The last 200 yards we picked our way very carefully through the bush to the edge of the opening of the pan, where the bush was beaten down and lighter. We had lucked out with the timing, for as I stared ahead, I could see the first of a stream of black blobs that were buffalo trickling out of the cover and across the beaten earth to the water. I nudged Bob and loosened the tension knurl that held the swing-off scope in place and dropped the sight in my pocket. In this situation only the open express sights would do the job properly. Because of its greater firepower over an extended period, Langeveldt had chosen his .404 Jeffery’s magazine rifle rather than the double. Slowly, the herd wandered toward us at an oblique angle, about parallel-wind to our position at some trees, placing them between us and the water. At about thirty yards I lined up the rifle and snicked off the safety. Langeveldt raised the flare gun at a high angle over the herd and fired, the charge louder than I thought it would be. The payload arched like a firefly higher and higher and with a muted pop burst into a brilliant white light that swung beneath the tiny parachute with incredible penetration.
I involuntarily gasped at the tableau before us. There were hundreds of buffalo, seemingly close enough to touch, a black ocean of them frozen in the light of the flare. Snapping out of my shock, I fired my first shot just as Bob did, and a pair of big bulls collapsed without a twitch with smashed necks. Nothing happened, no animal moved, as we reloaded and began rapid but careful fire, dropping the animals as fast as possible. We each had five straight; although ten buffalo, were down, within eight or nine seconds, all with brain, neck, or spine shots, still they stood, dazzled by the light.
Reloading with the speed of long practice, we continued to thin the herd, long plumes of muzzle fire streaking the shadows, collapsing the buffalo with easy, deadly shots. We had eighteen down when it happened. As suddenly as the flare had burst, it died, smothering the pan in blackness but leaving us and the buffalo nightblind from the sudden brilliance. We hadn’t thought about what would happen when the flare burnt out, let alone planned to have a second one ready to fire before the first one died. In a split second it was like being smack in the middle of a Merrill, Lynch advertisement, nothing but the earthquake tremble and thunder of hundreds of hooves all around us, the overwhelming bawls, moos, grunts, and gargles filling the suffocating night.
“Climb, for Chrissakes!” shouted Langeveldt from somewhere nearby. I felt panic grab at me and slung the rifle by the sling over my shoulder, making a blind jump for the tree I had used as a shooting rest. I missed the first time, but finally got a grip on a broken branch, hauling myself blindly higher with the power of fear. A few feet below my legs, buffalo were everywhere, jostling the tree with their horns and bodies in their mad rush to escape back into the thickness. I hung on like a lizard as the herd swirled and poured over our position, shouting to see if Langeveldt was still okay. If he heard me over the tumult, he didn’t answer. Then the madness seemed to subside, the sound less urgent as the stream of animals drifted away. I could still see nothing but the remaining glare of the flare on my retina, but heard Langeveldt call from a few yards to my right. I answered him with relief, and we decided to stay put until we could see, which took another half-hour until we were satisfied that we were alone at the pan but for a pair of hyenas cautiously shuffling around the carcasses. I told them something rude, and they hunched off to watch us from the edge of the grass.
I was afraid to light another cigarette for fear of impairing my night vision once more. Dusting ourselves off from the gray pall that had settled on us, we cautiously checked the downed buffalo. One was missing, the one I had fired at just as the flare had quit, but we found his body twenty yards past my tree, pretty well pummeled by his friends’ hooves. The bullet had been low for the spine but had done a decent job on the upper lungs. There were four big cows, the rest bulls, lying in the half-light like a field of black boulders. I don’t like to consider what might have happened had Bob and I not been near those trees. As it was, most of the bark was off them from about four feet to the ground where the buffalo had blindly run into them with their horns and shoulders. That sort of thing could really ruin the press of a man’s pants.
