The Buffalo Day

I’m sorry that I was silenced.  That when things became difficult – no, difficult is not the right word – when things became dark, heavy, insurmountable – I gave up the one thing that has always lifted me to the other side of my fear and sadness, my writing.  Now, months later, for many reasons that I will not yet describe, I will return to the therapeutic power of written word.  The story that I am choosing to begin with was not really the beginning the downward spiral of my third field stint in Africa.  In fact, things were growing tense and dangerous in ways that I had not yet even noticed before the infamous day of the buffalo.  This day, however, was the one that opened my eyes.  It changed the way that I saw everything around me and forced me to the reality that the reserve that I was trying work in was changing.  I believe that it is still changing, but this is not the place for me to discuss those theories.  This is the place where I simply record my memories, my stories.  Because they are just that, mine to keep, mine to hide, or mine to share.  I’ve decided that it is time to share.

Before you read this story, you should know a bit of background about the dangerous wildlife that we were working around.  I knew these dangers when I signed up for my dissertation.  I knew that freak accidents could occur, and I believed that patterns of dangerous incidents would warrant a reassessment of my plans.  I was aware that while lions and leopards were the beasts of novels and movies, the animals that people in far away continents thought Africans feared most, they were not what I should be most concerned with.  I was concerned about the large mammals – the elephants, the hippos, and the buffalos.

Hippo in foreground with buffalo herd in background - Murchison Falls National Park
(c) Alicia Rich-Stout

Buffalo - Murchison Falls National Park
(c) Alicia Rich-Stout

Elephant - Murchison Falls National Park
(c) Alicia Rich-Stout

Lion - Murchison Falls National Park
(c) Alicia Rich-Stout

Hippos supposedly kill more people in sub-Saharan Africa each year than any other animal.  These death rates, however, are skewed by the fact that hippos often attack by tipping boats, leaving scores of people to drown (many people in inland African countries never learn how to swim).  We found hippo tracks in our forest twice, so while we were wary, they were not the dangerous animals that typically kept me vigilant on my daily hikes through the forest.  In our forest, we spent most of our time avoiding elephants and buffalos.  Buffalos are apparently just behind hippos in animal deaths in Africa each year.  Buffalos are not as large as elephants, and they are not as easily spooked.  I ran from elephants dozens of times during my time at Semliki.  Because elephants are so protective and so fearful of humans (especially elephants in poaching-heavy regions), we avoided them at all costs.  Still, most of the time when an elephant charges it is with the intent to scare someone away, not to trample them.  Most of the time, if you flee, the elephant will do the same.  I’d been within just a few meters of elephants and experienced just that, both of us fleeing in opposite directions.

Buffalo charges are not like this.  Buffalos are famous for being one of the most aggressive animals in the world.  Buffalos attack to kill, not to scare.  In fact, just a few weeks before my story begins a buffalo in our reserve killed a poacher.  In a matter of seconds a single buffalo disemboweled the man and left him for dead.  When we found elephant tracks in the forest we stood around to debate how fresh they were, how safe it might be to continue forward.  When we found fresh buffalo tracks we turned and left without a word.

And so begins my buffalo story.

It was a week before Christmas.  Adam and Moses were in town gathering supplies and running errands. My ranger and I had been hiking for two long, arduous hours. Sunday and I were slowly ascending the escarpment.  I hadn’t found chimps for weeks, and I was frustrated.  All we were finding were angry elephants and poacher tracks all over the forest that left us winding the trails in circles without so much as a single dung sample.  With sweat stinging my eyes and deep, labored breaths I marched my heavy gumboots higher and higher up that mountain.  Sunday stomped along behind me, annoyed that I was forcing him on yet another searching expedition to the highest point in the reserve, with little hope of finding so much as one chimpanzee at the top.

