PH Andrew Dawson takes counsel with his old friend and tracker, Mukassa. Mukassa is a legend in the Zambezi Valley, the best tracker in the region
A professional hunter friend, Ivan Carter, likes to work very close to elephants, almost never allowing a shot at more than ten yards. Some of his clients, perhaps including me, are understandably a bit shaken when the great gray forms loom at this distance, seemingly close enough to touch. When he judges that the jitters might have an adverse effect on shot placement, Ivan backs off to regroup. In calming his clients, one of the points he makes is, "After all, we've got the guns."
Yes, we do--"we" being the professional hunter with his ever-present big bore, and you or me, bwana wa safari. We, however, are not the only ones who work in close to dangerous beasts, or who, if you or I mess up, are the only ones to follow the blood spoor. Most of the time we aren't even the first or the closest. The guys who show the greatest courage are not the men with the guns, but the unarmed trackers who show us the way.
I've been fortunate to hunt with many great trackers from numerous tribes, and I've messed up on my share of dangerous game. When I have to go in after something nasty, my palms sweat and my feet seem anchored in cement. Not so the trackers. They may get very quiet and very serious, but they go in first, unarmed.
There is much great reading in the body of literature we call "Africana." Some of it, unfortunately, is chest-beating claptrap. Not infrequently I see an account of a dangerous encounter in which the trackers "all run away." This has not been my experience, but, after all, trackers don't have guns, and if they don't trust the men who do, then the smart money is to run like hell. After all, it isn't necessary to outrun the animal. It's only necessary to outrun the overweight client. But these guys don't run, at least not very far. Remember, their job is to follow the spoor and find the animal. When this happens, and sometimes it happens very fast, their job is finished. Except for this: to get out of the way so that the men with the guns can do their job. This can mean vacating very quickly, which seems to me far more sensible than standing, blocking the shot, and getting run over.
I have had the great pleasure of hunting with some really marvelous trackers. First were Musili and Muindi, of the famed Wakamba tribe of southern Kenya. I learned much from their boss, Willem Van Dyk, my first professional hunter--but I learned just as much from these proud, taciturn warriors.
Just this past year, in southern Tanzania, it was my honor once again to hunt with two more great Wakamba hunters, Makanyanga and Sengi. They are old men now. As boys, both had hunted elephant with bow and poisoned arrows in the Wakamba fashion. As young men, they followed the safari trail with David Ommaney, Makanyanga starting in 1952 (the year I was born); Sengi in 1957. Between them these men have tracked across Africa for more than a century, from Zimbabwe to Ethiopia, and from Kenya to Gabon.
Twenty years ago I hunted with their elder Salum, of the same village, who had started with Philip Percival. There is vast experience and much wisdom in such men, and rarely are they given the credit they deserve. My friend Michel Mantheakis, current boss of Sengi and Makanyanga, and former boss of Salum until he passed on, told me something that few white professional hunters would dare: "These old men have more experience than any white hunter, and but for educational opportunities, could have been better professional hunters than any of us."
