Veldts, Vaals, and a 'Bok - stories from South Africa
***Warning—rant to follow.***
It is an irksome and foul thing to feel a duty to relate stories in a sterile, informative manner. This idiotic idea plagues the academic field of history and is a slight to the human dignity of those dead and alive. Why befoul the reality of experience with sanitized, chronological facts? One cannot become one in being with a fact. We creatures dwell in a universe of marvel, and most of us lock ourselves from it, while those of us who can see it simply dryly complain that no one else does and move on.
The worst thing that happens when one makes a new acquaintance is the dry recitation of the hollow chronology of their life's events like a sort of timeline graph. No person's story should be denuded and reduced to a timeline. The fact that history can be portrayed as a boring subject is a terrific testament to both the industry and the worthlessness of low-level academia.
The single biggest barrier to writing for me is the disgusting tendency to work with some sort of an audience in mind and to pander to their conjectured inclinations and intellectual or cultural capacity. This is a worthless and enshackling tendency in creative writing, and I wish to despise and eschew it and to speak out loud in my own voice and let words spill with authenticity and freedom. Refinement and stylistic honing belong to one with a voice that is already distinct. Grammar is to serve poetry and to make it better, not to bind and compromise it while still in the bud.
***End of rant.***
"Why are you in South Africa?"
I wish I could answer this question like Frederick Courtney Selous could have in 1872 and say:
"Because I am 19 years old, have $400, and would rather like to knock about and shoot some elephants whilst observing butterflies and being the autistic British explorer philosopher naturalist scout uberathlete that the world needs me to be."
Instead, the fact was that I had been rather cooped up for a few weeks interviewing for different remote accounting positions, which I was planning to leverage as a financial ballast to allow me to potentially move to Paris, hone my French to an advanced level of flawlessness, train at an excellent MMA gym, and study la femininitè française at an equally advanced and engrossing level.
What I discovered in these interviews was that these firms were charmed by the fact that I possessed personality, eye contact ability, and skill with the English language (unusual in accountants, evidently), but were simultaneously suspicious and terrified that I was not eagerly promising to be their loyal drone for the next ten years at least. They were particularly uncomfortable with me mentioning that I might go to law school even though I was planning not to be there for another year and to keep working while studying there.
If Yahweh had spoken directly to these individuals to move all their tents, goats, camels, and other paraphernalia out of the land of Ur to a place he would show them, they would have blanched, balked, and made inquiries regarding insurance. They were callow, mentally flabby, comfortable, and ruled by fear.
This cramped my soul, so after enduring a certain amount of inner tension, I coped in the best way I knew how—by buying a cheap flight to Johannesburg.
I found myself standing in a grungy and unfriendly airport, without a particular plan of where to go next, no ride, and no idea of what to look for in this strange city.
Joburg is a large wasp's nest, built out of trash, crime, and unsavory, stinging insect people. Money and the passion for it are the only forces responsible for its existence and have been from the first. It is as if a swarm of these greedy insects buzzing the desert in their rootless ravagings discovered a cluster of gold and diamonds and all swarmed onto it simultaneously, hoarding and killing while forming a clay nest that grew more and more large as it caked itself in dirt and trash, swelled with corpses, and baked rock hard and crusty in the desert sun.
Racism There is a straightforward fact. This was almost a refreshing thing to see as an American who has been subjected to constant fake preachings and noise about it. There, it is not only real, but it is acknowledged to be so. Black people will openly talk to you about the fact that they don't eat like you, live in different types of places, and like different things than you. They will also gladly stab you if a good opportunity arises. This is a tacit, mutually understood thing, and it is not hidden. Aside from hospitality employees and immigrants from other parts of Africa, almost every Black I saw in Joburg had a convicted hostility in the back of his eyes as if to say, "Yeah, I would kill you, white boy, just probably not here and probably not now." I would honestly have welcomed a good one-on-one scrap just for the experience of it, but these characters are not generally solo practitioners and would not start something unless they had a serious advantage already—which is what they mean by the "probably.". Keeping this "probably" on your side is the difference between staying alive and getting shanked in a place like Joburg.
