06 African Adventure (12 page)

Instead of turning tail, the buffalo set up a tremendous bellowing that quite drowned the sound of the horns.

They howled back at the noise as a dog may howl at music. The horn-blowers gave up. The deep-voiced choir continued for a few moments, then it also fell silent.

A few of the bulls in the front line began to lose interest in the show. They started to graze on the sweet grass. They no longer faced forwards like an army about to march. Some turned broadside, and Hal began to hope that the danger of a charge was over.

Then who should run out in front of the cars but the crazy colonel! He was carrying his -470. Hal remembered that Bigg had said he wanted a buffalo head. Now he saw his chance to get one. Hal shouted: ‘Bigg! Don’t shoot! Comeback!’ Bigg paid no attention. He raised his gun and levelled it on a huge bull, one of the leaders.

Hal leaped from the truck and ran. Before he could reach Bigg, the gun fired. Bigg turned in time to receive a smashing blow in the face from Hal’s fist. The gun flew from his hands and he fell in a heap.

The herd began to bellow again, but this rime they were not singing to the music of a car-horn orchestra. The bulls were roaring with rage, the cows were making loud snorts of alarm, the calves were mooing and running to their mothers for protection.

The bull that had been the colonel’s target was far from dead. The bullet had torn open his forehead. The thickness of the bone had prevented it from reaching the brain. The colonel had accomplished just one thing. He had turned this animal into a devil. An animal that had been only curious was now furious. A wounded buffalo thinks only of revenge.

The bellowing bull tossed his head, flinging a spray of blood into the air from his wound, and then came on like a runaway locomotive, straight for Colonel Bigg.

A moment before, there had been a good chance that the whole herd would start grazing and walk away. Now that chance was gone. The wounded bull had not taken two strides before every adult animal in the herd was on the move. On they came, a bellowing wave of black fury.

Hal, back in the truck, nudged Joro. The car leaped forward, and so did every other car at almost the same instant. They moved just in time to save Colonel Bigg from being trampled to death by the animal he had wounded. They shot past him and closed in so that the bull could not reach him. He dizzily picked himself up, got his gun, and staggered back to camp.

Meanwhile the black avalanche he had started came on and the pounding hooves made the earth shake. The animals in the front row could not have stopped now if they had wanted to. Those behind pushed them on. Dust rose in great clouds and through the clouds screamed the white birds.

The buffalo did not seem in the least terrified by the fourteen iron monsters roaring in to meet them. The drivers did not try to go round rocks and ridges. The trucks bounced and leaped like bucking broncos.

Roger found himself half the time in the air. At every bounce he went up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He was whanged at both ends, his head against the roof, his rear against the hard seat.

Then the two armies met. Such a roaring of motors and bellowing of buffalo and excited shrieking of baboons and birds and all other creatures within earshot surely could never have been heard before in this quiet river valley.

Heavy heads crashed into radiators, bent and twisted the metal, broke open the coils, spilled the water, and brought the cars to a shuddering halt. The horns of a buffalo join on the forehead in a boss of solid bone four inches thick, giving him a terrific battering-ram. Fenders were crumpled as if they had been cardboard, bumpers were broken, headlights smashed.

The shock of the collision threw men forward out of their seats against the windscreens, and one windscreen was struck even harder from the outside when a bull making a mighty leap landed on the bonnet and his great helmet of bone smashed the glass.

Four bulls concentrating on one truck pushed it backwards, slewed it sideways and toppled it upside-down. The car did not burst into flames. The quick-thinking African driver, when he saw the four black bulldozers about to crash into his vehicle, had turned off the ignition.

Vultures streamed down out of the sky. They always appeared as if by magic whenever there seemed a promise of death.

Here there was more than a promise. No man had been killed, but three of the animals lay motionless, blood streaming from their wounds. Their rock-hard heads had not suffered, but their necks or flanks had been gouged by their metal enemies. They would never again test their strength against a truck. Others, lying stunned for a while, got unsteadily to their feet. They shook their heads, rolled their eyes, but could not make up their minds to charge again. They turned to go. The rest of the herd hesitated.

