The Secret Seven (Part 2)
At times the hunter needs to rely heavily on patience and a stroke of luck.
The civet was a stroke of luck. Normally a nocturnal animal which, given my personal ethics of only hunting during natural light conditions, meant I was confined to bright moonlight nights and, as such, I did not have high hopes of finding one. It was the disgusting nomads from Sudan who gave me the animal. They bribed the local governor and illegally invaded the exclusive hunting area set aside by the Chadian government – north of the Aouk River, which formed the border between this country and the Central African Republic – with their cattle, donkeys, camels and sheep and then set fire to the veld to bring on the early flush of green. The wall of smoke and fire flushed out a Nigerian bohor reedbuck and, as we raced to load it ahead of the fast approaching fire, a huge civet sprang from his hiding place. The third shot from my belt fed .375, dropped it as it ran directly away from me. As I had loaded a soft on top of three
solids, my last shot (the first had been used to shoot the reedbuck) not only killed this beautiful viverridae instantly, but barely damaged the lustrous coat of this solitary animal found almost throughout SubSaharan Africa.
The final confrontation with the nomads ended badly for all involved. One nomad was shot and killed by a game guard with a .458, one was shot in the legs with a shot gun and my guide was speared through the forearm and axed against the leg. But for him putting up his arm, the spear would have gone through the middle of his chest. That summarily put an end to our hunt. I flew home and my guide was arrested and jailed for four months as soon as he came out of hospital in the capitol, N’djamena. After his release from jail, he spent some time with me in South Africa but then returned to face the spurious charges forming the basis for his arrest. He was found not guilty and his name was cleared. Justice prevailed in the end but, this being Africa, not without a fight!
So, the civet was important to me, not only because it was a beautiful, huge, old male but as a memento of the troublesome times we endured. What I did not know at the time was that all of these small carnivores seem to have an almost invisible layer of fat against the skin which, after you have skinned it, needs to be scraped off with a sharpened spoon or similar instrument. Failure to do so prevented salt penetrating the skin, which resulted in its destruction once it entered the tanning process and so I lost the biggest and best civet skin you could ever imagine and the one in the photograph is one which I bought from my taxidermist as an example of the animal for my trophy rooms. What a pity!
There are one or two other things you may not know about this solitary animal, namely: 1. It is a good swimmer but a
poor climber and digger. 2. Its spinal crest when erected can make it look up to 30% bigger. 3. It is omnivorous like us and its principal food consists of arthropods – millipedes and beetles – fruit and small mammals. 4. It is frequently trapped for meat in West Africa. 5. It secretes a waxy substance from its perineal glands which, after refining, is used as a fixing agent for perfume and has been so used for over a hundred years.
PATIENCE NEEDED
I hesitated for a long time before searching for the two genets. Their beautiful coats, large black eyes and sinuous bodies wriggling like unsubstantial wraiths through intertwined branches at night fascinated me. I thought they were beautiful and perfectly designed for their role in the food chain. It was only when I watched the incredible speed and skill with which one despatched a rat that I realised what compact, effective, silent, little assassins they were in reality. They say dynamite comes in small packages, well, these little carnivores were nitro-glycerine on legs.
Bucket loads of patience and my ancient Brno .22 with a silencer was what it took in the end, although I shot the large spotted or Cape genet – to me they are indistinguishable – in broad daylight in an old disused grain silo when alerted to its presence by our staff. When the two subspecies are not next to one another it can be difficult to know whether what you are looking at is the small or large spotted genet. Remember, the small spotted always has a white spot at the end of its tail.
THE FAVOURITE
By now I was hooked. Please don’t laugh, but I made a special trip to Tanzania to hunt for a honey badger. Oh, okaaaay, a side-striped jackal and a striped hyena as well. I hunted with Schalk Tait under the auspices of Macumba Safaris, which is owned by Mauro Daolio. Schalk has two law degrees although he has never practised law and I thoroughly enjoy hunting with this athletic young man – his South African school boy javelin record still stands, or so I am led to believe and my hunting partner once lost a $100 bet that Schalk could not throw a stone over 100 metres. Well, standing at the 100 metre mark was also a mistake and my partner not only lost the bet but the stone opened a substantial cut on his head when he failed to duck in time!
Of all the Secret Seven, the honey badger is my favourite. It is truly unique and there is only the one species in the Mellivorinae genus. I have grown up with stories about the pluck, courage and sheer chutzpah of this stumpy little beast with its cocky gait and big attitude and I still remember the photograph of one stalking fearlessly through a herd of elephants at a waterhole as they parted before him, while his own track did not deviate one iota.
What you cannot see clearly from photos, however, is the thick, loose skin around its neck, which Jonathan Kingdon (zoologist and author) thinks serves as protection against the bites of larger carnivores and, possibly, venomous snakes and bees and, in one recorded incident, it took a pride of lions a »
» whole 15 minutes to kill one poor, lone honey badger. And who can forget the film sequence where the heroine of the piece was bitten by a puffadder she was attacking and seemingly died, only to recover some time later and devour the snake she had killed!
Kingdon goes on to add that: “Enclosure of the external ear within the thickened body skin may also be an adaptation against bites, especially those of insects. While the absence of external ears may attenuate longer-distance air-borne sounds, the ratel is very sensitive to vibrations and sounds within trees or underground.”
