Chapter Eleven
The Bennachie Cattle Killer
In June 2002 our agent, John Barth of Adventures Unlimited, sent us a hunter from Miles City, Pennsylvania. His name was Dan Greene and over the course of his safari we became firm friends. Dan had taken two grand slams of wild sheep so he was no stranger to hard hunting. Dan’s hunt was focused on a large male leopard, a kudu of 55 inches plus, then whatever plainsgame time allowed. As usual we had pre-baited and scouted hard during the week prior to Dan’s arrival, and when he got to camp we had two big males on bait. One of these was the notorious Chavakadze male, and the other was a big male down on one of AJ’s ranches. This particular ranch is called Bennachie – apparently a Scottish word pronounced Ben-na-hee. This leopard had been killing about a dozen calves a year over the last three years and AJ was desperate to be rid of him. Both males had front foot tracks which squared over ten inches, and we decided to try the Bennachie male first. The Chavakadze male was much closer to our base camp at Mangwe Pass, but the pool where we had him on bait was surrounded by small koppies and a jumbled rocky outcrop of balancing boulders. These formations played havoc with the wind in the late evening, gusting it this way and that, and we had already spooked him once. As it turned out we were going to educate him a few more times in this horrible spot over the next two seasons.
Down on Bennachie, which is about an hour’s drive south-west of base camp, the cattle-killer would stroll every few days along a cattle trail which snaked along the base of, and parallel to, a continuous ridge of koppies which ran south east to north west. This ridge is about two miles long and at the south eastern end, about 400 yards distant, three small koppies formed a sort of bottleneck, or pass, where the trail ran through. The main ridge itself is over 200 feet high.
George and one of the staff had originally scouted this cat and set the bait which lured him in to feed. The bait had been hung in a Mbondo tree near the three koppies slightly east of the bottleneck. I had indicated my chosen blind area to George and he had cleared a shooting lane on the same day that he had set the bait. The blind area was closer than I like it to be, about 75 yards. We could not move any further back as there was a dip in the ground that would have hidden the whole bait area from our view.
Dan, Peter, George, Bee and I arrived with all our kit at about 4pm and Peter and I walked over to the bait to see what had transpired during the night. George and Bee quietly unloaded the equipment. One problem that often arises from pre-baiting before a client arrives, is that the leopard would feed heavily two nights in a row and thereafter feed sporadically. When he does that, he will often lay down near the bait guarding it. So the hunters will be lying quietly in the blind unaware that the leopard has arrived and is lying silently nearby. If the hunters move, sniff, or muffle a cough, it will be all over. The best night to sit for the leopard is the night immediately following the first hit. Unless a treacherous breeze or a noise in the blind compromises us, we will generally get a look at him on the second night.
When Peter and I reached the bait I was dismayed to see that it was hanging too low – well within hyena range. Bee had refreshed the bait during the pre-baiting week and, either through laziness, negligence, or both, had not pulled the meat up high enough. The big cat had fed though, and his tracks and scrapes where he had urinated and lain down, were clear. The place reeked of leopard. When we attach a warning line to the bait we try hard to avoid touching the meat so I was reluctant to raise the meat up out of hyena range. We decided to leave it. We attached the line, swept away our tracks with a leafy branch and unrolled the line back to the blind site.
We finished the blind, laid out all the equipment, the trackers left, and we were settled in by 5pm. Not long after we heard the Cruiser drive off, the birds began their business again, chattering in the bushes nearby whilst numerous doves cooed all round us. As sundown approached, the Natal francolin, who lived in the koppies, began to cluck and scratch and call out their last calls of the day as they fluttered and settled noisily into their roosts for the night. Far to our right, towards the northern end of the ridge, we could hear a troop of baboons barking noisily as they, too, went up the rocks and settled into their sleeping positions.
By 6.15pm dark had blanketed the koppies. A light fitful breeze gusted gently from the south east, our left, as we faced the bait and the ridge beyond. We were well within “dassie range” of the smaller koppies to our left, and also from the main ridge, so if and when they commenced their warning calls,we would hear them. Dassies whine out a chirping, grating call of alarm when a leopard is around. I do not believe they call for other predators, but they do call at the approach of humans.
The night cooled very quickly. The sky was crystal clear with the thin sliver of the new moon bathing us and the hills in weak silvery light. I lay on my back and I could see the whole smoky swathe of the Milky Way spreading upward on my left, and the whole sky was twinkling continuously with millions of bright stars. To our front left, just above the big ridge beyond the bait, we could see the Southern Cross and its two bright pointers. As the night drew on, we would be able to watch the cross turn on its side and drop away to our right. It was a typical crisp clear African winter’s night and I lay there certain that we had done everything we could to settle accounts with this killer. Far off a jackal howled mournfully. A few seconds later, even further away, his mate howled back.
