"Really fine buffalo trophies are generally from bulls that are on the verge of becoming old. Come to think of it, the buffalo is the only member of the Big Five with horns, which grow over a central core of porous, blood-transmitting bone and tissue. Unlike deer, which shed their antlers each year, horns are permanent fixtures that reach an optimum length and then begin to wear down. The armaments of an old bull, which have been under a few years of abrasion by bush and dirt, will be less well balanced than will those of a slightly younger bull who is still past maturity. They are, however, classic overkill weapons when it comes to sticking items through the guts of the incautious or careless.
"Today, there are really two kinds of buffalo hunting: the search for a really fine trophy head among the gentlemen's clubs and the sorting out of a good but perhaps less than record-book chap from a herd. Neither pastime is lacking in excitement.
"The hunting of herds tends to be the more stimulating to the endocrine system; there've been times that I wished I were wearing rubber BVDs, although the classic chase of a few old and wise hatrack types may appeal more to the precision stalker and is hardly dull. Normally, the spoor of the smaller herds is picked up as it crosses a hunting track or other clear ground, giving some idea of the size of the bunch, the number of bulls, and the approximate time of their passing by the drying of the surface of the dung. Given the sight, hearing, smell, and sheer number of the buff, getting close enough to do something unsociable to a decent male is one of the tougher hunting techniques. Should you be under the impression that walking into a herd of buffalo as they're resting and waiting until the one you've picked is close enough even though you're surrounded by the others is for the casual aficionado, I suggest that you stick with cottontail rabbits.
"The sensation of edging past loafing buffalo and examining them at fifteen or so yards for horn quality is nightmarish; in fact, when in this situation I always wonder what the hell I'm doing there. In the thick crud, shots will be bloody close, and after the stunned silence of an anemic half-second, the immediate explosion of tons upon tons of hurtling charcoal-to-buff bodies at least should scare you. It certainly does me! Twice I have had to put down other herd members with frontal shots when they realized that they were so close that they pretty well had to charge. Usually, though, if an anthill, or more properly a termite heap, is handy, the rest of the herd will just rush by, but it would not be a very good place to trip over your shoelace. Over the years, I have been comforted by the presence of large trees nearly as much as by termite heaps.
"A frill that can be added to this form of the sport, though I wouldn't care to try it with the bachelor groups, is charging the herd instead of the other way around. Of course, a professional can't do this with every client, but if a hunter is fit and reasonably dumb, has prepaid his safari, and does not have small children or major creditors, this is one of the best hunting tactics that can be employed on buffalo.
"The scenario would run as follows: You have spooked a herd, perhaps seventy-five strong, with a decent bull. A cow, who was lying down unseen, jumped up practically at your feet and rushed off. With everything else but a hearty Hi Ho, Silver, the rest followed her. They went, of course, downwind. After the equivalent of a nonstop double decathlon, with a half-hour allowed for the herd to slow up, you have managed to get in front of them, the wind now in your favor. They're walking, stirring up that unforgettable backlighted dust as they wander along, not feeding yet but holding to a solid track that will bring them about thirty yards past the fallen snarl of a dead tree where you and your hunter are hiding. Your heart threatens to crack the glasses in your breast pocket as they pass in a thick dark tendril, glaring suspiciously at your hiding place. Then, the bull you have an appointment with shows?naturally?on the far side of the herd, shielded by the rest. If you want him, there's only one thing to do. Just be sure you want him very much.
"Your bwana grips your shoulder, holding his rifle in his left hand. 'Come on, goddammit!' he yells at the top of his lungs. He has excellent lungs. The buffalo freeze. So do you. You may be dumb, but you're certainly not stupid. Still, in a blur of movement, you're dodging past assorted bovines, shrieking like a demon with a hotfoot. Buffalo?Cape bloody buffalo?look at you in the purest astonishment. Ha! And they think they're surprised. Then, like a pop-up target, he's right in front of you, ten yards away, just swinging his head to the side as he starts off. You stick the big foresight into its notch with the rear, and without thinking the whole thing is lined up on the rippling muscles of the boulderlike shoulder. Wham! Whock! The bull stumbles. The action is as smooth as 40-year old scotch as another round slides home and the bolt is palmed over. The buff starts to turn, loses his balance, and winds up in a pile like a kid on roller skates. Up comes the head, the horns curved and gleaming as the mandibles of a giant, hairy tarantula. Then a sound is heard, a sound that must be earned. It begins low and crescendoes, a terrible, wonderful, awful yet magnificent death song, a rising bellow that washes over the bush in its finality. The head drops and he's gone. He's also yours forever.
"He's still warm when you finish your cigarette and the black skinning crew comes up, but the ticks already know. Red and gorged, abandoning ship, they're crawling off the scrotum to wander away in the dry grass, seeking another host. The professional's steel tape slithers out and marks the spread at a whisper past forty-two inches, a good bull with a boss that nearly meets in the center, leaving only a slender part between the two halves like a fresh haircut. The white edge of the bullet hole in the incredibly thick skin of the scarred shoulder is just right, the bones beneath broken, the big bullet a lump you will later cut out from beneath the hide of the offside. Bent and discolored, it will be put into the little box in your desk drawer along with the lion's 'lucky' floating collar bones, the flint scraper picked up where some hominid must have dropped it unthinkable hundreds of centuries ago, the dried black and red thumb-sized seeds of the mahogany tree knocked down by Silent's slingshot, and the chunk of stream-washed quartz crystal that turned out not to be the new Kohinoor Diamond after all. To anybody else it would be just another twisted chunk of scrap lead and cuprous metal. To you it's as grand a memory as the big, glaring, shoulder mount with thorn-tattered ears over the fireplace in the den, in the presence of which none of your pals seems to discuss the size of the monstrous whitetail deer he outwitted last season or the ferocity of the black bear he collected in the Poconos. Fifty times, over the years, you'll weigh that slug in your hand, examine the rifling marks, and marvel at the I-beam bone that bent it into a U. Fifty times you'll almost take it to be made into a keyring, but you'll never get around to it. And you and I both know that you never will. It's far better off in that private little shrine that all hunters have in their desk drawers, along with the aluminum bands from far-wandering black ducks and the fossils and arrowheads of our youth. I suppose it's the way of hunters. We are very odd fellows.
"Should you be contemplating a safari to acquire a good buff, please be advised that the normal sequence of events is seldom as simple as the foregoing. A trophy buffalo is rare and envied because it has an intrinsic value generated by the most stringent rules of both commerce and emotion. All things, including buffalo heads, are valuable to their owners in direct proportion to the cost, difficulty, or danger involved in obtaining them. Buffalo are paid for in the Churchillian liquid commodities as well as by pure lucre. There will certainly be sweat on the bill; if things get tricky and tough, perhaps tears. If you are unlucky, it may be blood: yours."
?Peter Hathaway Capstick, Death in the Dark Continent