The chill of the escarpment air finally reached my face, and I began to let down my guard against most of the forest dangers.  Elephants and buffalo were often encountered in the lowland areas near the river and the swamp, but never at the top of the mountains.  Now my eyes were glued to the trees.  I folded up the brim of my hat so that I could better scan the flashes of green for that glimpse of a dark, hairy figure.  Back and forth, up and down, my eyes glided over the canopy, still hopeful after months of failed search attempts.

When we stepped into the shallow river crossing I must have felt Sunday’s body stiffen.  Maybe I heard a hoof, or I finally caught the bitter scent.  I really don’t know what made my head snap down into the riverbed at my feet like that, but I will never forget the flashes of images that followed.  Those scenes that wake me at night, that steal my gaze in conversation, the brief memories that make me shudder in the grocery store or at the bank.  From that moment everything seemed to move in short bursts punctuated by unforgettable snapshots.  They were hoof marks at my feet.  Buffalo tracks.  So many tracks.  Hundreds of them, all around my feet.  In front of me, beside me.  They were fresh.  The water from the river had not even had a moment to soften the sand around the imprints.  They impressions of these beasts just stared up at me in that place where I’d least expected them.

I looked back to speak to Sunday.  The words formed in my head, but I’m not sure they ever left my lips, “Buffalo – this high up?”  Before my voice could catch up with my thoughts I saw them.  Maybe I heard them.  Suddenly they were there.  It was not one, or even two buffalo.  I would not even call them a herd.  It was a wall.  A wall of pure power, strength, and aggression was looming before me, motionless, like a coiled spring waiting to bounce.  They were no more than 10 meters from my face.  I could smell them.  That putrid, unmistakable odor froze my every muscle, stopped my breath, made my fingers turn to ice in an instant.

Suddenly my body was no longer my own.  My thoughts were not inside my own head.  My actions were not under my own control.  I ceased to exist as myself.  I felt a hand, my hand, reach out for Sunday’s arm.  I felt my icy fingers pinch his sleeve, my tiny heart beating out of my chest so loud I thought every buffalo in that wall must be hearing it, focusing in on it.  Before I could understand what was happening, Sunday’s AK-47 was swung over that arm that my icy fingers had been brushed from.  He screamed at me with a voice I didn’t know he had, a voice of terror, “A-LEES-SEEAH! RUN! RUN ALEESEAH!”  He kept screaming while he fired.  It was so loud, the gunfire.  It filled every space in my head, vibrated my lungs, my ribs, my limbs.  The smoke awoke my lungs.  In a snap, the sound made the wall charge forward.  It made the dust and water fly as the wall rushed right toward my motionless face.  The smoke from his gun filled the air.  I’d never known guns smoked like that.  The mix of buffalo stench and gunpowder makes my stomach turn to this day.  It can reach my nose any time, any place, and make my stomach turn and my legs turn to jelly.  At that moment it did not though.  At that moment those legs were not mine.  Those legs turned to fire.

I think the buffalo may have pulled him to the ground the second I turned my back.  All that the strange mind outside of my body could think was, “Higher ground. Reach higher ground!”  And those legs of fire began to carry me.  I can’t remember scaling that cliff.  I can’t remember jumping over the fallen trees, crawling through the thick brush, winding around the rocks and trees.  I just remember Sunday’s cries.  Those unforgettable, pain-stricken sounds that I did not know a human being could make.  The gunshots that just kept firing all around me, filling the air and my ears.  I just remember my legs burning, the bullets whizzing.  There was no time to unclip my pack, to slip off my giant gumboots.  I carried all of that weight straight up and over the top of that escarpment and into a grassy, shrubby clearing.

Just as my burning legs carried me to the top I could hear him right behind me.  The grunting and the snorting made my racing heart stop like a frozen frame.  My head snapped back so that I could see what I did not want to know was behind me.  A bull was catching up to me.  He was nearly on top of me.  There was a stream of blood dripping down his right horn.  I was not sure whether it was the buffalo’s or Sunday’s.  I did not have time to guess, time to analyze.  I did not want to shout, but I felt a voice that could not have been my own cry out.  The wobbly, terrified voice that I’d never heard cried, “Please, please don’t kill me.  DON’T KILL ME!”  And with one last, terrified yelp, those legs of fire underneath me turned to water.  They melted away, and my face hit the grass and dirt at the top of that escarpment.

