Foam blowing over his boiler-tank chest, the buffalo sprang back for a moment, then charged, hooking the cadaver on an icepick horn and dragging it back onto the path. For long minutes he chopped the man like chicken liver with axe-edged hooves the diameter of salad plates. Then, the way a dog will act with a dead snake, he methodically ground what was left of the corpse into the earth by rolling his ton of weight upon it again and again. Satisfied, the gory hulk grunted again and backed off a few paces, watching to see that his victim did not move. Ten minutes passed before he turned and made his way back into the thicket where he lay down, pondering the maggot-crawling, festering wound on his hip.
An hour later, returning from a successful kudu hunt with two clients and four of my native staff, we found the body lying in the trail. We had come from the opposite direction, dry and tired after long hours of tracking, and it wasn’t until I had stared at the remains for several seconds that I was even able to recognize what it was. You will see better-looking bodies in plane crashes. The spoor told the story as clearly as if in neon lights and, gagging down the dry heaves, I dunked a pair of 500-grain solids in the .470 and unfastened the sling for quick handling. Waving back my clients and the rest of my men, I advanced a few yards up the trail and spotted the buff’s track leading into the thicket. Silent swiftly scampered up a tree for a look around. He glanced about for several seconds, then stiffened with a slow nod and pointed into the heavy bush about thirty yards off to my left front. He raised his arm, palm down, parallel to the ground, to indicate that the bull had stood up and was listening for us. I held stock still, then moved a little to give myself an open shooting space in front of the thicket. I must have made a sound. Instantly, there was one hell of a bawl and heavy crashing as the buffalo charged, bulling through the thick bush like it was so much popcorn. He caught the first bullet at fifteen yards, just as his outline became visible. It took him in the center of the chest, just below his tree-trunk neck, and staggered him slightly. The bull was too close for comfort now, so I snapped off a brain shot and saw an eruption of horn boss fly like heavy bark where the big slug clipped him, almost knocking him down as 5,000 foot-pounds shocked his brain. To my definite consternation he was back up again in a flash, like a big, black tennis ball bounding off concrete, bawling and bellowing like a bass banshee. Instinctively, I thumbed the lever and broke the double rifle, the empties pinging in smoky streaks over my shoulder, and loaded the two asparagus-sized cartridges from between the fingers of my left hand. He was almost on me when I belted him with both barrels right in the face. Except for the dim sensation of meeting a bright red, speeding locomotive in a dark tunnel, that was all I remembered for quite a while.
When I came around, I wasn’t sure what to rub first. A gash and lump the size of a teenage cannonball was growing over my blood-filled left eye and I had enough assorted contusions, abrasions, and bruises to supply a rugby team for the season. I felt like I’d done fifteen rounds with King Kong, but closer inspection proved that I was still relatively functional and that the majority of the blood belonged to the late buffalo. Silent, who had witnessed the charge from the tree, explained that the bull had been just about dead when he piled into me, but had made a reflex toss with his horns, which caught the muzzle of my rifle hard enough to smash it back up into my face, where the rib between the barrels had clouted me over the eye, knocking me cold. Both the last two shots had been winners, right through the lights, but his ton of forward motion hadn’t given a damn. The clients and gunbearers had levered him off my lower body, and why my legs weren’t broken still puzzles me today.
Invisible, my Number Two, came over and dropped something wet and smelly into my hand—a .577 lead ball he had cut from the buff’s thigh. Shot there by a poacher with a wire-bound muzzle loader, it had lain festering along the bone, which it had lacked the power to break. The pain must have been frightful, slowly driving the bull to the point where he would charge anything that crossed his path. I sent Quiza back to the hunting car for a tarpaulin and my camera and, when he returned, took a roll of film for the authorities to accompany the report I would have to write. A short while later I got a note saying that it would not be necessary to appear to give evidence at the inquest. The condition of the tribesman’s body was ample evidence as to the cause of death.
* * *
The African Cape buffalo, Syncerus caffer (not “water buffalo,” NBC), has enjoyed a Jack the Ripper reputation since the first European thwacked one with a muzzle loader more than 300 years ago. He has always been considered a top contender as the Dangerous Continent’s most dangerous animal, and there is no question that the sheer physical characteristics of Mbogo, Njati, Inyati, or Narri, depending upon what dialect you hunt him in, give him a very unique package of aggregate attributes that in their total are unequaled by any other member of the “Big Five”: lion, leopard, elephant, or rhino.
