The brush was so thick you couldn’t see 20 feet in any direction. The cape buffalo were so close you could smell their hot breath.
Sweat was running into my eyes and it wasn’t just the heat. My nerves were fraying by the second and suddenly the wind eddied and all hell broke loose.
The snorts of agitated buffalo became frantic and the crash of 1,500-pound bodies seemed to be coming from all directions. Looking under the brush, I could see dozens of feet darting back and forth.
I pressed myself up behind the largest mopane tree I could find — a measly six-inch diameter twig — and flicked my gun off safety, my eyes darting about, fearing “black death” would come barreling through the brush at any moment.
From all directions the forest was alive with the roar of trees snapping like kindling as buffalo horns and bodies smashed through them.
After what was surely no more than 10 seconds, but seemed like an eternity, the crashing faded into the distance. The savannah grew still and the buzzing of the black flies and my ragged breathing became the only sounds.
Was that sweat running down my leg or some other salt water?
I looked around to see dad and both professional hunting guides looking about as wild-eyed as I was feeling. Even our black tracker, Moses, looked a little pale.
This was the third time we’d busted the buffalo out of heavy cover in the last hour and at some point I imagined they’d get tired of playing cat and mouse and try a new game of buffalo and toe jam, myself playing the unenviable role of “toe jam.”
I’d hunted buffalo before and gotten within 50 yards of them, but this was half the distance and I was beginning to doubt my own sanity at thinking this was going to be fun.
I’d read book after book on African hunting and the thrill of hunting buffalo on foot in heavy cover. “What a rush,” I’d thought to myself. “Now that’s living, boy-o!”
Clint Eastwood once said: “Dying ain’t much of a living, boy.” And those words were in my mind as our lead PH, Bossie Mostert with Limpopo Big Game Safaris, gave the nod to the tracker to push on after the buffalos’ spoor.
I glanced over at dad again — his expression speaking volumes. He smiled, but his face had a decidedly green cast to it and his eyes looked more than a little haunted.
I can only imagine the look in mine as I fell in line behind him, picking my way along in the wake of the buffalos’ trail of destruction.
My mind rolling the last couple minutes over and over again, the medium-bore .375-caliber rifle in my hands suddenly felt about as dangerous as a cork gun and about as useful.
It’s pure fantasy, but hunters wrap themselves in the cloaked of ideology that the rifle is a great equalizer — both a sword with which to strike down the enemy and a shield to deflect all harm.
Against buffalo that notion couldn’t be further from the truth. As they famously say, “It’s easy to kill a buffalo. It’s hard to convince him of that fact.”
It’s a lesson some people only learn the hard way and some pay for with their lives. Bossie, a veteran of the buffalo trail, bore an angry scar that ran from his calf up his thigh into his belly, the previous season’s gift from a hacked-off buff, who didn’t take to kindly to someone punching .41-caliber holes in his hide.
Bossie’s gun had malfunctioned when the buffalo charged out of thick cover and his client, who’d already made the unforgivable mistake of screwing up the first shot, couldn’t hit a charging brick wall with his second.
The four months of hospital bed-ridden recovery for Bossie must have been some profound ones, as he surely had to have been questioning certain life and career choices.
I was certainly questioning mine when suddenly the tracker’s, then Bossie’s closed fists shot up – the silent signal to stop moving and be quiet.
Frozen between steps I was back to frantically straining to see or hear anything ahead of me.
In thick cover you don’t look for buffalo. You look for bits and pieces of buffalo — the flick of an ear, a darker spot in an already midnight black patch of gnarled brambles, the twitter of a bird’s wing or the swarm of black flies around the eyes and mouth of the cud-chewing critter.
If you see him, chances are he’s already sized you up. He’s just waiting to see if you’ve spotted him or if you’ll pass by, at which point he then gets to decide if he will let you live or chastise you for disturbing his siesta (nap, to you SA boys).
The fist became an opened hand and an infinitesimal gesture for dad to inch forward.
Swinging his gun slowly off his shoulder, dad began the laborious process of taking long, slow steps forward to saddle up next to Bossie. A few faint whispers drifted back to me on the hot breeze as the pair craned their necks to see what Moses was gesturing to as he squatted in the knee-high grass in front of them.
Very slowly the tri-pod shooting sticks were assembled in front of dad and he leveled his gun on them. Even from behind I could tell he was peering hard into the scope to find a mark, a place to squeeze off a round.
The boom of the rifle hit me like a lead blanket and I stumbled. The woods were alive again with rushing buffalo. Dad was racking another round into the gun as I slung mine forward and instinctively sidestepped into the meager protection of the nearest tree.
Unlike before, this time the crash of buffalo bodies went decidedly away from us and after a moment the distinctive bellow of a dying buffalo rang out.
The crash as she stumbled and fell echoed through the brush and the world once again went silent.
We waited. Bossie and Roan, our other PH, lit a cigarette. Dad and I whispered back and forth the details of where he thought his bullet had taken the animal. Moses knelt and watched the brush intently.
If we had waited just five more minutes, that would have been the end of the story. Although the ending to that buffalo’s story was written, we never saw it play out.
As Moses and Bossie pushed forward into the brush expecting to find a dead buffalo, the cow dad had hit with a perfect frontal chest shot busted from cover. The last we heard tell of her she was still hell-bound for Kilimanjaro.
Where she had fallen, a pool of blood nearly a meter across and three centimeters deep glimmered in the narrow beams of sunlight that wormed their way through the canopy.
We never found that buffalo and dad was beside himself sick with that. He killed another cow several days later with a single well-placed shot. I took my second single-shot buffalo that same trip, also a cow and also taken with a frontal shot at less than 50 meters.
Buffalo are not hard to kill, if you can shoot halfway decent, but they are infuriatingly stubborn about accepting that fact.
Levi Hill is an award-winning journalist, outdoorsman and gunsmith from Jal, N.M. He began shooting at the age of two and writing for press while in high school. He can be reached at hillmanoutdoors@gmail.com.
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