"Bodi! Bodi!", whispered Jean Marco from the cover of the liana vines in the jungle at the edge of the burned over munga. "If you say so," I thought, since I wouldn't see what he was referring to for at least another twenty minutes as we edged closer through dense cover. "But that sure isn't what we came equipped for!"

"Bodi" is the Bantu Pazande term for the bushbuck, the smallest of the twisthorn antelopes that are forest game in Africa and can live quite near human settlements because of their secretive ways and careful ability to hide in dense cover. As is true of most forest antelope, their hind quarters are a bit higher than their forequarters, and they spend a lot of their watchfulness time looking under the underbrush rather trying to get the advantage of high ground to look down upon open spaces. This is a habit that serves them well when looking at the feet of approaching menaces from the cover of the thick understory of riverine jungles. That's what we were in and the bodi is what Jean Marco spotted, in fact, three of them, at a distance that made my binoculars look like foolish accessories.

We were stalking along the border of one of the large green clusters of dense jungle foliage that rims any small riverine water source while looking out over the mungas. Mungas are a unique feature of this Zairois landscape. Flying over them several days earlier in a Cessna 210, they resembled footprints that stomped down on the vegetation at their margins. On the mungas the grass was not green, but was dry, tan where it still stood, and most frequently burned over in the dry season. This leaves black charred rock with tinsels of sooted stalks of the three meter high elephant grass. Mungas you can look over and see for long distances; visibility in the jungle margins in which we were looking is less than a meter in the brightest of daylight which doesn't penetrate the canopy in any event, further affording the colorfully camouflaged "bodi" excellent cover.

The mungas are volcanic rock that had been welling over from the shield volcano that raised Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon. In the process of solidifying, this volcanic rock often has hollow places beneath the bubble-like domes. Occasionally one can stomp one's feet and hear the tambour of the hollow echo. In some of these caves that communicate with the surface, large colonies of bats live and stream out of these atypical caves at nightfall to go foraging for insects or fruits and seeds depending on the species. They return to roost in the hollow mungas by day, and over centuries of this practice, large quantities of bat guano have accumulated in the caves, which makes for excellent topsoil and fertilizer if it can be extracted and brought to gardens. However, on the top of the volcanic rock, there is virtually no soil at all, particularly when the very sparse grass cover that grows very tall but not thick is burned over each dry season. For some cryptic reason, the firing over the mungas seems to actually increase the growth rate in the grasses' next season, despite the loss of much of the organic material in the smoky sky that is produced. It is said to have something to do with unlocking the mineral salts in the ash that results, but I was brought up in another latitude in which mulch from compost seemed to be a good idea for growing things, much as tapping the bat guano beneath the mungas was a good idea here only four degrees off the equator in Central Africa.

In the rainy season, there is very rapid run-off from the mungas into the small valleys between them that accumulate whatever material washes from them that is trapped by the dense vegetation of the riverine jungle that outlines these munga "footprints". This very large stretch of guinea savannah in small collecting tributaries to the mighty Zaïre River is adjacent to the Ituri Forest in Central Africa. The rain forest and the rapid run-off from the mungas contribute to the large river of Central Africa, the Zaïre--the only principle river of the world that crosses the equator and it does it twice in a large northern bow before dropping off the African shield volcanic plateau on each side and plummets through cataracts down to the level of the sea. This happens one hundred and fifteen kilometers inland from the Atlantic where the limited navigability of the Zaïre River (known as the "Congo" when Joseph Conrad navigated on it and wrote about it in "The Heart of Darkness") and the former principle city called Leopoldville is now the capital of Kinshasa on the inland side of thundering cataracts called Juny Falls in which the whole of the River Zaïre falls over the Western scarp. Eighteen hundred kilometers away, after the Zaïre has crossed the equator the second time, a similar process happens in which the River reaches the limits of its navigability against another thundering set of cataracts, this one falling down into the Rift Valley depression. This was the end of the line of the shipping on the river, and the second principle city was built here named after the same intrepid reporter that found Dr. Livingstone, I presume, and "Stanley Falls" gave name to the city Stanleyville, until it was changed in the new Republic of Zaïre to become Kisangani.