Dan was quiet and had hardly moved once we had settled in. He knew that from sundown to about 9pm were the crucial hours. As if on cue, just past 7pm, the dassies in the small hills to our left began to chatter. Perfect. The cat must be approaching down the cattle track from the east, with the wind at his back.
Dan and I sat up letting the blankets fall away without a sound. My heart picked up the pace, my ears straining for any clue. Both of us stared up at the curved warning stick willing it to move. Ten minutes crawled by with us sitting like that. Another ten. Still the stick remained motionless. It was puzzling. The dassies were silent. I had felt so sure that he would come right in and tear into the bait. Another ten minutes. Another ten. I motioned Dan back down under the warm blankets, and we lay there staring up at the stars trying to swallow without sound. Maybe he had carried on down the path to drink. Maybe he would be back later. Maybe it hadn’t even been him. A girlfriend perhaps moving about her business.
At eight o’clock the warning stick lunged forward. This was it! My heart was hammering as I sat up and motioned Dan up into position behind his rifle. As soon as he was seated comfortably, he nodded and I stood up and turned on the light. As the white beam struck I saw a brown hyena drop down off the bait back onto all fours, spin around and gallop off noisily into the bushes. I turned off the light and motioned to Dan to get back into his blankets. I was furious. If the bait had been hung correctly we would never have had this false alarm. We hadn’t been back down in our beds for more than a minute when the dassies started again up to our left. A leopard was on the move. Damn it. God damn it! About five minutes later, downwind behind the blind, we heard a low rumbling growl, then silence.
We remained in the blind for the rest of the night but nothing happened. I knew we had been compromised. Because of that low-slung bait we had furthered the education of an already smart cattle killer.
When the staff arrived with the daylight, I vent my spleen on the unsuspecting Bee. But my heart was not in it. I was partly to blame. I should have raised the meat when I had seen it banging too low. I was damned irritated at the whole escapade but it was water under the bridge and we were using up Dan’s days. Whilst Bee and George took down the blind and folded up the bedding, Peter and I went forward to cut the warning string and see if we could find any sign of our leopard.
Sure enough, just as we had surmised, he had come down the cattle trail past the three small koppies to the bait. This leopard had already fed on our bait three times and was probably not that hungry. We found the patch of sand where he had lain down guarding the meat. The hyena had sneaked in for a quick snack, and before the leopard could take action we had entered the scene with the light. The hyena took off and the leopard slunk around the back of the blind to see who his visitors were, and voila! Another hide-educated cattle killer. We continued to check the bait during the remainder of Dan’s hunt but the Bennachie male never fed again at that spot.
Dan shot a beautiful male a couple of miles north of Graham’s house. Graham’s stockmen had noticed fresh leopard activity in the Damula streambed and reported back to him. Graham went down to investigate and it seemed that the Damula Hill female was in season. Two large male tracks, both between nine and ten inches square, as well as the female tracks, were evident in the streambed and on two bush roads nearby. Graham bad hung a beef bait just off one of the roads, and the larger of the two males had fed. Dan shot the cat perfectly at about 7pm. This was an unusually long leopard with spectacular contrasting bright markings. His belly was a clean white colour and he was in beautiful condition. The average length of a mature male’s tail is about 36 inches, but this ones tail was 42 inches long. I think Marcus Zimmerman mounted this cat. I have seen it mounted, lying languidly on a log high up in Dan’s house and it is a beautiful mount. Dan took a spectacularly wide 54-inch kudu bull on this hunt, and he too looks very good up on the wall.
Meanwhile the Bennachie male prowled on, taking another four of AJ’s cattle in quick succession. Following Dan’s hunt, a hunter from Reno arrived. His name was Mike Boyce and he owned a large Taxidermy business. Mike badly wanted a “supercat”. He had taken an average male previously but he was really keen to try for one of the “Tyson head” giants that frequent these areas. Mike and his staff had mounted the big males we had taken with other American leopard hunters, Ron McKim, John Peck and Joe Crawley. Mike and his staff handle many leopard skins from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia and South Africa every year, so they are no strangers to big cat skins; and the Matobo cats had impressed them. Mike wanted one badly.
He had hunted with us – in 2001, but due to pressure at work had had to cut his trip short and never took the supercat he was looking for. I arranged this return trip for him at no daily rate and we were both keen to get to grips with a giant this time. When Mike arrived we only had a few females on bait. Early in the hunt, we passed the spot where Dan Greene and I had furthered the education of the Bennachie male. I pointed it out to Mike and after some deliberations between Peter, Mike, George and myself, decided to try for the rogue once more.
