Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa DocRocket's BVC Hunt With John Sharp

Looks like a fun trip.

Looks like great fun!!

Nasty f'er.

Guys, I apologize for being so tardy in getting an account of our Zim safari up here... I can only plead business, which is a damn poor excuse, so feel free to pelt me with rotten fruit!!!

As you may recall, I took my first safari in 2015 with John Sharp in the Bubye Valley Conservancy (BVC), and took two of my three desired species: kudu, and the Big One, cape buffalo. I did not take an eland, although I tried hard. I flew back home and figured I had shot my Africa wad, and that would be that. However: my wife, Cate, had other ideas.

I introduced Cate (a.k.a. The Redhead) to the Dallas Safari Club show in January of '15, and she has become as addicted to the event as I have. As it happened, between the '15 safari and January of '18, Cate and I tied the knot and became man & wife, but because both of us have busy businesses to run, there was no time for a honeymoon. Until we were walking in to the DSC show in '18, at which point she announced to me and Tiny (her growth-stunted 19-year-old son): "I hope you brought your checkbook, darlin."

"Why, what's on your mind, babe?" I replied, visions of a fine English hammer double gun dancing in my head.

"John will need a deposit for our honeymoon trip to Africa next year, Sugarbritches," she announced. (Yes, she really calls me that. Texas gal, born & bred.) So the deed was done. We marched straight to John Sharp's booth, established the dates of our 10-day safari, fixed a price, and I wrote him a rather large check for 50% of the total. Our very own Tarbe was there to witness me being browbeaten and henpecked into the whole thing. Ask him, if you don't believe me.

Fast forward to the last day of this past July. Cate and I were on a Delta flight to Johannesburg. We had clothes (her hunting clothes were all brand spanking new, and stylish as heck, of course), boots, guns, ammo, and sundry other articles stuffed down in the hold, and I was literally giddy with excitement. Well, excitement and trepidation, that is.

You see, Cate was and is an old school Austin, Texas gal. She grew up in a Texas that doesn't exist any more. As the daughter of a prominent Austin internist, she was raised pretty much as a princess... which means that while she did spend most weekends at the summer house on the ranch just east of Junction, TX, she never wore jeans in Town, and although her dad and brothers hunted everything on four legs, she had never actually shot a living critter in her life. That is not to say she didn't know her way around a rifle... she was and is a damn good rifle and pistol shot, she'd just never had opportunity to kill anything with a firearm.

So I was bringing a hunting virgin to Africa for her very first real hunting experience. I could see it going well, but I had a few anxious thoughts I kept stuffing back down about the myriad ways things could go wrong.

But the flights were fine, the overnight stay in Joburg at Africa Sky Guest House was delightful, and after all was said and done, we arrived in the BVC on August 1 in fine form, with all our gear intact, and the hunting party formed up. Here's a list of the characters:

DocRocket: needs no introduction. Nuff said.

Cate: Texas gal, 5'7" and 130 pounds of sugar & spice, mesquite thorns, and Austin attitude (not modern Austin, the old school Austin). A dead shot with rifle or pistol, but new to the hunting game. Which proved to be a key detail to some of our safari adventures, as you will find later on.

John Sharp: Professional Hunter in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and other countries for damn near 40 years. The guy who has stood down more DG charges than any man alive (which he claims were nearly all bluff charges, and as such no big deal), and quite possibly Africa's foremost authority on hunting buffalo and lion. Formerly an enlisted man in the Rhodesian Army and a veteran of the Bush War, he hasn't just seen the elephant in all its forms, he's killed and eaten the mofo. A devout Christian and a true gentleman. I once called him the real life 21st century Alan Quatermain, and the more I know him, the more I believe it's true.

Rayno Egner: Owner and operator of Dark Continent Video Productions, out of the Northern Cape of South Africa. Farmer, rugby player, lifelong hunter and professional hunter, Rayno and his wife operate one of the top hunting photo/video companies in the world. Rayno had booked one of his employees to video our hunt, but circumstances changed and we were stuck with him instead. I'm not complaining, believe me... Rayno is a great guy, always upbeat, intelligent, humorous, and very, very skilled at his craft (Ivan Carter insists on Rayno being his cameraman on all of his TV shows). Rayno looks like a younger and skinnier Brett Favre, and shares my passion for ice hockey. Cate and John were bemused by the way Rayno and I were constantly talking about Wayne Gretzky, and how much The Great One would have enjoyed being on our hunt. Goofy, like me.

I'll stop here and continue in a fresh post shortly.

So now you know the players, so let's talk about the stage: the BVC.

