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Augusts in Africa

Page 27

by Thomas McIntyre


  A long safari, removed from any outlet to the rest of the world, can be like a mail-order marriage for the strangers thrust together on it, and for at least the duration of the hunt there is only the most radical possibility of divorce. Our marriage had now obviously become a rocky one. I picked up a bottle of flavored syrup and attempted some cleverness to lighten the mood.

  “‘Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?’” I inquired of the Patron Sans Souci, who had wisely spent his day alone in camp reading some of the not-yet-terrible Le Carré. He went on reading in silence.

  Later, in the dark, the Gent demanded belligerently of the W. W. H., “Can’t you get one of these chimpanzees to go back to Jolly and get us some oil?”

  “You son of a bitch,” the Old Boy snarled at the Gent, throwing down his napkin and leaving the table.

  I was here to write about the hunt, and as much as possible to stay out of the way of the paying hunters. I knew my place. Even though I despise stupidity. But I exceeded my authority now, went even beyond-cleverness, as I folded my hands and leaned across the table to get close to the Gent’s face. I wanted to ask him the question that had been on my mind from the very moment I met him, though I was almost certain he could not answer it: Why, I wondered out loud, my eyes unblinking, did someone like him ever come to Africa?

  Leaning far back away from me, hugging his arms tightly around his chest, and blinking his eyes rapidly, he sneered, “Don’t waste any of your sympathy on me.” I wasn’t aware that I had. But that answer was no stranger than almost anything else he said.

  The next morning at the Missionary’s urging, “for the sake of the safari,” the Old Boy apologized to the Gent. But the Gent, after a quite audible private argument in the middle of camp with the W. W. H., resolved, it seemed, to punish us all by refusing to hunt. So the W. W. H. and I went off with Djouma and some other trackers on a long hot walk through a grassy valley that produced only more sore feet. We sighted a small roan antelope, who snorted at us before galloping away, and a lone giraffe who ran off the way one imagines a startled television-transmission tower might. (Nobody, of course, has yet explained the existence of the giraffe to my personal satisfaction. Like those aircraft engineers who contend that by all the known laws of aerodynamics the humble bee cannot fly, I can imagine no known law of nature which adequately accounts for an animal who has much greater difficulty bowing to drink than it has in stripping from a tree with its blue tongue a leaf-fluttering 20 feet above the ground.)

  Back in camp that afternoon, we found that the safari company had sent us an extra vehicle, a working four-wheel-drive diesel Toyota, and the Gent, relieved to have some decent equipment under him at last, agreed once more to go shoot at animals. And returned at sunset with a buffalo, probably from the same herd he had turned down on the trail when we had all wanted meat so desperately.

  The very next noon, mirabile dictu, he and the W. W. H. pulled in with a superb giant eland. How it had happened no one who knew, I think, ever really said; but everyone else was flatly shocked. Suddenly the Gent was downright expansive. He even invited me to go out with him that afternoon in the Toyota so I could look for a buff, or whatever else he had already killed. I knew that to see more game I was going to have to travel farther from the area around camp than I could reasonably walk to and back before dark, so I sighed and thought, What the hell. I made sure I rode in the open back, while the Gent sat inside the cab.

  It was passing strange to be bouncing across the country in a vehicle after so long on foot. I let the wind flow over me and kept my eyes moving all around as we traveled. We drove back past the camp where we had very nearly become midnight barbecue and found an old bull buff with nubby horns all by himself. I passed, deciding that we had enough meat for now and that I might find something bigger later. And I did.

  As we drove in I was standing up, holding onto the roll bar, when I saw a flash of tawny-golden color a quarter-mile ahead of us through a stand of tall teak trees. I leaned down and whispered sharply through the driver’s window for the W. W. H. to stop and back up. I sighted the tawny thing once more. Putting my 7X binocular on it, I saw in the late afternoon sun the folded, heavy skin of a huge walking animal’s rump, something so big my first reaction was, rhino. My immediate second reaction was that there were probably no rhino in the C. A. R. anymore outside a parc national. I knew then what it must be: a giant-eland bull, solitary as Bugs and Elmer’s bean.

