Day 9
We slept in to an indulgent 7:30 a.m. Behind us were the days of waking up at 3:30 to hit the road by 4 in a quest to chase Kudu on some far off mountain property. Now we were hunting in the beautiful bushveld concessions around us again. My bag was pretty much filled, or so I thought. So I was going to take it easy, shooting the breeze in the truck with Amon our tracker while Dad tried his best to bag his wildebeest. Hunting was always fun but now there was not agony to it, no worrying whether or not it would be successful. “It always comes down to the kudu,” I said to myself. I wondered if I would ever hunt kudu again. Undoubtedly I resolved to myself, but not for a long time.
I walked out in my slippers, piled on some eggs, toast and the wonderful gelatinous bovril that no visiting hunters like besides me, and settled in with a warm cup of coffee. Nathan appeared looking like an ice cream cone of a man puffing outward in his camouflage jacket in stark contrast to his bare legs in Rhodie shorts.
“Today we’re getting a wildebeest. Pieter has been complaining. There are too many of them in some properties,” he said. “Well we’ve been trying. They have been giving us the slip,” said Dad. “It ends today.” We loaded up the truck and drove down some dirt roads and cattle gates into a new property. We drove for quite a while, crossing a river filled with giant catfish basking in the morning sun. “If they’re still there when we come out, I’ll try to shoot one,” said Nathan. “We can fry him up.”The sun was high now and the air warmed up to a balmy 84 degrees, the price paid for sleeping in.
During Dad’s childhood, there was a television show called “Rat Patrol,” which in my sporting life has become a sort of running joke between the men of his generation and me. Any time you are driving around in the back of the truck, gun in hand and ready to blast something, usually feral hog, you’re not really hunting. You’re playing Rat Patrol and it’s a wonderful thing. It’s also a euphemism for doing a lot of driving, and imagining shooting situations that don’t really materialize.
At one moment during our Rat Patrol around this concession, there was an old low fence cattle gate leading to another area. Suddenly down the road on the other side of the gate Nathan and I could make out low dust clouds kicking up.
“Oh my God, what a tusker,” Nathan said. “Get on the gun! Put a shot on him! Texas heart shot!” Dad had a rifle in his hands and spun toward the rapidly shrinking warthog. It’s true, he was a tusker. His ivory protruded from his body like the wings of a light aircraft. He looked like he could produce lift if he ran fast enough. “I can’t see him. I never saw him…” Dad said coming off the gun. Nathan wailed and put his hands in his hair and finally said “Let’s see if we can go after him.”
I confirmed Nathan’s spotting. He was a monster. We brought the truck through the gate, and pursued the pig, and in doing so flushed a female and a couple piglets out from some thorny bush. The large male never appeared.
Nathan marked the time. “Tomorrow, we’re setting up a blind and going for him. There is a bit of a rivalry between the PHs on who can bring in the biggest tusks. I want to bring him in.”
None of us protested. Sitting in blinds was not too fun for us, but the prospect of heavy ivory softened the blow. We drove on and naturally, because we shot our kudu yesterday, kudu were now everywhere, albeit no real shooters. Groups of young bachelors with the first curl in their horns popped their head out of the heather and, springing to life from their statuesque posing, disappeared into the bush beyond. This was the thick stuff again, buffalo territory.
Suddenly, Nathan dismounts and we followed along. By now it was getting to be closer to noon.“Things will start bedding down now to get out of the heat. They’ll look for protection in the thickets.”
We followed a game trail, spotting an eland lazily walking toward the interior. This gave us confidence that our stalk was quiet and with the correct wind. However, sure enough, we heard the snorting alerts of wildebeest before we could see them. We froze and sank to our haunches. Suddenly they busted out again in a black mass of swishing tails and dust.
I still cannot tell how many there were. The mass was about the size of a school bus, so maybe ten wildebeest but who really knows.
We spotted that they bust out of the block and down a road then evaporating into a neighboring block. We followed approaching the road. Once again the wildebeest snorted but all I saw was a wall of vegetation.
I decided to stay put and let Dad and Nathan advance. I sat in the red sand of the road, rifle at the ready, not making a sound, until eventually I heard the crashing of the herd busting again. This time, Dad and Nathan returned defeated. “We’ll just bump them all day,” Nathan said. “It’s so thick in there. I have no idea how I would be able to shoot them without being ten feet away,” said Dad.
We returned to the lodge, but not before Nathan pulled over at the river crossing, unholstering his Glock and walking over to a large boulder precipice on the river’s bank. He stood for a minute studying the game. He thought better of it and returned to the truck. “No way. No one was in a good spot.”
