Syncerus caffer caffer (Nyeti) aggressively seeks revenge on those who torment it. Then once in a fight, Nyeti typically fights until it senses lifelessness from its foe. However uncommon for a bovine, these traits are not singularly unique to the bovine family. In order to understand the proclivities of the Nyeti more fully, we can study the other bovine that shares these traits, particularly humans. For this, we have Ernest Hemingway and Barnaby Conrad (Matador, published in 1952) to thank, among others. Ernest Hemingway’s book, Death in the Afternoon, written in 1932, details the temperament of the Spanish fighting bull (toro bravo), and the matadors that measured their worth fighting them.

While reading Hemingway’s book it occurred to me that several parallels can be drawn from Hemingway’s observations of the corrida de toros (bullfight) and the hunter’s pursuit of Nyeti. In addition to his thoughts on bullfighting, Hemingway offers two observations on storytelling. First, great writers need not write an epic. Second, if all stories are extended to their natural conclusion, they end in death. These seem apropos as well.

Years before Hemingway took his first safari in 1935, he discovered his intense interest in the Spanish corrida de toros. Some may say that Death in the Afternoon is the seminal book on bullfighting by a Westerner. Perhaps it was his detailed observations that birthed his desire for wild Africa, as surely facing the charge of a Cape buffalo at close quarters is no different in its finality than the matador (bullfighter) facing the toro bravo during the most dangerous stage, the tercio de muerte (the death phase) of the fight.

In reading Death in the Afternoon, one can’t help but draw upon Hemingway’s detailed study of the toro bravo before it enters the plaza de toros (bullring). Like rodeo bulls, some Spanish fighting bulls are more aggressive than others. Naturally the drama of the spectacle is heightened when both El toro and the matador display the heights of their ancestry. Hemingway’s interest led him to seek out and study both. He found that the most notorious toro bravo breed was the Miura. The Miura, the deadliest breed of the Spanish fighting bull, killed thirty percent of the matadors that faced them. The Miura trace their lineage back to the wild bulls of the Iberian Peninsula used first during the time of the Roman Empire. The Miura are described as large, fierce, and cunning…sounds like the Nyeti to me. I have travelled to the Seville area where the Miura are bred and trained, which paradoxically is also where Don Quixote fought his windmills. It is hilly, dry, rocky, and dominated by olive plantations and a few hunting estates with a recorded history back to when Alexander the Great hunted there.

Each pursuit, bullfighting, or bull hunting has rules of engagement. The rules are chiseled from necessity or expediency, either way, they are designed to preserve the life of the human. The corrida de toros has three acts, or tercios. The first act, or the tercio de varas, unfolds with the picadors (horse-mounted helpers) provoking the bull with lances, so the matador can study his tendencies and wear down his stamina, which causes the bull to charge the matador’s cape in a more direct path. In this act, the bull will expose which horn he prefers to hook his assailant with, while his aggressiveness is measured as his head and horns remain high for the charge.

During the el tercio de banderillas (second act) the banderilleros, (assistants to the matador), randomly approach the bull on foot in an attempt to spark its attention to the charge in spite of its recent injuries. After years of torment, this is the first time the bull will get a chance to attack a man on foot. The banderilleros run around and confuse the bull, while they jab barbed lances into El toro’s dorsal neck muscles, to both enrage the bull and ultimately to lower its head to torso height for the charge. At times the matador may perform this stage himself.

The final act, the tercio de muerte, is always performed by the matador. During the tercio de muerte the matador, with his extended cape, entices the bull to charge, each time bringing the bull’s horns closer to his torso as he passes. Once the matador is confident in the bull’s charge path, the matador extends his torso over the charging El toro’s horns in order to thrust his estoque (sword) down and through the top shoulders of the bull for an instant kill. The matador practices for years to make this final and fatal act…correctly the first time.

The placement of the sword must be practiced, and failures corrected. For the young matador, this is practiced at the novillada (practice ring). There he or she learns to appreciate the finality of the bull’s horns, made all the more perilous because the untrained bulls used for the novilladas are less predictable. Practice bulls are not Miura bulls, they are much smaller, sometimes females of the species, and often with blunted horns. They may charge the cape or the owner of the cape if there is poor cape handling. Regardless, through trial and error the apprentice, if they live, becomes a matador in about two years. These are the rules and training of the matador for the corrida de toros.

