I was jolted from the fantastic scene by giant movement right in front of me. I swung ahead of the earhole of a big cow as she raced past in confusion, not six yards away, and fired. She fell toward me, blood pouring from her ears, stone dead. I piled up another animal a few steps into her charge as she spotted me and bore in, the slug taking her perfectly above the eyes in the frontal brain shot. She dropped as if pole-axed, dead as charity on her knees, and remained balanced there, her head swinging back and forth, held up by her neck muscles and tendons. Without looking down, I reloaded and shoulder shot a smallish bull as he tried to break away into heavy cover. At the second round, he fell in a welter of lung blood blowing from his trunk. Fire. Reload. Ignore the searing barrel. Never let the magazine get empty. Blood. Dust. Urine. Fresh dung. The smell of smokeless powder mixed with Bob’s cordite and the incredible sound of the terrified herd washed over me. I killed another running elephant with a rear brain shot as it angled away, then swung on an immense cow that dropped at my shot from a shallow angle. Not satisfied that she might only be stunned, I ran up and shot her again in the back of the neck as she lay on her side. Down to one cartridge in the magazine, I pushed my hand into my pocket for ammunition and heard Silent shout over the elephant noise, “Basopa! Basopa! Lapa kohlo! Nyalubwe!”—“Watch out! On your left, Nyalubwe (my African name)!” I looked up and saw a broken-tusked bull break away from the far side of the group Langeveldt was destroying, headed right at me from twenty-five yards. No time to reload. I slapped the bolt over on the last round and waited for him to close on me. At ten yards I lined him up for a prefrontal lobotomy and squeezed off. Immediately, from the heavy recoil and deafening report, I knew that there was something damned strange about that shot. I saw the dirt blossom on his forehead in just the right spot, but instead of dropping the way they always do for Stewart Granger and Clark Gable, he didn’t even break stride!
How about that, I thought. He’s actually going to kill me. Me! I stood, rooted with panic, trying to get another cartridge out of my pocket and into the Winchester. At the last instant, as his trunk was reaching for me, I threw myself off to the right, rolling to escape the smokestack-diameter feet and groping trunk.
Suddenly, he turned away as something flickered through the air and hit him smack in the face. He swung around and began to beat the earth with his trunk, squealing and squalling like a six-ton puppy. Silent, probably because I owed him a month’s back wages, had thrown the fiber water bag into the bull’s face and, distracted from me, the elephant was methodically tusking and stamping the bag’s human scent into oblivion. I fished out a fresh cartridge and sent it through his brain, not daring to get up. That wasn’t too clever a move since he almost fell on me. Refilling the magazine, I realized that all was quiet. I know the term “deathly quiet” is a bit overdone, but there are few things more quiet than fourteen dead elephants.
I leaned up against a termite heap and managed to get a cigarette lit. Silent accepted one in the polite two-handed manner of his tribe and lit it off my coal. I had almost gotten over the shakes when Bob and Ricetime came over.
“What happened, Old Boy,” he said looking at my face. “Have a hairy, did you?” I pointed to the dead bull and told him about the freak first shot and how Silent saved me from the statistic books. He shook his head, shrugged, and walked around among the seven dead jumbos in my section, popping each one a couple of times with his Browning 9mm. pistol to be extra sure. The week before, a big, head-shot cow had suddenly come to life on the flatbed of a recovery truck from the abattoir. Nobody among the recovery crew was killed, but I’m sure I don’t know why.
Cutting a stiff grass stem, I went over to the bull and tried to probe the wound channel from the first shot. The stem entered about two inches and stopped. “What the hell.…” I wondered out loud. Where could the slug have gone? Bob provided the answer with his sheath knife at the back of the bull’s head, from the skin of which he recovered the errant bullet. Somehow, instead of driving through to the brain, it had just penetrated slightly, then pulled an unauthorized right-flank move, traveling between the skull and the skin until it ran out of steam at the back of the head. It had not given the bull so much as neuralgia. Later, I recreated the incident and found out the reason for the freak performance. That particular cartridge had been in the bottom of the magazine for something like twelve shots, kept in reserve while fresh ones were loaded over it. Gradually, from the recoil of the previous shots, the bullet had been driven down in the cartridge case until it had created a compressed load, a dangerous condition that may produce extremely high pressures and velocities. When I had to fire it in the emergency, it had been going so fast as to be unstable and, instead of boring through bone, it turned on an erratic course. A small technicality, but more than enough to cost a hunter his life.
