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A wounded leopard in the thick bush is the most dangerous animal in the world. Some will tell you buffalo, others lion, even others opting for elephant or tiger. Yet, if you want to form your own opinion, go hang around Riley’s Bar in Maun, Botswana, or the New Stanley Long Bar in Nairobi, or plunk down on one of the caned stools along the big, split mukwa log that serves at Mfuwe Lodge in Zambia. Ask where those funny, puckered fang marks and long, raised scars on the bodies and faces of the off-safari pro hunters came from and four out of five will tell you leopard. They don’t kill as many people as lions do; one good bite in the chest from Simba and that, old boy, is that. Still, more professionals and other hunters as well as native staff are injured by leopards than by any other game animal in Africa.
Perhaps the great classic of wounded leopard tales, told to me by John Dugmore, who had the camp next to mine in the Okavango, happened a few years ago in Kenya. John used to hunt in both Botswana and Kenya, safariing in one when the other had rains. A hunting party was on safari in, as I recall, Block 53, where one gentleman was indiscreet enough to stick a small bullet, a .243, into a big leopard with inconclusive results, the cat vanishing into a horror of thick thorn bush and grass. The professional said his prayers, loaded his shotgun, and went in after it as both the law and hunting morality demanded he do. Ten minutes later he reappeared at the edge of the bush looking like a tattered khaki bagfull of corned beef hash. The client and gunbearers got most of the major holes plugged and carried him back to camp, where they were able to raise Nairobi on the safari radio, ordering up a rescue plane, posthaste.
When it arrived, another hunter, quite a well-known one at that, stepped off to take over the safari for the mauled man. First order of business: settle the leopard.
It was too bad the plane had already left because, an hour later, he, too, had a lovely collection of spanking new scars-to-be, guaranteed to get you any amount of free grog from the tourists at any of Nairobi’s bars. The third professional arrived the same day, in the late afternoon. He packed Number Two on the rescue plane, dropped off his kit at the hunter’s tent, and took off for the patch of bush and the leopard. Yup. You guessed it. The big cat nailed him from behind and ripped off enough of his nevermind to make a meatloaf for six and then before anybody could do anything, savaged not one, but two gunbearers, merging back into the grass before a shot could be fired. Halftime ended: Leopard 5, Visitors 0.
Getting a bit panicky at the attrition of its staff, who were occupying most of a wing at the Nairobi Hospital—not to mention the air charter fares—the safari firm sent in John early the next morning. I don’t know what was running through Dugmore’s mind when he stepped up to that thicket, but it’s more than even money he wasn’t being careless. He had covered no more than fifty feet in a half-hour when the spotted blur was hanging in the air right in front of him, colliding nicely with the charge of buckshot from John’s right barrel. But not quite nicely enough, because John found himself flat on his back, the barrels of the gun sideways in Chui’s choppers, very occupied with trying to keep the cat’s long, hooked dewclaws from pulling his insides outside, an unpleasant sensation before one’s first cup of tea. His boys, however, were able to insert the muzzles of a second shotgun into the leopard’s ear, touching off both with definitive results. It wasn’t a very big cat, either, John told me—only about six feet, six inches over the curves.
I have a sinking suspicion that it is beyond the descriptive ability of any man to really tell you what it feels like, that last thirty seconds before you enter the long grass after a gut-shot leopard. I have never participated in a bayonet charge across open ground into fortified machinegun positions, but I can’t but believe that the sensation is similar. It’s getting dark fast; night in the equatorial regions doesn’t fall, it positively plummets. Because of your client’s shot all the natural bush noise is hushed, but the whisper of the grass in the rising moya ga busuku, the night wind, is enough to mask the cat’s movement in the murk. Standing well back from the cover, you can think of 650 good reasons why you should wait until morning, but you reject them all; even though your professional experience screams that you have a better than even chance of being horribly disfigured or disemboweled, your professional pride and your self-respect force you to open the separate shooting bag, the leopard katundu.
