AdAstra92
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Long-time lurker, first-time poster. I recently returned from South Africa on my first safari. There is so much to share, but for now, I would like to share one of the greatest days of my life, when I killed a Cape buffalo.
I kept a journal throughout the safari, writing in it each night, so this is a transcript from that from the day of the hunt, and the day after.
The cast of this story:
Alexis - my wife.
Jake - my brother in law.
Charles - my professional hunter.
Treymoor - our tracker/skinner.
Gerhard - another professional hunter that joined us as he’s working towards earning his big game license.
Ansa - my wife’s non-hunting guide.
07 AUG 2026: Today, I killed a Cape buffalo.
I could not have fabricated the story of this hunt to be better than reality. It was a storybook fantasy of a hunt and of a day. I am exhausted, and I will commit to telling the story tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.
For now, I will say only this: it was one of the best days of my life.
I must accept the limitations and realities of my time. Gone are the days of mapping the Nile and hunting ivory for a living. What remains is the result of decades of conservation efforts by governments and nongovernmental organizations. Game no longer runs freely across all of Africa. It exists in sections here and pockets there, and very few of these places retain anything approaching the breadth and biodiversity they once naturally held.
When I thought of coming to Africa to hunt, I understood those realities, but I still yearned for the opportunity to be part of something wild—or as wild as would be possible today. I did not want to go to a farm and shoot African game. I wanted to go into the wild.
It is now just before breakfast on August 8. I am sitting on the deck drinking coffee, listening to birds I cannot name and watching the sun rise over the plains below. It is sweater weather, with a light breeze, and dry. The vista is dotted with plains game.
Breakfast will be served soon, so I will return later today to continue recounting yesterday’s magnificent Cape buffalo hunt.
Before I forget: white rhino, zebra, giraffe, bushpig, waterbuck, reedbuck, meerkat, blesbok, springbok, impala, hartebeest, ostrich, warthog, vervet monkey, baboon, black wildebeest, steenbok, jackal, kudu—and more birds than I could possibly identify.
All of these we encountered during yesterday’s buffalo hunt. Oh, and Cape buffalo.
I have so many thoughts about yesterday that I am not yet certain where to begin. For the sake of posterity, I will first recount the events as they happened. In due time, perhaps I can make sense of what they meant.
We began early with a 5:30 a.m. breakfast prepared by Herman, the camp’s chef: black wildebeest sausage, eggs, toast, and coffee. While we ate, Herman packed a picnic lunch for the day.
The park was about an hour away. Along the way we stopped at a gas station to buy soda and snacks for the park administrator—a bribe, more or less. I also discovered that I needed a few rand simply to access the gated restroom.
At the park, I completed the paperwork: a hunting license and an indemnity waiver. We had taken two vehicles to accommodate everyone and the gear, but once inside the park we consolidated into Charles’ Land Cruiser.
Alexis, Jake, and I sat on the elevated bench. Treymoor and Charles sat aft. Gerhard, the gamekeeper at Witkop, drove, while Ansa, Alexis’ guide, rode shotgun. A park ranger joined Charles and Treymoor in the back and remained with us throughout the day to ensure that every rule and regulation was followed.
Through the morning we explored perhaps half of the park’s 80,000 acres. Game was everywhere. Buffalo were not. We stopped for lunch and ate from the hood of the Land Cruiser, then climbed back aboard and resumed the search. Early in the afternoon, Treymoor’s hand suddenly shot between our faces, finger extended.
“Buffalo!”
Deep in thick brush behind a pond, I could make out the eyes and bosses of a buffalo staring back at us. Nothing else was visible. It looked like the cover of a hunting magazine: two black bosses, two eyes, and an entire buffalo concealed behind the brush.
Charles instructed Gerhard to keep driving so we would not disturb the buffalo. About a hundred yards beyond the pond, we stopped. Gerhard—the backup gunner—Charles, and I got out, retraced the Land Cruiser’s tracks, and circled behind the pond. Slowly and carefully, we entered the veld, approaching the place where we had seen the buffalo’s eyes last.
