Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  Harry looked at the buffalo through the glasses.

  “There’s a damned good bull in that herd,” he said. “Better by six inches at least than the one you’ve got. I think we’d best go and collect him.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just prayed inside me and hoped we would not have to crawl too far in order to scare me to death. I don’t know what there is about buffalo that frightens me so. Lions and leopards and rhinos excite me but don’t frighten me. But that buff is so big and mean and ugly and hard to stop, and vindictive and cruel and surly and ornery. He looks like he hates you personally. He looks like you owe him money. He looks like he is hunting you. I had looked at a couple of thousand of him by now, at close ranges, and I had killed one of him, and I was scareder than ever. He makes me sick in the stomach, and he makes my hands sweat, and he dries out my throat and my lips.

  These buff were a herd of about two hundred, feeding up the edge of the hills below the escarpment and following a vague trail that meandered up the side and led eventually straight over the top. They were about two miles away, and it was walking all the way, walking when you could and crawling when you couldn’t, and slipping on the loose stones and fighting through the wait-abit thorn, puffing and blowing and sweating and cursing in the hot sun in the middle of the day. And finally wiggling along on your belly, pushing the big gun ahead of you, sweat cascading and burning into your eyes, with your belly constricted into a tight, hard kernel and your hands full of thorns and your heart two-blocked into your throat. And then the final, special Selby technique of leaping to your feet and dashing with a whoop into the middle of the herd, running at the bull, and depending on that thirty-second bewilderment to hold the buffalo stiff, like cattle, before you shot and hoped you hit him good so you wouldn’t have to follow him into that awful thick bush he was certain to head for. And wait for you in it.

  We crossed the mountains and were in the crawling, wiggling stage now. We had a good wind and the buff were just a few hundred yards ahead, looking blue-black and clean, as mountain buffalo are, instead of scabby and scaly and mud-splotched like the lowland fellows, or rusty red and scrubby like the herd that hung around Maji Moto at Manyara. There were two good bulls—the old herd chieftain with a fine sweep of deeply rutted, heavy horns, and a younger gentleman, almost as good, who would be pushing the old boy out of the mob one of these days. Harry and I presumed to save him the trouble of a fight.

  You judge a buffalo by the configuration and curl of horn as well as by the distance between his horn tips, and also by the depth of the horn boss as it rides his forehead, and by the degree of close-fitting joining of the two segments of boss as they come together like a part in the middle of an Italian hoofer’s head. Our bloke was very much all right on all counts. The boss covered his skull like a helmet, and the dividing line was as tight as a piece of string. The horns were shaped very well, not crooking in too much, and worn down evenly at the tips. He would be forty-eight inches or better, and forty-eight inches between those tips is a lot of buffalo. My first fellow was only forty-three and a bit, and he was impressive enough for me.

  We were in the herd now, creeping on our bellies and pulling ourselves forward by digging elbows into sharp rocks. The buffalo were grazing unconcernedly all around us. The herd bull was lying down, resting, and there were a couple of cows obscuring him. It is a difficult sensation to describe, to be surrounded by two hundred animals weighing from eighteen hundred to twenty-five hundred pounds each, animals as testy and capricious of temper as stud fighting bulls, capable of killing you just as dead accidentally in a stampede as on purpose in a charge.

  A buffalo close up is not handsome. His body is bulky, short-legged, and too long for symmetry. He smells of mud and dung and old milk. His patchy hide is scabby and full of flat ticks. Bits of his own excrement cling to him. Dirty moss grows on his horns, which are massive enough to bust everything up inside you if he even hits you a slight swipe with the flat, and sharp enough to put a hole in you big enough to hide a baseball bat in, and dirty enough to infect an army. He has the big bull’s cloven hoofs, for he is a true unaltered ox and the progenitor of the Spanish fighting bull, and he delights to dance on your carcass until there is nothing much around but spatters of blood and tatters of flesh. Even his tongue is a weapon. It is as rough and harsh as a wood rasp. If you climb a tree or an anthill on the mbogo he will crane his ugly neck and lick the meat off you for as far up as he can reach. His tongue erodes your flesh as easily as a child licks the point off an ice-cream cone.