In itself, my leopard bag is not inclined to load one with confidence. Even a few years ago most professionals would rather have taken a cobra bite than a lacing from a leopard because of the deadly risk of septicemia caused by the layer of rotting meat film under the cat’s claws that, before modern antiseptics, could mean almost sure death. Contained in this specialized piece of equipment, assigned to one of my men to carry full-time, are the following items: a leather jacket with vertical strips of thick linoleum attached to limit claw wounds; fifteen rounds of SSG buckshot, 12-gauge; three five-packs of Brenneke 12-gauge rifled slugs; a quart of the best wound disinfectant my doctor clients can steal for me; an old, leather United States Marine neck guard to prevent saber cuts to which I have had strips of light sheet steel riveted; six styrettes of morphine; four buckle-strap tourniquets; tape, bandages, and a six-cell electric torch with extra bulbs taped to the butt. I used to carry a 9mm. Browning high-power 14-shot pistol, but the authorities looked upon that dimly. Now I can use my thumbs to poke in a wounded leopard’s eyes without threatening their national security. Charming.
When you get all this paraphernalia hung about your person and stoke up the shotgun, you still take a few more seconds to think about your little spotted friend with the off-center hole. He is very, very clever. He’s not like a lion who will test your bowels with a bone-chilling roar as he charges, at least giving you some idea he’s coming. Oh, no. Not Ingwe. He’ll stay pat, even if you bounce rocks off his skull and pepper him with probing birdshot. He only wants one thing. Guess what. He’ll snuggle up behind some cover, flatter than a half-dollar after inflation, his claws dug firmly for the charge, his floating collarbones letting him hunch almost even with the ground. As soon as you are close enough, as soon as he’s positive he can’t miss, he’ll take you. Maybe from the front, maybe the side or behind. But as long as he’s alive, he’ll drag himself out for a piece of you. It’s almost impossible he won’t have some success before you stamp him canceled—he’s that fast.
If he catches you, you’re in for a very interesting time. He will usually lead trump, fastening his teeth in your arm, shoulder, or face, itself a finesse since he’s really interested in unzipping you from adenoids to appendix. To manage this he uses his hind legs and the curved knives of his dewclaws. He is so good at doing what comes naturally that there are records of a single wounded leopard mauling five armed humans in one charge and melting back into the grass before sustaining so much as indigestion. If things reach this point, my best advice is to get your knees up against your chest to protect your guts and feed him an arm or two until somebody peels him off you. This is where good gunbearers earn their wages. It’s very difficult to find somebody stupid enough not to run while a leopard is sorting out his bwana.
Most accompanying gunbearers, if permitted to be armed, have a disconcerting tendency to empty their guns into the leopard and the hunter, too, which doesn’t exactly solve the problem. Therefore, I eminently prefer my men to have spears, which, even in their enthusiasm, are less easy to stick through the cat as well as the boss. Other hunters tell me never to pay one’s gunbearer until after the leopard of the trip has been taken. It makes them a bit more careful in such situations.
I have personally been incredibly cautious around leopards, especially perforated ones, and have enjoyed supernatural luck in not having gotten the chop. At least not yet. A lot of associates have not shared my good fortune. Brian Smith, whom I shared a camp with on several Zambian safaris, got caught twice, once by a wounded leopard and again by following an unwounded one into cover for some reason he was never able to make clear to me. He does not recommend
the experience. More seriously, Heinz Pullon, a good friend and fellow hunter in Luangwa, a talented off-season ivory carver from southwest Africa, was horribly mauled by a wounded leopard he went into the crud after. The incident occurred shortly after I left Zambia to work in Botswana, and I was told that the cat just about pulled his face off. I think it left him when he passed out from shock and pain, or it might have been that somebody pried it off him; I’m not certain. From what I understand, they just about lost him before they could get him to Chipata Hospital, about 150 miles away. Strangely, last season I had a party of Germans from Southwest Africa for buffalo hunting in Rhodesia, and they all knew Heinz well. From their description he is still undergoing plastic surgery for the wound, and that was after five years.