We knew that if he did find our bait he would circle downwind looking for us before feeding. We had found that out the hard way. Therefore we decided to hang the bait a little further south, closer to the ridge – a move of some 300 yards. This would enable us to sit up on top of the ridge itself. It would entail a long shot of about 115 yards but I felt it very unlikely that the cat would clamber up the koppie looking for us. Also, our wind would be a lot higher than the bait area should any swirls spring up during the night.
Some days later he found that bait and ripped out about ten pounds from it. But he had turned into what we dreaded most. A one-time feeder. He would never, from that day on, to my knowledge, return to a feed until his demise two years later. Mike and I slept on unhit baits in the hope that we would catch him on that first feed, but in the big game of leopard chess, our moves did not bring us to a checkmate.
In August of that same year I was hunting with Kirk Clinkingbeard from Missouri when the Bennachie male hit a beef bait we had hung 200 yards from the junction of Bennachie, Tebele’s Farm and my wife’s uncle, Ernest Rosenfels’s Home Farm. This particular spot was used every couple of weeks by the Bennachie male when he returned to his favourite stamping grounds after patrolling his eastern boundary, the Ingwezi river. It was a very thick, leopardy area with numerous koppies clogged with Malalangwe (Barlariaalbostilata) bushes. Malalangwe, in Sindebele means “where the leopard sleeps”. It is a low thick springy bush covered with small silvery light greenleaves. These leaves, in the dry winter season, are covered in billions of fine powdery hairs which make you itch like hell. Around the bases of most of the koppies these bushes grow in profusion, packed tightly against one another. From the corner junction gate ran the dirt road which went south and eastinto AJ’s farms. From here it is less than a mile to where Dan Greene’s and my efforts had come to naught previously. The cat used the road so our bait was placed 50 yards off the road to the east. We had cleared an unobstructed view through the Malalangwe and Mbondo bush back to a small koppie 20 yards west of the road. From where we cleared a spot for the blind, we would fire east, across the road should we get a feed. Once again I was much closer than I like to be, but Kirk was a quiet man in the blind. Besides, it was theonly place from which we could shoot. We got a hit and the pugs were clearly those of our old adversary, the Bennachie male. Kirk and I sat for two nights in a row at that spot but he never came back.
I returned to the Bennachie male’s area in April 2003 with Gene Giscombe from New York. Our good friend, taxidermist Frank Zitz from Rhinebeck New York, had organised the safari for Gene. Gene had taken several leopard already in the average class and was obviously no stranger to a 24-bour hunting day as he had taken some of Africa’s really tough gems like the Bongo and Giant Eland. Gene was a real gentleman and a pleasure to be with. He said straight out that he would be game to do everything it took to nail one of our supercats.
With this in mind we decided to formulate a plan to use Tristan and his hounds should our conventional baiting hunt produce no success. As mentioned previously, we had been less than impressed with Tristan’s dogs operating in the granite, but your line has got to be in the water if you’re going to catch a fish, so we decided to give it a try.
When we hit the halfway mark of our safari, we decided to send for the dogs. Our plan was to split our effort into three vehicles. Our resident manager at that time, Gary Whitehead-Wilson, went in his jeep, Gene and I and Peter in another, and Bee and one of the skinners in the short-wheel-base diesel. With us at the time was a friend from Philadelphia, John Strobel, who was spending the season with us helping where he could. We would split up in the early morning and check all the known roads, rivers and tracks where supercats moved.
We constantly updated our map in the main camp on big cat movement, so we had a good idea of where we would probably find fresh sign. We would all call in on the HF radio on the hour, every hour. If anybody had come up with a large fresh track, my wife would be on the air too, and she would alert Tristan at Figtree by telephone. We guessed that he would be able to reach us within an hour and a half at the outside.
It was imperative that we get the dogs onto the spoor before 9am. After that the granite would heat up rapidly and the cat scent would burn off. Gene and I were handling the very western sector which encompassed Bennachie. We had a bait on a thickly vegetated island in the dry riverbed of the Ingwezi river on Tebele’s farm. This was only a couple of miles upstream from where we had educated the Bennachie stock killer with Dan Greene. Now, two years later, he had to be even bigger and he had to be smarter too.
