An exploratory hunt in a new concession in Botswana is filled with adventure, uncertainty and big-tusked elephants.
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Category: Hunting Stories
Goats on the Rim of the World. By James Reed
High adventure on a challenging mountain goat hunt in the Canadian Rockies.
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Third Time just as Lucky! The hunter who specializes in 59 1/2″ Kudu bulls. By Steve Tors
Mike returned about four years later to hunt with us again, and sure enough he shot another 59½” kudu! Mike was now the owner of three 59½” kudu trophies from three or four different hunts. The personalized licence plate of his Toyota Land Cruiser at home reads ‘KUDU 60’ – which I think is very appropriate!
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Lions and Lion Lands. From “The Book of the Lion”, 1913, by Sir Alfred E. Pease
In my youth I believed myself so hemmed in by circumstances and duties that I thought I should never break through such barriers into the real world beyond. Conventionalities which then looked like a granite wall I have discovered to be a delusion. I have learnt that human beings do not always understand the language in which duty calls, and that by the use of a little force a hole can be made through the thorny zariba of circumstances by which the poor, impounded creature, whether peasant or potentate, may escape to taste of life.
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Mountain Game of Leopard’s Valley. By James Reed
“I want to hunt in Africa, but I really don’t want to hunt game behind a fence.” This is a common statement I hear from hunters who are considering a trip to southern Africa for plains game. I used to feel the same way.
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The First Safari Book: Cornwallis Harris’s “Wild Sports of Southern Africa”
Many a page in the “Wild Sports of Southern Africa” may seem appaling for modern readers, both for the blatant racism and for hunting practices described. However, it is a document of an epoch, and inspired many later hunters and explorers. Here we reproduce an abstract from it.
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The Road Less Travelled. The challenge of hunting Cape Buffalo in Mozambique
By the end of my hunt I had done everything I said I would not: crawling two and three hundred yards at a time with legs that had been cut to shreds by razor grass, wading through chest-deep hippo channels, grabbing razor grass to keep from falling into rivers teeming with crocodiles, and lying flat on the ground with only the grass between me and a charging buffalo.
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Horseback Hunting in the KwaZulu-Natal Mountains. By Willem du Plessis
The bull turned one more time and looked straight at me. It was now or never. I got my breathing under control, aimed the small copper bead dead on, and started squeezing the trigger. The 570 gr Barnes hit him like a ton of cement and he dropped instantly. I looked at my friend next to me and he confirmed the kill without saying much … A 140 m kill shot with my favourite rifle – that had just happened!
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Bulls of the Last Frontier: A hunt for caribou in the Alaskan wilderness. By James Reed
“We need to get that boy a caribou,” Dom Watts said.
Dom had just heard the story of my son Logan’s Idaho bighorn sheep hunt, and the great attitude and perseverance the fourteen-year-old had exhibited in challenging conditions. Dom lives in Alaska and is an avid DIY caribou hunter, and he was already setting the wheels in motion to get Logan to Alaska on his first caribou hunt.
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The Dundee Monster. By Paul Zorn
I travelled down with my wife, Sandra and my faithful tracker, Bonniface who has been with me for over 21 years. I was like a little boy going on my first hunt, I felt really good. Peter and Chris had arranged for me to hunt an unfenced farm to the west of Chris’s ranch where we had seen some good kudu in May, apparently the area had not really been hunted much for the last 5 or 6 years.
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Hunting in Northern China
Today, you can’t legally go hunting in China. A century ago, however, things were different, and you can find testimony on pages of old books. Here we reproduce a few extracts from one such book, “Fur and Feather in Northern China” by Arthur de Carle Sowerby, F.R.G.S., published in 1914. Bats, admittedly, are mentioned only in passing, but we hope you’ll enjoy the stories about wild sheep, wapiti, and antelope.
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Barbary Bighorns of West Texas. By James Reed
Many people look down upon introduced animals, or “exotics,” but Barbary sheep, or aoudad, originally introduced from Africa’s Barbary Coast, have been roaming free in the southwestern United States for at least half a century, and have thrived in this new environment. They provide a true, challenging mountain hunt.
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