As he approached me more slowly, as his stench overwhelmed me and my lungs seemed to close themselves up, I saw so many more things than I should have been able to in those brief moments.  I saw my oldest nephew – his sweet, gentle face.  I wondered how anyone was going to explain to him that I had died.  I wondered how my husband would go on, how he would even face the light of day after this, how my parents could lose their youngest daughter or my siblings could live with this dark cloud of my sudden death.  I realized that my life was so much more than my own, and I felt so sorry for them that I was about to die with no warning.  My body went limp, and I gave in to the idea that this was my last breath, and I wished them the very best.

Then I heard the buffalo walk away.  I heard him turn, snort, and move away from me.  By the time that I could look up he was gone.  I regained use of my icy fingers and unclipped my pack.  The nearest tree was a shrubby little thing hanging over a deep ravine where Sunday laid with a herd of buffalo tearing him apart.  I crawled into it and waited.

I sat in that shrubby little tree, listening to it crack and creak, feeling the needle-like tingling in my face and my lips, trying to keep my hands from shaking me right out of it and into the ravine.  I listened to Sunday.  I listened to him cry and shout and mutter in deep pain and fear, powerless to stop the slow death that was unfolding beneath me.  I heard the stomping of the hooves, the deep, alarm-calling roar of the colobus, and the constant firing of his gun.  Then, just like that, everything became silent.  The trees rustled with the last few fleeing monkeys, and there was no screaming, no crying, and no gunfire.  Stillness, and silence.  “This is what death sounds like,” I thought.

For what seemed like an eternal five minutes I wondered what I should do next.  Do I climb back down and search for his body?  How can I carry his corpse all of 5+ miles back down the escarpment and to camp on my own?  What if that buffalo is still right here?  What if the herd is still down there?  What if I can never move these frozen legs and arms to get out of this tree and get myself out of here?  How do I tell my staff that Sunday is dead when I survived unscathed?

Then there were three more gunshots.  BAM...BAM……BAM, rustling, silence.  Then Sunday’s voice, “Ah-lee-seeha?  Ahleseah, are you there?”  I could not use my voice.  I could not find my words, not activate my lungs to shout.  I wanted to shout to him, to teleport him to the tree with me, but my voice was not my own.  He called out again, this time more panicked, “Ahleseah!”  Lukonzo words followed.  Then I found just enough power to form the words, “Here…I’m here.” I called out louder then, “SUNDAY I AM UP HERE! AT THE TOP!”  I heard more rustling, and a dark, swaying figure began to stagger out of the bushes.  It was Sunday, alive, badly injured, covered in blood.

Most of his clothes had been shredded from his body.  His pack was gone.  His gun was slung over one shoulder.  A piece of cloth was tied around his head and dripping with fresh blood.  The deep red blood that covered the dark skin of his torso suddenly shone in the sunlight.  He staggered forward, one hand pressing against his sternum, the other hanging limp at his side, his head slightly cocked, and his left foot dragging sideways.  He grunted in pain as he moved toward me.

“Here, here! Come quickly,” I said, “The bull might still be here!”  He climbed into the tree next to me, eyes staring at me in disbelief.  “You are… we are… alive.  We lived.  We’re alive!  Where are you hurt?! Where are your wounds?!”  He began grabbing my arms, pulling at my sleeves and my pant leg, checking me for bloodstains.  He found none.  He stared at me in again in even more disbelief.  “I’m not hurt,” I whispered.  “He just walked away… he just turned and left.”  Sunday whispered to the sky in Lukonzo.  “We must get help,” he said.  “Here, can you check my wound?”  He began to peel away the blood soaked cloth from his head.  I panicked at the inch-wide wound that the blood was seeping from.  It was white.  Why was it white?  Then I realized, I was looking at his skull.  He needed help.  “Tie the cloth tightly,” I said, wishing my husband and his first aid expertise were here to help.  “It needs pressure.  Stop the bleeding.”  “I can’t,” he said, “I cannot breathe if I tie it more.”  He placed his hand over his sternum again, trying to breath in, but barely coughing before lowering his head and grimacing in deep pain.  Chest wounds, head wounds, what looked to be a dislocated left shoulder… He needed to get to a hospital immediately.

