MY HEART OF DARKNESS

Words by E. Donnall Thomas, Jr. Photos by Lori Thomas

I WAS THERE NOT FOR A TROPHY BUT FOR THE EXPERIENCE OF TRYING TO TAKE A LARGE, DANGEROUS ANIMAL WITH NOTHING BUT A STICK AND STRING.

This story deserves a segment on “The Blackness of the Buffalo” for reasons analogous to Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick: Perfect lightness or perfect darkness seems to represent all the human mind needs to know in order to understand each of these imposing creatures. The first time I saw a wild Asiatic buffalo lumbering toward me through the lush green cycads that blanket Australia’s Melville Island, its mud-streaked ebony hide bespoke trouble as eloquently as the contempt in its eyes.

The creature was perhaps justified in his disdain. Aussie mates Bill Baker, Brad Kane, Dan Smith, and I had organized this trip to explore the possibilities of guiding bowhunters in pursuit of Australia’s most dangerous big game animal. Despite his welldeserved reputation as one of the country’s best bowhunters, Bill had never connected on a buffalo despite multiple frustrating attempts in other areas. Bill was carrying his recurve that morning, but I couldn’t even manage that much: Recent neck surgery to repair a damaged nerve had left me unable to pick my nose with my right arm, much less draw a bow heavy enough to kill a tough one-ton animal. Furthermore, in a classical example of “It seemed like a good idea at the time” thinking, we hadn’t brought a single firearm with us to the island.

photo: Donnall E Thomas

The bull ground to a halt 15 yards away and gave us the stink eye, and our plan was that Bill would put an arrow through him while I backed him up—with my camera. The bull’s belligerent attitude had already eliminated the need for an elaborate stalk; he had been closing the distance between us since first making eye contact. Unfortunately he was facing us head-on, and a frontal shot with a bow at any big game animal—let alone one that large—is a recipe for disaster. There was nothing for us to do but wait, and nothing to do while we waited except gauge the distance to the nearest gum trees and decide how we’d try to climb one should the situation go to hell in a hurry.

For some reason I glanced at my watch at the beginning of the standoff, which is how I know that all of us (including the buffalo) stood motionless for exactly 29 minutes. The arrow on the riser of Bill’s bow began to shake. I struggled to control the cramps developing in my legs. The buffalo began to drool and run his tongue inside his nostrils in an attempt to pick up more of our scent, a doomed effort since we had been careful to put the wind in our faces as soon as we spotted him.

Finally, the bull decided that we just weren’t worth his time and turned to walk away. The moment the axis of his body reached a full broadside angle, I watched Bill come to full draw and release the arrow. The impact made a sound like a baseball bat hitting a pumpkin, and the stricken bull seemed to hesitate between flight or fight. Fortunately he chose the former, and the long spell broke as we listened to him crash off into the brush. Had my outstretched arm not come up solidly against a gum tree, I might have collapsed to the ground. We easily located the fallen bull 50 yards back in the brush. Bill’s long quest for a buffalo with his bow was over, but three seasons’ worth of adventure on Melville Island had just begun. Australia is the home of biological anomalies.

No placental mammals are native to the island continent. (Descended from the Asian red wolf, the dingo arrived from the mainland courtesy of Malay traders long before first European contact.) Instead, Australia was populated entirely by marsupials like the kangaroo and the world’s sole egg-laying mammal, the duck-billed platypus.

New arrivals during the colonial era

photo: Donnall E Thomas

introduced a variety of large ungulates, ranging from pigs and goats (which now wreak ecological havoc throughout the country) to a half-dozen Eurasian deer species to camels. (No kidding: Australia is now home to the world’s largest free-range camel population.)

Asiatic buffalo went aboard Noah’s ark to Australia in the early 1800s, where their first stop was Melville Island, a lonely strip of tropical wilderness in the Arafura Sea that could have served as landfall for Robinson Crusoe. From there, colonists engaged in another exercise in “It seemed like a good idea at the time” thinking by introducing the buffalo to the Australian mainland. Apparently the plan was to domesticate them as a source of meat and hides, but the buffalo had other ideas. They proved impossible to contain and were soon marauding everywhere across the country’s wild “Top End.”

