Today, the great wild ox we call the Cape buffalo is the most prolific of the dangerous big game of Africa. In southern Africa there are truly huge herds, numbering into thousands of animals, itself a minor miracle because the vast majority of buffalo were wiped out around 1900 by a plague of rinderpest, the deadly cattle disease. Experts at the time thought they might even become extinct, forgetting that nature is pretty good at licking its own wounds.
A big bull buff is the second largest member of the Bos or cattle clan in the world today. The aurochs, which passed from this vale in the 1600s, was the wild ox of Europe, a formidable customer at six and one-half feet at the shoulder. Now, only the gaur of the dense bamboo thickets of tropical Asia has an edge on Mbogo, if you want to count the gaur’s first cousins, the seladang and banteng, as the same tribe. These animals are, however, mostly solitary and do not have the blood-and-thunder reputation of the Cape buffalo. A walloping bull gaur will span about six feet from his cuticles to his shoulder top. The average buff, depending upon where he comes from, will weigh about 1,600 to 1,800 pounds, although I have seen several that I am certain would shade a ton considerably.
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As a form of cattle, buffalo are good to eat. During the time I hunted in Africa, I would guess I ate buffalo in one form or another at least five days a week. It is tougher than beef, but with good flavor. The problem with buffalo as well as most African antelopes as a steady diet is that they have very little marbling or body fat and, after six months out in the blue, one dreams at night of a T-bone steak sizzling in great globules of yellow fat. The trick to shooting buff for the table is to make certain they can be dropped with a single shot. If they churn around for a few minutes, the adrenalin tends to toughen the meat and strengthen the flavor.
Lions also think buffalo are very good. Buffalo don’t appreciate that very much. Simba and his friends don’t kill as many buffalo as one might have the impression they do, although I believe that some lions specialize in the buffalo as food. Over the past few years, many people have come to believe that it is the female lion that does all the killing. This is by no stretch true. Many male lions do not live in prides and do their own hunting. Being bigger than the ladies, often it is they that will take on buffalo, sometimes working in teams of two. Even they are not successful on most occasions, and it is the relatively rare old bull that does not bear lion scars somewhere on his half-to-full-inch-thick hide.
I have noticed some variation in the methods lions use to actually kill buffalo in comparison to other game. Usually, the victim, once pulled down, dies of suffocation as the lion crushes the windpipe and holds it shut with his jaws. A buffalo is just too big to sit still for such goings on unless several lions are involved in the coercion. Most lion-killed buffalo I have examined have died of broken necks and bites to the back of the neck as well as throat wounds. I have been told by those who have witnessed the event that a lion will snag the buff’s nose with a forepaw and wrench his head so he falls in such a manner as to dislocate the neck by the buffalo’s own weight or momentum. I’ve seen lions try this but have never seen a successful attack in this manner.
That lions are by no means infallible in attacking buffalo was illustrated to me from a grandstand seat in the rocky hills of Matetsi last season. In the western areas of the concession there are three valleys separated by ridges; small streams and relatively lush vegetation abound in each low area. We had cut the spoor of a herd of fifty buff, guessed they were headed for the thickets in the second valley, and decided to check them out from the heights. As we nestled up to the lip of the hill, I saw the herd in grass and scrub, like fat black beetles on a lawn. While I was figuring the swirling wind for an approach, Amos grunted and nudged me, pointed with his chin and said, “Silwane, Nkos”—“Lions over there, Chief.” I shifted the glasses and finally caught a slip of movement downwind of the herd where three male lions, full-grown but not well maned, were stalking the herd. I did not relish sharing the high grass with a herd of buff and three lions and so settled back to watch with my client, cursing that I hadn’t brought the long lens for my camera.