This geography of the mungas can help explain some of the unusual features of the Northeast Zaïre ecosystem and some of its geographic pathology. But I had taken leave of the goiter and cretinism project I had been working on in Assa station after a day of operating in the makeshift theater on patients with goiter and other surgical needs. Around about 4:00, with only a couple of hours before the precipitous sunset in which the transition from day to night seems to take only minutes, Jean Marco and I could go out with the .22 and shotgun and search for "kangas", the local name for guinea fowl. Near the equator there is a perpetual equinox, and there is not much tangential light at the rising or setting of the sun, so that one needs to be mindful of this when setting out as dusk is nearing. I was mindful of this--I put a flashlight (in Africa called "a torch") in my knapsack, along with a camera, a water flask, the binoculars and a few shotgun shells and an extra roll of film for the small pocket camera with a built-in flash. I was ready to roll, always eager to be on a hunt with Jean Marco.

Jean Marco is his Europeanized name, but his name in Pazande is Paingbalete. Jean Marco is son of a very prominent workhorse at the mission station who had been brought in to carve the master drum. The Azande drum is a talking drum of the kind that sends telegraphic messages on relay to the other drums within earshot who can pass the message forward. It is a mark of modernity to know that despite telecommunications connectivity, in a spot like Assa devoid of electricity or telephones, the Azande drum serves a very useful function; however, the message can be sent out from one drum to another through a long relay, such as a death message, but by the time it reaches the town where transistor radios and telephones might be found, the message is no longer understood, not because of garbled transmission but because of lack of receptivity where the skill is no longer useful. While brought in to the Assa station as the master drum carver, Pastor Bule also carried on the other skills such as hunting and tracking in order to feed his growing family. Since he had originally worked in the gold fields in panning for gold in the gold-bearing streams, he achieved his ironic name in KiSwahili, which means "useless". Since he had done virtually everything in the mission station, the name was so obviously a misnomer that no one remembered its meaning. That could be said for his son Paingbalete after a period of time as well.

Now known almost uniformly as J.M., from his Europeanized name, the young Paingbalete was named, as are most Azande youngsters, by the grandparents. When told that Bule's older wife had conceived and born a healthy looking son, the grandfather was so surprised and exhilarated that he said, "Paingbalete" literally "there is nothing in my mouth", or, "I am speechless". That same Paingbalete now has a very growing family of his own with fertile and accomplished wife doing many different chores in the family and community while adding another child to the growing circle of huts each year.

Jean Marco, Paingbalete, and I were often speechless together, since we hunted long and hard in many different environments as I admired his skill as tracker and naturalist. J.M.'s own estimation of his skill was that if he worked very hard at it, and continued for many years, he could get to be half as good as the old senior hunter, now retired from the hunt, was at the outset. Jean Marco was capable of following cape buffalo on scent through the air, looking for telltale evidence as subtle as urine spray in foliage or a blade of grass bent opposite the wind, and the old hunter was said to follow still more closely telling number, size, and age and sex of the herds he envisioned in his mind without ever once looking down at the tracks they left which would have been minimal anyway in the hard volcanic rock of the munga. I would have been content just to come up to Jean Marco's speed as a tracker, and spent long hours and many days learning from him and following his lead. Therefore, I never doubted when he whispered there were bodi up ahead, I just knew it would be another long time before I saw what he had already numbered, oriented to the wind, and figured the stalk approach before I even knew which munga to look into.

To tell the truth up front, this is the story of my first bushbuck. I have learned a bit about them subsequently, but I was eager to see one in the wild and now we had the chance to stalk up on three of them. However, there were two major problems with a number of minor ones dependent therefrom. First, we were out looking for fowl, not antelope, and were equipped to shoot birds, not buck. The shotgun would be a non-starter in this pursuit, so it would have to be the .22 caliber rifle which I held for the first time from the rope that constituted its sling without any idea how many shells there were in its magazine or how it performed with its iron sights.

The second problem was that we had hunted for two-thirds of the time that light remained to us already in searching for the kangas. We had heard them, but not seen them, because they often pluck from the ground as they run along just before dusk when they fly up to perch in trees where they roost for the night. It is typically only the last moments of light that allow one to see them, and that is usually in silhouette as they fly up to a branch. We had walked over ten kilometers since we had set out on the hunt at 4:00, and now it was 5:30 with dusk scheduled to fall just after 6:00 with blackness to follow only a few minutes later. As we had stalked along looking for the kangas, dark clouds massed up and rolled over us and a thick tropical downpour hit, atypical for this time of year near the end of the dry season. We had been walking along through the dry mungas when the storm had hit, and we were both drenched, and the only semi-dry spot that remained was in the knapsack where even my notepad pages were stuck together by the unusual cloudburst. What was even more ironic is that Jean Marco had clucked disapprovingly when he saw my clean khaki shirt as I set out on the hunt. On one occasion when I had gone down to Zara, the waterhole, with him at dawn, he had asked me to take off the khaki shirt as too obvious to the game. Underneath it was a gray teeshirt, and he was not sure he liked that color for camouflage either. I offered to take it off, but said that if he wanted me to change the color of my skin, there were some things that I could and others that I couldn't do, and I wasn't sure which direction either one of us should go! The humor of that was explained to him at another time, since the bewitching hour of dusk or dawn near the game is not a time for idle banter.

