The Whiskey African Safari

"After they’ve been hit once they take a hell of a lot of killing…"
— PH Wilson, on cape buffalo, in Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

The morning was cool, gray. As wintry as it gets in southern Zimbabwe.

The two previous days had brought a rare misting of drizzle in the middle of the dry season, dampening the bush-veldt, giving a much-needed drink to the parched, dry grass-lands. At 10:30 AM, it was barely 50 degrees, and in no hurry to warm up, either. If I closed my eyes, the air felt and smelled very much like a November morning in Maryland or Delaware…

Only one thing was missing: Wind. On a cape buffalo hunt, wind is life and death. A steady wind gives the hunter an advantage and a game-plan. Wind influences the way a herd moves, and dictates the direction of a stalk. Its swaying of the branches and fluttering of the leaves conceals a hunter’s movements. Its rhythms whisper and swirl in a buffalo’s ear, masking the crunch of footsteps on twigs and the staccato scrape of acacia thorns on heavy canvas jackets. Wind neutralizes inyahti’s advantages — superior hearing and smell — while leaving intact those of the hunter: Strategic thinking and superior sight.

Today, there was no wind, no "moyo" at all, and consequently, no advantage for us.

Professional Hunter Bud Rummel, Freedom, Power and I were stalking cautiously on the trail of a decent-sized herd of buff. The winter leaves, brought down in a fresh blanket by the previous days’ wind and rains, had dried sufficiently over the course of the night and morning to be crisply noisy underfoot. Every step I took in the windless silence seemed to crash through the stillness like I was walking on potato chips. But I dared not avert my eyes from the bush ahead to optimize the placement of my steps — I was scanning every stump, every clump of brush, and every deadfall for a flick of tail or curve of horn. Our only chance lay in spotting inyahti before they saw us…

We’d cut fresh spoor from the road a half-mile back, and were following it slowly, at about a quarter of the pace of previous days’ stalks. Freedom and Power were listening for the grunts of cows and bulls and the mews of the calves. I was bringing up the rear, scanning ahead, but also monitoring the backtrack and left flank. Bud was in the lead, scoping the front and guarding the right side. The trackers were in the middle, ears-up and eyes-down, following the spoor.

But unlike most stalks, where a steady breeze would’ve kept the herd on a relatively predictable track, today, with no moyo to direct them and no heat to force them toward water, they were meandering, grazing, milling around. The track we’d followed so far was aimless and leisurely. The herd could have made a U-turn and gotten behind us, for all we could tell…

Power and Freedom stopped and stooped down abruptly. Being in front, Bud didn’t see them and I hiiiisssssed to stop him. We both squatted and froze, not knowing whether the trackers were taking a closer look at some spoor — or suddenly making themselves small to avoid detection from something nasty neither of us had seen. After a second, they waved us over. They were crouched over a pile of dropping, fresh, very fresh, green and moist. Bud reached down and touched the pile. "Still warm," he whispered. "In air this cool, that means we’re almost on top of them. Be ready."

The bush was dense — I could see maybe 30 yards, and only in spots. We were all on high alert, hunched over and creeping. One misstep, one stumble, one cough, one cracked twig at the wrong moment and the whole world could’ve exploded in pounding hoof-thunder, malevolent obsidian eyes, and dozens of pairs of hooked, gnarled horns the size of ox-yokes…

I readied the rifle without taking my eyes off the acacia and mopane brush ahead. I slowly slid my trigger-hand up off the stock to verify that my scope was set to the lowest possible magnification — what scope? My hand landed on air, and I remembered I’d removed the Kahles 3-9X the previous day. I was hunting the classic way, open-sights. Finding the grip again, my right thumb clicked the .375 Ruger’s safety to the middle, outward-most position. A quick flick forward and the gun would be hot…

It was game-time again. And all I could think was: Nine shots. Nine damn shots.

Morning breaks wintry over the bush-veldt.

When a cape buffalo hunt goes without a hitch — like the one for my bull had — it’s easy to be lulled into a false notion of how safe you are in the bush with a rifle in your hands. We’d stalked a herd, found a fine 36-inch madota in the clear, approached to close range, and I’d put him down in 30 seconds with 3 fast shots right in the breadbasket…

That was four days ago. Now it was day nine of a 10-day hunt, and I was all of a sudden back in the bush after another buff, but with a sobering new frame of reference. Other PHs and clients had arrived in camp in the interim, and I’d had a chance to hear a few first-hand stories about what adrenaline-fueled inyahti can do to hunters and guides — even after absorbing round after high-caliber round with little more effect than bee strings.