*Syncerus caffer caffer*, the Cape buffalo, is the largest subspecies of the African Buffalo and is found in Southern and East Africa.

On the other hand, the Nyeti hunter faces a bovine with an intellect honed through millennia of fights for dominance amongst themselves or survival against lions. Today, the Nyeti hunter will face a beast that is unpredictable when healthy. Then when wounded or threatened psychologically morphs into a beast conjured from those dark places in the corners of our minds we hide from and rarely speak of. Regardless of what caused the wound, the Nyeti hunter facing Nyeti’s charge will experience the same life-and-death scenario the matador faces, and Nyeti will typically explode from an unforeseen lair of its choosing.

This raises the question of how best to prepare the hunter for the moment of truth when facing a Cape Buffalo charge? Young matadors receive years of training and practice before facing a mature fighting bull. While the hunter practices his shooting skills, and typically becomes a suitable marksman, before taking the first step into the bush in pursuit of the Nyeti. The apprentice bullfighter (novillero) faces underage bulls in the novillada (place of practice). The purpose of the novillada is to harden the young matador’s nerves. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to test the hunter’s nerves, the nerves necessary to make a killing shot in the face of an Nyeti charge at close quarters. However, it can be imagined, which precipitates the question of how best to prepare the hunter’s nerves for a full-on Cape buffalo charge at close quarters.

One approach for simulating a Nyeti charge would be with a remote-controlled medium-sized car with a grapefruit-sized target in the upper center of the grill. Simulating the reality of a full-on charge would require the person to stand in front of the accelerating car while it closed in on them at approximately twenty miles per hour. The goal is to hit the target as it closes from thirty to ten feet. Why ten feet? That is my distance for the best possible chance to hit the charging Nyeti between the eyes, it may not be your distance. Perhaps other hunters can hit a bobbing grapefruit at sixty feet or more? Realistically, my experience with ambushes has originated and terminated within fifty feet. I haven’t had the TV experience where they charge from twenty-five to fifty yards while being seen standing in the shade in almost full view. But then no video crew would have been able to remain on duty in either of the charges I have faced. Perhaps that is why no killing shots from within ten feet are on YouTube.

Back to the simulation... If the hunter hits the target, then the motor is killed, and the emergency brake is applied, thus causing the killer sedan to skid to a stop at the hunter’s feet. If the hunter misses the target, then the hunter gets hit if they are not agile enough to jump out of the way. Without practice like this, the Westerner faces a chance ambush by Mr. Nyeti himself… untrained. Some shooting schools have dangerous game images on tracks that simulate a charge. These are nice carnival tricks, but they can’t harden the hunter’s nerves. In most cases, without hardened nerves, the result is predictable, and that is the main reason most Westerners should never hunt PAC Cape buffalo. However, with their PH’s approval, they can participate in the follow-up of their wounded trophy Nyeti if the first shot wasn’t conclusive. Both suertes on Nyeti are sufficiently dangerous.

Still, from Hemingway, we learn that over and above their skills, the matador’s life depends on one advantage. They have yet to relinquish this one advantage over the bull after five hundred years of bullfighting. The hunter facing a Nyeti charge DOES NOT have this advantage, though he does carry another advantage that at least makes the fight with the Cape buffalo somewhat fairer in principle. That one advantage… the dangerous game rifle, though it must be wielded with absolute precision during a charge in order to have any immediate effect at all. In either case for the hunter or matador, when the advantage is lost their life will hang in the balance.

It is this advantage that the matador retains that makes El toro’s charge at a matador’s less dangerous than the hunter facing Nyeti’s death charge. Both El toro and Nyeti seek unhinged revenge…but at what? We know the Cape buffalo is, without a doubt, focused on dismembering and killing as many people as it can, when it charges. So why does the bull charge the matador’s cape and not the matador? This characteristic is clearly in the matador’s favor…. but why? The answer is in the training. The Miura bulls are trained from horseback. They never experience a man on foot. Their torment comes from the cape held by the men on horseback. Five hundred years of training has taught the Miura handlers to never encounter the bull on foot, so when the bull enters the ring it associates its torment with the cape, not the person next to it. The Miura bulls are basically trained to hate the cape. The bullfighter determines the level of danger by determining how close to their body to hold the cape. If the bulls were trained with men on foot, then they would immediately charge the matador, killing him on the first pass, which to say at the least would make for a very short spectacle.

