You can’t just tell a Leopard to FUCK off. (Part 1)

Paul Connolly

(The colourful title of this story goes to the credit of Nelfie Kemp.)

It was when we were sitting under the teak trees at the Victoria Falls Primary School,  that Derek ‘Gomez’ Adams started telling us about the lion that chased him around the baobab tree near Chirisa National Park in northwest Zimbabwe.       

But first a bit about Gomez. If, for example, you were sitting with your partner or spiritually inclined, well behaved friends, having a beer, in a convivial atmosphere, at the Boat Club on a Friday evening, and you saw Gomez walking through the gate, it would be your most fervent hope that he did not join your table.

He is loud, irreverent, generally rude, and funny. Given to colourful exaggeration, he is good company, but you would be in a constant state of fear that he would remember and repeat in unnecessary detail some embarrassing event that occurred in your past.  Behind the bluster, he is great naturalist and an experienced and accomplished professional hunter.

He was telling a good story, and amusing, but we had heard the like before. When the lion he had wounded, finally caught him, and took his head into its mouth, then the story became interesting, but the best part was when he told us about his two gun-bearers who had launched themselves up into the same Baobab tree with impressive and unusual speed, and were perched in the top branches observing the pursuit below.  They were watching with great interest as the big cat gnawed away at Gomez’s head.

Eventually, Gomez’s tracker shot the lion off him, but not before his head was noticeably damaged and still hasn’t really recovered. Of course, there were those who claimed that the damage has improved his looks.  But Gomez lacked all sense of vanity, so it never bothered him.

With the lion was finally deceased and Gomez had recovered enough of his senses, he saw the two porters up the tree, and told them to throw his cigarettes down because he was in need of many. The porters refused, saying that they were scared and in need of more.                                         

After some choice language which left them in little doubt as to what the future held for them, one of the porters took a cigarette out of the packet, placed it between his lips, lit it and tossed the lighted cigarette down to Gomez where it landed near him in a little puff of dust. That was the bit we liked most, and we all thought it a little unfair that Gomez fired his porters shortly afterwards.

“They should have been promoted,” declared Fats Whittal.

It was that same afternoon under the teak trees when Tony Moore told us about the wounded buffalo that ambushed him, ripped into his torso, and opened up his rib cage so that his lungs spilled out onto the ground. Tony is a very different character to Gomez.  He is without doubt one of the most experienced and respected professional hunters in pretty much the whole of Africa. And unlike Gomez, blessed with good looks. He is neither diffident or overly modest, but he does not have the skill to tell a good story, even though the experiences he has had would have the members of the Royal Geographical Society in awed disbelief. He never knows the right occasion to pause and draw heavily on his pipe which is a permanent fixture. He never knows the right time to tap the ashes out of the pipe on the bottom of his shoe, all these actions which can create a sense of anticipation from his audience.  

But the story he was relating under the teak trees was so extraordinary that he didn’t need to concern himself with such subtleties. Despite that, nobody was paying real attention until he informed us that none of us really knew how big lungs actually were, and that because they were moist, small stones and twigs stuck to, them, and it was the devils own job to pluck all this debris off the lungs before stuffing them back into the rib cavity.

“Tony’, I said. “You’ve been smoking a pipe since you were sixteen. They must be the colour and size of an old squash ball, so how can you tell us that stones and twigs stuck to them”               

“That’s actually not true’ said Fats, an inveterate smoker himself. “I can tell you that inhaling cigarettes is good for the lungs. It makes them bigger, and I read that in a magazine for doctors and stuff”

In a disinterested attempt to steer the conversation back to the buffalo charge, Tony said that what concerned him more than his lungs flopping about in the sand, was the fact that a section of his heart was visible.  Not to be outdone, Fats said that it was a proven fact that a heart can live happily outside the body, for a while anyway.                                           

I wondered if he also had medical evidence on that one, but on occasions like this, it would have been churlish to ask him which medical journal he acquired this from.

But what got our attention was when Tony told us that he had just bought himself a new Land Cruiser, and after his tracker finally shot the buffalo off him, and he gathered up his lungs, he didn’t know how to get to the hospital because he wouldn’t let his tracker drive his new vehicle.

We liked that bit.

So it was not surprising that nobody found the story of the leopard that attacked me at 9 o’clock on a clear Friday morning in my suburban garden, worthy of re-telling, until I got to the end and mentioned the part about the toilet. I had just returned from a solo kayak expedition on a long section of the Congo river, and was enjoying the feeling of not having to worry about the myriad things, mostly imagined, that can go wrong on such a trip.

My house is large and rambling, with crisp lawns and a luxuriant garden and I was sitting on the veranda drinking coffee, when my new African neighbour, Marilyn, joined me, with her plump little two year old daughter.  She had kindly come to introduce herself and I offered her some tea.

After a short while, the gardener came sprinting around the side of the house in a frenzy, pointing towards the back garden, and shouting that a leopard had jumped over the wall, and had attacked the maid or the dog, he wasn’t sure which, and he clearly wasn’t hanging around to find out. I told Marilyn to go inside, and I went to see for myself.

Sure enough, as I exited from the kitchen door, I saw it, craning its head up in order to look through a window. Leopards, unless wounded, are rarely a threat to a full grown person, so I walked towards it, shouting for it to go away.  I literally said “Shoo” I did not use abusive language in this command, simply because leopards are so beautiful that you can’t speak to them in a harsh manner. And furthermore, the consequences of being rude to a leopard are not likely to be favourable. Instinctively we know that we can’t just tell a leopard to “FUCK OFF”. (Nelfie Kemp)

Part 2 Coming Next Week.