By Christian Schauf
Facilitating drug deals in Tanzania wasn’t how I’d planned the month of June to kick off. With a day to kill before heading off to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, I wasn’t about to just lay in my mosquito net-covered bed, “resting my legs” as our guides suggested. I wanted an adventure.
After a couple hours of snooping around and asking the shadiest hotel workers for suggestions, I was connected with a local fixer. A bit too friendly, with chrome-painted plastic hubcaps and FUBU jeans, he agreed to line me up for a quick bow hunt with the local Hadza, one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa.
I slipped him a $100 bill, double-checked that my folding knife was still in my pants pocket, hopped into his dusty Toyota RAV4, and headed out of the gates of my safe, Western-style resort. A few miles down the road, we pulled up to a mud hut where my $100 bill traded hands again, this time in exchange for 5 joints. My driver lit one, and put the RAV4 back in drive.
Addressing my puzzled look he said: “I pay the chief in weed to take you.”
We turned off the road and headed into the bush. My guide scanned left-to-right as we slowly navigated the rocky terrain.
“So where are they?” I asked
“Maybe here.”
It turns out the Hadza are nomadic, and finding them always started with a last known point of contact.
A few moments later, movement outside caught my eye and I turned to see a few kids running alongside the SUV.
“Ah. Here.” My guide said, quickly pulling over. He smiled and approached a very short, but confident looking tribesman. He handed him the remaining 4 recently acquired joints and pointed in my direction.
“This is the chief. He says it’s ok. I come too. We leave now. They find a baboon.”
I looked around at 50-60 people, all staring back at me. Mothers nursing and youngsters chasing each other. Four or five young adults surrounding a fire in a circle under a rock ledge. A group of hunters and roughly a dozen dogs, looking mission-ready. They checked the tips of their arrows and pulled at the strings on their homemade bows as one dog, missing a footlong swath of hide, anxiously licked his wound. The chief lit one of the joints, took a long pull, and then shared it amongst the hunters.
“This will give energy for the hunt,” my guide proclaimed to me, sounding like a bad narration from a late night Nat Geo special.
The chief excitedly spoke to the troops in a series of whoops, clicks and grunts, pumped his bow in the air, and we were off. I held my camera tightly in my left hand and kept pace with the hunting party through drainages, rock fields, and into the woods.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for my guide who quickly fell behind and out of sight, and with him, my only form of communication with these hunters. It was now just me, a pack of dogs, and a bunch of hungry looking nomadic hunters outfitted with poison arrows, running through the Tanzanian forests. For a minute I considered playing it safe and returning to my guide, but that’s a shitty way to have an adventure.
My long-sleeved t-shirt and khaki pants contrasted against their fur loincloths and beaded headbands, and I probably outweighed the biggest tribesman 2-to-1. But as we quietly followed the baboon’s tracks through the sandy dried river bottom, it started to feel, in a lot of ways, like every other hunt I’d ever been on. Even the dogs looked at each other, and to their human counterparts communicating and checking in.
As if in response to a silent whistle, the dogs raced into a thick section of forest, and the hunters yipped in excitement. Like a lion hunt in Utah, the dogs had tree’d our quarry. The hunters caught up, and circled the base of the tree, where a large male baboon rapidly scanned our gathering herd, the reality of his fate sinking in. He hissed. They began shooting.
The first arrow impacted, and the baboon let out scream so human-like, it made me flinch. But it only served to stoke the hunters’ excitement. More barking. More battle cries. And more arrows flying all over the place. I ducked and prayed amongst the chaos that a stray arrow wouldn’t find its way into my thigh. As additional arrows hit their mark, the poison took effect and the limp body of the baboon fell to the ground.
The chief hurried up to the baboon and grabbed it by the head to examine its teeth. I’m not sure how you’d score a baboon, but it sure felt like he was counting points. He smiled with pride and re-enacted the stalk and kill through charades and sound effects. The other hunters smiled widely and vocalized encouragement.
I took it all in, realizing at once both the uniqueness of this present moment as well as the universality of the hunting experience across time and culture.
The hunting party made quick work of the baboon, cutting main sections to be carried back, but also carefully cutting hair into donut shaped crowns to wear back to the village. The chief laid out across a sandy section of ground, and lit another joint, hair crown riding high.
We returned to our point of origin, where I was relieved to find my fixer, sitting on a rock, still waiting for me. I said my goodbyes as the tribe began cooking pieces of baboon over an open fire, satisfied with a good day.
I returned to my resort, switched into a pair of shorts, and headed down to the pool to join the rest of my climbing party.
“He’s alive! Were you sleeping in?” my friend Paul asked, taking a drink from a bottled water and repositioning himself on the lounge chair.
Replaying my as-of-yet-undisclosed morning adventure I replied: “Paul, you ever eat baboon?”