Any dangerous sport, including buffalo hunting, needs practice for any eventuality, so I have become a great believer in Charging Buffalo Drills for my safari clients. Upon arrival at camp, clients spend the first three days of their trip learning the basic elements of buffalo hunting: running, dodging, climbing, rapid reloading, and praying, with the major emphasis on invocation of the Deity. Actually, these skills, although they impart a good deal of self-confidence to the paying customers, are superfluous. As any experienced African hand will tell you if you stand him a drink, the only sure way to stop a charging buffalo is to take away his credit card.
5
Hippo
It was nearly ten o’clock under a brass-bright Zambian moon when the Texan stifled a yawn, tossed back his bourbon nightcap, and pushed the webbed camp stool out of the circle of firelight. His excitement over the magnificent black-maned lion he had shot that afternoon had taken that long to wind down. I couldn’t blame him; it had been reasonably hairy. The bloody nose of the big cat had lain just five paces from us where it dropped from a .458 soft-point that opened the top of his head like a can of pork and beans. But, enough celebrating. Now we both needed some sleep. Elephant hunting starts early, and I had laid tea on for 4 A.M.
Walking past the gun rack, I said a good night and reached over for the .470 Evans Nitro Express double rifle. I plucked out the two long cartridges stoppering the muzzles and chambered them for the 200-yard walk along the banks of the Luangwa to my own kaia, a grass hut nestled against a huge baobab tree. I turned the valve of the pressure lamp and watched the incandescent mantle fade to a dull orange. In the darkness I felt the smooth, cool checkering of the big electric torch along the rack and slipped the toggle forward. A hard lance of light goosed the blackness as I shrugged the rifle sling over my shoulder and started off on the little path along the river. I didn’t fancy that walk late at night, the grass and bush too high and visibility too low for comfort. The area was swarming with big game of all sorts, and bumping into something large enough to have Liberian registry wasn’t my idea of a pleasure stroll. I had already jostled a lioness with, by the sound of it, cubs, a month ago. I am not overly fond of lionesses under the most social of circumstances, but when they have the chilluns in tow, I develop a positive allergy. Putting her out of mind, I lit a smoke and pushed through the grass, hearing the watery splash of crocs in the river and, on the far bank, the yapping of jackals blended with the horror-movie chortle of hyenas on a fresh kill.
I was halfway home when I heard it, a heavy, low grunting from the thick tshani off to the right, then the hollow, crashing rattle of something big moving fast in my direction. The beam swung wildly as I slipped out of the sling and lined up the light along the barrels with my left hand. I knew what it probably was, which didn’t do anything constructive for my blood pressure. When the sound was almost atop me, I lunged ten feet back down the trail as two and a half tons of bull hippo bisected the spot where I had been standing. He looked bigger than a steam roller, his mouth like an open picture window with pink curtains, but I knew that the white gleam the torch picked up in his face wasn’t bric-a-brac. With a grace that belied his bulbous bulk, he whipped around and started to eat up those ten feet like he’d been practicing wind sprints. From the hip I yanked off both barrels simultaneously, never noticing the recoil or hearing the shots. The kick broke the filament in the flashlight bulb, however, leaving me in complete darkness with one bull hippo bent on murder about six feet away.
Despite what you may have heard, the greatest skill of a seasoned professional hunter is not the H. Rider Haggard, Hollywood business of nerving out charges and placing bullets precisely at the last second. It is the ability to get the hell out of the way. I am legendary in this field. Over the next six seconds I shattered the world record for one-ma
n heavy-grass crashing and hauled up with two thorn-studded feet at the door of my hut. I scrambled around by feel locating two more rounds for the Evans and even found my other flashlight. With caution that defies description, I ignored the shouting and general uproar back in camp and retraced the path of my recent withdrawal. Sure enough, up loomed a 5,000-pound lump of deflated hippo, a huge bull with long, deep, suppurating tusk lacerations on his back and flanks from a free-for-all with a rival. Waving the beam in the air, I called for my men, who appeared like dusky jinns from the grass.
After I explained a slightly more flattering version of what had happened, we took a good look at the Imvubu and found that one big slug had gone smack between his adenoids, blasting his spine and dropping him dead before he hit the ground. I have always wondered where the second shot went. Missing a hippo from six feet, despite the circumstances, is rather like missing a barn from the inside. But, somehow I pulled it off, no mean feat of riflery, to be sure.