We reached our bait on the island at about 7am and we could see clearly the monster pug marks in the damp sand of the Ingwezi. The tracks had left the island, crossing to the eastern side, on Tebele’s farm. Peter and I reached the bait. The cat had only torn off a perfunctory bite of about two pounds, then he had lain down a few feet away from the bait. Who knows how long the old rogue lay there, what he was thinking about, as he contemplated that meat. I was very excited. There was no doubt in my mind that these were the tracks of the Bennachie cattle killer, and that I would be able to settle accounts with him this time. We put the trackers onto the spoor and quickly set up the radio to get things moving with Tristan. With that done, we decided to kill time by trying to see how far we could follow the tracks and possibly save time for the dogs. The tracks ambled up out of the riverbed and into a koppie about 200 yards away from the river. I thought that he was probably laying up there somewhere, thinking about returning to the fresh beef bait tonight, but I was wrong. Peter followed him through the koppie then back down into the Ingwezi about a half mile downstream from the island, heading west onto Bennachie back onto AJ’s property. Bee had joined us by this time and I sent him up to the nearest large road to guide Tristan to us without delay.
As we waited for Tristan and the dogs, I measured a clear print of the cat’s front foot which Peter had found on a dusty cattle path. A hair over a square ten and a quarter inches! It was him all right.
I was anxious to close the book with this wiley old giant that had led us such a merry dance and I was impatient for Tristan to arrive. Gene had hunted leopard enough to know that this was a special cat and he too was excited. Maybe this was the world record cat that I felt so sure would come out of our area.
About an hour after our radio call, Tristan’s white Land Cruiser came barrelling down the bed of the Ingwezi, the dogs all clambering over each other straining at their leashes. These hounds were a colourful mixture of Blueticks and Walkers, some bred here in Zimbabwe and others imported from the USA. As they got closer I recognised Jessica and Whip who had done such a good job for us on Fred Herbst’s wounded monster in 2001. From this point on things changed gear and took off. To me it looked like the proverbial Chinese fire drill, but then we were quite unfamiliar with doghunting, but the mêlée was damned disconcerting to say the least. Before I could even brief Tristan the hounds took off downstream where they could see our trackers waiting. There were about a dozen hounds snuffling, cutting back and forth and galloping down the riverbed. As soon as they hit the track by the island they began baying and howling like mad things, heading off first onto Tebele’s, then crossing the riverbed again up into Bennachie. Tristan began to take control of his staff and his main dog handler, a very fit individual, took off after the howling dogs with various radios, leashes and other equipment in hand. We quickly introduced everybody – Tristan had his father-in-law, Terry Fenn (also a professional hunter), with him. I briefed Tristan on the situation and we all took off at a fast walk after the dogs with one of Tristan’s men following behind carrying 20 litres of water for the hounds.
Suddenly the note and pitch of the baying dogs changed, becoming more urgent and higher pitched, then the sound seemed to angle off a bit to the left straight towards a huge ridge of koppies a mile away to the south. The ridge was a big one and I had been up it before, following four kudu bulls which we had spooked on a nearby road. It was horrible country.
The ridge ran basically east west and was about a mile long and half as wide. Its eastern edge overlooked the Ingwezi river below. The top was about 800 feet high, and the whole thing was riddled with caves and crevices and choked with Malalangwe bushes. You could easily have hidden a battalion of well-equipped soldiers up in the high valleys and dips in its centre. Looking at it now, I realised that this was probably where our old friend had been headquartering all these years that we had been after him.
Gene Giscombe is a big man of about 6’ 2″ and weighing in at about 240 pounds, and he was game, but battling. The pace was devastating and we hadn’t even begun to climb yet. We reached the spot where the dogs had gone berserk to find Peter standing next to a dead cow. Peter is no longer spry and had decided to follow with us rather than try to stay with the dogs. This was no small calf at our feet. The leopard had killed a healthy heifer during the night. More bad news for my friend AJ. The typical dried black throttle marks were prominent on the neck and about 20 pounds of meat had been devoured out of the shredded crotch. This was about a 450-pound animal dispatched easily by the giant cat. I turned and told Gene that now we were going to get the Bennachie killer. He had a bellyful of meat and we were certain he was nearby, up in the ridge. Gene nodded and said, “Let’s go.” We could now hear the hounds baying going up the koppies, fading away then loud again as they disappeared around and into the jumbled outcrops, Tristan’s man right along with them, shouting and whistling encouragement as they climbed.
As John Strobel and I reached the bottom of the ridge we were into the damned Malalangwe bushes. I could now hear the dogs in battle as they barked and howled in the caves at the top. Tristan and I decided to push on as quickly as possible up to the dogs in case they started to take a hammering from the enraged cat. Gene was to follow with the others as best he could. Tristan and I caught up with the handler who reported that he had seen the leopard when the dogs first flushed it from a cave. We questioned him about the size and he answered that it was enormous. This man had seen a lot of leopard at close range and we were sure he was not exaggerating. The commotion had quietened down a lot and moved east down the ridge to the end near the Ingwezi. Here huge boulders were jammed against each other, some of them more than twice the size of a Land Cruiser. Underneath and amongst them, yawned deep black crevices and caves.
