Safari So Good

When it Comes to Hunting, we usually prefer to do ours under antlered heads on the walls of a quiet bar in Greenwich Village. We'll listen to the other guy's hunting yarns (if they're brief and he'll keep our glass filled) — even the gibberish about .416 Magnums ("For champagne?" we asked), and the time the wounded buffalo holed up in a thicket of wait-a-bit thorn. But when it comes to sitting out a damp, dismal dawn in a duck blind or crawling around an African anthill on knees and elbows — uh-uh. You don't catch us trying any such foolishness, not with so many pleasanter ways at hand to prove one's virility.

So when three friends suggested we join their African hunt last winter, we were understandably emphatic: the answer was no, not even on a bet. That was that. Several months later we found ourselves in Nairobi getting outfitted in khaki drill at Rowland Ward's (no relation to Montgomery) and thoroughly committed to dodging rhino around clumps of acacia, kicking snakes out of the portable bath tub and listening to hyenas jeer at us through the night.

Nairobi itself, we discovered, looks like any small midwestern city, give or take a few pith helmets and palm trees, but it was at Ward's that we first met the Africa of throbbing jungle and baking plain — at the souvenir counter. There, we spotted such "bush country" items as wine coolers and umbrella stands hollowed from the legs and feet of rhino, engagement books bound in lion skin and rings woven from the tail hair of elephant. Ward's even stocks amateur-type big game movies that could quite easily pass as our own back home. Here indeed, we decided, was a delightfully civilized short cut to the whole problem of safari in Africa. We purchased a wide selection of gee-gaws and headed straight for the airport with the satisfied feeling of men who have completed a good hunt. No luck. Our gun-toting friends cut us off and dragged us back to Nairobi, then calmed us down somewhat in the quietly British bar at Torr's and the noisier saloon of the New Stanley Hotel.

Later that evening at Chez Dave's, a night club, we met our professional hunter. He was an extraordinary fellow, unmarried, as most of them are, and willing to trade his jungle know-how for less money than the average postal clerk draws back home. It's not surprising that there are fewer than 50 good pro hunters in all Africa and that the really top ones (like Harry Selby and Don Ker and Philip Percival before he retired) are booked up as far as six years in advance. It's not simply a matter of being able to repair the Land Rover when it breaks down 800 miles from the nearest garage or of getting you back to camp after a day of blasting at beasts over featureless plain. Mostly, these fellows provide — at considerable risk to themselves — a comforting answer to the question "What if I miss?" as three tons of rhino charge down on you at 30 m.p.h. or a squealing, wounded cheetah hits 70 coming your way.

We were talking about the coming junket over a double brandy and we discovered that the word "safari" comes from Swahili and means simply "a trip." But the safaris of today are a far cry from the hikes Stanley and Livingstone took in this part of the world not too long ago. Then, 40 porters were needed to lug the gear of one white man, and it wasn't uncommon for the entire party to number over 600. Today, with everything from refrigerators to hot baths available in portable packages, you can do it easily with a tiny fraction of that number, and turn it into a damned comfortable trip at that. Gone are the old days of crawling into bed to find a venomous mamba coiled between the sheets. That's no longer likely because your personal boy turns the bed down for you each evening. For four white men on our safari, we took about 14 bearers, skinners, trackers, valets, cooks and what-have-you.

If trophies are all you care about, you can bag plenty on a 15-day safari. Three guys with two professional hunters we know knocked over three elephants, three rhino, five buffalo, two lions and a whole boodle of zebras, wart hogs, ostriches, impala, wildebeest, hartebeest, water bucks, dik-diks and elands during that time. But you'd be better off to allow at least three weeks to a month if you possibly can.

And there's certainly no reason to kiss civilization farewell, as we soon found out after leaving Nairobi. The first evening we were sitting on camp chairs by a great baobab tree, sipping a gin-and-bitters and munching fried termites, which, like salted peanuts, are difficult to resist. They taste like Fritos. The tinkle of wine bottles in their coolers, the rich aroma of dinner drifting across the dry grass, the fresh feeling from our shower and the thought of crisp beds in each tent, sheets carefully turned down, pajamas laid out — all this managed to induce a fine, close feeling of comfort and good living.

