Seventy pounds, broken tip, mock charge
Monday, 28 April 2014
Two kilometers from camp, the first fresh big-bull spoor of the safari. Dung still warm. Broken branches. Two hundred meters out, a very old bull — one tusk snapped in half, the other maybe seventy pounds — turns and charges.
It was colder than Alaska at first light. We drove out at a quarter to six, west on a dirt road, and two kilometers from camp we hit a fresh old-bull spoor — the first one of the safari. Big enough to wake everyone up. Five minutes in we found warm dung.
He walked the dirt road a while, then the gravel to Hereroland. On the gravel we lost him — hard ground, no print. The trackers took a quarter of an hour and put him back together three hundred meters further. He held the road another two hundred meters and we lost him again.
The trackers quartered the road edges looking for the step-off. A branch broke, loud, in the bush left of the road. Felix parked. The print was in the sand right next to the tire. We went in seven hundred and fifty meters and saw the bull at two hundred, in a thin patch of morning light.
He was very impressive. Right tusk broken off more than halfway. Left tusk three and a half feet long and thick — call it seventy pounds. We tried to close. He heard us, and he did not care for it, and he mock charged.
That was enough excitement for the morning. We let him walk. On the way back to the cruiser, very fresh kudu dung — a reminder that the country was there if you could find where to look.