Author: Hoffman

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...

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...