The drivers of all cars able to move were watching Hal’s car, for he was their leader.

‘Go ahead - slowly,’ Hal told Joro. The truck inched forward. The others did the same.

It was just enough to discourage the buffalo from further attack. One after another the big brutes turned tail and began to trot away.

This was the end of the battle. But not the end of the war.

The real job was still to be done. Three buffalo must be caught and caged.

Hal shouted instructions to the drivers of the trucks on either side, and they passed the word down the line. All trucks were to return to camp except two - Hal’s Ford Catcher and the Powerwagon carrying Roger. Hal knew this his brother would want to be in on the chase. Operators of the other cars must stand ready to drive out at once if their help was needed. Hal called some of the extra men to ride in the rear of Roger’s truck and his own.

Hal slipped out into the catcher’s chair. This is a small seat outside the cab. It is strapped to the right front fender. The man who is to do the catching must sit in this chair.

He holds a long pole with a noose at the end. The idea is to get the noose over the head of the running animal, but this is more easily said than done.

Hal signalled Joro, and the truck set out in pursuit of the herd. At every jolt Hal thought he would be thrown out of the seat into a thorn-bush. He hung on like grim death with one hand, clutching the pole with the other.

The long grass looked as smooth as velvet, but it concealed pot-holes made by the rain, pits made by burrowing animals, boulders, stumps, and logs.

Now they were actually in the herd. Like a black river, it flowed along on both sides of the car. Some of the animals were within reach of the catching pole, but Hal ignored them. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just any buffalo. He wanted one of the big bulls.

Ahead, he saw one, taller by a good eighteen inches than any of the animals around him. His back was as broad as a dining-room table. From his great head the horns swept out and up, ending in points as sharp as ice’ picks. On the nape of his neck an egret was taking a dizzy ride.

Over the thunder of hooves and the roar of the car, Hal shouted:

‘Let’s get that one.’

Joro could scarcely hear him, but he understood the pointing finger and speeded up the car. The bumper nudged the rears of some lumbering cows and they veered out of the way, leaving a fairly clear path ahead. Clear, but not smooth. The greater the speed, the rougher the ride.

It would be a miracle if the wildly leaping car did not tear out its sump on a stump or wind up against a rock with a broken axle.

A large acacia tree blocked the path. Joro threw the wheel over, the swerve nearly tossing Hal out of his seat. They barely missed striking the trunk of the tree. Joro did not turn for bushes. He ploughed straight through them. The worst were the thorn-bushes. They stood some fifteen feet high and as broad as the car, and they bristled with thousands upon thousands of thorns, each two inches long and as sharp as needles.

They did not merely scratch Hal’s face and hands. They tore holes in his shirt and trousers and bloodied him from head to foot.

For a moment he wondered if Joro was giving him this treatment on purpose. But he realised that there was no help for it. If they were to catch the big bull they could not stop for bushes.

Nor even for anthills. The African anthill is a strange and wondrous thing. It may be anything from two feet to twenty feet high. Though called an anthill, it is really built by termites, millions of them, and every particle of the hill has passed through the body of a termite. On the way through, the clay is mixed with certain body-juices which turn it into a kind of cement.

So the anthill is as hard as rock, and if you attack it with a pick, all you get is sparks. It defies sun and rain and may last more than a hundred years.

It was up the slope of one of these anthills that the big bull rushed until he was twice as high as the roof of the car. Hal would long remember that great black body high against the blue sky. Then, instead of running down the other side, the bull leaped into space, trusting to his sturdy legs to give him safe landing.

The truck would lose valuable time if it tried to go round the hill. Joro gave the engine the last squirt of power. The truck shot up like a rocket to the top of the bill. Then it left the earth entirely and took off into space. With bad luck, it could land upside-down. But with good luck, it you would call it that, it crashed down, right side up, into the worst thorn-bush yet.

Porcupine quills growing on bushes, Hal thought as he added to his collection of scratches.

