"A lot of these clients are first-class people, of course, but others are just big drinkers and big talkers, very childish men. What amazes me is how they worship their professional hunters, look at them like gods. I've seen grown men who seem to have good sense in every other way - must be good businessmen, at least, if they can afford that kind of safari - go all to pieces over one of these professionals who might just be a bloody idiot, and often is. Some of them are good men, good hunters and good conservationists, but too many are in it part-time, looking for quick money, or perhaps they're farmers who've shot a buffalo or two - short on experience and long on bullshit.
"One damned fella shot a rare cheetah down here, mistook it for a leopard - how could you mistake a cheetah for a leopard? The way they look, the way they move - why, they're not alike in any way! Another one told me he'd seen lesser kudu here, and dik-dik. Well, he hadn't.
"One hunter had trouble qualifying; there was no one who would vouch for him. He claimed to be a friend of mine, and used me as a reference when he applied for his license; probably thought they wouldn't check, since 1 was so far from Nairobi. I wrote back to say I'd never heard of him, which was the truth, but somehow he got his license anyway. And there was another one who claimed he knew me, too, one of these birds with a leopard-skin hat band and so many elephant-hair bracelets he could hardly lift his arms, you know the type. Told Billy Woodley he'd worked with me on elephant control down along the Ruvuma. Well, one day Billy and I were going through Namanga, and Billy introduced us, or rather, he said, 'I don't have to introduce you two, since you already know each other.' For some reason, the subject of our days together down on the Ruvuma never came up.
"Here in the Selous, we didn't care much how these people got their animals; if the professional did most of the killing for his client, as was sometimes the case - the client fires, and he never hears that second
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shot - it was more efficient and a lot more merciful. The point was that the Game Department needed the revenues, and every animal was paid for; a game scout went along with each safari to record any animals lost when wounded, since those counted on their limit, and to see that the limit was never exceeded. Each year we established a quota for each hunting block, according to what it could easily support, and we were very strict. I caught one German hunter who'd killed a rhino, although he had none on his quota, then tried to bribe one of my game scouts to keep him quiet; the scout came straight in and reported it, bringing the money. This German had also let an unqualified assistant take people out after buffalo, which was forbidden. I confiscated his license and told him he had forty-eight hours to get out of the Selous. The clients begged me, of course, but I just told them that they'd have to find themselves another hunter."
A cold clear morning. Well before daybreak, voices murmur and human figures move about, building up the fire to keep warm. A smell of carrion hangs heavy on the air, but the leopard, he^rd again last night, has not visited the buffalo, nor did the lions follow up our circling vultures. As for hyena, none have been heard since we left the Mbarangandu, nor are there hyena tracks in the sand river.
The sun-dried meat is packed into the loads; every man must help to carry it, since they mean to take it all. In the cold sunrise, the porters are quickly ready. As we depart, a stream of parrots in careening flight recaptures the sausage tree across the river; the fleeting human presence will lose significance with the last figure that passes out of sight in the dawn trees.
We are headed north again, into burned country, and the spurts of green grass in the black dust are sign that these fires preceded those we made on the way south; if this is the eastern edge of the large burn that we struck in the first days of our safari, then we are closer than we think to the Luwegu. In the bright grass the animals are everywhere, making outlandish sounds as we approach; the kongoni emit their nasal puffing snort, the zebra yap and whine like dogs, the impala make that peculiar sneezing bark. But the two buffalo that canter across our path are silent, the early red sun in the palm fronds glistening on their upraised nostrils, on the thick boss of the horns, the guard hairs down their spines, the flat bovine planes of their hind quarters.
At the edge of the plain, between thickets and karongas, Goa rounds a high bush and stops short; without turning around he hands the rifle back, as Brian and 1 stop short behind him.
In a growth of thin saplings, at extreme close quarters, stands a rhinoceros with a small calf at her side. The immense and ancient animal remains motionless and silent, even when the unwarned porters, coming
PETER MATTHIESSEN
up behind, gasp audibly and scatter backward to the nearest trees. Goa, Brian and I are also in retreat, backing off carefully and quietly, without quick motion: I am dead certain that the rhino is going to charge, it is only a matter of reaction time and selection of one dimly seen shadow, for we are much too deep into her space, too close to the small calf, to get away with it. But almost immediately a feeling comes, a knowing, rather, that the moment of danger, if it ever existed, is already past, and I stop where I am, in pure breathless awe of this protean life form, six hundred thousand centuries on earth.