I had also gotten a bit farther into the books I’d brought along on African hunting. I’d read about enraged cape buffalo tap-dancing on hunters’ skulls and spines, tossing them up into trees like rag dolls, and ripping them open in ways only a samurai would fully appreciate. But this stuff really wasn’t what got to me. No, what got me thinking out there in the bush was what actually happened to another client in camp on a buffalo hunt the evening after I’d killed my bull…

He was a French client, part of a contingent of five hunters from that country that had arrived in camp on the fourth day of my stay. This particular client had booked a buffalo hunt, and was being guided by a fully licensed indigenous PH with much experience on dangerous game’s deadliest duo — buffalo and elephant. The client’s rifle, though many times more expensive than mine, fired bullets of the same exact caliber: .375.

Here’s why this was on my mind: It had taken nine shots to put that bull down for good — which included several from the PH’s fearsome .458 Lott. And according to that guide, none of those shots were poor hits. They all pretty much landed on target, burying into what, on paper at least, should have been vital organs. Yet it still took half an hour or more of pursuit and three separate fusillades over many acres to finish him…

At the time this had happened, it had been easy to brush this off and not think about it, since as far as I knew, my next nose-to-nose encounter with inyahti would be many moons in the future — years, most likely. But all that changed when Bud pulled me aside after lunch on Day 7 of my hunt and said, "So, you want to take another buffalo?"

According to Bud, the buff population on one of the concessions we’d hunted was a bit out of balance — there were a number of aged, barren cows that needed culling. And because I’d kept a cool head and shot so well on my bull, the game managers had given my PH permission to offer me a second buffalo. It’s not something that’s extended to everyone.

You see, cull hunts are a somewhat delicate matter. The downside is that they can still be every bit as dangerous as trophy hunts, but for far less in terms of fees. The upshot is that it gives the safari outfit a chance to improve their herd dynamics, while still recouping something on an animal that would soon end up as vulture-feed anyway. The rub is that a hunter on the cull has to be able to do several things right, or else the hunt will do more harm to the herd than good…

Of course, he (or she) has to be able to shoot straight. Not everyone can do this under pressure, as any PH will tell you. But more importantly than this, he has to be able to distinguish an old cow, a true madella, from one that’s still a viable breeder. If he can’t do this quickly, and among multiple animals, there’s a good chance he could pull the trigger on the wrong cow when he raises the gun. That would be bad. He also has to be cool-headed enough to shoot at the right moment. Inyahti cows, while still huge and massively horned, are about 30% smaller than the bulls. Bullets that would not pass all the way through a mature bull might whistle right through a cow — and into another buffalo behind.

That’s bad in two ways: First, and obviously, because it needlessly injures or kills a possible trophy or prime breeding animal. Second (and far worse), because it leaves a wounded, surly beast with a reputation for turning people inside out roaming around in the bush or hunkered down in a thicket waiting for a chance at a little payback. That’s what wounded animals do: They charge and attack when approached. And they don’t reserve their vengeance only for the guilty parties.

Bottom line: To be given the opportunity to take part in a cull hunt is sort of an honor, and a serious responsibility. It’s not offered to just anyone. And even after gaining a new perspective on exactly how tough and dangerous inyahti can be, I didn’t want to decline. In fact, I wanted to make it even more of a challenge…

KAWONG! The .375 Ruger barked and bucked, and the target, an empty anti-freeze jug 50 yards away, skipped and spun at the bullet’s impact.

Bud and I strolled out to it. "Touch low, but adequate," said Bud, picking up the jug and examining the bullet’s clean, 3/8-inch hole half a foot below the 2-inch black spot we’d drawn on it with a ball-point pen. The sights on the now scope-less rifle were simple, a rear "V" notch with a white painted vertical stripe dead center, and a blade front sight with a white dot on top. For that last shot, I’d blended the stripe and the dot into one solid line, like an "I", and hovered the jug’s black spot over top of it.

The sights were close enough, but I wanted it dead-on.

The challenge of open-sights shooting is in trying to focus the eye on three things at once: Back sight, front sight, and target. This is physically impossible, which forces a hunter to pick one of the three to focus on at the instant of the shot. Most pick the target, letting the sights blur under it. But a good shot focuses on the front sight — and lets the target blur. This is hard to do on live game, especially when it’s the kind that can kill you. Everything in the mind tells the eyes to stay focused on the danger…

Now I steadied the gun on the makeshift bench-rest, actually the top of a thick fence-post with Bud’s canvas jacket draped over it. I added just a hair of elevation. When the sight picture formed an "i" under the distant spot, I touched off the shot. "Nice!" said Bud when we reached the jug, which had started to deform like a pumpkin on the porch three weeks after Halloween. The bullet had pierced the black spot on its right-hand edge.

I shot several more to cement the sight picture in my head, then practiced a few off-hand, mounting the gun from a low carry, aiming and firing all in one fluid motion. The rifle balanced wonderfully without the bulk of the scope and mounts. All the shots had hit somewhere on the 8" x 12" jug. Bud declared me ready…

Whether I was ready or not, I’d be back in the bush after inyahti the next morning.

