saber, or the echoing dawn calls to prayer of the muezzins from the minarets of the assorted mosques. What he especially missed, though, was browsing in the Village des Arts at Anse des Madeleines, “Madeleines Cove,” where festively painted fishing pirogues are hauled out onto the yellow-sand shore and a raw torrent of gray nightsoil cascades down an open 20-foot-wide sewer into the surf.
Augusts in Africa Page 19
