by Jay Cassell
I’ll spare readers most of the long, hot miles through the thorns. The only tracking hitch came in a flurry of sand some two miles into the chase. As the trackers sat down to smoke and consider the situation, Allan explained Ghao’s interpretation of events. Lori’s bull had run into the middle of a large herd of kudu and the sight of the bright arrow protruding from its chest had scattered the herd in all directions. Half an hour later, Ghao had sorted out the mess and we were back on track again.
After five hours and an estimated eight miles, Ghao stopped trotting and began to creep forward like a cat, fully aware that we were about to make contact with the wounded bull. Several hundred yards farther ahead, he suddenly pointed to a dense patch of thorns from which two spiral kudu horns protruded, and it was time for a strategy discussion. Allan’s rifle offered an effective if unattractive option. Ghao explained that based on the spoor he felt the kudu was distracted and that Lori should be able to slip in for a killing shot, and after some last minute discussion between the two of us I watched her leopard crawl into the brush.
After one of the longest hours in my life, Ghao suddenly leapt to his feet in excitement. Moments later, the bull charged past trailing another one of Lori’s brightly fletched arrows from its previously healthy side. When the kudu piled up a hundred yards away, Lori enjoyed the distinction of becoming the first modern woman archer to kill a big-game animal in Namibia . . . with a little help from her friends.
Back in the dry riverbed, the wildebeest have finally started to stir. Rising slowly from his lair at the base of the shade tree, Ghao tests the wind. Using hand signals and crude diagrams scrawled in the dirt, we offer one another thoughts on our next approach, each shaking off a suggestion or two from the other, like pitchers who want to throw curves when their catchers are calling for fastballs. Finally we reach a tentative agreement of sorts and begin to ooze forward through the brush.
And suddenly I realize just what a remarkable life experience bowhunting can be. Here we are, two men separated by apparently impossible gulfs in culture, language, and background, setting off together on one of the most seminal—and difficult—tasks our species can face. But a simple realization tempers my high spirits: as a fifty-two-year-old American, I will never be able to emulate Ghao’s remarkable talents here on the veld. While he was learning how to stalk and track, I was studying calculus, Spanish, and biochemistry, noble efforts in their own right that suddenly feel strangely devoid of meaning.
A century ago, our culture tried to destroy Ghao’s with rifles, roads and fences. Today, we threaten the same end through the process of assimilation: radios, money, Coca-Cola and all the empty promises of easy living. How will the story of the San conclude? Perhaps it’s foolish to be optimistic. But in the meanwhile, I’ll do my best to keep to the shadows and start every track at the beginning, just as I’ll remain grateful for the opportunity to appreciate the potential skills that lurk inside us all.
Reprinted with permission of the author. To order his books, go to www.donthomasbooks.com.
Vengeance
TERRY WIELAND
The border post at Namanga comes up suddenly as you climb through the heat haze from the Tsavo plain of Kenya toward the sweeping highlands around Mount Kilimanjaro. Namanga itself isn’t much. A collection of ramshackle buildings, a scattering of trucks, a lopsided bus, and everywhere, like shifting flocks of tropical birds, the bright-beaded Masai in their crimson robes. There are a few trees, and under every tree in the dust is a seller of something: Beads. Pens. Pots. A few have board duccas thrown together—a two-foot counter fronting a one-shelf store. Those who aren’t selling are begging. When they crowd around, it’s hard to tell one from the other.
Years ago, every safari passed through Namanga, hot and dusty and two days out from Nairobi, heading for Arusha to draw licenses and have a cold beer at the Greek’s. Nobody does that anymore. Today the safari trade is airborne; sleek six-seaters whisk you from Nairobi’s Wilson Airport to Kilimanjaro in an hour; pay the bribes, pick up licenses, and continue on west by air. By sundown you’re in camp with a cold one in your hand and Tommies prancing on the plain. You don’t even hate the safari car. Not yet.
