Safari Day 2: Buffalo Stalking, Dagga Boys, and The Elephant Man
The morning chill in Africa is hard to believe if you haven't been there. In the heat of the day each afternoon the mercury may rise well above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the dry air parches your burning throat, and the slightest breeze feels like a kiss from Heaven, and you can't imagine what it's like to be cold. Yet at 0530 on a BVC morning, you'll be damn glad to have long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a heavy fleece jacket, and a felt wool hat as you sit down to your breakfast porridge.
On SD2 we tucked into our breakfast of porridge (that's oatmeal to you heathen Yanks) and eggs and toast, and then we limbered the rifles and went out to the truck, keeping moving to ward off the chill. The trackers shambled over to meet us in their heavy insulated hooded parkas, with the standard African greeting: "Morning, morning," but always with a big smile for the Memsahib.
Then off we went to look for the mighty Cape buffalo!
Buffalo are the damnedest critters. A Cape buffalo bull is close to two tons of sinew and horn that can kill you more ways than you can think of, if he's of a mind to do so. He can see better than you, hear better than you, run faster than you, and in every way is your physical superior. But he knows that men have thundersticks, and are as deadly as lions, his ancient and deadliest enemy, so he fears you, and will run from you if he so much as gets a hint of your presence. He is at once the most dangerous of Dangerous Game, and the most shy and retiring of the plains game, the hardest to stalk close to, and the least likely to give you a clear shot on any given day. So chasing the mighty buff is three parts hoping you can get close, two parts hoping you don't get too close, and one part each of raw fear of his power and lust to hang his great meathook horns on your wall in constant competition with each other.
Once you've hunted buffalo and won, you'll never hunt anything else without comparing it to this. As our 24HCF compadre Ingwe says, "One hunts buffalo in order to have hunted buffalo."
I've described the process before, in my 2015 account. The short version is this... You drive around looking for tracks at waterholes; he trackers identify a group of bachelor bulls (dagga boys); and you follow the tracks. After 2 to 4 hours of walking in the mopane bush, eventually one of 3 things will happen: 1) you'll get a good look at the bulls, and none of them will be shooters, so you'll back off; 2) you'll get a good look at the bulls, and one of them will be a shooter, and you'll shoot him; or most likely, 3) the bulls will catch your wind and run off, or an oxpecker will scream an alarm and the bulls will run off, or a rhino will get startled and run you over in his (literally) blind panic to get away from the African Boogeyman, or any other number of bad things will happen that prevents you seeing or shooting a bull.
Number 3 is what happens most times you stalk buffalo. By this time it's usually close to noon, you're hot and thirsty and dusty, and the mopane flies (which are actually little non-stinging bees) swarm all over your face and around your head, and as you trudge back to the truck you can't help but think what a lucky damn sonofabitch you are to be doing this. There is nothing like hunting buffalo.
Sometimes you see a herd, though, which is a magnificent sight. Herds in the BVC run anywhere from 50 to 200 cows and calves, with a good sprinkling of herd bulls around them. The herd bulls are youngish fellows, sexually mature, and obsessed with the need to breed cows. They run anywhere from 3 to 6 years of age, I'm told. The cows come into season at all times of the year, so the young bulls hang around all the time to take advantage a horny cow's random randiness. Herd bulls are not usually shooters, being younger, and their horn bosses are not fully formed and hard. They are huge as a rule, however, and may have impressive spreads. In the BVC they don't encourage shooting bulls in herds, mostly because bullets may pass through the targeted bull and wound or kill a second animal. You can do it if needs must, but they'd rather you hunt the bachelor herds.
By the time the bulls hit age 5 or 6, though, they've got tired of the constant drama of hanging around with females, and wander off on in bachelor groups of three to five to half a dozen or so. Sounds familiar, doesn't it gentlemen? These bachelor buffalo are called dagga boys, and the oldest and gnarliest bulls are to be found here. This doesn't mean they don't breed a cow now and then, they just don't hang with the females on a full time basis. Herd bulls sometimes join the dagga boys (bachelor night out, sort of thing), but quickly return to the cows. Dagga boys sometimes rejoin the herds when there's a lot of hot females in season.
So, on the morning of SD2 we drove from water hole to waterhole, and while we didn't identify any good bachelor groups, we did see a couple of good herds. We stopped to glass them, just because. In both cases the herds were out in the open so the process was relatively easy; but when you're looking over a herd at close quarters in the bush, it's a whole nother deal... more on that process later!
This was Cate's first up close and personal look at buffalo, and she was impressed, to say the least. The game viewing in general was very good this morning. We saw two groups of eland cows, and one youngish eland bull, a ton of giraffe, impala, and a lot of waterbuck. This latter was encouraging to me, as waterbuck had been added to my wish list after I saw them in the BVC in 2015. We also saw a good selection of warthog, kudu cows, and some young elephant bulls.
After lunch, we had a chance encounter that justified the expense of hiring a videographer for the whole trip, as far as I am concerned. If you recall, I debated hiring a videographer in '15 but decided against it. As a result, I have no footage of the amazing close encounters with bull elephant and black rhino we had on that trip, and I really regret that to this day. But this time we had Rayno along, and he caught many of those fleeting experiences. Today's event was one of them.
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We were cruising a two-track that paralleled the Bubye River, when about 5 o'clock Lovemore spotted a mature bull elephant in the bush. John stopped the car, and we watched him, a scant 60 feet off in the bush. At first he seemed oblivious to our presence, but then he turned his head and looked right at us, flaring his ears out: talk about enormous! He lifted his trunk to get our scent, and whether it was the sweet smell of diesel exhaust or the subtle fragrance of the Memsahib, he decided we were an object that seemed close enough to Cow Elephant that he ought to make some courtship gestures.
His courtship gestures consisted of extruding his enormous schlong so that it dangled inches from the ground, then spraying urine all over the ground and his feet and legs as he walked around the bush to get a better look at us. Let me tell you, boys... if you've never seen a 5-foot length of 6" black PVC sewer pipe hanging under a 12-ton wrinkled grey body, you don't know what the definition of "sexy" is!! The old boy finally stepped out into the roadway no more than 10 yards behind the truck, waving his trunk and his dick at us simultaneously, and spraying urine all over the place, before he finally decided we would probably be a lousy lay, and shambling off into the riverine foliage.
Once we were assured we weren't going to be charged and/or raped by the bull elephant, we all broke into laughter. It was a pretty amazing sight.
Oh, and I must say it was a bit of a boost to my ego, at least at first, when my lovely wife thereafter referred to me as The Elephant Man. The other guys were similarly impressed, believing as I did that she was referring to the size of my own equipment; however, it turns out she was alluding otherwise, as she told me in private that evening in our chalet. She was referring to my apparent inability to hit the toilet bowl with any decent degree of accuracy most mornings, she informed me, crushing my fragile male ego into the dust.. I did not inform the other fellas of this distinction, preferring to maintain some shreds of my dignity for the duration of the trip...
To be continued...
