By Roger Pinckney
Moses threw another armload of mopane on the fire; sparks flew, while smoke and stories swirled. Sometimes safari life is an ass-clenching endeavor with attendant sweat and blood. Other times it’s just about being there. Today was somewhere in between. We’d narrowly escaped a stampede of Cape buffalo in heavy cover and had a bluff charge by an annoyed lioness that provoked nightmares for the next decade—nothing serious. Now it was time for the most sacred of safari rituals, the sundowner: whiskey and palaver around a fire as the sun slipped off toward Mozambique.
A leopard coughed somewhere on the far side of the river and there is nothing quite like good whiskey and a leopard’s raspy cough way off in never-never to bust some serious stories loose. The camp had a leopard tag and my PH said it would be easy enough to fill, but a tag was no good unless the hunter spent two weeks in the bush. I had 10 days and alas, another four was beyond my means at the time. Next time, next time, I kept telling myself but I suspected there would never be a next time and as it turned out, I was right.
Ron, a displaced Aussie, was my PH, Sarge, a Kenyan Arab, was my driver. Sarge was also studying to get his professional hunter’s license—a harder achievement than you might think. A PH had to know all the plants and all the animals, not just their names in English, Bantu and Swahili, but also their scientific names in Latin. Panthera pardus, Bwana Chui, or Old Mister Spots being typical, and Gorilla gorilla being an exception.
Not only that but their breeding habits, gestations, and reproductive rates and dates. Also their ranges, migrations, and how many hectares, or in some cases, square kilometers it took to support each. Then and only then was he allowed the luxury of even contemplating a stopping rifle—a foolproof double—be it an outrageously expensive Rigby, Westley-Richards, or even a mildly outrageously expensive Kreighoff or Merkel.
Being multi-lingual was a plus. “How many languages you speak, Sarge?”
“Seventeen Bwana,” he paused, “not counting the European ones.”
And as a PH is expected to participate in the sundowner jawing, he must be a storyteller as well. So, Sarge made this modest contribution:
“We had a leopard hunter in camp—was he a Swede or a German?”
“A Swede,” Ron said.
“Yes, a Swede. One language I don’t speak very well. He shot a zebra and we hung a hind in a tree but two nights in the blind, Chui, he not come. Then Festo came to me and he say, ‘Sarge, Chui he try to get into the skinning shed. He bother us. Can you shoot him, Sarge?’”
“I asked Alex, the game scout. We have hunter, we have tag, we have Chui. Can we shoot him?”
Ron explained. “The game scout works for the government. Should odd circumstances arise, Alex has the final word.”
“Best shoot him,” Alex said.
Sarge continued, “So we move the Swede into the skinning shed and we make him a bed on the floor. Then we make a hole in the wall big to shoot through. Festo took the zebra skull into the yard, drive a stake, wire the skull to it, and we all go to sleep.
“One hour, maybe two, crunch, crunch, old Chui is gnawing on the zebra skull. The Swede get up, poke his rifle through the hole, shoot and miss! Old Chui he run away.”
“And then you all went back to sleep,” Ron said. “You thought Chui would never come back.”
“Yes,” Sarge said, “but not 30 minutes, there he is again, crunch, crunch. The Swede get back up, shoot again and he miss again!”
“And this time you thought the leopard would never, ever come back, right?”
“Yes, but he did, crunch, crunch. This time the Swede shoot and he kill Chui clean. All the boys begin singing and dancing and the Swede he join in. Then Festo come to me and say, ‘Luke, Bwana, luke!’ and I luke and, yes, Chui had shat himself.”
Moses threw another armload on the fire; the Southern Cross ghosted above us all in the exquisite African twilight.
And the leopard coughed again.