Gene and the trackers caught up with us. The dogs were still busy climbing and looking around all over the place, most of them panting heavily. In and out of the cracks they went. Suddenly, back towards the centre of the ridge, Whip gave full cry and the other dogs all took off in that direction howling again themselves. We clambered back west as fast as we could go. I could not figure out why the hounds had not bayed the cat in a cave by now. He had obviously been there very recently with a full stomach and we couldn’t imagine him risking a couple of hundred yards of open ground by leaving the cover of the ridge. Why could the dogs not pin him down?
The baying quietened down a bit again and Tristan urged the hounds all the time. It was now hot on top of the ridge and it was about ten o’clock. We were all sweating rivers. One of Tristan’s older, more experienced dogs, Titus, came out of a cave then staggered slightly, sort of slipped sideways a bit like someone who had had too much to drink. One of the other, younger dogs also stopped, his head hanging.
“I don’t know much about hound hunting but these dogs are suffering from dehydration or something, where’s your water-man?” I said to Tristan.
Tristan was frowning and answered, “No ways – we hunt down in the lowveld in much hotter, drier climate than this”.
He shouted for the worker with the water to come up to us. Tristan could not figure out why some dogs appeared so tired.
The whole hunt had kind of petered out and lost momentum and I was becoming disillusioned with this dog business. It looked like another failure in the making. Little did I know how hard those dogs were trying. We all came together in a shady thicket and watered the dogs. I noticed that some of them lacked the interest or energy to really get stuck into the water dishes which was puzzling, to say the least. They simply lay down next to us. Two dogs, Ginger and Sadie, were still missing along with the handler. Suddenly we heard baying again, this time way down on the western edge of the ridge. But it was only the lonely baying of two dogs. Five were with us and another four were missing. Tristan, Terry, the water man, Gene and Bee decided to try and find where the missing dogs were, and then to move up to the western edge and help Whip and Jessica, who seemed to be with the leopard still. Peter and I walked back to the starting point to collect my jeep and we then followed asmall dry stream which came around under the western edge of the ridge. The plan was to all meet there and try and ascertain where the big cat had gone into hiding, regroup all the dogs, water them and try to revive the hunt.
Before we arrived at the pre-agreed rendezvous point in the streambed, Peter and I saw two of the missing hounds, Ginger and Sadie, laying in the sand. Ginger was staggering, trying to get up whilst Sadie lay flat on her side. As we stopped the vehicle I could see that the dog was not breathing. We went up to look at it, and it transpired that the dog had died some time before as it was already stiff. Ginger was salivating badly with strings of slobber hanging from her jaws. I was concerned at that time that the dogs had been driven into dehydration complications, but in retrospect, I see that would have been highly unlikely at ten o’clock on an April morning. I grabbed a water bottle and tried to force it into the dog’s mouth, but she fought back and bit me by mistake. I poured the water over her and tried to cool her down. Meanwhile Peter was whistling and shouting for Tristan, who answered from halfway down the ridge. Suddenly Ginger lifted her muzzle and gave a plaintive owoooooh, lay down, stiffened her legs and died.
I knew that something had poisoned the dogs and was just about to ask Peter about it when he said “Ginyambila” – black mamba! Tristan arrived and I could see the anguish and confusion on his face. Gabe was laying just behind some bushes in the streambed. He too was on his last legs. Tristan promptly shot him with his revolver, putting him out of his misery.
This was catastrophic. There is a deep, personal relationship that a houndsman has with his dogs. This was also the beginning of the season and it would turn out that four of the dogs, not just the three we had seen, had succumbed to the mamba. Tristan was left with a badly depleted pack. Peter pointed out the massive black bruising which manifested itself on the dogs’ underparts. He seemed to have no doubt as to what had killed the dogs, as he had lost two of his own dogs to a black mamba back in his home village, and he recognised the symptoms. Tristan was devastated. We all were. The hunt had wound down and we could not hear any baying at all. It seemed wrong to even enquire about the leopard in the face of what had happened, so I didn’t. Everybody finally came down out of the koppies. Tristan got his staff together and they made a careful sweep for all the missing dogs. Sadie, Titus, Gabe and Ginger were all dead. Biggun, a large male, was suffering but would pull through. Evidently he had taken a very small dose of venom and was fortunate to make it. My heart ached for Tristan as he sat there in the shade near his Cruiser fondling Jessica’s ears, staring at the sand. A few yards away Biggun lay in the shade licking his balls.
