Author: Hoffman

You can read through the text below, or listen to the voice recording of the story. Enjoy!   The night-long flaming and smoking of the reedbuck meat left it almost dry and a deep purple in colour. The men used palm leaves and strips of bark to truss it in tight bundles, which they will carry balanced on their heads. At the midday break they will probably cure it a bit more, so that it becomes almost black and dry. At breakfast and dinner they will shave off bits to have with their porridge.  Not a scrap will go...

I shot a young warthog in the grey light before sunrise. My companions strung it from a pole with strips of bark and we took turns in pairs through the day to carry it. It was hard work. It was a young boar and I had gutted it, but a warthog is a solid animal and the swing of the carcass from the pole gnaws at the shoulders and throws one off balance as one weaves through the bush. But there were no complaints; only smiles. It is a bit sad to kill an animal but as the sojourn...

You can read through the text below, or listen to the voice narrative. Enjoy!     Sometimes I feel like sharing the mundane of bush wandering; the parts that are not interesting or educational or dramatic, but part of the wilderness experience like the front door key is part of urban living. It is things like the careful checking of the vehicle at stops, the routine of finding a camp site, of preparing for the night, of having meals… The daily bush routine – which, in the African wilderness turns out to be is more of a framework than...

You can listen to the voice narrative, or read through the text below. Enjoy!     The young male lion’s skull lay forlorn on the edge of a hollow. It had once held water, but now it has dried to a desolation of cracked mud. Around, a calcific flat stretched away in scrub-mottled grey to a thin blur of trees on the horizon.  It was a bitter picture. I looked around. Nowhere on the bleached surface could I see even a single bone from the rest of the skeleton. Had the scavengers felt awkward about desecrating the countenance of...

You can listen to the voice narrative, or read through the text below. Enjoy!   Stories of the bush are told in many ways; sometimes with overwhelming force so that we cower in awe and fear; sometimes with spectacular drama so that we gasp in wonder. But mostly it is told quietly, so that only the most vigilant and sensitive will hear. To me it is often the subtle signs, the background sounds, the wafts of odours, the marks on the earth and vegetation that bear the richest and most charming narratives. But for most of us they go...

You can listen to the voice recodrding, or read through the text below. Enjoy!   We were not surprised when we caught the faint babble of men on the breeze. We had started picking up human signs a day earlier – a few tracks, a sapling stripped of bark to tie down something, a little glass jar that once contained Vicks Vaporub…  We had to be within a day or two from one of those lone villages in the bush. We followed the sound and found a group of fishers. It was an overcast morning and the breeze goose-pimpled...

You can listen to the voice narrative or read through the text below. Enjoy! Our camp was dry and grumpy and listless. We had walked all day in the arid heat with dry and sticky mouths and throats screaming for more than the few mouthfuls of water we allowed ourselves, and we never saw a single animal or even a fresh sign. But then, the sun crept out below the clouds, and for one last time exploded the dullness into riots of colour and light. I dropped what I was doing and poured out the little wine left and...

You can listen to the voice recording, or read through the text below. Enjoy! The African wilderness holds many perils and as many irritants. The perils – dangerous animals, poisonous insects, running out of water, getting lost – can usually be avoided if you understand the bush and are vigilant and careful. The irritants can usually not. At the top of my irritant list are the little black bees. Tsetse flies are an irritant of note too, but they do not like coming into the sun, so unless you are spending time under a shady tree where the surface...

We happened upon him in dense bush, this fine young loner. He must have been pushed out of a breeding herd by the matriarch a year or two earlier and now he was wandering the days till he is able to step up as a worthy sire himself. We were only a few paces away when I spotted him. A brisk wind had kept our scent from him; the noise of his feeding combined with the rumble of the wind through the foliage masked our sound – as it did his from us. He was still unaware of us, but it was...

Lion sign. A large male, perhaps on patrol, perhaps with the pride. Even this mere hint of their presence, more than a day old, quickened our pulses; we were in the presence of brutal strength, singularly focussed on its own survival – without reason or compassion. The mere possibility of confronting lions in the wild when you are on foot and exposed stirs a feeling of awe. To hear them roar at night grips the heart; if they are close the power of the sound makes your gut shudder. It is primal Africa exhaling into your face. Yet, in...