One of the great thrills of hunting in Africa is the experience of spending an entire night in a tree blind, waiting for a lion or some other animal to come to a bait or waterhole at dawn. The sounds that waft up from the darkness below are mesmerizing—grunts, snarls, scrapes, cries, tiny clicking sounds of hooves.
Over the years, I have spent many a night in a tree blind in Africa, but none as momentous as the night of May 5, 2005. I was in Cameroon, West Africa, that night with professional hunter Dougie Stephenson. The animals we were hoping to see at daybreak were a western buffalo and, if we were lucky, a forest sitatunga.
Our blind was a platform nailed between two limbs of a large tree about 35 feet above the ground. There was enough room to stretch out, a place to prop my rifle and a plastic sheet draped over a limb above us to provide protection in case it rained.
The southern part of Cameroon where we were hunting is jungle Africa. The forest is so thick in many places the only way to get around is on game trails. The biggest challenge is spotting game. Hence our decision to build a blind over a small clearing in the jungle where a spring bubbled out of the ground. The mud around the spring was thick with tracks. Duiker mostly, but also buffalo and the webbed-hoof track of forest sitatunga.
We climbed into the blind about 3 in the afternoon to see what would come in at nightfall. We had food with us and jackets, all we needed to spend the night if we didn’t connect with anything in the evening.
The climb up was precarious, on steps created by nailing lengths of saplings into the trunk of the tree. Dougie had a length of rope, which he used to lift our packs and rifles. Standing on the ground, watching my rifle spin and sway upward, I got my first premonition of trouble. It was like a chill breeze you feel sometimes when a storm is approaching.
My concern was the number of trees one sees lying on the ground in southern Cameroon. The soil is so rich and the conditions so perfect for growth that trees in Cameroon are like dinosaurs that grow too large for their own good. Instead of sinking into bogs the way dinosaurs did, they crash to the ground. Indeed, so many trees and limbs of trees fall to the ground during rainstorms that some PHs carry chainsaws in their hunting cars in case a tree falls across the road they need to traverse getting back to camp.
But rain seemed a very remote possibility that afternoon in May 2005. I ignored my premonition and climbed on into the blind. The view from up there was just what I needed if game came in. I carefully checked to see that my line of fire was unobstructed into the clearing itself and into the two major paths leading into the clearing. It was. There was nothing to do then but wait.
As the day wound down and shadows lengthened, there were a few scurrying sounds deep in the brush of the clearing. A duiker maybe. Or pangolin. Certainly not a buffalo or sitatunga, though. When it was full dark, I munched quietly on a sandwich, checked to see my rifle was safely wedged into the limb above me and nodded off to sleep.
Sometime later, I awoke to the sound of rain pattering down on the plastic sheet over my head. A breeze was stirring through the forest. In the distance, I saw a flicker of lighting. Close by, barely audible at first, was a low moaning sound of wind. It broke over us momentarily like a wave. A tree nearby made a sound eerily like a knuckle cracking, only louder. The limb we were on rose and fell like a ship at sea.
I fought a wave of panic, considered waking up Dougie and then relaxed. Everything would be fine, I told myself. Already, the wind was dying down. There would be a buffalo in the clearing for sure at daybreak. I quickly went back to sleep with visions of that in mind.
Of all the fears humans are subject to, one of the most gripping is the fear of falling. Of tumbling end over end in the dark, not knowing where you are and what is happening. And that is the very next thing I experienced. I awoke, it seems, just milliseconds before striking the ground. There was an enormous sensation of movement, the crash of wood striking the ground, then an explosion of pain in my lower back.
For what happened next, I have to rely on the memory Dougie Stephenson has of events. He says I struggled to my feet in the dark. He heard me doing so and hobbled over to push me to the ground, as he could tell by my cries that I had a serious back injury. He says I pushed my way back to my feet again, and he had to push me back down, then lie on me to keep me down. He did so apparently in spite of being injured himself. In fact, his injury was later diagnosed as a broken neck. He was in danger of quadriplegia or even death.
As for my injuries, they turned out to be almost as catastrophic: four broken or cracked vertebrae. An MRI would reveal later that one of those vertebrae was shattered into three pieces, one of which was shaped roughly like a fish hook and pointed straight at my spinal cord. The wrong movement would send that sliver of bone straight into my spinal cord paralyzing me from the waist down.
For the moment, all I knew was pain. It was overwhelming, shattering and relentless. And there was no escaping from it. Dougie had a satellite phone, and I recall him leaning over me in the dark with a pen light, struggling to dial the phone. His hands were shaking. His voice broke as he tried to reassure me. There was no answer but that was because of the hour—roughly 2 a.m. Someone would be awake in the camp soon. He would call back and help would come.
