Nasty Beast
Cape Buffalo (Photo: Keith Connelly)
To a dismaying extent, our faces make us who we are. If you are born with a lowering brow, the world will never believe that you are at heart a happy-go-lucky guy. Few animals on earth have a meaner, more malevolent face than the cape buffalo, and I am afraid they have the disposition to go with it.
“I am afraid.” Yes, those would be the key words. Cape buffalo kill a great many people who wander in the African bush. They like to catch you by surprise, gore you in the gut, and then hammer you into the earth relentlessly with that helmet-like boss on their foreheads. You are not just dead. You are pulverized.
The ranking of deadliest animals in Africa is an entertaining pastime, and Cape buffalo always find their way up near the top of the list, well ahead, for instance, of lions.
(With apologies, here’s a link to a really bad web site about Africa’s most deadly animals. Just for starters, mosquitoes do not rank second behind hippos. By spreading malaria, they kill roughly 700,000 people a year. The 80,000 or so hippos on the continent would have to score nine human deaths apiece per year just to stay in the game. Which would be fun, of course. But tiring.)
Anyway, Keith Connelly’s excellent photo brought this all back to me this morning, and I recalled the last time I was wandering with Cape buffalo, while reporting on rhinos in Kwazulu-Natal’s Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park:
We spot the droppings first, and then a lone bull out on a slope, browsing and looking characteristically angry and forlorn.
“The males in the herd change all the time,” says guide Jed Bird. “A male comes in and all he cares about is breeding and pushing other males out. He stops eating, and eventually he loses condition and some younger, stronger male comes and forces him out. Then he goes off alone to feed. It’s a jamming session, and he re-builds his condition so he can come back.”
The lone males are often wounded and bleeding, so they roll in the mud , or daga, to heal themselves. Hence locals call them The Daga Boys. “They’re the ones you have to watch out for. Herds generally turn and run away, but the lone males can come at you, if you surprise them. You just have to give them plenty of room and go around.”
This one watches us closely, his head swinging around to track our movements. Cape buffalo are not just hostile, but also have extremely sharp vision, an unfortunate combination. And they are persistently hostile. They don’t just want to throw a scare into you.
They want to pound you into the dust and make you pay for every slight they have ever suffered. Everyone seems to know somebody who has been speared, or tossed, or pounded into the earth until dead by one of these things. Later, as we are dropping down into a river bed, Bird spots one just ahead, lying like a massive rock in the dry sandy bottom.
He motions us back and we go around again. Staying alive is good.