The wind swirled. Then the brush erupted. Thirty yards to our right, three warthogs burst from cover. Behind them came three Cape buffalo.
Charles planted the shooting sticks and bellowed like a buffalo. Eventually the three bulls stopped on the hillside, stacked almost one above another. Then, as though someone had choreographed the scene, all three turned their heads and stared directly at us. Directly at me.
The adrenaline surged.
“Shoot the one in the back,” Charles said. “The top of the three.”
I settled the rifle and fired. Left and right were good. High. A miss.
What under any other circumstances would have been an easy shot had suddenly felt nearly impossible. My legs were shaking—not from fear, but from pure excitement.
Charles immediately snapped up the sticks.
“Just high, sir! No problem! Let’s carry on and see if we can’t cut them off!”
We raced back toward the Land Cruiser. As we reached it, the buffalo emerged on the far side of the pond where everyone could see them. The three bulls crossed several hundred yards ahead of us without the slightest intention of stopping.
We tore up the trail and around the hill. For a time, we parallel to the bulls, handrailing them as they ran at full speed until the terrain again separated us. The buffalo were somewhere in the draw to our left. Around the next bend, we paused. For a moment, nothing. Then the tops of their bosses began to appear. They were still moving on the same line.
“Quickly, sir!”
Charles and I jumped from the truck and trotted thirty yards into the grass. He snapped the sticks open in front of me
Now all three massive bulls were coming into view. Running. Left to right. Maybe 100 yards from us.
“If you can, aim for the nose on the middle one and take the shot,” Charles said calmly.
Aim for the nose...Just like a goose... Something familiar took over. Years of wingshooting compressed into a fraction of a second. I swung through the bull, squeezed the trigger—
and he dropped.
The other two bulls carried on. Mine did not move. Charles nevertheless had me shoot him twice more. We would take no chances with a Cape buffalo.
The first bullet had entered through the neck, severed the spine, and immediately dropped the bull in mid-stride. A freight train slamming into the dirt. Charles later told me that in more than twenty years as a professional hunter, he had seen a shot like it only once before. I could try that shot a thousand more times and never make it again... But I made the one that counted.
From high on the Land Cruiser, everyone had seen it. Alexis and Jake even captured the whole thing on video. It is quite incredible to watch, if I say so myself.
Charles knew that I am sober, so instead of champagne he had brought a bottle of sparkling grape juice. We celebrated beside an old, massive bull—one of the most dangerous animals on the planet. Only then did I begin to comprehend what had just happened.
Missing my first shot, on the heels of missing the zebra stallion the day before, had been a hard pill to swallow. Walking back toward a truck full of anxious faces with my hands still shaking and offering nothing more than a little shake of the head and, “no. Missed him.” That was not an experience my ego particularly enjoyed.
As we ripped up the road after the three bulls, bouncing and jarring in the Land Cruiser, I had to fight the voice in my head: Well, you had your chance, and you blew it, bruh.
I had saved my pennies. I had waited for years. I had traveled thousands of miles. And I had missed. Then, with only moments of opportunity remaining, everything changed.
For years, when I fantasized about Africa and about this hunt, I carried a particular image in my mind. I imagined myself in the tall grass with a professional hunter, pursuing something genuinely dangerous, while my beautiful wife watched from high above, safely perched on the back of a Land Cruiser. I imagined being able to chase the thrill—the dream, the adrenaline—with her still within earshot.
I suppose Green Hills of Africa and The Horn of the Hunter had something to do with putting that picture in my head. But so what? It was my fantasy. And I f****** did it.
I hunted one of the most dangerous game animals on the face of the planet, in Africa, beneath the blazing sun. Around me, white rhino, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and antelope grazed, foraged, and ran. I entered the thick brush of my own volition—and eagerly—to pursue a Cape buffalo.
When the adrenaline became too much to contain, I whiffed it. So we chased the bulls. We raced across the African bush in a Land Cruiser, bouncing and jarring over the road, trying to cut them off before they disappeared. And with only moments remaining, I made the shot.
