We trailed the skidding track through the open jess down to a dry creek bottom where the tracks played out. A mopane tree grew out of a dense clump of bushwillow; and we spread out around and above it, hoping to pick up the trail again. One of the trackers, Tino, was down in the creek bottom when a pair of oxpeckers flew out of the bushwillow. Everyone, and everything, froze.
Rory and I were on the creekbank above the brush. Rory slid to my side when the birds flew.
“If he charges,” he whispered, his eyes on the bush, “he’s coming, and we’ll have to grab him.” As he said this, he held up his free hand (the one not wrapped around the barrel of the 458 Model 70 with iron sights and the bluing worn off) and closed it on the air.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked, so I would know where to swing my 450 Nitro Express 3¼-inch Ruger No. 1.
He shrugged.
“Haven’t a clue.”
As it turned out, the buffalo was 20 yards away, lying in the bushwillow under the mopane, watching. It took us a quarter hour to verify that, as we moved side to side and in and out to try to get a look at him. The best that could be seen, with a binocular, was an eye and a segment of horn.
“This buffalo should have been gone by now,” Rory said, unease and excitement rising in his hushed voice.
Do you think there’s fear to be seen in a handful of dust? Imagine a bush, yards away, where a dagga boy waits, having decided not to run.
As long as we stayed downwind of the buffalo, he was not going to show himself, so we crossed (rapidly) the rocks and sand of the creek bottom and circled upwind of where the buffalo lay on the opposite bank. As our wind drifted into the bushwillow, and we waited with our rifles, we heard the buffalo getting to his hooves. Then we saw his gray-blackness moving. Then he walked into the open.
He was a young dagga boy, packing his hind hoof. His hipbones showed, and he’d been fortunate not to have been taken by lion. He moved lamely under the slanting afternoon sun, looking at us levelly as he drew off from us. We watched him go. He could still survive and in time mend—maturing into a bull who did not run. Rory calmly consulted his Timex and said we should head for the Land Rover.
In the days after that the buffalo hunting was a matter of old tracks, no tracks, blown stalks, wrong buffalo. In the middle of the bush, another tracker, John, found a 1961 Rhodesia and Nyassaland penny, with a hole in the center and elephant rampant on the obverse. I bought it off him and strung it through the band of my hat, hoping it would change our luck; but we went on hunting without any noticeable improvement in our fortunes.
We were not without buffalo meat in camp, though. Whenever a buffalo was killed, the trackers cut it in two with their tribal axes and knives and took everything from the body cavity—even stabbing handholds in the bulging white wall of the stomach to roll it out onto the ground and cut it up into tripe. When they were done, all of the buffalo, except the 200-pound bale of grazed grass from the stomach and the contents of the lower intestines (what Lewis and Clark’s “wrighthand” cook Charbonneau would have described as “not good to eat”), was loaded into the Land Rover and transported back to camp. There was abundant, virtually fat-free meat in camp from buffalo killed by previous hunters, and we ate it as rolled fillet; braised oxtail; steaks; biltong; cold in sandwiches; the liver, fried; testicles, likewise (Buffalo McNuggets); in traditional muriro stew with onions and rape greens, scooped from the pot with stiff cornmeal sadza (the main staple of Zimbabwe) rolled into a ball in the hand; and once for lunch as a poignant, handcrafted cheeseburger—the cheese Zimbabwean cheddar, the onion and tomato from the camp’s small vegetable garden behind the wattle-and-daub cook hut, the homemade bun baked in the hut’s woodstove, the mustard stirred up from dry powder—as artisinal and rustic as if someone were placing a call to you on a telephone he had carved from wood. But eating yesterday’s buffalo only made me want to find tomorrow’s even more.
The routine of the hunt was to check waterholes for a track that was not neruro (yesterday). Today’s track, if not up-to-the-minute, could still be used to judge what the bull would be doing in an hour, in the afternoon, tomorrow. If shiny and crisply outlined, we would be on it on foot.
