“P.S. Perhaps the hippo was a better anatomist than my doctor, for an X-ray has just shown that my fibula—the smaller bone of the two—was broken and there are several chips floating about in there. Skin grafting will go ahead anyway.”
To observe that Alan Root was an incredibly lucky person to live through his brush with Kiboko, the hippo’s KiSwahili moniker, would be gilding the lily. If that bite had been in the body instead of the leg, you may rest assured that he would have sent no newsletter. Many others, of course, whose work brings them within the reach of hippos do not fare so well.
* * *
A well-known crocodile hide hunter, Bryan Dempster, was returning from a foray against the saurians on the Zambezi one dark night with two African assistants, Albaan, and a Zulu, Joseph. Crossing a smooth, silent pool that lay along heavily vegetated banks, the blackness exploded without warning as the boat was rocketed completely clear of the water, the outboard motor screaming as the prop went wild, then dying as the hull smashed back to the surface. Dempster hit the water in a shower of equipment and rolled-up croc hides right alongside a tremendous bull hippo. In the thin moonlight, Dempster saw the gleam of ivory and white foam as the bull clamped the boat in his teeth and crushed it like a wormy rowing shell. Aware his only chance was to remain as quiet as possible, he steeled his nerve and watched the monster only a few feet away. Dempster’s mind raced. If the hippo didn’t do for him, there was a growing chance the crocs would.
Suddenly, there was a screeching as Albaan panicked, unable to swim, and began flailing the water. Dempster knew that the muntu was a dead man and that, unarmed and in the water himself, there was nothing he could do about it. Gritting his teeth to remain silent, Dempster watched the bull charge over, open his giant maw and slam it shut on Albaan’s head and chest. The screaming stopped. While the bull was submerged tearing Albaan to tatters, Dempster and Joseph quietly paddled to shore and lived.
A South African native-affairs official named Steyn, operating in the then-Bechuanaland protectorate (now Botswana) in 1959, was ordered to destroy a rogue hippo who had been flipping boats with fatal consequences in the Okavango River. He got a whack at the big bull and killed it outright with a brain shot, but drew the attention of a huge cow who charged the boat and, despite Steyn’s shots, slashed the craft, throwing the man clear. He disappeared in a burst of bloody foam as the cow grabbed him. Steyn was never seen again.
When I was a professional white hunter in Zambia, hippos were on the general game license. Since popping a hippo in the water while you stand on the bank is something less than the apogee of sportsmanship, although justifiable in the extenuating circumstance of needing bait for a man-eating crocodile, we developed a slightly more interesting method for those clients who wanted the beautiful hippo ivory. Ian Manning, a very experienced professional hunter and ex-elephant cropping officer with whom I led many safaris in the Luangwa, was the innovator of the technique, which gave some clients a scarier time than their wounded buffalo. Ian would find a shallow sand bar and, after firing into the water to spook any crocs with ideas of ambush, would wade out into the territory of a big bull, the client following in the certain knowledge that Ian had been into the vanilla extract during the lunch break. Although steadfastly threatening, the bull would usually permit them to approach to about twenty yards away. At that point there would be a full-blast, flat-out charge. More than one client who had already stood up to elephants would display excellent basic reflexes by dropping his rifle and taking to the hills as Ian would drop the beastie in a depth charge of spray with a brain shot from about as far away as his shoelaces. Ian never made any serious mistakes (besides inventing the Gin Nyampala) but one day I nearly did.
My client was Rudy Cabañas of Mexicali, who stood his ground like a veteran of the battle of Isandhlwana. At his shot the bull crumpled up like a piece of wet newspaper, the bullet taking him between the eyes. Rudy waded back to shore where one of my men was brewing up a kettle of tea for Mrs. Cabañas while the skinners took the tusks, filets, and large slabs of skin for coffee-table tops. I stood about knee deep at the edge of the sand bar along a deeper channel, covering the butchering operation from crocs and other hippos with my .375 H. & H. Mauser magazine rifle.
