By Terry Wieland

PACHYDERMIA

When in elephant country, carry an elephant rifle            

Never having hunted elephant myself  — at least, not intentionally — I’m hardly qualified to offer much more than some very circumspect opinions on what to do or how to do it in that regard.  I will, however, offer this piece of advice:  When hunting in elephant country, carry an elephant rifle.  It doesn’t matter if you’re on a rats-and-mice safari chasing some arcane variety of dwarf duiker, carry an elephant rifle.  Trust me.

No matter how jaded a hunter might be, your first encounter with an elephant when you are on foot and under-armed is a memorable experience.  Cape buffalo, formidable as they are, do not have the sheer majesty of an elephant, and while a big maned lion in those circumstances is certainly something to be reckoned with, if you leave him alone he will usually return the courtesy.

But an elephant?  One can just never be sure.  Their size is certainly a factor, but intellect also plays a part.  They are the largest of the Big Five — more than twice the size of the rhino, which is number two — but my dominant memory of various encounters with elephants has always been, “I wonder what he (or she) is thinking?”  I always had the impression, even when being chased by a herd of them, with the safari car slewing wildly in the sand, that all these elephants were doing this for a reason.  I didn’t know what the reason was, but I wondered about it.

There are numerous tales of people coming into conflict with elephants, and the elephant putting up with a certain amount of annoyance and provocation, until he finally decides he’s had enough and comes for you.  It happened to wildlife artist Guy Coheleach, back in the 70s, when he was filming a big bull, and throwing rocks to get him to charge.  The elephant complied, with growing truculence, until he finally snapped.  Guy was on the ground, with the elephant kneeling over him, trying to get a tusk in, when the professional hunter got a shot into a non-vital part of the skull and persuaded the elephant that enough was enough.  The bull wandered away, muttering.

In Botswana in 1996, I had a similar experience, although I was not trying to provoke the bull, just get close enough to get a decent photograph.  If ever there was a case for carrying a seriously long lens, this was it.  At any rate, I crossed the invisible line that put me on the wrong side of the bull’s territorial limit.  You could almost see him thinking, “All right, pal.  You want it?  You got it.”  My guide and I took off running, with the bull pacing behind.  When we’d covered about a hundred yards, with the bull effortlessly gaining, he slowed to a halt, tossed his trunk in the air, and turned away, happy with his day’s work of showing just who was boss in this part of the Okavango.

Had he wanted to catch us, he would have, without a doubt.  At the time I was running flat out, leaping downed branches and dodging pig holes.  I had no way of knowing he was just putting a scare into us.

No other animal I can think of indulges in false charges, either as a deliberate warning or just for the hell of it.  A Cape buffalo can’t be bothered, while a lion would probably think it was beneath his dignity.  Whatever the reason, when those two come for you, they come for keeps.

A breeding herd of elephants is a different matter from an old lone bull.  Breeding herds are led by older cows, and if bulls have a sense of humor, the cows certainly do not.  They take any perceived threat personally, and their perception of a threat can be as innocent as a cruising safari car rounding a bend and finding itself hood-to-trunk with a half-grown calf.  In the Okavango, where you can usually spot a herd when it’s still well off in the distance, we always came to a halt a few hundred yards away, and more if we could manage it.

On this one occasion, though, wending through some mopane on a narrow, sandy track, we found ourselves in the middle of a herd before we knew what was happening.  The herd, intentionally or otherwise, closed in behind, cutting off our retreat.  All we could do was gun the engine and pray that we got through before they took much notice and decided we were a threat.

One old cow raised her trunk and screamed, and the next thing we knew, we were skidding this way and that along the winding track through the mopane with the elephants in full cry.  The old cow was close behind, with her trunk stretched out over the car.  Up in the back, I was frantically trying to get my .30-06 out of its case, figuring to sell my life dearly.  There were about 50 elephants in the herd, all crashing through the mopane and screaming like Beatles’ fans.  I looked out to the side, and there was one young bull racing along.  He looked at me with a big elephant grin — yes, I swear, a grin! — as if to say “Hey, man!  Fun, huh?”  With the old cow’s trunk only a few feet from my head, screaming so loud I could smell her breath, fun would not have been my word for it.  We lived to tell the tale, but we were doubly cautious from that point on.  You only get lucky so many times in life.

***

One of Robert Ruark’s finest pieces of writing occurs in The Honey Badger, his autobiographical novel published shortly after his own death.  In it, he describes an old elephant that he found in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya when hunting with Harry Selby.  It was an ancient bull that lived near a muddy waterhole in the nowheresville town of Illaut.  He had no friends, no companions.  He was ancient, alone, and all he had were memories of a long, long life, now coming inexorably to an end.  Bored as he was, living day after pointless day under the relentless NFD sun, it probably could not have ended soon enough to suit him.  Ruark shot the bull, and when he slowly crumpled into the dust, he wrote, “Much of what I loved of old Africa died with him.”

