Piet Retief Farm, Zimbabwe
1992
Buffel rocked backwards in his new leather recliner. As he cranked the handle on his right the footrest popped out to support his feet, still in their velskoene. He looked around his lounge room at his trophies.
A large grey kudu with three distinct twists in its horns was hung next to an eland with long thick horns that had a single twist to them. He remembered that that eland had made him walk for hours. But he was so worth the wait. The perfect trophy on his wall, unmarred by a headshot, as he had waited patiently for the eland to expose his heart.
He put his own hand over his heart to feel the beat of life, just as his doctor had shown him years before. To feel the life inside himself, and to listen to his body.
When his body was happy, he could sleep, with no drugs and no nightmares.
When his body was restless, he needed to take the drugs, to stop the nightmares. To stop the darkness that threatened to pull him under. The new drugs helped his sleep, and they had slowed the frequency of the nightmares. They kept the voices of the children in his head hushed, but they never silenced them totally. He knew that only the butterfly would do that, one day, when he found her again. When he saved Impendla’s soul. The doctor had said that he had a chemical imbalance, that the drugs would help make it right.
It was Gibson who had called in the doctor, one morning when he thought Buffel was dead. After a period of a few weeks of repeating nightmares, night sweats and hardly any sleep, Buffel had in desperation taken a full container of headache pills to try and stop the nightmares that plagued him. To quieten the voices of the children, and Impendla’s cry for help. But the pills had made him sleep for too long. Gibson had entered his house to check on him when he hadn’t come out in the morning as usual, and was still asleep in bed at ten o’clock.
Buffel had woken in hospital after they had pumped his stomach free of all the painkillers. The doctor had listened to what had happened, and he had prescribed medicines. He had explained to Buffel that he didn’t need to stay on the medication all the time, if he didn’t want to, as long as he listened to his body.
He had followed the doctor’s advice, and soon he found that the voices would quieten down naturally when he was outside hunting, that was when his body felt the best. He had started hiring himself out as a professional hunter and guide, along with Gibson, and they had been contracted with different safari operators since.
He looked at his bull hippo. Its mouth set wide open, as if ready to fight. Its sharp tusks polished to perfection, the ivory shining as it caught the specialist lighting he’d had installed in the room and positioned to highlight the head. And every other head in the room.
He smiled at the hippo. Just the year before he’d shot that bull, the hippo had been added to some of the South African and Zimbabwean lists of dangerous game. It was a place well deserved. He knew that the river horse killed more people in Africa than all the other members of the Big Five put together. They were extremely aggressive. And when the hippo made their way back to the water after grazing on the banks and encountered a human, the meeting often resulted in a fatality.
But that didn’t make the hippo easier to kill.
It made it harder.
A challenge that Buffel enjoyed.
The bull hippo was hard to recognise within his water environment. You could hunt him on land, but the chances of him charging you were high, and invariably, you would end up ruining your trophy with a brain shot. The only option was to put the one and a half tonne beast down before he put you down. Permanently. And every hunter knew that anything smaller than a 40 calibre might not stop him.
Or perhaps you could be patient, recognise the bull from the cow in the water and shoot him with pin-point accuracy. The bull’s head was only a little larger than the cow, but his tell was he had two tiny humps on either side of his nose where his lower tusks fit into his upper jaw.
The bull needed to be shot through the eye, or the not so clean alternative was a shot just below his ear. Although the hippo would sink down into the water and disappear, within the hour, his carcass would then float up to the surface again, and you could send in the trackers to recover the body.
His bull had taken fourteen men to pull him from the river. He’d used his trusty 416 Rigby with a soft nose up the spout, and he had no damage on the head from the bullet’s exit.
His bull hippo was a trophy worth hunting.
