Sand rivers (21 page)

When 1 get back to camp the Warden is lying on his cot before his tent, head raised on his elbow, watching me come. I am not surprised that he and I have been having the same thoughts, or when he says, coming straight out with it, "You know, Peter, when this idea came up that you and 1 should go off together on a long foot safari, 1 was dead set against it. As late as Kingupira, I was telling Tom Arnold, Absolutely not! You can't just go bashing off into the bush with some fella you've never set eyes on; had to have a good look at you first." Especially, I thought, after having read my book on Africa - and once again, Brian anticipates me. Although

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we have been together for two weeks, he mentions the book for the first time, and actually says, "I thoroughly enjoyed it." Together we laugh about that first night m Dar. "Didn't know how to act!" Brian said. "Didn't know what was wanted of me, really."

Not only his words but his whole manner confirm what 1 thought 1 had already noticed, that he has left his mask behind at the main camp in Mkangira. He seems happy and relaxed, eager to talk, and the talk is almost entirely free of that cynicism and intolerance that 1 thought would cause trouble between us. Over our simple supper of beans and rice, he speaks with real affection and respect of some of the Africans on his old staff, such as a scout named James Abdallah who as a youth had been conscripted to help haul that steam engine up there to Madaba. "Terrible work. After three months, I think, James ran away and hid out in the forest."

In those early days, Brian says, he spent most of his time on elephant control, which was often a bit risky. "I lost a very good man once to an elephant, one of my head game scouts, like old Saidi - you might think of a head game scout as a sort of regimental sergeant-major. Today they call them game assistants: I suppose they think it's less demeaning to be an assistant than to be a scout! But anyway, this other Saidi - Saidi Nasora Kibanda - was a first-class shot, which is very rare among Africans; he was also a superb hunter, and very knowledgeable, one of my best men. One day about 1965 Kibanda was out with a trainee on elephant control, and the trainee wounded an elephant which Kibanda had him follow up. I'll never really know what happened; when these things occur, the survivor always puts things in the best light for himself. But apparently the elephant attacked, and the trainee ran, and for some reason, Kibanda failed to stop that elephant, although they were in open country and it should have been a routine shot. That elephant destroyed him." Brian paused as if granting Kibanda a moment of silence. "Old Kibanda was a hell of a good fellow, and his death came as a hell of a shock to me, I don't mind telling you - that man was my right arm. Very loyal, very intelligent - a very nice man altogether."

Brian clears his throat, frowning a little. "I suppose I lost one or two game scouts every year, out on control work, but I can't think what could have happened to Kibanda. These large-bore precision weapons stop an elephant pretty easily, although most Africans have a hard time beli&ving it; perhaps that's why they don't aim properly. Usually the animal will come at you with his head low, and you shoot at the forehead, above the eyes, to hit the brain; if the head is raised, of course, you shoot just at the base of it. Either way he goes right over, no problem at all.

"Of course there are times when nothing seems to go right, and probably it was one of those times that caught up with poor old Kibanda. 1 had a day like that myself. I was stationed on Mahenge at the time. We had been asked to deal with three bull elephants that were getting into

SAND RIVERS

the shambas, then becoming aggressive with whoever tried to drive them out, and running around knocking over houses, too. The people had these flimsy sort of kilindos, or huts-on-poles, that they would put up to keep watch on the crops; when elephants came, they would try to drive them off by beating on tins and the like. One day there was an old woman in one of these huts, and when three bulls turned up in the gardens, she started beating on her tins, and the elephants came for her, knocked over the hut and trampled her and tore her to pieces - made a real mess of her.

"When I arrived and finally had them located, I had to stalk them through very high grass, over my head, and when I came up with them, they were all together in a kind of opening they had beaten down in the high grass under a sausage tree. Two were broadside to me, one completely screening the other, and the third w^js looking off in another direction. When you shoot an elephant in the brain, it always sits back on its haunches, and I reckoned that the near one, falling back that way, would give me a fair shot at the one behind it. Then my gunbearer would give me the other gun, and I'd have two barrels to use on the third animal.

