A HUNTER REMEMBERS
… professionals of the past
II HAD LONG wanted to go in quest of a respectable tusker. Between 1971 and 1975, I went about it in the old Rhodesia, Botswana and the southern Sudan. Brian Marsh, safari outfitter and author of several books on hunting, began operating on a new concession at Sijarira on Lake Kariba, where he had constructed a safari camp on stilts. This was in conformity with the local batonga tribe’s traditional way of protecting their huts against the flooding of the Zambezi River prior to the construction of the Kariba dam. It was an idyllic spot where fish eagles ruled the skies by day and owls fluted through the night. In the morning, fresh lion tracks showed in the white sand of the lakeshore.
I wanted my first elephant trophy more than anything else, but bull elephants do not just conveniently appear. They are more likely to disappear before one’s eyes in thick bush and between the huge black boulders there. To compensate, there was a herd of about 300 buffalo in the area, watering at the lake, in view of the camp across a bay. On the second day of my hunt, we followed them on foot until they reached the drinking spot. By late afternoon, the wind had gone still, and they were nervously milling at the edge of the water. “Crocodiles,” Brian whispered.
I then became aware of a faint smell of putrefaction in the still air. I was squatting some yards from Brian with my .458 Steyr Mannlicher across my thighs while he watched the herd through his binoculars. Then the head
tracker touched my shoulder, and from the corner of my eye I saw movement in the bush to my right. Swirling around with my rifle ready, I saw a buffalo boss breaking through the dense undergrowth. My shot went through the jaw and broke its neck.
Almost instantaneously, Brian’s shot came from my left. How he managed it while encumbered with binoculars, I don’t know. The cause of this bull’s malice proved to be a suppurating front leg, crawling with maggots. He had been wounded and was trailing the herd. The measured distance between me and the dead animal was nine yards – quite sobering for a novice big game hunter’s first experience of its dangers.
Because it was not a selected trophy, I was allowed a second buffalo, of which experience I have no recollection. Mounted in my trophy room, it was later flanked by a very good sable from Matetsi in Rhodesia, and a superb northern roan from Bor in the eastern Sudan. During this hunt, I added eland, kudu and impala to my bag, but elephant remained grey ghosts in the grey bush of Sijarira.
FINALLY, AFTER FOLLOWING spoor, we came upon two elephant bulls – suddenly there, not thirty yards away. Brian nodded for me to shoot the one facing us. Drawing on my memory of Karamojo Bell’s writings on bullet placement for brain shots, I found the spot and the bull crashed down. Then the silence came, as it does after a death in the bush. The other elephant had simply vanished. The photograph on the opening page shows me sitting on a very respectable tusker, drained by the experience.
In all my years of hunting, I was never able to determine how the bush telegraph operates, but so effective was it that within hours, the inhabitants of what appeared to be an entire batonga village had arrived at the scene. The men carried small-bladed axes and long, narrow knives; the women calabashes filled with native beer, brewed from millet and wild honey.
What followed was an orgy of bloodied bodies entering and emerging from the cavity of the giant carcass, hacking at it, removing large strips of meat, all in a state of unrestrained merriment.
Racks were hastily erected out of saplings for the smoking of strips of meat using green undergrowth as fuel. The tusks would be left intact for putrefaction to loosen them up for extraction a few days later. An air of satiety had descended on the scene when we left for the lakeshore.
Brian had a small motor boat waiting to take us across the bay and back to camp. Night had set in, and we crossed the expanse of water in silence under a brilliant moon. It was time for reflection, then, on the deed done.
In the morning, breakfast included small tilapia fish from the lake, caught with nets made from the almost indestructible inner bark of mopane trees, and fried whole as Steinbeck did with trout fingerlings. The Batongas have lived there a long, long time.
We moved to another of Brian’s hunting concessions on the Insuza vlei, fringed with impenetrable thorn growth. Buffalo had tunneled through it to reach water pools in the dry season. One had to crouch along those sharpedged tunnels where confrontation with an oncoming buffalo might have ended badly.
MY NEXT HUNT with Brian’s safari company was in the northwest of Rhodesia, at his hilltop camp overlooking Botswana and Zambia. He was guiding a French hunter on a lion hunt and left me in the care of Pierse Taylor, a giant of a man. Those were bush-war times in that country, and safety was at a premium. On my first afternoon, using my custom .338 Win Mag on a pre-64 M70 action, I bagged a trophy-size sable antelope. I had it mounted by the late Nico van Rooyen of Silverton.
Pierse used a .375 Magnum. At noon one day we saw the unusual sight of an eland cow running at full speed away from a hyena. I watched Pierse sit down, heft his rifle on a knee and shoot the hyena. We paced it at 300 yards.