Most people who have never had a difference of opinion with one tend to consider hippos some sort of pathetic, overweight travesties of nature. Cartoonists usually portray them in short ballet skirts with little, round, flat-topped teeth, further reinforcing the idea that the only way a hippo could be dangerous would be if he fell out of a window and landed on you. Unfortunately, for several hundred humans in Africa each year, this is a fatal underestimation. An insecure bull hippo, wounded or not, can be as dangerous as cancer; and it would seem that bull hippos spend most of their time in the depths of insecurity.
The greatest and most common cause of hippo attack is their welldefined territorial instinct. Tourists love to take pictures of hippos displaying that big yawn so characteristic of the species. Actually, they are just showing you and other bulls what they’ve got to work with—an animal form of saber rattling. If you come wandering into his bailiwick in a dugout or outboard, he may well interpret your craft to be an interloper with amorous intentions on his womenfolk. If so, you had better lock all the doors and windows and take a deep breath. He has a mouth big enough to accommodate a dining-room table and, in reality, his tusks are razor-edged, self-whetting ivory scalpels as thick as your wrist, which can crush a native canoe or fiberglass speedboat with equal facility. In fact, in the old days hippos commonly attacked paddle steamers, often with impressive results! To be caught by a hippo is a singularly nasty way to receive your overdose of Africa.
* * *
Dr. M. P. Kahl, the man who took so many of the pretty pictures for this book, came by my digs a while back with a newsletter he thought might interest me. It was from the famous nature photographer and film maker Alan Root, of Nairobi, Kenya. It had been sent from Nairobi Hospital and clearly proved that Root is as handy with words as he is with pictures. I’ll let him tell his own story:
“We were diving in Mzima Springs together with cameraman Martin Bell to get a few more linking shots we needed in order to add some Mzima footage to a lengthened balloon film. All had been going well and the hippos were quite cooperative. On this morning, however, one bull was a bit uptight. He was a second-ranking bull and they are never as relaxed as the one at the top. You can see this particularly clearly in advertising agencies, but it happens in nature, too. Anyway, we met him in the water and he moved off rapidly, stirring up a lot of muck so that we could not see. Rather than swim through the murk and risk bumping into something we simply lay in the water waiting for it to clear. (We were wearing aqualungs.) We did not realize that the bull had stopped about twenty feet away and was now staring and snorting at the spot where our bubbles were coming to the surface. Also, occasionally one of our tanks would appear, and this obviously disturbed him. Had we been in clear water where he could have lowered his head and seen what we were, I have no doubt that he would have moved away, and certainly we would have been able to see his mounting tension and moved the other way. As it was, only the people watching from the bank were aware of what was building up.” [There were tourists watching Root’s party film the sequence.]
“When he charged he made the typical upwards and sideways scything motion, mouth wide open, and Joan was first in line. At the time she remembers nothing except that she was hit by a tremendous blow—but somehow a soft, slow-motion blow like being hit by an E-type marshmallow. It seems that the hippo got his nose under her and threw her up and out of the water. As she was in midflight one of the hippo’s canines pierced the rubber of her face mask just below her right eye and smashed the glass. (To put her face mask on and stick your finger through that hole is as chilling a feeling as you could ever want.)
