Black and Gold Adventure

By Roger Moore

It was the first day in a 10-day safari in early September 2009.  My youngest son and I were in Zimbabwe to hunt Cape buffalo and plains game.  It was Jordan’s first safari and my first hunt for dangerous game.  Jordan took a very large Cape eland with spiral horns of 41 inches around the curves.

We left camp with PH Collen Van der Linden and a few local trackers.  We spotted a herd of buffalo and followed to see if one of them was a shooter.  We stalked as quietly as we could.  The ground was littered with a million dry leaves that sounded like walking on big corn flakes.  The herd led us through heavy cover for a couple of hours.  One learns that as the morning warms, the wind begins to swirl and you get busted as the game catches your scent.

We went back to the hunting truck and drove to a dry riverbed for lunch and talked through a plan for the rest of the day.  We decided to try a different area and headed to it.  We were quiet as we drove a little faster than normal and when I looked out my door and saw a small bunch of buffaloes, I asked Collen to stop and started glassing them.  There were seven or eight buffalo – all of which were bulls.  They were walking along parallel to us going left to right about 160 yards away.

I scanned the herd and the bull on the far right looked like a shooter.  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Collen said, “That’s the smallest buff of the bunch!”  I looked up from my binoculars and he was glassing a herd of about fifteen bulls on his side of the truck 180 degrees opposite of where I was looking.  I pointed out the ones I was looking at and he said, “You’re right, the front bull is definitely a shooter.” Jordan had my Winchester model 70 in .416 Rem Mag in the back of the truck.  I got out, had him hand me the rifle and turned around to find the buffalo stopped and looking us over.

I bolted a 400-grain soft point into the rifle and set it on the sticks.  100 percent of my attention was on the furthest right bull and settled the crosshairs on his shoulder.  Collen advised me to hold off since another bull was coming up just behind the bull I was focused on, and we didn’t want a pass through.  It seemed to take forever but when the bull behind the one I was set up to shoot cleared and I heard Collen yell, “Don’t shoot!”  I straightened up and looked at him as the bull I had cussed while waiting for him to clear, stopped broadside and turned his head to look at us just as Collen yelled, “That’s the biggest buffalo I have ever seen!  Kill him now!”

I had gotten the rifle back on the sticks and one-third up from his belly and in the middle of his shoulder.  As the trigger broke, the bull hunched up and began the run on three legs, typical of a good hit.  Collen yelled, “Shoot him again!”  As the buffalo continued trying to put distance between us, I hit him a second time about one inch from the first bullet hole.  He continued without even wincing.  I bolted a 400-grain solid into the barrel as preloaded and swung along with him until the rifle roared again.  That shot seemed to not even faze him.  Collen said, “Run one up the base of his tail.  Get him on the ground!”  With the fourth shot he went down.

With the adrenalin going full bore and we were walking up to him, we realized that we had walked in between the two herds of bulls!  On our left we had six or seven bulls out of which I had shot my bull, and on our right we had fifteen or more bulls now about fifty yards away!  To say we kept an eye on them would be an understatement.  We were sandwiched between twenty-five or thirty buffalo all of which were mature bulls!

When we got to my fallen bull, Collen walked up to him and kicked him in the rump.  The bull started thrashing around and got back on his feet!  Collen said, “One more time.”  With that shot, he went down again.  We gave him a few minutes before Collen walked back up and kicked him in the rump again. He began thrashing around again but didn’t regain his feet.  With the fifth shot up through his brisket, he was down for the count.  He gave not one but two death bellows before we went up to put my hands on him.  He had three .416s in his right front shoulder within one or two inches of each other.  The first two were perfect round holes but the third shot on the move had a rectangular hole about an inch and a quarter long.  I had been so focused on swinging with him, I never noticed a six-inch mopane tree that I had fired that third shot through, setting the bullet tumbling.

After pictures, Collen brought out his cloth tape measure which told us the boss were 16¼ inches front to back and the outside measurement was 53 ⅝ wide. My best trophy on the first day of the safari.

We caped him and sent the cape and skull to my taxidermist in Denver, CO.  I ordered a pedestal shoulder mount and never saw the horns again.  The shop went out of business and all the trophies disappeared.

Late last summer, I read Richard’s article on the replication of the kudu in the Afton house, reached out to him, and asked if he could arrange a replica of my bull from photos and measurements.  They did a fabulous job of crafting and copper plating him. 

Tim, the taxidermist, was more of an artist than a taxidermist.  If you need a replica of a trophy, reach out to Richard Lendrum at the African Hunting Gazette.