It was a tired, bedraggled group that crawled onto the back of my Land Cruiser. We drove slowly back to the starting point in the Ingwezi, unloaded Tristan and his five remaining hounds and made our way back to camp. Geneand I returned later in the day and sat up over the dead cow that night in desperate hope but it came to naught. The Bennachie marauder, somewhere up in the labyrinth of caves on the ridge, lived through another attempt on his life.
Looking back, I am actually surprised that more hounds are not lost this way in the Matobo range. The mamba is a very fast nervous snake, and he will normally take off at the slightest noisy interference anywhere near him.
However, if he is cornered in any way, he will attack with ferocity. I can clearly picture the excited clumsy hounds pouring into a cave where they can smell leopard scent, the ones at the rear pushing on the tails of those in front. A mamba, already on edge due to the leopard having been in the cave, finds himself in the midst of a dozen howling leaping dogs with nowhere to escape. He must attack, and attack he did.
Talking to Tristan later, he shrugged it off as part of the risks of his job but I know that that incident must have hurt him badly. At the end of the season though he told me that he had been pleasantly surprised at how all the younger inexperienced dogs had come through for him, and he had managed to put together a workable season after all.
The final chapter on the Bennachie leopard unfolded in April 2004. I had been scheduled to guide a hunter from the States in November of 2003. But 2003 had been an unusually dry year and to make matters worse, in late October a strange cold spell hit the country for about 10 days. Temperatures dropped from 90° down to 40° F overnight. It was just too much for a lot of the plainsgame and cattle who were at their lowest ebb of the year. Our rainy season usually starts in November, so October, at the end of the long dry spell, is end of the tether for a lot of the game animals which are just hanging on by a thread, waiting for the new browse to sprout. The cold spell laid them down all over the veld. We would see zebra, kudu, duiker and cattle laying dead, just riding by in the car. Who knows how much game actually died out there off the beaten track.
The end result of all this was, of course, an early Christmas for predators and scavengers. Leopard would not even look at a bait with so many weak, dying and dead animals out in the bush. Vultures circled lazily for days, gliding down to earth constantly.
Our last client of the 2003 season – I will call him Harry – had already paid his hunt deposit. I called him and explained the situation. Financially we needed the safari, but the chances of him taking a cat were not good at all, so I advised him to postpone to an early hunt for 2004, which he did. Interestingly, his agent tried to book him with another operator, but Harry decided to stick with us. When Harry arrived in April I was finishing up a hunt in which we took a nice average sized Tom of about 130 pounds with a hunter from Tennessee. About three quarters of the way through Harry’s hunt we got a hit on Ernest Rosenfels’s home farm some eight miles east of the Bennachie male’s territory on the Ingwezi river. A mature female had been visiting this bait for about four days and we kept feeding her in the hope that the boyfriend would do his rounds, which he finally did. His track was not as big as the Bennachie male, but not far off. He was definitely a mature male and we decided to sit for him.
We carefully set up the hide and went through step by step what would probably happen. Harry was shooting from a sitting position at about 80 yards. In front of us, about 20 yards behind the bait, rose a huge koppie which dominated the whole area. It was about 500 yards across its base and some 500 feet high. It stood out prominently in that section of bush as it was the only koppie around for a couple of miles in any direction. We often climbed it when glassing for kudu and wildebeest. I had taken a magnificently coloured 160-pound leopard out of this exact tree with Tom Shimak from Illinois, in 2001. I had faith in this setup. One problem we did have here, was that thiskoppie was a sleeping position for a large troop of baboons.
When they arrived in the late evening to start moving into their sleeping positions up on the cliff face, they would either see or smell us, and bark and carry on for about an hour. I was always worried that this would possibly warn the leopard off.
Shortly after 5pm that evening, Harry and I were settled in. The francolin started their evening cackling before they retired and the baboons barked, squealed and echoed high up in the rocks.
By six it was quiet and the Scops owls started their clear monotonous “prrrrp.” Harry was quiet in the blind which was a relief. We ate our unwrapped sandwich and quietly sipped at our water. The temperature dropped quickly and we silently eased under the grey blankets fighting itchy throats and runny noses. Harry’s rifle, a .375, was cocked, off safe, and resting securely on fore and rear sandbag rests, ready to go. Shortly after eight, the dassies began to chatter. Our cat was on the move. We sat up, mouths dry, waiting. This is the hardest throat-drying, heart-hammering part of the whole deal before you move into action.
My warning stick curved forward, relaxed, curved forward, stayed bent. The cat was up in the marula tree and had snagged the bait towards himself and had it up on the branch. I urged Harry into shooting position, watched him whilst he snuggled in to the rifle butt. I kneeled up and switched the light on. There sat the leopard in all his regal nonchalant beauty. He looked at us, then away.