Years later I met a man, a collector of ancient manuscripts and maps, who had known Pierse Taylor in the old days when he would come out of the bush to
spend a weekend at a watering hole at the Victoria Falls. I remember him as a gentle giant of a man.
IN 1984, I again joined Brian for a lion hunt in Triangle in the southeastern corner of Rhodesia.
At the time he owned a small vineyard at Umtali, planted by an Italian immigrant, overlooking the flat sandy wastes of Mozambique. There was a restaurant at the top of the escarpment; we had dinner there the night before we drove in a dusty little vehicle down to the hunting area.
The hunt was to take place on a large cattle estate where lion kills were common. The owner and some quaint family members lived in a vast, dilapidated thatched house to which guineafowl and a tame bush-pig had free access. Whenever anyone drew close to the pig it rolled over for a belly-scratch.
Brian told me he’d once slept in a room adjoining the one where trophies and skins were stored. One morning he awoke with a tame young leopard curled at the foot of his bed!
The thatched hunting lodge was impressive, overlooking the staff compound and endless bush country. A fence of wire-netting surrounded the compound to prevent lions entering at night.
At dusk, some staff members were cooking maize-meal porridge in a large three-legged, cast-iron pot – a familiar utensil in Africa. I saw a warthog burst at great speed from the surrounding bush, fall on its knees before the fence and enter the compound through a hole beneath the wire. Unperturbed, the cook spooned out some of the porridge onto a rock for the warthog, which waited for it to cool before eating all of it then sedately departing its personal bush restaurant. A profound experience before the drinks arrived!
As constantly feared on the ranch, a lion killed a cow that night. Plans were duly made to erect a tree-hide a little distance from the carcass from which I might get a shot. We settled into the hide, torch at the ready, waiting. We waited while jackals feasted to their hearts delight, but no lion came in.
THAT WAS THE last time I hunted with Brian Marsh. Our paths crossed again several times in Cape Town, Francistown in Botswana, on my game farm near the Limpopo River and twice in New York where I was fortunate to entertain him and his wife, Jill. Sadly, Jill succumbed to cancer. I saw Brian finally in a frail-care centre in Cape Town, when senility had robbed him of all recollection of our wonderful times together. He died on 10 November 2014.
I read his eulogy at the spot where his only child, Jacquie, strew his and his wife’s ashes on a mountainside near Paarl. I said that, in a lifetime, one is seldom granted the grace to encounter someone with whom a true meeting of minds occurs. We had shared 43 years of our lives, as well as our books about our lives. It was a privilege for which I was profoundly grateful.
FOR LONG-RANGE shooting, it is vital that you use the correct information to dial in your scope to ensure a hit. Using a Kestrel weather meter or a similar device in conjunction with a shooting app like Strelok Pro, will ensure that you have the relevant data. This on condition that all data fed into the weather meter or app is correct. However, it can be cumbersome to constantly revert to a separate device for the relevant data for each target.
Warne’s Skyline Universal Data Card Holder makes it possible to write down the information for each target and display it in full view next to your scope when shooting. The ‘dope card holder’ consists of a ring (30mm, 34mm and 35mm are available) that is attached to the scope tube with two screws using a T15 wrench (provided in the package). Warne suggests that this be done to the front of the scope’s tube with the female threaded piece placed level on either the right or left side of the tube. (Warne recommends that right-handed shooters mount the data card on the left side of the scope for the best viewing position.)
An articulating arm is attached to the ring, onto which the card holder is screwed. The data card, made from plastic, attaches to the holder with Velcro. The articulating arm allows you to adjust the position of the card.
Five disposable stickers are supplied with the set. Each sticker has space for seven targets onto which you can record the number of the target, distance, elevation and windage. For consecutive exercises the information can be written on a new sticker, which can be pasted over the first, etc. Stickers can be bought separately.
I found that a non-permanent marker works well on the plastic card, obviating the need for stickers, but I did manage to smudge the writing a few times.
THE DATA CARD is a great tool when engaging multiple targets of varying distance. I simply used the data supplied by my app and wind meter to write down the relevant information for each target. Unlike an armband with data on it, the data card holder does not require the shooter to remove the support hand from the rear bag or to lift their cheek from the cheek-piece, as the data is displayed next to the scope and is available at a glance.
I have been looking for a convenient ‘dope card’ for a while and was pleasantly surprised to find this one in stock at Lynx Optics. It is now a permanent fixture to my long-range rifle. As a bonus, the articulated arm, which is tightened by hand via a butterfly nut, can easily be loosened and laid flat against the scope when placing the rifle in a bag or case. I simply pull off the card and keep it in my pocket when doing this.