The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  “I call it EDB,” Bill Winter said as we climbed down out of the green Toyota safari wagon. “Elephant Dung Beach. The first time I camped here the lads had to shovel the piles aside before we could pitch our tents, it was that thick. Ndovus everywhere.”

  Not anymore. On the way in from Archer’s Post, Bill had pointed out the picked skeleton of an elephant killed by poachers—and not long before, judging by the lingering smell. We’d stopped to look it over—vertebrae big as chopping blocks, ribs fit for a whaleboat, the broad skull still crawling with ants, and two splintered, gaping holes where the ivory had been hacked out.

  “Shifta,” Bill had said, and when we got into camp the safari crew confirmed his diagnosis. Shifta were even then the plague of northeastern Kenya, raiders from neighboring Somalia who felt, perhaps with some justification, that the whole upper right hand quadrant of Kenya belonged to them. When the colonial powers divided Africa among themselves, they all too often drew arbitrary boundaries regardless of tribal traditions. The Somalis—a handsome, fiercely Islamic people related to the Berbers of northwest Africa and the ancient Egyptians (theirs was the Pharaonic “Land of Punt”)—were nomads for the most part, and boundaries meant as little to them as they do to migrating wildebeest. But these migrants armed with Russian AKs and plastic explosives had blood in their eyes. They poached ivory and rhino horn, shot up manyattas (villages) and police posts, mined the roads and blew up trucks or buses with no compunction. Sergeant Nganya, a lean old Meru in starch-stiff Empire Builders and a faded beret, led us over to a lugga near the riverbank. In the bottom were the charred, cracked leg bones of a giraffe, scraps of rotting hide, the remains of a cook fire and an empty 7.62mm shell case stamped “Cartridge M1943”—the preferred diet of the Soviet AK-47 assault rifle. Nganya, who had been with Winter since their days together in the Kenya game department, handed the shell over without a word.

  “I’m sure they’ll leave us alone,” Bill said as we drank our chai under the cool fly of the mess tent. “They know we’re armed, and the lads will keep a sharp lookout around the camp. Just to ensure sweet dreams for one and all, though, I’ll post guards at night. Not to worry.”

  We would finish out the safari with some serious bird shooting. It was a welcome relief, a slow, leisurely cooling-out from the high tension and dark tragedy of big game, and for me doubly so because bird hunting has always been my first love among the shooting sports. But this was a different kind of bird hunting: I’d grown up on ruffed grouse, woodcock, sharptails and pheasants in the upper Middle West, and that kind of gunning had meant cold mornings, iron skies, crisp wild apples, the crunch of bright leaves under muddy boots. It had been all tamaracks and muskegs, old pine slashings, glacial moraines and ink-black ponds. In the one-horse logging towns we’d whiled away the evenings on draft beer, bratwurst and snooker. The great unspoken fear in that land of Green Bay Packer worship hadn’t been shifta but something far more fearsome, in those days at least: the Chicago Bears.

  The contrast between American and African bird shooting became quickly clear. We were up before dawn, but even this coolest part of the day was T-shirt weather. Hyenas giggled downriver and a great fish eagle winnowed the air overhead as we sipped strong Kenya coffee at first light. There were lion tracks outside the tents, fresh ones—great bold pug marks that circled the camp twice, evidently made during the night. But our guards, the wry Turkana named Otiego and the big, slab-faced Samburu we called Red Blanket, reported no signs of shifta during their watches. Yet they hadn’t seen the lion either. . . .

  Not far from the river was a hot spring, a maji moto in Swahili, and we walked in quietly through a low ground fog, armed only with 20-gauge shotguns. Soon the sand grouse would be flying. Lambat lead the way, peering intently into the mist. He raised a hand: Halt. We heard a huffing sound in the fog, then dimly made out two dark bulky shapes. “Kifaro,” Lambat hissed. “Mama na mtoto.”

  Either the fog thinned or adrenaline sharpened my vision, for suddenly they came into focus: a big female rhino and her calf. The mother whuffed again, aware that something was wrong but unable with her weak eyes and the absence of wind to zero in on the threat. She shook a head homed like a Mexican saddle and shuffled off into the haze followed by her hornless offspring, which looked at this distance like an outsized hog. I’d often jumped deer while bird hunting in the US, and once a moose had gotten up and moved out of an alder swale I was pushing for woodcock near Greenville, Maine. But rhinos are somehow different. If only for the heightened pucker factor.