“Take him, shoot Harry,” I said. Nothing happened.
“Harry shoot,” I urged.
“Can’t see him, can’t see anything,” said Harry.
The leopard rose up on all fours, jumped back into the main crook of the marula tree and went down the other side like poured oil. I turned off the light. I was furious. Hours and hours of work to get the right cat in the right position. It was too much. That leopard could have been shot with a scoped pistol. Nothing in the way, sitting in one position for a good eight seconds. I couldn’t believe it.
“What’s the problem Harry, he was sitting perfectly,” I whispered. Harry was also upset, mad with himself. “I don’t know, I just couldn’t see him, I’m sorry.”
I could not figure out why not. A million-candle power Q beam is brighter than daylight, the rifle was on a double rest aimed at the bait. I could only think that a mechanical fault had developed with the scope. Mad as a snake, I gestured for Harry to sit quietly. Who knows, sometimes, if a cat does not decide to come and investigate the light, or any noise we have made, he will go back to the bait.
Sure enough, about 15 minutes later the stick curved slowly – we waited.
The warning stick began to jerk like I had a fish on it. He was feeding. Once more I urged Harry up to the rifle. Once more I kneeled, put the light on.
“There he is, shoot, Harry.’’ I urged.
“I don’t see him, I don’t see anything.”
Now I wasn’t so much angry as resigned. A hunter who couldn’t see a leopard at 80 yards with a four-power scope on a dead rest, with no interfering grass or foliage, should not be hunting leopard I thought.
“I don’t know what to tell you Harry – the leopard is completely in the clear, on the bait; I can’t guide you in any better, the bait tree is the only big tree there!” I said to Harry.
The leopard now left the bait alone and was sitting in the crook of the tree staring at us like a big dog.
Suddenly, BOOM! Harry fired. The leopard didn’t appear to be knocked back by the bullet at all. He appeared to jump down, under control and away into the thick stuff.
Harry worked out what happened. When he moved up to his shooting position the first time the cat hit, for some reason known only to Harry, he had pulled the rifle out of the bedding grooves in the sandbags where he had bedded it aiming at the bait earlier in the evening, and snuggled the butt into his shoulder.
The rifle, as it turned out, was now aiming left of the cat into the bush halfway down the left-hand side of the shooting lane. When the cat came the second time, the rifle was still aimed left, but Harry had caught some movement to the right, realised what he had done, moved the rifle back to its correct bedding, and fired. But I could see he was not happy with his shot and he felt he had rushed it. We waited for the jeep to arrive. When the staff arrived and parked the jeep a couple of hundred yards behind us, I shouted for them not to approach the hide down the normal route from the right. That was the direction in which the cat had taken off. They arrived at the hide a few minutes later with my follow-up gear. My .460, my pistol and belt, and spare flashlight.
The bush was very thick and no one was happy. I looked at Peter. Maybe we should wait until daylight. We decided to take a preliminary look and call it off if the situation looked bad. I belted my cocked pistol on and I also cocked the .460. Into the thorns we went. Again. When we got to the bait tree we could find no blood or fat spatter on the tree at all. However we did find a bullet-cut in the edge of the tree with a tuft of belly fur or inner leg fur jammed into the white frayed edges of the cut. Remembering where the leopard had been sitting, the shot looked too low to have hit any vitals. We turned to where the cat bad leaped out of the tree and made off into the thick stuff at the base of the koppie. Peter crouched down with the spotlight in hand, I stood over him, rifle at the ready. Kloppers, the skinner, carried the battery behind me. Everyone else waited at the bait. Peter found blood about ten yards away where the cat had stopped. There was not much of it though, and it wasn’t from an organ or an artery. We spent another two hours that night looking for the cat or signs of blood, but we only found a few more small drops. When the tracks went up into heavy cover we called it off.
The next day we gave it everything we could. We covered every square inch of that koppie and went into every single cave and crevice. My belief was that the bullet had gone low, through the meat of a thigh and the cat was not mortally struck. We gave it the whole day on that wounded leopard and I sent Bee and two other workers back the next day as well.
Harry was really feeling down. He had taken all the plainsgame he wanted, so he really had nothing to do for the last four days of his hunt. I cannot fathom what got into me but I offered Harry another male if one came to bait. Maybe because he was a nice easy-going man, and we really felt sorry for his predicament. I do not know. What I do know is that it is stupid practice if your business is leopard hunting. Big male leopard are most certainly not an infinite resource, and to offer one for trophy fee alone when it could have brought us over US$9000 in a new hunt, is a self-inflicted wound. Anyway, Harry appreciated the offer but turned it down. He said he was really feeling low and was done with leopard hunting.