There on high, from the back of the Land Cruiser, Alexis saw the whole thing. For a little while, it felt as though a Hollywood movie had become real around me.
Over the buffalo, with Alexis’ encouragement, I bummed a cigarette from Gerhard. I drank my “champagne.” I took what felt like a thousand photographs with, of, and around the old bull. By any record book, he is a true trophy. The safari company is understandably tickled to have produced him, but his measurements were not what made him a trophy to me.
I did not have the privilege of living, hunting, and exploring during Africa’s safari golden age. I was born too late for that. But standing there beneath the African sun, with my wife looking down from the Land Cruiser and an ancient Cape buffalo lying in the grass before me, I thought I had received about as Hollywood-storybook an experience as I could ever have asked for.
We eventually began the drive back through the park. This place is funded and protected in large part by the handful of hunters who come here every few years, and I feel good about having played some small part in that. I do not feel good about killing. That distinction matters to me.
I feel good about having hunted here, and about knowing that the money I spent to pursue this buffalo contributes directly to protecting the buffalo, rhino, giraffe, zebra, antelope, and all the other animals with which we shared the landscape.
On the return drive we stopped again to watch several white rhinos grazing. Holy hell, they are big. We asked the ranger how many rhinos lived within the park. He explained that the total population is deliberately kept secret—one more small measure in the endless battle against poaching.
Back at the lodge, my bull was estimated to have a carcass weight of more than a metric ton. He literally broke the winch at the skinning shed. Charles again congratulated me on what he considered a magnificent trophy. I had not cared much about size or score, but the more he talked, the more curious I became. Perhaps I will ask him to score it before we leave.
Kudu steak for supper. Delicious.
I thanked Alexis for all of it. For the trip. For the marriage. For this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime day. I am so blessed. God is good.
I almost forgot the gas station.
On our way back to the lodge, we stopped for fuel in a small town. In South Africa, attendants pump the fuel for you, and the stations can become hives of activity. At the nicer ones, the attendants wear matching jumpsuits and move around the vehicles like NASCAR pit crews.
It did not take long for someone to notice the one-ton Cape buffalo lying in the back of our truck. Men began gathering around it. They stared at the old bull in awe.
I watched them for a while, then asked Gerhard whether a buffalo arriving at a gas station was really that unusual. He watched the gathering crowd with a wary eye. Hunting itself, he explained, was not unusual. Hunting culture was not unusual. But hunting Cape buffalo was different. Buffalo hunting simply costs more than most people here could ever afford.
Gerhard was neither rude nor resentful. If anything, his gentleness made the realization more uncomfortable. There before me was wealth made tangible—not in a bank account or a house or a car, but in hide and horn and hoof. And suddenly I saw myself from the outside. An American, not yet thirty-four, traveling abroad on holiday, standing beside an animal that many of the men surrounding me might never have the means to hunt themselves.
It is a difficult feeling to describe. I am grateful beyond words. I know that I worked hard for this. I saved for years. I planned and waited and sacrificed other things so that someday I could come to Africa and do exactly what I had dreamed of doing. But hard work is not the whole story. I had help along the way. I was born in a place where opportunities existed for me that do not exist equally for everyone. I have been fortunate in ways I earned and in ways I most certainly did not. And somewhere amid all of that has been a healthy measure of simple luck.
Yesterday, I killed a Cape buffalo. It was everything I had imagined Africa might be: danger and beauty, dust and adrenaline, wild animals stretching across the landscape, my wife watching from the Land Cruiser, and an old bull thundering through the grass.
It was better than the story I had written in my head.
But perhaps the thing I most want to remember is Gerhard’s face at that gas station as he gently explained what I was seeing. Whenever I find myself wishing for more, I will remember that face. I will remember how extraordinarily fortunate I was simply to have been there.
Location: Free State Province, South Africa
Rifle: CZ 550 Safari Classic in .375 H&H
Optic: Burris LPVO 1-6x with Talley rings and QD mounts
Ammunition: Hornady Dangerous Game 300gr DGX
Safari Company: Somerby
I kept a journal throughout the safari, writing in it each night, so this is a transcript from that from the day of the hunt, and the day after.