  I jumped down from the Toyota and grabbed my 375.

  “What is it?” the W. W. H. whispered.

  “Eland.”

  From the ground I had lost sight of the bull, and I slipped forward to try to find him again, the W. W. H. and Djouma following closely behind. Then I saw him, walking easily, undisturbed. Djouma could not yet see him, so I took him by the shoulders and pointed him at the big mature eland bull.

  “Yes,” he said excitedly, “yes. Thank you, Tom,” pronouncing it Tome. Now the W. W. H. saw him too and commanded me to shoot him from this very spot. The eland was well over 300 yards away.

  “Out of the question,” I said.

  Djouma understood our argument, if not our words, and hissed, “Yes,” going off at once in a swift Chuck Berry duck-walk, flitting from tree to tree. I went after him, leaving the W. W. H. frozen and speechless where he stood. We moved to where the trees ended at a wide bare field of black volcanic rock. The eland was on the other side where another stand of the big trees began, turned sideways to us. The distance had been cut to under 200 yards, and Djouma gestured for me to shoot. I rested the rifle against a tree and let off the safety, putting the crosshairs into the middle of the eland’s shoulder hump, trying not to let his wonderfully long horns distract me. As my finger lay on the trigger, the eland turned and wandered into the tall timber and a thicket of Isoberlinia doka within it.

  “No,” Djouma whispered. I lowered the gun and slipped the safety back on. Djouma caught hold of my sleeve and, bent double, we crossed the open ground like some single, rare specimen of trotting mammal.

  Inside the timber, Djouma circled downwind in wide arcs around the dense patch of short green-leaved trees the eland must have been feeding his way through. The African moved in a deft half-run, his plastic-sandaled feet never touching a twig. Jogging heavily behind him, I crunched down on a dry leaf, and Djouma wheeled on me, tsk-ing in reproach. We proceeded this way for many minutes, Djouma biting his lip as he searched through the trees for a glimpse of the eland.

  Djouma suddenly halted, taking my arm and whispering rapidly to me in the French language. He pointed to the solid wall of trees, then held his thumb and forefinger a small distance apart. Too small? Wait a moment? What is it, Djouma?

  Impatient, I started to raise my rifle, but he pushed it down. “No. No. No,” he insisted in a whisper.

  The bull eland glided out of the cover 80 yards away. He was quartering toward us with his ears up and the light through the trees behind him. He stood looking, unable to define us, and Djouma whispered, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  I brought the 375 up slowly, putting the duplex reticle of the scope on the point of the bull’s left shoulder and let the safety off.

  Dust lifted off the eland’s shoulder where the 300-grain soft-nosed bullet struck him. The eland bucked and spun, disappearing into the cover. We ran full out through the trees after the wounded bull, then Djouma snatched my arm, and there was the enormous animal staggering ahead of us, his shoulder broken and the bullet deep in his chest.

  I was going to shoot him again, but I saw that he was about to fall. He dropped his heavy-horned head as if its weight suddenly became too much for him and began to sway, then lay down. He had his legs folded under him, and now he lifted his head and looked straight ahead, silent. I walked up to 20 yards from him, trying to control my panting from the run. Working the rifle’s bolt, I angled another round in back of his ribs and into his chest. He rolled over, dead.

  He was sandy golden and half again as big as a horse. Th
e clean white vertical stripes, black neck ruff, and heavy hump were just as I had always heard them described. He had a powerful warm sweet smell that I would be unable to put out of my mind as long as I lived, and his black spiraled horns were nearly 40 inches long on a straight line from the bases to the tips, and over 48 inches around the spiral. One-armed Djouma threw off his cap and his shirt and bounced into the air ecstatically, proclaiming himself a “grand tracker” again and again. He daubed his finger in the eland’s shoulder wound and blooded himself. Then he came over to where I sat on an old termite hill, staring stunned at this perfect creature, my unloaded rifle laid across my knees. As he reached, grinning wildly, to mark my forehead too, a distant lion began to roar.

