Chapter Six

Baiting

If you have ever sat around a group of bass fishermen after a long day on the water and listened to their numerous theories, and if you’ve heard all about the merits of the ‘fuzzy’ or ‘purple oil worm’, then you will know what it is like to sit around the fire in the evening with leopard hunters. Every hunter knows the correct way to outwit the big cats. Every hunter will have the remedy to rectify a problem situation which is not bearing fruit. Everybody has all the answers!

The sceptical layman observing one of these sessions must be forgiven for concluding that these intrepid cat hunters are out-and-out blowhards! The fact is the leopard is hunted in many different types of terrain – mountains, jungles, savannah, desert, semi-desert, rocky areas and thornveld. He is hunted in wilderness areas, populated areas and cattle ranches. All these different types of habitats have influenced different methods and different tactics. What works between the Masai villages in northern Tanzania will not work in the granite hills of the Matobo. Coupled with the factor of widely varied terrain, is the human element. Because buffalo are the most plentiful of the dangerous game animals, it follows that they are hunted more than the other dangerous game species. But not far behind the total days spent hunting buffalo, are the days spent in pursuit of the leopard. We are not talking about the number of hunts brought to successful conclusion, we are talking about the hunting effort itself. In Zimbabwe between four and five hundred leopard export permits are made available each year. About two hundred to three hundred leopard trophies are actually exported. I would guess that if one half of leopard hunts are successful, we would be very generous in our estimations. So if 250 animals are actually taken, we can assume that 500 leopard have been hunted. The minimum number of days marketed for a leopard hunt is 14. Therefore a minimum of 7000 hunting days are taken up in Zimbabwe alone in leopard hunting! Add to that the figures for Tanzania, Mocambique, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa and Namibia, and you begin to get the idea. Add this phenomenal amount of hunting effort to the many varied habitats where leopards are found, and the result is a giant medley, where the tactics that work, are as numerous as the spots on the skins which we seek with such fervour.

I have mentioned elsewhere in this book that these experiences, these adventures, both failed and successful, have not been put together for the purpose of instruction. They have been written purely to share our triumphs and heartbreaks, to show what has worked for us. I have been determined to steer away from the ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ syndrome that we see so much of when cat hunting has been written about. What I describe in these chapters may be perceived by others in our game as wrong, or a complete waste of time when transposed to their areas. But that is the point. This is all about what we do, and what works for us. And of course, what hasn’t.

So many of us have, or have had, preconceived ideas about the leopard. Yes, the leopard is the supreme master of the ambush. He is the dispenser of violent, sudden death. Yes, he is powerful, cunning beyond belief, and he is a successful hunter. But leopards, quite surprisingly, are not fussy when dinner time arrives. He has no airs and graces. He is a scavenger. Unlike his cousin the jaguar, and unlike the cheetah, the leopard will consume someone else’s kill. He will eat animals killed by fire, wire snare or drowning. He is a survivor. He will, when he has to, eat meat that would sicken a maggot. Lion and hyena, to varying degrees, are the same. This seems to be the situation in most ‘wilderness’ areas – large tracts of land that have been set aside purely for the benefit of wildlife. East Africa’s Serengeti and Masai-Mara, Zimbabwe’s and Zambia’s huge National Parks and Safari areas, South Africa’s Kruger National Park. In these areas the leopards have not been significantly influenced by man. Their natural prey is abundant. Obviously some seasons are more bountiful than others. When the antelope have their young, and the grass is green and high, providing plenty of cover for a stalking cat, it is the season of plenty. But when the winter months arrive and the leaves fall and the wind and frost lays the grass down, the leopard has to work harder. His menu of acceptable foodstuffs grows to accommodate his hunger. This is how we understand the scheme of things for the leopard in unspoiled wilderness areas.