In the morning sun, reflecting the soft light of shining leaves, this huge gray creature carved of stone is a thing magnificent, the ugliest and most beautiful life imaginable, and her sheep-sized calf, which stands backed up into her flank, staring with fierce intensity in the wrong direction, is of a truly marvelous young foolishness. Brian's voice comes softly, "Better back up, before she makes up her mind to rush at us," but I sense that he, too, knows that the danger has evaporated, and I linger a little longer where I am. There is no sound. Though her ears are high, the rhinoceros makes no move at all, there is no twitch of her loose hide, no swell or raising of the ribs, which are outlined in darker gray on the barrel flanks, as if holding her breath might render her invisible. The tiny eyes are hidden in the bags of skin, and though her head is high, extended toward us, the great hump of the shoulders rises higher still, higher even than the tips of those coarse dusty horns that are worth more than their weight in gold in the Levant. Just once, the big ears give a twitch; otherwise she remains motionless, as the two oxpeckers attending her squall uneasily, and a zebra yaps nervously back in the trees.
Then heavy blows of canvas wings dissolve the spell: an unseen griffon in the palm above flees the clacking fronds and, flying straight into the sun, goes up in fire. I rejoin the others. As we watch, the serene great beast settles backward inelegantly on her hind quarters, then lies down in the filtered shade to resume her rest, her young beside her.
We walk along a little way before I find my voice. "That was worth the whole safari," I say at last.
Brian nods. "Had to shoot one once that tossed a porter into a thorn bush and wouldn't give up, kept trying to get at him. But by and large, the rhino down in this part of the country have never given me much trouble." He turns his head and looks back at me over his shoulder. "Still, that's a lot closer than you want to get, especially with a gang of porters. If this was Tsavo —!" He rolls his eyes toward heaven. In an easing of the nerves, we burst out laughing, and the Africans, awe-struck until this moment, laugh as well: kali ("hot-tempered", dangerous) or not, a rhinoceros with new calf ten yards away was serious business!
Yet seeing the innocent beast lie down again, it was clear how simple it would be to shoot this near-blind creature that keeps so close to its home thickets, that has no enemies except this upright, evil-smelling
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shadow, so recent in its ancient world, against which it has evolved no defense. Its rough prong of compacted hair would be hacked off with a panga and shoved into a gunny sack as the triumphant voice of man moved onward, leaving behind in the African silence the dead weight of the carcass, the end-product of millions of browsing, sun-filled mornings, as the dependent calf emerges from the thicket, and stands by dumbly to await the lion.
We head northeast into dry grassy hills. Big pink-lavender grasshoppers rise and sail away on the hot wind, the burring of their flight as dry and scratchy as the long grass and the baked black rock, the hard red lateritic earth, the crust of Africa. To the west rise rough black escarpments, and beyond the escarpments an emptiness in the air, arising from the depression of the Luwegu's valley. Tov/ard the southwest border of the Reserve shrouds of dull smoke ascend to the full fire clouds, all across the Mbarika Mountains.
The path descends into inland valleys of dry thorn scrub and long clinging strands of shrub combretum, then small sand rivers of sweet musky smells and cat-mint stink where crested guinea fowl, a shy forest species, run away cackling under the thickets. But there is no water, and because of their extra loads of meat and the strain caused by the encounter with the rhino, the porters are already tired before noon. To Brian's annoyance, they keep falling far behind. "It's very easy to get lost in bush like this," he mutters. "They must stay together."
Beneath borassus palms a small trickle of good water runs along the bed of a karonga, but under the red banks a juvenile elephant is swatting its legs with a fan of fresh-broken branches, and across the ditch at the wood's edge a cow moves back and forth in agitation; then a second cow with a smaller calf moves into view and disappears again. It is hard to tell how many elephants are here, or where they are, but the nearest among them are a lot too close. Uneasily, the porters set their loads down, all but the small wide-eyed Shamu, who stares astonished at the elephants like a little boy. Goa says sharply, "Tua!" (literally, "to land") - "Put your load down!" And Shamu does so as the second cow emerges part-way from the nearest thicket, ears flared out, and drives us back with a loud blare of warning. The confused calf in the karonga tries clumsily to climb the bank, and a third elephant, until now unseen - doubtless the mother of a calf we have not seen either - comes for us across the karonga. "Kimbiya!" Goa tells the porters. "Run!" The Ngindo scatter off into the bush, and the rest of us back up rapidly for the second time today. But the cow has stopped behind that wall of vines; we wait and listen while a boubou, startled out of its bush by the elephant, flies across the karonga and resumes its duet without a care.
The calf in the karonga is safely away, and the other calves are, too; we do not see the elephants again. Those in the bush right in front of us have simply vanished, so silently and so magically that even Brian can't
(Precedingpage) Water-buck on the Mbarangandu delta.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
quite believe it, and goes poking about in the bush in a gingerly way, just to make sure. Meanwhile, the porters have traveled so fast and so far that we have trouble reassembling them. "We lost track of ourselves," Mata admits, in the wonderful translation of Kazungu. We cross the karonga, drink warm water, and rest in the cool green shadow of an afzelia. Brian is pensive. "Have to be very careful with these animals, more careful than usual. I don't want to provoke a charge if 1 can help it. We're a long way from help, you know, if somebody gets hurt, and there's no track for bringing in a Land Rover. These emergencies can happen very fast, even when you see the animals and take pains with them, as we did here." He shakes his head. "What you don't want is to have one elephant cut off from the others. You try to make certain that they're all gone past before you push ahead, but sometimes in dense thicket like this, there's one that's slow or old that you don't see, and then there's trouble."