Unlikely as it would seem, there is a very elite little fraternity of men who have killed leopards with their bare hands. Most of them accomplished this with small or very badly injured cats, or both, as in the case of Carl Ackeley, the naturalist-taxidermist who collected and mounted many of the animals in the African Hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York. Attacked by a seventy-pounder, he managed to get the leopard onto its back and crush in its ribs with his knees, puncturing the injured cat’s lungs and killing it. Akeley, however, looked like he’d been gone over by a rogue power mower.
The title for leopard fighting in the heavyweight class unquestionably goes to an American hunter named Cottar, an ancestor of my friend Glenn Cottar who operates in the Tsavo District of Kenya today as a professional. A huge Oklahoman, “Bwana” Cottar, as he was called, came to Kenya early in this century to be a white hunter and on one occasion choked two leopards to death at the same time, one in each hand! The story goes that one of the small leopards had been chewed up in a tussle with the other when Cottar happened along, and they decided to take out their differences on the Bwana. Considering that the Oklahoman used to like to do his leopard wrestling after a few belts, his success is even more fantastic.
Cottar was a man who took his hunting seriously. Around dusk one night he wounded a leopard on his farm and followed it into the bush. As might be expected, he got the hell bitten out of him, and the cat ran off into the gathering darkness. Wrapping the tatters of his shirt around his wounds, Cottar repaired to the farmhouse and broke out a bottle of 100-proof cure-all. In a couple of hours he had drunk most of it and, fuming over the failure of having lost the cat, cracked open another quart. About halfway through this one he finally decided to blazes with it, picked up his rifle and a kerosene lantern, and went crashing out into the stormy, black night. Stamping around the thick bush, commenting on the ancestry of the leopard while suggesting physical impossibilities, he found it. Or, more likely, it found him. Again, it showed no hesitancy to shred Cottar, but this time he managed to shove the muzzle against its chest and finish it off. Cottar picked up the big leopard, slung it over his shoulder, and went back to polish off the booze in, presumably, a better frame of mind.
A few years later the Bwana had another meeting with Spots that cost him the use of his right arm through terrible injuries by the leopard. Undaunted to the end, Cottar learned to shoot with his left until gored in the heart by a rhino in later life.
Over the length of my career I have had to root six wounded leopards out of heavy cover. Perhaps it would be better said that there were six leopards I had to shoot after being wounded, many, many more that had been mortally hit and died before I found them. Although several of these experiences were hirsute, to say the least, I probably came closer to the long, long trail awinding with a dead leopard than any live one.
You will remember Armando Bassi as the Spanish client who killed the lion that was trying to bite Paul Nielssen’s leg off near his camp at Luawata. After Paul was sent to the hospital in Chipata, I took over the safari for the Bassis from the camp adjoining Paul’s, Nyampala. Although Armando had been on safari several times with Paul and with Tony Sánchez Ariño, another Spanish professional employed by the company, he had never seen a leopard and wanted one in the very worst way. In the last few days of my previous safari my clients and I had often heard what sounded like a very big leopard calling from a tremendous thicket of riverine bush and grass on the far shore of the Munyamadzi River, not 300 yards from camp. As a courtesy we never invaded other hunters’ territories and had gotten two good leopards elsewhere, but since Paul was in traction and his concession unused, it seemed reasonable that Armando and I should try to nail the lovesick tabby.
The same day I got the Bassis’ kit moved across from Luawata, Armando and I, after firing into the water to discourage crocs, waded across to the far side of the river and shot a puku, a chunky, deer-sized antelope of about 150 pounds, and made a “reccy” for a leopard setup.