But the fact that the leopard is such an adaptable predator, the fact that he can exist cheek by jowl with man, has changed what we accept as ‘normal’ behaviour for his kind. He has changed. In many parts of his natural habitat he has evolved, changing his habits in order to survive, both by utilising what man has to offer on one hand, and by avoiding contact with man on the other. He has adapted his skills and hunting habits in order to avoid the people he lives near, and he has had to accept a very different menu of foodstuffs than his cousins in the wilderness. He has learned about dogs, wire, steel traps and poison. He knows well the pitfalls and opportunities presented by cattle and goats. He knows the smell of man, of tobacco, of vehicles, diesel and petrol. This leopard, the private ranch leopard, is a very different quarry than those who live in the wilderness areas. He has developed into a far more cunning and altogether more difficult adversary.

Because of this sophistication, baiting our Matobo leopard is a far more detailed, complex, and important part of the hunt, than it is when trying to outwit a cat in a wilderness area. The hunter cannot just hang meat haphazardly out in the bush and sit back waiting for success. He has to outwork, outthink, and out-luck the most adaptable chess master of them all. Baiting cats in our areas is approached with three main aspects in mind. These are where to place the bait, what kind of bait to use, and presentation of the bait.

Where to Place the Bait

In both the mountain camp and the project camp, we have large I :50 000 maps pinned to cork boards in the lounge area. On these maps we record all pertinent information about our leopards. We mark fresh track sightings, actual leopard sightings, tracks reported by cattle workers, nocturnal calling, calf kills, natural wild kills, and places where we have been able to work out approximate home ranges.

It was not long before we knew most of the big males on our area by name. We usually named these big boys after a river or koppie in their home range. The result of all this was that we were able to cut down the time wasted at the beginning of a hunt looking for tracks. We already knew where several large males lived before the hunt even started.

Pre-scouting and constant map updating took care of any debate about which areas we should commence operations. The next step then was to select the actual spot, the actual tree where the bait should hang. Some of this has been covered in the other chapters, so the reader will have to bear with, and forgive any information repeated here.

After years spent following both lion and leopard tracks, sometimes by vehicle but mostly on foot, from the northern Tanzanian border to the western areas of Zimbabwe on the Botswana boundary, if there is one thing I learned that is true for all the cats, it is that, like us, they will take the easy road whenever possible. The leopard takes cover during the day in the deep shade of the high rugged koppies but at night he goes about his business on footpaths, dirt roads and sandy dry streambeds. I would guess several factors influence this, the main ones being comfort and ease of movement, quietness, due to the absence of noisy grass and bushes, and lastly, good visibility. Some years ago we picked up a very large leopard track on the eastern side of AJ’s land, on the Ingwezi river. We decided to follow the track as far as we could, and if and when it went into good cover, we would ‘flood’ the area with baits. The track climbed out of the Ingwezi riverbed and headed exactly west toward Botswana. After walking about five miles on this track, which stayed on the dirt farm road, I sent George back for the Land Cruiser. When he arrived, Peter seated himself on the left-hand side of the bull-bars so he could see the footprints and we set off slowly, expecting the track to pull off the road at any time. We followed that animal in a straight line for about 17 miles! We were amazed. If I had seen that track in the morning in the Ingwezi, and then on AJ’s western boundary later on, and we had not followed it, I would have said it was a different animal. We found where the big cat had killed one of AJ’s weaners and we built a tree hide and sat for him, but that turned out to be one of the hunts filed under ‘screw-ups’. Whether that big leopard travelled such a distance during the night to take care of boundary marking or social obligations, or just hunting, we will never know, but he did it comfortably, straight down a well-used dirt farm road.

Even though the Matobo cats will hunt down, or walk along river beds, roads, paths and fence lines, he will not eat his kill in the open. He kills an animal then drags it into thick cover where he will settle down to feed. Often we have found where a leopard has killed, dragged his meat a considerable distance into cover, fed on it, and stashed it under leaves and grass. He has then returned the following night and dragged the kill off once more – most times up into a thick rocky koppie.

Whether a hunter is operating in a wilderness area or on private ranch land, leopards make it clear that they are happier and more comfortable feeding in dense cover. I have found that the thicker the cover surrounding a bait, the quicker the leopard will come to feed in the evening. This is a crucial factor when hunting leopard on a government concession where you have to shoot the leopard without the use of a light. If the leopard has to cover large open areas in order to get to the bait tree, he will do it very late into the night, if at all. He will not cover that open ground in the daylight.

