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fellow I had known from medical school who became an optometrist. Graeme told the story
about how one night they were sitting around the camp fire at the same place when an impala
being chased by wild dogs ran into the circle around the fire, already severely injured by the
wild dogs. This has been described previously in old hunting topics. The wild dogs took down
the impala but Graeme drove the wild dogs off the impala and allegedly cut out the tenderloins
for their braaivleis. Anyway, the story went that the hyenas then came to try and grab the
carcass but since it belonged to the wild dogs he drove off the hyenas and the wild dogs came
and collected their trophy and carried it off in short time.
This had happened at the Xakanaka Camp site where we were camping. We knew there
were always hyenas around at night, behind our backs some 10 yards away. I suspect it was
because the herbivore biomass seemed to be considerably reduced and these were starving
hyenas left over from a more bountiful time when they could hunt. As soon as we climbed into
our car top tents at night they would raid the camp site looking for any scraps, which we
obviously didn't leave for them. At South Gate, however, some unsuspecting German tourists
left their shoes outside their tent and the next morning they were gone with only a few pieces
left behind, even though hardly edible. The pack did steal some of our pans and dumped them
in the bush, leaving deep tooth marks. Hyenas have the strongest jaws of all mammals but
fortunately are cowards.
Spotted Hyena at Dusk
Clearly one can understand how sleeping in a tent on the ground is very dangerous with such
ravenous hyenas around and why, particularly kids, are plucked out of tents at night usually
haven been bitten in the face. Early African hunters described coming across Africans missing
parts of their faces from hyena attacks. There was also a hippo that walked around the
Xakanaka camp site at night munching the close cut grass. Fortunately, he was accustomed to
camp fires but hippos, like rhino, will sometimes be driven to extinguish fires. William Henry
Drummond, author of '
Large game of South and South-Eastern Africa”
, was the first to note
that rhinos stamp out fires, as portrayed in the movie “
The God's must be Crazy”
. One of the
most unusual stories about hippos is this area is the story by Gordon-Cummings of holding onto
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