Augusts in Africa Read online

  O’Cadla turned and walked back to the diminishing camp, his self-image and worldview changing in ways unknown to him. The vultures returned warily to lavish their attentions once again upon the lion.

  They drove north that day through the dodgy splendor of Nairobi and spent the night at Lake Naivasha. The next day they crossed the Rift Valley. The road took them through the Mara Game Reserve, the plains peppered with wildebeest. A cloudburst hit as they climbed the Soit Olol Escarpment into Block 60. On top the brush was thick, and Fisher said it would be right good and sporty for buffalo. They rounded a bend and had the bonus of finding a lone elephant bull lumbering monumentally across the road. The fissured soles of his feet turned back as he lifted them, his tusks thick and curved inward at the tips, his hide oily black from the rain. He took no notice of them whatsoever.

  “Pity, that,” Fisher said. “I had hoped the season would be reopened by your arrival.

  “There is nothing really quite like walking up to one of those old brutes with malice aforethought,” he continued, coming down himself with an attack of excitement. “As you get closer, he gets bigger and your gun gets smaller. Finally, you are absolutely certain that you are facing a 40-foot, ironclad monster with only a 22 short in your hands. It is one sensation the theater does not offer. And I should imagine that it is a sensation which has changed only slightly from when the first bloody hunter went up against his first bloody mammoth. Once you’ve done it, nothing is quite the same again either—except doing it again. Odd thing, that.

  “Christ! but I sometimes do think you are the finest creatures on the planet,” he shouted out the window, snapping off the wheezing windshield wipers for punctuation, the rain having ceased.

  During all of this, O’Cadla unaccountably experienced a tingling in the back of his neck that was something very new to him. He would have been at a loss to explain.

  The sunlight was falling between the clouds as they pulled up in front of the whitewashed game department office. The young scout who handled the registration book was enthusiastically official. He, personally, had seen a 50-inch buffalo just yesterday and would be most happy to take them directly to it. Fisher thanked him and promised without fail to look him up at the very first opportunity.

  As they stepped out onto the covered porch, an old man stood there. His white hair and beard and black skin gave him the disembodied appearance of a photographic negative. He wore an army sweater and tattered shorts and kept his feet in tire-tread sandals. He was leaning motionlessly against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching the rainwater as it steamed off the grass. Fisher halted and with genuine feeling greeted him as “Mzee.” The old man turned his head slowly and shook the white’s hand politely; but it was obviously a thing of no importance to him, as they had been of no importance to the elephant. Fisher spoke to him and the old man nodded vaguely, wanting to get back to his watching. As they left, O’Cadla shook his hand also (trying to affect the old man’s nonchalance) and was shocked by the weight of the serenity he felt. Its atomic number would have been something in excess of gold’s.

  “That chap,” said Fisher as they got back into the car, “was one of the first game scouts out here. When they found he could shoot and knew a bit about elephant, they put him on control work. For 40 years he lived with the tembos, slept with them, moved when they moved, knew them by name. And when they would wander into some poor bugger’s shamba and raise a ruckus, or some old boy would get stroppy and start chasing people about the bush, he would kill them. He has killed more elephant than any man living. He loved them and he killed them well. Paradoxical, that. But, to be able to kill them as they deserve, you must love them. He hasn’t held a gun for 10 years. He’s become very much like an old bull himself, standing there in the shade all day, staring off at something none of us can see.”

  O’Cadla, whose eyes had not left the old African who saw only sunlight and wet grass and no necessity of a smile, knew then that he was undone. He would be doomed to come again to this place that offered such a peace at a cost so far beyond the present means of his heart. He would have to make himself worthy. The land, that he had had every confidence of escaping from uncharmed, had charmed him—in a way that was by no means benign. There remained only one last question.

  “But he must do something else?”

  “I doubt,” Fisher said, clashing the gears, “that there is anything else nearly so pressing.”

  Running Scared

  The 1970s …

  I WAS AFRAID it would be gone if I waited. I was certain that if I did not go at once, it would in some not-so-very-mysterious fashion disappear, or be confiscated. Obsessed, I have never been so absolutely certain of anything else.

  So at 22, with no evident prospects and against the better judgment of just about everyone, I invested a minor inheritance in a post office box I had located in a Nairobi phone book and asked to be shown the sights.

  The reply arrived in an envelope with lions on it. They would be looking forward to seeing me.

  For the next year I trained. I went into the desert and shot jackrabbits, rolling tires, and rocks. I ran and sweated and did not consume alcoholic beverages (no small feat for a twentysomething). Damn, but I was proud of myself. And while I plotted, they closed, then opened, then closed elephant hunting on me. But I decided not to be dissuaded by even that and pressed on. Finally, one morning I stepped off a plane under an overcast, high-altitude equatorial sky and knew I was a long way from home.

  The airport worker on the tarmac who held the stairs wore a black turtleneck fisherman’s sweater and had a face carved from ebony wood—so startling, and yes, exotic, were his features—and the uniformed customs agent had tribal scars and stretched earlobes. There was talk of leopards killing family pets in the suburbs. And what I was experiencing was not the allure of far-away places with strange-sounding names. It was dread.

