By Terry Wieland

M’BOGO MAN

It’s very difficult to write anything new about the Cape buffalo.  It seems that everything that can be said, has been said, and more than once.  From Robert Ruark (Horn of the Hunter) to South African novelist Stuart Cloete (Turning Wheels) to John Taylor (Big Game and Big Game Rifles), the character, personality, and even the personal hygiene of the Cape buffalo have been analyzed, dissected, admired, and written about in vivid and eloquent terms that are impossible to compete with.

Many hunters have much more experience with Cape buffalo than I do.  On the other hand, a vastly larger percentage of hunters have considerably less.  Over a 16-year period, I killed seven Cape buffalo — six in Tanzania, and one in Botswana.  Of the seven, only one (1) was a one-shot kill.  In case you’re wondering, of the seven, only one was poorly hit with the first shot.  I’ve been present at the deaths of four or five others, acting as back-up gun.

I mention all this by way of presenting my credentials, such as they are, for offering a few opinions on the animals known as M’bogo.  They are my own most-admired big-game animal, which doesn’t mean I like them personally.  I feel about them much the way they seem to feel about me, as well as every other person they run across.  Ruark said a big Cape buffalo looks at you “like you owe him money.”  No one ever put it better.

Many years ago, I read an entry in a wildlife encyclopedia that described them as “peaceful grazers,” and all the old stories of their ferocity dismissed contemptuously as “hunters’ tales.”  Having grown up reading Ruark, Taylor, et al, I was infuriated by this, but later found that to an extent it is true.  The Cape buffalo is Jekyll and Hyde:  Peaceful enough (usually) until you annoy him.

In 2004, two men were killed by Cape buffalo in separate incidents, one in Kenya and the other in Tanzania.  In the first incident, Simon Combes, a wildlife painter I knew quite well, got out of his car to look at the view of the Rift Valley and was flattened by a buffalo apparently enraged at being disturbed.  Something similar happened to a Canadian hunter who was casing a waterhole.  Neither animal was ever found, so we don’t know if they were carrying a poacher’s bullet or a snare on their leg or were just cantankerous.  Among the Masai living along the Rift Valley, incidents of buffalo taking out their ill feelings on women collecting firewood are quite common, but these are not reported in the pages of hunting magazines.

That same year, I was hunting buffalo along the Rift and a herd was grazing its way across a mountain meadow to where it fell away in a steep slope covered with tall grass.  We crept along the edge and crawled up through the grass to the lip of the slope as the herd moved toward us.  Lying there, not daring to move, wondering what they would do when they got wind of us, as they surely would, is one of my most vivid memories of buffalo.  They were so close we could smell them, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Lekina’s handsome Masai face grinning at me wickedly.

In such a situation, the danger is that they get in among you and, when they realize you’re there, you’re close enough to pose an immediate threat that needs to be dealt with, not fled from.  That’s how people get stomped, tossed, and flattened.  It’s a memory I treasure, albeit from a safe distance.

The moment when Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde usually occurs when a bull is struck by a bullet, not killed immediately, catches his breath, and sizes up the situation.  Then you’re in trouble.

It used to be said of young professional hunters in East Africa that it was good to have a close call with a buffalo early in their careers.  Otherwise, they might kill 500 buffalo without incident, become complacent, and it was the 501st that took them out.

In his Mr. Hyde phase, a Cape buffalo becomes relentless, cunning, and unbelievably durable.  The word vindictive is often used, but that seems unfair given the fact that you are the one who opened hostilities.  It is not so much vindictiveness as a desire to settle the score, and that seems fair to me.  Also, a mere gesture, such as tossing the offender, does not suffice:  They feel a need to stomp you into marmalade.

John Taylor wrote about a buffalo that was wounded, treed the hunter, and then stayed at the base of the tree, slowly dying but refusing to leave.  He was dreadfully thirsty, and could have drunk at a waterhole a few yards away, but 

revenge was more important.  In the morning, when the hunter cautiously climbed down, he found the bull with his head down, as if sleeping — stone dead, but still at his post.

In Turning Wheels, Cloete tells of a very accomplished woman hunter, similarly treed, but unable to pull her feet up out of reach.  The wounded bull began licking, eventually removing boots and flesh.  He died right there, but she bled to death, and was later found by her brother.  Her feet were mere skeletons.  Tony Henley, the Kenya professional who finished his career in Botswana, discounted that story because a  buffalo’s tongue is not all that rough.  He had no quarrel with the sentiment, though.

My own personal experience with buffalo tenacity occurred in 1993, high up in the crater of Mount Longido, a vast extinct volcano near the Rift.  At 75 yards, I put a bullet into his lungs, he disappeared into a thickly wooded ravine, then lay down to watch his back trail.  Duff Gifford, my PH, and I stood on the lip of the ravine.  We could hear him breathing.  He could hear us talking.  We decided to give him ten minutes, then go in after him.  At ten minutes, almost on the dot, the bull came for us instead.  A flurry of shooting ended with my final bullet in his forehead, shot from the hip, and he died four feet off the muzzle of my rifle.  That was unquestionably the best shot of my life.

In recent years, an American professional hunter who operates in Tanzania has made it fashionable for clients to face a contrived buffalo charge.  This is accomplished by deliberately wounding a bull, then choreographing it and using camera angles in such a way that the bull looks bigger than he is, and closer than he is, and the shooter more heroic than he is, all captured on videotape for the folks at home.  One guy of my acquaintance hunted with this individual, and supposedly shot five Cape buffalo this way.  It took considerable effort, since many higher-ups in Safari Club had hunted with the PH in the past, but he and his obscene videos were finally barred from the SCI convention.

At one convention, I was signing copies of my book on dangerous-game rifles when one of these clients came up to me and started gushing about how he had learned to do the wounding and the provoking himself, and how “it adds so much to the safari.”  He was actually proud of this, and presumably expected me to congratulate him.

The whole idea violates so many principles of ethical hunting that it’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll just leave it at that.  Sad to say, stories are starting to filter back of other professional hunters, working with game-ranch buffalo, doing the same thing.  Where there’s money to be made and egos to be fed, it’s hard to stop.

Thinking back to the bull up on Mount Longido, I find myself admiring him to the point of love.  How can you not admire an animal of such tenacity?  He could have slipped away down the ravine at any time, we would not have seen him through the canopy of brush.  Instead, lying in wait, he must have realized he was dying.  All that was left was vengeance.  When we did not come in after him, he came out after us.  He did not go quietly.  They seldom do.