The cast of this story:
Alexis - my wife.
Jake - my brother in law.
Charles - my professional hunter.
Treymoor - our tracker/skinner.
Gerhard - another professional hunter that joined us as he’s working towards earning his big game license.
Ansa - my wife’s non-hunting guide.
07 AUG 2026: Today, I killed a Cape buffalo.
I could not have fabricated the story of this hunt to be better than reality. It was a storybook fantasy of a hunt and of a day. I am exhausted, and I will commit to telling the story tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.
For now, I will say only this: it was one of the best days of my life.
I must accept the limitations and realities of my time. Gone are the days of mapping the Nile and hunting ivory for a living. What remains is the result of decades of conservation efforts by governments and nongovernmental organizations. Game no longer runs freely across all of Africa. It exists in sections here and pockets there, and very few of these places retain anything approaching the breadth and biodiversity they once naturally held.
When I thought of coming to Africa to hunt, I understood those realities, but I still yearned for the opportunity to be part of something wild—or as wild as would be possible today. I did not want to go to a farm and shoot African game. I wanted to go into the wild.
It is now just before breakfast on August 8. I am sitting on the deck drinking coffee, listening to birds I cannot name and watching the sun rise over the plains below. It is sweater weather, with a light breeze, and dry. The vista is dotted with plains game.
Breakfast will be served soon, so I will return later today to continue recounting yesterday’s magnificent Cape buffalo hunt.
Before I forget: white rhino, zebra, giraffe, bushpig, waterbuck, reedbuck, meerkat, blesbok, springbok, impala, hartebeest, ostrich, warthog, vervet monkey, baboon, black wildebeest, steenbok, jackal, kudu—and more birds than I could possibly identify.
All of these we encountered during yesterday’s buffalo hunt. Oh, and Cape buffalo.
I have so many thoughts about yesterday that I am not yet certain where to begin. For the sake of posterity, I will first recount the events as they happened. In due time, perhaps I can make sense of what they meant.
We began early with a 5:30 a.m. breakfast prepared by Herman, the camp’s chef: black wildebeest sausage, eggs, toast, and coffee. While we ate, Herman packed a picnic lunch for the day.
The park was about an hour away. Along the way we stopped at a gas station to buy soda and snacks for the park administrator—a bribe, more or less. I also discovered that I needed a few rand simply to access the gated restroom.
At the park, I completed the paperwork: a hunting license and an indemnity waiver. We had taken two vehicles to accommodate everyone and the gear, but once inside the park we consolidated into Charles’ Land Cruiser.
Alexis, Jake, and I sat on the elevated bench. Treymoor and Charles sat aft. Gerhard, the gamekeeper at Witkop, drove, while Ansa, Alexis’ guide, rode shotgun. A park ranger joined Charles and Treymoor in the back and remained with us throughout the day to ensure that every rule and regulation was followed.
Through the morning we explored perhaps half of the park’s 80,000 acres. Game was everywhere. Buffalo were not. We stopped for lunch and ate from the hood of the Land Cruiser, then climbed back aboard and resumed the search. Early in the afternoon, Treymoor’s hand suddenly shot between our faces, finger extended.
“Buffalo!”
Deep in thick brush behind a pond, I could make out the eyes and bosses of a buffalo staring back at us. Nothing else was visible. It looked like the cover of a hunting magazine: two black bosses, two eyes, and an entire buffalo concealed behind the brush.
Charles instructed Gerhard to keep driving so we would not disturb the buffalo. About a hundred yards beyond the pond, we stopped. Gerhard—the backup gunner—Charles, and I got out, retraced the Land Cruiser’s tracks, and circled behind the pond. Slowly and carefully, we entered the veld, approaching the place where we had seen the buffalo’s eyes last.
The wind swirled. Then the brush erupted. Thirty yards to our right, three warthogs burst from cover. Behind them came three Cape buffalo.