I decided to let Harry hunt with a young PH who was working for us at the time, a fellow named Bruce Cronje. They were going to potter around for bushpig and maybe small cats for the few remaining days of the hunt. I took the opportunity to go down to South Africa with my wife and have some X-Rays done on my back. The next day Bruce called us in South Africa and said that Harry had thought about my offer, realized it would save him quite a lot of money by not having to buy another safari later, and decided to try again for a cat. I told them to go ahead, not really believing he had much chance in the four days remaining.
Bruce and Harry took another cow at Graham’s and put out four new baits and continued to check the ones we had up already. On Bruce’s second day, evening was approaching and he found himself at the Tebele, Bennachie junction gate, with a fresh cow shoulder still to hang. This spot is only a couple of miles north of the ridge where we had lost the dogs to the mamba. As Bruce had only joined us that season, he was unfamiliar with the Bennachie male and all the drama and mishaps that had gone before. Bee was with him that day and showed him the spot where I had sat with Kirk Clinkingbeard, about 300 yards away from the gate. Rather than let the meat sit in camp for the night doing nothing, they strung it up on the off chance. When they checkedthe meat the next day on their rounds, they found the bait had been hit! Not only had it been hit, it had been hit by a monster leopard with a ten and a quarter inch track! The Bennachie male. Bruce set up in the same spot I had sat with Kirk across the road. At 9pm that night the warning stick curved slowly down, then up, down again, then it began to jerk erratically. The monster was feeding.
When Harry was ready, Bruce switched on the light. Nothing. The bait was still swinging but the leopard was not there. The light was turned off and they quietly eased down. What the hell had gone wrong? Had the seasoned old marauder slipped out of trouble again? A few minutes later the jerking warning stick bent heavily. Harry eased back behind the rifle. When Bruce hit the light the second time, the leopard which had run circles around us for so many years, was standing up on his hind legs ravaging the meat. He was huge. Bruce said he looked like a lioness. As he fed he never even looked up at the light. At the blast of the rifle the cat went down, growled, and then took off leaving the bait swinging.
After much backslapping and armchair quarterbacking, the happy duo moved out of the hill and onto the road which passed just a few metres away. When the vehicle arrived Bruce manoeuvred the car right up to the bait. As it turned out, when the leopard had hit the bait the first time, a huge piece of it had come away in its jaws, and he had moved a few feet away to eat it. This was why the hunters had not seen him. It was strange that the light never bothered such an old experienced cat, but this was probably the first time he had actually been under the light.
Bruce and Harry found a promising pool of blood under the bait tree where the cat had fallen at the shot. It looked good. But things that look good in the African bush can look very bad in a very short space of time. Bruce and his team went as slowly and as carefully as they could until the rapidly diminishing blood spoor went up into the koppies.
They were not too despondent as they drove back to camp because Bruce felt that the chances of finding him dead in the morning were good. But Harry had met Murphy the week before, and Murphy was waiting for them in the morning.
The team searched high and low for the wounded cat, but the cat had licked the wound clean and the droplets had dried up. It seemed that he was not fatally wounded. By late morning they had not found him and Bruce got a message through for Tristan to come down with his dogs. Unfortunately, Tristan’s partner was away on a hunt with the main pack, and all that remained were two dogs, a male and a female, who proved to be worthless as the female was in heat and not even leopard blood could entice them into going to work.Tristan’s blood must have run cold when he arrived on the scene, because from this spot, can be seen clearly, to the right, what we had named mamba ridge from the year before.
The end result was a failed follow up. Bruce and his staff combed the hills for the rest of that day but found nothing. It is hard to believe, but an otherwise good hunter had wounded, and lost, his second big male leopard in ten days! Shooting off sandbags at under 80 yards! But the most disheartening thing of all, was the fact that this failed opportunity was the last chance we would have to close accounts with the Bennachie stock killer. Tristan’s handler had seen him. Bruce and Harry had seen him. And he was a giant in an area where big leopards are common. Whether he died from his injury or whether he died in a territorial dispute, no one will ever know, but he was certainly the cat with nine lives as far as my efforts were concerned.
Bee said he returned the next day and saw the killer’s tracks made during the night walking along the road heading straight for the thick rugged fortresses in mamba ridge. But he said there was no blood and the tracks were evenly spaced. When I heard the story I was not too sure if it was even the same cat, and now, a whole season later, we have seen no sign of the giant calf killer. But seven miles south, on the edge of Dombolefu Mountain, AJ says a giant leopard is starting to take cattle.