With the incredible, liquid caution of the hunting cat, I noticed them working to ambush the herd from a flank, taking advantage of some heavy patches of scrub mopane. From my view, they were as flat as cobras in the lion-colored grass, barely perceptible even with the binoculars, inching closer in short movements. It was a mixed herd, with ten calves and the rest mostly adult buff, including six mature bulls, of which two were real veterans, 2,000 pounders with worn, thick horns and scarred flanks. Whether they innately knew that any possible attack would come from the heaviest cover, I can only conjecture, but the two big boys and one of the others began feeding off to the side where the lions waited, stopping at intervals to glare around them. At the tip of the herd, downwind of the bulls, an old cow grunted and stiffened. Almost surely, the tricky wind had blown her a few molecules of lion odor. She whuffed again and cantered off high-headed, pushing a calf ahead. Instantly, all six bulls swarmed the edge of the herd and stood, heads thrust forward, drooling at the patch of bush, chopping the hard ground with tentative hooves like butchers sharpening their knives. In line abreast, they started to walk toward the lions. I held my breath as the spectacle unfolded through the lenses. At twenty feet one of the cats lost his nerve and, uttering a four-letter growl I could hear, started to stalk stiffly away. That did it. As one, the buffalo took after it, flushing the other two novice hunters practically from their feet. The rest of the herd poured after the bulls, even the calves. It was a maelstrom of dodging lions and hurtling buffalo dim within a rising pall of dust. I saw one lion stop to feint at a charging bull. That was a mistake. The bull hooked at him, missing, but smacking him with the flat of a horn hard enough to roll him over twice. Before he could recover, the buffalo was on him, so anxious that he was pushing the cat along with his nose in his excitement to gore it. It slipped under his face and he ran completely over the cat, which gave a roar of pain and scooted away into cover. Over the next ten minutes, the herd hunted the lions from one clump to the next until they forced them into the open stream area, at which point the cats decided to exit, frolicking, over the next ridge.
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I really have no idea how many buffalo I have shot or been in on the shooting of under various circumstances over the years and different countries. Counting cropping, meat hunting, sport safaris, and destroying poacher-wounded animals, the total must be pushing 1,000 fairly hard. Certainly 800. I have personally killed over 400 in meat shooting on concession contracts and cropping alone. Nobody can be mixed up with that many Inyatis without a good portion being wounded ones of various severity, with the accompanying treat of following up on the spoor.
I have lost only one wounded buffalo that I am aware of, and that was under circumstances which convinced me that the animal was hardly hurt at all. In Zambia, Monty Toothacher, an American from Maine, and I were scouring the hills for something or other in the Mwangwalala area of the Luangwa when Misteke, a substitute gunbearer, noticed a good buffalo bull seemingly asleep in the middle of a thicket. I looked it over closely with the glasses, to be sure it was not a lion kill dragged there, and saw an ear move. Although Monty was carrying only a .300 Winchester Magnum that day, he was a very fine shot and I decided to let him take the bull. I whistled softly and he came to his feet, looking around him. Monty shot, and the bull swapped ends in a blink, disappearing even before I could stick a solid .375 up his backside in a raking shot, which is customary with wounded dangerous game if there is the slightest possibility of its escaping to turn rogue. Taking just the somewhat “windy” Misteke, I followed the spoor for more than a mile. Not once did the bull slow down, and the blood spoor stopped within a few hundred feet. Baffled, I returned to the spot where Monty had shot him and found that the light bullet at such high velocity had hit a thick stick and broken up into tiny fragments, doing nothing more than shower the bull with stinging little shreds of lead and
jacket that hadn’t penetrated through the skin. Satisfied that the bull would be no menace, I let him go.
One of the biggest problems in following up wounded bulls is that, whereas most herd animals will separate from their kind when wounded, a buff who is a member of a small bachelor group will stay in the company of his pals. In thick bush, there can be great difficulty determining which animal is the wounded one, and more than one man has gotten the deep six from watching the wrong one while the wounded one charged unseen from close at hand. In addition, sometimes the unwounded buffalo will adopt the attitude of the hurt one and be as willing to charge as he is.