I will never forget Dougie’s professionalism. One of the less important injuries I had was a finger jammed completely sideways. Not broken or sprained, but simply jammed sideways, at a 45 degree angle to my hand. The finger was my ring finger, and it was swelling rapidly. In the midst of all that chaos, in the dark and pounding rain (yes, it had started to rain), Dougie had the presence of mind to remove my wedding ring and button it up inside my shirt pocket. I found it there later, back at camp and had to fight back tears of gratitude.
What Dougie couldn’t do is give me anything for my pain. That continued without let-up for hours on end. At one point, I remember becoming aware that my eye sockets were full of water from the rain. It had stopped raining by then and I became aware of mosquitoes. They were thick on my hands, and they had bitten me so much my hands were swollen. At that point I realized I was lying in thick grass, that it was dark, that we were in elephant country. Cobras were common. Western buffalo are known for their aggressiveness, and we had been in the blind because there were tracks everywhere. I couldn’t get up. What would I do if animals came? Where was everyone?
Those concerns were then swallowed up by the pain, and I had the sensation of rising into the sky, of it getting warm. I saw or seemed to see a pink sky. Then, mercifully, I fell into a coma-like state.
The next memory I had was of excited talking all around me. It was light and the safari operator was bent over me with a cup of dark liquid. It was pain-killer. Dougie had been able to reach the camp on the satellite phone. Help had arrived. And just as he had promised, everything was going to be alright.
Actually, my ordeal was far from over. I still had to be carried out of that clearing on a makeshift stretcher made from tree limbs and vines, and I had to get back to camp on 30 miles of safari track. Every mud hole, every broken bridge we had to cross sent stabs up pain up my back.
Instinctively, I knew I was a broken straw, that I would be paralyzed if I didn’t get proper medical care, that I had to stay flat on my back or else. What ensued was several days of back and forth activity that culminated in a medical jet being flown into Douala, Cameroon, for my transport home. Along the way, I was dropped on my injured back by camp staff attempting to carry me in a blanket from the car to the charter flight I had called in to get me to Douala. Once there, I was left in the back of a King Air for hours because the medical jet from Nairobi was delayed.
I was so dehydrated and exhausted by the heat in the King Air that the medical crew on board the evacuation flight said I was experiencing heart arrhythmias. They jammed needles in my arms and pumped me full of anesthesia and sleeping pills. I remember waking up only once on that long roundabout flight from Douala to Nairobi. What I was doing in Nairobi, instead of Madrid being cleared for transport back to the United States, is anyone’s guess. For sure, the company that transported me home did not get the logistics right. My most searing memory of that stopover in Nairobi was the sight of another African doctor bending over my bed showing me the image of that fish-hooked-shaped piece of bone pointed at my spinal cord. He needed my permission for emergency surgery.
I may have yelled at that doctor. I’m not sure, but whatever I did had the effect of getting me on another jet home, without surgery. The stops along the way included Corfu, Greece, and Brussels, Belgium, where I was picked up by an air ambulance that had just delivered an injured soccer player to his family in Belgium. Meeting that jet saved me many thousands of dollars because it meant I had to pay only for the one-way trip from Brussels to Miami, where the jet had originated. Still, the cost of the trip home was an astounding $124,000.
Swaddled in expert medical care, I recovered from my injuries. I did have to learn to walk again, and for weeks afterward I had to fight panic attacks when I began to re-live the experience of falling. What stabbed me the hardest back then—and still does if I dwell on it—was the uncontrollable return of the sound of that limb hitting the ground under me. Swish… Crash… Then an explosion of pain.
What I have carried away from the experience, among other things, is a loss of innocence. Ask anyone who has endured a catastrophic accident. They will all tell you that life is forever different after your illusion of security has been shattered the way mine was. You know in your bones from then on that bad things happen, that misery and pain and catastrophe are a hairbreadth from normalcy and every-day-ness. On the positive side, what you gain is a profound sense of gratitude. For whatever reason, you were spared and allowed to go back into the woods and fields to enjoy what you had before. The only difference is life is a bit sweeter, albeit tinged with something like melancholy because of an enhanced sense of life’s brevity and fragility.
On a more mundane level, I have also learned the importance of having a little known source of protection when you travel—namely, medical evacuation coverage. If I had been covered by a top notch provider of medical evacuation coverage, my transport home would have been free, and it would have been handled by individuals who know how to handle emergencies. For sure, no one who travels more than a few hundred miles from home to hunt should do so without this coverage. It’s not that hunting is dangerous. Statistically, it’s not. But it is where the rare accidents occur and the severity of them that is important. My advice is, don’t travel to hunt without medical evacuation coverage.
(Postscript: The medical evacuation company I recommend is Global Rescue, www.globalrescue.com. The company has an operations center staffed by former Navy SEALS and other expertly trained former military personnel. They say they would have picked me up in the field where I was injured, sparing me the ordeal I went through getting home.)
