Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari

by Ruark, R.

  He came down.

  “How are your legs feeling?” he said. “Are you up to a bit of a sprint?”

  “As up as I’m ever apt to be,” I said. “Where are we running and from whom?”

  “Look,” he said soberly. “I don’t kid you much. There are two hundred buffalo out there in that high grass. They are feeding down toward the neck of the marsh. We have to get back the same way we came. It’s wet in there and sticky. There are going to be about five hundred yards where we have to run. We have to run in order to get past two hundred buffalo. If the wind twists and they catch a scent of us, they may stampede. Charge they won’t. You know this. But in that high grass, if they all start running we won’t be visible to them until they’re already swarming over us. That’s why I want to know if you’re willing to chance a run for it.”

  “What happens if they do take off?” I asked Harry. “What do you do when two hundred buff come bearing down on you?”

  “I would try to shoot one,” Harry said. “I would try to shoot one so we could climb up on him so’s the others could see us and run around us. It would call for a bit of lucky shooting to drop one so we could use him in a hurry. You’ve seen how hard they are to stop.”

  It was nearly six when we headed back through the marsh where the car was and camp was and booze was. Off to the right as we slipped through the reeds, you could hear the buffalo chewing and snorting and grunting. You could see the egrets and hear them squawk. We were doing fine and were nearly out of the thigh-high water and into the muck when we walked right up on the back of an outgrazing bull buffalo. He let out a large bellow and took off, galloping awkwardly, out to stir up the animals and alert the town. You could hear the sudden loud, harsh rustle in the reeds when he alerted the town.

  “Run,” Selby said in the smallest and most distinct voice I ever heard a man use. “Run. That way.”

  We ran. We ran through the stinking ooze, tripping over the long grasses, hearts hitting hard in chests and breath gasping in rattles, and over to the right other things were running. Two hundred buffaloes were running. They weren’t scenting us because we were still downwind, but old Uncle Wilbur with the knobby horns had passed the word and two hundred buffaloes were galloping like a spread formation on a football field. They ran and we ran. You couldn’t see them run because the grass was twice as tall as they were, but you could hear them breaking it down as they pounded steadily through it.

  We reached some reasonably high ground and some shorter grass. As we hit it, fifty buffaloes, the right wing of the spread, passed just aft of us at full gallop, something under fifty feet behind us. I was completely winded. Harry was short of breath. We still had the black boys with us.

  “Jesus loving God,” Harry said.

  I didn’t say anything. Kidogo said something in Nandi. Adam said something in Wakamba.

  “I’d not like to have to do that again,” Harry said. “Bit of a near thing there at the end.”

  We walked toward the other shore. I was walking slowly. Harry was out in front by twenty feet. All of a sudden his cupped hand reached out and drew me up to him. This one I wasn’t really anxious to believe.

  The damned buffaloes had run the length of the marsh and had turned in formation and charged again, this time straight into our scent. They were standing like a Roman battalion, feet firmly rooted, heads proudly high, and noses sniffing, no more than twenty yards in front of Selby. I came up behind him on the run.

  “Him on the left, by the cow,” Selby said. “That one. The good one. Not the first one. The second bull.”

  I was gasping like a boated fish when I threw the .470 up just as the entire battalion wheeled to run the other way. I went for the big fellow’s rear end, having read somewhere that if you shot at the root of the tail, you either broke his back or discommoded his kidneys. The gun said bang and the buff went away and there was no whunk after the sound of the shot. It was almost dark now.

  “Thank the Lord,” Selby said reverently.

  “Thank the Lord what?” I said peevishly.

  “Thank the Lord you didn’t hit him,” Selby said. “Or else we’d have to go and find him in the dark.”

  “This has been quite a day,” I said.

  “Ndio, bwana,” Kidogo said, although he had not been asked.

  Virginia was waiting for us when we came into the camp in the soft black night, the fires going cheerfully and what seemed to be a gin bottle on the table.