But, J.M. got his way. We walked over to the mungas which had been burned over just a few days before, and the tall whip-like stalks of charred elephant grass swiped at me with long black ash streaks criss-crossing me in a pattern that would have done a camouflage sportswear manufacturer proud. It also added a commando face paint appearance, so by the time I had entered the riverine jungle at 5:30, I was nearly a match for Jean Marco as we crawled forward. In order to make less noise, he had taken off his sandals, and casually dropped them in the jungle. I was concerned about them, saying "How will you find them again?" Now, Jean Marco realized, this must be some form of white man's joke. Couldn't he see where we are? Isn't it perfectly obvious? Couldn't anyone walk back in the dark and find those very sandals without even having to feel around for them? The answer--painfully--was that "No, one of us couldn't."

Behind us giving the deferential lead to J.M. was another tracker/bearer Basilimona, carrying a spear, the likonga. This is an ancient piece of melted ore pounded flat and sharpened to the degree that it can hold an edge, but it is well balanced, and is carried largely for defensive purposes. The defense is not against other humans who might be hostile, but a last desperate hope when charged by a cape buffalo, most frequent killer in this area of human beings. A cape buffalo seems quite vindictive and selective in its targets, and if startled by a group of hunters, will run off, but then circle back and ambush his annoyance from a side that they will not expect it. In pursuit of this big game, frequently the hunter and hunted swap positions, often with one of them not being aware of this change. But, we thought, at least we are not on the stalk of dangerous game; but it will be a very difficult task to close in on the bushbuck before the light has gone. Jean Marco slipped along on all fours under the vines and I followed suit with Basilimona silently tagging along at a respectful distance only occasionally communicating with his hand signals that the three objects of the attention of two of us were moving. Because the breeze was coming quickly across the munga, we had to skirt the riverine jungle to get downwind and then would have to cross an open space to get within .22 caliber range of the bushbuck, if they were still there, and it was still light.

There are two Bantu words that change very little when moving up from southern through eastern to central Africa, and one of these words is being applied to the bushbuck. Elsewhere in Africa the goat is referred to as Bodi and its spelling changes a bit but its pronunciation stays much the same along the whole course of the Bantu language spread. The other word that seems to be mutually understandable among groups that can recognize little else is the word for water. In the southern part of the Rift Valley, "mati" is the word for water as in the Nkomati River that forms the boundary with South Africa and Mozambique, meaning "here there is water". As one travels north, mati becomes mazi and in some stretches of the linguistic chain, maji. Here, our twisthorn (Tragelaphus) bushbuck with the reticulated pattern on its side (scriptus) is being called a goat, but the forest antelope had much better instincts to avoid danger.

At last they came into even my view, and there were three handsome bucks, the middle one by far superior. The three were standing at the edge of the munga opposite the jungle we were in, and each was looking in opposing directions. They were making a brief foray out from the jungle margins into the clear munga with nothing but a few blackened strips of tall grass between us and them if we had moved out into the direction of the wind to close the gap between us. But that would put us in line of sight of these rather skittish antelope who were browsing the edge opposite us so we at least would be advancing upwind and in the very narrow possibility of their blindside. I would have to make the transit, and now I moved out onto the munga on hands and knees, leaving my camouflaged fabric knapsack--for my sake, on the open munga, since I am not likely to repeat Jean Marco's trick of finding something at night in the jungle--and sneaking forward alone with Jean Marco and Basilimona holding back at the margins of the jungle where they were invisible to my eye when I looked back only once and only a few meters forward. All three bushbuck were two hundred and fifty meters from me and now it was 5:48 on my luminous dial runner's watch.