The border post at Namanga, deprived of the high-rent safari trade, has been reduced to shaking down busloads of package-deal tourists, who stand there looking helpless as they are deftly disencumbered of their loose belongings by the bony fingers of the crimson-dad crones who trade on their Masai appearance to ply city-bred skills. The old Africa hands avoid making eye contact, stride purposefully, and snarl hapana as they wade through the crowds to get their passports stamped. Sometimes it works. By the time you finally roll out of Namanga with Mount Meru looming in the distance, you truly feel you are in Tanzania—land of great beasts and grubby beggars, and more than enough of each.
When Tanzania gained its independence in 1963, the new government embraced a philosophy of crackpot socialism that over the next 30 years managed to undo what little economic progress the country had made in the last 100. On the social front, the newly minted politicians with their pseudo-Oxonian accents and Savile Row suits found their less-enlightened brethren rather an embarrassment, and none more so than the Masai. The Masai, with their spears and their buffalo-hide shields, their crimson cloaks and elaborate beads, their herds of cattle and lion-mane headdresses, were great for the tourists but bad for the image of a socialized society. In quick order, the Masai had their spears confiscated, their red robes banned, and their children locked up in school. In far-off Dar es Salaam, the politicians and United Nations do-gooders congratulated each other over cool ones on the veranda and discussed whose lives they could screw up next.
For 30 years the Masai in Tanzania lived under proscription. Their entire way of life—all the things that made them Masai, and hence made life worth living—had been legislated out of existence. The old men crouched in the dust and drank beer, and the lions went unhunted.
Then came the end of the old government. Julius Nyerere, darling of the aid agencies, retired to reflect on his accomplishments, and a new crowd took over a country that had become an economic basket case. Disenchanted with socialism, they unleashed free enterprise (or tried to) and backed it up with a more-or-less blanket endorsement of the old ways. Not many Masai would return to their traditional way of life anyway, they reasoned. Not after 30 years. What harm can it do? And so the proscription was lifted. Announcements went out.
Within days the spears had come out of mothballs and every scrap of red cloth had been swept from the ducca shelves. The elaborate blue, white, and red beads and head-dresses sprouted from every Masai head, and the school desks sat empty. The smiths on the plain stoked their forges to begin once again making the long-bladed spears and simis, the short swords that, together with shield and spear, announce to the world that this red-clad dandy is a blooded Masai moran.
It’s a funny thing about Tanzania: you can pull the Land Cruiser over to the side in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight for miles across the plain except dust devils, and within five minutes there will be a couple of urchins crowding around the truck with their hands out. Give it a couple more minutes and there will be a half-dozen locals begging for handouts. Even if you don’t pull over, when they see you coming in the distance they lock their eyes on yours and stand by the road with their arms straight out, palms upward, gaze unwavering as you roar on by, muttering. In Tanzania, begging at the personal, regional, and international level has been elevated to the status of national pastime.
But just when you think you’ve got that figured, you round a bend and see a Masai by the road. His hand is not out. It’s holding a spear, or fingering a simi, and if he stares at you at all it is down his long, straight nose. The Masai—the real Masai, not the sheep in wolf’s ’s clothing that infest Namanga—asks nothing from anyone except to be left alone with his herds and his flocks and his lion scars.
About 20 miles south of Namanga you are in the heart of Masai country. M
ount Meru looms in the distance, and on the other side lies Arusha, the metropolis of the north; but here the plain stretches away with only the occasional spiral of smoke to indicate a dwelling. Off to the southeast, Kilimanjaro drifts in and out of its constant clouds and haze. As you drive, a line of hills appears on your left, rising starkly from the plain. It is not really a line of hills, though; it is the rim of a long-extinct and worn-down volcano called Mount Longido, which rises 3,000 feet from the Masai plain.
Eroded to a stump, Longido is dwarfed by its sisters, Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro, and is now little more than a high crater encircled by steep, rocky hills. The crater is several miles across and grown over with trees. The name comes from the Masai Ol Donyo Ngito. Ngi is a type of black rock found on the mountain, and for centuries the Masai have climbed Longido to sharpen their spears and simis on the black rocks. The highest remaining point of Mount Longido is a sheer rock pinnacle like the prow of a ship. It is usually obscured by clouds, and on the higher slopes the thick brush turns to rain forest. From the upper reaches you can see all the way to the border post at Namanga, 20 miles north, and into Kenya as far as Amboseli National Park.