  “I don’t know why you let me do these things,” I said. “Why the hell don’t you keep me home like any decent wife would if she loved her husband?”

  Virginia looked at us, thorn-torn, wet to the waist, tsetse-bit, mosquito-chewed, suicidally tired, sunburned, and out of humor.

  “Buffalo again,” she said. “Idiots.”

  I was thinking about this as we crawled into the middle of the herd, the herd of buffalo I didn’t want anything else to do with ever, ever again. We had to pause for a long time behind a big thornbush, waiting for the herd bull to get up and for the cows to move away from in front of him. I got some little breath back and summed the situation. A big fat tsetse was biting me on the bite another big fat tsetse had created as an art form earlier. The sweat was running down in solid sheets, the salt of it burning my eyes. Grass seeds were secreted in my socks and chewing on my ankles like bugs. I had more thorns in my crown than any man needs. This was costing me a minimum of a hundred dollars a day after transportation.

  At this particular moment an old cow with an evil expression, a cow I had not seen, looked right over the bush I was hiding behind. She looked at me cynically and hostilely.

  “Woof!” the old cow said. “Garrumph!”

  I got up on my feet. I had the gun with me.

  “God damn Ernest Hemingway,” I said bitterly, and when the bull lurched up, crooked-kneed, I walloped him. The bull went down. He got up again. “God damn Ernest Hemingway,” I said again. “This has gone far enough.” I squeezed on the bull again, and the gun was jammed. Then I heard Harry shoot, and the bull went over. He got up. He took off. All the buffaloes took off. It was sort of like crossing Park Avenue against a light. Animals went past us like taxicabs.

  “We killed him all right,” Selby said. “We turned him over twice. Why don’t we have a cigarette and give him a little chance to get slightly sick before we go after him?”

  The cigarette tasted brassy in my mouth. Harry was looking cheerful again. The boys were not. Nor was I. I had a hunch a compliment was coming. It came.

  “Well,” Harry said, “let’s go and pull him out by the tail.”

  This was the compliment. This, the accolade. This was what I had been waiting for. When a dangerous animal is wounded, especially a buffalo, the professional generally sends the client back to the car, with a gunbearer to hold his hand, while the hunter goes into the thick bush and earns his pay by finishing off the angry animal the client has wounded. If the client is a very good and deserving client, the hunter may ask him politely if he’d like to go along and share the fun. If the client is a very, very good client, he gets a compliment.

  “Let’s go get him,” Harry said, as if he assumed there was no question about it. I gave him a brilliant answer and hated myself for it.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We checked the loads on the rifles and we dived into the bush. Adam and Kidogo were spooring ahead of us, crouched, sniffing like dogs on a scent. There were lots of places in the bush for the buffalo to be, grown-over dongas and patches of tangled impossibilities where any buffalo in his senses would stop and wait for killable people to come by. The bloody dung and the bright gouts of heart blood always led into a cul-de-sac and always led out again. This was a peculiar buffalo. He never stopped once to bleed and sulk and build his hatred into a fever. He moved. He was a traveling man.

  I found out all about me on this little shauri. I found out more about me than I found out in three years of war. I found out that I was a very brave man because a man
as scared as I was— poking my way through that bush and spreading the underbrush ahead of me with a gun barrel while two black innocents worked as bird dogs and trusted me to finally face the issue of a bull buffalo bursting out of the bush at under twenty yards—found out just how far you can carry fear. I found out at what point just ordinary fear is overcome by the fear of fear, and where it changes into cold determination.

  JU-88s, scream and all, never scared me like walking cautiously and slowly through this Tanganyikan bush, tracking, searching each clump of grass and blob of trees for twenty-five hundred pounds of vindictive force and evil plotting. Submarines and ghosts and footpads and buzz bombs never scared me like this—never scared me into a glandular panic in which myself walked outside myself and observed the other myself at work, cold and competent and functional out of pride of trust by two blacks and an English schoolboy.