That passage from The Honey Badger has stayed with me for more than half a century.  I thought about it quite often in 2004 when I was back in Botswana, hunting eland up in the Kwando district north of the delta.  A huge grass fire swept down from the Caprivi Strip, and we spent our days dodging the flames as it bobbed and weaved, driven this way and that by the wind.  Some days, we’d circle around and hunt in the burned-over areas, which were smoldering seas of ash.  At night, sleeping in the open, we cut a fire-break around camp.  You just never know.

At one point, we were minding our own business, standing up in the safari car, glassing the distance, when a small elephant herd came out of the bush and surrounded us.  They seemed curious as to who we were, and why we were there — just nosing about, not hostile in any way.  But an elephant herd is an elephant herd.  I eased my rifle out of its case — a .458 Lott loaded with solids.  When in elephant country…

But nothing happened.  They checked the Land Cruiser from end to end, raised their trunks and sniffed us, mumbled a little to each other, then turned and shambled off.  Slowly, we all exhaled. Chris started the engine and we eased off in the opposite direction.

Jack o’Connor, who killed many grizzly bears during his life, but was mainly a sheep hunter, wrote that, while he didn’t care if he ever killed another of the big bears, he hated the thought that someday they might be gone.

“Hunting in mountains with grizzlies is a lot more interesting than hunting in mountains without them,” he wrote.

The same is true of elephants.  Knowing they’re there, knowing one might emerge from the bush at any time, knowing that you might come round a bend and find the road blocked by a half-dozen bulls, it just makes it all that much more interesting.  And, if you have a .505 Gibbs near at hand, just in case, so much the better.

By Terry Wieland

The Travelling Library

Blood, sweat, gun oil, dust and ashes

When Theodore Roosevelt made his celebrated safari through East Africa, more than 110 years ago now, he took with him a veritable mountain of equipment.  From rifles and ammunition to his tailor-made safari outfits and jars of pickles and horseradish, everything that accompanied TR has been meticulously listed and analyzed — and, it must be said, ridiculed — but those were different times.

When one set out from home by steamship, expecting to be away a year or more, with no limit on baggage, travelling into the unknown — in Roosevelt’s case, at least — one tended to err on the side of caution and take not just one of everything, but back-ups as well.  Roosevelt was a prodigious reader, a man who studied anything and everything.  The prospect of finding himself bookless in a savage and illiterate land was horrifying, so it’s not surprising that one entire trunk was given over to what became known to history as the “Pigskin Library.”

This collection contained 59 volumes, all bound in pigskin for durability.  “They’re meant for reading,” Roosevelt growled, and read they were.  In African Game Trails, he noted that he always had a book with him, in his saddlebags or cartridge box, and would sit reading wherever he found himself with a few minutes to spare, throughout the day.

The Pigskin Library was carried in a large box of aluminum and oilskin, and it took two men and a boy to lift and carry it.  Among the titles were the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Niebelungenlied.  He had Thucydides on The Peloponnesian War, Captain Mahan on Sea Power, Carlyle on Frederick the Great, Francis Bacon’s Essays, and The Federalist.  Homer was present with the Iliad and the Odyssey.  There were three volumes of Macaulay on history, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno.  Novelists?  Twain (2), Thackeray (2), Dickens (2), and Sir Walter Scott (5).  Poets?  Longfellow, Spenser, Tennyson, Shelley, Emerson, Poe, Keats, and Browning.  After lunch in the field, in the shade of an acacia, he could delve into anything from The Song of Roland to Bret Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp.  Theodore Roosevelt was a man of varied and voracious tastes.  He led what he called “the strenuous life,” and serious reading was a major part of it.

Later, he wrote that the pigskin bindings became stained with “blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes,” but instead of becoming “loathsome” as would a conventional binding, or distintegrating altogether, they “merely grew to look as a well-used saddle looks.”  To those who love leather — and which of us doesn’t? — that says everything.

Other African travellers followed Roosevelt’s example, although they probably would have taken books with them anyway.  Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark both mentioned their reading material in their own, later books about their own, later safaris.  Hemingway’s reading was less exalted, tending to recent novels, while Ruark’s was downright plebeian:  His favorite reading material during a warm afternoon, waiting for a kudu to peek out from the bushes, was Dashiel Hammett and similar purveyors of sex, crime, and gore.

