Limpopo Safari - Last Day

 

The evening was spent around the firepit, my hartebeest roasting over the hot coals, sipping South African beer, and reliving the day’s hunts and telling stories of past hunts.  While I’m impressed with the Old Spaniard, hunting this rough country in his late seventies, I can’t help but laugh when Kobus tells me that while guiding the Spaniard, he heard something and turned around to find two feet kicking in the air.  How the old fellow managed to fall into a warthog hole head first, we can only guess.  Kobus Senior tells of a lion hunt with himself, the client and another guide tracking a female lion for miles, until the lion tires of the chase and lies low in wait of her pursuers.  The deep growl at forty yards has everyone’s hair on end and rifles are raised.  But the client doesn’t shoot.  Kobus whispers to him, take the shot, but the client, terrified, asks him to shoot it.  “Shoot your own lion” Kobus tells him, but it doesn’t matter, the lion gives them no choice and comes.  Fast.  Both guides have their beads on the charging lion, waiting for the client to shoot, but then it’s quickly too close and both guides fire, the lion dropping dead at Kobus’s feet.  They turn to find the client had turned to run, dropped his rifle and tripped, and was too scared to get up.  He was crawling away.  I felt bad for the damage the man’s pride must have taken, but I don’t laugh too hard.  I’ve never been charged by a lion.

 

I mention the beautiful Bush Buck mount in my room and mention I’d like to take one if presented with the opportunity.  Both Kobus’s laugh.  Kobus Senior took that buck in the eighties, and while they often see them in the evenings, caught in the headlights, seeing them in the daylight is a rarity, and most hunters looking for bush buck go home empty handed.  There’s only been one taken here besides Kobus’s.

 

The morning is cold.  Dew forms on our eyelids in the thick fog and I shiver as we head up into the mountains.  Visibility is poor, but we head off just the same as the sky brightens, and the fog slowly burns off in the African sun.  In thick brush, what should pop out at under fifty yards but a bush buck.  Kobus is excited, the buck is very old with a rack for the record books, and I should take him.  I feel a little like I’m cheating, like I’m breaking some hunter’s code, as we have not tracked or hunted him, he just appeared.  Wrong place at the wrong time.  He heads into the brush and we move ahead a hundred yards, and the old male walks right across an opening broadside.  I raise the rifle and drop him in his tracks.  I console myself that at least he was moving when I shot, but there’s nowhere near the satisfaction that I gained from the difficult stalks thus far.

 

After taking the Bush Back back to camp and having some blesbuck for lunch, we head out again and scour the mountains for kudu.  I’m quite adept at ignoring the pain in my feet now, as we clock another twenty kilometres of up and down mountain ranges.  We spot two young kudu bulls in the next valley over, and decide to go the long way around the valley to close.  Enroute in the opposite direction, we spot a huge male feeding in the brush across the valley, at just over three hundred yards.  I just want to sit and watch him feed.  He is beautiful.  We plan a stalk and move as quietly as possible along the side of the mountain, attempting to work our way farther up the ridge and out of the kudu’s line of sight, before circumnavigating the valley and then working our way up the other side.   Just before moving out of sight, we glass back to check him, and of course, he is looking straight at us.  We continue with the plan, my legs and feet at their limit, but no kudu are to be found, and we head back to camp dejected.

The next day is much the same and my confidence is waning.  I’ve taken some incredible game, and each and every stalk is firmly ingrained in my memory as the finest hunting I’ve ever dreamed of.  I seriously don’t mind not taking a kudu.  This hunt has been successful beyond all imagining.  We’ve watched many fine kudu bulls, and blown many a stalk.  I remember Hemingway’s month long quest for kudu and I don’t mind, but we do not let up.  We get in the rough country again and put our feet to work, before first light as every morning this week.  By mid afternoon, I am seriously exhausted and I want to quit.  I want to sit by the fire and sip gin and tonics and relive the hunts I’ve had.  As we move along, the sun dropping below the horizon and the light quickly waning, and I tell Kobus that if we happen upon a kudu now, like we did the bush buck, I would not feel bad taking him, as we have hunted hard.  Not a second after the last syllable escaped my mouth, we happened upon a monster kudu bull, at less than fifty yards.