  As I crawled along just behind Selby, with Adam and Kidogo following me, I was thinking these things. I knew a lot about buffalo by now. I knew how fast they are, despite their apparently lumbering gallop, how swiftly they can turn, how they stop cold on a dime, and how they go through bush at a spurt—bush that an elephant wouldn’t recommend. I knew how much lead they would soak and keep coming, especially after being wounded. You may kill him easily with one bullet, but if you don’t, the next fourteen .470s serve mostly as a minor irritant. And you cannot run away from a wounded buffalo. You have to stand and take him as he is, shooting at his nostrils as he comes at you with his head high and his horns swept back, his neck stretched and his cold eyes unblinking at you.

  You shoot for the nose and hope it gets into the brain because if you shoot too high, the bullets bounce off his massive horn boss like rubber balls off walls in a New York stickball game. And if he keeps on coming, like the one that got up on Bob Maytag a few months before, he comes with a hole under one eye and a hole under the other, and then somebody like Selby had best have one serious slug left to shoot him at four or five feet and catch him when he falls. When this one fell with his eye finally shot out, they picked fifteen 500-grain bullets out of his carcass, all of them enough to kill him separately, but the first fourteen unable to kill him collectively.

  A leopard will possibly claw up more people and is faster and tougher to hit when he lies back on your trail and begins to stalk you, but you can change his charge with a shotgun blast and he dies very easily, as all cats with thin hides and delicate bones and soft flesh die. You can change an elephant’s mind, too, by shooting him in the face, and you can change a rhino’s mind by shooting him anywhere that he’s biggest. But the reason my friend Mbogo is generally rated as the toughest piece of all the African furniture is that he is a single-minded type. You got to kill him to discourage him. He scents very good and sees very far and hears marvelously. He keeps the egrets around to eat his ticks off him but not because he needs them for anything but ticks and society. The rhino and his tickbird sentries are another matter. The faro uses the birds for eyes, and the ticks come in as a bonus for the bird-dog job they do for the rhino. The buff really fancies the snowy egrets because their white plumage looks nice and decorative on his black back. They are the only pretty thing about him.

  God, as I was crawling and creeping and cursing and sweating, how I remembered all the buffalo I had met and the first one I had shot. Maybe the reason I was so sensitive about buff was that I took two stampedes and a dozen stalks before I finally shot one, and I had been in three more stampedes since. This bloody Selby, I said. Him and his fascination for this awful animal. Him and his getup-and-run-yelling technique of making the last fifty yards at a gallop, standing and shooting in the middle of the herd while the animals snort and explode past you, not wanting to run over you but not caring if they do run over you. They wall their eyes with mad panic and stream past you, each one bigger than a pair of Brahman bulls, each one with two inches of skin thickness to cover the steel cables that make his muscles an armor plating, each one with enough obscene vitality to run for five miles shot through the heart.

  As I crept along on my belly, I remembered Mbogo Moja, the first one. We had stalked across a swamp and I was bitterly out of breath, the stomach muscles jumping and a piercing pain in the chest and a great tremble in the fingers that wasn’t a fear-shake but a nervous reaction to fatigue. We walked as
far as we could walk, with the long withes of grass tripping you at every step, and then here suddenly was an old bull and his askari—an expelled herd bull, driven off from the cows by his son, with a neophyte to run his errands for him and learn all his wisdom so that someday he could go back and kick the bejesus out of the reigning bull who had driven Papa off from his wives and his family security.

  So we crawled this one, too, like you creep geese in Louisiana, stopping and freezing occasionally when the askari raised his head to stare at you with a colder stare than any actress ever wasted on an enemy. This askari was mightily nervous. He felt that everything wasn’t happy. He kept feeding away, edging off to the nastiest patch of thornbush in Tanganyika, with the starting of the Serengeti reserve on the other side of the swamp. If the one we shot got hurt and went across, he would not only be sick and angry and venomous in his sickness, but he would also be illegal.

  We crept to a bush and froze behind it, and there were the animals, fifty yards away and moving steadily out of range. Harry had his hand palm down behind him, and suddenly he lifted it in a curling beckon. I crawled, still blowing, up to his shoulder. He turned his head slightly and whispered.