The two-way radio that the rangers had started carrying must have been smashed to pieces and lost with the pack that it was in, but somehow Sunday’s little burner phone had survived in his pocket.  He pulled it out and made a call.  As he started shouting into the phone my whole body began to tremble.  My breath caught in my throat.  “Stop shouting! Stop! The bull may still be near!” I kept trying to whisper to him. The conversation was mostly in Lukonzo, but I quickly gathered that Sunday did not know how to explain where we were, and the rangers on the other line did not know the area well enough to even comprehend if he’d given them better directions.  He kept repeating that it was “the place where we found those poachers.”  There were poachers caught here?  This was news to me.

Sunday hung up the phone, stuffed it into his tattered pocket, gave a weak little cough as he grasped his chest again, then looked up at me, “We must go.  We must leave before they return to finish,” he said.  The trembles in my body rushed out in an instant, and my muscles turned to ice.  “I can’t,” I stammered, “I can’t move.  I can’t leave this tree.”  The shaking began to return to my hands just before he grabbed them and squeezed tightly, “We cannot stay.  We must.  We must go NOW.”  I nodded.  I bit my burning, trembling lip and took control over my muscles again.  He painstakingly descended from the tree as I followed.  He reached for my pack on the ground nearby, and dragged it toward me with his working arm.  Unzipping the top pocket, I grabbed the GPS and my phone.  Somehow both of them were completely unharmed, so I stuffed each into a cargo pocket on my pants.  I felt my muscles loosen a little as I lifted the pack to my back.  I took a couple of deep, labored breaths and caught a glimpse of the fear in Sunday’s eyes.  “Where? Which way?” he asked me.  I thought for a few seconds and realized that we could not return to the trail from which we’d fled.  There may still be buffalos there.  And even if we take the nearest connecting trail back to the lowland area of the forest, we would find ourselves in the heart of buffalo territory – the most likely place for the herd to flee to after a dangerous encounter.  It seemed the safest way to travel was the most mountainous.  We’d have to travel off-trail, along the side of the escarpment for a while, moving up and down each peak before descending as close as possible to camp.  I knew that this would be a difficult task for Sunday.  He could barely breathe, and he’d clearly suffered a severe concussion and lost far too much blood.  Still, we had no better option.  “This way,” I told him, as I began to move across the savanna, feigning as much confidence as I could muster.  I knew I wasn’t fooling him though.

My legs were still trembling from fear and weak from my escape.  As we moved along the side of the escarpment I stumbled and slid like a drunkard, scrambling to my feet as quickly as I could each time.  Sunday staggered and swayed along slowly.  I tried to help him, offered a shoulder, a hand, but he refused each time.  “I can make it,” he kept repeating between strained gasps for air.  We stopped again at the top of a hill so that he could try to text a ranger and tell them where we were planning to emerge from the forest.  All I could think about right then was my husband and every silly, stupid argument we’d ever had, every ridiculous thing I’d ever believed mattered.  I grabbed my phone and sent him a single text message, “I love you.”  Sunday put his phone away again, touched the bloody cloth on his head, and nodded at me.  We moved forward.

We hiked for 6 miles.  I kept repeating to him, in as calm a voice as I could find within me, “You will be fine.  We will get you to a hospital soon.  You will get to a hospital, and you will be fine.”  I think he knew that I was saying these things for myself, not for him.

