Author: Hoffman

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 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...

We came upon it unexpectedly, as the sun was touching the treetops, this pool of sweet water, left behind by the little river when the drought and the heat stopped its flow and pushed it further and further back towards the Ruvuma. Over many millennia the pool had been hollowed deeper by bits of mud carried away on hooves and hides. Now it was a generous knee-deep deliverance from thirst and heat. Perhaps it hid below its surface secret little fissures and pebble beds that kept slowly bleeding into it, preventing it from also turning into a sun-baked crust...

It was close to noon and time for the midday break. A bush willow close by offered a generous pool of shade.  As I approached, I noticed a small chop mark on its trunk. The brown globules of gum that had seeped out of the wood were still soft on the inside. It was probably done a few days or a week ago. There were no tracks around the base, but the chop mark was unmistakably human made. It was typical of someone wanting to mark a route or a position – perhaps to a snare or a beehive...

A stone’s throw out of our lair of last night, and we came across this posting on African Bush fb. It was fresh, made in the early dark hours by a lone bull elephant. As you can see from the spoor, he was heading west (from left to right on the pic) and quite briskly. He might not have picked up our scent under the smoke from our fire, which we had kept going through the night, but he would certainly have seen the fire’s flickering glow and, being downwind and close, the great ears may even have detected...

My turn. Mud-milky and smelling of earth and animal dung, but sucked through thinly-parted lips in long, eager draughts. If one wanders into unknown stretches of wilderness in the African heat, the deadly spectre of dehydration hovers in every mirage. Your movement is absolutely governed by water – can you survive on the water you can realistically carry until you are likely to find more? Here’s an excerpt from Paths of the Tracker with a very real story: Henry didn’t seem to notice his sense of affront. “One of the most important things to remember for survival in the...