The BVC is just under a million acres of Old Africa. An amalgam of several old Rhodesian cattle ranches, the owners of the BVC have kept the ravages of the Mugabe Crime Machine at bay, no doubt by means of millions of dollars in bribes... er, I mean, "fees". A group of PH's hunt the BVC for the owners, but do not own it. The entire complex is surrounded by two 10-foot wire fences, so yes, it is a "high fence" operation... but it is so large, 95% or more of the game in the BVC never comes within sight of a fence in their entire lives. The game species and numbers within the BVC defy description. There is no wildlife park in Africa, or the rest of the world, to match it. There are more than 500 lions, almost 300 black rhinos, almost 300 elephant, more than 1000 leopards, and tens of thousands of Cape buffalo; and that's just the Dangerous Game. The plains game species are all represented there: wildebeest, zebra, kudu, eland, blackbuck, bushbuck, all of the Tiny Ten, impala by the zillions, and so on. If you want to see the size of the buffalo herds, I posted some pics of herds in my account of my 2015 safari, so go back to that post and you can view them. Suffice to say that we saw thousands of impala wildebeest and zebra every day, hundreds of giraffe and buffalo every day, and so on. We only saw 2 rhinos on this trip, but on my last safari, John and I sighted 14 black rhinos in 10 days, one of which was at Bad Breath distance.

The BVC is split up into 9 hunting areas or concessions, each of which is more than 100,000 acres. When you engage with the BVC and your PH to hunt there, you have exclusive rights to hunt your area. As John put it to Cate at supper on our first night on this safari, "Cate, your husband is the king here. Whatever he wants, within reason, is his to command. That maa
Each concession has a central "camp", which consists of several luxurious (for African bush, that is) chalets, a dining hall, and support facilities. I had selected Nengo as our hunt district. I did so because Nengo Camp is one of the loveliest camps in the BVC, overlooking a big dam with its attendant water hole, so the profusion of game right outside your chalet window is staggering. Nengo also benefits from having a long section of the Bubye River itself running through the middle of it, so you have the benefit of the mostly dried-up river bed and its sporadic natural waterholes to draw game.

Is it worth paying the premium price to hunt in the BVC? I can't speak for anyone else, but it was worth it to me. It is a safe place, for one thing; that is not as easy to come by in modern Africa as it was 50 years ago. And by safe, I mean safe from evil men with automatic rifles. It is NOT safe if you fear lions, at least theoretically. More than once on this safari, we came off a buffalo stalk to find on our backtrail that lion tracks had been laid down over our booted footprints. Yes, that meant while we hunted the buffalo, the lions hunted us. John assured me that no hunter had ever been killed by lions since the inception of the BVC, but he averred when I asked him if anyone had ever been mauled by lions. And I also noted that the black Africans in our camp became very anxious about being outside of the concrete walls of the camp after sunset.

This is truly one of the last vestiges of Wild Africa.

To be continued...

Nice start James!

Looking forward to the rest.


Tim

Brother James,

I'm very much looking forward to your next installment. Thank you for allowing us to experience Afrika, once again, through your eyes.

God Bless,

Your friend Steve

Great stuff!

First Blood

Now, let's get back to the action.

As previously noted, my lovely wife Cate had never killed anything with a firearm before. Well, not quite true... she had shot turtles on the pond on her dad's ranch with a .22 rifle. My mistake, early on, was thinking that she didn't know her way around a rifle, which was far from the truth. She had been sent to a summer camp in New Mexico every summer in her girlhood, up until she was 16 or so. I eventually found out that in addition to learning her horsemanship skills at this camp (she's a damn good rider, I learned early in our acquaintance out in west Texas), she also had riflery training every morning at this camp, and being the competitive gal she is, she naturally made it a point to win the "friendly" competitions they held.

We noodled around in local gun stores looking at rifles for a while, and borrowed a couple of rifles from friends for her to try, but eventually settled on a Howa 1500 Mountain Rifle in 6.5 mm Creedmoor. With Hornady factory ammo (143 gr ELD-X) it's a very, very accurate rifle, well under MOA. It's a smallish rifle, well-suited to Cate's frame. She liked it from the get-go. She had never used a scope before, but it didn't take long for her to get that down. She didn't shoot off the bench much at all, but shot from hunting positions and off sticks. We didn't use paper targets, because I didn't want her focusing on group size: I put up an 8" gong, which as y'all know is pretty much the size of a deer's boiler room, and she rang that thing with authority.

My rifle was/is old hat... a Kimber Caprivi 375 H&H, this is the same rifle I used in 2015. I'm very, very comfortable with this rifle. It shoots 300 gr A-Frames at 2500 fps, give or take, and puts them well within minute-of-ventricle. By way of reference, for those of you with an M1 Garand rifle, this Caprivi has roughly the same size and weight as the old WW2 battle rifle. Carrying it in the right hand, the size/feel of the stock at the action is virtually the same.

