Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa Back from my Zimbabwe safari... Aug-Sept 2015

Sorry to leave you boys hangin', but it's been a sch!tstorm since I made my first post yesterday. Let's just say American Airlines must hate me with the white hot intensity of a thousand burning suns, the way they treat me...

Anyways, I got home last night just before midnight, after 42 hours in transit. This should tell you two things: first, southern Africa is a looooong way from Texas; and two... I'm so stupid tired I forget the second thing.

Soooo, anyway, back to the story...

Part 2: Cape Buffalo

The whole point of this trip was to hunt Cape buffalo. The most dangerous game of all the dangerous game, the DG species that injures or kills more hunters than any other, the sixteen-hundred pound bull that dominates the southern African bush like nothing else. Don't ask me why buffalo, I can't explain it. I could cite Ruark and Hemingway and Taylor and a dozen other writers, but that wouldn't explain it either.

When I booked this hunt 3 years ago I specifically searched for PH's who both 1) had a lot of buffalo (BIG buffalo) in their concessions, and 2) were considered to be good at it. After talking to a lot of people, it came down to 5 PH's, and after I'd talked to those 5 at the DSC convention in 2012, it came down to two: John Sharp and Lou Halloran, both of Zimbabwe. John got the nod for a lot of reasons, which I won't go into. Suffice to say that he's as good a guide/PH as you're going to find in Africa today.

When I booked the hunt, John advised me strongly to book a 10-day hunt. Jorge agreed, as did a number of other Africa hunting veterans. As John put it, "There are simply no guarantees when you hunt buffalo. You might kill your bull in 3 days, but more likely you won't get a shot at a good bull until you've hunted 7 or 8 or even 10 days."

Case in point, the guy John hunted right before me booked a 21-day lion & buffalo hunt; killed his lion on Day 6, and then hunted hard for 15 more days before he finally got a shot at a buffalo. He succeeded, but it took him more than 2 weeks. Another guy hunted hard with John's compadre PH David L., and went home after 2 weeks without the 43+ inch buffalo bull he wanted. And so on.

So we started hunting buffalo on Day 1. We got out to the "rifle range" (a deserted stretch of road about a mile from camp), and John set up a shooting table while Isaac, his head tracker, trotted out about 100 yards and set up a cardboard box with a Shoot-n-See target pasted to it. I dutifully put 2 rounds downrange, we pronounced the rifle/scope/load/hunter good to go, and we went hunting.

I had the rifle sighted 3 inches high at 100 with my load, but on John's recommendation we zeroed it dead on at 100 yards. "You won't get many shots farther than 80 yards in this country," John opined. "And I certainly won't advise you to shoot at a buffalo any farther away than that."



Basically, hunting buffalo amounts to driving around to find bull tracks, then following them. We drove to a dozen waterholes, and at each one the trackers got out and walked around the periphery of the bareground area around the waterhole, looking at tracks. They would then return to the car and make pronouncements in Fanagolo, which John would translate to me as, "Nothing. Just a herd," or "Nothing," or "Two young bulls that headed south". That sort of thing.



This pic shows the process. That's Lovemore (number 2 tracker) on the left, Isaac in the middle, and the Game Scout on the right. I never got his name, I got the impression that the rest of the crew didn't care for him much.

Toward the end of the day we encountered a couple of buffalo herds, which are damned impressive... two or three hundred buffalo cows, calves, and bulls thundering away from the waterhole in a huge cloud of dust. Mostly you just hear the thunder and see the dust:




But occasionally you can catch a glimpse of some buffalo, like this, and it can be truly impressive:





Eventually we came to a waterhole with enough buffalo tracks to make Isaac pay attention. Not a herd this time, but six bulls; he told John that 2 went east, two went north, and two went west. Then suddenly Lovemore picked out four of them in the bush to the north, about 250 yards out. One was broadside and looking at us, as big as a pickup truck he was, his head turned to look directly at us, and yes, he did look at us as if we owed him money. Ruark will be blessed forever for that quip. (I wonder if he made that description up himself, or did Selby, or Virginia?)

As I write about this for other people to read, I feel as if I must restrain myself from citing Ruark, as every trite and amateur bit of writing about buffalo hunting I've ever come across cites him and it’s tiresome. We’ve all read Ruark, he was long dead before any of us could have met him, we all know the clichés, let’s move on… but that doesn't change the fact that the damn things DO look at you like you owe them money. So I guess we're stuck with it.