The most impressive fact about the buffalo is that he has virtually no weak points. Jumbo and rhino are myopic in the extreme, but a bull buffalo could read the want ads in dim light across Times Square. The talent of his big, scruffy, thorn-torn ears is incredible, fully the equal of both lion and leopard, either of which he outweighs by many times at no apparent cost in blinding speed and maneuverability. His sense of smell is practically supernatural when he sticks that big, black nose like a #10 jam tin into the wind—as good as elephant or rhino and much better in ambient air than any of the cats. He is a living arsenal of weaponry for use against jerkwater hunters or preoccupied Africans, offering a Chinese menu choice on your shortcut to Glory of horns that can disembowel a locomotive, hooves like split mattock-heads, and up to a ton of bulk that can roll you into a fair resemblance of shaggy tollhouse cookie mix. What’s more, if you cross him and get caught, he will display a singular lack of reluctance, regardless of race, color, or creed, to give you a nice, home demonstration of his talents. If you are planning on hunting the mighty buff, you had best give some thought to putting your affairs in order. In the thick stuff, where he loves to loaf away the fly-filled, hot afternoons, he has the edge, not you.
How really dangerous is the Cape buffalo? In a thoughtful word, plenty. Of course, as would be the case with any dangerous animal that looks as purely malevolent as a buff (Ruark distilled it well when he said that they look at you as if you owe them money), there has been no shortage of “sea stories” to help along his reputation as an advanced felon, charging on sight, an unstoppable mountain bouncing .600 Nitro Express slugs off his horn boss like soggy lima beans. Actually, with properly constructed, nonexpanding bullets of reasonable caliber, buffalo fall quite easily to brain shots if a proper angle can be used for the shot. I once won $50 in a bet with another pro by driving a 7 × 57mm. bullet completely through the skull of a big bull.
I have tried to follow up on the legend that buffalo regularly lick the meat off the legs of treed humans with their wood rasp tongues but have found no reliable report that this is so. I can’t imagine anybody sitting still while a buffalo licked away his flesh like soft pistachio ice-cream, although it does make a juicy tale!
As is consistent with the current trend to debunk the idea that there is any dangerous game at all, some preservationist writers have tried to paint the buffalo as just another of Mother Nature’s sweeties, absolutely harmless unless hounded by those awful hunters, a pox on them. In a way, this may not be unfounded from their viewpoint and exposure. The “Run, Bambi, it’s Man” and “Don’t Shoot Him Mister He’s a Sheepdog” mentalities rarely waste their time in the thick bush of a hunting concession when they can sit in a zebra-striped minibus at a game preserve and photograph buff that are used to people. They will tell you that they’ve photographed thousands of buffalo without any incident whatever, and I’m sure they have. What they don’t realize is that park buffalo behave entirely differently from “wild” ones, acting more like dairy cattle than anything else, drinking and grazing in daylight, while normal buff lie up in heavy cover during daylight and
only come to water at night. When I say heavy cover, I refer to thorn and scrub thatched with grass until the end result is thicker than boiler plate, and about as translucent. To spend a few days tiptoeing around this vegetable morass looking for a good bull at tag-you’re-it distance is possibly the most tense, nerve-wracking hunting in the world. The first thing you will notice in this pastime is the absence of lady photographers in fake leopard hatbands.
I don’t know if buffalo take their lead from elephants, but they don’t seem to like automobiles much, either. Shortly before I joined him, Bob Langeveldt was driving home from an elephant cropping expedition late one afternoon when a lone bull buffalo came boiling out of some cover along the track and slammed into the passenger-side fender, driving one horn through the metal of the body and lifting the car’s front clear off the ground. By all appearances pleased with his work, he backed off and charged again, doing about as much damage to the radiator as a well-placed hand grenade might have accomplished. Each time Bob would try to get his rifle uncased, the bull would wallop the Land Rover again, flattening Bob. Finally, he got the rifle out, loaded it, and broke the buffalo’s neck as it tried to untangle its horns from the car’s gall bladder. He said it was a long walk home.
