Kenya."
It was a funny story and he told it well, and I had to laugh about the elephants and little dogS; but watching Brian watch me laugh, I wasn't sure that we found the story amusing in quite the same way, and hoped that the differences would not cause trouble on our foot safari.
Author with Brian Nicholson.
IV
After a few days we were to move our base camp south and west about seventy miles to the Madaba region, near Nandanga Mountain, where C. J. P. lonides is buried; David Paterson would meet us there with the supply plane. Meanwhile, in hope of photographing sable antelope and greater kudu, Hugo, Brian, and I made a "fly camp" safari to the Tundu Hills, perhaps twenty miles from Kingupira, setting off through the wild-dog woods where five of these apocalyptic creatures, half-hidden, watched us pass. At a side track beyond the Kilunda Pool, we turned south to a dry sand river called Chimbulili, then southwest once more toward the open woodland ridge called Nakilala. The half shaft on Brian's Land Rover was broken, depriving it of four-wheel drive, and in the wet shallow grassy valleys that occur so unexpectedly in these parched woods, his machine had to be hauled out twice by Hugo's winch, with the aid of thrust from Bwana Peter, old Saidi, the Chagga boy Renatus, Hugo's mechanic and assistant, and Mwakupalu, the assistant cook, who would tend to the sahibs on this brief safari. For Brian, the broken shaft was a minor frustration compared to the scarcity of animals in one of his old haunts in the Selous. "Always elephant and buffalo in this valley, always!" he said. "Usually sable or kudu, too, and often both." But all we saw along the way were two solitary buffalo, two small bands of Lichtenstein's hartebeest, or kongoni, a common duiker, and a band of zebra, very wild, fleeing like striped spirits through the trees. (This is a slightly smaller race of Burchell's zebra of northern Tanzania, with narrower stripes that look black rather than dark brown.)
PETER MATTHIESSEN
Here in the Kingupira region, which is relatively open and accessible, we saw most species only once and in small numbers, and most were exceptionally flighty - so flighty, in fact, that Nicholson, who had yet to see an elephant on this trip to the Selous, was already speculating that someone had been shooting at the animals. But, as he said, the situation in the Selous was quite different from that in the famous national parks of northern Tanzania, where wildlife could be readily observed not only because that highland country was more open but because many of the animals were hardened to the hideous sounds and outlandish sights and smells associated with the vehicles that turn up stuffed with human masks and glittering lenses all day long. "The parks are all very well in their place, but they are parks," he said. "The Selous IS the real Africa. This is what most of Africa really looks like."
In the Selous, the spoor on the tracks and in the stream beds testifies to the abundance and variety of animals, but because of the wildness of the place, one must hunt them out and count each sighting as an event. This suited me entirely. (Rick Bonham agreed. "To me, this is the heart of Africa," he had said. "This is how it used to be. The place is stacked with game, even if you can't see it - signs everywhere, even back in the miombo. And what you do see, you have all to yourself. In the parks, there's always a minibus parked next to it." This was especially true of the "Southern Circuit" parks near the Kenya-Tanzania border, especially Manyara, Ngorongoro, the Mara Game Reserve, and Amboseli. In recent years the more remote parks, such as Ruaha which Maria visited in mid-August, have been lacking in visitors as well as funds and staff, and buildings, roads, and basic maintenance were breaking down.)
For a photographer the situation was very difficult. Hugo was having trouble getting close to animals, and had to shoot through screens of foliage when
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