Buffalo encounter
Tanzania, June 1984
I was smoking a pipe at the bar in the lodge, concentrating on my Swahili phrase book and occassionally looking out over the plain beneath where a group of baboons and a few warthogs had gathered by a water hole when a buzzing noise made me look up. A plane was flying overhead, presumably the Swiss zoologist back from his wildlife census.
I set off to A’s house and arrived just as the zoologist and his family drove up. After much shaking of hands we arranged to meet in the lodge that evening to exchange our tales and soon it was clear that I could fly with them to Dar es Salam in a week’s time.
Until then there wasn’t much to do. Once he had delivered his family, who were moving into a house nearby, the zoologist flew off once more to take care of a few errands.
I spent a lazy afternoon sitting on a patch of grass by the rocks next to the waterhole, watching a group of baboons grooming each other in the shade of a baobab tree. Two hyraxes stretched on the warm stones and insects were buzzing around. It was the hottest time of day and most of the animals were resting.
The rains had been bad this year and the grass which should have been green was dry and brittle. The water holes were shrinking. Occasionally, clouds would boil up at the horizon but only a few drops of rain had fallen during my stay so far.
Later that day, I had arranged a lift to the Seronera institute with a group of visiting scientists to try and meet a cheetah specialist. He was away, as he had been on my last visit to the institute so I studied the poster presentations on the wall yet again and returned with the group once their meeting was finished. They were off to the Ngorongoro crater the very next day. I was amazed at the number of officials, journalists and tour operators who dropped by the Serengeti for a single day, went to the institute and then left without actually having seen any of the wildlife.
Before they turned in for the night, I joined the group for a cup of tea and one of them brought me a few wildlife magazines with articles about dolphins. I hugely enjoyed reading about the research on spotted dolphins off the Bahamas and looked forward to the Indian Ocean and my possible encounters with dolphins there. So engrossed was I that I did not notice that the sun had started to set. I said a hasty farewell and set off for the village.
In the growing darkness I could make out the shape of buffaloes in the bushes ahead. I walked on slowly. They had their backs to me and paid me no further notice. But another buffalo was walking to a water hole ahead where the path led down from a hil before rounding the pond and leading back onto the hill. The animal and I were practically on a collision course. A few people ahead of me on their way down started to run to get out of the way in time. The buffalo raised his head. A second lot of people, on their way home from working in the lodge were about to catch up with me. We had all slowed down. The buffalo had turned his attention to us and took a few steps in our direction.
I had read somewhere that the way to deal with a charging buffalo is to lie down and play dead. Running is pointless as they can run a lot faster than humans. However, I had my doubts that I would find the nerve to lie down in the face of a charging buffalo and looked frantically around for any trees to climb. There weren’t any.
Before the thing got any closer, I left the path and sneaked through the bushes around it. It worked because its attention was diverted by the group of people still on the path. I rounded the creature and re-joned the path where I met two men walking in the opposite direction. When I warned them about the buffalo they looked first at me, a little pittingly I thought, then at the animal, raised their arms and slowly walked towards it, shouting and calling. I closed my eyes, but it worked; the buffalo took one look at them, left the path and disappeared into the shrubs at the foot of the slope.
After fifteen days in the Serengeti, I learnt that there was no place in the plane after all because one of the park officials had decided to fly to Dar at the last moment. Just the day before I had turned down a lift with a few rangers who might have been able to sort me out with a short volunteer placement (I had tried before, only to be told that even volunteers need PhDs), so I was not best pleased.
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