There is a Masai village, also called Longido, at the base of the mountain. It consists of a few buildings, a ducca, a police post. Under the spreading acacias, two saloons grace the main drag, which is nothing more than a wide spot in the dust. One establishment is called the Lion, the other the Vatican. The Lion is the more upscale of the two, which is to say it has a door. Right now the door to the Lion stands open and beckoning, and inside a stack of beer crates reaches to the low ceiling. The bar is a plank, and the seats are planks that run around the edge of the one small room. Two Masai moran in blinding red robes sit with a glass of ale, their spears leaning against the wall, discussing stock prices. They nod as we enter and do not stare overlong.
Ever since the army I have not been a lover of warm beer, but sometimes it isn’t bad. This was one of those times. Then we continued on out of town and around the base of the volcano and into our camp, on the southern slope facing Kilimanjaro far out across the Ngasarami Plain.
The plan was fairly simple. Mostly what people hunt around Longido are lesser kudu and some plains game. Sometimes they venture up the outer slope in hopes of a klipspringer, but mountain climbing in the heat is not a lot of fun, and as you get higher the going gets rougher. Like most mountains, it looks a lot easier from a distance.
Longido is shaped like a huge bowl. There are one or two passes where you can climb up over the hills and down into the crater, and in some spots these hills rise higher and higher, eventually simulating real mountain peaks, shrouded in cloud with rain forest and heavy mists. The crater is several miles across; a few Masai live up there and raise crops in the crater, carrying on a running battle with the baboons who raid from the forested hillsides. The Masai run their cattle on the hillsides as well, sharing the sparse grazing with a few dozen Cape buffalo. Rumor had it that high on Mount Longido there lurked a few buffalo bulls, too old to breed, too cantankerous to associate with, living out their lives alone. A few people had been up there and seen tracks. That was all. But they were big tracks. I had hunted Cape buffalo waist-deep in swamp water and dry as dust in sand and thornbush. Why not on a mountain top?
Cape buffalo-hunting today consists all too much of roaming around in a safari car. No one we knew of had ever climbed Mount Longido looking for a big old bull off by himself on a distant mountainside, but preliminary investigation suggested there might well be a good one up there if we were willing to sweat. Jerry Henderson thought that hunting such a bull would make good publicity for his new-found safari company and reminded me in his soft Texas tones that I like mountain hunting.
Sure enough, I do. And sure enough, I will. The company had a small group of very good professionals from Zimbabwe—Gordon Cormack, Duff Gifford, and a third I will just call Frank. Frank was a youngster of Afrikaner stock, and he was to be my PH when Jerry and I went off up the mountain. Jerry had dispatched him earlier to go up and look around, and Frank had returned determined that once was enough, although he did not say it in so many words. Instead, he decided the best way out was to discourage me from going up there. One conversation with Frank was enough to persuade me that I wanted no part of hunting Cape buffalo with someone I didn’t trust, and it was obvious, as he lectured me on the perils of mountain hunting, that he himself did not want to go up that mountain.
“I’ll go,” I told Jerry. “I want to go. It can’t be any steeper than the Chugach, or any thicker than coastal Alaska. But I ain’t going with him.”
Frank, to his relief, was out. Duff Gifford, to my relief, was in. The next morning we rolled out of camp and edged along the base of the mountain toward the winding trail up and over the hills to the Masai settlement in the crater.
Our party looked, as we made our laborious way up the mountainside, much like those porter safaris from Teddy Roosevelt’s day. In addition to Duff, Jerry, and me, we had our cook and camp boy, both laden down with equipment. A couple of Masai retainers trailed along as well. Then there was the government game scout, Swai, a grinning citizen of legendary corruption who was based in Longido. By law we had to have him along; by custom he surrounded himself with his own retinue of flunkeys, including a gunbearer, a gunbearer’s assistant, and who knows what all. Altogether, we had a dozen people strung out along the dry watercourse that cut through the thick brush on the mountainside and afforded the easiest route over the hills and down into the crater.