The closer that we got to camp, the more slowly we had to move.  In the last mile we found fresh buffalo dung and tracks all around us.  We were in the middle of the savanna, and so close, but it sent a surge of panic through every part of my body.  I tried to control it, but my steps got faster and faster right then.  Sunday was coughing more, leaning forward more, staggering to the left and right with every step.  He began to fall behind me and mumbled, “Not so fast, Aleeseeah, I cannot breathe. Not so fast.”  “Sorry,” I replied, trying to control and steady each of my steps.  I tried to move my mind to calmer, happier places.  I thought of my friends.  I pictured us sitting at a picnic table just before I left, sipping beers and laughing with my dog at my feet.  It was then that I saw them.  The rangers.  First I saw Nicholas’s bright green cap and his kind, concerned face.  I’d never thought I could be so happy to see that silly hat.  Tall Felix was at his side, and all of the other rangers followed behind them.  They all rushed toward us.  A lump formed in my throat.  Feeling returned to my fingertips and my toes.  I exhaled deeper than I knew that I could.  “HELP HIM! HELP HIM, HE NEEDS A DOCTOR!” I shouted.  They all rushed to Sunday’s side, grabbed his gun, hoisted his arms, and mumbled to him in Lukonzo and Luganda and English.  I let them move ahead of me while exhaled three more times.  The oldest ranger, Silver, stayed behind with me.  He was the only one that saw it in my eyes.  He saw the panic, the fear.  I believe he saw the whole experience in my eyes, because I saw it reflected back in his.  “You made it,” he whispered to me.  He spoke more, but I can’t even remember his other words.  I just remember seeing the safari lodge truck that came speeding toward us.  They carefully loaded Sunday into the middle of it, laid him down on the seat, patted the driver’s seat, and we were off. The nausea came over me in one large wave just like the breeze in my face as we sped back into camp.  They dropped me off before rushing Sunday to the hospital in Fort Portal.  It would take them two more hours to get there.

Our staff stared in confusion as I stumbled out of the truck.  I said nothing.  I did not even glance at them or at the sky or at anything but the dirt in front of me.  I slowly staggered to the kitchen, pack dragging behind me, feet barely leaving the ground, and slumped into the bench at the table.  Right then I felt my whole presence return to my body at once.  My awareness, my fear, my consciousness all rushed into me, and the weight of it was so heavy that my face hit the table and my shoulders crumbled into my deep sobs.  The guys had never seen me cry.  Sure, I’d concealed some frustration-induced field-tears in my tent before, but I’d never let them see me in pieces like that.  I’m not sure I’d ever been in pieces like that.  I just shook and cried and cowered like that while they stood around me with great concern and sympathy in their eyes.

On his way to the hospital, Sunday told the other rangers that he was certain he’d put at least six bullets into the buffalo that was on top of him.  The rangers were concerned that an injured buffalo may be wandering around our trail system, or make its way to the nearest village at the top of the escarpment.  Healthy buffalos are a force to fear, but a wounded or sick buffalo is even worse.  A chance encounter would likely leave someone dead.

As I wandered around camp with a glazed stare, trying to think of anything but the awful sounds and images in my head, I heard a truck approaching camp.  I walked down the road enough to see who this could be, and managed to make out a large military truck spilling over with soldiers.  Ranger Ben jumped down from the truck and came over to talk to me.  Before he reached me one of our trail slashers, Wisely, was standing at my side.  They’d already spoken on the phone, and they already had an agreement.  They knew I was not going to be happy about it.  The rangers wanted to go back to kill the wounded buffalo, but the only people that knew the trail system well enough to understand my directions were our own staff.  Ben and the other rangers stopped in the nearest military camp to pick up as many armed men as they could find, and they promised that my dear Wisely would be protected.  Still, I felt the trembling return to my hands, then to my knees.  I gave Wisely a panicked glance.  He tried to return my gaze with confidence, but I saw through it.  “I’m not okay with this,” I said.  “Wisely isn’t a ranger.  He’s not a soldier.  He’s not armed.  Sunday and I were nearly killed.  Now you want to take my Wisely back out there to that hell and risk his life as well?!”  I knew that I would never win this battle, and maybe Ben was right.  The buffalo needed to be shot.  Who else would show them the way?  Wisely was adamant about going.  This was his moment to demonstrate his bravery.  Just like that, I watched one of my friends, little 4’6”-85-pound-Wisely get hoisted onto the military truck and disappear in the distance while I shouted, “Please be careful!  Please protect him!”