With these two factors influencing the leopard’s behaviour – the fact that he uses dry riverbeds and paths to travel, and that he prefers to feed in thick cover, we place most of our baits on the edges of the riverine bush and at junctions. River-road junctions are a very productive spot as long as there is good cover nearby. Fence line river junctions and to a lesser extent fence line road junctions, are used a lot by our hunters. River junctions – where a tributary enters a main riverbed – are also excellent areas to hang bait.

Where a pathway or road, or even riverbed, cuts through a pass in a hill range, there is an excellent possibility of finding leopard sign. If these particular koppies look like they would have sufficient cover to hold a recently satiated leopard, then this would be one of the few times that we would use a drag. The idea would be to attract the leopard’s attention as he uses this pass through the hills, and then draw him away into a position where it would be favourable for the hunter to set up a blind. We don’t want the cat to feed on a bait then lie up where he can watch us build the blind, so this drag, hopefully, will be found by the cat when he utilises the pass in the hills, and if we can get him to follow it to the bait, we are in business.

With these basic principles in mind, where the leopard walks, with dense cover nearby, another important aspect joins the mix, and that is wind direction. Wind direction is of paramount importance when building a blind and when considering a leopard’s approach to the meat once the hunter gets him feeding.

Wind direction also influences where one puts the bait initially. If a riverbed flows from the north to the south – as most of ours do – and the prevailing breeze is from the southeast – as ours is – then it does not make sense to place the bait on the west bank of the river. Especially if the cover is a fair distance away from the streambed. The leopard will walk down the streambed oblivious to the tasty smells wafting away from him. It therefore follows that the bait needs to be in dense cover on the eastern bank of the riverbed and the blind will be downwind, in cover, on the western bank. The influence of wind, here has been described in black and white, in basic terms, but I have always believed that an old male leopard, living in a 12 000 acre home range, will find your bait no matter which riverbank you put it on. It’s his own back yard, and he knows it intimately. He may have lived there longer than a decade, and he is very aware of what is happening at home. But placing the bait where he will smell it when using one of his normal trails, will accelerate matters, and this is important when you only have two weeks to lure your cat in for the shot.

Unlike cats that have adapted to extremely dry climates, as in the Kalahari in Botswana, our Matobo leopards drink regularly. With plenty of watering points available, such as rivers, dams, cattle tanks and granite dwala catchments, these cats can be quite choosy when deciding where to slake their thirst. Understandably, they will drink where the water is clear and unsullied by cattle or game activity. These regular drinking spots are also baited successfully, especially if there is a good thick cover upwind of the water. As the streams and granite basins dry up in the winter months, it becomes easier to identify a cat’s favoured hole, and in a really dry year we will bait just about every well-vegetated watering point in a big cat’s home area.

Apart from streambeds, junctions and watering points, another situation which influences our baiting tactics is ‘funnel’ meadows or valleys. If a valley, or sunken meadow, lies on an east-west line, and if the mouth of the valley makes a pass, or funnel, through a ridge, or hills, on its eastern side, then any rotten meat placed in this spot will stink up the whole valley to the west every time a prevailing breeze blows. And a hungry hunting cat will find this bait very quickly. Thanks to gunfire my hearing is poor, but my sense of smell is acute. Usually when driving around in the open hunting vehicle I will smell something rotten in the bush before anyone else on the truck. We will always investigate these smells in the hope that it may be a stashed leopard kill. When the breeze is right I can pick up the tainted smell of a rotten bait a good 500 yards away in one of these “funnel” valleys. A super-predator like the leopard must be able to smell it a lot further away than I can.