We reached the Masai huts around noon with the sun directly overhead and overbearing as only the equatorial sun can be. We flopped down under an acacia while Swai went off to negotiate with the locals. While we waited they brought us tea and maize, scorched by the fire and not half bad. When Swai returned, he brought with him three Masai to guide us. They wore their working clothes—gym shorts and spears. Ceremonial garb is fine for standing around wowing the tourists, but climbing a mountain in search of buffalo calls for something a little more practical. We divided up the baggage, formed a line, and swung on up the mountain.
To anyone accustomed to the Chugach, or any of the mountains of the American West, the going was not that hard. It was steep in places, and stony, but there were trails through the thorn brush where generations of goats and cattle and buffalo had browsed. The worst part was the heat. The sun was a physical weight on our shoulders as we struggled upwards, panting and sweating. The Masai suffered not at all, moving ever upwards in a loose, swinging gait, bare feet oblivious to rocks and thorns, bare shoulders shrugging off the sun.
Below us the Masai settlement was soon reduced to a few dots and postage-stamp fields, and we were high enough to look out across the crater. The peaks still loomed above, but the ancient volcano had lost its shape and unity, and we felt as though we were climbing among jumbled hills. There were ravines and gullies overgrown with a jungle of tangled brush. There were boulders that blocked our path as we wended our way back and forth, ever upward toward a high meadow that bordered a patch of rain forest just below the peak. There we would camp and, with luck, glass the hillsides below for a glimpse of buffalo.
We reached the meadow in late afternoon and made camp—a couple of small tents and a fire pit. Dinner was a laudable effort under the circumstances, eaten around the fire in the chill brought on by the sudden darkness of the equatorial night. Then our cook produced a precious few ounces of Scotch—barely enough for a sniff apiece, but it lent the illusion of a safari camp—and Duff and Jerry and I sat around our cheerful little blaze talking guns and buffalo and mountains.
That night was one of the coldest and most miserable I can remember. With darkness the temperature plunged and the rain came. We had no bedding—a slight mixup—and I spent the hours huddled on the damp plastic of the tent floor with the stock of my Model 70 for a pillow. I didn’t know it at the time, but the sheer misery of that cold, wet night on the mountain was to prove a great benefit to us.
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br /> As soon as the sky turned grey I crawled out into a soupy mist that swirled and drifted and soaked the air as the rain had soaked the grass. Everyone was gathered around the fire, which smoked and hissed as it tried to produce enough heat to boil water. A more forlorn looking group I have never seen in a hunting camp. Swai, the game scout, huddled close to the tiny flame wrapped in an army blanket with his teeth chattering and his retainers bunched close around. Duff handed me a coffee and smiled his wolfish smile. The wet misery of the mountainside had robbed him of none of his assurance.
“Shall we go take a look?”
“In this stuff?”
“It’ll clear. We want to be out there when it does.”
Duff said a few words to Swai, who mumbled in response but made no move to leave the warmth of the fire.
“Is he coming?”
“Not right now. I told him we’re just going to glass. No need to disturb himself.” The wolfish smile again.
Duff and Jerry and I gathered our rifles and binoculars and picked our way through the grass along a ridge to a rocky promontory. The fog was shifting now, swirling gently at first, then a little stronger. Somewhere up there the sun was rising and bringing with it a breeze, and soon that breeze would become a wind and clear the fog away for good. Meanwhile, we could see little and do nothing but wait. But at least we were waiting alone.
For those who have not had the pleasure, hunting in Tanzania is, by law, a group activity. By law, you must have a game scout with you at all times. By the letter of the law, that means all times. No self-respecting game scout, however, goes out alone. He needs at least as many retainers as the professional hunter has, to show his equality. So if the PH has two trackers and a boy to carry the water jug, the game scout needs at least three flunkeys and preferably four. That adds up to a hunting party of ten, traipsing through the bush and scaring the wildlife.