These were my personal first impressions from the few hours I spent in Johannesburg upon arriving, and they probably do not completely reflect the reality of the place, which has some nice areas, I am told.
My plan was to stay with a connection I had through the international BJJ combat sports community in a town called Pretoria, slightly north of Joburg. This fellow had not told me where he lived yet, so I made for the most interesting thing I could find in town, which was the Voortrekker museum and memorial. This is a museum dedicated to the Dutch pioneers who went on the "Groot Trek" away from British incursion in the Cape, north across the empty, burning veldt.
The Boers are a powerful and heroic race worthy of notice and attention. South Africa came about through them and only still exists because of them. They sailed over in their creaking wooden vessels, stern of face and large of bone, and set about building, working, farming, and hunting in this brutal fairyland at the bottom of the world.
Together they nailed together wooden wagons, hitched them to small native oxen, sixteen on every wagon, and with their long whips cracking, pointed their bristly beards and starched bonnets toward the unknown and went off at a slow swinging pace, stiff-neckedly determined to colonize this murderous Eden with its pagan hordes of ebony warriors and its thousands of terrible beasts.
When necessary, they disassembled their wagons, strapped them to the oxen, and climbed mountain passes. Similar to those of the American pioneers, these wagons were a vehicle, home, and fortress all in one and could be circled in a laager and for days held against screaming masses of bloodthirsty savages.
They believed in a strong and rigid Calvinism. Notwithstanding this or their stiff necks, the Boers were a deeply poetic people who held this wonderland to be carved by the hand of a loving, omnipotent God intended for them to delight in and to settle. Many poems, songs, and sayings sprung out of their broad-moving language, and many brave, pointed churches dotted the valleys and mountains of the wilderness. And it was the gnarled old boer who read aloud the sharp Gothic print from a yellow crinkled page of his old Bible to a drowsing family beneath the dancing stars of the open veldt.
Additionally, these people, unlike Americans, maintained a more European level of culture with more permanent, ornate buildings, quality leisure, and the ability to make good conversation. They are also skilled in the social uses of alcohol and devoted to meat of all kinds. It was for a long time illegal to mow a lawn on Sunday, and many permanent dwellings were built with stone, brick, and thatch.
The 'oke (South African term, short for "bloke") with whom I spent my first couple of days was a formidable, burly character who had been a cop and worked in private security all over the world. He had been into martial arts, bodybuilding, and CrossFit at a young age and was an experienced sailor. He ran a successful company from home and had two sons, two Belgian attack dogs, and two gyms in his house, one for Jiu Jitsu and one for weights and CrossFit. He was visibly relieved when I told him I wasn't vegan.
The neighborhood he lived in had concrete walls with both razor and electric wire, ubiquitous features in South Africa; however, there was also a dairy farm within the enclosure, which had a shop and restaurant attached. This is an excellent concept and might be successful if it were tried in the States.
I later discovered that this neighborhood was the childhood home of Jan Smuts, a colossal and impressive man who began life as an uneducated shepherd boy of 14 and ended by making a significant splash in the First World War, being an advisor to Churchill, working on the Treaty of Versailles, and being Prime Minister of South Africa.
After staying and training there for a few days, I rented a car (my host told me that buses and bus stations would be problematic for a paleface) and proceeded towards the Great Karoo, where I had an arrangement to work on a cattle ranch. I made a brief stop in Kimberly and saw the mining museum, which was reminiscent of a small town in the old west, and had a chair in which Cecil Rhodes had his hair cut, as well as saloons and other things.
It was closing in on nightfall, and I was trying to find a place where I might park the car and spend the night. The area in which I was was exceedingly rough. The only places I had seen of analogous ghastliness were the Indian Reservations in New Mexico. There were vast complexes of little rusty sheet metal boxes held together with wire, fields of trash through which little children and goats ran and foraged. It was like something out of McCarthy's Road.