I eased forward when three heads were down browsing the edge--which was an infrequent coincidence, since one of them always seemed to be on alert--and when the heads come up, I froze in the very uncomfortable position having my knees pressed into the cinders of the munga. There was a bit of standing water from the cloudburst that had happened earlier, and I followed this water as I thought it might represent the lowest of the grooves in the open munga. At two hundred meters from the bushbuck, I froze, flattened out against the munga since the middle buck had swapped ends and was now looking across the munga in my direction. For over three minutes I did not move and neither did he, but then he turned broadside and browsed with head down again. I slithered forward as rapidly as I could without making too much apparent motion, and halved the distance so that I was now almost in the middle of the munga dome. It was getting close to 6:00 and I was straining my eyes to see clearly the three buck which were shadows in the limmed light. When I made it just a few more meters I thought I could go no further without spooking them and stopped on one knee bringing the .22 rifle up to align it with the middle buck, the largest one that had been my target all along. He was broadside now as I eased off the safety and put the iron sights high on his chest. I squeezed the trigger.

"Ping!" "Thunk!" The hollow tambour sound bounced back from the sounding board of the jungle, but was not loud enough to alarm the antelope to flight or give them a direction on their menace. The two bucks on either side froze with their heads down, and the middle buck simply stood stationary, twitching his tail occasionally before he swapped ends and was now broadside to me from the other flank. As he jumped, I chambered a second round and the small spent shell went twinging out from the ejection port. I lined up again and touched the trigger. "Ping!" "Thunk!" Again, nothing happened. Since nothing was moving, I bolted in the next shot, unsure of how many shells there were in the clip and touched off again in the same position. "Ping!" "Thunk!" With this repetition the other two bushbuck got the idea and bolted heading straight into the bush and disappearing as through a wall, their frontsides vanishing completely while their tails were still visible until they were sucked into the green veil now darkened by night. I could still see the outline of the middle bushbuck standing like a statue. When I bolted in the next cartridge, I shot just as I had before with a resounding thunk that returned. A bark of an alarm cough came from inside the jungle from one of the two retreating bushbucks, but no sound came back from the one still out in the munga with me. I worked the bolt for the fifth time and as best I could braced against my knee I pulled the trigger. "Click!" That answered the question of how many rounds were in the clip. It also seemed to satisfy the biggest of the bushbuck that I was the source of his problems, and with graceful beautiful bounds he cleared the distance from his edge of the munga to the jungle wall which seemed to swallow him as it had the others.

I heard, more than saw, two fleet-footed figures rushing by me on either side one with a raised spear charging toward where the bushbuck had disappeared. I walked back across the munga retracing my course to see if I could find the knapsack, since I knew that inside it I had the flashlight. I had not reached it yet when I heard a shout. J.M. and Basilimona had come upon the bushbuck which looked to the unpracticed eye as coordinated as if he had been untouched. But he had died in the air in that magnificent bound, and was actually caught up in the liana vines suspended above the ground stone dead. All four shots were in his chest, which is why the resonant thumps had been heard, and the spear had been unnecessary as he had drowned while standing there, and made that magnificent leap anaerobically.

I found the knapsack after bypassing it twice, and came forward as quickly as I could to take a flash picture as J.M. and Basilimona dragged the bushbuck back across the munga.

Now it was dark, really dark. We made it across the munga to the point where we had left the jungle edge, and felt our way forward along our backtrack. I had the torch and was shining it ahead as J.M. and Basilimona were trying to drag the antelope between them along the narrow path we had made in coming in. It was not easy going for any one of us, and I was the one not attached to fifty kilograms of dead weight. However, I was struggling with the backpack and two long guns scissoring me in their slings caught up on the liana vines, since shotgun and .22 rifle together were slung over each shoulder, the barrels frequently colliding in front of my face. This was not going to work.