There was another bull, I had noticed, about forty yards away at the edge of the small herd of ten or so, but I paid him little attention, more worried about a croc sneaking in under cover of the muddy water. As he seemed at a safe distance and was doing little more than muttering at me, I didn’t notice it when he submerged. I smoked a couple of butts, started to turn around to see how things were coming along with my men, and just happened to catch a dark shadow in the water only a couple of yards in front of me. Like the Loch Ness monster putting on a one-man show, the second bull lurched out of the channel under a full head of steam right next to me as the water bulged and blew into a flurry. His mouth looked as if it could hold a pair of locomotives. My muzzle blast actually scorched him as I got off a round where he looked biggest and his bow wave knocked me off balance in the water. To tell the truth, I wasn’t scared—I was paralyzed! In all the near nasties I have come across in a business not noted for its security, that one was about the closest of all. I was so spooked that it took an hour before the shakes even started. I do not spend any more time standing around in rivers underestimating hippos.
Although most deaths by hippo are the result of unthinking intrusion by boat, a lot of souls have taken wing after meeting up with hippos on dry land. Hippos don’t feed in the water, as you would suppose, but graze at night on grass and such at considerable distances from rivers and lakes. Around the Queen Elizabeth National Park, in pre-Amin Uganda, the hippo population was so overgrown that they had leveled the vegetation along the rivers to amazing distances, incurring official wrath that resulted in large numbers of them being cropped. The problem with feeding hippos is that they consider water to be their safety zone and become intensely unpleasant about the whole thing should you happen to blunder between them and their aquatic security blanket. River banks at night are marvelous places to avoid, especially along hippo paths. When a hippo is disturbed on land, he will charge back down his path to the security of the river despite any obstacle, including you.
A few years ago along the Pafuri River in South Africa’s Transvaal, a tribesman and his wife were walking, the woman carrying a child on her back in the traditional manner. (Incidentally, after you have spent some time in Africa, you will notice that a black African will nearly always wear his shoes out along the outside edges of the soles first. All people who are carried in this manner, with their legs straddling their mother’s waist, are slightly bowlegged and walk on the outsides of their soles.) Spotting a bull hippo ahead, the man yelled at it to scare it back into the water where he figured it belonged. Apparently the bull didn’t see things quite that way. He charged, took the woman’s leg off at the hip, bit away most of her side and wandered back into the river. The woman, of course, died on the spot, but somehow the child was unharmed.
It would seem that the Pafuri is noted for its savage hippos. About ten years ago another official named Steynberg was surprised while standing on the river bank. A hippo charged from the water and bit him just once. Once, however, was ample. His heart and lungs were exposed and he died in agony on a tortuous drive to the hospital. In 1966 on the Limpopo, the Great, Greasy River that forms the border between South Africa and Rhodesia, a single hippo cleaned house at an African beer bust, biting a man through the chest and killing him instantly. It had been the third fatality that year alone by hippos on the Limpopo.
The hunter and naturalist James Clarke reports witnessing an attack on a hunter named Barnard on the Olifants River in Transvaal. A young bull, weighing about a ton (quite small), charged Barnard, turning its head sideway for the first bite. Somehow, perhaps because the animal was inexperienced at disemboweling people, its first go resulted in its teeth bouncing off the man’s hipbone, leaving just a whopping red welt across
his stomach. (I’ll bet!) However, with practice and perseverance, the young bull soon got the hang of it and crushed Barnard’s elbow on its next try. Warming to the task, the bull encored the performance by driving a tusk deeply into the armpit but failed to sever the arm. A pal of Barnard’s was then able to cancel the arrangement through the judicious application of two .505 Gibbs slugs to the brain. Barnard survived, but it is unlikely that the encounter did much for his bowling average.
I, for one, have never been able to figure out how a hippo, with his widely separated tusks, can manage to bite another animal in half. Yet there have been many reliable reports of just this happening, in one case the bitee being a child in Zululand who was described as neatly severed. I cannot imagine anything in the world tougher to bite in two than a ten-foot crocodile, but one of those unsociable Pafuri hippos did just that. The hippo has almost no natural enemies as an adult with the possible exception of man. Whereas young hippos may sometimes be taken by crocs if the mother is lax, adults enjoy the distinction of being too big and tough for any other animal to molest. A lion could not possibly bite deeply enough to reach vitals even if it got up the nerve to try in the first place.