The likelihood of getting carjacked and killed if I stopped on the side of the road was perhaps marginally less than it would have been if I were driving it through the streets of the aforementioned apocalyptic novel of that name, but only marginally. There is a darkness in this type of poverty that is not present in any sort of natural, mud hut, wilderness state. I felt as if I were an armored beetle moving through a vast crowd starving of ants. If I stopped moving or showed weakness, I was potential food, and though I might be inconvenient and struggle, I was worth a try and would eventually be overwhelmed by numbers and stripped to the bone, and they would be a little fatter tomorrow and watch for another beetle.
It was at this point that I realized that my route passed near a town named Orania. This place is essentially an enclosed community of Boer Calvinists who farm and aim for self-sufficiency and the preservation of their culture. A friend of mine in the States was a bit of an enthusiast for the concept and had brought it to my attention. Even if it was a white supremacy fortress, I could likely excite hospitable instincts with my rugged Viking visage and potentially park my car there and survive the night.
I arrived and was let in through a portal after a couple of guards had scanned my face with a flashlight. I asked if there was any place where one could get food, and they pointed me straight ahead. It was late Saturday night, and it turned out that the whole town was gathered in the park for a concert—which I had just successfully infiltrated. Blending in was in no way a challenge since most of the locals were more or less master race material and were the cultural equivalent of American rednecks. I felt completely at home.
They were the least proficient white English speakers I encountered in South Africa, having gotten rusty through isolated intercourse with only their Boer-exclusive community. Nonetheless, I was able to buy a couple of kebabs and a pankoeke,a sort of hybridized pancake crepe dessert. There was an Afrikaans rock band groaning into microphones, and lots of ball caps and rugby shorts were in evidence. I chatted briefly with some 'okes of my own age who said that they were trying to get farm jobs in America in order to take advantage of the exchange rate.
A brief word on this. As of 2024, one can buy a frozen, grass-fed T-bone steak in a farm shop in South Africa or eat a restaurant breakfast for the equivalent of $2.50 American money; however, cars are slightly more expensive than in the U.S., and gas is about double— a bit more than $6 per gallon. Average hourly pay for labor in S.A. is around a single U.S. dollar.
Tired and feeling fairly secure, I was able to snuggle into my sleeping bag in the parking lot with no fear for my life and spent a relatively peaceful night.
Come morning, I headed for the small town from which the ranch had arranged my transport. My ride out was not until the following day, so I was directed to a B&B to spend the night. I debated finding a mountain or nearby park, but there were baboons, razor wire, and a few ill-favored individuals in evidence. Really I was not paying for lodging so much as a place to lock myself, my passport, and my laptop for a night. After rationalizing in this way, I assured myself that my masculinity would be compromised by sleeping indoors and walked in.
The woman who ran the establishment was very old and had 14 grown children. She was originally from a farm that had an ancient Bushman painting featuring a ship. This was a rather massive thing since such a painting likely predated the colonization significantly, and her farm was not near the coast. She had moved to the town with her first husband, who had since died, and they had run a dry cleaning business that had eventually shut down because of the cultural decline of formal clothing. She was clearly a rare product of a bygone age, and her house was beautifully decorated with tasteful European paintings and abundant delicate china and was equipped with an excellent library.
She inquired as to whether I was married, and when I said no, she said that in that case, I had great liberty to roam and explore life. I said that I thought that the appropriate time to do that sort of thing was early on, and she said, "You are very wise.". Coming from one who has lived nearly a century, seen times come and go, and who hosts and meets thousands of members of the human race in her own home, I thought this remark was significant.
That evening, I had an excellent, 4-hour-long conversation with a middle-aged South African couple who worked for a charter company in the British Virgin Islands. We made engrossing forays into history and orbited around cultural questions, education, and human nature in general. By the time we ended, there were four empty wine bottles on the table, and an entire pound of ostrich biltong was gone.
An old farmer in an abused pickup (called a "Buckey" in S.A.—reason unknown) gave me a lift to the ranch. We drove through some very ancient and desolate mountain country, significant for its sheep and dinosaur fossils. Then I arrived at the ranch, deposited my things in an old Boer guest cottage, built of whitewashed stone and very charming, and became involved in what was probably the most completely foul butchering project of my life.