It has long been my practice, when I’m getting ready for a trip somewhere to hunt something, to get myself in the mood by reading about it ahead of time.  If I’m going to Tanzania to hunt Cape buffalo, it will be Ruark or John Taylor; if it’s bobwhite quail in Georgia, I might read Havilah Babcock, and for brown bear in Alaska, Frank Hibben’s stories about Allen Hasselborg on Admiralty Island.

When the time comes to board the plane, or point the car west, I’ll be carrying books related to where I’m going, and what I’ll be doing.  In 1988, heading for Alaska to hunt brown bear from a boat in Prince William Sound, I took an anthology of Jack London’s stories about the Klondike.  On that trip, it rained for 21 days out of 23, including 19 days straight.  I clearly remember being in the cabin of the boat, with rain pounding on the deck and bouncing off the grey surface of the sea, with a cup of steaming coffee, warm and dry and leading the life I’d always dreamt of.

Two years later, when I went back to hunt Dall sheep in the Chugach Mountains, I took Jack O’Connor’s Sheep and Sheep Hunting.  We had a base camp that consisted of a tent, two cots, a Coleman stove, and a buried cache of moose meat.  We flew in, one passenger at a time, on a Piper Cub that bounced in to land on a gravel bar, brushing the alders with its wingtips.  Weight was at a premium and we counted every ounce, but O’Connor in hardcover repaid the effort.

Roosevelt obviously read for enlightenment as much as enjoyment, while Ruark read for escapism; as for Hemingway, a day without words was simply unimaginable.  My approach is a little different.  I read ahead of time to get myself into the right frame of mind — a fever pitch of enthusiasm is the actual goal — and I read while I’m there to remind myself that I’m leading the life I always wanted and now, in some ways at least, I have.

For years, my inseparable companion on trips to Africa was the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. That’s one book I’ve read cover to cover to cover, and some favorites like The Undefeated or Snows of Kilimanjaro I’ve read fifty times or more.  Yet, those two stories particularly I can always read again and always, it seems, get something new out of them.  That, I think, is the secret of any travelling library:  It should contain books you can read and re-read, and never tire of, and always learn something.  Sometimes, what you learn is that from the vantage point of more advanced years, you now see things differently.

One of my recurring nightmares is of being marooned somewhere with no books.  In 1990, my old pal Michael McIntosh was on his way east from Missouri when he blew an engine in Terre Haute, Indiana, and found himself holed up in a motel for three days with nothing to read.  It was a “no pets” establishment, and he had his dog with him.  He was able to smuggle her into the room, but she would start to bark if he left her alone, so there he sat — for three long book-starved days.  Figuring he’d been given a foretaste of Purgatory, if not actual Hell, he thought the experience might lead him back to religion.  Instead, it led him to assemble an emergency survival kit of two bottles of Scotch and several volumes of Faulkner, and this became his constant companion on all future trips.

Regardless of how short any outing is planned to be, untoward things can occur (as witness Michael in Terre Haute).  One book I am able to reread endlessly is Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and I still have the little Bantam paperback I bought in 1966.  Not quite pigskin, but in those days they made paperbacks to last.  It literally fits into a pocket of a safari jacket, and has been places even Hemingway never thought of going.  It’s gotten me through sleepless nights in cheap motels from Sault Ste. Marie to the New Garden in Nairobi; it’s been read by candlelight in the Okavango, and on the night train to Inverness.

As I write this, I’m preparing for a quick visit to the surgeon’s knife to replace a hip that backpacked up too many mountains and ran too many marathons.  I mentioned this to a friend, and told him I was trying to decide what books to take, in case I was in there longer than expected.  “Oh, you won’t need books,” he said, “All those rooms have TV sets.”  He might as well have told me it would be equipped with a team of inquisitors and a rack.

Because of my penchant for working up enthusiasm through reading, for the last couple of years I’ve had to avoid Jack O’Connor and Robert Ruark.  I did not want to start shedding tears for being (temporarily) unable to climb mountains or chase kudu through the thornbush.  Since I am now assured that hip replacements and backpacking up mountains go together like gin, tonic, and a slice of lime, I’m thinking that Horn of the Hunter would be a good one to take, along with an O’Connor anthology.

But, I also have a couple of new ones to try:  two autobiographical anthologies by John Hewitt, my old acquaintance from my early days at Gray’s Sporting Journal, as well as Steve Bodio’s A Sportsman’s Library.  The danger with reading Hewitt is that laughing will be too painful, while Bodio will simply make me feel inadequate, as usual.  Neither is exactly Thucydides, but the great Greek contributed this gem of wisdom already:  “The strong do what they have to do; the weak accept what they have to accept.”  No wonder he was in the Pigskin Library.

By Terry Wieland

The Fiercest Heart

Stuart Cloete — soldier, novelist, elephant hunter

In 1994, when I was holed up on a remote farm in the (then) Orange Free State, learning one last time that I am not a novelist, I found myself longing for something to read other than my well-worn copy of Hemingway’s short stories and a stack of ancient Reader’s Digests left over from the previous occupant.