Anyways, that's as technical as I'm gonna get on the subject of rifles today. Suffice to say both thunder-sticks arrived in Africa in good shape, and they both put bullets on paper at 100 yards to the satisfaction of our intrepid PH, and of course your intrepid correspondent, who, after all, was and is the final arbiter on the accuracy and performance of the rifles in my hands...

So, after confirming zero on paper on the morning of Safari Day 1 (SD1), we piled into the truck and began cruising from waterhole to waterhole to view the game, check out the tracks, and so forth. (I gave a more detailed description of this process of game-finding in my 2015 account, if you're curious.) After perusing 3 or 4 waterholes and their attendant mixed herds of wildebeest and zebra, John pulled over at the next spot, stepped out, and motioned for the sticks. Isaac, John's longtime head tracker, pulled out the shooting sticks, and we all piled out of the truck. It was Cate's time to shoot a zebra.

I should mention that John now has a set of Viper shooting sticks, which Cate really liked. For a new shooter, or one who's not real comfortable with the ubiquitous crossed sticks used everywhere in Africa, the Viper sticks are really cool. Basically it's two sets of sticks joined at the feet, so you end up with a bipod supporting the fore end of your rifle, and a second bipod supporting the buttstock at your shoulder. It really stabilizes the rifle, although you sacrifice mobility and adjustability in doing so... but that's a decent trade, most of the time.

Anyway: John and Cate moved up closer to the herd, and John picked out the zebra he wanted her to shoot, and they set up the sticks. Zebra moved, sticks came down, and they stalked further up, and repeated the setup and takedown a couple of times until finally Cate got on the zebra and all looked good. John gave her the go-ahead, and the Creemoor barked, and the zebra ran around the brush for a dozen seconds, then fell down. Everybody cheered, Cate high-fived the trackers and hugged John, and we walked over to view her trophy.

It was a lovely old mare with a very nice head an neck, which will look very nice as a pedestal mount (Cate had, of course, picked out her taxidermist, decided on the style of mount she wanted, and where in her living room the mount will go months before the safari...). This mare had a very cool bonus for us, too: the stripes on her left haunch were misaligned where a lion's claw had scarred her deeply years before, so that when the skin finally closed up again, the stripes went from black to white and white to black along a 12-inch scar line. We will make sure that piece of back skin is incorporated on the panel of the base of the final mount.

I painted some blood on both Cate's cheeks (just a little) to fulfill tradition, and she wore that blood proudly for the rest of the day.

We loaded up the carcass and headed back to camp for lunch. As we rolled along, Rayno suddenly rapped on the top of the cab over John's head, and John screeched to a stop. There was a hushed conversation among John, Rayno, and Isaac in Fanagolo with much hand signalling. Then John stepped out and spoke to me.

"Would you like a bushpig?" he asked. "We rarely see them in the daytime, but the guys spotted a pair of them under the bushes by that rock," he gestured at a huge rock dome 50 yards from the two-track, "and one of them looks pretty good."

"Of course I do," I said, pretending I had a good grasp of what a bushpig is and what its value as a trophy is, which of course I didn't, having seen maybe two pictures of bushpigs in my entire life and having zero real interest in shooting one. But as I had learned on my first safari, when Africa offers, one had best not turn the opportunity down. So off to hunt the mighty bushpig I went!

We circled around the rock and sneaked upwind, and then Isaac and Lovemore both pointed. A blur of grey-orange something-or-other was evident under a bush. I couldn't see head or tail, but judged I was looking down the spine of a sleeping critter of some type. John put up the sticks and I sighted my rifle on the nearer half of what I thought was the spine. The Caprivi roared, the grey-orange blob quivered a bit, and then congratulations were offered all round. We moved up and found a lovely little pig of about 100 pounds, grey and orange and ugly as all pigs are, and a bit hairier and orangier than most. The big 300 gr A-Frame had ploughed a furrow up the lumbar spine of the hog on its way in, and then blasted a small crater in the brisket on its way out, and pretty much macerated all parts between the two massive holes.

"You'll want a full body mount of that one," John positively beamed at me as he said this. He was really, really tickled that we had collected one of these. Rayno explained to me in the truck that in this part of Africa, this is one of the rarest trophies you can aspire to. I felt vaguely guilty for not being all that excited; after all, I've killed a bunch of pigs in my life, and they're just not an exciting animal, even if they wear grey-orange paint rather than grey-brown paint. But I have been educated, and this animal's hide will be duly transformed into a full body mount by Conroe Taxidermy some time next winter.