Unlike our North American bison, these animals are related to the African Cape buffalo, to which they invite obvious comparison. The two are similar in size and body structure, although the horns on the Asiatic species are crescent-shaped rather than down-curved. On the basis of my three seasons of extensive experience with the Asiatic buffalo, I believe it lacks the malignant edge of the Cape buffalo’s personality. Although bowhunting them without benefit of firearm backup was not as suicidal as it had initially appeared, we did bring rifles along when guiding clients on subsequent trips because we never forgot that these were large, dangerous animals that could and did kill people in the Outback every year. My useless right arm kept me from carrying

photo: Donnall E Thomas

my own bow on that first trip, but I still found plenty to do: scouting new cover, spotting game, tracking, skinning, and, best of all, supplementing our meager larder. We had only been able to import a minimal amount of food to the island. We salvaged all of the buffalo meat for distribution to the island’s Aboriginal Tiwi population, and we anticipated being able to subsist on some of it ourselves. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that meat from any bull worth shooting was too tough to chew even though it tasted just fine.

Although a fly rod may seem an inefficient survival tool, I always carry one on wilderness trips. My four-piece 7-weight has served me well all around the world, from feeding sheep hunting camps with char and grayling on the North Slope of the Brooks Range to providing our party with sea-run Dollies on exploratory hunting trips to Siberia. I couldn’t imagine it failing to do the same in the fertile waters surrounding Melville Island.

And did it ever. We were camped on the island’s remote east end, far from the little Tiwi community of Snake Bay. The area’s only inhabitants were Laurence and Marjorie Priddy, members of Australia’s “Lost Generation,” whose parents had hidden them in the bush when authorities began to round up Aboriginal children and pack them off to boarding schools to “civilize” them by erasing

all traces of their traditional culture. Twice a year, Laurence walked to Snake Bay for a bag of rice. Otherwise, the couple subsisted on vegetables raised in their garden and on barramundi, Australia’s signature estuarine gamefish.

The evening after we’d each invested an hour trying to chew our way through a bite of Bill’s buffalo, I showed Laurence my fly rod and suggested a fishing trip the following morning. “That’s fine, Don,” replied Laurence, who had evidently viewed some fly-fishing television at some point, “but there’ll be no kissing them and throwing them back in the water. When we catch barra, we kill them and eat them.”

“Perfect,” I replied.

photo: Donnall E Thomas

Early the following morning I met Laurence at his house and climbed into his ancient “tinny,” as Australians refer to their small metal skiffs. The creek in front of his house was flowing briskly inland on a strong building tide, and we let the current carry us across a long, open flat toward the jungle. It soon became apparent that if one of us bailed constantly with the coffee can bobbing in the bilge, we could just keep pace with the water pouring in through the tinny’s perforated bottom, a state of affairs that made me acutely aware of the area’s ominous apex predator: the saltwater crocodile.

For as it happens, the range of both buffalo and barramundi overlaps almost perfectly with that of the “salty,” a prehistoric monster that even the fearless Aussies regard with profound respect. I’d already seen evidence of their presence the day before: a huge, waddling drag mark that led into a buffalo wallow and didn’t come out, motivating me to give the mudhole as wide a berth as possible. When I pointed to croc tracks covering the creek’s muddy banks, Laurence confirmed that the water was full of them. This was not the place to swamp a skiff.

To my disappointment, the brisk tidal flow had muddied the current—never a good sign for a fly rod angler. Laurence encouraged me

photo: Donnall E Thomas

photo: Donnall E Thomas

to have at it anyway, and I did. To my delight and surprise, on my third cast something whacked my streamer out in the turbid water and then gave me a glimpse of a yard-long length of silver flashing in the tropical sun before it threw the hook. Newly alerted, I didn’t miss the next strike and eventually managed to haul that 20-pound fish over the tinny’s gunwale. In accordance with prior agreement, I did not kiss it and toss it back in the water. That was my introduction to a fish that has haunted my imagination ever since.