On a trip into Newcastle, I went into a book store, browsed the shelves, and enquired of the pony-tailed young man behind the counter if he had anything by Stuart Cloete.  He looked at me blankly.  Stuart who?  Figuring I’d mispronounced the name, I wrote it down.  He stared at it, shrugged, and said he’d never heard of him.  And that was that.

Now this was a presumably literate person of Afrikaner extraction looking at the name of a man who was South Africa’s major novelist, short-story writer, and whispered candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature into the 1960s, and who died as recently as 1976.  Yet his books were not on bookstore shelves, and his name meant nothing to a bookstore employee.

This was before the advent of the Internet and its flood of information (and, more commonly, misinformation) and today, fortunately, there is scattered material available about the life and works of Stuart Cloete — a man who deserves to be known and read by anyone interested in Africa, or African hunting.  In the 1960s, his name was uttered in the same breath as Hemingway or Robert Ruark.  In fact, I first encountered it in Ruark’s last novel, The Honey Badger (1965), where he was mentioned as one of the then-current giants of African literature.  This reference caused me to buy Cloete’s 1963 masterwork, Rags of Glory, and I’ve been searching for, and reading, Stuart Cloete ever since.

*****

Edward Fairly Stuart Graham Cloete was born in Paris in 1897.  His mother was Scottish, his father an Afrikaner, he was born in France, and educated in England:  You can’t get much more cosmopolitan than that.  Although he was barely five years old when the Second Anglo-Boer War ended, it affected his life as it did all Afrikaners of his generation.  Some became bitter anti-British nationalists; others became devoted sons of the British Empire; Cloete was one of the latter.  He was educated at Lancing College and went on to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.  He was commissioned into the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, later transferred to the Coldstream Guards, and was badly wounded in August of 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.

After the war, he turned to writing.  His grandfather, Henry Cloete, had been Special Commissioner of Natal, and Stuart drew on some of his records of the Great Trek for his first novel, Turning Wheels.  It was published in 1937, sold more than two million copies, and was banned in South Africa because it not only depicted a mixed-race relationship, it also expressed some unfashionable views of what was, by then, a revered era in Afrikaner history.

Being banned invariably increases a book’s public stature, and usually its sales as well, and from that point Cloete was a major force in South African literature.  He became what is called a “man of letters” although that term is usually reserved for writers of an academic bent with no particular specialty.  Cloete became, first and foremost, a novelist, although he was also a highly respected short-story writer, poet, and essayist.

As a novelist, his material was the rich history of South Africa.  In 1941, he published Hill of Doves (about the Battle of Majuba in 1881 that ended the First Anglo-Boer War); Rags of Glory (1963) dealt with the Second Anglo-Boer War.  Along with the Great Trek (Turning Wheels) these comprised an historical trilogy.

Altogether, Cloete wrote 14 novels, published 12 collections of short stories, and wrote eight major works of non-fiction, from the life of Paul Kruger to the origins and implications of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya.  His last books were a two-volume autobiography; the first volume, significantly, was entitled A Victorian Son, and that sums up Cloete’s life in many ways.  Like Jan Smuts, he was an Afrikaner who became an Anglophile and loyal subject of the crown, but never lost a sense of his own origins.

All of the above notwithstanding, my favorite aspect of Cloete’s writing is the hunting, the animals, and the hunters.  They play a major role in many of his books and in some of them — notably The Curve and the Tusk, Gazella, and The Fiercest Heart — elephant hunting is central to the plot.  Cloete knew whereof he wrote, for he was an elephant hunter himself.

These are not “big” novels in the block-buster sense, like James Michener’s Hawaii and epics of that ilk.  They more resemble Hemingway’s shorter, more concentrated works like The Sun Also Rises, in which a few characters are examined in depth.  There is no cast of thousands in the usual Cloete novel; more likely it will be a cast of three or four, and the subject will be what William Faulkner referred to as the “eternal truths, the truths of the heart.”

*****

In 1976, I was in South Africa as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) at the time of the Soweto Riots.  Cloete had died in Cape Town earlier that year, and amid the rising plumes of smoke as the rioting spread in all directions, clearly visible on all sides of Johannesburg from the roof-top bar at the Carlton Hotel, Cloete’s name came up among the correspondents of the world’s newspapers.  In various writings, Cloete had foreseen what we were now seeing for real.