  It had been a better, more “successful” stalk than any I had ever known. The sole bad part was that in the middle of the lion hour two nights earlier, the night of the lost eland, amid the brays and protestations of the camels, the old Sudanese had arisen and with the two younger ones packed the animals in the darkness and gone back to Jolly. Now I could not show the old man this fine, astonishing eland or salaam him or discuss the finer points of caravan life and the art of putting one foot in front of another.

  After the Game

  As for the horrible noise when the lions … roared … it was so appalling that one seemed to be in hell.

  —Bernal Diaz

  I FLOATED IN the waterhole that was chill and sparkling. Tini Falls fell in a 200-foot veil into it, and I did my level best not to consider the five-foot crocodile that had slid into its den at the water’s edge when we had arrived. It was a sanctuary, of sorts here, and nothing, no matter how possibly red in tooth and claw, was about to make me let go of it until I was perfectly ready to.

  Djouma, to whom I had given all my Copenhagen after the eland hunt, lay sleeping sweetly on a large black rock above the pool, while the Old Boy’s wife paddled in the water in her Willis & Geiger clothes. The Patron Sans Souci and François had come swimming too. The W. W. H., though, refused to enter the water on grounds of the croc, and the Old Boy just wanted to sit, smoking his pipe. The Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown stood apart from us again, diligently fishing for perch with bloody hunks of wormy reedbuck liver, unwilling to waste one minute of his vacation on leisure.

  Our safari was now nearly done. Begun on foot, it was ending in Toyotas. Four weeks, through the cycle of the moon, and it was almost time to leave.

  We were now based in the Chari watershed 100 kilometers north of Pipi in the large Koubo camp previously occupied by the infamous Saudis. It was mid-February and this was country of wild palms and grassy plains—by the map the flats of the Koumbal, Yata, Mbongo, and even the Ouandjia (that had wound its way through our journey) rivers, all gathering strength for Chad. In places there were pockets of volcanic-red and green-forested hills where the Old Boy had hunted for giant eland, as hard as I had ever seen a human hunt. And across it all were good numbers and varying types of wildlife.

  Two week earlier at Pipi, when I had come in at dark with my giant eland, I found that the Missionary-Photographer had stumbled across and killed an excellent full-ginger-maned lion that he really didn’t want, giving us two record-book eland and a lion on the same day. That is the way Africa can work, sometimes: windfall on the heels of famine. And now meat no long represented a problem for us, eland proving to be the best wild fare I ever tasted.

  So a day later we decided all to hunt one more morning, then break camp and drive back to Jolly. The Patron and the Old Boy’s wife, who were not here to hunt anyway, announced that they would set out ahead of us and walk the 25 miles back to Jolly on the one-lane dirt road that the rest us would be driving up late in the day.

  At dawn of that day, the Old Boy handed his wife the over-and-under 12 gauge he had brought, loaded with double-aught buckshot, and kissed her goodbye, as she, the Patron, and young Idriss set off on foot. We hunted till noon, then returned to Pipi and gathered our gear and headed for Jolly. As we drove in during the late afternoon and evening, we expected to see the marchers at any time, waiting exhausted for us along the road. But when we reached Jolly, they were already there—beaming, sunburned, and freshly bathed, the Patron in a tweed sports jacket and wrinkled shorts sitting at the open thatched-roof bar, drinking an ice-cold beer from a bottle with an elephant head on a red oval label. Later the Patron would tell me that as soon as they were out of sight of Pipi, the Old Boy’s wife had broken open the 12 gauge and removed the cartridges. Whenever they reached an infrequent village along the old colonial road with whitewashed stones lining the sides, the villagers came out to welcome them and bring tea to drink and straw mats to lie on while they rested in the shade.