A certain steer had died of bloat for reasons unknown, and the rancher was looking to salvage as much meat as possible. It had been hanging for two days in a very dirty shed, and all the guts were lying on a grimy black tarp. Suffice it to say that there was a mysterious green substance permeating all the tendon and skin-related areas and that nothing was salvageable. The level of unsanitariness of the entire job impressed me as being truly third world.
The uniquely African flavor was enriched by four farmhands in dirty blue jumpers consisting of one Black fellow and three bushmen. The bushmen looked like small, dark, very weatherbeaten Nepalese, and spoke broken Afrikaans in addition to their own language. They had perhaps 20 teeth between them. They were good workers and had a silent patience and durability about them. Bushmen were traditionally a regionally specific, nomadic hunter-gatherer group that lived off of antelope and yams in the Karoo area. The main character in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy was a bushman.
After the project and for the next week or so, I did various odd jobs and exploratory trips around the ranch and took meals with the owners and their children. They were a somewhat unique breed of what I would call the traditional permaculture hippie. They were fourth-generation ranchers who traveled an enormous amount, homeschooled their kids, did cob construction projects, wore lots of hand-knitted clothing of loud, bold colors, and decorated their house with the same eclectic palette. Their type of style, to me, always has typified a confused horizontal mixture between eastern and western cultures and a vertical confusion between childhood and adulthood—undisciplined, intuitive emotion without a guiding principle or vision.
Nonetheless, they were extremely real and highly practical people who had seen much of life and the world and become rich in the wisdom of experience. The rancher, as a young man, had done a walking tour of India and lived off handfuls of rice and spent time with 90-pound cave-dwelling yogis who naturally sported loincloths and floor-length dreadlocks, among other wild and strange things. They had hosted all manner of guests at their farm for educational and social reasons.
In our phone conversations leading up to my arrival, I had gleaned that there was a herd of antelope-like creatures on the property that were in need of being culled, and that furthermore a gun existed and the possibility of me borrowing the one to do the other was not unattainably remote.
After a few days, I brought this up at lunch and inquired into the details of venturing out and taking a shot. They responded that I could possibly do so, only I must only shoot a male since all the females were pregnant. So I inquired what the visible differences between males and females were, whereupon I was told:
"Well, you see, Joe, the males have... bawls."
I said that I generally operated under this assumption when dealing with mammals. They said that aside from this difference, which was almost completely imperceptible even with a pair of binoculars ("binos" they called them), there was no visible distinction between the genders of the beasts. I decided that I would disappear into the bush for a couple of days with the "binos" and study these and any other wildlife in evidence.
The creatures that I was after were called "blesbok," which is Afrikaans for "blaze buck," as they have a large white blaze down their face. Their bodies are comparable in size to a mule deer, and they have curved, goatlike horns "rather a bit oinky" in the words of my rancher. The herd on the property was about 40 head and seemed to be used to seeing people.
I threw some homemade bread, cheese, two oranges, a bunch of tiny bananas, and some hard-boiled eggs, as well as a hunk of biltong, into my backpack along with my sleeping bag and binoculars around my neck, and set off along the dusty road that cut through the ranch.
I spent about 4 hours studying the herd and got much the same result as I would have with people watching in NYC; that is, I saw much of interest but could not get a strong sense of the gender of the creatures. After a while though, through observing small tufts of fur in various places, a certain type of gait, and behaviors like aggressively trotting to the outside of the herd and snorting, I was able to get a feel for which ones were most probably male. This done, I decided to venture further afield and kept on down the road, which led through a property that belonged to a Dutch princess as well as a game reserve.
I saw an abundance of little yellow springbok with their black racing stripes, more blesbok including an albino, as well as wildebeest and zebra.
