By Scott Longman as recounted by Michael J. Miller
Northwest Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) 1977, on a cape buffalo hunt
I didn’t realize it as this particular adventure unfolded, but really, it all came back to Tanya.
What she said was: “Do you have to?”
It was about 4:00 p.m., and that hour had significant teeth, because the head professional hunter, Lew Games wanted everyone back inside the compound by 6:00. The penalty for violating curfew was the all too real potential of getting ambushed by a communist guerilla outfit called ZANLA.
Despite that, Rory had pointed out to the peninsula. It jutted into the Zambezi River. And it had a trio of magnificent Cape buffalo bulls.
I kissed her. “All I want to do is shoot just one buffalo.” She nodded and Rory and I were off, moving downhill. Rory didn’t take us to the base of the peninsula. He took us to the water.
He explained: “We simply haven’t the time. Straight across and they’ll be in our laps.” He lifted his rifle high in one hand, eased into the water and began to swim. I scrambled after him, hyperaware that the river served as a hunting blind of sorts, but in that scenario, toothy crocs are the hunters and humans the prey.
Once on the far side I took a look at the buffs. All were good, but the one in the center was better than the other two. I whispered to Rory my choice, and he breathed back his agreement.
The .375 H&H went off like an artillery piece. The bull dropped as though his legs had turned to pool noodles.
I cycled, hard. The grass was tall enough that there wasn’t a shot at the downed bull. But then the struck buff sprang back up. A wounded, upright bull is big trouble. I ended up firing a total of four rounds at him.
The next several moments have been seared into my neural net in the way that only severe shock can do. My first semi-coherent thought was: That sonofabitch is shooting back at us!
Shooting!
At US.
Rory figured it out first, as he slammed my face into the deck. “Far bank of the river! Terrs!”
My last instant look before getting a face-full of grass revealed little winking flashes way across the Zambezi. Muzzle flashes. A whole real lot of muzzle flashes. ZANLA.
Winston Churchill once famously observed that “There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect.” What he didn’t note was that the exhilaration accrues on per-shot-fired basis. Every single shooter in that tree line had full-auto capability, and every single user was employing it, in a sustained, horizontal lead monsoon.
Flat on our bellies, Rory had been sliding and tugging me down to the back side of the small rise we had been on when I fired.
So, to briefly recap: someplace, close by in the tall cane grass was a wounded and heavily adrenalized Cape buffalo bull. Likewise, someplace else quite close were two other bulls. To our front was what appeared to be the entire Russian Army at Kursk, firing at us with enthusiasm.
None of that, as it turns out, was the actual problem.
All of those problems were, at best, also-rans in the first annual Who-Gets-To-Kill-Us Contest. And the way I figured that out was the ground.
The earth was trembling.
Badly.
It turns out there were a lot, lot more buff than we had seen. And now, no doubt spurred by all the auto weapons fire, they’d launched into a mass stampede—straight at our position.
Rory was phenomenal. “We’ll get back up on the rise. Just as the first one gets to us, we’ll both shoot him on the spot. Buff don’t usually trample their own—they’ll part around him.”
I listened to this as if outside myself and vaguely ruminated that a life plan that called for dropping a charging cape buffalo at your feet so that the hundreds or thousands of the others charging behind him wouldn’t tromp you was, honestly speaking, not the single best plan I’d ever heard.
Rory went on: “After that, we are going to have to use the gap between the two streams of the herd to run like hell.” My voice, unrelated to Actual Me, asked: “We are going to leave the cover of the downed buffalo to run with and between all the rest?”
Rory came right back. “You’ve got it. See, as soon as we shoot the buff, the terrs will have a fix on us. Almost certain, they’ve had a fellow setting up their mortar in the last few minutes. So they’ll start dropping mortar-bombs on us.”
Then, he turned, with an energizing life-affirming grin. “It’ll be a lark. Not all that far to the water.”
We edged up on the rise, and could see the motion ahead now, violent whipping and dropping of the grass, then flashes of snouts and horns and bosses, all at a thunderous dead-run at us.
Safety off.
The entire ground was bouncing like the surface of a kettle drum.
Find the one.
That one—that one—that one
BOOM!
Two seconds
And with that I witnessed, in bright blazing disbelief, the single most staggeringly-welcome thing I had ever seen.
Mere feet from our position, the herd parted.
It was as if there were an immense, invisible zipper tab in front of us, driving forward at ultra-high speed, as the two sets of separated zipper teeth flew by us on either side. We later guessed that it was the small rise we were on. Apparently, even stampeding Cape buffalo recognize the path of least resistance.
Based on how my wide-eyed face felt, I must have looked like a high-voltage owl. Rory grinned again. “Well, you’ve clearly been tipping the vicar, then haven’t you? Worry about recovering your buff tomorrow. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Tanya saw us coming.
I was exhausted, soaked, triumphant, abraded, grimy, exhilarated, thrilled, bruised, and, ultimately, transformed. It was so good I couldn’t find words to begin to describe it to her, but she stopped me, her tone blistering.
“You are unreal!”
She pulled a full-on charge. “You told me that you’d just be a minute and all you were going to do was shoot one buffalo!”
“Well I heard you! I heard the whole thing! You must have shot a thousand of them!”
I turned to look at Rory. It took maybe three full seconds before we started the laugh. The laugh swirled and grew and gained momentum, a dust devil becoming a microburst becoming a tornado, booming and rising, loud enough that it must have carried all the way to the far bank of the Zambezi.
Editor’s Note: This story is adapted from its original telling in Facing The Charge: African Dangerous Game