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A lot has been written about leopard hunting, an especially good job having been done by Robert Ruark. Yet, I don’t think even he realized how fantastically precise a business it is. I would rather hunt leopard than any other species because of the challenge of it—the lack of luck as an element as compared with most types of shooting. I am a fanatic about my leopard setups. If they’re not perfect, they usually don’t work. That I lavish great care on them is borne out by the fact that I never had a client with a leopard license who did not have at least two open shots at stationary leopards over a full safari, and over 80 percent of my clients’ leopards have qualified for the record book. Yes, I did have one man miss not one, but two literal sitting ducks. I can get them there, but I can’t hit ’em for them.
The first step of the process is the selection of a tree for the bait, the most crucial element. Since the concept is to get the cat to come back to the bait while there is still daylight, there absolutely must be very heavy cover all around the tree for him to be able to approach unseen. You can have the best-looking leopard tree in the world, but if the big cat has to cross open ground, he won’t use it until after dark. Leopards hate to have any other wildlife see them because of the alarms they set up ruining Ingwe’s hunting. This cover, of course, is innately part of the problem: if you give him the cover to approach to feed, you also give him the same cover to disappear into if wounded.
Bait trees should be somewhat slanted because a leopard is basically lazy and the easier you make it for him to investigate the bait, even if he has a full stomach, the more likely he will return to feed. The branches of the tree should be sturdy and wide enough for a leopard to comfortably lie on. Of equal importance is the fact that the situation of the tree must be such that the spot to which the bait is attached has open sky directly west of it so that the cat can be silhouetted against the afterglow of sunset. Every second of light counts.
Zambia is perfect for bait trees because the prevailing winds in the winter always blow west to east, more or less. I do not believe that leopards have much of a sense of smell for airborne odors, although hunters are far better off with the wind in their favor. In Rhodesia, however, in the Matetsi region, the wind is always just opposite, making one choose between wind and light.
Leopard baits are also a matter of preference between hunters. Since that gruesome set of faked pictures of a leopard killing a baboon (they were taken in an enclosure) appeared years ago in Life, most people think that baboons are the best possible leopard bait. Although leopards do, indeed, eat baboons when they can catch them, they are too small to hold a leopard at a bait site because he’ll finish the whole animal at one sitting and not return. It’s also a common misconception that rotting meat is a leopard’s favorite fare. Leopards are scavengers of the first order and will eat decaying flesh of the most revolting kind, but the value of a decaying bait is that of creating enough stink for the cat to find it in the first place. If you “top-up” a leopard bait that has been fed upon with fresh meat, the cat will invariably, in my experience, abandon the rotting bait for the fresh.
Ideally, I prefer wart hog as the perfect initial bait for drawing leopards for several reasons. In the incredibly dry winter season, much meat ten
ds to mummify rather than rot, leaving almost no invitation of scent to blow around and draw cats. For whatever reason wart hog tends to rot quite quickly, especially if speared to allow flies to lay their eggs in the wounds. Leopards seem to place wart hog high on their list of prey, and the animal is sturdy enough to resist the cat tearing it loose from its anchorage and escaping with it. Once a leopard has found the bait, practically anything will hold him there, particularly when he has established a feeding habit at the spot.
It’s very important that after the bait is attached the cat not be able to remove it and carry it off because, obviously, if he has hidden the bait somewhere else, he won’t be looking for food at your tree, and you will have to wait several days for him to finish it before he goes on the prowl again. Usually a leopard will lie up somewhere nearby to keep an eye on his chow, and some risk is entailed in inspecting baits lest one bump into the cat in the grass, an interruption to which they do not take kindly. Some of my leopards have been killed while I was bait inspecting; if they are in a nearby tree, they can be stalked close enough for a shot, although with their senses, it’s unusual to surprise a leopard and be able to stalk him. If you manage it, you’ve pulled off one of the classic feats of hunting. In all my hunting years, I’ve only been able to catch five this way.
Death in the Long Grass Page 14