Nap Time and Dinner Time

With both rifles blooded, the first edge of the safari was nicely settled. We drove back to camp and dropped the fresh carcasses off with Gibson, John's ancient and venerable skinner, who seemed delighted at the sight of Cate's zebra's lion scar, and over the moon at the sight of my bushpig. Then we the hunting party headed back to the dining hall for lunch.

Meals in camp are a Big Deal. Breakfast is, well, breakfast... but made to order, and always a crucial start to the day. Even for a non-breakfast person like Cate, it becomes the foundation of the day's events at 0545, with departure looming at 0630 each morning. Lunch in camp, which is where we took it most days, is a big deal, too: meat and potatoes and soup and all that, it's a full meal, and you're ready for it after a full morning in the bush. And then supper: well, this is a production. Delicious cuts of wild game cooked to order (medium for Cate, medium rare for me and Rayno, and blood-rare for John), delicious fresh-baked bread and rolls, and after dinner, delicious home made cake or pudding for dessert. Coffee, of course, is available at all meals in John's camp, and I mean coffee... dark, rich, full flavored coffee from John's French presses. He buys the beans locally and they're ground fresh each day. Delicious, and necessary for a couple of coffee addicts such as Cate and me.

For those who imbibe, wine and liquor was top quality and plentiful. I gave up Demon Rum 5 years ago, so left that to Rayno and John, although I will admit that the wonderful aroma of freshly-poured Pinot Noir blended with that of freshly grilled eland steaks was tempting. Neither John nor Rayno are heavy drinkers, but they did get a bit tipsy on the 9th night (more on that later), which was a lot of fun. Sundowners, dinner, and after dinner, were all lively times for discussions about our lives away from hunting, on matters of politics, religion, and everything else. Having the company of such sharp and interesting minds as we had in camp for such discourse was remarkable.

And then there is the Best Thing about safari: nap time. Think about it... it's hot (90's or hotter), dusty, and you've just filled your belly with a good meal of wild game and smoked a pipe or cigar over coffee while conversing on any and every interesting subject under the sun. You find yourself yawning and stretching, and then you toddle off to your chalet, where the air is still cool. You slip your boots off, lie back on the bed, and you're gone. An hour later Soul, the houseboy, knocks on the door to remind you that there's more hunting to be done, so you don your boots and fully refreshed you wander back up to the hunting car. It may not sound like much, but anyone who has been on safari will tell you: the best part of safari is the naps.

To be continued...

The 20 Day Safari

At the end of Safari Day 1, after dinner was done and our bellies were full and we sat at table with glasses of scotch and cups of coffee and cigars and pipes lit and all the good stuff, I told John I had noticed something.

I began by summarizing my 2015 hunt for the others. John needed no reminding, as his memory for hunts and hunting details is astounding: he recalled almost every detail of my hunt 4 years before as well as I did, and recalled some details I had forgotten. But for those of you who may not recall it quite so well (ahem. ) here's a brief summary: I shot a nice zebra stallion on SD1, then we began stalking buffalo on SD2, killed a good buffalo on SD4, killed a really good kudu on SD6, then it started to rain, and we never got another shot on game despite looking hard for eland and waterbuck every day thereafter.

"So here's the thing, John," I said after the summary discussion hinted at above. "I had a great hunt in 2015, with the exception of not getting an eland, which is simply the way hunting goes. But I've been thinking, and maybe more accurately feeling, and what it feels like is this." I paused to puff my pipe and take a sip of coffee.

"What it doesn't feel like, to be precise, is that today doesn't feel like Day 1 of a new safari," I continued. "In reality, it feels like Day 11 of a continuing, ongoing, 20-day safari. It feels like I never left. We are still hunting eland, we are looking for our second buffalo, and maybe a second kudu, and definitely a nice waterbuck, but it's not a new hunt at all. We've added a couple of new people to have fun with us," I pointed my pipestem at Cate and Rayno, "But you and I are still on the same hunt we were on in 2015."

John smiled that small smile of his when something has got him thinking. "I think that's a very good way of looking at it, James," he said. "I'm pleased to hear that's how it feels to you, too."

"So that's how it feels to you as well?" I asked.

"I often feel that way," he said. "Not with everyone, but with clients who become friends, as you have done, that's how it feels."

Cate and Rayno seemed bemused by the conversation, but there were so many other good things to talk about they didn't mind. John and I mentioned it to each other now and again for the rest of the safari. (For example, on the morning of our second-last day in camp, I said to John as we walked out to the truck together, "Day 19, John, and we still haven't found him." "Don't remind me," he murmured in agreement. More on this discussion later...)