All around the room, every trophy had been both shot and then mounted with patience, and skill. First his own, then the taxidermist’s, who had painstakingly recreated the animal’s size and bulk, with the synthetic materials for the inside, and then they tanned the leather outside. Lastly, they added in the glass eyes. The best quality eyes that didn’t look dull, but made you want to reach out to the animal hanging on the wall, and touch it to see if it breathed, as the animal appeared to watch you everywhere in the room, their expressions so real within the glass.
His trophies would last forever.
A hunter was judged on his trophies, and they proved his patience and his accuracy.
Both things Buffel prided himself on.
He felt the easy beat of his heart and he knew that the medicines that sat in the mirrored cabinet in his bathroom could stay there for another while.
He had another hunting client coming in a week’s time, and he was looking for a new concession to take him to. The client had requested a trophy elephant, but his special request was that he wanted to shoot it with a crossbow.
Buffel had at first been reluctant to take a man who hunted like that into the bush. A wounded elephant could kill you real fast if you got it wrong. But the client had sent him, via fax, pictures of other kills he had made, of American bison that had been taken down with a single shot with his new fancy carbon fibre arrows from a compound crossbow that looked nothing like anything Buffel had ever seen before.
Buffel had begun research into bow hunting and found that it had become legal in South Africa in 1983. Yet the most important information he had learnt was that just this year, the South Africa Executive ruling had come down, the hunt was to be done under a professional hunter’s supervision, and if competence could be proven, then bow hunting could be used to hunt all animals. It opened up a whole new opportunity to new hunters to bring new foreign currency into the country.
His interest was piqued.
The gentleman was arriving soon to show his skill with that crossbow, with first an impala hunt, then a kudu, and on his list for this trip he had added a giraffe to prove that he could take on an elephant.
Buffel had changed the hunt from a giraffe to a buffalo bull. Perhaps if this hunter could take down an African buffalo in one shot, he would consider the elephant hunt. Not before.
The client was happy with those terms.
He lifted the new bunch of brochures he had sourced at the last Travel Expo he had attended in South Africa. He picked up his coffee that sat on the table next to him, and took a sip, then he lifted the top brochure and began reading.
Buffel spat his coffee onto the paper. Then he wiped it quickly with his sleeve.
‘Shilo!’ he said as he stared at the colour picture in the advert for the Amarose Private Hunting Ranch. Shilo hadn’t aged much. He looked just as fit as he had the day he left Piet Retief. Perhaps a little grey had snuck in on his temples in the last few years, but otherwise his smile was just as big as always.
He looked happier than Buffel had ever seen him. It seemed to be an inner glow, rather than an exterior expression. Buffel frowned and ran his finger over the image.
It didn’t look like he was posing for the photograph as he drove the Toyota with its tracker on the front. Three big elephant bulls with their large tusks stood in the left of the picture.
Just what a trophy hunter wanted.
He continued to read the animal listings and costs of the newest ranch to publicise its hunting quota for buffalo, lion and leopard. The Amarose Private Hunting Ranch held four of the big five up, and was advertising concessions for hunting within their fences.
But Buffel only saw Shilo.
Shilo, who had deserted him.
Shilo, who had information that could destroy him now that he had built up a new business and a reputation.
Shilo, who knew too much, and needed to be silenced.
Shilo who had helped the butterfly escape, and might know where she was now.
He put his hand over his heart as the voices rushed back into his head.
It raced.
His body was unhappy that after these years, when he has been so settled, he had found Shilo again.
But he wouldn’t get up to take his meds waiting in his bathroom. He was stronger than those meds, he didn’t need them.
Soon he would be hunting and then calmness would return.
Patience.
Buffel knew that patience was the secret to checking in on Shilo, making sure he’d remembered their PSYOPS code and never talked.
Patience.
He looked at his fireplace where two huge ivory tusks arched towards each other. Set in elephant feet, and weighted, he compared the size of his last trophy to those in the picture. About forty centimetres still remained inside the elephant, but he thought that the elephant he had shot in the Zambezi valley was bigger than what was on offer from the private ranch.
But he wasn’t going be visiting Amarose for the animal quota this time.