If you are fortunate enough to find a ‘throne’, it can be another ace in the deck when trying to close accounts with a big cat. Matobo leopards, especially a dominant male, will have several places in his territory where he lazes away most of the daylight hours. Because of the abundance of granite koppies in our area, many of which have high promontories, the cat’s throne or favoured lookout/sleeping position will be high up in the rocks, and worthless to us for the purpose of baiting. But occasionally we find a large tree well hidden in the thick stuff which just reeks of leopard. These throne trees are usually scratched where the big boy has been cleaning his claws and marking his territory. This is an excellent place to hang a bait – he will definitely be coming back to this favoured spot. We found in the Zimbabwe lowveld, where koppies are not so plentiful, scratch trees, or “tree thrones” are more common. Several times we have spotted leopards in the early morning or late evening stretching themselves or just gazing out over their territory, way up in the upper reaches of the bigger koppies. One such prominent look-out is situated about 900 yards in front of our mountain camp, and we have twice seen a large female calling from there.

All these factors influence where we place the bait, but if the hunters have had the time to do their homework, then at least one, possibly more, big male leopard’s home ranges and patrolling routes will already be known, and these routes, his watering points, his scratched thrones, his paths through the hills, must all be baited as soon as possible.

What Kind of Bait?

Whether you are listening to hunting talk or just reading about leopard hunting, you will get the idea that the best baits for leopard are warthog, impala and zebra in varying orders of preference. Impala and warthog are both prolific breeders and most hunting areas enjoy good numbers of both species. For this reason the quotas offered on these animals are generous, and generally speaking, neither species is overly difficult to find. It follows then that these will be used more for baiting leopard than other game and because of their ‘manageable’ size, are probably killed by the leopards in greater numbers than the larger species. Zebra too are common and widespread throughout most hunting areas. A zebra will provide four good-sized leopard baits, and because the meat is very fatty and oily, it does not dry out quickly in cold windy and dry conditions like most other meat will. It remains moist, and lion and leopard both appear to favour it.

But the truth is, a leopard will generally eat just about any meat presented in good condition in thick cover. I have taken cats on elephant, buffalo, giraffe, steenbok and nearly every type of game animal inbetween. Not all private ranch land or communal lands hold populations of warthog and impala however, and this is the case in most of the Matobo range. But these leopards do not go hungry. Every koppie is a larder for these opportunists, providing several different varieties of prey.

The prime food for the leopards in our areas is the rock hyrax, or dassie, as he is known locally, and there are plenty of them. These small interesting animals thrive in the granite hills of the Matobo range. They live together in colonies of sometimes up to thirty animals and their numbers are often made up of two different species living happily side by side. In appearance the dassie resembles a tail-less beaver and they weigh about eight to ten pounds. Dassies spend hours basking up on the rocks and when it becomes too hot they move back into the ample shade thrown by balancing boulders. At night and in bad weather they move into tightly-packed huddles in the crevasses for warmth and protection. Apart from the leopard, their main threat is from the majestic black eagle, several snakes, and the eternal enemy – poachers. The rural Africans use the dassies’ skins to make warm karosses (blankets) and they relish the meat as well.

Other animals which live in and around the koppies, and that are preyed upon by leopards, are klipspringers, duikers, kudu, bushpigs, francolin and small cats. Klipspringers are dainty antelope weighing about 30 pounds. They are a yellow-grey colour and only the male has horns. Klipspringers live in small family groups of two or three, and they bound up and down the granite rocks like rubber balls. Their feet are quite pliable and rubber-like, and these unusual antelope appear to be standing on their toes like ballerinas, as they perch on top of the boulders. The common grey duiker is hunted by the leopard almost throughout the whole of the leopard’s range. They are also small antelope and also brown-grey in colour, but unlike the klipspringer they  do not need the rocky outcrops to survive. They are very adaptable animals and can survive throughout a wide range of habitat. They are normally found alone and occasionally in pairs.

Bushpigs are ferocious nocturnal animals which travel in groups from two to twenty. They vary in colour from red-brown to yellow and almost black, with a white ridge or mane running over the crest of the shoulder and down the back. These pigs usually spend the daylight hours hidden away in thick bush up in the koppies, and they commence foraging in the late evening.