  The sun bulged over the horizon, a giant blood-orange, and instantly the fog was gone, sucked up by the dry heat of the day. But then it seemed to return, in the whistling, whizzing form of a million sand grouse, chunky birds as quick and elusive as their distant relatives, the white-winged doves and mourning doves I’d shot back home.

  These were chestnut-bellied sand grouse, Pterocles exustus, the most common of some six species that inhabit the dry thorn scrublands of Africa. They fly to water each morning, hitting the available waterholes for about an hour soon after dawn, fluttering over the surface to land, drink and soak up water in their throat feathers for their nestlings to drink during the dry season.

  I promptly began to miss them, overwhelmed and wild-eyed at their sky-blackening abundance. Then I settled down as the awe receded and began knocking down singles and doubles at a smart clip. It was fast, neck-wrenching shooting, with the birds angling in from every direction. I stood under the cover of an umbrella acacia, surrounded by shell husks, the barrel of my shotgun soon hot enough to raise blisters, shooting until my shoulder grew numb. Bill stood nearby, calling the shots and laughing at my misses.

  “Quick, behind you, bwana!”

  I spun around to see a pair of sand grouse slashing in overhead, mounted the gun with my feet still crossed, folded the lead bird and then leaned farther back to take the trailer directly above me. Pow! The recoil, in my unbalanced, leg-crossed stance, dropped me on my tailbone. But the bird fell too.

  “Splendid,” Bill said with a smirk. “Just the way they teach it at the Holland & Holland Shooting School. The Classic Twisting, Turning, High-Overhead, Passing, Fall-on-Your-Arse Double. Never seen it done better, I do declare!”

  Then it was over. The sand grouse vanished as quickly as they had appeared. The trackers began to pick up the dead birds and locate any “runners.” There were few wounded birds. I’d been shooting No. 6s, the high-brass loads we’d used earlier in the safari for vulturine and helmeted guinea fowl. The heavy shot had killed cleanly when I’d connected. We could have used No. 7½ shot, perhaps even 8s on these lightly feathered, thin-skinned birds and increased the bag a bit, but there really had been no need to. By using heavier shot, we’d ensured swifter kills, and there never had been a dearth of birds.

  Or so I was thinking. Just then one of the birds—a cripple, far out near the whitescaled salt of the hot spring’s rim—scuttled away, trailing a shattered wing. Lambat stooped like a shortstop fielding a line drive, grabbed a stone and slung it sidearm. It knocked the bird dead at 20 yards. He picked up the grouse and brought it to me, walking long and limber, dead casual, a look of near-pity on his face as he placed it in my hand. Ah, the sorry, weak Mzungu with his costly firestick, blasting holes in the firmament with those expensive shells, when there were rocks right there for the picking. “His lordship,” indeed.

  Reprinted with permission of Louise H. Jones.

  Everything Your Heart Desires

  ROBERT F. JONES

  The camp was in an uproar when we returned. Shifta—four of them, scruffy little men with dirty shirts and heads wrapped in hand towels, accompanied by even scruffier dogs—had approached the camp. Ganya had driven the poachers away with warning rifle fire. No, they hadn’t shot back, merely eased themselves into cover and out of range. They had faded southward, into the tangled vegetation of the riverbank. Everyone was excited. Even the old mpishi—the safari cook—was muttering and shaking his head as
he poked at his perpetual fire. Normally the mpishi was Mister Cool.

  After a lunch of grilled sand grouse breasts, we drove up the river to Merti, the last town before the Ewaso Nyiro makes its great bend and loses itself in the wastes of the Lorian Swamp, hard by the Hothori and Sabena deserts. There is a police post at Merti, and Bill wanted to check in, letting them know we were in the area. Along the way I kept seeing wrecked vehicles beside the twisting, twin-rutted road—fully a half-dozen of them in the course of a 30-mile drive. Some were badly rusted and nearly buried with windblown sand, but others seemed newer. We stopped to examine one. The frame was bent like a steel pretzel, the hood ripped as if by a giant can opener. Even the wheel rims were twisted. The vehicle was barely recognizable as a Land Rover. But what could have torn up the truck so badly? On this barely traveled road, it could hardly have been a multi-truck collision.