One of the major causes of rampaging hippos, such as the one who jumped me in the grass that night on the Luangwa, is the damage inflicted by other bulls in territorial and mating battles. These contests, unlike the relatively harmless tests of strength between the males of most species before mating, are bloodbaths that often result in the crippling and death of the loser and sometimes the winner, too. Every mature bull hippo has terrible scars over much of his body from the tusk bites of rivals, the acquisition of which must be a most unpleasant experience. I have seen several of these battles in closeup and assure you that they are hair-raising, incredibly bloody encounters, normally fought in the water. Both the winner and the loser are sure killers of anything crossing them in their agony and murderous temperament. I’d sooner try to push around a hungover gorilla than look sideway at one of those bulls after a Dating Game tussle.
The Greeks were not as inaccurate as the appearance of a hippo would indicate when they named the animal “hippopotamus” or “river horse.” He may have a figure like a gourd, yet it’s not fat but muscle under that leathery hide. Hippos are startlingly fast, both on land and in the water, where they may swim or walk along the bottom. Their dung, which is spread through the water by vibration of the tail, is seemingly very important to many of the smaller fish species, including the Tilapia bream, possibly the most delicious of the fresh-water food-fishes. In places like Botswana’s Okavango, it has been found out the hard way how important the animal is to the shifting water system that varies from season to season, flooding roughly from north to south and back again. Many of the channels that had historically been kept clear of vegetable debris by hippo movement have become seriously clogged and water movement has been impeded because of pressure of poaching on Okavango hippos. They are now closely controlled in that area.
It is my personal opinion that hippo meat is one of the finest of game foods. I had a safari chef who could make a better stroganoff from the thigh-thick interior filets that lie up under the ribs along the spine than you could buy in New York. Just as it would be difficult to describe the taste of beef to a person who had never tried it, so it is with hippo. The taste is mild, less than lamb and more than beef, slightly more marbled than usual venison. It tastes exactly like, well, hippo.
In Zambia, among the Chenyanja-speaking tribes, there was a typical example of the apparently meaningless taboos that often crop up in Africa. They had it firmly in mind that the eating of hippo flesh would cause boils and carbuncles. That I ate it regularly made no impression—it was just another case of lo nsebenza ga lo Abelungu, white man’s business, the same weird reaction that a wild Bushman would show on seeing me speak through a single sideband radio to headquarters a hundred miles away. You would expect him to be agog with amazement; normally, he shows no reaction or surprise at all. You could flap your arms and fly like a bird and rouse little more interest. As far as the bush African is concerned, there’s nothing a white can’t do with his magic gadgets.
In East Africa, on the other hand, hippo is a delicacy among the blacks. In places like southern Sudan, they were hunted with harpoons by probing the river or lake bottoms until located, then stuck. In the ensuing festivities, a dead man or two was no rarity, which perhaps gave the meat the succulence of stolen grapes.
As hippo were not used by my safari staff, I normally tried to engineer that the hippo of the safari be taken before we tried for lion. Since lions are great scavengers, and a hippo after a day in the sun has little olifactory resemblance to Chanel No. 5, it usually did not take long for any resident pride to find the windfall and settle in for a protracted feed. The trick was to get the bloody carcass out of the water, hopefully towing it with muscle power to some point where a Land Rover could be brought within rope length. Strong strips of hide are cut in an enlarging “whirlpool” design from the flank and back, knotted through flaps cut in the skin on the away-side of the carcass, and attached to the hunting car. A good dose of four-wheel drive will turn the carcass over toward you, gaining perhaps four feet, at which point the operation must be repeated until the hippo is in position to be staked down before first light, in the hope of catching a lion still feeding at dawn. It takes most of a day to make fifty yards in this manner, or with gangs of locals if a Land Rover cannot be brought in. All in all, there are more exciting things to do on safari than roll hippos around all day.
Like his prehistoric pal the rhino, the hippo is mostly a pain in the neck because you have to be so damned careful to avoid him. Despite his short-fuse temper, stunning power, and speed, he is very necessary to the balance of his range in Africa. But that doesn’t mean you have to love him. I’ll go along with Sir Samuel Baker, the Victorian explorer, who had enough brushes with hippos during his Nile expeditions to last a dozen lifetimes. “There is no animal,” as Sir Samuel put it, “that I dislike more than the hippo.”
6
Crocodile
“What’s with the birdcage?” asked Paul Mason over his scrambled egg and impala liver breakfast. I glanced across the hard-packed earth of the safari camp to the slender figure of the young woman padding softly through the early light to the nearby lagoon.
