It took three matches to get the cigarette lit, my hands and fingers doing the samba on their own. I walked over to the hide and finished the water bottle, popping the finger back into place just like Steve McQueen would have done it. It didn’t hurt then, but two hours later it felt as if six Gestapo men were amputating it with a dull tack hammer. In fifteen minutes most of the camp was there, including the Texan who, Lord save his soul forever, had brought along a bottle of bonded Kentucky Drain Opener.
Debalo climbed the tree with Simone and maneuvered the pathetic little corpse of Xleo into a plastic fertilizer bag, lowering it to July. Nobody said anything when the old man, tears streaming down his dusty face, went over to the leopard and, kicking him onto his back, castrated him with one sweeping slash of his knife. Blood for blood has been Africa’s way for a very long time and I was just as pleased that, for once, none of mine was involved.
* * *
I had always thought of myself as a fairly average Joe until a few years ago. I never put razor blades in the Halloween apples. I was nowhere near My Lai. I hardly knew Martin Bormann. I have a large mortgage and a writer’s income. What’s more, I did give at the office and only beat my wife occasionally. But, there is something in my past that lurks like the shrunken mummy of the milkman in the cedar closet, a character defect so horrendous that I have been blackballed from spaghetti dinners at the ASPCA and socially snubbed by the recording secretary of the local Audubon chapter. The newsboy knows; he doesn’t bring the paper to the door anymore, just throws it into the densest part of the rosebed. I doubt that even Cleveland Amory could grant me salvation for, you see, I dearly love to hunt leopards.
If there is a more misunderstood big game animal than the leopard, then you and I haven’t been seeing the same cocktail crowd. Women who wouldn’t know a paradox from two waterfowl will screech with indignation when they find I am a leopard hunter, apparently one of the worst social offenses this side of necrophilia. Well-meaning local conservationists, who wouldn’t know The African Queen from a gay tribesman, expound mightily and indignantly to me of the fate of the poor leopard, apparently suspended by rotting dental floss over the yawning abyss of extinction.
Not that anybody seems particularly interested in the injection of any facts into the hysteria we have long been fed about leopards, but, just for the record, the African leopard is in better shape as a species than just about anything you can think of up to the Norwegian rat. The United States does not permit the importation of skins of any spotted cats, regardless of how they were obtained, no matter how legally the pelt was obtained in its country of origin. It would seem another example of our Big Brother Knows Best international attitude.
Our great, grinding bureaucracy takes its advice, I was recently advised by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, from such organizations as the Survival Service Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and other such covens of experts. You can imagine my surprise when, a short while ago, a slender report crossed my desk on a joint project conducted by the IUCN and the WWF stating the conclusions reached in a study of “Leopard Status South of the Sahara,” which says with bald-faced candor that the joint is crawling with leopards and even offers the tentative suggestion that they might be commercially hunted under close control! Good Lord! This from the organizations responsible for placing the leopard on the endangered list? Practically giddy, I sat back to read the report carefully.
“The leopard enjoys better distribution and numbers than the lion, cheetah, spotted hyena, wild dog, hippo, crocodile, sable and roan antelopes, white and black rhinoceros and several other major wildlife species. More pertinent still for long-term conservation, the leopard enjoys adequate prospects in the face of extensive and intensive disturbance of wildlife environments due to man’s expanding populations and expanding aspirations.”
Don’t go away, there’s more:
“The leopard’s present status is better than that of many wildlife species in Africa which are not usually considered as endangered.… The species can be expected to survive with acceptable numbers and tolerable distribution into the foreseeable future.”
The author of the report, Dr. Norman Myers, declares that the leopard population in many parts of the African range numbers as high as “one per square mile and higher”; moreover, conservatively estimated, there are as many as 500,000 alone in the Zaire Basin and another minimum 100,000 and “perhaps many more” in the miombo belt further south through Zambia, Botswana, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. This didn’t sound very much like an endangered or extinction-threatened species to me.
It took twenty minutes to find the right man at the Fish and Wildlife Service, long-distance all the way. He seemed a reasonable guy, a sportsman himself, who agreed to level with me if I didn’t use his name. He had a clear, concise answer to my query of when—in the light of this new evidence from the same people who had shut the door on leopards—he thought sport-hunted, legally licensed leopards might again be permissible to import.
“Never,” he said.
“Just how do you mean, ‘never’?” I asked him, somewhat taken aback.
“Do you have any idea of the pressure that antihunting organizations exert on legislation of this type?” he asked me back. “Unbelievable. You think you can’t import your leopard trophy because the cat’s supposed to be about to fold up as a species. Wrong. The preservationists found they couldn’t really prevent hunting on a moral basis so they used the threat of extinction to accomplish the same ends. This law may have been instituted to save endangered species from commercial exploitation, but there is no provision at all for animals taken under license for sport.”