The first day's trek out of Nairobi runs through a game preserve: the Serengeti Plain. This is just as well, since it looks exactly like the movies and reassures the cash customers that they are indeed in certified 24-karat Africa. It's open country, dotted with clumps of thorn and euphorbia trees, swarming with zebras by the hundreds, wildebeest by the thousands.

The Serengeti is also the place where people first meet lions. You can't shoot them here (the lions, that is, except maybe to get your arm out of their jaws) and they won't attack a car — or so it's said. Still, lions look awfully damned menacing without a batch of bars in front of them.

Beyond the Serengeti, we were grinding away with our camera when we spotted our first rhino. The lone bull with a good sized horn was 300 yards off and grazing — rather like a gray rock against the yellowish grass — when we dropped from the hunting car and the boy drove off. (We learned regretfully that it's not sporting to shoot from cars; and, more to the point, it's illegal. Still, we can't help feeling remarkably small when we're left on foot in the same square mile of territory with the game.)

One of the members of our party moved ahead watching the rhino's tick birds. Rhinos are testily near-sighted in an elderly, human way. Not so the tick birds that live on their backs and off their bugs. And when the tick birds are alarmed, so's the rhino. That day, the birds started worrying when we were about 50 yards off — a bit far for the best results against the rhino's armored hide. Nevertheless, our guy sat down in the grass for a steady shot and the rhino lifted his head, ears up, tail high.

The beast snorted and came toward us at an inquisitive trot, turning his head to get his horn out of his line of sight. Our guy waited — then squeezed off a shot. The rhino snorted and broke into a gallop. (The ground does literally shake.) He shot again, but the brute kept right on coming. We'd been told that with head lowered at the end of a charge a rhino is virtually blind, that we could step a foot or two out of the line of his charge and be perfectly safe, that he'd just go barrelling on. Small consolation.

Then our professional hunter's gun cracked; the rhino swerved and went crashing into a tangle of dwarf thorn.

"He's OK," said our hunter (meaning dead). The first shot had gone through his cheek, the second had seared his side. The hunter's bullet had mashed bone and nerves at the shoulder, shocking the beast to death.

We learned two things from that encounter: that we'd better practice up on our shooting and how delicious is the taste of rhino ham.

Our own shooting began with a gaffe that will probably get chuckles at the Explorers' Club. We'd gone along on the hunt primarily for photographs, but in Nairobi our hunter had persuaded us to take out a shooting permit and had spent a good part of the trip since then urging us to use it. Well, we drew first lion, and we found ourselves crawling clumsily toward one thick-maned old fellow who was having himself a feast on a zebra we'd dropped earlier as bait.

We stopped about 30 yards away and sighted carefully. The hunter was a little back of us and to one side. Then, to our shock, we found the lion had moved closer. We saw his head poking up out of the short grass only 30 feet away. We aimed fast and squeezed the trigger, heard the bullet thunk home.

"Hole in one," we thought, rather pleased with ourselves, and a bit irked at the pro hunter's silence as we walked forward together. As a novice, we thought we rather deserved congratulations. Silently we approached the kill, gun ready just in case. Then we saw it. We'd shot a fine big hyena! The lion had slunk off.

The roughest part of safari life (for us) is the early start on hunting days. It's still dark and cold when the boy brings in the tea and begins to fold down the mosquito netting. But it's worth hurrying some to get outside for the dawn, which comes quickly in Africa. One moment, the sky is blue-black, the stars glittering in thick brilliance. The next, the stars are dim against a spreading strip of pink. Then, in moments, the color glows into a vivid red, laced by the black tracery of thorn trees, then pales and grows white as light floods the land.

African evenings are lavish too. The talk is quiet around camp, broken by silence to watch the distant mountain hazing from purple to black. After dinner, with the fire banking down into glowing ash, we would spot the glint of hyena eyes 20 yards off in the dark and hear the night sounds of Africa: the cough of a hunting leopard, the momentary muttering of baboons disturbed in their sleep and the yip of a small animal as it becomes a meal. Occasionally, we'd wake during the night — perhaps to the snuffling of scavenger (concluded on page 58)Safari so Good(continued from page 54) hyenas in the camp or to the strangely quiet padding of elephants moving nearby.