We walked over to the hunting car, which Ricetime had pulled up near the site of the massacre, and Bob got on the squawker to tell the recovery crew where we were and how many passengers they had. In a few minutes I could see the big trucks crawling up the firebrake like metal hyenas on a spoor. I glanced around. They didn’t resemble elephants now, just so much meat lying in their own glazing blood and slop. Fat, shiny, green flies began to whine in the ovenlike air, while above, king vultures slid lower down spiraling columns of sky. Bob started the engine and engaged the clutch, shifting smoothly to second as we bounced along the firebreak in the eye of a plume of pink dust, looking for the other sixteen elephants who would die this afternoon before the quota of thirty was reached.
I thought about it as the greenish dun of thorn and scrub flashed by the open door. Maybe it was just the law of nature in its purest form: the few must die that the many may live. At least here the dead weren’t wasted. In fact, their dying kept thousands of square miles of virgin game-land from the hands of man and his bloody crops and cattle. I have never been proud of having been a cropping officer, have never felt anything but revulsion for the slaughter that has been necessary for the survival of the parks and the animals in them, small and large; and slaughter, after all, is the only way to describe the cropping process. Sometimes, late at night, I think back on those days of gore and mayhem, and an interesting little idea comes to mind. Maybe we’re going about this whole thing wrong. Might it not make a lot more sense if we were to crop a few excess people—for their own good, of course—and give the elephants a bit more room?
3
Leopard
The palest shard of Kalahari moon was just rising over the broken stand of maroula trees when the old man, July, placed another short log on the fire. The bright, blue tongues of flame licked hungrily at the dry wood, and he hunched closer, his one good eye squinting as he scraped with the small knife at the tiny bits of fat and flesh still adhering to the kudu’s headskin. He had worked for many hours now, and most of the hide lay across his lap, as clean as parchment. He would finish it in the morning, he decided, knowing that the cool, dry Botswana evening would not let the hair begin to slip. Placing his hands at the small of his back, he stretched his old muscles and took a long swallow from the calabash of tshwala at his side. The fires around the safari staff compound had lapsed into round, red pools, like crocodiles’ eyes on the powdery gussu sand, he thought as he took out one of the cheap OK cigarettes the client, a Texan, had given him for cleaning the ivory yesterday. He was a good man, the Mlungu, July had calculated. He had not run like a woman from the elephant’s charge, and more importantly, he had plenty of tobacco.
As the half-breed Masarwa Bushman sat over his cigarette and beer, he saw a movement from his own hut. Across the shadowy compound came his son, seven years old, his only living child. There had been others, he remembered, but they had all died, and his wives had grown old. Not until he took the tall Masarwa girl, the last, had he fathered a man-child who had lived for more than a few months. The boy would not have a proper name, of course, until he was circumcised, but old July called him Xleo, Little Fish, in the smacks and clacks that for
med the vertibrae of the Bushman tongue. Sleepily, the boy walked past the old man to relieve himself at the edge of the bush, and July watched him pass. Neither knew that death waited only feet away.
The big, male leopard had lain flat against the cool sand for more than two hours, watching the camp from the thick bush just past the first ring of deep, black shadows. He had seen the strange, hairless baboons feeding around their fires then, with much chattering, going into the grass caves where they slept. Only one old male had stayed in the open, and the leopard sized up the best approach through the dense bush to slaughter him from behind. Then, the young one had come out of the cave and was walking directly, stupidly, right at him. Without the smallest sound, he bellied to the edge of the winter-dry bush near the opening of the compound. His seven feet of steely muscles rippled hard beneath the rosettes of his glossy, dappled hide, his hind claws digging into the sandy earth to grip for his charge. At the very edge of the light’s halo, the child stopped, fumbling with his loin apron, and, at that instant, the leopard burst forward from the murk, a silent, hurtling streak of death.