  Later that day I sat in the lounge of the New Stanley Hotel with John and his friend Liam while they toasted a fellow professional. Who had recently been eaten by a lion (they said). In his camp bed while he slept (they also said). And though he had been a fine hunter, it was a most comical way to go, didn’t I agree? It was a prank at the expense of a greenhorn—me—but I agreed.

  The first dawn there was the trumpeting of elephant as they tore down trees to feed. It chilled me—knowing there was something even bigger out there when we were already tracking lion or buffalo. And God, how it terrified me to hunt buffalo.

  We followed them into brush so thick that the longest shot possible would be at 20 feet. And it could not be a miss. Jumping a large breeding herd sent them off at a tear, trampling every obstacle ahead of them with a sound described in the words of a Yoruba hunter poem as thunder without rain. Other times, we could sense in the silence a small herd of bulls creeping away on the tips of their hooves, looking back for any sign of us—hoping, perhaps, to come up behind and have a spot of fun. And if buffalo weren’t dread enough in those dark thickets, then it was the bushbuck barking suddenly and invisibly beside me, or the ominous thumping and John saying to be careful, bit of a rhino just over there—somewhere—or forest hogs big as heifers or the platter-sized hoofprints of secret elephant, swelling with water.

  I could not help but be impressed, and at last I understood from what shadows might have arisen a harrowing mythology of dragons and demons and beasts of all manner of crimson-stained tooth and claw. But what really scared the bejesus out of me was that after two weeks of crawling on my hands and knees through that kind of stuff, I was acquiring a taste for it. Was this, then, why I had come so far and spent so much money, to end up viewing life—my life—as decidedly cheap? I had no easy answer.

  In camp at night was a hot shower and a clean change of clothes. Then we could fix a drink and sit down with the plate of “toasties” and talk, though never, it seems, of what happened that day if it had gotten notably horripilant. And there was the fire. I don’t think I was ever so infatuated wi
th fires before. One night, after a week of hunting buffalo without firing a shot, I was wearing my woven-paper Hong Kong 98¢ beach sandals to which John had taken an immediate and obviously unwarranted dislike—a prejudiced offense to his aesthetics he never bothered concealing from me. Then, somehow, one of them was missing. It took me a moment to locate it.

  “John,” I inquired politely, “correct me if I am mistaken, but by any chance is that my flip-flop roasting on an open fire?”

  John admitted with an enchanting smile that it did, indeed, seem to be.

  “And did you cast it there?”

  That would be a fair estimate, he reckoned. Leaving me with no alternative, of course, but to feed in the other one. Rising with what dignity I could muster, I proceeded to walk unshod to my tent, without wondering too much where cobras went at night.

  Since I couldn’t hunt elephant, I settled for the photographing of a herd of cows and calves at an exceedingly close range. Now an elephant cow with a calf is probably the most intractable animal on earth, and I bore this in mind as we stalked to within a few yards of them, a tricky wind coming at us for the moment. John presented a brief tutorial on where to shoot to kill an elephant, and after I exposed several frames we backed out furtively.

  When I was a score of yards from the herd I stood and began to walk upright to the car. Then John said five of the most riveting words I believe I’ve ever heard.

  “Oh oh,” he said. “You should run.”

  No need to ask why. I ran. But as I did, I looked back.

  She was a large cow; and as she loomed above John, he took his William G. Evans 500 Nitro Express and two 578-grain solids from his gunbearer. She was coming on implacably, slate against the sun, her ears back and her head down. And John stood there, steadfast, fully prepared to kill her if she crossed a deadline he visualized ahead of him. And she as prepared to kill him if she made it across that line. Ah, but he looked brave. And she magnificent.

  And as I ran, looking back, I wanted to yell at her to stop, lose our scent, change her mind. I wanted to yell, “Go back! Don’t die! Because when I finish this run, I am going to run back here. And I want to find you.”

  And that is Africa: Just when I thought I was out …

  Buff!

  The 1970s …

  They saw the buffalo after killing the elephant. The PH switched off the engine and eased out of the battered olive Land Rover, carrying his binocular. His hunter slipped out on the other side, and one of the trackers in the back, without needing to be told, handed his 300 down to him. The hunter pushed the 220-grain solids into the magazine and fed the 200-grain Nosler into the chamber, locking the bolt and setting the safety as the PH glassed the buff.

  It was nearly sunset; and already in the back of the Land Rover lay heavy curves of ivory, darkened and checked by decades of life, the roots bloodied. They had found the old bull elephant under a bright acacia late in the afternoon, having tracked him all day on foot. He was being guarded by two younger bulls, his askaris; and when the hunter made the brainshot, red dust puffing off the side of the elephant’s head, and the old bull dropped, the young ones got between and tried to push him back onto his feet, blocking the insurance rounds. The bullet had just missed the bull’s brain, lodging in the honeycomb of bone in the top of his skull, and he came to and regained his feet, and they had to chase him almost a mile, firing on the run, until he went down for good. By then it was too late to butcher out the dark red flesh; they left that task until the morning when they would return with a band of local villagers and carry out everything edible, down to the marrow in the giant bones. They took only the tusks that afternoon; yet when they finally reached the Land Rover again they were very tired, pleased with themselves, and ready only for a long drink back in camp.