  We tracked this bull for three hours and over three miles of mountain and bush. Sometimes you would go for several hundred yards without a single holly berry of blood to tell you what you were chasing. We sometimes found a sudden spatter of the pinker lung blood. Then we would find nothing at all and would be forced to recast our steps, working backward on the trail until we picked up the old blood trail and headed in a new direction. Harry and I walked this boy up to tangled retreats that he had to be in and wasn’t in, but we had to sort him out of it as though he was in it.

  For three hours my safety was off the gun and it was carried at half-port. For three hours I was mentally and psychologically girded to stand flat-footed and spraddle-legged and shoot this ton of fury until there wasn’t anything else left to shoot him with. For three hours I was nerve-edged to a sort of super-perception where every sound, every scent, every blade of grass, every rustle of breeze, every upturned stone and disturbed piece of earth meant something with a sick and angry buffalo on the end of it.

  We found him dead.

  I hated him for not being alive, for not charging, for not making me prove out loud what I had already proved inside me.

  He was lying dead like a damned old cow in a pasture, under the shade of an acacia. The flies were already at him. He had taken my bullet and Harry’s through the lower heart and he had gone the three miles in the three hours and he had not even contemplated standing to make a fight. He was an unworthy enemy and he had degraded me by working me up to this point of desperate courage and had then cheated me of the opportunity to prove my courage. He had cheated the two black boys of a chance to scuttle and sprawl in the sudden rush of fierceness, while their bwanas did with guns what white bwanas are supposed to do. Here he was, dead, carrion, a hunk of meat, a slow trickle dried on his nostrils, looking beautiful in the horn department and just as dead as the Democrats, for more years than the Democrats will be dead. The buzzards were coming down.

  “Hapana,” Adam said, looking disgusted.

  “Ehhh,” Kidogo said.

  “Bloody fraud,” Selby said. “Never knew one before who wouldn’t at least entertain the idea of standing and fighting. This one didn’t. Never even paused long enough for the blood to collect in a pool.”

  “God damn Ernest Hemingway and Francis Macomber,” I said.

  This was a big buff and a handsome buff, but the littler one, the uglier one, is the one I got hanging on the wall.

  Chapter 15

  THE last days at Kitete, after the buffalo, were an odd mixture of things. There was the business of the scopes all going out at once. I missed a bull oryx, as big as a house, three straight times, holding on his shoulder and never touching him.

  “I can’t be that bad by now,” I said. “I was on that baby as solid as ever I was on anything. You saw me knock that hawk out of a tree with the same gun yesterday. He was two hundred if he was an inch. I think the scope’s gone crook.”

  “We’ll see,” Harry said, and drove on, circling crabwise up the side of the tilted shallow hill that runs up to the Rift escarpment and then plunges sheerly down for thousands of feet to a flat valley. This day the blue of the sky was blinding, the sun was a solid brass ball, and all over the country you could see the grass fires starting, darkening the sky early and lighting up the dusk with a rosy, far-seen glow. The time was all gone. We would be off and away tomorrow or the next day or the next, depending on luck.

  We came onto a herd of Grants, slow-grazing, unafraid, new to the country, and just off a reserve somewhere. There was a fine herd ram.

  “I say,” Selby said. “Would you mind awfully if I shot this fellow? I’ve not much of a collection, but I’d like him in it.”

  “Fire away, Junior,” I said. “I got all the Grants I’ll ever need. Take the Remington and wallop him, as Harry Selby says to the clients.”

  The boys toaed the .30-’06 and Harry got out. He crept up on the Grant, getting to within thirty-five or forty yards and resting the rifle barrel on an anthill. He fired. There wasn’t any bullet-hitting sound. The Grants took off, and Harry let them run. After about three hundred yards they stopped. Selby fired again, and the ram went over on his horns.

  “Kufa,” the boys said in the car. We drove off to collect Selby, who had walked over to the Grant and was looking at the precise hole in the geometric center of the gazelle’s shoulder.