A tight herd makes for tough shooting in the bush.

In Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber , the Professional Hunter character, Wilson, waits until Macomber (the hunter) is actually faced with having to pursue a wounded buffalo into heavy brush to tell him what terror he can expect in the event of a charge, and what his options are. He does this so as not to worry the soon-to-be-dead Macomber…

This is exactly what was going through my head when Bud and I were in the truck, driving the dirt roads looking for spoor. That’s because as we jounced and burbled and clanked along in the diesel Land Cruiser, Bud was filling me in on a few details that had somehow not been mentioned in the eight days prior to him asking me if I wanted to try for a cow buff.

"Everyone thinks it’s the bulls that are the troublesome ones," he said, with his trademark semi-drawl, "but it’s the cows that are most apt to get cheeky with you." I smiled at the irony of this comment, remembering the Hemingway correlation. "The only time I had to stop a charge, it was a cow — and she wasn’t even wounded," he elaborated from under the brim of his Stetson. "She circled us and was coming full-on from behind. Had time for one shot, and got her right in the brain."

Great. And all this time, I’d been worried about those big, cuddly bulls. "One more thing, too," he began (here it comes, I thought), "When you kill an old matriarchal cow — a real madella mafazi — the herd doesn’t like to leave her behind, even if you drop her stone dead. Sometimes they can be a bit stubborn to move off her. So be on your toes after you put her down. If we even find a shooter, that is. There are probably only about 10 or 20 suitable candidates for culling out of 400-odd buff on this property…"

I mulled this over. Some of the other PHs had said similar things about how inyahti herds act toward an injured member, especially a dominant bull or cow. They tend to surround them, prop them up, and nudge them on. If I was going to succeed in taking a herd’s golden matriarch away from them, I had to put her down fast and decisively, while she was in the open. Otherwise, they’d bunch up around her and I might never get another clear shot — which could turn this into a long and very dangerous day.

And all of it playing out close-up, at open-sights range…

Reflexively, I felt for the leather shell carrier on my belt. It held six round-nose solids. I had four in the gun. I hoped it would be enough. In light of what that French client and his guide went through three days earlier, I wasn’t so sure. Turning over everything in my mind that I’d heard in camp, read in my books, and been told by my PH just minutes ago, I was re-evaluating the wisdom of my decision to come to Africa armed with the smallest legal caliber for Cape Buffalo…

But I couldn’t afford to think about that now. It was game time.

We stalked along slowly in the cool, death-still air, the fresh track easy to follow. All eyes were up and scanning, all ears tuned for the telltale grroooiiink of mature inyahti. Over the last hundred yards, the bush had begun to open up just a little. I didn’t know whether this was a good thing or not, strategically. But it couldn’t be helped.

I was periodically squatting to see through the brush at its thinnest — where the bushes were single trunks beneath their thorny bulk. I’d scan the close brush first in a sweeping arc from left to right. Then the next layer of bushes at medium distance, back from right to left. One more sweep at the farthest range, left to right again — wow, there’s a thick bunch of saplings out there at around 80 yards…

And one of them IS MOVING.

"Sssss!" I hissed. Everyone froze. I’d lagged a few yards behind in my squat-and-scan routine, so I threw up the hand: Don’t move. I watched for a minute, seeing first one, then a second, then five, six or more buffalo body-parts filing slowly through the brush. They were moving roughly parallel to us, and in no hurry…

I looked at Bud and the trackers, and then waved them over. We congregated behind a bank of acacia bushes. "About 80 yards, I saw six or seven of them," I whispered to Bud. "Couldn’t tell sex or anything – didn’t see any of their heads." We all got down low and watched as bits and pieces of more buff sauntered through. It was a decent-sized herd.

"Let’s keep going like we were and try to get out in front of them," Bud said softly, gesturing so that Freedom and Power would understand. "Then we’ll turn and cut them off, and see if there’s a madella mafazi in there." A good plan. We moved off through the bush at a slightly quicker clip, weaving our way through the prickly acacia and mopane. About 50 yards later, we rounded an especially dense thicket…

And ran smack into a dozen inyahti!

The meandering herd had become more like a snaking column, and we’d been nailed, utterly, by what looked to be the very front of that column. It was a stare-down. Other buff materialized behind them, then noticed us and stopped, all their eyes on the four of us. But all our eyes were on the closest buff, a monstrous bull, fully 42 inches, the Mister T of the entire concession, glaring at us from first-base distance. All of a sudden the hole in the end of my barrel seemed pathetically small…

Then, something happened in that Mexican-standoff moment. A lone, lighter-colored buff moved in slowly from 40 yards behind the big bull. It noticed the intruders, and began to walk straight toward us. My view was obscured by the anchor-sized curl of Mister T’s left-side horn, so I slowly squatted, bringing my binoculars to bear on the more distant buff. Mister T shifted his head incrementally to follow my movement. I’d moved. I was now his focus.

