An unforgettable safari in Tanzania's Rungwa region.

by Diana Rupp

Professional hunter Peter Barnard looked through his binocular with the intensity of a mariner spotting land after a months-long voyage. “Do you see him, Diana? Do you see the bull I’m talking about?”

“Can’t miss him,” I replied as calmly as I could. The Cape buffalo stood on the end of a long line of buffalo in an open area of long yellow grass, and it was like no buffalo I’d yet seen. Its horns swept far out beyond its ears, dipped down in sweeping curls, and curved back up again, ending in gleaming black points. Its bosses, though not large, were broad and solid all the way across. It was a mature bull, beyond a doubt.

The buffalo were all facing us, a long line of them. Our hunting team had just closed the distance by about fifty yards over open ground, and though the herd certainly had us pegged, they hadn’t budged. We’d been chasing them through the scattered cover of a miombo woodland for the past hour, but now it seemed they had tired of running and had decided to stop and figure out what was pestering them.

At any rate, we weren’t going to move closer and risk spooking them. Peter set up the shooting sticks and I rested the .375 H&H on them and centered my cross hairs on the bull’s chest. But a straight-on frontal shot at 100 yards was not a shot I was going to take. The big bull looked in our direction, periodically dropping its head and coming up with a mouthful of grass. We looked back at the bull and its compatriots through our various optics. It was a standoff at high noon, and the next move was mine. I could feel the expectant silence of the hunting team behind me as Peter and I exchanged brief, whispered consultations.

“I’m going to wait for a broadside shot,” I said.

Peter agreed that it was likely the bull would eventually turn. The other possibility, left unsaid, was that the herd would break and run at any moment and we’d lose our chance. With fourteen years of experience behind him, Peter had seen too much go wrong with the frontal chest shot on buffalo, especially at such distance, and all through the safari he’d impressed upon me the importance of waiting for a broadside angle. But it was easier to discuss it in the abstract than when staring down a bull with 45-inch-wide horns.

My buffalo-hunting resume consisted of a whole lot of reading about it and two and a half days of actually doing it, so I was determined to heed his advice and wait. The importance of making a good, clean shot cannot be overstated on any hunt, but on a buffalo hunt, the stakes are higher. The slightest miscalculation could mean endangering not just myself but the entire hunting team, for a wounded buffalo is one of the most dangerous creatures on the African continent. So, with a steady rest for my rifle on the sticks, I tried to breathe and relax my muscles and stay calm and wait. A strong, warm breeze blew directly in my face as sixty-odd Cape buffalo stared at me with their tough, dark glares. Behind me, seven people who had worked hard to get me this opportunity stood motionless in the dust and sun, waiting for me to shoot.

Tracks in the Dust

We’d left camp around 6:30 that morning as usual, the dark-green Land Cruiser pulling up to the main tent just as we finished breakfast. I drained the last of my coffee, shrugged into my fleece-lined jacket, and climbed up on the high seat. My husband, Scott, slid in beside me. Our .375s were already snugly seated in the rack in front of us, the camera bag at our feet.

The old game ranger, wearing one of the colorful knit hats that were his signature, handed up his weathered .30-06 to add to the gun rack and then clambered in stiffly beside me. Trackers Martin and Fikiri and assistant Kombo climbed up and took their spots in the seat behind us. Lead tracker Mishak, who had come up from Zimbabwe with Peter to spend part of the hunting season in Tanzania, stood beside us where he had a good view of the road ahead. I tried out a cheerful “Jambo” on everyone and they all smiled and returned the greeting.

On this, the third day of our Tanzania safari, Swahili words were starting to come easily. Many of them seemed more appropriate in context than their English equivalents, especially nyati and mbogo, the words used interchangeably for Cape buffalo. I’d learned some qualifiers, too: We were looking for a kubwa sana nyati. At least, Peter was trying to find me a very big buffalo. I was simply excited for a day of buffalo hunting, now that I was hooked on the fascinating and suspense-filled process of hunting this heavy-horned member of Africa’s Big Five. It’s an active hunt that involves finding fresh tracks in the dust and then following them on foot, sometimes for hours. When you catch up to a herd of these huge, short-tempered bovines and try to get a shot at one of them, things can really get interesting.

