The cape buffalo herd stampedes in a tight circle, a hundred beasts pressed shoulder to shoulder, grunting, farting, and bawling, their pounding hooves raising a red tornado of dust above the plain.
“They do this when they’re attacked by lion prides, man,” Russ Broom says. “We should get closer.”
We are 40 yards from the spinning stampede as it is, so close that should the herd decide to uncoil and charge us, we’ll both be dead in seconds. At that moment, six days into my first safari, I decide that my professional hunter is not just unorthodox in the extreme. He’s stark raving mad. “I’m not moving,” I say.
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A short, barrel-chested man with sunburned skin, Broom squints at the dust, shoots me this manic grin, and says, “There’s a 45-inch bull in that bunch. If we don’t get closer he’s as good as—”
The herd breaks formation, whirls, and thunders away. For a second or two, through the red dust, I see the horns of the monster fleeing but cannot get a shot.
“Feck, that was a big Cape, man,” Broom says, disappointed and amused.
Jelly-legged and stunned from being that close to an African Cuisinart, I say nothing. Broom hangs his hat and binoculars on the shooting sticks, sits on a termite mound, chuckles, and lights up a cigarette. It’s his fourth or fifth of the day.
His smoking doesn’t bother me as much as it did the first time he lit up. We were on buffalo
tracks, getting close enough that scent mattered, and Broom fired up a Newbury. I was horrified and said so. He was dismissive.
“If we can fool their noses with me smoking, we’ll catch them by total surprise,” he said. “And with the smoke, I can watch the wind drift.”
Throughout that stalk Broom held the cigarette up in front of him like a divining rod and kept moving us so the smoke was constantly going over his shoulder. I hate to admit it, but the tactic was devastatingly effective.
We’d gotten close enough to that first herd to see that there were no shooters. On subsequent days, following the cigarette smoke, I’d gotten close enough to take a magnificent kudu and a bruiser sable that charged me before I killed him at 10 feet.
And earlier on the afternoon of the buffalo stampede, Broom smoked as we stalked the big herd that migrated out of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe’s northwest corner. Every time we got close to the buffalo, we were dead downwind. They could see us, but they could not smell us. Finally, after four close calls, a kind of a collective bovine nervous breakdown had occurred and started the whirling.
“Well, then,” Broom says, crushing the cigarette. “Shall we move on? Alfred? Will you get the truck? There’s that leopard bait not far. We should check it.”
Broom’s lead guide heads off and soon meets us on a two-track with the Toyota. By now the adrenaline of a close encounter of the buff kind has given way to amazement. Forty yards from spinning death and we lived to tell the tale.
“You’ve seen that before?” I ask. “The way they stampeded like that?”
“Many times,” says Broom.
An Early Start
https://www.outdoorlife.com/articles/hunting/2015/01/dangerous-game-african-nightmare/