I finally expressed my reservations about the cloudy water despite landing two more fish. Laurence paddled us toward the rapidly vanishing shoreline and directed me to the nearby jungle. “The water will be clear up in those little pools, Don,” he assured me. “But be careful in there. Don’t want you stepping on one of our snapping handbags.”

Croc tracks littered the mud as I slogged across the flat. Entering the shade of the gum trees felt like reaching Conrad’s “heart of darkness.” The water was indeed clear, but the stumps and snags littering the little series of pools would make landing a fish the size of those I’d already caught challenging if not impossible. I shot a roll cast through the debris and received an immediate strike. The leaping barra soon had my fly line festooned across the snags like tinsel on a Christmas tree, and when the fish threw a half-hitch around one I chose to break the leader deliberately rather than wade in and try to salvage the fly. No snapping handbags for me.

photo: Donnall E Thomas

By the time I had finished replacing my fly and leader, I had the eerie sensation that I was not alone. I scanned the water for croc nostrils but saw none. My sixth sense proved accurate, however, for when I glanced up into the trees I saw a buffalo bull staring back at me from the shadows no more than four rod lengths away. The animal showed no interest in yielding the right of way along the series of shrouded pools, and I decided then and there that we had enough fish for dinner.

As indeed we did, but just barely. Barramundi

photo: Donnall E Thomas

enjoy a tremendous reputation as food fish, and our evening meal that night confirmed it. From then on I was charged with providing fresh fish for dinner every night—a tough job, but somebody had to do it. And I did. To the chagrin of my concerned Aussie companions, not even the crocodiles could keep me out of the water. Those missions began my love affair with barramundi, which continues to this day. With the strength in my arm finally

recovered, I returned to Melville Island over the next two seasons to guide bowhunters and save the camp from tough buffalo steaks. It didn’t feel right to guide others for an animal I hadn’t killed myself, however; so on the first morning of my next trip I headed off into the bush with my bow.

It didn’t take me long to spot a lone bull

photo: Donnall E Thomas

wandering down a clearly defined buffalo pad through the cycads. In terms of horns this was no monster, a shortcoming about which I could not have cared less.

I knew where the trail the bull was following led, and after carefully checking the wind I set out to circle ahead of him. Just as I arrived at my destination and found a conveniently located cycad to crouch behind, a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos noticed me and sounded a raucous chorus of alarms. I’d seen careful stalks unravel before because of these beautiful but profoundly irritating birds, but when I finally spotted the bull lumbering toward me he seemed to be paying no attention to the alarm bells ringing overhead. back in the trees the buffalo had switched paths; instead of continuing down the one I’d set up to shoot across, he was now proceeding down the one right beside me. It was too late for me to move, so I held my ground and hoped for the best. When the bull passed me broadside at four yards, I waited for his near front leg to come forward, concentrated on a patch of mud that happened to be in just the right place, drew, and released. In retrospect I can’t recommend this exercise in hubris, but as it happened the heavy arrow passed all the way through the buffalo’s chest. The bull spun, galloped 50 yards, and collapsed without giving any indication that he was ever aware of my presence.

It all seems so long ago now, as if these events took place in a galaxy far, far away. Bill Baker is dead, a victim of gastric cancer. Political turmoil in the local Tiwi community has left the island all but closed to visitors. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

This coda doesn’t mean, however, that our adventure was all for naught. The experience was always about more than hunting buffalo—it was about friends and fish and exotic wildlife, about the excitement of exploring a brave new world of tropical wilderness. Brad, Dan, and I remain good friends. I still return regularly to Far North Queensland and the Northern Territory, to visit friends and explore new saltwater with my fly rod. And whenever I head back home, I miss everything about the wild.