We had gone several hundred meters dragging the bushbuck first between them and then each one spelling the other in single file with a blood trail from the nostrils of the bushbuck tracing our steps behind us when the torch was turned in that direction. We came to a log across our trail that I remembered from coming in, and it was here that we draped the bushbuck over the log and Basilimona and J.M. discussed what should be done further to pack out the antelope and get back in the dark. We knew that about two hundred meters further was a small stream that we had crossed in very thick jungle, and they would have to get down to it and cross it, which would not be very easy with a burden between them, particularly since they couldn't swing it up on a pole since there was no standing room in the jungle at that point. They ruled out the option of leaving the bushbuck until morning when it might be light enough to see to return with it, since they said there would be zero chance that it would be found again, since there are many more predators than man in the jungle and they all worked much better than man did at night. These subtleties were explained to me at another time, since they had a decision they had reached. J.M. would take my torch and the empty .22 rifle and Basilimona would carry the shotgun and with the light of the torch they would make far better time returning to Assa across the ten kilometers we had wandered since 4:00. It was now 6:45, and they figured they might be able to cover that distance by 8:00, and return with other helpers and bearers who might be able to truss up the load after we got through the thickest part of the jungle and, suspended on a pole between fresh bearers, they would move on a trot through the night across the open mungas to return with the bushbuck. I would sit on the log here with the bushbuck until they returned, which they estimated to be--shining the torch on my runner's watch to get a fix on the time, as well as leave me with some luminescence on the dial--little after 9:00. Obviously I wouldn't be writing postcards during this time interval, but I would no doubt find something to entertain myself, and they set off with loud babbles that faded quickly by the time they reached the stream.

I was alone with my thoughts. Well, no, not completely alone, I had a dead bushbuck as a companion. My first bushbuck and a good one. Before the torch had gone, I noticed with some chagrin that dragging the bushbuck across the open munga had abraded all the hair off one side of the body of the pretty patterned reddish-brown coat. I had not come here on a trophy hunt, but the bushbuck horns were a quite respectable trophy, but there was no question of taxidermy at this point so far removed from even a simple commodity as valuable and scarce as salt. I reached over and could touch the head of the bushbuck, and measured the horns with the span of my hand, essentially doing a Braille appreciation of the bushbuck's head. The heel of my hand touched the snout with sticky gouts of blood that smeared there, so I stopped this exercise in tactile postmortem examination. I looked at my glowing watch. Seven ten. I thought the better part of an hour had passed already.

I looked around me into the night. I was startled at first. What appeared to be a starry sky were little flecks of bioluminescence all around me. In the leaf mulch at my feet, I could stir up tiny glow worms, and on the under surface of leaves I could feel at eye level what appeared to be ice crystals beneath them that glimmered very briefly when touched. More conventional fireflies were hovering about, and I almost thought they gave off enough light to begin to see the outline of things. There was no starlight, since the canopy prevented any observation of that, and it had been cloudy with the rain in any event, and I could remember no moon. After deliberately prolonging the search for bioluminescence around me--using up a good deal of the vitamin A I could muster in the rods of my retina, I bemused--I looked back at the startling bright luminous dial in contrast with the faint sparklingaround me: seven twenty. Time surely does fly when you're having fun! Here, I had thought the study of bioluminescence had taken me over half an hour.

Having exhausted one sense that was not particularly acute in the almost palpable blackness, and having done as much Braille postmortem examination as I wanted to, I concentrated on listening. At first all I heard was a course in gross sounds of the turaco and other large birds that sounded like they were quite close until the sounds moved closer and you realized that they had been quite far away to begin with. Sounds carry in a peculiar way in the jungle and it seemed there were very few directional clues as to how to focus in on them. I had heard monkeys in the trees when we were hunting kangas several hours before, and I tried to listen now to hear if there was any such sound of their chatter. There was no such sound, but there was the sound of movement in the canopy above, and at first I thought it could be birds, but there was no whistle of the wings, only sighing of branches that seemed to be pulled in possibly brachiating passages through the canopy. There was no wind palpable; but I concentrated on the special techniques I had learned from the trackers on sensing air movements with the fine lanuga hairs on the mastoids behind each ear. A licked finger upraised showed no evidence of any cooling on either side, but no wind detection by more subtle means could be noted. And still there was the sound of tree branches moving.

At a very long distance I heard twice the sound that had been interpreted for me just before dawn of chimps calling to each other from their arboreal perches. There was the hum of mosquitoes or other flying insects that only rarely came close to my ears, and I don't recall any bites. What sounded like a tree frog or katydid-like insect began tuning up behind me which seemed to elicit a twitter of birds. There was an almost electrical current kind of hum coming from the termite nest we had noted in the torchlight just before we got to the fallen treetrunk on which I was sitting. I would occasionally feel ants crawling over my exposed hands or arms, but these were not the stinging kind, and simply brushing them away was all that seemed needed. Well, that was a pretty good auditory tour, now lets see what time it is getting to be. Seven thirty.