In Botswana in 1970 I had another bull come roaring out of the thorn and give the tail of my big Toyota a stunning thump, but he did nothing beyond cosmetic damage, and I was able to outrun him. In Rhodesia in 1975 I lived in the house of a man who had been killed by a buffalo in the backyard three years before. His tombstone nearby was always a handy reminder not to take Inyati frivolously. Geoff Broom, who owned the safari firm I worked for in the Matetsi region, was riding with his young son and a dog to inspect a stretch of new track for the coming safari season when a buff blew out of the shadows and stuck a horn through the metal just above and aft the driver’s (right-hand) door, creating a three-foot tear that would accommodate a prize watermelon as he ripped free. Geoff was unarmed at the time and damned lucky to get away without more serious damage. He always thought that the bull had either been fighting with another or had been in a tussle with a lion. Point is, dear friend in Disney, would you like to tell me that if a man had been walking past any of these points, rather than riding in a car, he would not have been charged? I didn’t think you would.
I have heard hunters, back from their first foray in Africa, usually in Kenya where the buff limit is one per customer, opine that killing their bull was like pole-axing Elsie the Cow. And so it can be … sometimes. If you are lucky enough to find a good bull in the open and swat him where it counts with a big slug, he’ll probably roll over and give up the ghost. But, if you flinch and pull your shot from even the heaviest rifle, you had better make sure the disaster insurance is all paid up because you have now got yourself a problem. A big one. There is a definite cause-and-effect factor in the fact that hunters tend to get the New Look from wounded buffalo because they tend to wound so many of them.
The problem is adrenalin. Although it’s true that adrenalin and other high-performance additives are a factor with any large animal when wounded or excited, the Cape buffalo is clearly the champ in the overdrive department. If you don’t drop him stone dead or mortally wounded with the first shot, he will completely lose his sense of humor and may get the idea he’s invulnerable to bullets, a point he may prove to you over the next few minutes. If he makes you or your hunter follow him into the thick stuff, don’t forget that you’re likely in for a scrape that won’t end until you collect his headskin … or he yours. You can shoot him practically to pieces, if he gives you the chance, but he’ll keep coming despite wounds that would disable a tyrannosaurus. Blow his heart into tatters, literally, and he’ll have enough oxygen stored in his brain to go a hundred yards and still have the moxie to take you apart with his tent-peg horns and mix you up with enough topsoil to start a modest tomato farm.
A buffalo whose attention you have gotten with a badly placed shot is really something to behold. For sheer, unveering ferocity, he will make a range bull look like Ferdinand. When he has you nicely in range and comes gallumphing over to chastise you, he keeps his head very high until a few inches before contact—probably so he can watch your expression—making it about as easy to slip a bullet through the armor of his horns into the brain as to complete a triple carom shot on a warped pool table after seven martinis. Either you stick a big slug up his nose and hopefully catch his brain or upper vertebrae, or remember the words to the “Hail Mary” in a hurry. I had a fascinating, if somewhat gory, chance to see practical examples of the physiological effect of adrenalin on a wounded buffalo last year in Rhodesia.
I was hunting with a South African doctor client on a short safari, just for buffalo at Matetsi, and we had found the spoor of a herd of twenty-odd. Unlike most areas I have hunted, this region was unusual because often the herds would contain shootable bulls, whereas over most of Africa the old bulls are strictly small bachelor herds from singles up to eight or so. From the track, Amos, my Kalanga-Bushman gunbearer, and I agreed that there were at least two large males in the group. We tracked them into a narrow valley between the basalt hills, where a small creek flowed, the Bembe. There was plenty of cover along the water and we were able to sneak to within forty yards of the herd as they grazed across our front, a perfect setup. After a good inspection with the binoculars, I picked out a nice bull with a close boss and about forty-four inches of spread, standing three-quarters facing us. The doctor fired from a tree rest and, on hearing the .458 Magnum soft-point whock home, the bull staggered and sat down on his haunches. He got up and wobbled fifteen yards, then collapsed again. As the rest of the herd thundered off into cover, I hurtled the stream, anxious to get in an insurance shot before he got back up. As I came up to him, he was still alive but clearly unable to rise. Keeping a tree between us, I opened my eyes in amazement at what I was seeing. The bullet had caught him just at the base of the neck where it meets the chest and severed the main artery before penetrating to do God knew what inside. The incredible thing was that there was a thumb-thick stream of blood pumping out of the bullet hole that was hitting the ground at a later-measured thirty-six feet away! God’s Honest, fellas. Can you imagine the power of a heart strong enough to produce that kind of pressure through a half-inch hole? It’s no wonder a wounded buffalo can carry around more lead than an ore cart!
