Hunt long enough, and you’re eventually going to mess up. If you’ve never lost an animal, count your blessings and you might want to go out and buy a lottery ticket because you are extremely fortunate and very lucky. You are also probably one day closer to having an agonizing day in the field! As I approach 40 years of hunting I must admit I’ve experienced some mishaps along the way. What follows are a few that stand out. By sharing these episodes, I hope to accomplish two th

The countryside was mostly flat as it spread away from a rocky hill known locally as Kudu Mountain, and it was a mixture of acacia, thorn and red dirt. Standing in the shadow of a large acacia, I watched Egyptian gees muddle in a waterhole two football fields long and half as wide. I knew a duiker with magnificent horns lived along the damn, and that warthogs polluted the area, often grunting and wallowing in the goo surrounding one of the few oases this side of the Orange Ri

Anyone even slightly aware of what’s in my books and magazine articles on African hunting knows I quite often cite Robert Ruark. In fact, if Mr. Ruark was still alive, I’d probably fall under the moniker of ‘fanboy’…or stalker. I won’t apologize for my near obsession with his output.

As a group, outdoorsmen in general and hunters in specific tend to be decorative in their remembrances of how much fun they had. A hunter’s home decor typically involves pictures, sculptures and especially taxidermy that celebrate past experiences. However, occasionally a well executed shoulder mount of a game animal is no more effective at stimulating a memory than a relatively anonymous artifact such as a rock, or in my case, a spearhead.

We hunters and gun toters like to present questions to one another in efforts to get a very finite answer from our brethren. “If you could have one gun to hunt with, what would it be? You can have one carry gun, what is it and why? Pick one handgun cartridge to do everything with.”

Blue wildebeest, eland, gemsbok, greater kudu, impala, lechwe, springbok, white-tailed deer, and zebra. Right off the top of my head...

After a couple days hunting the vast Manketti Reserve with Quagga Safaris Professional Hunters (PHs) Eon Kok and Tyron Fletcher it became...

For me, the greater kudu is one of the most impressive and beautiful of all the antelope species found on the continent of Africa...