"Well, the first part of the plan worked well enough; the first sat backward, I dropped the second, and grabbed the other gun. But the third animal was already taking off, and I got off two quick shots aimed at the pelvis, because a pelvis shot will cripple an elephant and stop him so that you can finish him off properly. However, 1 had shot too fast, and he kept going. Because I wasn't absolutely sure the second elephant was dead, I told the gunbearer to load up the first gun, showed him just where he should point the barrel, and then I took off after number three. He was only about sixty yards away, and badly hurt, but my third shot didn't drop him, 1 still don't know why, just set him running again, and a fourth shot intended for the pelvis didn't stop him either; all it did was turn him right around. I realized that the gun was empty and I had no more cartridges, hadn't thought I'd need them, you see, and I did the only thing I could do: I ran like hell back down that path that the elephant had made through the tall grass. After about five yards, I tripped and fell, and he was on me.

"This elephant was badly hurt, and his trunk was full of blood, spraying all over me, but he couldn't smell me, you see, and after he missed me with his tusks, he somehow lost me, and I was able to roll away. Luckily, he decided to take off again, and I ran back to my gunbearer. I didn't have Goa at that time; this man was only a trainee who never did make it as a gunbearer, and when he saw me all covered with blood, he panicked; he thought the elephant had got me, and because I was running, he imagined it was still hot after me, and so he departed in the opposite direction. When I caught up with him, I gave him a hell of a clout to calm him down, and grabbed a handful of cartridges out of his pouch and went back and finished off that elephant. That was the closest call I ever had with a wild animal."

PETER MATTHIESSEN

A half moon rests in the borassus fronds over our heads, and a tiny bat detaches itself, flits to and fro, and returns into the black frond silhouette. We lie peacefully upon our cots and watch the stars. From the forest comes the hideous squalling of frightened baboons trying to bluff a leopard, or so we suppose, since there is plentiful leopard sign around the camp.

In the moonlight the bull hippos of the herd move in close to the bank to bellow at our fire; in trying to frighten us away, they panic one another and porpoise heavily away over the shallows, causing great waves that carry all the way across the river and slap on to the mud of the far bank. Man does not belong here, and the hippopotami cannot seem to accept US; we have disrupted their whole sense of how the night time world unfolds in the Old Africa. They do not go ashore to feed but remain out there just beyond the fire light, keeping watch on the intruders and banishing our sleep with outraged bellows.

This is how Brian has arranged the day. We shall rise at six, have tea, and be off at seven; at about nine, we are to break for tea and porridge. At mid-morning, we shall walk again for two more hours, then rest in the hot part of the day; in mid-afternoon, we shall walk for two hours more, tending toward the river, where we shall make camp at the first good site.

Leaving the river forest in the early morning, we emerge on to an open plain and head south again over low hills between broad bends of the Luwegu. The bright green grass around a pan has attracted an early morning convocation of impala and wart hog, baboons and geese, and the pan is full of baby crocodiles; storks and herons stand about, minding their own narrow-brained business, and a pair of skimmers, feeding together, draw fine lines up and down on the still surface.

This morning everyone is silent. The porters speak just once, murmuring softly amongst themselves, and instantly Goa stops and turns and, after a moment, says almost inaudibly, "Nani ani ongeal" "Who is talking?" When nobody speaks, he takes this for an answer and goes on. Over his shoulder, Brian murmurs, "I always have it as a rule: no one talks on trek except me and the tracker." I nod in approval, not bothering to answer. Talking almost invariably detracts from the real pleasure of walking, in which one finally enters the surroundings. And in the wilderness the human voice is disturbing to animals we might otherwise see, quite apart from the fact that nothing must intrude upon Goa's apprehension of his surroundings.

Now Goa has stopped again, raising one hand. Shadows deep in the scrub ahead have shifted, and soon a bull elephant moves out into the open, in no hurry, since Goa has left him time and space in which to take his leave. There are more elephants during the morning, in twos and threes and fives; although on foot, we are rarely out of sight of them.