“Fish trap, actually,” I told him, ambushing a sausage from the platter Martin was passing. The woman disappeared into the bush, the cone-shaped cage of woven cane balanced lightly on her shaven head. “The women wade out into the lagoons along the river when they’re low like this in the dry season and just slam the wide end of the trap into the bottom ahead of their feet. The bream and catfish are so thick when the water drops, they always get a few in the trap, then they just stick their hands through the open top and grab them.”
Paul grunted, then spoke over his shoulder. “Martin! Buisa maquanda futi!” I was surprised that he even had the proper Q-click in the word for eggs. The old waiter, once the batman of a colonel of Kenya’s crack regiment, the King’s African Rifles, came to attention smartly, then trotted off to the kitchen for more scrambles. Mason grinned, proud of the Fanagalo he had picked up on his first two weeks of safari in the Luangwa. Even if it wasn’t the formal language of the country, Chenyanja, the Tongue of the Lakes, Fanagalo did the same job for central and southern Africa as KiSwahili served on the east coast. And, a hell of a two weeks it had been. Still in his thirties Mason was fit and tough enough to hunt really hard, tracking twenty miles a day with nothing but an occasional breather, the kind of hunting that can produce the quality trophies he had taken. The third day out he’d busted a lunker lion from spitting distance with a better black mane than Victor Mature’s and had built on that with a forty-eight-inch buffalo and a kudu that would necessitate an addition on his house if he planned to hang it on the wall. From the reports brought in by Silent, things looked pretty fair in the leopard department, too. The number three bait had been taken by
a kitty that left a track like it was wearing snowshoes. Mason was one of the really good ones, a humble man who never thumped his chest, a fine shot and a better companion, a genuine pleasure to bwana for.
“What say we just screw around with some Zinyoni today, then hit the leopard blind about four?” I asked. “There’s any amount of francolin and guinea fowl over by the Chifungwe Plains, and we could shoot the water holes on the way down for ducks and geese. Always the chance of picking up a decent elephant spoor in that area, too.”
“You just purchased yourself a boy,” he answered. “But, how’s about we pot another impala? This liver’s out of this world.”
“Sure,” I told him, “you’ve got two left on your license and the camp is getting kind of low on meat. That kudu filet’s about finished and…”
The scream was low at first, more a cry of surprise than alarm, then crescendoed into a piercing shriek of pure animal terror echoing hollowly through the mukwa hardwoods, up from the lagoon. Again it cut the cool morning air, even higher, a throbbing razor-edged wail that lifted my hackles and sent a shiver scampering up my spine like a small, furry animal. We both froze for an instant, Mason with a piece of toast halfway to his open mouth, his eyes wide in surprise. Reacting, I snatched the .375 H. & H. from where it leaned against the log rack on the low wall of the dining hut and loaded from the cartridge belt as I ran toward the lagoon. I heard Mason trip and curse behind me, then regain his feet and run, stuffing rounds into the magazine of his .404 Mauser action. My heart felt like a hot billiard ball in my throat as I bulled through the light bush along the 150 yards to the low banks of the lagoon, a reedy, dry-season lake that would join the Munyamadzi River 100 yards away at the first flooding rains. Bursting into the open, I could see a flurry of bloody foam fifty yards from shore, a slender, ebony arm flailing the surface at the end of a great, sleek form that cut the water with the ease of a cruiser. I raised the rifle. Should I shoot? What if I hit the woman? Like a mallet blow, I realized that even if I did hit her it would be a blessing, far better than being dragged inexorably, helplessly down by the huge crocodile. I lined up the sights and carefully squeezed off a 300-grain Silvertip, which threw a column of water just over the top of the croc’s head, then whined off to rattle through the trees at the far side of the lagoon. A second later Paul fired, the big .404 slug meeting empty water where the croc had been an instant before, the giant saurian submerging like a U-boat blowing positive. Slow ripples rolled across the calm surface, waving the dark, green reeds until they lapped the low banks. Once again, the lagoon was silent. We stood helplessly, shocked into muteness, thinking of the woman. We could almost feel the tent-peg teeth deep in her midriff, the rough scaliness of the croc’s horny head under her hands as she used the last of her strength to try to break loose before her lungs could stand no more and she would breathe dark death.
Death in the Long Grass Page 19
