Book Review

Before opening this compact, heavy volume brimming with 162 colour photos of safari life in Namibia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Cameroon, I never expected the author to be the long-legged blonde Namibian giant standing at the ASG booth at the 2007 SCI Convention.

But 500 pages later, I felt real affinity with this man of long strides crossing the deep sand and dry woodland savannah of Namibia’s ‘West of Khadum’ hunting concession. A man who breathes freedom, not loneliness, in hunting Africa’s harshest paradise that is the utter opposite of the game- rich farms of the central plateaux of his South West African childhood. A man who finds “great inner composure in severe physical activity,” so that after the sweat dries, one is only left with the core. 

Denker is a hunter who thinks the chase is nothing without heat and thorns. “What, after all, is the bushveld without dust?” You believe him when he writes that the day he starts carrying a GPS and a cell phone on safari - “symbols of estrangement from nature, of the loss of hunting skills, of the want of courage to face the unpredictable” –  is the day he hangs up his rifle.

Denker’s great-grandparents on his mother’s side came to Bechuanaland as missionaries, and he has the same stoicism of white settlers – “people with great powers of endurance to stand their ground.” At age four, he kills mice and sparrows around the homestead with an air gun that was replaced by a .22, then a .243 Winchester, and finally by an 8x68S fitted with a 98 Mauser action - a gift from his respected father.  He begins hunting game to feed staff on the cattle farms his father manages, and learns the ways of Namibia’s wildlife.

Between hunts with safari clients, he goes to Mozambique’s Zambezi Delta – an unspoilt wilderness of alluvial plains – to seek sable, alone with a local tracker whose language he does not speak but whose person, like many of the blacks he hunts with, he captures beautifully on paper and in photos.

Sensing the snobbism of clients and PHs seasoned by Tanzania, he goes to see for himself and is disenchanted by tracking animals (including lions) in Toyotas, and by hunters and game scouts too unfit and without the instinct to stalk game on foot. Striking out on his own, he seeks Cape buffalo with a few local Masai in the wet, misty cloud forest at the very top of Longido Mountain, exhausting and outlasting his trackers. He develops a passion for Masailand’s gerenuk and lesser kudu, and admires its Grant’s gazelle and dik-dik: “Perhaps this is what it is all about – the contrast between the harsh, thorny surroundings and the unbelievable gentleness and beauty of the creatures that hold their own here.”  

He goes three times to Cameroon to hunt for himself, learning that it takes several ‘empty-handed’ safaris before attaining success on species like dwarf forest buffalo, sitatunga, bongo and forest elephant.  This is due not so much to the nature of the equatorial forest, as having to “work one’s way through the incredibly corrupt Cameroon system… That is almost unbearable for an upright character,” to obtain permits, licences, supplies and staff – even to ferry his vehicle across a river. He judges the people harshly:  “Only money counts; there is no helpfulness for its own sake…If one shows any weakness, this will mercilessly be exploited,” he warns, which makes our problems in C.A.R. seem like child’s play.

Denker is not critical only of other countries; he laments Namibia’s hasty development of “supermarket hunting” on fenced game ranches stocked with non-indigenous species. Who needs blesbok, he asks, when you have Hartmann’s mountain zebra?  He recalls the old days as “a hospitable, contemplative time, free of haste and commerce.”

Along the Hunter’s Path is a homegrown book that takes us along the (sometimes confusingly) meandering journey through one hunter’s (still-young) career. He writes as the spirit moves him, so that the book is more his evolution as a hunter than a neat chronology or division of subject matter.  (I wish there were more actual dates.)

Although deeply impressionable, Denker is no romantic; he doesn’t dramatize danger (“A good buffalo hunt is a fine thing, but is often overrated.”) or humanize species. For example, he doesn’t consider black rhino or elephant especially ‘intelligent’ species. Yes, poaching-pressured elephants are certainly more nervous, but “I have not noticed that they become especially cunning or careful; neither have I experienced a wounded elephant capable of tactical manoeuvres as some other species.” For Denker, who has walked countless miles under punishing conditions pursuing elephant with clients, bagging a trophy springbok in the desolate emptiness of the Kaokoveld is a finer hunt than “the mere slaying of any elephant in an area crowded with elephant.”

Denker expresses the emotional side of pursuing and killing animals that is largely ignored in most hunting books. He makes a spiritual examination of human nature, brought to the surface by experiencing critical situations, “When a little numbness grabs for one’s heart, yet one is able to take one’s heart in both hands and stare the situation into the eyes.”  When, emptied even of sweat, only the core of the man remains. Denker has not only experienced “some horrible moments of mortal terror,” facing-down charging elephants, he has also killed a man – a powerful, charismatic man he liked, trusted and respected when he first arrived in 1993 to hunt the forgotten “sandveld wastelands beyond good and evil,” between Bushmanland and the Caprivi Strip.

As good as any detective story, Denker describes how old jealousies, deadly feuds, competing ‘medicine’ and odd coincidences made “it my fate to play a role in this drama” whose result is ultimately applauded by the area’s inhabitants.

In the mid-90s, he hunted the East Kavango’s elephants that stand four metres at the shoulder and present tusks just short of two metres with 50-cm circumferences for 70 to 100 lbs of ivory.  These silent sandy regions, “as monotone as an ocean,” laced with life-giving fossilized riverbeds called omurambas and flat clay pans, he calls the landscape of his soul.

Denker hotly pursues every elephant fired at by a client in order to deliver a follow-up to the heart/lung complex if the animal does not drop to a brain shot; he has never lost a wounded elephant.  One danger he notes with elephant is that its behaviour after taking a shot gives no indication of the shot placement, and one often doesn’t know in which direction the elephant will flee – including towards the hunters.

Denker writes that leopards do not come to bait in Namibia’s farmlands, where for generations they have been harassed by farmers and gin traps.  But in the big-game concessions, “It is a piece of artwork to discover the secret whereabouts of a leopard, to offer him a well-placed bait, to visualize the leopard…licking his lips in an epicurean, yet grumpy way to retreat into the direction anticipated by the hunter.”  One leopard hunt he sums up as a two-second encounter after 19 weary days. 

Hunting East Kavango’s wide-roaming lions is not easy. On one safari, “all that remains is a 20-km march back, empty-handed through the thornbush by night – a typical day on the trail of a hungry lion” in a land of few herbivores.

Denker was 39 in 2000 when he wrote and published this book in German (Entlang des Jägers Pfad); he translated it himself into English in 2006.  I would love to have edited (and maybe reorganized) it, but I think my heavy hand might have spoilt the authenticity and charm of Denker’s language. Lucky for us, he is one of the all too few PHs who carries a camera – and uses it as well as a rifle.

Along the Hunter’s Path can be purchased in Africa from Zimbi books (R790) www.zimbibooks.com; in Africa and the USA from Rowland Ward (US$120) www.rowlandward.com; not including shipping.