His rack is massive.  But he has seen us just as we saw him, and he tromps off snorting heavily.  We have dropped to our knees in the tall grass and we wait.  If he has gone, there is not enough daylight to stalk.  After maybe ten minutes, we raise our heads ever so slowly, and spot the tops of those amazing spiral horns about eighty yards off.  Kobus tells me we’ll have to stand up to shoot, and that I’ll have very little time.  I stand, rifle at the ready, and there he is, staring back at me at eighty yards, perfectly broadside, but I cannot see his body at all.  The grass is too high.  It’s just his beautiful kudu head, and he barks loudly at us. 

“I don’t have a shot” I tell Kobus. 

“Stay on him, maybe he’ll move into the open”

I know where his body is, I know where to put the bullet, but I don’t want him that bad.  Not bad enough to make a poor shot.  Not bad enough to risk injuring him.  It’s hunting, not shooting.  And he is gone.

We glass for awhile as I now feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins.  I breath deep to calm my nerves.   It is getting dark.

“There he is!” Kobus points.

My rifle up, I look through the scope at where Kobus is pointing.  There he is again, on the mountain side, in thick brush, at one hundred and sixty yards, facing us.  Watching us.  The light is still good enough for the frontal shot.  Everyone of the five animals I’ve taken this week has been a perfect shot.  Every one of the animals I’ve taken has dropped within five feet of where I had shot them.  I am confident.  I place the reticule centre of his chest, then slightly right as he appears ever so slightly quartering, but I’m not steady enough.  I take my eye away from the scope, knowing he won’t stand there forever, and it’s getting dark, but I want to take a good shot, one I am confident in.  I breath deep and aim again.  The reticule sits rock solid exactly where I want it and I squeeze.

 

His front knees buckle, he stumbles, and I lose him in the brush.  We listen and hear nothing.  He must be down.   Then Kobus tells me I was too far left, he saw the shot hit.  We drop and I draw the front of the kudu in the sand and showed Kobus where I was aiming, where I’m sure I hit.  Kobus confirms that that is exactly where I hit, but I should have been six inches right.  He was standing broadside, his front legs and head twisted towards us.  My heart sinks.  Kobus moves to where I shot, his feet in my tracks in the sand, and raises the rifle, looks through the scope, then turns and smiles reassuringly at me.  He confirms that I wouldn’t have been able to see the body for that bush, the kudu would have appeared to be straight on from where I shot.  Kobus could see the rump through brush, the kudu was completely  twisted, but I couldn’t see that at all.  We are quite confident though that the shot has taken the right lung and possibly the right shoulder.  Kobus tells me he made the exact shot on a kudu two years ago, exactly the same situation that I’m presented with, and the damn thing went for weeks.  Kudu are tough.

“Let’s not push him” Kobus advises.  “Let’s come back at first light”

 

My emotions are mixed.  I’m confident of the shot, but it was the wrong shot.  I know I can do nothing but wait till morning, and I feel very low.  In the morning, we head back with both Kobus Junior and Senior and two other trackers.  We find the scuff marks where the kudu was hit.  Within an hour,  Kobus Junior finds the blood trail.  It’s all rock and there’s very little spore.  We track the blood for three hundred yards, and then we lose it.  I have a long drive and an even longer flight to catch, I have to go.  Kobus Senior drives me back so I can have a quick shower and a change of clothes and off we drive to the airport, over three hours away.  He tells me he knows how I feel.  Being a professional hunter, he’s been in the same situation many times before on his own shots, and he reassures me that my marksmanship has been exemplary.  I’m appalled when he tells me that only losing one out of six animals taken is quite amazing.  One bullet per animal all week, dropping them in their tracks.  The guys hunting before me were averaging ten rounds per animal.  He gets many poor, poor hunters, and this sort of thing is surprisingly common.  It doesn’t make me feel any better.  No one wishes to injure an animal.  But ever cheery, he assures me he will find the kudu.  The country is remote, and if the kudu dies quickly, it may take awhile to find him, as kudu can cover many, many kilometres, but eventually they will.  I will have some piece of mind, and the rack.  It will be easier if the kudu bull is only injured.  He has had single lung shot animals recover, but being the dry season, there’s only a few water holes around, and if the kudu is still moving, they will check the watering holes in the evenings, and they will find him shortly.  I’m waiting.