We went after our first elephant in the Ituri Forest after crossing into the Belgian Congo. The vegetation is so thick there it's usually impossible to see much more than 20 yards ahead. The humidity is oppressive, the jungle floor sodden.

Fortunately, the trail we were following warmed up fast. Before long, we came upon broken branches on which the sap was still wet, then to droppings that were still warm.

Now, several of our men were moving ahead with the tracker. Soon we heard the belly rumble of the grazing bulls — an extraordinary sound like distant thunder — and the crashing of small trees and branches, broken as the animals moved. We followed quietly. Then the elephants stopped and we saw them in a small clearing speckled with shafts of light.

The scene was the epitome of all African romance. In the half light of the matted jungle, the animals towered over us like houses. The larger bull, tusks glimmering, was facing our way, huge ears flapping gently back and forth. A smaller animal was in front of him, turned sideways to us, quietly darting his trunk up and around. The jungle was quiet, but not hushed. There was a constant level of small, busy noises.

We waited for the big fellow to turn. No one tries to shoot an elephant head on; it can be done, but the 30 inches of hide and bone he presents is enough to deflect even a 520-grain bullet packing muzzle punch of over two tons. We waited 15 minutes without moving, until the larger bull turned just enough. Two guns crashed almost together and, incredibly, both elephants toppled.

An extraordinary sight followed: natives poured out of the jungle. Pygmies had been watching the hunt, watching us so silently that we never suspected there were any other humans within miles.

They were hoping to cadge some free meat but there's another reason for sudden appearances of friendly natives. Whenever anybody shoots a fairly respectable game animal, the camp boys and hangers-on from nearby villages go into a special fuss, prancing around and shoulder-lifting the successful hunter, mumbling chants made up on the spot, usually to the effect that the bwana is a mighty hunter, feared by the animals and admired by the local populace and that a silver shilling or so would make that admiration boundless. Of course, if the mighty hunters are American the chanting locals are more likely to set two or three shillings as the price of Full Admiration.

Leopards, we found, are very unpleasant beasts. Since they like their meat prime, we hung a small deer in a tree one day as bait, then came back a day or two later and settled in a blind of bushes. Then we waited.

In time, the signal came: utter silence. It was as if a cloud of cotton had dropped over everything. Even the ants stopped moving. Before we knew it, we had a gun in our hand. Our bearer knew what was up. He was counting on bwana to clobber the cat.

We'd been watching the carcass on the branch. We blinked once, looked back up to the branch and saw a carcass and a leopard. He stood intensely immobile; then slowly, that magnificent stretch of gold and black muscle looked around.

We brought our gun ever so gently upward, sighting just forward of the shoulder. Then we squeezed the trigger. All hell broke loose. Screaming, the cat leaped toward us and the hunter's gun crashed close by. The leopard was stretched on the ground. The hunter's safeguarding shot hadn't been necessary; ours broke the cat's neck. His leap had been convulsive.

If you think that hunting of that sort holds any excitement — you're right.

• • •

Figure on $1,400 each for three hunters and $800 for one non-hunting companion for a three-week safari in most of Africa. (Cut that tab in half for hunting in French Gabon.) Price includes everything up to wine for dinner but not whiskey, guns, ammunition, licenses ($150 or so for a general license, plus up to $200 for special permits for protected game such as elephants) and mounting trophies. Good safari organizations in the U.S. are Fugazy Travel Bureau, 351 Avenue of the Americas, New York 14; Continental-American Travel, 465 Park Avenue, New York 22; and Continental Arms Corp., 697 Fifth Avenue, New York 22.

Getting to Africa will run you anything from $600 for the round trip by sea (Farrell Lines, 26 Beaver Street, New York 4) to $1,600 for the first-class round trip by air to Nairobi (Trans World Airlines, 380 Madison Avenue, or British Overseas Airways Corporation, 342 Madison Avenue, both in New York). For more details, check with your travel agent or with East Africa Tourist Travel Assn., 295 Madison Avenue, Belgian Official Tourist Bureau, 589 Fifth Avenue, French Government Tourist Office, 610 Fifth Avenue, and Casa de Portugal, 447 Madison Ave., all in New York.