The car ripped its way through the thorns and was once more in the open, now close to the big bull. It was too close for comfort, and the buffalo increased his speed. His hide glistened with sweat, and foam dripped from his mouth. Now both he and the truck had left most of the herd behind. The bumper of the car almost touched his flying heels. The pole extended over his back and the noose dangled above his head.

Hal tried to settle the noose in place, but succeeded only in bumping the animal’s back with his pole. The egret flew up with a sharp cry of alarm. The buffalo wheeled about and went off to the right. Joro at once turned in pursuit, and the car went round the curve on two wheels.

Again it drew close. Again the bull tried to throw it off by a sharp turn, this time to the left. The heavy truck spun about and followed.

Suddenly the bull stopped dead and glared at the truck with savage red eyes. He was tired of being pestered by this smelly monster of metal and rubber.

Joro stopped the truck. The buffalo was now on Hal’s side of the car. Before Hal could get the pole and noose into position, the beast charged.

If he had struck the car low down, it would have gone over in a flash, pinning Hal underneath. Instead, he crashed into the door, horns first. He pierced the door as if it had been cardboard.

He found himself locked to this strange, evil thing. He wrenched his head violently, and in doing so not only pulled his horns free but jerked open the door.

Now he could see a human being inside and his fury was redoubled. He reared up on his hind feet and thrust his head and shoulders into the cab.

But Joro was not waiting for him. There was a hatch in the roof of the catcher and it was open.

Even as the great head plunged into the cab, Joro was scrambling through the hatch and on to the roof. He was quick, but not quick enough to escape one horn, which poked him in the rear and speeded him on his way.

Hal and the men in the back of the truck could not help laughing at the way Joro shot up through that hole like a living cannon-ball.

But what happened then was still more amusing, though a bit terrifying. The head of the buffalo burst up through the hatch. By drawing his hind feet into the cab, he even managed to get his forefeet on to the roof.

He was mad with rage, determined that his enemy should not escape him. He swept the roof with his horns, and Joro could barely keep out of his way. The animal bellowed furiously and flung the spume from his foaming mouth. His eyes were like burning coals. He struggled desperately, but could not climb higher through the hatch.

In the meantime his hind quarters and hooves were working havoc in the cab, battering the metal fittings, slashing the instrument board and smashing the windscreen.

Hal wished he had a camera instead of a catching-pole. What a sight this was! A Ford truck with a bull buffalo in the driver’s seat!

Game-wardens had told him of incidents like this -buffalo, rhino, lion, leopard, bursting their way into cars. And in America’s Yellowstone Park not a year went by without a report of a black bear or a grizzly breaking into a car. But it was one thing to hear about it and another to see it with his own eyes.

He was so entertained that he almost forgot to act Then he suddenly woke up. Here was the best chance he could possibly ask for to catch a magnificent bull.

He swung his pole about until the noose was above the animal’s head. This new annoyance, fluttering above like a bird, did not improve the buffalo’s temper. He roared at it, tried to stab it with his ice-picks.

Hal opened the noose with a twist on the pole and lowered it. That should have dropped the loop neatly over the animal’s head. But the rope caught on one of the wide-spreading horns. A part of the loop fell into the buffalo’s mouth and he set out to destroy it with his powerful jaws. But a buffalo fights with his horns and hooves, not often with his teeth. His teeth are meant for grass-eating. The tough nylon cord resisted all attempts to torn it into chewing-gum.

With a sudden jerk Hal managed to pull the rope loose.

The buffalo had given up trying to reach Joro. He had drawn one of his forefeet down into the cab. Soon he might withdraw his head, then back out of the car and escape. Hal realized he had only one more chance.

As skilfully as he knew how, he manipulated the pole so that the noose opened into a wide loop and dropped over his quarry’s head. It settled round the great black neck. The cord ran back along the pole to Hal’s hand. He gave it a yank that snugged it about the animal’s throat.

The bull, with a savage bellow, tried to pull his head down through the hatch, but the rope tightened and held him fast. Hal was not trusting to his own strength. He knew his strength was no match for the bull’s. He had already looped his end of the rope round the fender and made it fast.