Climbing to the top of a small hill, I sat on a boulder and ate some bread, cheese, and one of my oranges. After a short time, I heard the brisk rattle of hooves, and a herd of perhaps a dozen zebras came within 150 ft of me and stopped, turning in my direction. I froze. They were so close I could hear their breath and was sure they could hear my heart beating. We stayed this way for almost 3 hours with the silence of the Veldt around us, broken only by the occasional stomp of a hoof, snort of a nostril, or rattle of a stone. During this time, I understood the power of the stripes as camouflage. You would think that bright black and white would stand out against a background of brown and green, but several times when I took my eyes off the herd, I found myself squinting directly at them, struggling to catch their outline again. The fact that the black and white of their coats form such a contrast makes their profile almost impossible to distinguish, as they form a sort of squiggle on an irregular backdrop. They are also unbelievably beautiful. Every stroke is different, like the bold stroke of a master calligrapher. All the stripes dance with each other across the hide and may flow in and out of each other but never intersect. Sometimes there appears a stroke of gray, which seems to heighten and harmonize the contrast, rather than blur it. The play of this graceful pattern over the rippling muscles of these powerful animals as they move with a sort of determined, athletic arrogance is something to behold. I had probably seen hundreds of pictures of zebras during my life and perhaps seen a few in zoos, but none of that was real compared to this.
After a while, either I left or the zebras did; I can't quite remember which. Those moments are overshadowed by the power of the experience itself. When you are totally present inside the reality of something, measuring the time you spend there is difficult and pointless.
Nonetheless, at some point it ended, and I was walking again. This time I made for a mountain and started zigzagging my way up through the scrub and long grass. Reaching the top, I encountered another animal new to me, the hartebeest. These are another deerish species with red coats and horns in the shape of a Valentine heart. I only encountered them in higher-altitude parts of the mountains, so I assume that this is their preferred habitat.
I sat on a boulder and ate more orange, some eggs, and some bread, which had become totally delicious for some reason. After that, I paid attention to an excellent sunset and started looking for an appropriately contoured piece of ground to sleep. Soon enough I found a place where the rocks, grass clumps, and ground shape were somewhat accommodating, and, encasing myself securely in my sleeping bag with the backpack as a pillow and water bottle near at hand, I lay down and watched the stars and moon.
In the morning, I got up and discovered that I was above the clouds. The sun was shining down on the valley as it dropped away from the highlands where I stood, and a flat layer of clouds was rising upwards from the bottom of the valley.
After sliding down the mountain, I started to walk back to the ranch and took notice of a group of very strange and extremely African animals—wildebeest.
Pronounced by South Africans "vil-de-bea-yust," these animals have a uniqueness of their own totally distinct from anything else on earth. They have horns somewhat like a water buffalo, as well as a hump, but with a thin and almost scrawny frame and a bizarre, lumbering, asymmetrical gait. They also have long tails covered with white feathery hair that they swing in a full circle fan motion as they run. Imagine a little lamb gamboling, or trying to gambol, while balancing a heavy backpack on his front shoulders and a dumbbell on his head, as well as an unclear sense of direction, and you will get a sense of the movements of the wildebeest during leisure hours.
After I got back to the ranch, a couple of days of work went by without any update on Blesbok hunting. There was, however, one interesting incident that happened while I was chasing cows.
It was a very foggy morning, and we were trying to assemble all of the cows who had calved in the past couple of days and move them to a new grazing area. I was tasked with running up the side of a flat-topped mountain and moving any cows and calves I encountered down to their new area. Seeing one cow with no calf on my way up, I decided to let her be and check for more at the top. The top consisted of perhaps four acres of flat ground with lots of rock and scrub. The fog was so thick that I could only see for about 20 ft in any direction. I heard a rustle in some bushes and went to inspect, thinking it could be a cow. Whatever it was quickly moved out of range, moving bushes as it went. I could only see and hear its movement from the rustling and twitching of the vegetation; there was no distinguishable shape. Whatever it was had far more agility and speed than a cow. Then I hear a sort of grunt. More bushes rustling. I followed, curious. Then whatever it was let out a sort of gargling scream that ended by swallowing itself in a guttural snort. Picking up a rock, I imitated the noise at a higher volume. It replied with further escalation. This screaming contest went on for a bit, and then I heard another voice join in from a different direction. At this point, I had crisscrossed the top and had seen no cows, so, deciding to leave before things escalated further and keeping hold of the rock, I headed down toward the ranch. Afterwards I was told that I had partaken in a screaming contest with a baboon. The ground-dwelling monkeys are actually very strong and can be dangerous, vandalous pests. I'm not sure what would have happened if one of these had attacked me; some jiu-jitsu movements might work on a baboon skeleton, but the strength, teeth, and thumbed feet might have stacked the deck conclusively against me. Generally, though, intimidation is a good tactic with animals, and it was helpful and enjoyable for me in this case.