Anyway, the buff moved on. The big one looking at us was mature in the bosses, but no wider than the ears (which means less than 32" or so) and John dismissed him. “We can do much better than him,” he promised.
I wish I had a thousand dollars for every time a guide has told me we can do better, and then we didn’t. PLEASE God don’t let these words be prophetic, I prayed.

Then we had an Elephant Encounter. I'll get to that later. I have only two words for it that I'll share with you now: Holy, and Sch!tt.

Next morning we were up and back to the waterhole by six. The trackers got out, and found the herd, which Isaac said were 5 dagga boys, two of which he said were big old bulls. He said they were lying up in the district to the north, and coming to water in the early morning. We got back in the car and headed down the road to find the place where their tracks crossed, the road, then we got out.

"Load your rifle," John said quietly. He then went through what I guessed was a standard explanation of the process. "We'll go in single file, you right behind me. Keep in mind these things have incredible hearing, so don't cough, don't clear your throat. Let your nose run, and if you must fart, do it quietly. We have the wind, so they won't smell you, but they will hear you and if they do they'll be gone."

Then John took his rifle from Isaac. It's a beautiful old Rigby 470 double, which the head guy at Holland & Holland said at one time was "the finest working double rifle that has ever passed through my hands". It was made in 1927, and the barrels were severely damaged some time later; it came to H&H in the 70's, and they rebarreled it, but that pretty much wrecked its collector value; hence the "working double rifle" classification. I had a lot of opportunity to scrutinize this rifle, as it was front and center in my field of vision, 3 feet from my nose, for the next several days.

Here's a pic of the stalk starting out: Isaac in the lead, watching tracks; Lovemore behind him, scanning ahead for visual contact with the buffalo, then John behind him. I'm tail-end Charlie, with the camera, which is why you can't see me. Obviously.



In the bush, we stayed close together, usually only a pace or two apart. We started tracking at 0645. At that time the temp was in the low 80's.

Within 50 yards we came across fresh cow turds. Having grown up around cattle in Alberta and Saskatchewan, I know that cow turds that are shiny and wet-looking on a hot summer morning only stay that way for a couple minutes after they drop out of the cow's azz... and I also knew that there ain't no domestic cattle in this part of Africa... so these fresh turds were actually fresh buffalo bull turds. At which point my focus became a lot more, well, focused.

Then I laughed at myself because, of course, NObody ever shoots a buffalo on the first stalk of the first day of his first buffalo hunt.

"Get ready!" John said, setting out the sticks.

Holy. Sch!tt... !!! Thinks I, and I laid the rifle in the canvas sling between the shooting sticks. I could make out the bulk of something that appeared to be about the size, shape, and black color of a railway oil car about 20 yards ahead in the thick mopane brush. After peering for a while, I could make out something that looked like horns at one end of the railway car. Then suddenly it was gone, and virtually without a sound. John said, "Put your rifle on safe", and I did. And we began stalking again.

And stalking. And stalking.

BTW, this is what buffalo look like when you're stalking them in the mopane scrub:




... except that this one is a lot easier to see than they usually are, and it's a lot farther away than they usually are. This one's about 40 yards out.

We got close enough half a dozen times to set up the sticks, but either the buff we could shoot was one of the young ones with soft bosses, or there was too much brush for a good shot, or they just started moving again before I could get set up. BTW, you only have about 3-4 seconds from the time the sticks go up to take your shot. There's no time to dawdle.

Finally, at about 11:00, after more than 4 hours of stalking, we had 3 bulls staked out. Isaac and John and I had gone in alone. We were about 15 yards from the bulls, which were in a very dense thicket of mopane. We scootched up to them on our butts, slowly and being vewy, vewy quiieet... One bull fed out of the thicket to the right. John peered at him through his binoculars. "He's young. Soft bosses," he whispered, very softly. The second bull started to move out to the left, and John started to put up the sticks.

Then the brush to our left front exploded and a Sherman tank came barreling out of it... actually, it was a black rhino bull. Sherman tanks are smaller and slower. The rhino had been startled by the buff, and being a rhino and doing what rhino's do best (i.e., charge at anything they think might be a threat) it came at the buff, which of course scattered to the four winds. The rhino thundered past our position without seeing us, scarcely 5 yards away. Holy. Sch!tt.

I didn't get a picture of the rhino as he galloped past. I didn't take a picture of my underwear afterward, either. At that point we decided we were done for the morning. It was time for lunch and a nap.