To set the stage, you are no doubt aware that I am a great, famous, even modest flyfishing writer of some renown, so you can well imagine how irritating that whole scene with the giraffe was. Of course, I always travel with that Murphy fellow, so I should have been expecting what happened next.

We decided to move to an area with fewer obstructions and motored up the channel a few miles to an open area that reminded me of my childhood days in the Everglades around Loxahatchee, which back in 1965 was a wild place indeed. I tied on a gold-and-orange popper and sent it out beside a patch of lily pads where it was obvious that something was chasing something else, given the all the splashes going on thereabouts. One strip of the fly was all it took.

Hippos can be caught on the fly,
but you need at least a 15-weight rod
and they are hard to net

Whatever it was that now had my popper in its mouth, it was strong. I didn't think it was a tigerfish because the tigerfish around here—the Vuntumtiki region of the Okavango—tended to stay in the deeper channels and allow other predator species of game fish to terrorize the weedy shallows, where we were at the moment. I also noted that this fish wasn't jumping like a tigerfish does, making me suspect it was an African pike or perhaps a nembwe. And I didn't think it was a hippo. A few minutes later my suspicions were confirmed as the long, green, fearsome-looking fish rammed the side of the boat. African pike.

We decided to keep this specimen for catfish and tigerfish bait, so it was whomped on top of the head with the net handle several times by our boatman and set in the bottom of the boat near the cooler. I went back to casting.

In the next 30 minutes we caught some happies (as in plural for a happy, which is a type of oftentimes colorful sargo-Family Cichlidae, which includes the famous peacock bass of the Amazon Basin) and, despite my earlier assumption, a tigerfish in the shallow, weedy water of the lagoon (this tiger was apparently confused).

Tigerfish have teeth that should
be avoided and, like the African
pike, can be vicious

By now it was nearing 11 a.m. and we decided to head back to camp for brunch. Seeing that the pike was laying right where my feet were going to be for the ride back to camp, I reached down, grabbed the dead fish by the back of the head, and went to give it to the boatman. This was when Murphy reminded me of his presence.

The stiff, dry, clearly dead assailant promptly chomped down on two of my fingers, its long, sharp, abundant teeth penetrating well into my dermis to about my spleen, or so I assumed from the spurting blood. Curious, I wondered (1) how a dead fish managed to bite me and (2) why it was still hanging from my fingers. Knowing that it was important for me to maintain my cool and demonstrate to the fish just who was higher in the food chain, I calmly flailed it against the edge of the cooler until it released its maniacal grip. Don and the boatman stared impassively at me, obviously assuming that my actions must be some sort of strange North American flyfishing ritual. Just as the fish let go, I heard a ruckus along the shore and looked up to see several dozen waterbuck, half a dozen red lechwe and one very large crocodile all running away into the nearby woods. Something had apparently startled them, which Don later claimed was my"incessant screaming and wailing," but which I am sure was a nearby troop of baboons. Odd, but I wasn't aware until then that 14-foot crocs were afraid of baboons.

Move on to Lions, Tigers, and Dares, Oh My Return to Top

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