The day before my departure from the ranch, I was finally allowed to hunt the blesbok. I was given a beautiful old bolt-action rifle with a scope and a box of ammunition. When I asked whether it was sighted in, and if so at what distance, I was told, "Probably.". I mentally shrugged and walked out in search of the herd.
After a while I found them and began closing in, looking for a male to shoot at. I was able to get about 200 yards in without causing too much excitement, but closer than that and they became skittish and would set off at a leisurely pace. Frustratingly, there were no elevated terrain features that I could use to conceal myself or rest the stock of the rifle to take aim. The fact that I was using an unfamiliar weapon of unknown accuracy while juggling a pair of binoculars and a small backpack while simultaneously looking for a good shooting posture as well as a suitable target within a group of identical animals who were constantly reshuffling themselves substantially increased the already significant stress and adrenaline of the situation.
After perhaps a half hour, I saw what seemed pretty likely to be a male. He was within effective range but partially obscured by a bush. Heart pounding, I watched him through the scope for a few minutes, debating whether I should wait for a better shot, wait until I was positive it was a male, wait until I was more calm, wait until I got into a better position, wait until it came a little closer, wait until my breathing was slower, wait for a thousand different things. Anything but take the risk of a shot. Once I did that, there would be consequences. Once I did that, my actions could be judged. Once I did that, the result was either success or failure. Once I did that, my reputation as a hunter and a man would have to bear the consequences of a split second of time and the tiny bend of a finger. Or so I thought to myself in those moments on my stomach in the dust, panting and squinting through the scope while my finger caressed the trigger and the blesbok continued his breakfast under the hot glare of the African sun. In those moments, and many others like them across different scenarios in my life, it has been prior experiences and trials that have braced me for pulling whatever triggers needed to be pulled. The fact that I had jumped trains, bought one-way tickets to places I couldn't pronounce, learned foreign languages, run from Marathon to Athens, shot dozens of guns, killed animals, and closed sales all told me that not only could I pull that trigger and deal with the aftermath, but I actually needed to pull that trigger or else betray my past experiences and the person they had made me into.
So I pulled it. The blesbok immediately jumped a couple of feet into the air and then started calmly trotting back to the herd. Outraged, I slammed another round into the chamber and let fly a wild shot, which kicked up a spurt of dust a few feet away from him. He did not seem perturbed in the least. I grabbed the binoculars for a closer look and realized that my hands were shaking so much that I could barely see anything. After the flow of adrenaline (and profanity) had slowed somewhat, I noticed that one member of the herd was walking with a slight limp. Thinking back on the first shot I had taken and supposedly missed, I could not remember seeing a spurt of dust or hearing the bullet whine or ricochet. So, I figured that I had probably wounded him in the leg and needed to finish the job and put him out of his misery.
It was at this point that the actual hunt began. I began watching and approaching the herd in hopes of singling out the limping animal while they stayed just out of range, reshuffling and trotting around as they saw fit. As soon as I would get close, they would go farther away, sometimes splitting into multiple groups and galloping totally out of sight. This went on for a couple of hours; sometimes I would catch sight of my friend with the slight limp, but he was still fast enough that I would lose him just as quickly. Eventually, I saw him split off in the direction of the cow pasture with two compatriots. I followed very far behind at a slow pace, not wanting to be noticed.
The cow pasture was a far superior location for my purposes for several reasons: the vegetation was taller, the terrain was more irregular with plenty of rocks and gullies, and the whole area was dotted by giant clay anthills, which are God's gift to the African hunter. These clay anthills are in the shape of a small igloo or pizza oven (the Boers would occasionally hollow them out and use them to bake bread), and they are generally around 3 to 4 ft tall, making both a perfect visible barrier and resting place for a rifle. I had read stories of western-style gunfights taking place behind these anthills during the Boer and Matebele wars.