  So when on the way to that drink the PH spotted a bachelor herd of Cape buffalo (with two exceptionally fine bulls in it), it was all a bit much, actually. He motioned his hunter to come around behind the Land Rover to his side, and crouching they worked behind some low cover toward the bulls, the mbogos.

  The first rule they give you about dangerous game is to get as close as you possibly can—then get 100 yards closer. When the PH felt they had complied with this stricture, to the extent that they could clearly see yellow-billed oxpeckers hanging beneath the bulls’ flicking ears, feeding on ticks, he got his hunter into a kneeling position and told him to take that one bull turned sideways to them: Put the Nosler behind the shoulder, then pour on the solids. It was then that the hunter noticed that the PH was backing him up on this bull buffalo with an 8X German binocular instead of his customary 470 Nitro Express double rifle. The PH just shrugged and said, “You should be able to handle this all right by yourself.”

  Taking a breath, the hunter hit the buffalo in the shoulder with the Nosler and staggered him. The bull turned to face them and the client put two deep-penetrating solids into the heaving chest, aiming right below the chin, and the buffalo collapsed. As the hunter pushed more cartridges down into the magazine, the second fine bull remained where he was, confused and belligerent, and the PH urged the hunter to take him, too: “Oh my yes, him, too.”

  This bull turned also after the first Nosler slammed into his shoulder, and lifted his head toward them, his scenting nose held high. Looking into a wounded Cape buffalo’s discomfortingly intelligent eyes takes you to depths few other animals seem to possess, depths made more profound by the knowledge that this animal is one very much capable of ending your life. That is a time when you have to be particularly mindful of what you are doing out there in Africa and make your shots count—especially when your PH, already suspect because of the way he talks English and the fact he wears short pants, who is backing you up now on dangerous game with an 8X German binocular, especially when he leans over and whispers, “Look: He’s going to come for us.”

  Another careful breath and the hunter placed two more bullets into the bull’s chest beneath his raised chin, just the way he had on the first one, except this bull did not go down. That left the hunter with one round in his rifle, and as he was about to squeeze it off he mused about whether there would be any time left afterward for him either to reload or make a run for it. Now, though, there was this enraged buffalo who had to be gotten onto the ground somehow, and all the hunter could be concerned about was holding his rifle steady until the sear broke and the cartridge fired and the bullet sped toward the bull—but just before the rifle fired its last round the buffalo lurched forward and fell with a bellow, stretching his black muzzle out in the dirt. Then he went silent.

  Standing slowly, the hunter and the PH moved toward the two downed buffalo (the rest of the small herd now galloping off), to find them both dead. Only then in the dwindling light did they see that one of the first bull’s horns, the horn that had been turned away from them when the client first shot, had been broken off in recent combat and a splintered stump was all that remained. He had been a majestic bull at one time, but at least the second bull’s horns were perfect, matched sweeps of polished black horn, almost 50 inches across the spread. And there, both men stooping to squint at it, glittered a burnished half-inch steel ball bearing buried in the horn boss covering the bull’s head like a conquistador’s casco.

  The ball bearing had served as a musketball fired from an ancient muzzleloader. Whoever the native hunter was who fired it, he must have had an overpowering lust for buffalo meat, and for buffalo hunting. What became of him after he shot and failed to kill with his quixotic weapon at much-too-close range was probably best not speculated upon.

  WHEN I FIRST heard that story I was a boy of 10. It was told by a gentleman of my acquaintance (a man who taught me how to hunt then, and with whom I hunted until he grew too old), who had experienced it on a safari to then-still-Tanganyika half a century ago. Like the best hunting tales, it was twice told after that. Unlike other tales, though, it never grew tedious in the tellings, at least for me, only aging gracefully. Every time I heard the gentleman’s
excitement in telling it, as if it were the first time and he had been transported back to those Tanganyikan plains, and saw the massive head on the wall with the steel ball shining in the horn, it explained something to me of why a person could get daffy about hunting Cape buffalo. Its power as a legend was such that it sent me off to East Africa to hunt buffalo myself when I was of an age to.

  Black, sparsely haired, 1,500, perhaps 1,800 pounds in weight, some five foot at the shoulder, smart and mean as the lash, and with a set of immense but elegant ebony horns that sweep down, then up and a little back, like something drawn in three-dimensions with a French curve, to points sharp enough to kill a black-maned lion with one hooked blow—horns known to span 60 inches across the outside spread—the African Cape buffalo is, along with the Indian gaur and the wild Asian water buffalo, one of the three great wild cattle of the world. Of these, the water buffalo has largely disappeared into domestication—with a few animals transplanted to Australia and South America having gone feral—and the gaur is confined to a significant extent to subcontinental national parks and preserves. The Cape buffalo alone among these has little or no truck with men, other than of the most existential kind. Making it the last native wild cattle that can truly be hunted.