Incredibly, Scott and I had each killed our first-ever buffalo in a single amazing day, the very first of the safari. That morning, we’d tracked two separate herds, finally closing to within thirty-five yards of an unalarmed bull as it grazed. I’d center-punched its shoulder with the .375, followed up with three solid bullets as it ran, and we found it dead in the first patch of brush.

Then, after sending my buffalo back to the skinning shed in the Land Cruiser with Kombo, we’d continued on the tracks of the remaining buffalo and caught up with them again in midafternoon. Scott shot a big-bossed old bull that dropped within a hundred yards of his initial shot. But as we approached it from behind, it suddenly surged to its feet. Scott was ready and he put it back down instantly, and for good, with a point-blank shot through its spine. The moment left us all breathless.

That evening, the Tusker beer and fine South African wine flowed freely as we ate buffalo steaks around the campfire, and we looked ahead at the wonderful prospect of being able to hunt one more buffalo each during the six remaining days of our seven-day safari.

On this morning, the sky was awash in wide brush strokes of brilliant pink as we bumped across the dirt airstrip near camp and turned south on a dusty two-track. A small bird called a lilac-breasted roller flew off a branch in front of us, its neon colors rivaling the brilliance of the sunrise. We were hunting in Tanzania Wildlife Company’s Rungwa Ikili concession, and the 5,000-foot Ikili Hills formed a rugged frame for the open woodland we hunted. We’d followed a herd of buffalo up one of these ridges the day before, tracking them across rock ledges and finding them bedded on ridges with sweeping views of the plains below—places I’d never have believed buffalo would live, or that I’d be privileged to see.

We drove for more than two hours along dusty, leaf-strewn roads, hunkered in our jackets on the windy top seat of the Land Cruiser. About 9 a.m., when the sun had already burned off the morning chill, Mishak leaned down and said something to Peter through the driver’s-side window. Peter was already on the brakes, and he and the trackers bailed out and congregated around the tracks of a herd of buffalo that crossed the road sometime that morning. Their discussion, in a mix of Swahili, English, and Mishak’s native Shona, was intense, but not lengthy. Peter walked back to the vehicle with a purposeful stride, and Scott and I were already stashing our jackets under the seat and checking our ammo carriers when he said, “We’ll follow these."

I filled the magazine of my Empire Rifles .375 with three 300-grain Hornady solids and chambered a softpoint (a 300-grain Barnes Triple-Shock) as Peter instructed, checking the safety carefully and slinging the rifle over my shoulder for what might or might not be a long hike. Buffalo hunting is a team endeavor, and we made quite a procession as we headed into the forest, leaving Kombo with the truck. Mishak and Fikiri walked ahead, working out the trail; behind them came Peter with his .416, me, videographer Jon Bergmann with his camera, tracker Martin carrying the daypack, and Scott, carrying our camera and his rifle. The old game ranger brought up the rear. We followed the tracks of the herd through the woodland for about forty-five minutes, the trackers expertly unraveling the trail each time we lost it by making half-circles around the last track. Soon the pace got slower and more intense, and when Fikiri poked the shooting sticks into a pile of buffalo dung, it squished apart, still soft and warm.

We crept to the base of a termite mound and crouched behind it, hearing the low grunts and snorts of a feeding buffalo herd just beyond. Peter edged forward on his belly and studied the situation with his binocular for several minutes before wiggling back to report that there was a good bull in the herd. We backtracked a few yards into the tall grass, got down on our hands and knees, and crawled as quietly as possible for a couple of hundred yards. When Peter finally stood up, staying behind a skinny tree, I got up too, careful to stand directly behind him. We were right on top of a big, black mass of feeding buffalo. I hardly had time to catch my breath when there was a swirl of wind and a thunder of hoofs, and suddenly the buffalo were running, and we were running after them.