Quicker than thought, he was on the boy, feeling the hooked scalpels claws grip deep as he wrenched the body for the bite that would crush the spine at the base of the neck. The impact drove the child backward into the circle of light where, with the leopard on him, he turned openmouthed to his father, paralyzed with shock and pain. Ignoring the hoarse, screaming shout from July, the big cat executed the boy with a single, crushing bite at the base of the head and, grabbing him with long fangs across the middle, leaped back into the bush and the blackness.
Awakened by the shouts and screams fifty yards from my tent, just across the safari camp, I arrived wrapped only in a kikoy seconds later. July was being held down by Debalo, my tracker, and Simone, my gunbearer, the old man’s lips flecked with foam and a panga, or bush knife, locked in his right fist. I twisted the knife away and shook him, demanding to know what was the matter. His good eye shone insanely in the firelight as he tried to break loose, finally almost collapsing. Over and over he muttered one word: “Ingwe”—“Leopard.”
I took a flaming branch from the fire and flipped off the safety of the Evans .470 Nitro. At the edge of the bush that formed the perimeter of my camp, there were big, wet gouts of dark blood over the pug marks of a leopard and the small, flat footprints of the boy. The blood, black in the torchlight, led into the cover, overstepped by the pads of the big cat, now splayed with the weight of the boy. I sent Simone running back for my electric torch and shotgun and, shivering in just the loin wrap, followed the spoor into the dark scrub. It took only a few hundred feet, with pauses at each step for some sound of either the man-eater or the child, to realize that there was no hope. I had picked up enough patch-work in my years of pro hunting to realize that the only thing I was likely to get out of this adventure was some radical redecoration, maybe worse. I retraced my steps to the fire and went over to Simone and Debalo, both of whom were inspecting smears of the boy’s blood between their fingers. “Quedile,” clicked Debalo, shaking his head slowly. “Eeeehh,” agreed Simone, “file.” “Dead,” said I, and we were all quite correct.
I led July up to the big, hissing pressure lamp the cook had hung from a tent pole outside the gun tent, where the first-aid kit was kept. An injection quieted him down enough to be led off by two of his wives, tears streaking down his wild face. My client, a manufacturer from Dallas, Texas, was looking on, trying to figure out the mixture of Fanagalo and Tswana I used to communicate with my staff. I explained to him what had happened and he paled, an understandable reaction, since he had been sleeping in a canvas tent sixty yards from where a man-eating leopard had struck. I asked him to give me the time from his safari to take off after the man-eater in the morning, saying that I would make it up at the end of the trip or refund what time I spent on my own. He wanted to go with me but understood that I would lose my license if the Game Department got wind of my exposing a client to such an escapade. Dead or injured paying customers are very, very poor for the safari business and tourist promotion. He took it gracefully, though, and told me to take as much time as I needed. Following the washed-out beam of the flashlight through the tshani grass, I went back to my tent and climbed into bed, staring at the black canvas above me, thinking about leopards in general and man-eaters in particular.
* * *
The leopard was once described by a man who spent a lifetime studying them as “the perfect killing machine.” With the exception of man, he is the most effective and successful mammal predator in the world, a fact borne out by his presence from South Africa to China, in every possible terrain and climate condition from high, icy mountains to steaming swamps, to open grassland to rain forest, bushveldt scrub, and the miombo of most of south-central Africa’s safari hunting areas. He does very nicely in Iran and parts of southern Russia as well as in Ceylon and Java, where the tiger gave up the ghost long ago. As we will explore in a few minutes, contrary to popular opinion, leopards are anything but in trouble as a species, and huge areas of Africa today still have large populations of them.
Pound for pound, Chui, as he is called in KiSwahili-speaking East Africa, Nyalubwe in Zambia, and Ingwe farther south, is one of the most powerful, elusive, clever, bold, and dangerous animals in the world today. The secret of his success is his adaptability together with his fantastic natural equipment. He can and does live on fish, insects, birds, offal, carrion, other scavengers, garbage, smaller antelopes, pigs and wart hogs, monkeys and baboons, domestic stock, and, all too often, man himself. A big leopard is anything over 115 pounds and 6½ feet long, of which a couple of feet is tail. Yet a cat of this size can, and normally does, kill and carry off prey three times his weight, usually stashing the body thirty or more feet up a tree to keep it safe from other predators and scavengers. The leopard is the smallest animal that consistently kills and eats man—the ultimate evolution of the carnivore.