  “Plastique,” Bill said. “C-4 or Semtex, the Communist equivalent. A land mine did this work—the shifta use them all over the province.”

  Merti, when we got there, had the look and feel of a besieged “strategic hamlet” in Vietnam. The police post was encircled ten feet high with barbed wire, its corners guarded by machine-gun towers. The town itself resembled the old, grainy sepia-tone photographs of laagers during the Boer War, and you almost expected to see wide-hatted, leathery voortrekkers hung with bandoliers lounging outside the duka drinking beer, waiting for the order from Smuts or Botha that would send their commando back into the field. The Kenya police were definitely on the defensive in this undeclared war.

  Yellow-necked spurfowl were part of a healthy mixed-bag rough shoot.

  “Oh, yes indeed, sir,” the sergeant in charge said, smiling widely. “There are shifta about. Perhaps a hundred of them. Bad men, yes. Mbaya sana.” But he wasn’t doing anything about them. And rightly so, Bill pointed out later. If he sortied from the town, the shifta might lure him and his men deeper into the waterless thorn-scrub while others swung back to loot the dukas in town and make off with whatever supplies and weapons they could lay their hands on.

  “Well,” Bill told him, “we’re upriver in Block Seven near Kittermaster’s Camp, hunting, and I’m sure they won’t bother us.”

  “Oh no, sir.” The sergeant smiled. “Of course not. Not with the police so close at hand.” They both laughed heartily.

  We stopped at the duka and drank a warm Tusker beer. The dusty, cool shop was pleasant but poorly stocked.

  “I came off safari once, years ago, into a little duka like this,” Bill recalled. “Back in my anti-stock-theft days with the Kenya constabulary. I’d been chasing Turkana cattle thieves all over hell and gone. God, it was hot. What I wanted more than anything was a good, clean shave, and I’d run out of razor blades days earlier. I came into the duka and asked the owner what he had in stock. A big, happy, smiling chap he was, like that police sergeant we were talking to just now. ‘Oh, bwana,’ he said, ‘we have everything your heart desires!’ He gestured around at his shelves.

  “ ‘By chance, would you have a razor blade?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘Hakuna,’ quoth he rather sadly. ‘I have none.’ ”

  Bill laughed.

  “ ‘Everything your heart desires.’ Don’t you love it, bwana?”

  I think I’ll go out this afternoon with the shotgun,” I told Bill at lunch on our last day at Elephant Dung Beach. “A rough shoot—see what I can walk up. There must be plenty of birds right around camp.”

  “Sounds like a fine idea,” Bill said. “I’ve got to stay here and organize the packing, though. You can take Lambat and Otiego along with you to push the birds up. There’s no end of ndeges around here. I hear them calling in the morning—guinea fowl, francolin, yellow-necked spur fowl, maybe even some button quail. You’ll have a good time, I’m sure. Ndeges mingi sana hereabouts, birds galore.”

  And shifta as well, but we left that unspoken. It was too beautiful a day to worry about them, at least out loud. This was my last day afield, and the bird shooting so far had been an alien form—there’d been the sand grouse, of course, and I’d shot driven guinea fowl in an old coffee shamba that had previously belonged to Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, of Out of Africa fame. It had been good shooting, but too formal—too much like an English driven pheasant shoot for my rough-and-ready American taste. The boys had formed a line at the top of a long, brushy slope and pushed the birds down to us where we stood above the jungly banks of the Tana River near where it rises beyond Thika, the guineas lurching into the air well above us, big dark birds heavier than pheasants but just as fast as they poured past, cackling, and we shot fast and furious, folding some nicely but seeing others slant down, heavy-hit, legs trailing, to land in the riverside tangle. When we went in to finish them we found fresh buffalo sign—steaming mounds of shiny dung, trampled shrubbery.

  “What do we do if they come?” I asked Bill, hefting the 20-gauge pitifully in my hands.

  “Climb,” Bill laughed. “Panda juu. There are plenty of trees at hand.”

  “I don’t know if I’m still that arboreal,” I said doubtfully.

  “You will be, bwana,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Nature will take its course. I was in a situation like this with a fat old English nobleman once. He scampered up a thorn tree like a bloody nugu—just as agile as a monkey. Never even let out a yelp from the thorn stabs. Didn’t feel them.”