In Zambia I was hunting with George Lenher, a client from New York, and shot a mediocre bull for lion bait one afternoon with a .375. Since trophy quality was of no importance, I killed the buff myself and took it on my “pot” license, which gave every professional a dozen buffalo and some wildebeeste and impala for rations each season. As it happened my bullet was deflected by a piece of brush and did not kill the bull immediately, although he wasn’t going anywhere. Following him up, I saw him standing broadside to us about thirty yards away. Not wanting to disturb the area, which had quite a lot of lion spoor, I got the bright idea of killing the bull with Silent’s spear. Keeping my rifle handy in my left hand, I threw the spear and, to my complete astonishment, hit him smack dead center in the heart. After about thirty seconds he fell over, and, with George’s 8mm. camera still rolling, lay for many minutes with the spear embedded in the center of his heart, which kept beating. I have seen the film run back in the States, and it bears out better than anything I have ever witnessed the incredible resiliency of the Cape buffalo.
Back in the Khwai Concession in Ngamiland, northwestern Botswana, on the same safari with Dr. “Bob” Welch that produced the pair of record-book Tom leopards, there occurred another typical example of the refusal of a buff to die.
Although most of the cover in the area is scrub and sand, there are many dambos, or open plains, favored by immense herds of buffalo. It was early in the season, my staff of twenty-three men were grumbling for some red meat, and I was anxious to start some biltong drying for snacks. Because of this, and as a chance for Bob to try out his new .460 Weatherby Magnum, the most powerful shoulder-fired
commercial sporting rifle in the world, with over 8,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy, we decided to convert a youngish bull at the tail of the herd to table fare. While I covered him with my .375, Bob snuggled up to a termite heap and probably wiped out most of the nest with the muzzle-blast concussion of his first shot. The 500-grain soft-point hit like a sumo wrestler beating a rug, throwing up a small explosion of dried wallow mud a touch high on the withers.
“Belt him again, Professor,” I whispered as the bull took off across the plain. Clearly, the buffalo had not read the energy charts for the .460 and was blissfully ignorant that he should have collapsed like a dynamited bridge from the “shock” alone. Wham! Whock! The bull kept running along although I could see the second shot strike like a shell on a concrete bunker. Five shots later and the bull was still on his feet, moving toward cover despite the fact that I could watch the big slugs going into the chest cavity. From Bob’s bloody nose, I knew he was taking a horrible pummeling from recoil, but he kept pouring on the lead. After another two hits the beast stopped and stood, legs splayed, until Bob’s last and tenth round mercifully (for both of them) broke its spine. An awed cheer went up from the gunbearers as if I’d just announced a beer ration. We walked up and inspected the bull and found that Bob’s shooting certainly wasn’t at fault, nor was bullet performance. The chest cavity was absolutely devastated—heart, lungs, and everything else in sight. That buffalo had just gotten the notion he wasn’t going to fall down, and by God, he didn’t. At an average range of about 100 yards, he had absorbed better than 60,000 foot-pounds of bullet energy before the spine shot scuttled him. I’m glad he wasn’t chasing me all that time!
There has been a good deal of what I consider pap written over the years about the “diabolical” cunning of the buffalo when wounded, purposely doubling back on his trail in a fishhook maneuver to ambush the pursuing hunter. I have had to dig out enough buffalo from heavy bush to respect them second only to a live, sixteen-inch shell with a smoking fuse, but I have never experienced an obvious trap-laying ambush. By nature, when hurt they head for the nastiest, thickest tangle of crud they can find, where their sense of smell, keen eyesight, and hearing work to their advantage to locate you before you can find them. True, they will permit you to walk past them if they think you haven’t seen them and it looks as if they will have a “freebie” from the rear, but usually, they will wait until you are in range of a short, decisive charge, then come boiling out of the thorns and shadows in a black streak of high-brass murder. At that point, brother, they couldn’t care less about your bank balance or your Rotary attendance. Unless you are fast and fortunate, you had better delegate somebody to give your regards to Broadway, ’cause you may not be seeing it again. You will be entering a state of Terminal Meditation.
Death in the Long Grass Page 16