It may not seem like much to the casual reader, but to the African hunter, this concept of a never-ending safari that you can pick up at any time in the future is a profound one. The hunt never really ends, you simply lay it down after a while, and then after a longer while, you can pick it up again.

And that, my friends, is a priceless gift.


To be continued...

Safari Day 2: Buffalo Stalking, Dagga Boys, and The Elephant Man

The morning chill in Africa is hard to believe if you haven't been there. In the heat of the day each afternoon the mercury may rise well above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the dry air parches your burning throat, and the slightest breeze feels like a kiss from Heaven, and you can't imagine what it's like to be cold. Yet at 0530 on a BVC morning, you'll be damn glad to have long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a heavy fleece jacket, and a felt wool hat as you sit down to your breakfast porridge.

On SD2 we tucked into our breakfast of porridge (that's oatmeal to you heathen Yanks) and eggs and toast, and then we limbered the rifles and went out to the truck, keeping moving to ward off the chill. The trackers shambled over to meet us in their heavy insulated hooded parkas, with the standard African greeting: "Morning, morning," but always with a big smile for the Memsahib.

Then off we went to look for the mighty Cape buffalo!

Buffalo are the damnedest critters. A Cape buffalo bull is close to two tons of sinew and horn that can kill you more ways than you can think of, if he's of a mind to do so. He can see better than you, hear better than you, run faster than you, and in every way is your physical superior. But he knows that men have thundersticks, and are as deadly as lions, his ancient and deadliest enemy, so he fears you, and will run from you if he so much as gets a hint of your presence. He is at once the most dangerous of Dangerous Game, and the most shy and retiring of the plains game, the hardest to stalk close to, and the least likely to give you a clear shot on any given day. So chasing the mighty buff is three parts hoping you can get close, two parts hoping you don't get too close, and one part each of raw fear of his power and lust to hang his great meathook horns on your wall in constant competition with each other.

Once you've hunted buffalo and won, you'll never hunt anything else without comparing it to this. As our 24HCF compadre Ingwe says, "One hunts buffalo in order to have hunted buffalo."

I've described the process before, in my 2015 account. The short version is this... You drive around looking for tracks at waterholes; he trackers identify a group of bachelor bulls (dagga boys); and you follow the tracks. After 2 to 4 hours of walking in the mopane bush, eventually one of 3 things will happen: 1) you'll get a good look at the bulls, and none of them will be shooters, so you'll back off; 2) you'll get a good look at the bulls, and one of them will be a shooter, and you'll shoot him; or most likely, 3) the bulls will catch your wind and run off, or an oxpecker will scream an alarm and the bulls will run off, or a rhino will get startled and run you over in his (literally) blind panic to get away from the African Boogeyman, or any other number of bad things will happen that prevents you seeing or shooting a bull.

Number 3 is what happens most times you stalk buffalo. By this time it's usually close to noon, you're hot and thirsty and dusty, and the mopane flies (which are actually little non-stinging bees) swarm all over your face and around your head, and as you trudge back to the truck you can't help but think what a lucky damn sonofabitch you are to be doing this. There is nothing like hunting buffalo.

Sometimes you see a herd, though, which is a magnificent sight. Herds in the BVC run anywhere from 50 to 200 cows and calves, with a good sprinkling of herd bulls around them. The herd bulls are youngish fellows, sexually mature, and obsessed with the need to breed cows. They run anywhere from 3 to 6 years of age, I'm told. The cows come into season at all times of the year, so the young bulls hang around all the time to take advantage a horny cow's random randiness. Herd bulls are not usually shooters, being younger, and their horn bosses are not fully formed and hard. They are huge as a rule, however, and may have impressive spreads. In the BVC they don't encourage shooting bulls in herds, mostly because bullets may pass through the targeted bull and wound or kill a second animal. You can do it if needs must, but they'd rather you hunt the bachelor herds.

By the time the bulls hit age 5 or 6, though, they've got tired of the constant drama of hanging around with females, and wander off on in bachelor groups of three to five to half a dozen or so. Sounds familiar, doesn't it gentlemen? These bachelor buffalo are called dagga boys, and the oldest and gnarliest bulls are to be found here. This doesn't mean they don't breed a cow now and then, they just don't hang with the females on a full time basis. Herd bulls sometimes join the dagga boys (bachelor night out, sort of thing), but quickly return to the cows. Dagga boys sometimes rejoin the herds when there's a lot of hot females in season.

So, on the morning of SD2 we drove from water hole to waterhole, and while we didn't identify any good bachelor groups, we did see a couple of good herds. We stopped to glass them, just because. In both cases the herds were out in the open so the process was relatively easy; but when you're looking over a herd at close quarters in the bush, it's a whole nother deal... more on that process later!

