I was in Zambia in 2000 with Doc Kilgo and baby-faced Stuart McClean who made the mistake of following me everywhere I went with a video camera in hand and a wide-open spirit for adventure. Only problem was, we sometimes confused adventure with a serious risk of life. This was one of those experiences that could have easily turned out ugly for us instead of the buffalo.
Anyone who has hunted cape buffalo on the ground, whether with gun or bow, and made the first shot at 20 yards or less, likely had a little bit of a lip quiver going. It is exhilarating when all goes well and horrifying when it doesn’t.
Had my Professional Hunter (PH) had his way, he would have preferred that I shot every dangerous animal from the vehicle. He had been mauled by a lion the previous year after his boneheaded booking agent client “gut shot” a lion as it tried to run away from a bait when it saw them walking up on it.
Stupidity on fire!
So, unfortunately, they had to carefully track the lion’s blood trail and when they walked up on him, he charged them. Even though they shot him a couple times and broke his lower jaw, the lion got close enough to swat at Harry, on a full run, practically tearing his pants off and leaving a tooth in Harry’s calf.
It all looked good on video to the wanabe bad asses, but it totally screwed Harry up psychologically and robbed him of any confidence to guide a bow hunter like me to hunt a lion, cape buffalo, leopard and hippo in a legitimate on the ground hunt.
After all, that’s what I paid for… to have a PH that could and would back me up and use his best judgement to shoot at the appropriate time of danger, if it occurred. I needed a PH that could let me stalk and hunt the game, knowing the risk, yet not being stupid about it.
I knew my PH Harry wasn’t mentally prepared early in the hunt by the things he asked me to do. One of those things was asking me to shoot the buffalo and lion from the truck. My answer was hell no! I could sense his anxiety when he told me that many of his rifle clients shot buffalo from the truck and nearly all of his lion clients did too. I told him that wasn’t hunting to me and I wasn’t into that cowardly crap.
If I couldn’t do it the right way, I wasn’t going to do it… period.
I don’t hunt to impress people with a false impression of how brave I am, I hunt because I love the challenge even when my testicles are drawn up my rear end as I wonder if this is the wisest thing to do in the moment.
Everyone who hunts dangerous game with a bow knows the risk they are taking as they have to get close, and they have to hold their water till the best possible shot. Most of them pray their way through the release of the arrow, as all hell is about to break loose.
I knew my resolve pissed Harry off, but he was told what my expectations were when I booked the safari and my position wasn’t changing no matter how much he begged. I would have fired him if there was any alternative, but we were stuck together and we would have to make the best of it and suffer each other.
I don’t want to lead you to believe that Harry was a coward…he wasn’t. He was a guy who was struggling with the consideration of the worst-case scenario and he was the only gun in the game and his last bad experience was still fresh on his mind.
I understand what he was thinking as I was no stranger to bad hunting experiences. I was shot once while hunting twelve years earlier and it affected my ability to focus on the hunt and not the bad possibilities for a few years. He really shouldn’t have taken this safari, but like most PH’s, the only way their family eats is by virtue of them hunting and now he was stuck with an intense hunting purest like me. So, I told him, “Get your rifle and back me up on this buffalo, I’m here to hunt!”
We were nearing the boundary of the concession when we saw them. They had just crossed the dried creek bed that separated us from the non-hunting part of the national park. There were about 125 cows and calves with a few bulls mixed in with the herd and, as what usually happens, a few bulls crossed behind the herd.
Fortunately, there was a really good bull in the group.
As they say in Africa, we made a plan, and drove a few hundred yards past the herd and got out of the truck. Me, Harry, Stuart and one of the trackers named Philemon headed for the creek bed to see about sneaking around behind the herd and easing up to the last group of animals for a shot, as the wind was perfect.
Philemon had brought his sneakers with him, the ones we had given him earlier as a gift. They were tied together and wrapped around his neck. He carried them everywhere he went because he was afraid someone might steal them in camp and he wanted to wear them in a wedding. Peter told him to hide them under the creek bank until we came back. Doc, Sarge and the rest of the trackers stayed in the truck to see what direction the herd ran in if we got busted on the stalk.
We began our sneak as the creek bank was about five to six feet tall and for the most part concealed our approach, if the other guys leaned over some. At my height of 5’2”, I was at or below the bank most of the time no matter what.