In the hotel bookshop, I found a copy of Turning Wheels (no longer banned at that point) and read it on the plane home.  It’s the story of the Voortrekkers who strike off into the interior in 1837, battling Zulus on the one hand and their personal demons on the other.  Like the Trek itself, it is Biblical in its implications, and the villain of the piece is the Old-Testament patriarch, Hendrik van der Berg, who murders his own son in order to steal his betrothed, Sannie van Reenen.  Hardly gets much more Biblical than that.  The hero, for lack of a better word, is a hunter, Swart Piete du Plessis, and his sister, Sara, equally devoted to hunting and a life of freedom, rejecting the Boer orthodoxy that worships farming, disdains wild animals, and regards hunters as ne’er-do-wells.

One of the most memorable scenes occurs when Sara, on her own on horseback, encounters a Cape buffalo, wounds it, and is unable to escape.  The buffalo kills her horse and Sara manages to climb a small tree, but is unable to get high enough.  The buffalo licks the flesh from her lower legs down to the bone and she bleeds to death.

Fourteen years later, I found myself in the Okavango, hunting buffalo with Tony Henley, the Kenya professional hunter who fought the Mau Mau and knew Stuart Cloete personally.  I asked him about that famous vignette.  He regarded it as unlikely.

“A lion, now, a lion might do that,” he told me.  “A lion has a rough tongue, being a cat.  A Cape buffalo?  I doubt it.  But I wouldn’t put anything past them, and Cloete knew his history.  It might well have happened.”

Or, the scene might have been Hemingwayesque, wherein the author creates something more real than reality itself.  Whatever the case, the image has stuck with me and, whenever I hunt buffalo, I always note any tree big enough to get out of reach.

In many ways, Cloete was an author ahead of his time.  The mixed-race relationship in Turning Wheels is one example; he is also what could be called a “feminist” author.  His three heroines in that book are Sara, Sannie, and a wise old Afrikaner lady named Tante Anna.  Similarly, some of the most admirable characters are their black retainers.  The Fiercest Heart (1955), another novel of the Great Trek, is about a woman who would be admirable in any society, while Gazella (1958) centers on a woman who is less admirable but doubly formidable.

It’s a difficult thing for a novelist to live within a society of which he is critical, subject to such oppression as having a novel banned, or worse, yet continue to depict things as he sees them and believes to be right.

After 1948, the accession of the National Party, the imposition of apartheid, and a general increase in Afrikaner nationalism and the suppression of pro-British feeling, Stuart Cloete found himself in a situation not unlike that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the USSR in the 1960s.  The South African police were not the KGB, but they were no slouches, and they could be completely color-blind in their imposition of techniques of persuasion involving rubber hoses.

Fortunately, like Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak before him, Stuart Cloete had attained a level of international renown as a writer that rendered him, to all intents and purposes, untouchable by the regime.  Any attack on him would result in a monumental public-relations blow at a time when they were trying to smooth relations with other countries.  After his death, events moved quickly in South Africa and by 1994 it was ready to move to full majority rule.

Alas for Stuart Cloete, he fell from prominence as a writer.  He was pro-English, so did not appeal to the Afrikaner die-hards; he was white, and he was male, which rendered him unfashionable on several levels.  Today, the only real tribute to him is the annual literary prize awarded by Lancing College, his old school in England, to a student who is a promising writer.

But, as Robert Ruark once said, there are “worse monuments to a life than a book or a tusk.”  Stuart Cloete, writer and elephant hunter, would surely have appreciated that.

A Masai homestead near the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania.  The grass hut is perfect for the climate.

By Terry Wieland

Under Canvas

The fine art of teamwork

Many has been the paean to the joys of the old-time tented safari, wherein you set up camp for a few days or a week, hunted a bit, and then moved on — with a long line of porters in the early days, later with trucks or what were termed “safari cars.”  Generally, the joys stem from the nomadic life, not from the moveable canvas structures themselves.

Alas, the old-style safari is no more.  First, you need vast expanses of unfettered hunting territory, like the old concessions of colonial Tanganyika, and these no longer exist.  Second, you need a safari crew that really knows the business of setting up and tearing down a camp, packing and unpacking with military precision.  That’s no small thing.

Lest you are one of those who think “military precision” is an oxymoron, let me disabuse you.  The army does many things well, and in the immediate wake of the war in Europe (1939-45), thousands of soldiers came home with some skills that may not have been immediately apparent, and not readily appreciated, but which served them well in later years.  Among these were the ability to scavenge, a taste for rough living, and an abhorrence of Spam.

Looking back on what many would consider a misspent life — or at least, unfulfilled potential, as my mother maintained to her almost-last breath — I can divide the first few decades into distinct eras of education, none of which involved actual formal schooling.  In my early ‘teens, there was working on the farm next door, and in my later ‘teens, there was the Army.