This was Cate's first up close and personal look at buffalo, and she was impressed, to say the least. The game viewing in general was very good this morning. We saw two groups of eland cows, and one youngish eland bull, a ton of giraffe, impala, and a lot of waterbuck. This latter was encouraging to me, as waterbuck had been added to my wish list after I saw them in the BVC in 2015. We also saw a good selection of warthog, kudu cows, and some young elephant bulls.

After lunch, we had a chance encounter that justified the expense of hiring a videographer for the whole trip, as far as I am concerned. If you recall, I debated hiring a videographer in '15 but decided against it. As a result, I have no footage of the amazing close encounters with bull elephant and black rhino we had on that trip, and I really regret that to this day. But this time we had Rayno along, and he caught many of those fleeting experiences. Today's event was one of them.
saw
We were cruising a two-track that paralleled the Bubye River, when about 5 o'clock Lovemore spotted a mature bull elephant in the bush. John stopped the car, and we watched him, a scant 60 feet off in the bush. At first he seemed oblivious to our presence, but then he turned his head and looked right at us, flaring his ears out: talk about enormous! He lifted his trunk to get our scent, and whether it was the sweet smell of diesel exhaust or the subtle fragrance of the Memsahib, he decided we were an object that seemed close enough to Cow Elephant that he ought to make some courtship gestures.

His courtship gestures consisted of extruding his enormous schlong so that it dangled inches from the ground, then spraying urine all over the ground and his feet and legs as he walked around the bush to get a better look at us. Let me tell you, boys... if you've never seen a 5-foot length of 6" black PVC sewer pipe hanging under a 12-ton wrinkled grey body, you don't know what the definition of "sexy" is!! The old boy finally stepped out into the roadway no more than 10 yards behind the truck, waving his trunk and his dick at us simultaneously, and spraying urine all over the place, before he finally decided we would probably be a lousy lay, and shambling off into the riverine foliage.

Once we were assured we weren't going to be charged and/or raped by the bull elephant, we all broke into laughter. It was a pretty amazing sight.

Oh, and I must say it was a bit of a boost to my ego, at least at first, when my lovely wife thereafter referred to me as The Elephant Man. The other guys were similarly impressed, believing as I did that she was referring to the size of my own equipment; however, it turns out she was alluding otherwise, as she told me in private that evening in our chalet. She was referring to my apparent inability to hit the toilet bowl with any decent degree of accuracy most mornings, she informed me, crushing my fragile male ego into the dust.. I did not inform the other fellas of this distinction, preferring to maintain some shreds of my dignity for the duration of the trip...

To be continued...

Safari Day 3: Hog Warts, Ivory That Is, and Ivory That Isn't

Now, as I have previously explained in this chronicle, the Memsahib had some definite goals for this safari, and having fulfilled the first half of her wish list on SD1, she immediately moved on to her second objective: a warthog. I had mentioned to her that warthog tusks are lovely, and can be carved by an artisan into magnificent stuff such as jewellery, knife scales, and other objects of admiration among the hunting set. Well, at the mere mention of the word "jewellery", the die was cast, and Miss Cate's heart was set on one of the ugliest critters on God's green earth, the African warthog.

As previously noted, there were a lot of warthog to choose from on this hunt. We saw many, many warthog on the first two days, dashing away from the truck with their tails sticking up ramrod straight in the air, their short little legs pumping. I'm not a fan of the A10's namesake, at least as a trophy, but I think they're cool little critters.

We started SD3 with a good buffalo stalk. We found tracks at a waterhole shortly after sunrise, and we set off to track them. It was a beautiful morning, and as we followed the meandering trail between towering kopjes I couldn't help but marvel at the loveliness of this place. By 9:30, or about 2-1/2 hours of tracking, the trackers signalled they had seen the buff, and we all froze. Then Isaac conferenced with John in sign language. John turned to me and whispered, "There's a herd of zebra in there, and the buffalo are behind them. Too many eyes, we'll probably be seen. But we might be able to swing around them."

So we turned off the track to the north, or our right, into some dense bush. Twenty minutes later we came back out onto the buffalo trail, and both trackers signalled that the buff were still ahead of us. We resumed our westward direction. I happened to look up and was surprised to see something solid and dark in the mopane brush to our left, about 150 yards distant. I could make out some zebra behind the dark blobs, and then as clear as dammit I saw a big buffalo bull's head looking straight at me.

At that moment the bush exploded. Zebra scattered in all directions, and half a dozen buffalo bulls thundered out of the thicket into parkland to their west, parallel to the track we were on. In seconds they were gone, although the deep echoes of their hooves pounding the hard, dry earth could be heard long after they were out of sight.