Kudu are common throughout ‘koppie country’ where poaching is not out of control. Any young kudu up to a year old is easy prey for the leopard and we frequently find their carcasses hidden away in the thick stuff.

All these species are available to any leopard prowling the hills. Obviously the hungry cat will take other game like young zebra, impala and wildebeest, but I mention these to illustrate the abundance of prey inside the koppie ranges.

For more than a hundred years a kind of guerilla war has been fought in these bush-choked granite hills. The battle between the cattle farmer and Panthera pardus. South western Zimbabwe is dry country, but it is good cattle country and even before the white settlers arrived, various black tribes grazed their herds throughout the Matobo range. And they suffered too. Leopards love to eat cattle; and cattle viewed in nature’s food-chain, are simply not designed to be a permanent link. Even though the Brahman mothers will aggressively defend their young, cattle are ill-equipped to increase their numbers in these areas unless they are carefully looked after, and the predators’ numbers are thinned. They are simply too vulnerable and lack natural raw cunning.

The African cattle owners pen their beasts at night. If one of these locals owned ten cattle he would be considered well-to-do, so the death of just one calf, 10% of his herd, would be disturbing news indeed. But any farmer, black, white or yellow, who wants to breed cattle as a commercial venture, has to leave his cattle out at night, as 50% of the beasts’ grazing will be done after the sun has set. The large scale rancher cannot afford to halve his cattles’ fattening time by penning them at night. When calving season arrives the commercial cattle farmer tries to keep his cows with calves at foot, near his homestead, in the hope that the calves will not be as exposed to leopards as much as they would be out in the bush. But grazing becomes limited around the homesteads and sooner or later the gambolling young calves end up in the dark hills.

A rancher with approximately 300 cattle will lose between 20 to 30 calves a year to leopard, hyena and cheetah. Our hunting areas cover five large commercial cattle ranches, 21 small scale cattle ranches and huge areas of African communal land, all with plenty of young calves living deep within leopard country. The result is that the cattle farming greatly increases our success in hunting the big cats. We may have 10 or 15 baits out for a client, but at certain times of the year there will also be 500 or more succulent young calves walking around ignorant of the fact that they too are actually live bait.

Forty percent of our leopard are shot off of natural calf kills. Seventy percent of our giant ‘Super Cats’- males over 160 pounds, which are normally the grizzled, wise old cattle killers, are taken off calf kills.

When we first moved into the Marula area on a permanent basis, we were still in the mind-set of going out with the client on the first day, driving around continuously, blasting away at any impala we could find. The problem was, the impala were just not available in the numbers that we were accustomed to in the south eastern lowveld. It was now a time-consuming frustrating exercise which never seemed to produce enough bait animals. To make matters even more difficult, this area had been under severe poaching pressure, both by vehicle and by dogs and wire snares, so the impala were not only scarce, but they were damned skittish too. We soon realised that we would have to find an alternative bait source.

If a client had a zebra on his list, we tried our best to complete this task on the first day. This would provide us with four good-sized baits without delay. But zebra (and wildebeest) hunting is no walk in the park in this area either, and sometimes it would take us several days in which to hunt one successfully. Most of the time we had to track these animals down on foot – no easy task when they spend so much time grazing through springy tough grass in the vlei areas. One problem encountered when baiting cattle ranches or communal land, is bait theft. Hungry poachers, or indeed any travelling native who comes across an impala or piece of beef hanging in a tree, will take it, not only wasting the hunters’ money, but upsetting the overall baiting strategy. Because the locals in western Matabeleland don’t eat zebra or donkey, we have to secure some of that meat when baiting a problem area.

One of us came up with a plan to try use the locals’ livestock in the communal lands for bait. This turned out to be a boon for these subsistence farmers. They were now able to get rid of old, lame, sick or just ‘for sale’ animals without having to walk them long distances to market. We started off using donkeys and goats, and with experience, we found that we achieved more hits on these baits when they were divested of their skin. I do not know why this is. We’ve thought about it, debated long and hard over the campfire about it, but I haven’t heard a convincing theory yet. During these years of goat and donkey baiting we continued to take impala as and when they presented themselves during a hunt. We were taking leopard, but not with the same success that we would enjoy later on when we had to reshape our business into ‘total’ leopard hunting.