Charles planted the shooting sticks and bellowed like a buffalo. Eventually the three bulls stopped on the hillside, stacked almost one above another. Then, as though someone had choreographed the scene, all three turned their heads and stared directly at us. Directly at me.
The adrenaline surged.
“Shoot the one in the back,” Charles said. “The top of the three.”
I settled the rifle and fired. Left and right were good. High. A miss.
What under any other circumstances would have been an easy shot had suddenly felt nearly impossible. My legs were shaking—not from fear, but from pure excitement.
Charles immediately snapped up the sticks.
“Just high, sir! No problem! Let’s carry on and see if we can’t cut them off!”
We raced back toward the Land Cruiser. As we reached it, the buffalo emerged on the far side of the pond where everyone could see them. The three bulls crossed several hundred yards ahead of us without the slightest intention of stopping.
We tore up the trail and around the hill. For a time, we parallel to the bulls, handrailing them as they ran at full speed until the terrain again separated us. The buffalo were somewhere in the draw to our left. Around the next bend, we paused. For a moment, nothing. Then the tops of their bosses began to appear. They were still moving on the same line.
“Quickly, sir!”
Charles and I jumped from the truck and trotted thirty yards into the grass. He snapped the sticks open in front of me
Now all three massive bulls were coming into view. Running. Left to right. Maybe 100 yards from us.
“If you can, aim for the nose on the middle one and take the shot,” Charles said calmly.
Aim for the nose...Just like a goose... Something familiar took over. Years of wingshooting compressed into a fraction of a second. I swung through the bull, squeezed the trigger—
and he dropped.
The other two bulls carried on. Mine did not move. Charles nevertheless had me shoot him twice more. We would take no chances with a Cape buffalo.
The first bullet had entered through the neck, severed the spine, and immediately dropped the bull in mid-stride. A freight train slamming into the dirt. Charles later told me that in more than twenty years as a professional hunter, he had seen a shot like it only once before. I could try that shot a thousand more times and never make it again... But I made the one that counted.
From high on the Land Cruiser, everyone had seen it. Alexis and Jake even captured the whole thing on video. It is quite incredible to watch, if I say so myself.
Charles knew that I am sober, so instead of champagne he had brought a bottle of sparkling grape juice. We celebrated beside an old, massive bull—one of the most dangerous animals on the planet. Only then did I begin to comprehend what had just happened.
Missing my first shot, on the heels of missing the zebra stallion the day before, had been a hard pill to swallow. Walking back toward a truck full of anxious faces with my hands still shaking and offering nothing more than a little shake of the head and, “no. Missed him.” That was not an experience my ego particularly enjoyed.
As we ripped up the road after the three bulls, bouncing and jarring in the Land Cruiser, I had to fight the voice in my head: Well, you had your chance, and you blew it, bruh.
I had saved my pennies. I had waited for years. I had traveled thousands of miles. And I had missed. Then, with only moments of opportunity remaining, everything changed.
For years, when I fantasized about Africa and about this hunt, I carried a particular image in my mind. I imagined myself in the tall grass with a professional hunter, pursuing something genuinely dangerous, while my beautiful wife watched from high above, safely perched on the back of a Land Cruiser. I imagined being able to chase the thrill—the dream, the adrenaline—with her still within earshot.
I suppose Green Hills of Africa and The Horn of the Hunter had something to do with putting that picture in my head. But so what? It was my fantasy. And I f****** did it.
I hunted one of the most dangerous game animals on the face of the planet, in Africa, beneath the blazing sun. Around me, white rhino, giraffe, zebra, wildebeest and antelope grazed, foraged, and ran. I entered the thick brush of my own volition—and eagerly—to pursue a Cape buffalo.
When the adrenaline became too much to contain, I whiffed it. So we chased the bulls. We raced across the African bush in a Land Cruiser, bouncing and jarring over the road, trying to cut them off before they disappeared. And with only moments remaining, I made the shot.
There on high, from the back of the Land Cruiser, Alexis saw the whole thing. For a little while, it felt as though a Hollywood movie had become real around me.