“Having flung Joan aside, he turned on me and took a bite at my backside. Here I should explain that he still could not really see us; he was just making great slashing sweeps of his jaws as he ran toward us. His canines made two neatly incised holes through my swim trunks, taking only a sliver of skin from my right buttock. (This nicely balances the leopard bites on the other side, but unfortunately, like them, it will be a small scar and hardly worth showing.) But the blow rolled me over onto my back and the next thing I knew he had my right leg in his mouth. And I really did know it. I was vividly aware of every detail of what was happening. No pain, just a numbness and dull feelings of tearing and crushing but no pain at all. He got my leg right into his mouth, so that the left-hand canines were slicing through the calf while my foot and ankle were between his right-hand molars. Fortunately, they do not chew as a cat would, but just open and close their jaws enough to get a nice scissoring action of the canines. So at least my foot and ankle were only cut and badly bruised. My calf was bitten right through and chomped three or four times, fortunately all more or less in the same place. The hippo then shook me like a rat. I apparently appeared above water a few times and I was certainly scraped along the bottom too as my trunks were full of sand and debris. My most vivid recollection here is deciding that my leg had had it and the feel of the hippo’s whiskers on the back of my thigh as I was shaken about. He then dropped me and went off.”
“I had lost my mouthpiece and had water in my mask, but I still had air in my lungs and I stayed down a while. I knew that if the hippo was still there and I surfaced, I would be attacked again. I had to surface, though, and the hippo was gone. Joan was standing about twenty feet away in waist-high water. She didn’t know I had been bitten and I didn’t know she had been thrown. Martin Bell’s head appeared about fifteen feet behind me—all he knew was that there had been a hell of a commotion and that something was wrong. In dreamlike slow motion I emptied the water from my goggles, found my demand valve, cleared it, and put it in my mouth. Somehow, though I knew I had been bitten, I could not come to grips with the reality of it. Then I reached down and felt the floating mush that was my leg and called, ‘Christ, I’ve been bitten.’ Joan gave a wail and came wading toward me, but I yelled at her to get out of the water and she turned back to the bank. I lowered myself to swim for the shore, but I was swimming through blood and not doing too well when something clamped onto my wrist. It was so fierce and tight I thought it was the hippo again, but it was Martin, and he towed me across that pool with all the power of a nuclear submarine.”
“We were concerned now about a ten-foot crocodile who had spent a lot of time over the past week methodically stalking us as we worked. We had met him in the water and faced him down a couple of times, but he had been getting bolder every day. I knew that as his fear of us decreased, I would have to watch him carefully, but felt that for the moment we were O.K. as long as we behaved properly. Thrashing about on the surface and bleeding like a stuck pig did not come under the heading of proper behavior, so it was a relief to get to the bank.”
“There I was bound up by an Italian doctor, part of a tourist group who saw the whole thing, stuck in the Range Rover where I lay drinking whisky on the way to Kilaguni Lodge, where we were able to amicably hijack a tourist plane. In less than three hours from the attack I was in the familiar, homely surroundings of the casualty ward of the Nairobi Hospital.”<
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“Getting there was all the fun. In the next twenty-four hours I developed gangrene and became so odoriferous that even some of my best friends told me. In fact, all my best friends told me. I had some spectacular fevers—Boy! I have had the sheets changed before when I was sweating, but never the mattress! And, in between the sweats I needed an electric blanket to keep warm. Three days, seventeen pints of saline, eight pints of blood, many million units of intravenous penicillin, and several cups of tea later I was declared O.K. and since then I have been on the mend.
“As my surgeon put it, ‘That hippo was as good an anatomist as I am,’ and I must say that for all the random savagery of the attack the hippo really did do a neat job. There was a hole through my calf large enough to push a Coke bottle through, and by the time the doctors had cut away the damaged tissue to clean the wound they had enough meat, as they put it, ‘for a reasonable hamburger.’ But the teeth smashed muscle only—no bones, no tendons, no arteries and no major nerves and veins. It’s hard to conceive of passing through a bull hippo’s jaws and having so little real damage. (They are still the leading herbivore in Africa when it comes to killing people—crocs lead the carnivore list.)”
“I have now been in the hospital for two weeks, the leg is much improved, and I am having a skin graft in a couple of days’ time. If it takes, I should be out ten days after that, though not walking for another week or so. Joan had a few bad days when the shock of her near-miss was compounded by my gangrene, but is now well and comes in every day to photograph the wound for the surgeons who are interested in just how it closes over. So that’s it—my bum is numb and I’m putting on too much weight but I’m going to be O.K.”
Death in the Long Grass Page 18