We stopped behind another termite mound and for a moment we could see the herd again. Peter set up the sticks and pointed out a nice bull, but before I could settle in for a shot, the buffalo moved off into cover again, and once more we followed them, staying behind small trees and termite mounds. Eventually, the herd seemed to tire of the game. They moved out into a large, grassy opening, putting some distance between themselves and their pursuers. Once again we broke into a jog, following Peter along the edge of the opening, dodging through cover, stopping to glass the now spread-out herd. And that’s when Peter first saw the big buffalo.

“Forget the other bull!” he told me as I strained to sort out the various buffalo through my binocular. “The big one is the one we want.”

I said any good, mature bull would be fine with me, but Peter shook his head. “Trust me, you want this one,” he said with a grin.

There was a fine screen of trees between us and the herd, and now the buffalo had settled down considerably, but they were much too far away for a shot. We moved parallel to them as they fed slowly beyond the trees. It was time to make our move.

“We’re going to walk right toward them,” Peter whispered. In a brazen move, we marched into the open and directly toward the herd, Peter judging correctly that we could close the distance just enough to get into shooting range without spooking the buffalo. When he stopped to set up the sticks, the buffalo turned to face us and the standoff commenced.

It lasted probably ten minutes, but to me it seemed that empires had risen and fallen by the time I saw, out of the corner of my eye, one of the cows to the left of my bull start to turn to its right. It was the half-second of warning I needed. When the bull swung its ponderous head to the right and took a step, I could see, with razor-sharp clarity, its shoulder muscles rippling under the skin. I didn’t hear the boom of the rifle as I broke the trigger or see the buffalo kick up its back legs and take off running, which Scott described to me later, but I sure heard the commotion I had caused as I racked the bolt immediately to the sound of drumming hoofs.

What I did see was a milling mass of buffalo and the big bull running, quartering across our front. “Move quickly!” said Peter, motioning us forward. We all jogged toward the hulking black mass of buffalo. I lost sight of the bull, but Mishak hissed something to Peter that he relayed to me: “It’s down! Your bull’s down!” I was elated, if not quite believing it.

As we ran forward, the herd stood its ground, staring at us. Peter and the trackers slowed to a walk, shouting and waving their arms. Scott stood at my side and we held our rifles at the ready, and for a moment humans and buffalo glared at each other across a grassy no-man’s-land. Then, almost reluctantly, heads swinging, horns tossing, tails raised, sixty buffalo turned and galloped away, leaving one of their number behind, lying on its side. Its legs moved as we walked up to it, and, following Peter’s instructions, I put one more shot into the boiler room as insurance. The bull’s death bellow--low, quiet, and resigned--was a sad but welcome sound, and then the clearing was still.

We approached the bull with great care, Fikiri pulling its tail and Peter and I both touching its eye with the muzzles of our rifles. Then everyone crowded around to touch those magnificent horns, exchanging a barrage of exclamations, all of us repeating, “Kubwa sana nyati.” But this was more than a very big buffalo. It embodied the skills of the trackers and PH, the challenge of the stalk, the beauty of this still-wild region of Africa, and my personal wonder at making the ultimate connection with an animal that I had previously seen only in photographs, video, and dreams.

We had the pleasure of tracking buffalo for another four days, taking a fine zebra and Lichtenstein hartebeest in the process, and the safari culminated with Scott making a perfect shot on his second buffalo, a wily and ancient dagga boy, on the final day. We encountered annoyed elephants during our stalks, glimpsed lion, sable, and roan, drank more wine and cold Tuskers around the campfire, and lay at night in our dark tent listening to the eerie wail of hyenas. To me, all of these wonderful memories seem to merge into that one beautiful day when we stood together—clients and trackers and PH and cameraman and game ranger--in shared admiration of a huge buffalo in the long yellow grass, under the African sun.

For more information about this hunt, contact Tanzania Adventures Inc.