"Well, that's it," John said, and we all stood staring off at the sound of rapidly receding buffalo.

"I saw them just before they broke," I said.

"Yes, well, it was probably too late by then anyway," he replied. He and Isaac and Lovemore conversed briefly in Fanagolo and sign language. John nodded sagely. "They were all young bulls," he said. "Not a shooter among them. One might have gone thirty-six, but he wasn't nearly as good as the one you've got."

And with that we reverse course and walked back to the truck. It wasn't as long a hike as the track in, because we were able to walk a straight line instead of the meandering track of the buff, and so forth. We got back to the truck before 1100, where we enjoyed a refreshing drink of ice cold ginger beer. Cate had some interesting observations about buffalo tracking. She noted that the tracking order (Isaac, then Lovemore, then John, then Me, then Rayno with his camera, and finally the Memsahib) left her feeling acutely vulnerable.

"I'm back there all alone," she said. "Basically, I'm lion bait!"

She decided that even though she was not hunting buff, she was going to carry her rifle on buffalo stalks. "While the rest of y'all are hunting buffalo, lion are hunting me."

The ride back to camp for lunch was abruptly interrupted when John and Isaac simultaneously spotted a good warthog in the dry bed of the Bubye River. John beckoned Cate out of the truck. "He's a bit farther than a hundred yards," he said. "Do you think you can take him at this distance?"

"I sure can try," she said, and at that they moved forward with the sticks. We were on the high northern bank of the river, while the warthog was rooting in the sand at the base of the south bank. They set up at the edge of our cover. She lined up on the warthog and then the Creedmoor cracked. The "whack" of the bullet echoed across the sand to us, and the grey pig took off like a bullet to our right, up the far bank and into the riverine.

"Hit him a bit far back," John said.

"I'm sorry," Cate apologized, embarassed at the shot.

"No problems," Rayno said. "He's hit hard, and he won't go that far. We'll follow up and finish him."

Which we did. We descended the north bank and plodded across the loose, coarse sand of the dry riverbed to the far bank. Isaac and Lovemore cast about for tracks, and immediately led us up into the brush where the warthog had disappeared. This had none of the trepidation of a wounded buffalo stalk. Hunters are rarely charged by wounded warthogs--although it has happened--and if they do, they're not the hardest charges to stop with the rifle. Nonetheless, we progressed carefully, and after a hundred yards or so, the trackers stopped and pointed. There, under the boughs of a mopane, the warthog stood with his hind end to us. John put up the sticks and Cate finished him. John wasn't satisfied, though, and asked me to put a .375 bullet into him where he lay just for insurance. I couldn't really see what part of the pig I was shooting at, except that I could tell I wasn't shooting him in the mouth. It would've been a shame to damage those huge tusks!

We walked up to the dead pig, and his tusks were truly impressive. Cate posed happily with her soon-to-be-jewellery, and then Rayno flew his drone camera high above us to record our triumphant progress back across the riverbed. All in all, a splendid hunt.

On the ride home, Cate sat in back with Rayno and me. Rayno explained how only hippos and elephant have real ivory. Miss Cate opined that this was so much hooey, and her jewellery was going to be called warthog ivory, that that was the end of the discussion. Rayno, being a married man and smarter than most, agreed that she must be right.

To be continued...

Looking forward to the next segment Doc!

Dog Days and Hyenas

At lunch after the successful conclusion of our warthog quest, John asked Cate what else she might want to hunt, as she had cleaned up her entire shopping list in only 3 days. We tossed a number of ideas around, and to my surprise the Memsahib said, "I'd like to get a hyena!"

Well, that was a surprise! I've never thought of a hyena as a trophy; to be honest, all the stories I'd read and TV nature shows I'd seen had left me with fairly strong distaste for old Fisi. Unlike the coyote or wolf, he doesn't have that noble canine visage. Unlike the big cats, he lacks the grace and fluid movements that characterize that family. No, the hyena is just an odd-looking character. He's ugly, he runs funny, and his wife has a bigger dick than he does.

But Cate had other reasons... you see, her primary experience of Africa up til now was NatGeo specials on TV as a kid, and repeated viewings of the Disney "Lion King" movie when her kids were small. And based on her Lion-King criteria, warthogs and hyenas all needed to die. Since she had her warthog, it was Fisi's turn now.

So that afternoon we took a haunch of zebra out of the cooler and a barrel of zebra and warthog guts for a scent trail, and we proceeded to set up a hyena bait. The process was interesting, to say the least. The bait had to be hung, and the blind had to be built. John selected a spot near a huge dome of ancient volcanic rock about 5 miles north of Nengo Camp. There is a waterhole on the southwest side of the rock dome, which being the only waterhole in that area tends to draw a lot of game. John expected there to be a lot of hyenas in that district accordingly.