Once we started using the natives’ livestock for baiting, I noticed curious differences in our information-map records. After looking at all our information of known big male movement and chatting to our PHs about them, we were able to deduce that most of the large males moved off our properties, into the further reaches of their home territories as soon as we started driving around blasting away at impala! It seemed they were shy of all the activity and gunfire. Now that we were utilising livestock shot far away in the communal lands, our known resident big males were staying put. It was great news and our success rate improved immediately.

With hindsight, of course, it is pretty obvious – if we needed ten impala for bait, more often than not it meant that about 15 shots were fired. Add that to the amount of vehicle activity, and the big cats were slinking off to quieter hunting grounds. Graham finally provided the solution to our baiting problems, and thereby helped push our success rate to where it had never been before. One year the guts fell out of the beef market. Rather than sell his cattle at a deflated price, with transport costs to consider too, Graham asked if I’d be interested in purchasing his sale stock for bait. We looked at the figures and found that this would suit both of us.

Instead of driving around for hours looking for impala, we could now fire one shot right near the homestead and have four large fresh baits immediately. One old dry cow would provide us with four big baits whilst younger stock would give us three. Beef is denser than an impala carcass and stays fresh longer. Add to this the benefit of the inside fillets, backstraps and tail for our use in the camp, the guts, head and feet taken for consumption by our staff, and it was a winner. The leopard went for this diet like they were born to it.

Another big plus for us moving onto using beef for bait, was when we had to “flood bait” an area urgently. Our standard method of baiting is to hang meat near rivers, paths and roads, in thick cover in an area frequented by a large male. But often during a safari we come across a large track in an area where we have no bait; where we are not expecting to find sign of a large dominant male. If the track is fresh from the night before, we track the spoor as far as we are able. In most cases the track will leave the road or game trail and disappear into the depths of a koppie range. It is likely that the cat moved up there at first light and is whiling away the day in thick cover. If we are able to get our hands on sufficient bait before nightfall, we put up as many baits as we can, ‘surrounding’ the area where we think the leopard is laying up.

This goes against my practice of not baiting against, or in big koppie ranges, but when I find a giant leopard track on day ten of a fourteen day safari, I will try anything at all that might put us into position on a big cat. Often, the following morning, we find that one of these ‘desperation’ baits has been eaten by the fellow with big feet. We immediately take down all the other baits placed nearby. If we leave them up, there is always the risk that while we are sitting at the eaten bait waiting for the leopard, he has stumbled onto one of the other baits and is happily dining on the fresh beef. The availability of cattle was crucial in providing enough meat in a hurry when we needed to action this “flood baiting” plan. If I had to pinpoint just a handful of factors that changed our leopard hunting success from around 50% to above 80%, baiting with cattle would be one of them.

A myth, or misconception that many people believe regarding Matobo leopard behaviour, is that baboons are the leopards’ favourite prey. I don’t know how that idea originally came about. Possibly because there are so many baboons throughout the Matobo range, people assume them to be an abundant source of leopard food. We have hunted in the Matobo hills for many years and not once has any of us found the remains of a baboon eaten by a leopard. Because we haven’t found such evidence doesn’t mean that baboons are never eaten by leopards – but it is definitely not as common as people believe. I watched an episode of National Geographic on television once where an average sized leopard attacked a female baboon at the edge of a large troop at a waterhole. Before you could say ‘bad idea’ nearly the whole troop had ganged up, and screaming and barking like mad things, they went for the leopard with their long canines bared. The cat snarled a few times and made a half-hearted rush at the enraged apes but his heart was not in it and he retreated into the long grass. The adult male baboon is a very strong adversary. Graham and I weighed one once, which had been shot by a hunter named Chris Cagle. This animal weighed 87 pounds, most of that was pure muscle. The teeth are a good two inches long, often longer than a leopards! Of course the world heavyweight baboon champion is not going to win a fight with an adult male leopard, but their large troops are a serious deterrent. I have no doubt that a wounded, sick, or in fact any ape that strays too far from the group, will be snaffled in a heartbeat by a hungry leopard, but I do not believe that they are ‘favourite prey’ at all. Baboons are unbelievably alert animals and always have a sentry or two on duty. It would be a difficult task to sneak up on them unannounced, even for the master of stealth.