We were indifferent to a great deal as we tracked, whether the bounding escape of a big kudu or the gray apparition of a rare roan bull galloping off. We weren’t blind to our surroundings, though. Once, Rory picked up a small tortoise, fast asleep under the grass, showed it to me, then placed it back carefully into the cover. Snowy flashes caught our eyes, and looking we saw marangwonda, scattered bones, the immense broken skeletons of elephant, too heavy to have been dragged off by scavengers. We would also find wide sandy elephant beds where the giants lay on their sides, a lesser indent up at the head where a tusk furrowed a resting spot. (In marula season, the fruit fermented in the elephant’s stomachs and they flopped down, snoring, sleeping one off.)
The buffalo knew too well, though, where to lead us to make the tracking of them, if not impossible, then at least dubious: unbroken dry shoals of quartz pebbles, tall thick grass, shelves of flat bare rock, and across noisy acres of fallen leaves.
“Like walking around in a crisp factory,” Rory would say, taking a fatalistic drag on his Newbury cigarette.
Mentally translating “crisp” into “potato chip,” I thought of “a dangerous man,” Floyd Thursby, in The Maltese Falcon who “never went to sleep without covering the floor around his bed with crumpled newspaper.” Cape buffalo were nothing if not the Floyd Thursbys of the African bush. With thoughts like that—especially at moments when the trackers halted in voiceless unison, like a synchronized swim team practicing out of the pool, all of them staring at the same (for me) unidentifiable object in the bush—I had to remind myself that I was coming for the buffalo, not he for me (except for that unpredictable, but statistically significant, instance when he actually could be coming for me).
For six days we hunted like that. Far from frustrating, it was six days of valuable practice—I even began to find tracks myself when we had lost them. As the days went by, I also began to develop a premonitory awareness. At the end of a long fifth day, I told Rory my secret prediction: We would find the dagga boy, Old No. 7, on the seventh day. Rory did not argue.
On the seventh morning we looked for buffalo on a high grassy flat where we had seen tracks heading the evening before, klipspringer bounding out of the kopjes ahead of us. The buffalo had already moved on, though. I didn’t have to ask Rory where we were going next: We would go to his favorite area for buffalo, Kapinda, a distant part of the concession where stands of mopane grew up to the bottoms of rock ridges, the jess could be thick, and long-yellow-grassed woodland parks rolled out over broad ridgelines.
The morning grew warm as we drove the more-than-20 kilometers to Kapinda. Reaching the area, we rolled slowly down the indistinct dirt roads, looking for tracks, and at midmorning found large round ones—those of two dagga boys together.
We parked the white Land Rover in the shade of a tree. I took my soft case down from the rifle rack welded to the rollbar behind the front seats, unzipped it, and slipped out the 450. Sliding in a snap cap, I levered the action closed and dry-fired offhand at 50, 30, 15 yards, keeping my eye on the unripened turquoise monkey orange or yellow leaf I held in the crosshairs of the 1.75-6x32mm scope, keeping it steady through the shot, the power ring turned down to 1.75X. I ejected the snap cap and chambered a 500-grain soft-nosed bullet, loaded to 2,100 feet-per-second velocity, and set the safety. I took a long drink of water (but not enough to slosh in my belly) from one of the canteens John carried in his day pack. It was time to go.
The track led across all the usual dubious terrain. We lost, and found, the dagga boys’ trail time and again until we tracked them into a keep of tall crenulated rocks on a high ridge. We knew they had to be just ahead; and they were, bedded.
What gets buffalo killed, above all else, is the wind; but it is also what keeps them from getting killed. This time the wind sw
irled in their favor. We heard thunderous crashing, like three-quarter-ton mule deer busting from cover, unseen. Hunkering in silence in the rocks, we waited to see if the buffalo would tell us what to do next.
Fifteen minutes later, Samuel, Rory’s head tracker, spotted the two good, old dagga boys feeding among the mopane out on the flat ground below the rocks, as if all had been forgiven. They had not been irreparably spooked and drifted back toward the rocks.
“How far can that rifle shoot?” Rory asked. It was not a question I liked. “Not that far.”
“Two hundred yards?”
“To shoot well? One hundred. Less.”
