CHIRUNDU TALES. (Part 10)
Over time, we had a few notable events involving some of our African staff. Ambrose, our carpenter, who featured in a previous article when he thought he had been bitten by a snake, had a very keen interest in alcohol consumption and I doubt if a single weekend went by without him getting completely blotto. Having said that, he was a very accomplished tradesman and could be relied on to turn out a professional product during the working week when he was sober.
One Sunday night he was in his usual tipsy state and chose to approach me about a salary raise he felt he rightly deserved. The first I knew about it was when Helen woke me up to find him outside, shouting at the top of his voice and waving a machete. He was really far gone and not in the least bit interested in postponing the grievance until Monday morning. I knew him well of course and did not feel that I was in any danger of being attacked but Helen had other ideas. I tried to reason with him and eventually my watchman and a couple of other workers managed to coax him away.
This all took place next to our bedroom window and when it was all over and I went inside, I found Helen standing in the bedroom brandishing a 12 bore shotgun, which I might add, was loaded with buckshot! The incident really upset her and I am sure that throughout, she was quite prepared to use it if he had actually attacked me. She had been standing in the darkness with the gun pointed at Ambrose’s head about 2 yards away and I don’t think he ever realised how close he came to having his head blown off!
Evans Ratidzo was one of our Field Technicians who worked on the collection of data for analysis by our research team in Salisbury. He had been well educated at school and was trained at Rekomeche Research Station for the work he was employed to do. For a city boy, he adapted well to conditions on the station, particularly when it came to encountering wild animals in the course of a days’ work. On a daily basis he would encounter a fair selection of wild animals, particularly elephants, but seemed to cope quite well in fact he only ever complained about one elephant, the sick one that was shot by George Mawdsly a sugar estate employee.
One Saturday afternoon I was informed by one of the field workers that a small herd of buffalo had penetrated our fenced area breaking the fence as they did so. I collected my rifle and as they were within a nearby paddock, soon located them. For culinary reasons I chose a young bull which I managed to kill with a single neck shot. The rest of the herd disappeared.
The herd had been in a fairly thick area so it was necessary to cut a track to recover the carcase. I walked back to our HQ to alert a crew to clear the track and allow a tractor and trailer in. Evans, who was back at base, accompanied me back to the spot as he had never seen a dead buffalo before. We were standing by the animal whilst waiting for the gang to arrive when Evans felt the call of nature and disappeared behind some bushes about 20 or 30 yards away.
After a few minutes I heard a loud yell and turned to see Evans hobbling back towards me with his trousers round his ankles. Initially I found it rather amusing but within a few seconds realised that he was in trouble. He fell down before he reached me and was unable to get up, complaining of severe pain in his side as he tried to do so. When asked what had happened he said he was butted by a buffalo that attacked him from behind The gang arrived at that moment so I tasked them with making a stretcher whilst I went to collect my LandRover. We loaded Evans up and I took him, with great care I might add, to the mission hospital at Chirundu where he was admitted. I then returned to the station.
Early the following morning I returned to the spot where the buffalo had been and found traces of blood. It seemed that I had a wounded buffalo on my hands! With Julius as tracker as well as backup (he carried the .458) we followed the spoor and about a mile and a half on, we found a young dead buffalo heifer that had a hole in her rib cage. We confirmed later that the hole was created by a .375 bullet, the same as I had used the previous day. I had to accept that it was likely that I had inadvertently killed the two buffalo with a single shot and reported the matter to the Game Department who accepted that it must have been an accident as only one shot had been fired which was easily heard back at HQ.
Later in the morning I went to the hospital to see Evans only to find that he had been transferred by ambulance to the Government hospital at Kariba as the mission could not cope with his injuries. I then drove on to Kariba only to discover that he had been airlifted to Salisbury where he spent several weeks in traction, having suffered a fractured hip. On his release from hospital he was sent home with instructions not to return until he was 100% fit. He returned to the Salisbury office just before Christmas and as it happened I was there at the same time on one of my quarterly trips.
Naturally it made sense that he would travel back with me and so we set off. When we reached Chirundu, we were greeted by a flooding Mwangu river that prevented us reaching the station. Luckily I was able to borrow a boat from a friend on the sugar plantation and so we loaded up and headed for home. The boat we were in was only about 12 feet long but had a large outboard engine which pushed it along at a good 30-35 mph so the 15 or so miles we had to travel should only have taken us about half an hour. I knew this section of the river well so was not worried about hidden sandbanks or trees etc.
About a mile downstream from the Kafue River junction I spotted a lone hippo well ahead of us and did not take any particular notice of it as hippo were plentiful in the area and would normally move out of the way of an oncoming boat. Somewhat surprisingly I did not see the hippo again but when we reached the approximate point where it had been, it suddenly re-appeared, about 20 or 30 meters ahead of us and came straight at us with its mouth wide open. As we were travelling at full speed there was little I could do except swerve to our left. Had I de-throttled, we almost certainly would have hit it head on. Luckily the swerve worked but we were perilously close to it in fact the spray from the boat splashed over its head. Evans , who was sitting to my right could have touched it I am sure but he chose to dive under the boat deck. He emerged as I levelled the boat out and looked decidedly pale! When I looked back upstream, the hippo had surfaced and next to her was a very young calf. Problem solved! The remaining couple of miles to the station were uneventful.