  “We’re not going to get any closer,” he said. “That askari is nervous and leading the old boy away. You better bust him now, although he’s too far off for my pleasure. Try to take him just where his neck comes down into his chest.”

  Selby, when he is working with dangerous animals, always wears two stalks of extra bullets sticking like cigarettes from his right hand. Harry had said: Do what I do. I had two stalks of extra bullets sticking out between the second and third fingers of my right hand. At this time it had not occurred to me that Selby was left-handed.

  I got up on one knee and sighted low into the old bull’s chest, and the heavy Westley Richards settled handily in balance and I squeezed off the trigger, and then the bull was gone and I was on the ground, my nose full of cordite fumes and my head full of chimes. Away off somewhere a gun exploded, and then there came a mournful bellow as morose as a hunting horn, a cow’s horn, lonesome-sounding in the Carolina woods when a Negro cropper is lost and blowing hard on the horn to keep himself from being frightened blond until he finds the dirt road again.

  Selby was standing now, spraddle-legged, with his hands on his hips and looking down at me.

  “For Christ sake,” he said, jerking his head toward the wood. “One of you ought to get up.”

  From this I assumed the buffalo was down, too. It appeared that right-handed shooters are not supposed to store their spare ammunition in their shooting hand. In the effort to emulate Selby, it never occurred to me that the guy was a natural southpaw, and that bullets contained in a shooting hand would ride back against the second trigger and touch off the other barrel simultaneously, loosing 150 grains of cordite against your face.

  “You all right?” Harry asked. “What happened?”

  “Both barrels,” I said. “At once. Dropped me. Did I hit him?”

  “You knocked him tail over tin cup,” Harry said. “He turned completely over. Then he got up and departed.”

  “I thought I heard somebody else shoot,” I said. “Away over yonder.”

  “Me,” Selby said. “This bugger was flat out for the bush. I’d not taken the time to check his blood pressure, you know. I didn’t know how good you hit him. I thought I’d best break his back before he got stuck into that patch of bush. Very nasty in there. Actually I shouldn’t have bothered. Hear that bellow? He’s dying now. You’ll find you got his heart. They don’t bellow from a spine shot. Hope you don’t mind, old boy, but once in a while a little collaboration saves all hands a lot of trouble. I know how to pull a sick one out of the bush. But it’s just that I don’t fancy it as a recreation.”

  We walked up to the buffalo. He was dying, bellowing, making mournful sounds, and trying to drag himself toward us.

  “Slip one bullet into the gun,” Harry said. “I still don’t trust that sear. Take him just behind the horns in the back of the head. You know what I always keep saying. The dead ones kill us.”

  I slid a single bullet into the right-hand barrel of the .470 and squinted carefully at the back of this boy’s neck, where the muscle roll humped out like the back of the neck on a retired prize fighter. I was gun-shy. I pulled instead of squeezing, but the bullet went in and poor old mbogo stretched his neck forward to its full length. Blood crept out of his nostrils and he was dead. Dead and ugly. Uglier dead than alive, and four times as ferocious.

  My God, but he was immense. He was muddy from rolling, and the ticks were working on his scaly hide and it was a hot day and the flies were coming down. Maybe he was only forty-three inside the horns, but to me he looked like a hell of a lot of bull lying there in the yellow grass, his ugly face pointed straight out and the long striated lines of his horns and his ax-edged hoofs and the solid butting weight of his heavy casque of boss making him look like a contrived machine of destruction.

  “Frightful brutes, aren’t they?” Selby said. “We’ll just take his marrow from a couple of legs. Tommy Shevlin says it tastes like pâté de foie gras. Best of him too tough to eat. Except the tongue’s wonderful. Boys’ll take his belly fat, and we can make a tobacco pouch out of his scrotum. ’Less you want his hoofs for ash trays, we’ve had him. Except the horns are lovely. Not big but beautiful. I’m interested to see what you did to him with the first shot. I think you’ll find you wrecked him, but I couldn’t know that before you touched off the second fusillade, could I?”

  Adam and Kidogo unsheathed a panga and a sharp skinning knife and started the postmortem. They took out a rib section, which they would eat themselves, and they removed the heart and the kidneys and the liver. They snipped the fat from around his intestines, and we finally burrowed into his chest cavity in the interests of science.