They are certainly ferocious and Mills and Hess, in The Complete Book of Southern African Mammals, refer to James Stevenson-Hamilton, the first warden of the Kruger National Park, who recorded “two incidents in which a honey badger reputedly attacked a wildebeest and a waterbuck by going for the scrotum; both animals are believed to have died from the resulting wounds”.
Pound for pound, it has the largest brain of any carnivore, which is contained in a particularly hard and heavy skull. It has well-muscled shoulders and neck (the one I shot wore a size 20 collar) and has broad forepaws with huge claws. When it wants to, it can also make a loud rattling roar which, along with its “get-out-of-my-way” approach to life, can be quite intimidating.
They are omnivores and specialise in digging out insects, mice, spiders and scorpions with their powerful front claws. They also take on bigger creatures, such as large, poisonous snakes and springhares but, interestingly enough, the extent to which they eat honey is not known. I knew most of this but what I did not know was that, “when pursued a honey badger may... resort to using chemical defences. I once watched four spotted hyenas chase a badger into a tree. The badger fell out of the tree, in among the group, and instantly there was a foul smell as, with teeth bared and rattling, it faced the hyenas. They jumped away and the badger disappeared into the night.” Without wishing to sound crude, I imag- ine that if it was me that fell out of a tree in like circumstances, the resulting smell would not have been dissimilar.
Although not common anywhere, honey badgers are found throughout Africa, except in the driest parts of the Sahara and Namib deserts, the rainforest of West Africa, the Nile Valley, South Africa’s Free State and the Mediterranean coastline. Kingdon mentions that, “areas in which the ratel is rare or absent are increasing. The reasons for this are not fully understood but may include susceptibility to cat and dog diseases. As modern apiculture displaces the more fatalistic and tolerant practices of traditional bee-keepers, the ratel is beginning to suffer serious persecution.”
I was lucky enough to study honey badgers on two occasions and learn about the symbiotic relationship that existed between them and pale chanting goshawks, on the one hand, and black-backed jackals, on the other hand. My tracker told me that, in the Kalahari, whenever you saw goshawks on the ground or fluttering down repeatedly onto it, you could be sure that honey badgers were not far away. I once saw precisely that. My better sighting, however, was of a black-backed jackal following a busy honey badger scurrying from one patch of scrub to another. The jackal would wait patiently for the badger to start scuffling about and digging until the mice ran out. The jackal got the better of the deal as he caught at least three mice to every one by the ratel but he didn’t seem to mind and effectively ignored the jackal.
The bottom line, however, is that the honey badger is one tough, little critter and, if it weighed as much as a lion, I doubt that many would hunt it other than in a tank.
As we drove along the rutted, two-tyre, dirt track not far from the Kigosi River in north-western Tanzania, I could make »
out a large, grey-black blob ahead. We stopped the Land Cruiser. Through my 10x42 Leica Geovids I could make out a lone hippopotamus heading in our direction. On she came, never varying her plodding pace. In fact, she bumped into the car, taken by surprise. She retreated a step, confirmed the obstacle was not going to move and scraped past the passenger door ignoring all of us. I could have patted her on the head through the open window. She was miles from water and heading even further away. We assumed she must have been forced to leave her fast drying waterhole and, in desperation, was trying to find an alternative source. The future looked bleak for her.
The sighting cast a damper on our early morning mood and we drove on in silence, each with his own thoughts, mine very much on the fate that would one day inevitably confront me.
We stopped, still in silence as we reached the edge of the tree line overlooking the mbuga behind a thick, spreading, vehicle-high, no-name shrub where Schalk had previously seen a pack of side-striped jackals. We climbed onto the back of the vehicle and used it as a blind and glassed the mbuga to our front. No good, the surrounding vegetation was too thick so we climbed down and, bent double, made our way to a large termite mound standing free and on its own at the edge of the mbuga. Better!
From our new elevated position, Schalk almost immediately spotted something – a honey badger! Nerve sapping seconds ticked by as he tried to orientate me in the still gloomy light. I just could not see the relatively small dark grey animal against the predominantly charcoal ground of the mbuga. Eventually I picked up movement – always the dead give-away. My, he looked small from where I was. “He’s about 180 metres away. I know it’s far but we can’t go closer. As soon as we move from here he will see us and run. Have a go. See what you can do.”
I rested my rifle on my day bag and found I was surprisingly steady. Even through the scope, however, the dark figure, outlined by the silver grey path of fur on its back, seemed impossibly far. Suddenly the busy badger stopped sideways on, lifted his front half off the ground and peered myopically ahead. From my position it looked for all the world like a large, black mole snake.
The shot flowed from my .375, loaded with 285gr PMP solids and sighted an inch high at 100 metres. As I recovered from the recoil, exclamations and excited chatter broke out in Swahili from behind me. “Come on, let’s go and see what you have killed,” Schalk said in his broad Afrikaans accent.
He was a monster; 42 inches from nose to tail and twice the size of any I had seen before. The bullet had bisected his thick neck two inches from the oblique crevices which served as its ears on each side of the big, blunt muzzled head and three inches to the left of where I had aimed. What a lucky shot!
I suppose the test of any endeavour is a simple question. Would I do it again? In the case of the Secret Seven, probably not but I am so glad I have done it once. I learned so much about animals I had previously all but overlooked and came to admire them enormously. I hope you will give them a try and make up your own mind.