Here and There Read Online Free PDF Page B

bought a ticket there and then. And my heart sang, and my soul quivered, and my doctor started filling prescriptions and needles. One of the most embarrassing and shaming things about going to Africa is that we have to take an expensive chunk of First-World pharmacopoeia with us. Prophylactics, inoculations, oils, ointments, unctions and sprays, none of which are available or offered to people who live there.
    I had been invited to go big-game hunting, in the bush that runs along the southern edge of the Serengeti plain and the Ngorongoro Crater. I’d never done this before. I don’t have a problem with hunting per se – I spent quite a lot of my autumn shooting birds and stalking deer – but game hunting in Africa comes with a long tail: from Teddy Roosevelt to Ernest Hemingway and all those army officers galloping about bagging things, and the murderous taxidermically challenged Americans, looking for big and rare things to decapitate in the name of interior decoration.
    If you peruse YouTube, you’ll find that the very cream of all of the most objectionable white males in the universe are posting little films of themselves wearing absurd amounts of camouflage over their paunches and baseball caps, dribbling over mega-ammunition and rifles that would cost five years’ wages of the men who have to carry them. These hunters beam on raw mainlined adrenaline, punching the air over some diminished corpse. It’s not a good look, and it’s not something I want to be associated with.
    But then, being white in Africa comes with all sorts of bad looks. Every white face arrives trailing a long story. And that’s difficult, and you wish that you could wear a T-shirt that read, ‘Really, I’m not like all the others’, in 13 tribal languages. But of course you are.
    I’d never done big-game hunting, and I was interested particularly because I like being out in the bush, and this was a couple of weeks before the rains were due. The temperatures were stifling. Everything was parched into shades of beige and terracotta, but there were still amazing splashes of green, and in the brittle grass, flame-ball lilies of bright orange and yellow sprouted miraculously.
    If you didn’t know, you’d think all this was a dying place, that precious little would return from the desiccation. Every afternoon the heat rises, and the great cumulonimbus clouds sit on the horizon like mountain ranges, a threat and a promise of things to come. This is not beautiful in any traditional aesthetic way. This land has got more forms than any other living environment. Everything is gnarled and bent, hunched and defensive. Everything has to fight for its little corner. It’s like looking at nature with all the adjectives stripped away.
    This is where we came to hunt buffalo. Buffalo are mythologised by hunters as the most frightening animal in Africa. They’re not. It’s the ones with the guns that are most frightening. But buffalo are huge and tend to be bad tempered. They have short sight but excellent hearing and noses, and will charge first and ask questions later. (They don’t ask very complicated questions.) They are very unpredictable when threatened or spooked. Most herd animals will run. Running offers the best statistical option for every individual in the herd. However, in small groups, ones or twos, it can be that attack offers the best statistical option, so buffalo can go either way.
    A professional hunter, two local trackers and I stalked into the middle of herds of buffalo, waiting beside trees, standing very still, like big kids in silly hats playing Grandmother’s Footsteps or What’s the Time Mister Wolf, as the huge black cows slowly moved past us, sniffing the air, staring with small, baggy eyes, sensing something. Watching buffalo is spectacular. In fact, I can’t think of any other 40 minutes of my life that have been as completely concentrated on one task.