  This mbogo had accepted a .470 bullet, five hundred grains of hardnose bullet powered by seventy-five grains of cordite. He had taken it through the jugular and into the heart, where it smashed all the major arteries and crushed the whole top of the heart. It had ranged backward through him and destroyed the lungs. When we opened him up, about ten gallons of black lung blood gushed out. Yet he had gotten up off the ground with this terrible wound and taken off as blithely for the bush as if we had pinked him in the fanny with a .22.

  “Nobody ever believes it,” Harry said. “Sometimes I don’t. But these creatures are damned near indestructible. Look there at the mess you made with that bloody cannon. And remember that he was two hundred yards away and rolling off like a steam engine when I popped his spine for him and put him down. He’d have gone half a mile and still had enough gas left to scare us green when he came at us from a piece of bush not big enough to hide a hare.”

  “I don’t ever want to shoot another one,” I said. “This is all the mbogo I need this day, or any other. Like the memsaab says: ‘Hapana taka piga mbogo lio.’ Nor any other day. Any man with one buffalo doesn’t need another. It’s like what David Green says. A man with a Rumanian for a friend doesn’t need an enemy. David’s a Rumanian.”

  “You’ll shoot another,” Harry said. “You will always hunt buff. It’s a disease. You’ve killed a lion and you don’t care whether you ever take another. But you will hunt buffalo until you are dead because there is something about them that makes intelligent people into complete idiots. Like me. They are the only beast in Africa that can make my stomach turn like it rolls over when you’ve had too much grog and don’t know whether the bed will stay there for you. You’ll hunt more mbogo, all right. Kidogo! Taka headskin kwa bwana.”

  That was a long time ago as we measure time in Africa. That was practically in another century. There was another lion and a leopard and a cheetah and all sorts of the common stuff and some rhino we didn’t get and some kudu that we butched and a lot of travel in between it. There was a stampede in between it. Like yesterday.

  We were driving back to the camp in the latish afternoon, with the ory
x and the cheetah done now and out of the way. Where the road dips low and the hills begin to slide down away from the escarpment, there is a big swamp, a long, wide flat, full of high reeds, with the hills moving up on the other side into a tiptilted half bowl of land. This was just a few miles away from Kitete, where the camp was pitched and where the hippo grunted in the front yard. This was two turns in the road and one baobab tree away from camp and a bathi and one of Dr. Ruark’s nutritious deliciouses, the bone-building gin.

  The sun had slipped a little in the sky and the evening nip was coming into the air when Harry slowed the Rover to an easy stop. Across the marsh, only a quarter mile away, the big fat black worms were crawling down the hill.

  “Mbogo,” Harry said. “My sainted aunt, what a head on the big fellow.”

  They were probably the same herd that I was working on this moment, and thinking about now, but out of focus a few miles and feeding very quietly down the side of the hill and into the swamp. I was bitter enough.

  “I know,” I said. “Kwenda. Let us go and collect it. Let us struggle through the marsh and go and collect it. By all means. Pese pese.”

  “Right,” Harry said. “I was just going to mention that possibly we should go and collect it. Haven’t much time, though. Past five now. What we do we will have to do in a hurry. Kwenda. Pese pese.”

  We fought through the high grasses, in some spots eight and ten feet tall, and treacherously mucky underfoot. We slipped and sloshed and stumbled and fell and bogged. The mosquitoes were in very good form. By the time we’d got across the swamp, the buff had all fed down off the slope and were in the grass. We scouted carefully around them. You could see where they fed by where the egrets fluttered, zooming up into the sky and returning to settle on the animals’ backs. One time we got too close on the way across. An old bull, his horns worn down by use to fists, was feeding out from the main mob, and I almost tripped over him. Again the wind was right and he never cared that we were there. Big knob-billed geese flew over us and honked. Teals dipped and whizzed around us. We hit the far shore finally, wet and bug-bitten, and stumbled along its rocky outcrop to a big thorn tree. Harry went up it like a monkey. He could see from there. He could see very well from there. He was up the tree a long time.