DÉJĀ VU DAGHA BOY
The new old-fashioned way to hunt big game
WHEN I flew to Africa to hunt a buffalo, as the plane’s wheels left the ground, I thought about the ultimate intersection of our two trails, mine and the buffalo’s, at first thousands of miles apart but relentlessly converging until we would be within a stone’s throw of one another, maybe looking into each other’s eyes. Is this karma?
As it turned out, in the dense bush, stare as we might, all we could see of this buffalo, a colossal, mud-caked, worn-horned old loner that set the bar for dagha boys, was the sporadic flick of his tail. In the African heat, he stood drowsing in a thicket; I stood frozen behind the shooting sticks, waiting. Not 30 metres separated us; to try to reposition the PH, assistant PH, two trackers, two game scouts and my friend Ken to a better position, all striving for invisibility behind me, would have been crazy. To distract from the cramp in my foot, the tickle in my throat, the stiff shoulder, the sweat in my eyes, the sun hammering down, I counted: One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three... I lost track. Would this buffalo never step into the open?
We were deep inside the Klaserie Private Nature Reserve (KPNR), an 880km² chunk of Mpumalanga Province that lies alongside the vast Kruger National Park. Ant first told me about this place 20 years ago and finally I was experiencing it. The Klaserie is made up of the holdings of several dozen landowners. In 1969, the original families began to conjoin their farms, remove their cattle, crops and internal fences, and let the wild back in. Now, 50 years later, KPNR is stiff with plains game, all of the Big Five and, in the Klaserie River, hippos and crocodiles. It’s private property; access is strictly controlled, and every two-way radio is tracked by satellite on a computer screen. KPNR’S professional
management includes a warden and armed ex-military anti-poaching units with tracker dogs.
There are a handful of holiday homes belonging to KPNR landowners, their grounds protected from elephants by electrified wire, and more than a dozen small photo-safari and hunting companies are permitted to operate in the reserve – co-existing amicably, staying out of each other’s way and bringing employment. Yet as we bump along endless kilometres of two-track, in and out of mopane and acacia forests, most of the time we could believe we were in Old Africa.
Our camp, a cluster of modest thatch-roofed rondavels, is also surrounded by high-set electric wire yet one morning, tracks showed that lions had strolled among the huts as we slept. In the evenings, elephants and rhinos fed in the distance. Game can pass freely between KPNR and the Kruger National Park as no fences separate them. To quell complaints that private citizens are profiting from public assets, Kruger Park supports the ethical, controlled, sustainable use of wildlife – including trophy hunting – as management and antipoaching tools, and approves the reserve’s quotas and policies. By the age of 51, Ant had been hunting in the KPNR for 35 years, and he applauds the rules. At the time, for buffalo, only bulls older than 10 years were fair game and, because of drought, the reserve’s quota for 2018 was only ten bulls. There are about 3 000 buffalo in the open area of the Klaserie and we saw many fine younger bulls, which bodes well for the future. And the rains were good this past year. Ant expects his own annual buffalo quota to go back up to half a dozen or so. This then, is modern, reclaimed, ‘engineered’ wild Africa – Africa 3.0, if you like – and it seems to work. Management there is driven by decades of scientific research and practical experience.
nspired by President Teddy Roosevelt who used a Winchester Model 95 lever-action .405 during his lengthy African safari in 1909, I had brought Winchester’s modern Japanese-made Model 95 lever-action carbine on my safari. I’d had it fully customized by Griffin & Howe, including an improved rear sight, and my .405 Win handloads fired 350gr bullets generating around 4 000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy. I was after Cape buffalo, large, durable creatures with thick skin, heavy horns, short fuses and oversized adrenal glands; prudence dictated heavier loads. While not the usual double rifle synonymous with African safaris, mine functioned reliably and I was well-practiced with it.
On the first hunting day of this safari we’d risen before dawn, forded the river in the Land Cruiser, eased through the neighbourhood elephants and set off to look for sign. Instead we’d found the makers of sign: six buffalo bulls
clustered around a small waterhole seemingly at arm’s length from our vehicle. We stared at them. They stared back. Ant nodded at the one glowering on the far side, clearly the senior officer, the one in charge of collecting the money we apparently owed them, according to Robert Ruark. “We’re not likely to do any better than that old boy,” he murmured. “Want to go after him?”
“It’s Monday morning,” I whispered back. “What are we gonna do for the rest of the week?” Ant had that bird-in-thehand look, but I was the client. “OK,” he’d said, “onward.” Naturally, we saw all manner of other creatures, but for the rest of the day not one more buffalo.
Early the next morning, we had gone straight back to the little pan, bailed out of the Toyota, checked the rifles and the GPS, and set off to follow a trail that looked like it was made by morning commuter traffic on the M2. How hard could this be? That Tuesday, we slogged nearly 12 kilometres on foot, in 36 degree heat, tracking that mob, six black bulls ranging in age from about 8 to 12-plus years. We’d hopscotched along the dung piles – yesterday evening’s to this morning’s, to patties that were two hours old, then steaming-hot fresh and finally huge dark shapes in the bush. Three times we’d come upon them; twice the wind had shifted and they’d buggered off, and once they’d seen us before we saw them. (And buggered off.) After the third close encounter, they had swung to put the wind up their backsides, to smell us coming. We tried to leapfrog them, to get upwind, but that hadn’t worked either. They knew the score.
Finally, with the sun setting, we’d given up and retreated to gin-tonics by the fire while the moon shot into the sky and the Milky Way lit up like Times Square, and a leopard grunted in the near distance.
D ays later we managed to stalk within shooting distance of a lone bull, but could see nothing of him but his flicking tail. Eventually the buffalo decided the next tree looked shadier still and drifted that way. As his black bulk appeared through a hole in the vegetation, I put the bronze bead on the line of his front legs and up about a third of his body. The hammer was already back, I remembered the tang safety too, and squeezed off a round. The bull was so close I heard no impact, but he stumbled, swung away and fled. Ant went right, I went left, and Robbie, the tracker, grabbed the shooting sticks and went up the middle. Just around the next bush there was the buff, his rump sticking oddly up in the air. His forelegs had folded under him. Dying, but in a welter of dust he pushed himself back to his feet and swung broadside again, still uncertain where the danger lay. At the second shot, like a dynamited building he toppled where he stood. Then came the haunting death bellow. Was it really over?
I remembered something American hunter Jack O’connor wrote back in the ’60s: “It strikes me that the only sure way to kill a Cape buffalo is to shoot him a dozen times with a 20mm and take out his guts and bury them, then cut off his head, tie stones to it and sink it in a lake.” So, make certain he’s dead! After that we can de-cock. Calm down. Shake hands. Take photos.
Then Ant said, “I think this is our buffalo! The one we were tracking.” Out came the smartphones – not to check our texts, but to scroll through photos, swiping and zooming in on pictures of the old bull, the senior we’d stumbled across at the pan early Monday morning and then stalked for the next two days. The horns, the ears, the marks on his face – it really was him, the mud-coated, oxpecker-bedecked giant who, hours earlier and kilometres away, had finally given us the slip and, we thought, vanished out of reach. If this isn’t karma, what is?