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A solitary eland bull, a glimpse of kudu. Huge ground hornbills fly away with the slow, ghostly beats of their white primaries that seem incapable of keeping such large birds aloft; like vultures, which are also huge and without enemies, the batutu seem exceptionally shy. Yellow hyacinths shine in the grassland, and a bush of daisy-like composites, with a solitarv' red-stemmed lily unlike any flower we have seen. The country is more open here than it is to the north of Mkangira; the white-crowned black chat of the miombo woodland is no longer common, and the racquet-tailed roller has been replaced by the lilac-breasted species of the savanna. Even the tsetse seem to have lost the appetite they show in the closed woods; 1 watch them alight on the shirt of the man ahead, but they do not bite.

Against the blue hills to the west stands a ccw—calf herd of elephant. Getting our scent, a young cow leads the juveniles away while the old matriarch stands guard, trunk high, as if in warning; and soon we see the young toto hastening away after the others, the top of his small earnest head scarcely visible in the high grass. Not far off there is a wildebeest, then a mixed band of impala, waterbuck, and eland; the antelope move calmly to the wood edge, unafraid. For a long time the big gray eland bull stands watching us, attended by three soft brown cows with calves. Like other striped animals - kudu, bushbuck, zebra - eland are taboo animals to the tribesmen to the east of the Reserve, who know that eating striped beasts may bring on leprosy. (This view is shared by tribesmen of the Sudan-Zaire border, who will not eat bongo.)

On the far side of the wood, we find ourselves among a herd of waterbuck almost before a long calm look persuades them that it might be best to take their leave. In numbers of animals seen this morning the far south of the Selous compares with the great parks, but the tameness of almost every creature in this country south of Mkangira has nothing to do with the aplomb of sophisticated parks animals which, being resigned to the human presence, are not tame so much as half-domesticated. Here the confiding curiosity appears to stem from a trusting innocence of man, unlike anything 1 have seen elsewhere in Africa.

Once again the Luwegu comes into view, set off by broad white sand bars and tall palm trees, the surface broken here and there by clumps of rocks that turn out to be hippos. We descend to the bank at the end of a sand bar where a giant kingfisher, night blue and chestnut, has seized a fish too big for it to manage; it squats on the sand belaboring the fish, then gives this up and lugs its catch away across the river, which at this bend must be three hundred yards across.

As Goa sets his fires we head south, trying to cut across the river bends. Since the river bears west, we are soon inland and higher than we intended, emerging at last on the cliff of an escarpment. Five buffalo lying down under black boulders heave to their feet and hump away into high grass, and from the rocks, a black eagle takes wing across a hidden valley

PETER MATTHIESSEN

of baobab plains and grassy glades and palm and water pans, cut off from the world by the steep cliffs and hills east of the river. Brian had never known that this place existed; in his years here, he had always found a way around these rough escarpments. "If I'd known about it, I would have come here and made camp; a place like this is bound to be crawling with game. It's likely that the tribesmen who once lived here knew it, but we must be the first white people ever to come here."

Beyond the escarpments, the Luwegu crosses a flat plain, but in the southern distance can be seen the sudden mountains where the river descends from a steep-sided gorge. The Wandewewe Hills beyond are part of the Luwegu watershed, but most of its tributaries descend from the Matengo Highlands west of Songea. These elevations on the great inland plateau are drained by the long rivers that flow northward, following the tilt of the plateau toward the Rufiji. The Luwegu and the Mbarangandu run almost parallel, and both are characterized by broad canyon valleys between steep cliffs of reddish sandstone that rise on both sides to long flat-topped plateaus.

We follow a steep buffalo trail down the escarpment, crossing the plain of baobab and pushing more buffalo out of the dense shade of a karonga. Then we climb again, still too far to the east, working our way around more hidden buffalo; in the very steep, hot, thorny going the Ngindo are exhausted, but on account of the buffalo their nerves give them the energy to keep up. Over the centuries the elephants have found all the paths of least resistance, and Goa follows their clear trails up and down the broken country, but by midday two of the porters are "pretty well knocked-up", as Brian puts it. Because there is no shade where we strike the river, we continue along the hot slow sand, enter the bush again and find ourselves between an agitated hippo and the river.