But I couldn’t worry about him now. Something about that other buff demanded my attention. I got the lenses steady below the bull’s blurry hook and saw what I’d noticed somewhere deep in my subconscious — the wide, shallow, worn and battered horns of a mature cow. "Mafazi!" I whispered. "Madella mafazi!" An "old lady."

"That’s another bull — those bosses are hard." Bud said as he raised his own 8-power Zeiss binocs for a better look. Freedom and Power kept their eyes on Mister T, whose eyes were now on Bud…

"No, you’re right!" said Bud quietly. "God, she’s ancient. Look at those worn tips. That’s our girl, Jimbo – take her!"

Freedom eased in front of me to erect the shooting sticks, but I waved him off. I shifted from a squat to a one-kneed kneel, a classic, steady shooting position. I raised the rifle. The old cow came closer still. Closer. Closer. Mister T’s horn framed the top of my sight picture. If she didn’t angle away a bit, I’d be shaving his chin-whiskers with the bullet. She didn’t.

At 40 yards, I couldn’t take it any longer. The shot was tight, but it was clear, and I knew I could make it. I leveled the sights, found the "I", and hovered the dot on her heart. Front sight, front sight, front sight. The world blurred except for that crystalline white dot as I squeezed…

KAWONG! The gun bucked and I jacked another round in, clak-chak! Mister T whirled like a dervish. The madella did, too. Buffalo were exploding everywhere out of the brush, pounding the veldt in stampeding chaos. I was standing now, in the zone, tracking the cow through the brush as she galloped away at a quartering angle to the left. Tracking, tracking…

KAWONG! My second shot struck a thin mopane tree dead center, blasting it to bits and nearly felling it. Hell, I couldn’t have hit that tree if I were aiming for it. "Miss! Take her again, Jim!" screamed Bud as I jacked another round in and brought the sights to bear on her once again. But I had no shot — the brush was too thick. I saw the form of the cow, still motoring hard at 55 yards and getting away fast. I had to put at least one more slug into her or this was going to get ugly. There was an opening in the brush 20 yards in front of her. I sprinted a few fast steps to my left to open the angle up a bit, then put on the brakes and mounted the gun as her head popped into view…

And then, luck smiled on me. Instead of angling harder and farther left, forcing me to hit her amidships, the madella turned and ran directly away. I threw the front sight right at the base of her tail, right where the spine is, and squeezed…

I didn’t hear the gun go off.

But I did see the big cow slam to the ground. Without thinking, I rammed the last round in the gun into the chamber and took off toward the cow at a sprint. I wasn’t taking any chances with her getting up and gaining the protection of the herd. I could hear someone following close behind…

At 20 yards, I slowed down. She wasn’t getting up. The shot had been true. We’d later find the bullet lodged far up her body in the spine. Her head was still up, though, and she’d begun her forlorn death bellow. As Bud and the others caught up, I dispatched her with a final bullet to the neck.

That’s when I realized two things: One, the rest of the herd was coming back for the madella at a trot. And two, the fact that I had an EMPTY GUN!

I racked the bolt open and fumbled for the shell carrier, jamming rounds down into the magazine, dropping them on the ground. Bud was there, ready with his .470…

But Freedom and Power were charging the herd! They were whooping, waving, jumping, stomping, and slashing with sticks as they approached the determined buffalo — even Mister T! By now, I was back in business, the bolt of my .375 Ruger falling shut on a fresh round, with three more in the magazine…

We didn’t need to back them up, though. This time on the veldt, the inyahti exercised the better part of valor. They milled, they grunted, they stomped. But in the end, they retreated.

An ancient inyahti cow with ragged, worn horns.

Some may be thinking that what I did — kill an old female animal — was cruel or unnecessary. But I was glad to do it.

The teeth on that cow were so worn; she’d not likely have made it through another season. That’s how a lot of old cervids die, you know. Because their teeth are gone, they slowly weaken because they can’t properly chew and pre-digest their food. Eventually, they starve — or lions eat them because they’re weak and easy to bring down.

So what I did was a perfectly natural thing. I became the predator that took the weak, old, easiest-to-kill member of the herd, a magnificent beast whose time had come.

And instead of the meat rotting on the veldt to nourish the vultures, it became food for an entire village of people. I can never feel anything but good about that.

Well, folks, that’s all. Thanks for stalking along with me on the greatest adventure of my life thus far — and thanks for all your feedback, good or bad. Keep it coming…

Playing my part in the play of life,

Jim Amrhein
Freedoms Editor,
Whiskey & Gunpowder

Sunset and moon rise over the bush-veldt

October 22, 2007