Rory was calculating. We had the wind up here and could see the buffalo clearly. If we went down, we would lose sight of them and did not know how the wind was, there. A low ridge ran near the buffalo with large rocks piled on it. If we went down in a wide circle, using the rocks as landmarks, we could get within 100 yards or less of the bulls—if it all went right. Rory knew I didn’t want to do this at sniping ranges: Oddly, I felt better the closer I got to buffalo, even glint-of-the-eye distance—as long as I was seeing more of a buffalo than just that glint. There was also something fundamentally unseemly about trying to “fell” Cape buffalo “at a venture.” Hunting buffalo was, at least for me, ultimately a highly personal matter, and therefore ought to be carried out up close. There wasn’t really a choice, now, though.
Rory decided and we crawled out of the rocks and when we were away from the buffalo’s line of sight stood and worked our way off the ridge. I stumbled more than once on the way down (either from simple clumsiness or excited tension), and I was certain I had started the bulls. We couldn’t know, so we went on with the stalk. On the flat ground, moving toward the low ridge and the landmarks, Rory asked me what I had chambered. I told him soft.
“Solid,” he whispered, and I reloaded the single-shot quietly. Reaching the low ridge, we left the other trackers behind; and Samuel, Rory, and I climbed it and moved along the crest. The rock we had singled out to navigate by (black and wind-carved) was just ahead. I could see off the other side of the ridge, and I saw a black shape standing beneath the low branches of a mopane. I reached out and touched Rory; and he whistled softly to Samuel, and we all stopped.
We lined up three trees and used them for concealment as we worked closer, until the dagga boy was 60 yards away, slightly downhill. There was no cover or any place to get a rest, and I slid out alone from behind the last tree and set the fore-end of the 450 in a leather-covered cradle on the top of the hiking staff I used. I found the buffalo in the scope. I turned the power ring up to 4X. The bull had his head in the branches and leaves, but I could see a blocky rump, slightly swayed back, and heavy belly, his real weight carried in the bulked hump of his shoulder. He was quartering toward me, and as I looked among the branches and leaves of the tree, I saw a boss and the curve of a horn and a glint: He saw something where I stood, but he waited for the wind to tell him what it was.
The buffalo’s left ear drooped and below its tattered fringe I could see his chest and the base of his neck. I stage whispered to Rory that there were twigs in the way, and he whispered back, “Not enough to bother that bullet; all quite thin stuff.”
I looked back through the crosshairs and saw that he was right. I found a place on the bull’s chest that looked open.
“I’m going to shoot him in the chest, just below his left ear.”
“That’s a good place.”
I held a little longer, making sure that what I was seeing in the blackness in the scope really was the bull’s chest. I slid the tang safety forward.
“Don’t shoot unless you’re absolutely happy,” Rory warned.
I was tense, concentrated, and yes, happy—nearly euphoric in a semi-terrified way. My finger pressed the trigger and the rifle fired.
The bull spun out from beneath the tree in a splintering of branches. He ran counterclockwise in a half circle, placing himself 15 yards farther out along the line of fire, but partially covered by the mopane’s trunk. His head was up, domed by the heavy boss, his Roman nose scenting for the source of the bullet that had struck him. Out of nowhere the second dagga boy pounded past and turned into the wind, drawing along the wounded bull with him. They went straight away, making for a second, lower ridge.
I had another solid in the chamber and threw the scope on the wounded bull (the rear one of the two), 100 yards away now. I scarcely felt the powerful thunderroll of the gun as it fired and the second 500-grain solid broke the buffalo’s left hip. It didn’t seem to slow him, but the first solid was finishing its work as he ran.
As I reloaded once more, the two bulls went out of sight over the second ridge. Then the first reappeared, going away from sight; and I saw the horns and boss of the second, lit from above by the harsh noon sun. I mused about whether I would have to try an even farther, unseemly shot, when the second bull lurched to his right. His head twisted down, and his body dropped, dust rising from where he fell from view, 200 yards from where I stood.
We hurried down off the first ridge, heading for the second. Before we were halfway there, we heard a mourning bellow from the other side.