In the knapsack there is left to me a water flask, the small Nikon pocket camera, and my notepad. That's it! I could write some notes! I don't really need to see, I will just feel my way to the bottom of the page and turn the page over the spiral binder and see how legible it is when I get it exposed in the light tomorrow. I reached into the backpack and felt the sticky wet pages that pulled apart when I tried to separate them, and remembered the rain squall. I had tried to write some notes earlier when it was light, and found that the ballpoint skipped over the damp spots on the page and now they were all wet. So, I would not be writing any dissertations on the experiences at the time they were being had. I began to think that it would have been a good idea to have my small dictaphone tape recorder, so I could listen to the sounds of the night and then later I would replay this rather spooky experience. But the battery-powered device would not have survived the drenching, either. I tried to listen for the intervals that I should have taped as the birds and insects were alternately playing first fiddle.

Then something happened that made a dramatic change in the night. Expressed much more precisely, something stopped happening. The twitter of sound evaporated. The silence was now almost as impenetrable as the blackness. I thought that even the bioluminescence I had looked at earlier had diminished. Well, perhaps I had just grown weary of this game, since all circuits were overloaded while I was trying to overextend these senses to make up for what I could not see.

I felt as though I had been plunged into a sensory deprivation test, suspended in neutral buoyancy and body temperature water with no sight or sound--a test of resiliency to see how easily one can become unhinged. I prided myself on the fact that many of my acquaintances would not have to been able to "take it" but would run from this jungle screaming by now. Which way to run?

The idea became an obsession. First, that it would be the kind of thing someone else would do, and then became a suggestion of a quite reasonable response, "I have enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand!"

And then I heard it. The loud unmistakable popping snap that seemed to be right in front of me. Oh, now I get it! The trackers are having a little fun with me and have come back to find out how I am doing and thought they might scare me a bit in the process to see how I would react. So, I was nonchalant about it at first, and then decided to think about other things. I went through each step in the hunt that we had just had, and a remarkable idea occurred to me that I had just scored on my first bushbuck, and a rather fine antelope at that. In fact, I was sitting right near it. To be specific, I was sitting within reach of a dead bloody bushbuck who must have been radiating a scent beacon into the jungle night!

Now, what am I doing here, sitting next to dead meat as though I am part of it, and shortly could become so! At this point a very rational thing to do would be to put some distance between me and the bushbuck. I could not just get up and launch out into the jungle, since I didn't know which way to go and the thick vegetation would certainly obstruct any passage. I vaguely remembered that J.M. and Basilimona had gone away from the direction I was facing. I had one guide as to spacial orientation and that was the log on which I was sitting. If I just eased my way down the log I could put distance between me and the bushbuck and still be close enough to be found when the trackers returned. . . . and there it was again. In the palpable silence, that twig snapped with a long pop as though it had been deliberately broken.

It takes me some time and pain to confess now what was certainly the case then. I was too scared to move. By the time I had figured out that I could slide down the log, I was convinced I was not the only one who would be observing this motion. I had no place to go. This was not my element, and I had invaded the home base of others better adapted to it. Man is not the only hunter in the jungle, but he may be one of the clumsiest and the one who needs most artificial aids.

I turned my wrist so the fading glimmer of the watch could just be seen. Not even eight o'clock. I had genuinely thought that a good deal more of the night had passed and I was not sure how much more of it I wanted to experience. One retreat would be to put my head down on my arms and try to doze off, but in the most likely, and still improbable, event that there were a heavy predator nearby, that seemed a rather defenseless posture, and I should be doing at least something.

Far away in the night I heard a feline scream. A civet cat or a caracal, it was explained to me later, and I remember taking comfort in the fact that the cat's cry was apparently far away. Then it happened.

A guttural cough. It seemed like it was almost in my face. I imagined that I could smell hot breath, and I probably did have my nostrils full of bushbuck lying draped over the log just to my left. Take action!

I bolted without spending a lot of time thinking about it. I just slid, staggered and stumbled to my right along the log swatting branches with my head as I put as much distance as the log allowed between me and the bushbuck. "OK, come and get him! He's all yours! Be my guest! So, maybe it is my first bushbuck, and I would rather it not be my last, so you are welcome to him, just leave me alone. Above all, leave me!"

Nothing. No response to my sudden movement. No answering crashing sound to the noise I had made. Well, that did it! I had made noise. Isn't man a king of the jungle after all, and aren't all creatures intimidated by him? Then, the idea is to make human-like noises! I thought about this for quite awhile, just how long I could no longer tell since my watch no longer glowed enough to read the time. Another anchor slipped.