Besides his incredible strength the leopard moves at blinding speed from close quarters and is noted for his patience, calculating intelligence, hair-raising ferocity, and boldness wrapped in the best camouflage in nature beside a fashion model. Many natural history books claim that he is afraid of men, but I don’t know a professional hunter or game officer who would agree with that. He’s shy, secretive, yes, but he’s afraid of damned near nothing. Leopards frequently live very close to man’s habitations, eating garbage that would gag a vulture, picking off a stray cow or goat, even taking a man or child if they think they can get away with it; and they usually do. One pair, if you can believe it, was trapped in the Johannesburg, South Africa, soccer stadium a while back, where they had been living very successfully on stray dogs, pigeons, rats, and such for what may have been a long time.
One of the most difficult factors in hunting down man-eating leopards is that they tend, in many instances, to be “casual” killers. Whereas a man-eating lion or tiger will return to a kill or even stay on it, leopards frequently will not. Their depredations form no pattern because they usually take men when the opportunity arises along with hunting their “natural” prey. Our old pal, George Rushby, one of Africa’s greatest hunters of man-eaters of all species, felt strongly that leopards in particular eat people as part of their normal diets, citing the fact that even hard-core killers continue to eat monkeys and baboons right along with their forays against Homo sapiens. It’s likely that leopards consider men just another form of monkey or ape.
The old theory that man-eaters only pick up their odd culinary preferences through the ravages of old age, broken teeth, injury through porcupine quills, and other disabilities that preclude their successfully hunting their natural prey was shot down during a recent study of seventy-eight man-eating leopards after they had been killed. Nine out of ten of these central and south African confirmed man-eaters were males in the bloom of health and carrying on their activities in areas of good to excellent populations of game. Of the entire seventy-eight animals, only one fell under th
e category of “aged and in poor health.”
Despite the fact that so many leopards are casual about their people-eating, there have been some individuals that have made the great lion and tiger man-eaters look like bush leaguers. The idea that the dedicated man-eating leopard may be the most dangerous animal on earth seems to hold some water when viewed in the light of the box-scores of cats such as the Panar leopard, who reduced northern India’s population problems by 400 souls before the late, great Colonel Jim Corbett corrected its table manners. In part of 1959 and 1960 a pair of leopards operating in Bihar State, India, killed and ate more than 300 assorted men, women, and children. A potentially great contender for the Mixed-Sex-and-Age-High-Overall People-Eater had his career tragically cut short at the sixty-seven mark in the Chambesi area, north of my Zambian activities, when he goofed one late afternoon, attacking a man from the rear who happened to be carrying a fishing spear over his shoulder. As the big cat sprang, the steel point entered its eye, pierced to the brain and killed it instantly. The Mirso leopard, also a central African, ran his tally a bit over one hundred tribesmen a few years ago before being trapped and destroyed.
African and Asian leopards are absolutely identical animals, subject to the same family variations on both continents. As a very rough rule, the paler pelts seem to come from grassland animals, whereas the darker, more striking markings are usually from leopards who live in shadow-mottled foliage. The leopard is sometimes called a “panther,” especially in India, but this is an overgeneralization of the word. Technically, a panther is any member of the Panthera genus of cats, which are distinguished by having a hyoid bone in the throat that permits roaring. These include the lion, tiger, leopard, and jaguar and exclude the snow leopard, puma, ocelot, and similar cats that cannot roar but “scream.” The “black panther,” seen in zoos and rarely in the wild, is, despite the American Heritage Dictionary’s observations, not without spots; the animal is really a deep, semisweet chocolate color, produced by recessive genes through an overabundance of melanin in the pigmentation of the fur. These variants are more common in Asia, although I have inspected a skin from the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia. Black leopards are born of both mixed and normally spotted parents and the litter may be shared by both “black” and normally marked offspring. In strong daylight the underlying rosette patterns are clearly visible, as they are on the pelt of a huge, black or melanistic jaguar I killed in Brazil in 1968, one of my few personal trophies.
Death in the Long Grass Page 11