The three amigos (my mental name for the blesbok) and I then began a very interesting game of peek-a-boo. I would see a horn or a nose and sneak around in a wide circle, looking for a good shot, and they would randomly shift to any position that took their fancy. Sometimes I would find the perfect anthill in what I assumed to be their general vicinity and simply wait. It was one of these times that I had an excellent shot at what was most likely my limping quarry. The problem was that the bullet would fly in the direction of the ranch buildings, which was a non-negotiable safety breach, so I had to let it go. The three amigos then did something that demonstrated to me that they understood exactly the game we were playing and were capable of employing psychological tactics to break me. I was just coming over a small rise in response to a flash of tail that I had seen, and there they were, all three of them well within range, but standing right smack in the middle of a group of cows. They looked at me. I looked at them. Little bastards. I walked towards them; they absconded at a quick pace in the direction of the open veldt again.
The saga continued on the open ground for a while, the blesbok sticking to the same strategy of leisurely circular trotting comfortably out of range, when a new character came onto the scene. I had not brought any water with me and was thus obviously thirsty, so my friend the rancher rolled up in his truck with some liquid refreshment. I updated him on the scenario and pointed out my quarry, who was limping visibly at this point, and he told me to hop into the bed, and we would see if we couldn't bring the saga to a close. We drove within range; I put his vitals in the crosshairs and did not miss. He limped for a bit and lay down; we came closer, he got up again, and we followed slowly, waiting on what we were sure would be the final moments. I hopped out, shot him in the head; he got up again, so I put one more in the body to be sure and then slit the throat so that he could bleed out.
Killing an animal is a very difficult and generally somewhat traumatic experience. I have enormous respect for the hunter who can consistently and with sterile precision end the life of his quarry on the first shot. But the reality is that events do not always shake out that way, and for every perfect kill, there were probably multiple imperfect ones that the good hunter had to experience before he became that way.
That being said, I still have no idea whether that rifle was actually sighted in or not.
Inspecting the body, I found the truth about every round that I had fired. The first shot of the day had hit just behind the front kneecap, removing the hide and slightly bruising a tendon, but leaving the joint intact. If it had been a single millimeter to the left, there would have probably been no story to tell. The shot from the truck had hit the shoulder blade of one of the front legs and redirected, exiting through the chest in the front. This would probably have bled him to death in a short while, but it did not hit any vitals and so did not have an instant effect. The third shot had gone straight through the heart, ending everything immediately. Also, it was a male.
Hunting is an excellent lesson in humility, especially for modern men accustomed to a controllable world of instant results. Entering into the reality of an animal and pursuing it within its own world on its own terms is a painful lesson in respect. The fact that an irrational creature incapable of abstract thought can dance circles around you and your superior technology is a very healthy and visceral reality check.
After this, we took the body to the barn in the pickup, and I commenced the job of butchering. Physically cutting off hunks of food from a kill has a certain purposeful, healing justice about it. It shows that all the pain of the hunt was actually for a real purpose, and that you did not take the life of a fellow creature for nothing.
However, there is a certain sacremental reverence proper to death that butchering cannot fulfill. There needs to be a gesture of more ontological significance, a visceral experience of subsumation and oneness. This is why we should eat the heart. Raw. Obviously.
I ate everything except the hard tubular chunks and it was actually not unpleasant. Raw heart is pretty teasteless and easily swallowable, without the bitter sliminess of liver.
I found a rusty hacksaw in the barn, and began the work of removing the horns so that I could take them home. I afterwards sucessfully smuggled these unweildy pointed biohazards inside my carry on bag through the customs checks of 4 different countries. At the time of this writing, they are in Kansas waiting to be mounted and decorated.
There were many other things that I did before I left that magical country that have been relegated to the compost system of my interior, and are blending themslves with other things seen and done. They may rise to the top at some future time, but for now they are helping form a deep and fertile bed of forgotten knowledge, which is gradually disintegrating into the soil of wisdom.