  “Bloody gun’s a good foot high, maybe more,” Harry said. “I held on this fellow at thirty yards and missed him clean. I held on the same spot at three hundred and clobbered him. Let’s sight her in.”

  We sighted her in. She was fourteen inches high and a little left. No wonder I’d been blowing them past the oryx bull. I had been aiming high to get the spine if possible because the oryx is awfully hard to kill, and had been slipping them over his back. We moved a couple of graticules, and now she was accurate again.

  She wasn’t accurate long. We knocked up another oryx, a fine one, in the low meadows where the Rift dwindles, and I held steady on this one from another anthill. He was standing broad to me, and the shot was alarmingly simple. The welcome whunk came after the boom. The oryx leaped and took off, running hard with his horns laid back.

  “You shot his jaw off, for God’s sake,” Harry said. “What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

  “The gun again,” I said, and bitterly, because I hadn’t wounded much and hate it. “Let’s sight her.”

  “Can’t be out again so soon.”

  “Sight the gun.”

  This time she was a foot and a half to the right and another foot high. This, the gun that had gone two months so accurately that the boys just said “Nyama” (meat) when the gun fired.

  “Bloody gun is possessed of demons,” Harry said. “Let’s go put that poor choroa out of his misery.”

  We coursed the wounded animal and came up on him, and I had two belts at him. I missed him cold. This time it was my fault. I was nervous and upset at wounding him, and I didn’t trust the gun any more and I was jerking. He ran and went over a high, stone-cobbled hill where Jessica couldn’t follow, and crossed some mountains, and at dark we had to give him up. I felt like hell, sick and sorry and ashamed.

  “Leopards’ll have him in an hour,” Harry said. “That’s one consolation. Every cat in the community will be on that blood spoor. Quit feeling so bad. Everybody butches one now and then. You can’t say we didn’t try. And you can’t blame yourself for the gun.”

  “These damned scopes,” I said. “You can’t trust them. But everything you shoot around here you shoot at some impossible distance, and most of us haven’t got your eyes. I haven’t, anyhow.”

  “Forget it,” Harry said. “Let’s go get some chacula and hit the sack.”

  “You’re beginning to talk like a bloody Yank,” I said.

  “Evil associations,” Harry said, grinning. “Kwenda.”

  We got a fine oryx the next morning. I had checked the sights again, and when we jumped this big fellow running hard up the side of the hill, I led him two lengths and a shoulder high, aiming at where I thought he might be when the bullet got there, and, su
re enough, he was there. There was that bone-hitting crack and he slowed to an amble. I belted him again and down he went. He was sort of snarling in a bovine fashion, and I had to bust him in the neck before we could come up on him. They are one of the two or three actually fierce antelopes that if they’re hurt will skewer you with those sharp, straight, thin stickers they wear on their heads. This was a fine oryx, one horn worn down a little from digging, as they always are, but the best horn past thirty-one inches, clean and black and sharp enough to go all the way through anything it hit. He was buff-gray, lying there, a stripe down his back, a black-and-white mosaic pattern on his legs, his big stupid donkey face oddly striped with black and white. They look bigger than they actually are, but they run five or six hundred pounds and are as tough as a destroyer’s skin.

  The gun was in again, but she went out again that afternoon. This was the last full day, and I wanted Virginia to see some of the lovely country she had missed. We were just cruising, enjoying the fresh breeze and the blue sky and the wonderful yellow plains against their backdrop of blue hill, when Kidogo pointed and said:

  “Kitambile.”

  There were two big cheetahs, both toms, in the middle of the yellow plain. The bigger was sitting on an anthill, profiling six or eight feet off the ground. Against the fierce blue of the early afternoon sky and sitting on a yellow anthill in a sea of yellow grasses, his hide white against the black spots, he was something.

  “I’d say this is a definite bonus,” Harry said. “A shauri mungu sent to repay you for the no rhino, the bad joke with the kudu, the way your gun’s been acting up. Magnificent, isn’t he? You can remember him like this. It’s a sight very few people get to see. Get out and. . . .”