My idea was this: I should shout and carry on or sing and that would keep at bay anything that would be coming for me. I had already written off the bushbuck, and consigned him as the "sacrificial anode". A bushbuck, even my first bushbuck, was not a trophy "to die for". I held a long running debate on the advisability of this "human noise thing". I determined that I would do just that with loud shouts and screams and very emphatic orders to clear the area showing that I was in charge here--but I thought I'd better wait first for a clearer signal that all else was lost before trying this extreme of putting the world on notice that there was a live man as well as a dead bushbuck perched on the log in the jungle.

I heard no twig-popping to induce this fit of rage that I was rehearsing, but I started thinking clever thoughts. Isn't homo sapiens a species different from the rest because of that sapience? And besides an opposable thumb and symbolic reference systems in language and numbers and upright posture, doesn't man also make things and occasionally carry them? Of course! I felt much more comfortable just having identified myself with the race, obviously one of the superior members of it as well, since my idea intrigued me. Taking a long time and infinite caution, I opened the knapsack and pulled out the camera. Of course!

The retractable lens cover was already back. I turned it in my hands several times to be very sure of the orientation. I lifted it to my head, but not in front of my face. I aimed down the axis of the log on which I was sitting to my left where the bushbuck was, where I had so abruptly distanced myself from him. I sharpened all my senses, took in a deep breath, and pushed the shutter release. The flash was dazzling as it pierced through the blackness all around me and left on my retina only two glowing after-images. Two luminescent orbs that looked a hand's breadth apart yellow-green and flashing back at me reflecting the sudden intrusion of the light.

Having all your worst fears confirmed is not too much of a comfort. The two eyes were right about where the bushbuck was, so the cat had closed in. Damn! If only Basilimona had not taken the shotgun! It might not have been lethal, but it would have been very discouraging in the event the leopard came for me rather than just the dead game. But, how would I aim at a leopard in the dark without light. I could not shoot at the after-image of the flash!

I waited to hear sounds of crunching or dragging. There was nothing.

A new reality dawned upon me. Of course I could see eyes, widely dilated eyes at that. Hadn't we just dragged a creature with two large dilated eyes and placed him on the end of a log? I almost wanted to chuckle out loud. Then a cautious thought nagged at me. We draped the bushbuck over the log, so the body was perpendicular to the axis of the log and the flash. I would see two eyes if there were something looking frontally head-on at me. I wondered how many more flashes are in this camera?

I waited for what seemed a quarter of an hour if I was any judge of that any longer. I then brought the camera up as before and touched the shutter release. Following the flash I saw no eyes no where.

Maybe the angle was different. Well, let's go it again. Raise the camera, touch the button--nothing. No eyes, and. . . no bushbuck! Was I mistaken? I certainly wasn't going to slither down the log to check! Where I thought it should have been I saw nothing in the brief instant of the flash, and at least no eyes looking back at me.

Well, if there was danger there, the help is sated. Now time did pass without much of a trace. I did go into a suspended animation, first concentrating on rhythmic breathing and then drowsily nodding off, not because I felt exhausted, but because it was a genuine refuge from the conscious passage of time.

Though in a dream I heard distant shouting and--could it be?--singing. I will have to admit for honesty sake, my lower lip trembled. "Over here!" I yelled, which no doubt means nothing in Pazande. Then I saw the glimmer of my torch fighting its way through the laced curtains all around me and the laughing babble of eight strong young men. I could hardly stand up.

Basilimona was the first to arrive carrying the torch and asked me something. It was later translated to the question, "Why did I push him over here?" pointing four measured meters from the log. J.M. came directly to me. He wanted to show me two things, but first put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me very cautiously in the periphery of the light. When he was convinced that I was O.K., he took the torch from Basilimona and walked back on the trail where the blooddrops looked like gooey dew along the drag line. He pointed to the mud between two leaves and in the light of the torch measured the large pug and looked back at me again. J.M. would say a short prayer of gratitude about this incident on Sunday five days later, but for now he had one other thing to show me. With a broad grin he held up his sandals in the torch light to show me he had recovered them from the night.

Figure 1. My first bushbuck, at the last of the fading light.

Figure 2. Jean Marco and Basilimona retrieve the bushbuck who was suspended in liana vines of the heavy cover adjacent to the munga from which he bounded.