Wisely returned less than an hour later, though it felt like years had passed.  They dropped him just down the road, and he came marching forward with a proud grin, arms waving at his side.  When he approached me, however, his expression changed.  I saw pity in his eyes.  He reached in his pocket and held out my bandana.  “So much blood,” he mumbled in his broken English, “Blood was everywhere.”  In his other hand was the tattered remains of a pack – Sunday’s pack.  It was splattered and soaked in blood, and barely even resembled the pack that I’d watched Sunday sling over his back just that morning.  When I spoke to Ben later, he would tell me that there were pools of blood covering the ground, soaking the earth, splattered over the leaves.  They found no buffalo, not even a trail of blood to signal the departure of a wounded animal.  Perhaps, they told me, Sunday was mistaken.  Sunday was not mistaken though.  Two weeks later a nearly dead buffalo would wander to the edge of a village on top of the escarpment, collapse to the ground, and die there.  When the villagers butchered the animal they removed six bullets from its chest cavity.  Six bullets from an AK-47 at point blank, and the buffalo did not stop grinding its hooves into Sunday’s chest.  Was there anything that would stop a buffalo on a killing spree?

Later that day, once I regained enough composure to reduce my sobbing fits to 3-5 minute bursts every 30 or so minutes I began to wander listlessly around camp, once again feeling detached from my body.  Every time I tried to stop moving and sit down I felt like I was back in that forest again, back in that tree, shaking, listening to the gunfire and the screeching, blood-curdling cries of agony below me.  Then the sobbing would return.  I called Adam and told him very briefly that this bad thing had happened.  He said that between the strange text message from me with no responses to follow and the flurry of activity around a Uganda Wildlife Authority truck parked at the hospital across the street in Fort Portal, he thought something may have happened, but did not really want to think about it at the time.  “I can’t go back into the forest tomorrow,” I told him, “I just can’t do it.”  “I know, I know,” he said, “I’m coming back now, and we’ll discuss whether we will go back in at all after this.”  As I hung up the phone that last comment rang in my ears.  Whether I will go back in at all?  Never return to the forest? Tears returned to my eyes and ran down my cheeks.  I couldn’t imagine leaving after what I thought was one isolated incident.  I couldn’t live with myself if I gave up on this project because of my fear after one freak encounter with a herd of buffalo.  In the days and weeks that followed, others would suggest that I return to the U.S., if only for a brief period of mental recovery before returning to the field refreshed and strengthened.  Each time, I would shut that person down.  I swore up and down that this one chance encounter was not going to stop me.  Even though the flashbacks left me wide awake, sweating, shaking, crying, night after night…  Even though the terror at the thought of returning to the forest, the images of the things that could happen to me, or worse, to my husband left my stomach in such knots that I’d stopped eating or drinking… I would force myself to go on.

And I did.  A week later it was Christmas, and the next day I entered the forest.  The day after that I went in again, and then I did it again, each time for a little longer.  I will revisit the stories of those days of my attempts at rebuilding, my refusal to quit in my future stories, but I wanted to conclude this story with the recognition that I did not quit right then.  And neither did my brave, selfless husband.  Rangers Nicholas and Ben took turns staying in camp to help me through my fear and protect me in the forest in the very dark, difficult days that followed.  I thought things could only get better from there.  Sadly, those days were not yet the darkest that I would experience at Semliki.  This was not an isolated incident as I’d deemed it at the time; it was only the beginning of a once sleeping volcano that had been building power for months before, outside of my awareness.  And poor, unsuspecting Nicholas would be caught in its path just seven short weeks later.