The reason modern bullfights utilize bulls that have never seen a matador on foot, until they enter the ring, is because “used or educated” bulls are so deadly. The laws governing bullfights changed in 1967, when Pope Pius IV issued a Papal edict excommunicating all Christian princes who allowed bullfighting with “experienced” bulls within their countries. Experienced bulls were those that survived their first fight in the ring and became educated as to where their torment originated. In fact, one bull alone killed sixteen matadors, wounded sixty others, and was never killed during its five-year stint in the ring. It was eventually sent to the slaughterhouse due to age. This exemplifies the bovine’s ability to gain, store and utilize knowledge. Pope Pius IV reinstituted bullfighting once the principalities desiring a return of the bullfight agreed to kill all fighting bulls that survived, so subsequent matadors would only face uneducated bulls. This speaks volumes about the mental aptitude of the fighting bulls. It goes without saying that many a post-1967 matador died in the ring when the bull figured out that the matador rather than the cape was the problem during their first time in the ring. Once the bull understands the suerte the matador has lost his advantage. It is naturally the matador’s goal to kill the bull before this advantage is lost.

Now apply that understanding of El toro to the instincts and cunning of a beast forty percent larger and stronger. It also sports much longer horns, and the organic knowledge that hunters are pests, and you have described Syncerus caffer caffer, and it will likely ambush the hunter without warning from the thickest thornbush or cover available. Nyeti will be fully engaged in the killing of the person they believe is their tormenter from the first step into a charge. Both the Miura bull and Nyeti demonstrate the capacity for deductive reasoning and aggressive retaliation against that which torments them. So, when you go into the field to eliminate a PAC Nyeti or follow up a wounded bull, one must not underestimate their abilities to identify and attempt to eliminate what they fear. In the case of the matador, once his advantage is lost it means almost certain death. In the case of the hunter facing a charge, after several hundred years of hunting Cape buffalo, we know they too are coming directly at the hunter with the same intentions.

Whether it be a bullfighter in the ring or hunters facing a death charge from Nyeti, they share many suertes in common. First, the closer the horns the greater the drama and danger, and secondly, one’s feet display the matador or hunter’s nerves. The best bullfighter’s feet remain stationary, displaying their command over the bull, while less trained matadors step, hop or jump out of the way, displaying their lack of confidence in the suerte. The same goes for the ambushed hunter, who must remain steady on their feet while 1,800 pounds of determined rage attempt to run their horns through them. Jumping, hopping, or running away virtually eliminates the stability necessary to hit the grapefruit-sized brain. Like the matador trying to place the estoque or death sword while cowering from the danger, the hunter’s shot will most likely miss the brain or spine, thereby further enraging Nyeti’s sensibilities. Remember, the hunter doesn’t have the advantage of the matador’s cape to misdirects the bull’s initial attention. Black Death is coming for you for the first time. Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War, written in the fifth century BC, lays it out perfectly. First, know yourself, and then know your adversary as well as you know yourself. If you don’t, then retreat until you do.

At the beginning of the day the buffalo hunter must enter the thornbush and weld his bushcraft with confidence, knowing that he will dictate the events of the day, and not be condemned by them. Triple this if following up a PAC animal. It is no different than the matador entering the tercio de muerte.

The Nyeti hunter and matador’s day will end differently. At the end of the day the modern corrida de toros ends with the death of the bull. On the other hand, the outcome from a Nyeti hunt is undeterminable. Only with hardened nerves and precise marksmanship will the hunter best Nyeti should the moment of truth come to pass. If not, then the hunter might well experience the same demise that even the best matadors the ring has ever known experience, as Nyeti grinds its bosses ever deeper, then through the hunter’s torso.

Bullfighting and Cape Buffalo Charges

A Time to Kill

Patrolling the Alpine Loop