“But,” I asked incredulously, “isn’t there just a mite of difference between a bale of poached hides and a legally documented trophy?”
“Not as far as the pressure groups are concerned,” he said. “What you have to remember, Mr. Capstick, is that in the eyes of these people, the killing of anything is morally wrong, and believe me, they’ve got the muscle to keep that law on the books unaltered. If you think it’s tough to get a law passed, just try to get one rescinded, particularly with some animal like the leopard. People aren’t interested in any facts that are going to let you start bringing leopards back into this country. So forget it.”
I thanked the man from Fish & Wildlife for putting it so straight and hung up. It was incredible. The so called authorities report after considerable research—two years—that the leopard is anything but endangered, with heavy populations in much of its range. They may be legally hunted throughout most of black Africa, yet, through our wisdom at 6,000 miles range, you can’t bring one through United States Customs. It’s not just a matter of leopards, either chum. If you treasure your right to hunt under the law and want your kids to be able to do so also, there’s a message in this state of affairs that you should heed.
I might also point out that, while any sportsman understands and loathes poaching, it is also the sportsman’s dollars that support game departments and fight against commercial exploitation of game through the payment of very stiff license fees that are not redeemable if you do not shoot a leopard on your safari. Obviously, not many people want to pay the high fees to hunt leopard if they may not keep the skin as a trophy, and therefore, a great deal of revenue is lost that would go directly to preserve leopard habitats and reduce poaching. So, ironically, by not permitting properly documented trophies to enter the country, we actually do more to harm the leopard as a species than we do to help it. Of course we should implement and enforce every law or deterrent possible to stop poached, commercially obtained hides from entering this country or the world market. If we can stamp out demand, we will cut off the need for supply. But nobody ever made a coat from one legally killed, very expensive leopard hide, and certified trophies should be permitted to enter the United States if for nobody’s sake other than the leopard’s.
*
* *
It is the very will o’ the wisp character of the leopard that gives the impression that he is rare. One does not go to a game reserve and see old Chui standing around like the elephants and zebras. One sees lions, wasting their time in classic fashion, as well as cheetahs. But a glimpse of a leopard is extremely rare, especially in hunting areas. Leopard hunting offers a dramatic contrast to the techniques used for the rest of African game, most of which amount to spooring or tracking down game. The leopard presents the exact opposite situation. Here’s your problem: to make an immensely shy, mostly nocturnal, dangerous animal come to you in disregard of his normal habits, you must bring him within forty or so yards without his detecting you with his predator’s ears, eyes, and cunning, place him in the open area of a tree which he generally shuns, and kill him with a single shot so he doesn’t escape, sick and savage, into cover thicker than clam chowder where he will get somebody—maybe you—hurt or dead before he can be stopped.
That the leopard can exist in amazing numbers all around man without being detected was well demonstrated on my first safari in Botswana with the firm of Ker, Downey, and Selby Safaris, Ltd., a famous Kenyan company. My clients, Dr. John R. “Bob” Welch and family of El Cajon, California, wanted leopards very badly. Unfortunately, the Khwai Concession, an Okavango Swamp region where we were to hunt, was reputed to have very, very few leopards due to heavy poaching when the country had been Bechuanaland. In fact, after a few days of scouting before the Welches’ arrival, I had to agree that there was no fresh leopard sign to be found anywhere. Although I explained that the time we would have to spend trying to dig up one, let alone two, might seriously cut into hunting other game, Bob still insisted that we give it a try.
At this time, none of the other professionals conducting safaris in the area were even bothering to try for leopards, and the sight of me with a Land Rover festooned with bait wire evoked some substantial ribbing. Nonetheless, we spent an afternoon hanging wart hog and impala quarters in four different places about five miles apart. The next morning, to my complete astonishment, all four baits had been fed upon by different leopards and two had been completely torn free and stolen.
Impressed by the size of the tracks of one particular Tom, who was feeding with a female about two miles from camp, I picked this location to build a blind in the heat of the day when the cats would be lying up away from the spot. When we returned late that afternoon, I found that the leopards had actually been using the blind to lie in, keeping an eye on their larder! Nevertheless, we settled in and weren’t in hiding for twenty minutes before a huge male appeared in the tree next to the bait. Bob swatted him cold into the record book.
Two days later, hunting in the area for buffalo, I sent one of my men, Debalo, over to the tree to see if the female was still feeding on the remains of the bait. He came back wide-eyed, saying that he had flushed another big male out of the same tree along with the female. Apparently, this gal had some Indian Love Call to whip up another oversized bachelor within forty-eight hours! Sure enough, when we returned that dusk, the pair were back on the bait with all the abandon of pussycats. With a very careful stalk, we were able to get into range for Bob’s son, also with a single shot, to add his record-book Tom to the collection. As the safari continued, I hung some bait on my own, just to see how many leopards actually were in the area. Within ten days I had eighteen different leopards feeding in an area ten by ten miles. This, in a place where perhaps one or two leopards were shot through an accidental sighting each year among perhaps a hundred clients hunting a month each.