We got behind the last few animals when Harry raised up to see the biggest bull about 30 yards away walking back and forth under a combretum bush to escape the ox peckers on his back. They were tormenting him by eating at the wounds left by their incessant pecking on the bloody pools.
Harry hand signaled for us to climb the bank and told Stuart to stay behind. Once I was on the top of the bank and behind a bush, I signaled for Stuart to follow. Harry was totally focused on the bull that was now only 20 yards away bellowing as he walked in circles under the bush. Then I saw Harry move his fingers telling me to come beside him, and as I did, the bull popped out right in front of me broad side.
I quickly drew and turned it loose without thinking, as I had shot over 7000 arrows practicing for this moment.
My bow had become an extension of my body.
The arrow drilled the bull through both lungs. He grunted and started running away. Before we knew it, we were facing the entire herd facing us at about a hundred yards and they didn’t look too happy. My bull was standing closest to us with blood spraying out of his side at every breath and my white fletching had turned red as it stuck out behind the front leg.
I knew he would soon expire if we left him alone.
Then Harry did the unexpected and shot him in the chest, then turned to me to say, “They are going to run for the park, I needed to get a bullet in him.”
The herd ran into our concession with my bull lagging behind. Harry handed me his rifle and said, “Go ahead and finish him. I shot him through the front shoulders. He collapsed and I bolted another round and shot him threw the spine as he lay on his side. He moaned and expired.
Everyone congratulated me but I was not happy with Harry’s quick decision to shoot. I had another buffalo permit so I let it go for the moment and just went along with the celebration. After the photographs, the trackers started chopping the bull in half to prepare him for lion bait. Once cut in two pieces, I climbed up into his chest cavity to see the damage the arrow had done to make sure the broadhead had performed as I was told it would.
And it did.
The arrow passed through both lungs and was stuck in the ribs on the far side of the cavity. I was extremely impressed as the bull’s ribs were about an inch thick and overlapped each other with no gap. I shot him with a 690-grain arrow tipped with a two bladed, 200 grain Teflon coated stainless steel broadhead, delivered with a little less than 90-foot pounds of kinetic energy.
I only add that detail for the guys who may be dumb enough to try the same thing.
A friend had teased me about my heavy equipment choice and I told him that I could shoot through the door of his truck and pass through him before he could flinch. Yet, my arrow didn’t completely pass through the buffalo. They are a tough creature, made of thick skin and dense bone, not aluminum foil.
I was glad to get the opportunity to stalk and shoot a great buffalo with my bow, but I was extremely disappointed in Harry’s quick decision to shoot. I believe had he shot at the ground in front of the bull’s front hooves, he would have probably turned to run. But I know that there is not a more unpredictable animal than a cape buffalo and they can take a lot of killing.
You don’t want to be the only gun on a full fledge charge from an animal who focuses on one person and kills him, so I accepted his decision. The good thing was that Stuart got the entire hunt on video as he was as anal as I was to do it right.
The next day, I told Harry that after we get our lion or leopard, I wanted to hunt my second buffalo, and that’s when Harry told me that I only had one permit. I asked what happened to my other permit and he said that it had been sold to someone else without his knowledge. I wanted to believe him but I didn’t, as every day I experienced more inconsistences.
But for now… it was time to focus on hunting the lion!
THOUGHTS OF THE HUNTER KIND:
Hunting dangerous game is a dangerous game. From my perspective, once you sign on, you better be on.
Harry lived in conflict.
He wanted to be professional, but he needed to survive the experience if he was going to feed his family. Because of that, he was accustomed to compromising his ethics to provide a hunter the opportunity to kill an animal by driving up to it and blowing it away. The thought grieved me…. But I understood that most of the time he had rich, cowardly clients wanting to prove their manhood by killing animals that could hurt them if they got out of the truck. Their real “payoff” seemed to be in the hunting photos that followed, where they looked like the bad asses that they wanted to portray.
PRAYER OF THE HUNTER KIND:
Mark 14:38 “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
Lord, this is so true of me. At times I deviate in ways that only You see, as I am no different from the truck hunters in many ways. Forgive me Lord and use me to show someone else that their sin can be forgiven too. My peace is in You, Jesus. I praise Your Holy Name!
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