MY FIRST HUNT
Each hunt is different
MY FIRST real hunt was a big disappointment. I was about nine years old and my father considered me strong enough to walk for several hours in the bush. Before that, I had just wandered in the bush close to where we lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, shooting doves with my airgun.
There was always great excitement when my father returned from a hunt with a kudu, or an impala or two, in the back of the Land Rover. I watched as the animals were gutted and skinned – and I kept the horns. I would climb into a large wild fig tree to hang the horns in the branches where ants and nature would clean them out.
This hunt was about an hour’s drive from where we lived, on a farm close to the Bulawayo airport. We were only going for the morning and planned to set off at about 6am. I grew increasingly excited as we prepared for the trip. The night before, my father put a mop through the barrel of his Jeffery .375 and selected a handful of cartridges. Oil, water and tyre pressures (including the spares) were checked on the Land Rover, and the bottle of water we always carried in the vehicle was refilled with fresh water. I laid out my clothes, hat and veldskoens for the early morning start.
It was September, towards the end of the hunting season, and the morning was cool but not cold. We were not taking any food so had tea and toast before we left. The heavy sand road onto the farm was badly eroded and I suppose I expected to see game as soon as we got there but we saw nothing on our drive to the hunting area. We parked under a shady tree and before setting out, my father threw up a handful of sand to gauge the wind direction. Walking into the wind we started our hunt.
I watched how my father selected a path that avoided leaves and low bushes as much as possible. Periodically he stopped and listened, crouching down to peer under the trees to look for movement. He pointed out spoor and droppings, whispering which were kudu and which were impala, and how to judge how fresh they were. Was the spoor clear with flicks of sand behind them having been thrown up by the hooves? Were the droppings soft and recently deposited? After about an hour I began to realise this hunting thing wasn’t so easy!
We must have walked for about three hours, with a few stops to drink from our water bottle, and during this time, the only game we saw was a solitary duiker – which we weren’t hunting. When we returned to the vehicle my father’s comment was, “No luck today. That’s how hunting goes.”
Ihad to wait until May the next year for the new hunting season before going out again and this time the experience could not have been more different. The farm we hunted on was situated at the end of a long dirt road which led off the Bulawayo-to-queensmine tar road, a few kilometres beyond the turn off to the Bulawayo airport. The farm had a wonderful mix of terrain. A few hundred metres in was an area of acacia woodland. Both kudu and impala loved the acacia pods, impala tending to stay there all day whereas kudu visited in the early morning and evening. Beyond the acacia
was an area of mopane and grassland, through which ran a river. The river was dry in the winter months but the wide banks were heavily grassed and wooded with tall trees. Further in, the farm became more broken with koppies and long, low hills, much favoured by kudu in the middle of the day. We hunted this farm several times and developed a routine of hunting the acacia woodland and surrounding mopane grassland early in the morning, before moving to the hills around midday. Once on top of the selected hill, we glassed the surrounding area to check for game then hunted on the hill, dropping down and skirting along the bottom on our way back to the vehicle. I don’t know what the geological make-up of the hills was, but they were strewn with black stones about the size of a football, which made walking uncomfortable and recovery of animals difficult.
On one occasion while up in the hills, my father told me of an experience he had had there some years earlier. He shot a kudu bull in the neck and the animal dropped on the spot. Leaving our gardener, Johan, with the kudu, he went to get the vehicle. Returning some time later, he found Johan but no kudu. Johan explained that after my father had left, the kudu started to stir. Carrying only a knobkerrie there wasn’t much he could do when the kudu stood up and took off into the bush. My father tracked the bull for some distance but never saw it again. As a result, when I started to shoot, I was taught to aim for the ‘gearbox’ (the heart/lung area in the shoulder), no matter how close the animal or how easy the shot seemed.
On this particular hunt we entered the farm at about seven in the morning. We drove a short distance then halted. My father removed his rifle from its case, loaded the rifle and placed it on a rack in the front of the vehicle. Then we set off along the road which ran through the acacia woodland. About 400 metres in, my father stopped, opened the door, stepped out the vehicle and pulled the rifle off the rack. After walking a short way into the bush I saw him take a rest on a tree, aim and fire. I joined him and we walked up to a fallen young impala ram.
We loaded the impala then drove on to the mopane grassland. After parking in the shade we set off to hunt the area. Signs of game were everywhere. Approaching a small koppie, we saw movement as two kudu bulls turned and ran. Telling me to stay where I was, my father went after them but they had been spooked and we never saw them again.
My father decided to try another area of the farm and as we were driving back the way we had come, two kudu bulls ran
across the road in front of us. Rifle in hand my father leapt from the vehicle and followed them into the bush. A short while later I heard a single shot and when my father emerged from the bush, he gave me a thumbs-up.
Driving to the kudu was easy as the bush was fairly open. It was a mature bull with a broken wire snare around the lower part of one of his back legs. While the area was swollen, it was not infected, and the kudu was in good condition. He must have been carrying the snare for some time. Using a small, hand-operated winch secured to the rear of the back of the Land Rover, we managed to load the bull. My view of hunting was now becoming overwhelmingly positive.
We decided to hunt a while longer as our biltong area and freezer capacity could take two kudu or, a kudu and two, maximum three, impala. We drove to where the mopane and acacia woodland met and, after parking the Land Rover, set off skirting the edge of the acacia. The plan was to do a circuit back to the vehicle.
As we were walking through the scrub mopane, my father suddenly dropped into a crouch, lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The bush exploded with impala rams jumping in all directions. They were not sure where the danger was coming from so we remained still and some came even closer. One ram, about 30 metres away, saw us and froze momentarily giving my father time for a shot. The ram dropped on the spot.
The first ram had also fallen where it was shot so we placed the two animals together and set off to collect the vehicle, marking our trail with pieces of toilet paper. The shortcut back to the vehicle took us along the road close to the river. Being May, the grass cover was still good and the trees in green leaf which made for a pleasant veld walk.
We wanted to get back to the vehicle as quickly as possible and, because we were no longer hunting, made no real attempt to move quietly. Looking to our right we saw a magnificent kudu bull slowly moving away from us. He was completely unaware of our presence and we stood watching as his wide, almost three curl spiral horns bobbed and weaved through the bush. At one point my father lent his rifle on my shoulder and drew a bead on the kudu, but we had all the meat we could use. Reluctantly we continued on our way leaving the beautiful animal to slowly disappear into the bush.
My first experiences certainly gave me a good introduction to hunting – and how hunting luck can go.