Lunch was kudu burgers made from our very own kudus taken the day before. It made a very respectable burger with ketchup, pickles, and a facsimile of American cheese. I lazed around the communal area, and even read a bit of my book “Death on the Nile” by Agatha Christie in what was really the first moments I had to actually read on the entire trip.
“We are going to go over the road to zap a blesbok,” said Nathan. “You still have either an impala or blesbok left on your package, and we know there are a lot there.”
Our last blesbok stalk manifested a wonderful kudu, and blesbok had become such an irritant for busting other game that I had developed a personal animosity to the beast. I was happy to try to put one in the salt.
I’ll spare you the report because it involved chasing herds across wide expanses of savannah over and over and over and over, only further cementing my ire. The blesbok again used a dispersed recon picket including some friendly red hartebeest to maintain a perpetual distance of 400 yards, a distance I personally don’t feel comfortable shooting at off sticks. “Okay we’re done with this. Let’s get back to wildebeest.”
We loaded up, and Nathan examined his map to decide where to go next. We got in the truck and returned to the main dirt road and began driving toward the nearby concession where we took the kudu. Suddenly, down a natural alleyway of vegetation, we spotted a group of about ten wildebeest about five hundred yards off the road. We pulled over and glassed the group.
“This property, I have not hunted before. It’s not in our usual concessions. I’ll have to call Pieter.”Nathan got on the phone and had a quick chat in Afrikaans then hung up. “Pieter knows the owner and is going to ask if we have permission to hunt this property.” Quickly the phone rang back with the affirmative answer and we were through the gate and onto the concession.
The road followed into a woods, while the wildebeest we saw were in a sprawling meadow cut for some powerlines that may have never been installed. By now the sun had begun to set and the shadows began to overtake the light. Amon stayed in the truck while I crawled to the edge of the tree line, and peeked my head down the alleyway. The road was at my back. Nathan and Dad used the woods as cover and advanced.
The sun continued to set and I watched them make very slow work of approaching the group. Eventually they came within 200 yards and I was certain there would be a shot. I watched for what felt like half an hour, the sun completely set now and the world held in that purple grey twilight, but still nothing. The wildebeest became alert but could not determine from what direction the threat was coming, if there was one at all.
Eventually, I saw Nathan and Dad retreating from their spot, returning toward the truck. I began my own exfiltration from my perch by the road and walked toward the truck. “We had plenty of shots but Nathan said there were no real shooters,” said Dad. “Yeah there were some big females and some juvenile bulls but nothing I would be happy with for you.”
This was another demonstration of Nathan’s integrity. I was certain the day was over. By now everything was fading from dark melting brown to inky black in the death throes of twilight. Nathan piped up. “Let’s walk into the woods a bit. There may be more in there if the group is split.” This surprised me as there was not much light left.
I stayed in the truck with Amon, twiddling my thumbs and listening to the night sounds start to play.“A wildebeest is a bad animal to shoot at last light,” I thought to myself. If it goes wrong it’ll be a long night and it’s getting darker still.
Just at that moment, I heard a shot. Goddamn it. I heard Amon’s radio crackle.“Big wildebeest,” he said. The radio crackled again. Amon got out of the driver’s seat and opened up the back. I hopped down with my own rifle. “Nathan wants the .375.” Well that can’t be good.
Amon with the .375 and I with .30-06 began to march in the direction of the shot as the stars began to twinkle overhead. I was ready to shoot anything that moved, imagining a hulking buck kicking and loping wounded wildebeest to sprint from behind any tree necessitating me to take a miraculous off-hand shot to put the poor creature down. Everyone would be so impressed as I would save the day.Amon’s radio crackled once more. “Dead.”Amon smiled widely. Oh thank God, I thought.
I approached the down wildebeest and it looked like the biggest I had ever seen though I never really saw one up close. Dad described the stalk.
The wildebeest presented only its head and shoulder ahead of a tree trunk 159 yards away. “Put the shot as close to the tree as possible, but don’t hit the tree, and it will be perfect.” In the dying light, my dad’s scope pulled in enough light to set the clock back another hour. He put the shot exactly as told. The wildebeest bucked and ran off collapsing only fifty yards away, this was not known at the time because it was lost in the darkness. We took photos illuminated by flashlight with the stars shining as the crescent moon rising behind us. It was a beautiful wildebeest and the most thrilling stalk of the trip for my dad. It was a culmination of many things for him. We returned to the camp for zebra pie courtesy of our Fresca friend, and drank quite a bit for the first time on the trip.
For tomorrow we had dreams of shooting some ivory of the piggy variety.