In the summer of 1967, I was assigned to crews setting up tented camps for a couple of big military events, one of which was the annual rifle matches at the Connaught Ranges outside Ottawa.  These were self-contained cities, complete with tents, running water, latrines, and electricity.  Where yesterday there was an empty field, tomorrow there were long lines of tents set up with geometric precision.

We were a bunch of callow youths, whose uniforms were often too big because we had not yet attained even the smallest “army” size, and that summer slimmed us down further.  Every one of us came out with more muscle than we went in with, however, and often with a few skills that came in handy later.  The tents in question were the military original of the big marquees that are rented for outdoor weddings.  They were 24×36 feet (roughly 8×12 metres) and slept 12 men apiece.  The floor boards resembled modern shipping pallets, scaled up to a size where it took four of us to lift one.

First, the camp was laid out with little colored flags; next, water lines were laid with taps sticking up out of the ground every six tents or so; then we moved in, unloading and laying the floor boards.  Tent parts were dropped off atop each set of boards.  These consisted of the canvas top, side walls, two tall poles with heavy guy ropes, and a bundle of wooden tent pegs about two feet long.  As well, there were longer, heavier “corner” pegs for the main ropes that went to the tops of the poles.  These corner pegs, eight to a tent, were 30 inches long, three inches diameter, with steel tips and reinforcing steel bands.  Driving them two feet into the ground required both muscle and skill.

One might look at all this and consider it mere manual labour, but one would reckon without the skills of our supervising warrant officers, many of whom had served with the “real” army in
Europe.  If you’ve seen the movie Zulu, think of Colour-Sergeant Bourne.  Their boots were like mirrors, their shirts retained their creases even in the heat of summer, they carried drill canes, and looked at us, first with contempt, later with grudging approval, and finally with considerable pride at having turned this rabble into a bunch of working teams who could erect a tent, complete, in a matter of minutes without a single word of command being uttered.

Devotees of Cool Hand Luke will recognize what happened:  When men are divided into teams, formal or otherwise, and set to do similar tasks, competition soon emerges.  Having been taught from early life how to wield a splitting ax, I took to swinging a ten-pound maul (mallet) like I was born to it, and my specialty was driving in tent pegs.  Even here, competition emerged — trying to see how few swings it took to drive in a peg leaving the exact regulation length showing above ground.  I think the record was two swings, not counting the one-handed taps to get it started, and for the bigger, tarred and steel-banded corner pegs, it was three.

By the end, we could move down a line of waiting floor boards at near a dead run, with tents popping up behind us like mushrooms in a spring rain, and sergeant-majors (sergeants-major, for linguistic archaists) strolling along between the lines with approving nods.  We learned later that these guys, veterans of various wars from Europe in ’44 to Korea, had bets among themselves as to whose teams could do it faster, but with the requisite measured-in-inches precision.

What does all this have to do with Africa?

When I went there first in 1971, to Uganda and the Sudan as a journalist, I often ran into veterans of the King’s African Rifles, now sergeant-majors or officers in the new Ugandan Army.  This was before the complete break-down under Idi Amin, and I recognized the type.  They were impeccably dressed, impeccably behaved, and quietly proud of what they had become.  They could have sat down for a beer with the senior NCOs I’d met that long-ago summer — actually, it was only four years earlier, but it seemed a lifetime — and discussed everything from digging trenches, to shooting Commies, to setting up a tented camp, all with no explanations required.

Later, I had the privilege of seeing an old-style tented safari camp set up, and the head man of the crew was obviously an old KAR vet.  His shorts were ironed, his shirt spotless, he carried a hand-carved stick under his arm like a drill cane, and never lifted so much as a finger.  He just strolled, watched, and occasionally nodded while the camp went up around him.  From the time the first wicker hamper came off the lorry until the tents were up, the fire burning merrily, the clients comfortably ensconced with icy libations, and the tantalizing smells of roasting this and baking that coming from the cookfires, I doubt he said a single word.  Maybe a low growl now and then.

Early writers on the subject — Roosevelt, Hemingway, Ruark — all mentioned this phenomenon, and I don’t think it’s accidental that all three had a military background and recognized the hallmarks of valuable but underrated military skills.

In recent years, I’ve had varied experiences with movable tents in Africa, but in each case it was a matter of setting up a spike camp, allowing us to stay out for a night or two, definitely roughing it and not expecting the usual safari-camp luxury.  One time, I ended up in a tent high atop Mount Longido.  The expedition had been organized at the last minute, and what we lacked was a good major domo of the old school to oversee preparations.  Somehow, someone forgot blankets, which left me shivering through the night in the inevitable rain-forest shower, saved from hypothermia only by the Eddie Bauer goosedown shirt (circa 1975) that I always pack, no matter what.