Shortly after we arrived home, I found Evans waiting for me outside my office. He asked me for a sheet of paper on which to write his resignation! He told me that as much as he enjoyed his job and respected me as his boss, he felt that being around me was not good for his health and there had to be a better way to make a living. I talked him out of it in the short term and undertook to try and find him a better job. I sympathised with his sentiments and contacted our Salisbury office to see if there were any vacancies in the laboratory. As luck would have it there was a position vacant for a junior lab technician so the transfer was made and Evans no longer had to worry about elephants, buffalo, hippos and me!
Once he left for Salisbury, I seldom saw Evans again but I was very pleased to hear of his progress at the lab. Obviously the American entomologists he worked with were very impressed and arranged for him to go to the USDA facility in Orlando Florida where he went on to study for a degree in entomology at the University there. I don’t know what became of him as he was still in the US when our project closed. I’m sure he did well and no doubt had lots of tales about life in the wilds of Africa to tell his fellow students.
Once again my faithful watchman/tracker Julius gets a mention. Whenever I went hunting or game catching , Julius would be with me. The rules under which we residents were permitted to hunt were fairly strict and controlled by a committee of Chirundu Hunting Association members under the watchful eye of the Game Department. The association was given a designated area to be hunted as well as quota at the beginning of each season which was divided amongst the members. Basically we each bought a General Game License that covered a selection of 12 of the smaller game animals such as Impala and warthog but did include two kudu as I recall. Buffalo, elephant and the larger antelopes such as eland and sable and the big cats were hunted under Supplementary licenses as were additional smaller animals as long as they were within the overall quota.
Because of my location, some people naturally thought I would be taking advantage and exceeding my quota but I emphatically deny ever having done that and religiously obeyed the rules. After each animal was killed we were obliged to record it on the back of the license within 24 hours and report it to the Hunting Association secretary within 3 days. There were no restrictions on game birds provided one had a valid Bird License. I was never very interested in bird hunting and restricted my activities to the occasional Guinea Fowl or Francolin shot for the pot with my faithful little Brno .22. However I did on one occasion use a shotgun to very good effect.
The occasion started on September 30th, the last day of the hunting season for game as well as birds. The duck season started on October 1st. Helen and I were having dinner with the Stroebels, friends of ours on the estate. Ral, the husband, proudly displayed a new 5 shot Remington semi-automatic shotgun he had purchased and insisted I borrow it and try it out. Somewhat reluctantly I accepted.
As usual, there were a lot of guinea fowl nearby so I called Julius and we set off on foot intending to bag a couple of birds with the spanking new Remington. The birds were in the gully below our HQ and soon took flight as we approached. I reacted by firing three rapid shots and saw a couple of birds fall. Julius dashed forward and started to pick up the fallen birds and as he was doing it, I heard a vehicle approaching from the direction of Mana Pools and told Julius to stay out of sight. It turned out to be Ranger “Scratch” Tebbit who was somewhat upset that having driven the 30 or so miles from Mana that morning he had not seen a single Guinea Fowl. He had been asked to take some back to his colleagues at Marongora!
I said that I might be able to solve his problem and shouted for Julius to come out of hiding. He asked if I wanted him to bring out the birds, which was a little embarrassing. Anyway he emerged carrying about 12 birds. He was soon relieved of about 10 of them and “Scratch” departed with a smile on his face and not a mention about my shooting birds one day out of season.
Julius was a sort of gamekeeper on my staff and was responsible for controlling baboons and monkeys that were damaging our maize and protecting our domestic as well as game animals used in our various cages around the station plus our domestic herd that was kraaled at night at HQ. He and two others were issued with single shot shotguns that were only used for crop protection. Each evening the guns were handed in and locked up in my safe.
Very early on, Helen and a friend, Angela Faulder from Gatooma came on a visit and spent a couple of days with me. One night whilst they were there Julius arrived at the house to tell me that there were two “Kitties” very close by, probably 50 or so meters away, just behind our chicken run. The Kitties were actually leopards I put a few Heavy Load SG shotgun cartridges in my dressing gown pocket and took one of the shotguns out of the safe. I advised the girls to stay in the house.
With Julius holding the spotlamp we approached where he had seen them and sure enough they were still there, crouched closely together. I was in a bit of a dilemma because although I was perfectly entitled to shoot I was reluctant to do so. I decided to scare them off with a shot over their heads but when I pulled the trigger, all I got was a click! I reloaded and tried again with the same result. The leopards had not moved so we backtracked slowly and I took a rifle and let off a shot over the spot where they had been. We did not see them again. Actually we never saw another leopard until the final week of the three years of the project when in a matter of three days, we saw five!
The shotgun was found to have a broken firing pin which sent a chill down my spine. If I had have fired at the leopards and it was the shot that broke the pin, what would I have done if I had wounded one or both of them? To put it mildly, Julius and I could have been in serious trouble not to forget the two girls who may have had a couple of casualties to deal with!
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