africanhuntinggazette.com 143Terry Wieland’s One for the Road
andpullingthetrigger. Thewoundedbull—
if it was our bull — was gone, then and for all
time. I should add that it was a hell of a head.
Guides like that make you even more
nervous and likely to miss. Others, like
Lekina, know that their own chances of
survival go up considerably if they keep you
calm in a tight situation, and try to make
things easier rather than harder. Shouting
“Shoot, shoot!” when the client is either not
ready, or not in a good position to do so,
accomplishes all the wrong things.
I’ve heard of, although I’ve never
experienced, the extreme case of a guide
running on ahead to try to spot a wounded
animal, and then turning around and
shouting to the hunter to “Shoot!” when
he can’t even see it from where he is. And,
naturally, the shout then spooks the beast to
make tracks.
On my first safari in Botswana, my
professional hunter was a Tswana by the name
of Patrick Mmalane, a Sandhurst graduate and
captain in the Botswana Defence Force. He
had signed on as a professional hunter with
SafariSouth. Naturally,hebeingblackas the
ace of spades, I insisted on referring to him as
my “white hunter,” which caused great mirth
among the trackers. Since Patrick and I both
held the Queen’s Commission, we declared
our end of the dining table to be the officers’
mess. We became quite good friends, and I
went back the following year for a four-week
odyssey wherein we drove around Botswana,
wingshooting, seeing the sights, and setting a
number of local beer-drinking records.
Patrick eventually left hunting and rejoined
the BDF, and the last I heard he was a
lieutenant-colonel. I mention all this because
it was interesting to see his relationship with
our trackers. They were Bushmen, in whole or
in part, and as at home in the bush as Patrick
and I were on a drill square. While Patrick
was good with a rifle, and held command in
an easy grip, he was not a tracker, and game
spotting was not his long suit. The trackers
treated him with the same somewhat bemused
respect that an experienced sergeant-major
accords to a newly appointed young officer.
In the end, we all proved ourselves to eachother—andearnedwhateverrespectwehad
— through our own abilities, and by the end
of the week, one Cape buffalo bull and several
lesser species later, we all got along with a
kind of easy familiarity. Everyone did his job,
no one screwed up, and we had a pretty happy
ship.
It would be nice to be able to say that
eventually I ended up with one tracker who
did for me what Metheke did for Ruark, but
those were other days. A tracker/gun bearer/
factotum of the Metheke stamp is either
a distant memory or, more likely, an ideal
that never really existed — certainly not for
visiting client-hunters like Ruark, or me.
One of my most treasured memories of
hunting in Africa, however, is when, on
my second safari with him, Lekina Sandeti
invited me to be a guest in his hut, and to
drink a cup of the buttermilk-like concoction
that is a staple of Masai life. This was, I was
told by my PH, a great honor. Whether
Metheke ever did the same for Robert Ruark,
I don’t know. As I say, those were different
times.Superb trackers and valued friends, from left: Lekina Sandeti, Momella Torongoi, and Abedi Shimba. Lekina and Momella are both
Masai. Abedi, who died a few years ago, was part-Bushman, and taught both Roger and Derek Hurt about tracking and bushcraft from
an early age.