The guy who was killed by the lion was a gun bearer and I had just met him a few days earlier but I didn't see him get killed. The guy who was killed by the hippo was a rich real estate developer that I knew and I wasn't even in Africa when he bought the farm. The same is true of the guy who was killed by the cape buffalo. He was an African businessman who was hunting without a guide. I've actually known two people who got "gutted" by cape buffalo, One was a professional hunter and he didn't get hurt too badly and the other is an old friend of mine. My friend put a 500 grain solid from his .458 behind the shoulder of a cape buffalo and the buffalo took out his appendix and part of his colon before he died. My friend lived but he has given up buffalo hunting. Both of the grizzly attacks were to clients of mine and both of them were hunting guides.
The bison and the VW is the stuff of nightmares. I saw that. It was in Custer State Park in South Dakota and my parents had a summer home just a hundred yards outside of the park and about a mile off the Needles Highway. I used to ride my horse up to the highway, and let him graze in a meadow, and I would climb up on a tall rock and look around. It was, and still is, the most beautiful place in the USA. I was 11 years old, sitting on that rock, when the bison moved into the meadow. They didn't bother my horse and he just moved over to graze on the grass below my rock. A VW bug came up the highway with two men and two women and they stopped to take pictures of the bison. There are signs that tell people to stay in their cars but they didn't believe them and they got out and walked toward the bison. There was one old bull who started pawing the dirt and the people ran back to the car. They all managed to get in when the bull hit it and he started rolling it up the side of a hill. It looked like a little kid kicking a beach ball around. I dropped off the rock, got on my horse, and set a land speed record getting back to my parent's house. My dad was a doc and I told him what happened and he had my mother call the ambulance and the park rangers. He hopped in his car and headed for the highway. He wouldn't let me go with him so I got back on my horse and galloped back there. I took a short cut and got there about one minute behind my dad who was climbing in the car to check on the people. I rode right up to the car and he told me to get away and I didn't. The bull had shredded the top of the car and it looked like he had taken a big can opener to it. They all looked dead to me but I wasn't an expert on "dead" so I asked my dad and he told me they all had severe head injuries and they were dead. Then he changed his mind and told me to get off my horse and take a close look at them. I did what he told me to. I had long been a problem to my parents and one of the things that drove them nuts was my horse and I liked to find the buffalo herd and piss off a buffalo and get him/her to chase us. My dad thought if I saw those dead folks with bashed in heads, it might stop me from fucking around with the bison. It was a pretty gruesome sight and it slowed me down for a couple of days but it didn't cure me.
Every year somebody would get killed by bison in the Black Hills and I'm told by my friends who still live there that it is still a problem. Bison are not gentle giants.
During the early 1980s, my wife and I got hooked on Africa and we spent a couple of summers there. I met a lot of hunters and guides and I heard about it when people got killed. There was a little fishing village on the Atlantic coast where the men used hollowed out logs, called pirogues, as fishing boats. They would usually hang feet over the side and there were at least half a dozen men in that village who were missing a foot/leg because a shark had clipped it off. They had some great whites but the bad ones were tiger sharks. They also have a lot of rivers in Africa with crocodiles and most of the villages have people, especially women, who have had body parts snatched by crocs.
Africa is a beautiful continent but there are a million ways to die there. You can still get eaten by cannibals in the Cote d'Ivoire and Togo. I've eaten with cannibals but we ate monkey and not people. At least they told me it was monkey.