I am content that the Warden is being careful, and after all these encounters 1 have complete confidence in his nerve and expertise.
"One time, up on the Ruaha River - and by the way, we have more of the Ruaha right here in the Selous, about seventy miles of it, than they have in the Ruaha National Park -1 had an elephant get in among my porters after I'd gone past. Chased one poor devil way off into the bundu, hot after him, you know, squealing like hell. Usually an elephant is quiet when it comes for you, at least until it's right on top of you; that's when it starts to yell. But this old cow yelled all the way, so we knew just where to follow. Kept coming on scraps of the porter's clothes - the turban he wrapped up on his head to cushion his load, then his shirt, his shuka - everything! He was running naked! But there was no sign of the body, so we kept on calling. After half an hour we reckoned that the poor chap must be a goner. We kept on calling, Hoo! - and suddenly, from a great distance, we heard, Hoo! The chap returned on his own two feet, all scratched and scared, but he was in one piece. Those clothes had saved him. Hadn't thought to shed them, they were just ripped off by the thorns, because with that elephant behind him he wasn't fussy about his route, he just went moja kwa moja, straight on through. But the clothes distracted that old cow just enough to slow her down. He never knew whether he'd outrun her or eluded her; he'd just kept running flat out, he said, until he realized that there was no more noise behind him."
We have hardly started out, toward three, when we run into more trouble. From a deep thicket comes a profound ominous mutter. Exasperated by the failure of the porters to keep up despite their hard experience this morning, the Warden begins a low muttering of his own. "What are these old cows so cross about?" he frets, cautioning the oncoming porters to be quiet. At that moment, the hidden elephant gives a loud and scary blare of warning close at hand - too close for the shot nerves of the Ngindo, who drop their loads and flee without further ado.
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As Goa and Brian exchange guns, and Brian jams cartridges into the chamber, a Sykes monkey gives its loud yowp of alarm, and there comes a single sharp loud crack of breaking wood, then a dead silence. After a few minutes, when nothing happens, the porters are whistled for, and come in very quietly, one by one, grab up their loads, and flee again, loads to their chest. Not one was smiling. The porters are choka sana, very tired, from carrying the extra loads of meat and from the strain of all these encounters with big animals, and for the first time on the safari feel free to say so. "These elephants really made a pest of themselves today," Abdallah sighs as we pause to sip water from a ditch.
Our recent adventures with animals have broken down some of the formality between blacks and whites, the separation between their safari and ours. Kazungu tells me that he has never been on a foot safari before, nor have any of the young porters except Mata. Through the big voice of Kazungu I try to explain to the young Ngindo how precious this wild country is, where the water is clean and the game plentiful and even the dread rhinoceros is so peaceful. All the young porters nod fervently, saying "Ndio, ndio, ndio," and Abdallah^ays, "It is good to see our country, and where the animals are staying," at which they all murmur "Ndio!" once again. It turns out that Abdallah is not an Ngindo but a Makonde, the coastal tribe now famous for wood sculpture. Although he seems no older than the rest, Abdallah is married and has one child, and Kazungu says that he himself has plans to marry, possibly next year. Kazungu has kept up his journal:
About 9 a.m. we suddenly met a rhino. ... To avoid being attacked by this rhino, we had to go slowly backward. 1 was very frightened. For a few minutes, nobody knew which way to go . . . This was the first time I saw a rhino face-to-face.
After leaving the rhino we went right down to the river to make the porridge, then resumed our safari. The people were behaving very well, there was no trouble, they were more attentive now to what they were told, they were polite. . . . The safari was hard for people carrying loads on their heads and shoulders, but through good cooperation in a tough position, everybody was happy. They were tired, but still they were enjoying themselves. The only trouble they had was getti
ng adjusted to hunger before the morning meal.
As we were proceeding with our safari, we met some elephants resting. When they realized we were around they started screaming, and we were shocked, and ran away and climbed on the trees, leaving our belongings behind. I knew I would be all right because I stayed close to the person carrying the gun. Everybody ran away except Goa, Bwana Niki, Bwana Peter, and me.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
Of the afternoon's encounter, Kazungu wrote:
We could not see this elephant, could not see or hear anything with our ears and everyone was trembling. The elephant started screaming very highly, and this time the belongings were scattered around, and even I dropped my luggage and ran away. Later we started callmg to see if we could find each other.
After all this, we went down to the Mbarangandu.