I was with the president of a well-known manufacturing company in Botswana a few years ago, the gentleman wanting to better a mediocre head he had shot on an East African safari previously. We found four old bulls in a hollow in the grass near water and stalked them quite close. I pointed out the best bull and he fired, hitting it in the chest with a .458 Winchester, which caused it to hunch up and follow its buddies off into the grass. As is usual, we backed off into a wooded glade and sat down for a smoke to let the buff stiffen up and, with any luck, sound the death bellow that they all seem to make when dying of a chest wound. I have to admit that I was semidaydreaming, sitting with my back up against a tree, well in the open in the warm sunshine. The client was perhaps ten yards away, nearer Simone and Debalo, standing with his foot on a log. I casually noticed him looking past me, his eyes growing wider and wider, his mouth open as if to say something. Before he did, a very deep, very impressive URRRUMPPHH sounded over my shoulder, draining my blood down into my toes. The client threw himself into high gear, racing up a sapling even faster than Simone and Debalo. I jumped to my feet and looked around the tree, knowing full bloody well what it was: a large, angry buffalo. He fastened his eyes on me from three yards and trundled over, smacking that tree as I jumped behind it into a shower of leaves and dead sticks. My rifle, leaning against the trunk, was shaken loose and fell on its side. Fortunately, it was a pretty substantial tree and after several go-arounds, keeping it between the bull and me, I ended up on the rifle side. Somehow, the bull had missed stepping on the stock and breaking it and the .470 was functional. With the greatest relief I fed him both barrels right in the chops.
When we got most of the party back to earth, Debalo had a good look at the buff, punctuating his muttered eeeehhhs with a sudden ooop! “Yena hayikona fana, Morena,” he said, giving it an irreverent kick in the rump.
He was right. It wasn’t the same buffalo the client had shot at earlier. Except for the two holes in his head, there was no other bullet mark, and I was certain the American hadn’t missed. As if in answer, a low, inexpressibly sad sound wafted in from a couple of hundred yards away: Mmmmmmbaaaaawwww! The unmistakable death song of the Cape buffalo. He was dead just where we thought he would be. I doubt that his compadre had just blundered into us; he was fighting mad when he arrived. Goes to show what happens when you get emotionally involved.
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The very existence of the African buffalo has been well intertwined with that of the tsetse fly, which, curiously, was responsible at one time for the almost complete reduction of the buff in parts of his range and now is likely the buffalo’s best friend. This odd symbiosis is due to the disease carried by the tsetse generally called nagana, which is fatal to all domestic livestock and pets. This is not to be confused with the trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, which may also be carried by tsetse that have become infected by biting a human carrier or sufferer of the disease and passing it on through trypanosomes in the saliva to other humans.
Through untold millennia of natural selection wild game has a natural immunity to nagana. Yet domestic cattle or horses cannot live more than, at the most, several weeks in tsetse country without dying. It was long thought that, especially in regions hoped to be brought under the plow, the buffalo was the main host of the tsetse; it followed that if one shot off the buffalo, the tsetse would disappear. In some parts of Rhodesia, especially Matabeleland, nearly every wild animal was slaughtered in the hope of removing tsetse—a hopeless plot doomed to failure.
As research in later years began to prove, tsetse are very catholic in their bloodsucking and if anything, the wart hog is a bigger host than the buffalo. Because of the presence of tsetse in many large regions, game there is still very populous and it is logical to presume that the nasty fly with a bite like a hot ice pick is to a great degree responsible for keeping out man and his animals and preserving habitat.
