WHAT MAKES A HUNTER?
Personalities are formed during the formative years
SORTING THROUGH PICTURES and papers going back to my early childhood, I found a letter from Mike Balcomb written during our high-school days almost 60 years ago – we were boarders together at Maritzburg College. He wrote, “…the next full moon is on the 10th of March. We get a free weekend from 8 – 10. What say you? See if Helen can do without you for that weekend – the hunting shouldn’t be too bad.” Mike was referring to bushpig hunting on his family’s farm at Kearsney, Natal, which we did at night by the light of a full moon. Mike became a wellknown professional hunter and gamerancher in northern Zululand. He’s retired now but we’ve kept in contact.
This got me thinking about my other boyhood hunting pals. My oldest friend is Rob Catterall. I began school at Merchiston Prep in Pietermaritzburg after my family moved back there from Windhoek. I arrived late for the first term, and Rob was chosen to show me where the “bugs” (toilet block) was. Though barely two bricks and a tickey high, we discovered a mutual interest in guns and hunting. We went on to attend Maritzburg College together and both joined the same firm on leaving school. Over the decades, we did a good deal of hunting and fishing together. Rob now lives in Canada, but we’re in constant touch and he remains an ardent hunter to this day.
I recently wrote of the boyhood hunting experiences I shared with Terry Wilson (“Of Boys and Big Bangs” Feb 2019). Terry and I remain in contact, and he is just as involved in firearms and shooting as he ever was.
However, I had other close boyhood friends who were equally passionate about guns and hunting, yet who, on
leaving school, simply fell from the way. One, whom I won’t name as he became a public figure and may not want his boyhood exploits revealed, introduced me to the writings of Robert Ruark (which set the course for my life), also of Karamojo Bell, John Hunter and others. He was very knowledgeable on the subject, and we spent much time roaming the bush with our air rifles, yet on leaving school he pursued it no further.
WHEREIN LIES THE difference between those who loved it but lost it, and those for whom it becomes a lifelong passion – even a career? I imagine it must include parental influence, boyhood opportunities, love for the world of nature, a love of adventure and a desire to lead a life less ordinary. In an attempt to answer this question, I can only offer my own case as a possible example.
My earliest memories are of my father’s guns and hunting, and of picnics in the veld in South West Africa. On one such occasion, when I was four years old, my father took me in his lap, shouldered his 16-bore shotgun and let me aim it at a milk bottle and pull the trigger, then pretended we were both bowled over backwards by the recoil. His intention was to thrill me, and he succeeded more than he ever imagined. Aged four or five, I watched him shoot a gemsbuck and pass up a shot on a kudu bull. I wanted to be in on every aspect of the hunt; once, he even allowed me to cut up some springbuck ribs – I retain the crescent-shaped scar on my knuckle to this day.
The only toys I ever wanted were guns. My dad gave me a double-barrelled popgun that fired corks. I begged him to let me play with a real gun; he gave me his diminutive single-shot .22 – his own boyhood ‘first gun’. I broke it in two at the pistol grip pretending to club an attacking lion. He gave me a .577 Enfield muzzle-loader when I was too small even to lift it.
Later, in Pietermaritzburg, he took me to movies such as Where No Vultures Fly and King Solomon’s Mines (Stewart Granger version) which made a lasting impression. He built me a ‘hunting rifle’ with a carved wooden stock and a steel barrel made from electrical conduit piping. The ‘action’ was a barrel-bolt off a stable door,
screwed onto the side of the stock, and the scope was a section of brass curtain rod. In my imagination I created my own adventures. He’d let me spend hours playing with his 16-bore Charles Boswell shotgun or his 7x57 Mauser on my bed. I can’t describe the pleasure this gave me.
Reading played a major role in setting my life’s direction. Our home bookshelves had a large volume titled Wildlife of Our World. Before I even learned to read, I was poring over the photos in it. I studied it throughout my childhood, fascinated by all forms of wildlife, including insects. I read all Kipling’s Mowgli and Jungle Book stories. Later, my brother, seven years my senior, bought the American field-sports magazines and Veld & Vlei (later Field & Tide ) and I devoured these.
When I was eight, I inherited my brother’s BSA Cadet Minor air rifle and began hunting. Bordering our suburb was the property of the Town Hill Mental Asylum – a vast area of natural bush, timber plantations and mealie fields. For boys, it was a hunting paradise, and I regularly brought home doves which my mother turned into delicious stews with barley gravy.
MY DAD HAD two cousins with farms in the
Natal Midlands, where he took me hunting when I was about ten, using his single-barrel .410 shotgun and his pump-action .22. He let me shoot my first flying bird with the .410, choosing a sakubula (longtailed widow bird), a slow flier that hovers, making an easy target for a kid. After this initiation, he admonished me, “From now on, hawks and gamebirds only.” My mother’s brother was on a sugar farm in southern Natal, and we spent holidays there every year. When I was about eleven, for the first time, my father let me take out the .410, accompanied only by my cousin, just three years my senior. He even let me go out alone with his .22 when farm labourers reported seeing a phiti (blue duiker) in a patch of bush. When I got there, my brother had already shot it with the .410, but the mere fact that I’d been trusted to take the .22 out alone was reward enough for me – I saw it as a rite of passage.