  From Ouanda Djallé, trading the rattletrap Land Rover in on another Toyota, we headed farther north to Koubo, held to be among the finest areas in the French safari company’s concession. At Koubo the Patron and I selected a boukarou at the farthest reach of camp on the margin of the narrow Koubo River, and the very first night there I was awakened by hyenas trotting around the flimsy grass walls.

  I found a penlight and flashed it into the night, catching a pair of yellow eyes of a hyena, that most peculiar distant relation of the cat—not dog, as one might suspect—are noted, according to Dorst & Dandelot, for occasionally attacking sleeping humans and “causing serious mutilation by biting off the face [italics definitely mine].” Their jaws are some of the strongest in Africa and are ideal for crushing. They are very far from the cowardly slinkers of legend. Yet they are fastidiously clean creatures, essential scavengers, and to love Africa in all its stark relief is to love, or at least appreciate, the hyena, Peter Lorre laugh and all. Killing one could not for me be hunting, merely shooting. (The Gent, to be sure, later shot one—badly.)

  All the same, as this one oooooooUP-ed merrily in the darkness and ran away from my feeble light in his sloping uphill lope, I resolved then and there never to be without my rifle in my boukarou at night.

  The next day I hunted a handsome Buffon’s kob, a reddish-orange antelope the size of a black-tailed deer and related to the waterbuck, lechwe, and reedbuck. The buck was running in a herd of 20 or 30 other kob out on one of the big grassy flats, trying to cover a doe. Then he stopped, winded by the pursuit, and I crept up to about 150 yards from him and rested the fore-end of my 375 in the crook of the German shooting stick the Old Boy had given me. The kob looked farther than he was, and I made the amateur’s mistake of holding high and shot over his back with the first bullet. He sprinted off in a wide circle and stopped again.

  There were three tall trees growing together on the flat, and I kept them between us until I got just a little over 100 yards from the kob. His ringed horns had a deep S-curve to them; and in the late-afternoon light the look of his muscles under his hide had a sculpted, austere, somehow ancient quality. It felt as if this whole affair of stalking an animal across the clean, well-lighted heart of Africa was without time. It seemed so familiar—not so much a matter of my having been here before, but that in our own fashions the kob and I were in this together, and always had been. My bullet took him behind his shoulder and off he went once more, dying in midstride.

  For the most part, the Gent and the Old Boy were doing the bulk of the hunting, it being their safari after all. The Gent got to shoot things on a fairly regular basis and this, presumably, was what pleased him. Djouma, spotting vultures circling one day, even led him into the tall grass after a beautifully maned, large lion, who proceeded to sit up directly in front of them, then flee before the Gent could manage to fire.

  There were lions most everywhere (we counted 32—young and old, male and female, one for every year of my life—before the safari was done), and on another day I watched the Gent, Djouma, and the W. W. H. cross a small creek and stalk a pair of them feeding on a buffalo that the lions had battered to the ground. I was 30 yards away and could see that the lions had just started to feed, having gotten to the favored first parts by chewing out a large hole around the buffalo’s
anus and then pulling his intestines out through a tear in his lower abdomen (often a buffalo is not yet dead while all this is taking place). Now one of the powerfully built lions was worrying the big red buff’s head the way a dog worries a rag. I could also see the three men advancing slowly on them, the Gent raising his rifle two or three times, always when he was beside a tree, but never thinking to use it as a rest to steady his aim. During all this I had a round in the chamber, my scope turned down to 1.5X, and my thumb on the safety, fully expecting that any second now I would be dealing with a wounded lion coming at me in a full-roaring charge. Luckily there were no manes on these lions and the Gent held his fire, letting the big cats crash off into the brush once they sighted the creeping humans.

 

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