  We’d gone in then and collected our birds, and the buff left us alone. Just as the shifta would leave me alone today, I hoped.

  Yet deep down it was because of the shifta—the chance of them being there—that I wanted to do this. Every bird hunter knows the neck-itching feeling that crawls up from your kidneys when you walk into a good covert. As if something deadly were waiting there, silent in the mottled green dark. What’s waiting, though, is no deadlier than humiliation if you blow the shot. Yet when the bird gets up with a rattle and a roar, it’s as if some bogey man suddenly sprang out at you, heart-stopping, remorseless: Abdul the Objectionable in his final, fatal pounce. The adrenaline rush is beyond comparison. This would be even better.

  The country upstream from camp was thick with wait-a-bit thorn and elephant grass, tough going as we pushed into it. Behind us the sounds of camp life—clanking pots, happy conversation in English and Swahili—quickly faded; ahead the doum palms and borassus swayed, their shadows shifting black on the bright grass. A heavy silence, broken only by the buzz of flies and bees and the rusty creak of nooning birds.

  Otiego swung wide to the right and slapped his spear at a low thorn thicket. A bird got up with the forever-startling feathery whirr—a long brown bird, big as a pheasant—and I centered it, pow! Then another, and three more. I didn’t hear my second barrel fire, but there were two birds down. Feathers still falling through the hot, hard light. Otiego brought them back—yellow-necked spur fowl, their throats pale orange, conspicuously bare, their wet dead eyes rimmed with bare skin, pebbly red.

  We could hear others ahead calling back and forth—graark, grak, grak. They ran as we approached, and we could see them scuttling gray-brown through the scrub. Then from the left a different bird got up—darker, chunkier—and Lambat dropped flat as he saw me swing past him, then shoot. The bird fell down. Its white throat and legs and mottled belly proclaimed it a Shelley’s francolin, counterpart of the sharp-tailed grouse of my boyhood.

  In the denser forest back of the riverbank another variety abounded—Heuglin’s francolin, dark-feathered and plump as European partridge. They got up like ruffed grouse, with a great spooking thunder of wings, in there under the confining forest canopy, and had the same maddening habit of waiting until you were past, then lining out with a tree trunk between them and your gun barrel.

  In the open, with the pheasant-like spur fowl and the tight-holding, sharp-taillike Shelley’s francolin, I couldn’t seem to miss; now it was hard to score a hit. Otiego grinned wickedly and clucked his mocking disapproval.

  Back out in the open we jumped
a small covey of buff-colored, round-winged birds that buzzed off like outsized bumblebees. Button quail. I dropped two before they pitched in less than a hundred yards ahead. Lambat scooped the pair up on the run, but when we got to where the singles had landed we couldn’t trigger a single reflush. Yet there had been at least eight in the covey, perhaps ten—slow fliers at best—that had landed in the tall grass. We could hear them scuttling, hear their frog-like whoo-whoo-whoos as they ran. We didn’t see them again. The dead birds in hand looked vaguely like quail, but there was something odd about their feet. Then I noticed that they lacked the hind toes of the quail back home. It certainly didn’t seem to hinder their speed on the ground.

  For three hours we zigzagged through that wild, thorn-fanged riverside bush, a gamebird heaven, the trackers working like clever gundogs, spotting each possible hiding place, circling beyond it, then pushing through to put the birds out toward the gun. On some I shot nicely; on others I might as well have thrown the gun at them. But it was a time machine—no, a time-and-place machine. At one moment I was back in a southern-Wisconsin pheasant field, swinging on a fast-moving rooster with the corn tassels crunching underfoot; in the next I was kicking the soybean stubble for Georgia quail. Then I was up in Minnesota working the shortgrass prairie for sharptails, and in the next step jumping a woodcock out of alder edges in Vermont.

  Yet at the same time I was aware that this was Africa: there could be a surly old bull buffalo just under the bank to my left, very angry at having his midday snooze disrupted; or a lion behind the next bush, sleeping off his midnight gluttony but not too lazy to get up and chomp a clumsy Mzungu. And above all there was the chance of encountering Abdul & Co., with automatic rifles, plastique land mines and a total lack of compunction when it came to killing unwary travelers.