Another time, we set up camp near the Rift Valley, not expecting rain, but the rainy season began that very evening.  We hastily set up tents, and I awoke the next morning to find my .500 NE double rifle lying in a puddle of water.  That’s one way to find out your tent leaks.

Both times, we were hunting Cape buffalo, and these tales of hardship add a slight glow where none is really necessary.  Mbogo doesn’t need any press-agent burnishing.

The last few years, I’ve developed a taste for sleeping under the stars rather than pitching a tent, but I still love tent life.  We found in the Army, contrary to the thinking of many, that it is vastly more comfortable to sleep in a tent than in a barracks.  I had a pal in Botswana who was setting up a guiding company, and he lived in a tent, permanently, for seven straight years.  When he finally got his house built, he confided, he missed the tent dreadfully for the first few months.  Solid walls and a roof and a stone floor just seemed, well, confining.  It was, on the other hand, vastly more reptile-resistant, which is no small consideration when your main squeeze has a small dog and a horror of snakes.

There are still tented camps to be found, from the Cape to the Red Sea, but most are permanent installations.  Even so, they are much more comfortable than any of the adobe rondavels and small buildings to be found on a lot of game ranches.

Done right, tent life is more luxurious than the Ritz.

A Masai homestead near the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania.  The grass hut is perfect for the climate.

By Terry Wieland

A Tale of Three Buffalo

The things that stick with you

In Horn of the Hunter, Robert Ruark describes two Cape buffalo he took on his first safari, in 1951, in (then) Tanganyika with Harry Selby.  The first was wounded and gave the pair a hell of a time until he finally succumbed.  The second, which had much bigger and more massive horns, was also wounded, and disappeared into a dense thicket.

Selby and Ruark looked at each other, then sat down to smoke a cigarette.  As the minutes wore on, Ruark became more and more anxious about what was to come.  Then Selby invited him to accompany him as he went after the buffalo — a serious compliment as you know if you’ve ever been in that situation.  Ruark steeled himself, checked his .470, and off they went.  The tracking took some time.  It probably seemed much longer than it was, but that’s the way these things work, as they crept along, expecting a charge at any second.

Finally, they came upon the buffalo, dead in its tracks, facing away.  He had died as he fled, and not even contemplated a classic m’bogo ambush.  Ruark noted that his horns were bigger, but “it’s the first one, the smaller one, that I have on my wall.”

Forty years later, I faced a similar situation on a two-part safari that began in Tanzania, hunting with Robin Hurt, and ended in Botwana, hunting with Tony Henley.  In the first instance, Robin and I were waist-deep in the Moyowasi swamps when we came upon a herd of buffalo.  I was carrying a .416 Weatherby, made a lucky shot, and a big bull went down and stayed down while the rest of the herd splashed off.  It’s my only one-shot kill on a buffalo.

A week later, in the sand and thornbush around the Okavango, I wounded a bull with a shaky shot – he left, we waited, then we followed.  Like Ruark, I was steeling my nerve, carrying the Weatherby like a quail gun, anticipating mayhem.  Only it didn’t turn out that way.  After half an hour, we spotted the bull’s hind end through the leaves.  He was about 50 yards away, I anchored him with a shot at the base of his tail that smashed his spine, and I then finished him off at point-blank range with several more.  He certainly didn’t die easily — adrenalized and angry Cape buffalo soak up lead like a sponge — but nor did he try to get even.  I was either vastly relieved or greatly disappointed, depending on the state of my whisky intake, but honesty compels me to conclude it was mostly relief.

But, again like Ruark, there was a feeling of having been cheated of my moment to prove something.

Three years later, I found myself back in Tanzania, hooked up with a new safari company set up by an American and staffed by a couple of professional hunters from Zimbabwe — Gordon Cormack and Duff Gifford.  Gordon is now dead, I’m told, and Duff is plying his trade somewhere in northern Australia.  This was a new kind of safari in a country newly liberated from crackpot socialism and embracing free enterprise with joyous cries.  There were safari camps that could be rented, on concessions that were eagerly snapped up by Arusha businessmen who couldn’t tell an elephant from an elevator.

Wieland with his Mount Longido Cape buffalo.  The rifle is a post- ‘64 Model 70 in .458 Winchester, loaded with 500-grain Trophy Bonded Bear Claws.

We decamped from Jerry’s ostrich-and-flower farm outside Arusha to a camp at the base of Mount Longido, put together a makeshift mountaineering expedition, and set out to climb.  Longido is a long-extinct volcano which, I am told, in its heyday dwarfed Kilimanjaro.  Now it’s worn down into a vast bowl with walls hundreds of feet high, a much higher promontory at one end covered in rain forest, with families of Masai occupying the huge crater.