Farmyards always had hens with chickens, and all farmers regarded hawks and snakes as problem animals. I shot a green mamba on that farm with the .410, and spent days sitting on the veranda in wait for hawks. Later, on the cousin’s farm at New Hanover, I shot my first guineafowl flying with that .410. By now, my passion for guns and hunting had become nigh-obsessive.
My mother died when I was twelve. Around that time, I met Terry Wilson and started hunting with him in the Chase Valley area using muzzle-loading and pin-fire shotguns. That same year Rob Catterall introduced me to the Bentley farming family, also at New Hanover. I began spending my school holidays on their farm, and my life changed. I was given the use of a Greener 12-bore double and gundogs; I entered the world of wingshooting and also shot my first bushbuck.
I continued to read everything I
could on guns and hunting. Ruark’s books on safaris in Kenya with Harry Selby, and his novel, Something of Value, loosely based on Selby’s life, influenced me more than any others. Jock of the Bushveld prompted me to start writing a novel about a boy and his dog on a Zululand farm in the 1880s. I never finished it – my father died when I was fourteen and I had to enter the boarding establishment of my school. I was unofficially adopted by the Bentley family, and their New Hanover farm became my home during holidays, so I had plenty of hunting.
AT BOARDING
SCHOOL ,Imeta new circle of friends – farm boys who’d invite me home for weekends and holidays, affording me more hunting opportunities. One pal,
Sev Bang, two or three years older than I, had a driver’s licence. His parents did an overseas trip, leaving him to oversee their two farms, one a bushveld cattle ranch at Ubombo in northern Zululand where the only accommodation was a stone hut. I had inherited my dad’s 7x57, his 16-bore double and his .22 – I took all three with me. It was wild country and we were free to do as we chose – we even crossed into Swaziland to hunt (there was no border post then). After the constraints of boarding school, I felt completely unfettered and self-reliant – it was most exhilarating, and it served to further inflame my passion for the wilderness and for living off the land.
Without parental guidance, I became too wilful and headstrong for my age, which resulted in my hatching an ill-conceived plan. I wanted to become a ‘white hunter’ (as East African professionals were then called) and I saw no reason for delay. Not knowing whom to approach, I wrote to the East Africa Tourist Travel Association, posing as a prospective safari-goer, and asked them to put me in touch with all the safari outfitters in East Africa. I used my elder brother’s address, not wanting the replies coming to the boarding-school. I received numerous replies (which I still possess) and one was from Selby & Holmberg! That was enough for me. I decided to go to Kenya and ask Harry
Selby to help me become apprenticed.
I asked a pal for the phone number of a mutual friend whose family had recently moved to Pretoria; I would hitch-hike up there and ask to overnight with them, lying that I was on my way to get a job in Southern Rhodesia. I packed a small bag, removed the school badge from my blazer, and with very little money, made a pre-dawn escape from the dormitory and hit the road with thumb aloft.
Unfortunately, my Pretoria pal’s father proved to be an inspector of schools; he asked my age, and refused to drive me to the Great North Road until he’d phoned my legal guardian. Also, the chap at school, who’d given me their phone number, caved under interrogation, so I was thwarted from both ends. I was put on a Viscount and flown back to continue my schooling.
AS LIFE TURNED out, my sister married a Rhodesian cattle rancher in idyllic game country, and from my twenties on, I spent two or three weeks a year hunting there. I also returned to live in South West Africa, where I was fortunate to have farmer friends who afforded me all the hunting I could want. I became a freelance gun-writer and, in 1988, I accepted a fulltime editorial position at Magnum, which opened up undreamed of opportunities.
I got to do a pukka East African fly-camp buffalo safari in Tanzania, another in the Zambezi Valley, and also hunted in Botswana, all over Zimbabwe and SA, and several overseas countries including a moose hunt on the Arctic Circle. I finally even got to meet and form a long friendship with Harry Selby, my original inspiration for all this.
It distresses me to see kids today knowing little but computer games and smartphones, and seemingly wanting nothing more. To each his own, but my conclusion is that, if you want your offspring to share your love for wildlife and wilderness adventure, encourage them from early childhood and afford them every opportunity you possibly can. Offer them a life less ordinary.
MARCH 1985 BROUGHT Magnum readers the first version of Hunting Opportunities with just seven entries listing available hunts. That’s an incredible 36 years ago! This feature has appeared in Magnum every year in either the March or April issues (or both), and has brought together many hunters and land owners for the benefit of both parties.
Just look at the prices. Blesbuck at R70 and springbuck at R36 – never mind the daily rate which for general game works out on average at R52.
Jump ahead twenty years to the Hunting Opportunities in March 2005 and you will find blesbuck cost between R500 and R800 while springbuck were between R280 and R350. How things change.