Unfortunately, this result did not overly endear me to some of the other professional hunters whose clients started asking pointed questions as to why they hadn’t had a shot at a leopard. Professional hunting is about twice as jealous a livelihood as opera singing or ballet dancing, and the usual catty comments started passing around that I had either trapped or bought the pelts, which made me do a bit of a slow burn. Fortunately, I had taken a series of photographs of the whole process, which tended to dampen some of the nastier observations on my professional integrity.
* * *
The easiest shot you will have on safari—if your professional knows his apples with Ingwe—will be at your leopard. It is also the shot you will be most likely to blow. Leopards do strange things to the nicest folks. Look at it this way: any damned fool can sink a two-foot putt for a nickel. But, let that two feet represent the United States Open Championship and a hefty stack of thousand dollar bills, and you have a different proposition. People who can shoot the eye out of a downwind tsetse offhand at 500 yards far too often completely miss or, worse, wound stationary leopards at 40 yards.
You have been sitting for two hours in a cramped blind watching the flies you cannot swat as you peer blearily through the tiny peephole above the gun port at the half-eaten remains of a wart hog or impala. Your mouth is raw from chain smoking. (The professional says it’s okay as long as you don’t scratch a match because if the leopard can smell your smoke he can smell you too.) You are suddenly aware of looking into two golden-green eyes as evil as poison gas, while a hulking male leopard changes to solid form. Log-thick forearms flex as he drifts further up the tree, the dull-white talons in his great pads cutting into the bark and flesh of the tree—and you can imagine them doing the same to your face and hooking deep into your guts to spill the eland filet you had for lunch all over the tops of your nice, new Clark’s Desert Boots.
You try to remember what your hunter told you, to pick out a particular rosette on the point of his shoulder and break him down with the 300-grain .375 Silvertip from which the tip has been carefully pried to facilitate quick expansion; blow those lovely chips of bone through his chest cavity like grenade fragments, smash him in the engine room.
Your breath catches in your throat as you ease—ever so slowly—down to the rifle resting in the Vee-sticks, the safety softly gliding under your sweating thumb. Through the scope, he looks bigger than a tiger, 150 pounds of nitroglycerine poured into a gold, amber, and ebony sheath of the most perfect camouflage as he sticks his head into the hole he has eaten out of the carcass the night before. The post and cross hairs bounce and shift as your pulse hammers in your ears, your breath short as you inhale, then let half out. You start to squeeze. Wait! He pulls his head back and shakes his muzzle, a horror of black gore, shifts his weight then inserts his face back into the bait. Wham! The rifle surprises you as it fires. The leopard is leaping—a high, impossibly beautiful arc as he hangs in the sunset, his body extended and angling like a muscular javelin—only to disappear thirty feet from the tree into the snarl of head-high grass. Fear and despair wash over you like you’ve just been told you have cancer. You’ve screwed it up, created the most dangerous situation in African hunting, put a wounded leopard in the long grass. Then you are aware of being pummeled on the back, your hunter grinning like a mad man.
As if from a great distance, over the ringing of the shot in your ears, you hear a voice saying: “Right through the pump! Never jump like that unless it’s a heart shot, right on the button! Nicely done, you old bastard!” You are still in a fog as the bwana thrusts a fresh butt into your face and lights it for you. You hear him say he will wait five minutes for the other eight lives to flow out of him before he goes to collect him. Then, snuffing out the cigarette, he checks the loads in the scatter gun, wraps his heavy sweater around his neck and knots it, and walks out of the blind, the lion-scarred gunbearer a pace behind with his stabbing spear. Slowly, as if wading, they enter the cover until it closes over and around them like a great, yellow fog. Time oozes by like slugs on a cold log. You light yet another smoke, trying to see something, anything, in the darkening field of grass. Then you hear them, the finest words you have ever heard, words you will remember for the rest of your life.
“Here’s your pussycat, Bwana, dead as fair play. Helluva big blighter, too!” You bull through the grass until you see the faint outline of the men, the hunter bent over the body of a
superb male leopard, spread flat on his stomach, dead in full stride. It is like opening your eyes at the first Christmas you can remember. He does not look shabby, like the lion you busted last week, tick-infested and filthy; he doesn’t look simply dead like your elephant or the record-book buffalo with the scabby, five-o’clock-shadow hide. He looks fresh, perfect, bigger than he did even when he was looming against the afterglow in the tree. Except for the ridiculously tiny white-edged hole almost hidden in his lower chest, he looks as if he’s been invited to this odd little gathering in the thick tshani, just one of the gang. You bend down, smoothing the hard silkiness of the long guard hairs, and decide not to mention that your bullet is six inches from where you intended.
Death in the Long Grass Page 13