Our expedition included Jerry, Duff, a game scout, the game scout’s two vassals (one to carry his rusty single-shot shotgun, the other to carry his briefcase) and several trackers and camp staff.  We had no real camping equipment, but we were only going to be up there a day or, at most, two.  I was carrying a borrowed Winchester Model 70 in .458, belonging to Jerry.  My ammunition was his hot handloads using the then-new but always excellent Trophy Bonded Bear Claw bullets.  Our other rifle was a .416 Rigby that belonged to Duff’s late father-in-law, Allan Lowe, who carryied it several years before when he was killed in Zimbabwe by an elephant.

We topped the outer wall, traversed the crater, and began a long climb up into the rain forest, where we set up camp.

The thinking was that the crater was known to hold some Cape buffalo, mainly old bulls who had left the herd, voluntarily or otherwise, and now dwelt up here in lonely splendor, contemplating past glories.  Our job was to find one, which was not easy on the steep, rocky mountainsides, cut by dongas and overhung with thick brush.

After a miserable rainy night, we emerged to find our staff huddled around a fire, trying to ward off the shakes brought on by malaria and damp chill.  Breakfast was cursory, to say the least, and since our colleagues showed no eagerness to leave the fire, Duff, Jerry and I took our rifles and binoculars and went to look for a vantage point from which to scan the mountainside.  This was made more difficult by the early morning clouds that shrouded the peak, drifting in and out like thick fog.

I was perched on a rocky outcrop.  Jerry and Duff were down the way, glassing the other direction.  The clouds opened for an instant, just long enough to spot the tail end of a buffalo disappearing into some brush.  Duff and I left Jerry on my look-out and descended into a long clearing, toward where I’d seen the bull.  It had to be a bull, since there were no other buffalo up here.  Duff was off to the right, checking some sign, when the bull appeared out of a thicket 75 yards away.  I sat down and put the crosshairs behind his shoulder.  At the shot, he made a dash and dropped from sight into a donga.  Then all was still.

Duff and I crept toward where he’d disappeared.  What we found was an odd situation.  A thick canopy of brush turned the donga into a tunnel.  A trail led down into it on the far side, where the bull had disappeared, then emerged from the brush to climb up on our side.  Through the brush, we could hear the bull’s labored breathing.  We found a place to stand with a dense thorn bush on one side and the donga’s steep side on the other — just room for both of us, but not for both to shoot, depending on where the bull appeared.  He was not ten yards away, but invisible, and his breathing became harsher.

“We’ll give him ten minutes,” Duff said.  “If he doesn’t come out, we’ll go in.”

We could hear the buffalo.  The buffalo could hear us.  At any time, he could get up and walk down his tunnel – which he surely knew intimately – completely unseen.  He stayed put.

The minutes crawled by — seven, eight, nine — and at ten minutes, almost to the second, we heard the bull heave himself to his feet and begin to move.  He burst out of the brush and up the trail.  I fired one shot into his black hide, then a second as he turned sharply, rounding on me at a distance of a few feet.  Duff was behind me, unable to shoot and no place to go.  I shoved the last round into the chamber, stuck the muzzle in the bull’s face, and pulled the trigger just as I was jumping back, trying to get out of the way so Duff could shoot.

It was not necessary.  The bull dropped, four feet away, and came to rest on the edge of the bank.

*****

African veterans reading this will, undoubtedly, have questions.  Where was the game scout and our trackers?  (Back by the fire, trying to keep warm.)  Why did Duff not shoot when the bull first appeared?  (Problems with his rifle, which I will try to explain in the ammunition column of this issue.)  Where did your first bullet hit the buffalo?  (Both lungs.  He was slowly drowning in his own blood.)

It’s difficult to sum up my feelings about that bull, because he was so admirable.  He could have escaped, yet he crouched there, facing back toward his trail, waiting for us to come in after him.  As his lungs filled up and breathing became increasingly difficult, he came out of that donga with one thought, one plan, and that was vengeance.

We pieced it together later, from the tracks and the pool of blood.  Having dashed into the donga after the first bullet, he left the trail, moved up the donga into a cul-de-sac, turned around and lay down, facing the trail — the only way we could get in.  And there he waited as his time ran out.

For those who care about such things, his worn-down horns measured 43 inches, side to side.  In his prime, they probably reached 48 inches.  But that’s inconsequential.

These events took place almost 30 years ago now.  The skull and horns disappeared in the dissolution of the safari company.  No idea what happened to the rifle.  I have a few photographs and one bullet, the Bear Claw that went between his eyes and tore up 18 inches of spine.  One of the trackers dug it out for me as another was building a fire and putting chunks of the backstrap on sticks, to roast.  It was like eating India rubber.

But that’s not what I remember most.  What I remember is that buffalo’s valor, and how I came to love him.