The zebra quarter was hung from a smallish tree with chains, covered with brush to keep the vultures off it, and then he and the trackers built a blind with sticks and branches and camo netting about 60 yards above the bait, up on the rock dome and behind a couple of huge boulders. Then the trackers splashed guts and blood all over the ground, and then tied a pile of guts to a piece of rope. We got back in the truck and dragged the pile of guts up and down the countryside in all directions for several miles. Finally, John set up his game camera to monitor the bait. We would see what was coming in to the bait when we rolled out of camp in the morning.

"Could be lions, could be spotted hyena, and we have brown hyena here as well," he said. "We'll check the game camera after we look at the tracks at the waterhole."

Early the next morning we came back to check the camera, and found both brown and spotted hyenas had come to the bait. We began formulating a plan to hunt the bait two nights hence. Then we headed out to look for buffalo. After checking several more waterholes, we found a small bachelor herd and followed their trail for several miles, then the wind shifted and the bulls thundered off. John and Isaac both said there was a soft 36" bull in the herd, but they saw no shootable ones. Back to camp. But on the way we came across a trio of elephant bulls playing at a waterhole, and we stopped to watch them for half an hour.

Next morning, SD5, we again headed out to look at the game camera on the hyena bait, but had to wait for a herd of buffalo to clear out of there. At breakfast, John had announced we were headed north of the Bubye River again, and that it was "time to get serious about buffalo". So here we were, a few miles out of camp, looking over a herd of well over a hundred cows and calves, with perhaps 30 bulls or so. One bull, near the head of the herd, was a very good bull, well over 40 inches with hard bosses.

"Just what I want," I whispered to John.

"But not in a herd," he replied.

So off we went, to check out Number 4 and Number 5 waterholes. We found sign of a group of 5 bulls at Number 5, so we set off to find them. It was hot already by 0900, and it got a lot hotter. The cover here was a lot thicker than we had been hunting, and there was almost no wind. We tracked them until almost 1100, then the wind came up and the bulls caught our scent, and off they went... busted again. We drove all afternoon, saw little game; it was just too damn hot, well over 110. And this is winter! I can't imagine how hot it must be there in summer, when the afternoon temps rise over 125! We put a stalk on a good impala ram in the very heat of the day, which was absolutely brutal: no wind, the heat of the sun like a physical pounding on your body, having to creep slowly through the brush, and after an hour or more of that the have the herd cow spot us and send her off with the rest of them all leaping away after her.

SD6 was more of the same. We tried to find the same bulls we had tracked the day before, as Isaac said there were at least a couple of very old bulls among them. We struck sign well south of where we'd lost them the day before, and set off to track them, but we were betrayed by the wind again after only a couple of hours of stalking, without sighting them at all. We hunted the river again in the afternoon, which was thankfully not as hot. We put in a stalk on a huge waterbuck but once again the unpredictable and swirling winds defeated us, and the waterbuck crashed away in the heavy brush.

John was unhappy with the pictures from the game camera, which showed lions and brown hyena coming to the bait, but no spotted hyenas. He decided to take down the bait and blind, and set up again nearer to camp. We spent the last hours of daylight moving the set. Dinner that night was a bit subdued. We were all feeling a bit discouraged by our continuing lack of success.

SD7 was even more of the same: a long stalk on buffalo without a glimpse of the beasts, then busted by a stray zebra that spotted us and stampeded as we were getting close. In the early afternoon I started to feel a bit of panic. We were down to the last few days of the safari, and all we had to show for all our effort were a zebra, a bushpig, and a warthog. I was beginning to have some severe doubts about the outcome of this safari. The heat was oppressive. The long drought, having extended from the previous winter, had reduced forage for the animals to a minimum, so they were hard to find and harder to expect to stay put. For the first time I was starting to wonder if we would be heading back to Texas with little to show for our hard work.

I could have got really sulky at that point, and was frankly ready to head down that road, but at just the right time, Africa offered up, and everything changed. But before I get into that, I have to go back to our suppertime conversation on SD3.

To be continued...

Doc; thank you so much for putting in the effort of detailed write up. Very much looking forward to the rest.

Thanks GRF

Outstanding, Doc! what a great hunt!

For sure.

And, he's a really good writer, has the reader right there along with them, enjoying the hunt.

And, I look forward to the next chapter.

DF

Thanks Doc, looking forward to the rest of the story.

Doc, you've got a great writing style, I sure appreciate you posting this stuff. I need to print it off, so others can read it too.

*with your permission of course!