Over the buffalo, with Alexis’ encouragement, I bummed a cigarette from Gerhard. I drank my “champagne.” I took what felt like a thousand photographs with, of, and around the old bull. By any record book, he is a true trophy. The safari company is understandably tickled to have produced him, but his measurements were not what made him a trophy to me.
I did not have the privilege of living, hunting, and exploring during Africa’s safari golden age. I was born too late for that. But standing there beneath the African sun, with my wife looking down from the Land Cruiser and an ancient Cape buffalo lying in the grass before me, I thought I had received about as Hollywood-storybook an experience as I could ever have asked for.
We eventually began the drive back through the park. This place is funded and protected in large part by the handful of hunters who come here every few years, and I feel good about having played some small part in that. I do not feel good about killing. That distinction matters to me.
I feel good about having hunted here, and about knowing that the money I spent to pursue this buffalo contributes directly to protecting the buffalo, rhino, giraffe, zebra, antelope, and all the other animals with which we shared the landscape.
On the return drive we stopped again to watch several white rhinos grazing. Holy hell, they are big. We asked the ranger how many rhinos lived within the park. He explained that the total population is deliberately kept secret—one more small measure in the endless battle against poaching.
Back at the lodge, my bull was estimated to have a carcass weight of more than a metric ton. He literally broke the winch at the skinning shed. Charles again congratulated me on what he considered a magnificent trophy. I had not cared much about size or score, but the more he talked, the more curious I became. Perhaps I will ask him to score it before we leave.
Kudu steak for supper. Delicious.
I thanked Alexis for all of it. For the trip. For the marriage. For this incredible, once-in-a-lifetime day. I am so blessed. God is good.
I almost forgot the gas station.
On our way back to the lodge, we stopped for fuel in a small town. In South Africa, attendants pump the fuel for you, and the stations can become hives of activity. At the nicer ones, the attendants wear matching jumpsuits and move around the vehicles like NASCAR pit crews.
It did not take long for someone to notice the one-ton Cape buffalo lying in the back of our truck. Men began gathering around it. They stared at the old bull in awe.
I watched them for a while, then asked Gerhard whether a buffalo arriving at a gas station was really that unusual. He watched the gathering crowd with a wary eye. Hunting itself, he explained, was not unusual. Hunting culture was not unusual. But hunting Cape buffalo was different. Buffalo hunting simply costs more than most people here could ever afford.
Gerhard was neither rude nor resentful. If anything, his gentleness made the realization more uncomfortable. There before me was wealth made tangible—not in a bank account or a house or a car, but in hide and horn and hoof. And suddenly I saw myself from the outside. An American, not yet thirty-four, traveling abroad on holiday, standing beside an animal that many of the men surrounding me might never have the means to hunt themselves.
It is a difficult feeling to describe. I am grateful beyond words. I know that I worked hard for this. I saved for years. I planned and waited and sacrificed other things so that someday I could come to Africa and do exactly what I had dreamed of doing. But hard work is not the whole story. I had help along the way. I was born in a place where opportunities existed for me that do not exist equally for everyone. I have been fortunate in ways I earned and in ways I most certainly did not. And somewhere amid all of that has been a healthy measure of simple luck.
Yesterday, I killed a Cape buffalo. It was everything I had imagined Africa might be: danger and beauty, dust and adrenaline, wild animals stretching across the landscape, my wife watching from the Land Cruiser, and an old bull thundering through the grass.
It was better than the story I had written in my head.
But perhaps the thing I most want to remember is Gerhard’s face at that gas station as he gently explained what I was seeing. Whenever I find myself wishing for more, I will remember that face. I will remember how extraordinarily fortunate I was simply to have been there.
Location: Free State Province, South Africa
Rifle: CZ 550 Safari Classic in .375 H&H
Optic: Burris LPVO 1-6x with Talley rings and QD mounts
Ammunition: Hornady Dangerous Game 300gr DGX
Safari Company: Somerby
To AH
)