While we are on the subject, the relationship between tsetse and man is not generally understood outside of Africa, many people believing that the bite of a tsetse is usually fatal or a sure cause of sleeping sickness. If that were so, I would be dead several thousand times over. Zambia’s Luangwa Valley is alive with the little monsters, and tsetse bites are just a part of every hunting day. Although there is tsetse in the area, there is no sleeping sickness because there are no carriers. In Botswana, on the other hand, “SS,” as it’s called, or “tryps,” is much more common because of the Bushmen who hang around camps and carry the disease. When I was there I had two clients get “bad” or infected bites, which look like small boils. The only recourse is a flight to Johannesburg, where a quick course of treatment is effective in the early stages. Last season, handling a few clients in Rhodesia who made short safaris there for sable antelope, after having been on Safari in Batswana another two had “bad” bites. In itself, tryps is not necessarily fatal or even debilitating if caught in the primary stages. The high rate of fatality is accounted for by the fact that cases are misdiagnosed because of the masking effect of malaria prophylaxis pills or by the fact that Bushmen are diagnosed only after becoming semicomatose. Unfortunately, I have lost several friends from the disease, including the well-known hunter, Johnny Blacklaws, and, I believe, one or both his clients.
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Getting back to the buffalo, at the time I was cropping elephant with Bob Langeveldt, we also had a quota of other game to be taken. One of them, impala, was a cinch since they could be shot by night with .22 rim-fire Magnums and solid bullets in the heads. The other, buffalo, were something else.
Over a period of several weeks, we had shot only about fifty, and those in small groups that made recovery operations expensive and awkward. For many an evening we would sit over sun-downers trying to devise a practical method of culling reasonable numbers of the big animals at one swoop, but the problem was always the reluctance of the buffalo to stay put once we had opened fire. We could always knock down four or five, but sooner or later one would move, just as one of us squeezed off, and trundle away wounded, panicking the rest of the herd into flight. One night, Bob came over, a sly grin on his furry face, and poured himself a healthy wallop of Haig. Wordlessly, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a modern variety of flare pistol, really a spring-loaded tube that fired a charge which launched a parachute-hung flare. I looked at him like he’d been hunting in the sun without his hat.
“Feel like a little field exercise tonight?” he asked, patting his new toy.
“What’re you going after, bats?” I turned over one of the flares in my fingers.
“Hayikona, man, buffalo. We ought to be able to really mop ’em up with this rig.” He noticed my raised eyebrow. “Know that pan out on the Chibembwe Road? The one where we saw the big kudu a couple of days ago?” I nodded. It was a small flowage about ten miles away, well into the bush from the tourist loop roads. “Well, by the look of it, there’s a herd of 300 or more using it every night to drink and wallow…”
“Whoa!” I interrupted. “You mean you want to go buffalo hunting at night?” I shook my head in remembrance. “Seems to me we’ve got enough problems with those bastards in the daytime, let alone crawling around the boonies after dark.”
“Listen, chum,” he said, explaining it as if to a congenital idiot, “you’ve read the old stuff on how they used to do almost all their buff shooting at water holes at night, hey?”
I allowed as I had, and that if he had read his Harris and Baldwin closely, the process entailed something of a health hazard. Moonlight buffalo shooting from a soggy hole in the ground was not my idea of the perfect evening.
“Moonlight, hell! We’ve got our own moonlight.” He waved the flare gun. “All we have to do is work in close and, when I fire the flare, clean ’em up while they’re dazzled by the light. Can’t miss.”
Langeveldt is very persuasive, I thought to myself climbing into the car next to him and stacking the boxes of .375s on the dash shelf. He eased the clutch out and we swished down the track, narrowly missing the nightjars that sprang up from the still-warm dust of the road in alarm. Small packs of foraging mongooses reared on their hind legs like underfed woodchucks, chittering at us as we passed, and the lights picked out the eyes of impala and zebra in the roadside bush. Once, a lioness lay in the road, waiting to move until Bob almost nudged her; then, with a sneer, she vaulted into the cover and haughtily padded away. At a quarter mile from the pan, he stopped the car and we loaded the guns, walking the rest of the way down the road, dully lit by a sinking sliver of moon.
Death in the Long Grass Page 17