“He is dead,” announced John with a solemn nod. Not quite. Coming over the second low ridge, we found the buffalo lying on his right side, his back to us, his bellow faint and his head wobbling feebly on the ground. As a grace I walked up close behind him and gave him a third solid in the back of his deeply creased neck.
It almost seems a requirement of hunting stories, especially ones about “dangerous game,” to offer a ballistics formula. There is the one describing kinetic energy or “Pondoro” Taylor’s (sadly, rather questionable) “Knockout Value” for large calibers. Looking at this old dagga boy, the formula I came up with was:
Ruger No. 1 × [(.458+500 grs.) × 2100 fps ×
{(1 @ 60m) + (1 @ 100m)+(1 @ 2m)}] + 1700 lbs = Old No.7
It would take more than a formula, though, to define this buffalo’s wide boss, embedded with pale green cambium from his butting and rubbing his way through tree bark. Or horns that were worn back to where the thickness carried all the way out to the blunted tips. (The most elderly bulls could batter their horns back to stumps, so they looked as if they wore Wehrmacht helmets; this bull’s horns were an honest badge of at least 15 years in good standing as a dagga boy.) Or define why, even as “he lay in death,” as Theodore Roosevelt wrote in African Game Trails, he still “looked what he was, a formidable beast.”
By the time a road had been hacked through the bush so that Tino could bring the Land Rover up to retrieve the carcass, the buffalo had exacted his own final revenge by dying in a spot remarkable for its infestation by mopane flies, a small stingless bee that sups on sweat and tears and other human and animal liquid excreta and is said for all that to produce exquisite honey. They soon had Rory beside himself (though a native Zimbabwean, he’d never acquired an indifference to the tiny insect). He gathered up cabbage-sized lumps of dry elephant dung and set them alight to smolder in an almost incense-scented cloud of smoke, in the vain hope that the flies would be driven off by it. They weren’t, and they became so annoying to him that he resorted to stopping up his ear canals with his old cigarette butts to keep them out—or maybe just so he could keep from hearing them.
Meanwhile, the trackers, working away with axes and knives, had opened the buffalo and let run out a rivulet of blood, drained into his body cavity by the first solid through the veins and arteries at the top of the heart—which nonetheless had not stopped him from running as far as he did. Trying to step around the blood and other fluids, they laughed and horsed with one another, nobody showing so much as a hint that “in the depths of his conscience” he felt the unease that José Ortega y Gasset claimed all hunters experienced (and these men were nothing if not among the truest hunters I had ever known). The killing of other animals might very well bring unease and regret; but no one was ever really unhappy after finding a big Cape buffalo, dead.
Paying the mopane flies no mind, I opened a warm beer from the cooler in the Land Rover, to propose a silent toast here among the trees and brush. The beer wasn’t bad, but I realized that my drug of choice was neither it nor mefloquine, but the object of my salute: dagga boys. To find the pure dagga boy you had to get as far away as you could from the Africa of a million UPF-rated sun hats and photographic opportunities during game drives across clean, well-lighted plains. That was the kind of Africa the last decent parts were swiftly turning into; and there was nothing genuinely wrong with that, if you were satisfied with “Africa Lite.”
Where I wanted to be, though, as long as it continued to exist, was an older place, where things worked out harsher, even crueler—though no more so than the continent’s natural background radiation of cruelty. At this moment, that place was located approximately 28-degrees east of Greenwich and 17-degrees south of the equator. It was located with these men and mopane flies, heavy rifles, smoldering dung, bright fresh blood, and always, a dagga boy. It was where I had come for my ancient, savage fix, my shot of Old No. 7, neat as always. If it meant troubled sleep, that was all right because it also meant that it was not Africa Lite out there, not yet. It was still Africa Dark. Let there be dark.
Dreaming the Lion
The 1980s …
I sat up in the dark, listening. Moving blind hands, I searched for my rifle; but it wasn’t beside me. I had to find it and to hear the roaring once more so I would know in what direction the lion, bamara, was moving. Waiting and listening, I heard that silence, with a lion walking in it, build to almost intolerable volume. There were nights when it would be an endless minute or more before I would be awake enough to realize that I was away from the lion now, that I was not in Africa anymore.
Augusts in Africa Page 24
