Being stalked by buffalos

Are we stalking them or are they stalking us? Photo and video by David Lansing.

Before setting off through the thick montane, Calvin issues instructions: Stay tightly bunched and follow his hand signals; make no noise; if we happen to spot a buf or a leopard in heavy bush after he’s already passed it, “Well, then you’re on your own,” he says with a small smile, “but don’t run. That only makes it fun for them.”

We walk through the eerily-quiet forest, silently scrambling over fallen logs and mossy boulders. If you look down at your feet to see where you are going, you run the risk of walking into an elaborate spider web, that of golden orbs the size of fists, strung between the trees head-high. Calvin says not to worry. The golden orb is quite poisonous but can’t bite anything flat—like a forehead. Still, it is disconcerting when one wanders across the top of your head.

After awhile we come across broken grass littered with still-steaming buffalo dung. Calvin motions for us to be perfectly silent and keep our eyes on the thick woodland ahead of us. The breeze swirling through the trees picks up; I smell the heavy, musky, barnyard odor of the buffalos. Just as Calvin reaches for the binoculars looped over his chest, Hardy coughs, involuntarily, and the forest explodes with the thundering rush of twenty or more buffalos crashing through the trees a stones throw in front of us. The sound, which thumps me in the chest like a fist, and the sight of such large, powerful animals crashing through the woods so close to us is magnificent and horrifying.

As Robert Ruark wrote in his fine memoir Horn of the Hunter, “I don’t know what there is about buffalo that frightens me so. Lions and leopards and rhinos excite me but don’t frighten me. But that buff is so big and mean and ugly and hard to stop, and vindictive and cruel and surly and ornery. He looks like he hates you personally. He looks like you owe him money. He looks like he is hunting you. I had looked at a couple of thousand of him by now, at close ranges, and I was scareder than ever. He makes me sick in the stomach, and he makes my hands sweat, and he dries out my throat and my lips.”

That just about sums up my feelings as well.

Here’s a short video of us stalking buffalos.