Having said all this about our distant relative, the baboon, we have actually taken several leopard off baboon baits. In the mid eighties we were operating on three ranches in the Mberengwa area owned by the Knott brothers. These areas were tough to hunt. The country around Mberengwa is mountainous and extremely well vegetated, and to make matters worse it had been wellhammered by poachers. There were limited populations of big kudu, zebra, impala, bushpig, warthog and duiker, but the main reason we built a camp there was leopard. The Knotts had been fighting a similar war to the Matobo ranchers. One animal, however, which was abundant here was the baboon. There were plenty of them and they came to hate us. My brother Sean was in his early twenties in those days and still playing rugby for Zimbabwe, so he was physically very fit. In order to chase troops of baboons through mountainous country you have to be fit – these animals cover ground at a serious pace when under pressure. Because of the scarcity of game we had to resort to hunting baboons for bait.

This was long before we began to specialise in leopard hunting and we had yet to move on to the beef bait strategy. Our hairy friends found that their free-and-easy days foraging around the ranch at leisure were over. I think the leopard in the Mberengwa area preyed more on baboons because of the scarcity of small and medium sized wild game. Thanks to Sean’s tenacity we were able to bait extensively with baboon and we took some fine leopards in the two seasons we operated there. On the Knotts’ ranches were several abandoned asbestos mines which had shut down in the sixties and seventies. These interesting sites were strewn with disused and broken equipment and the bush was steadily reclaiming the land. We found leopard sign around one particular mine and we set a baboon bait on a pathway between two massive asbestos-dust dumps. I hollowed a small cave out of the dust high up in one of these dumps and took two very nice leopard out of that spot. The first was taken by Hank Sumpter from Kansas and the second by Dave Faust who hailed from Alaska at the time. I often shudder to think what American lawyers would have written to me if my clients had gone home coughing! Fortunately Dave and Hank both became close friends of ours and never developed asbestos-related chest problems!

I should mention here that we have found that a leopard will not feed on a bait indefinitely. As stated before, a hungry leopard (or lion) will eat meat in poor condition. But I believe his body needs the many nutrients which fresh kills give him – blood, heart, liver, and fat, so even if he does eat your rotten bait, he will soon leave it and move on to hunt something fresh. When we are trying to keep a leopard on bait for a client who is still to arrive, we try to give the cat a whole fresh ungutted impala rather than another piece of drying, bloodless meat. That way he usually stays around a little longer.

Presentation of the Bait

We found out pretty quickly that hanging meat haphazardly in any old tree was not going to work in the western Matobo hills. What worked for us on government concessions and in the south eastern lowveld was not going to work here. When we first moved our leopard operations to the Ingwezi river camp on AJ’s ranches, there were still lots of leopard on these areas that had come through the hazardous times of traps and poison. With the introduction of safari hunting, these were the veterans and they were very hard to kill. As we gradually outwitted these cats, or as they died of natural causes, their offspring also grew up learning about people, cattle and ranch activities but they were spared the dangerous lessons on steel and poisoned meat. With the advent of safari hunting, these leopards now had a value. Traps and poisoning were over. These ‘new’ cats were easier to get onto bait and our success percentage climbed. But compared to uneducated concession cats, they were still at the top of the class.

Once the correct spot and the correct bait have been selected, all that remains is the securing or positioning of the meat. So many hunters have said to us, “come on, I can see how you have to select the correct area, where the leopard will find the bait, but surely once you have that spot you simply put up good fresh meat and the job is done!”. Not true. Learning the hard way – at ‘Murphy’s school of hard knocks’ – we have lost leopard opportunities which could so easily have resulted in success if we had known better.

We learned to address three main aspects when presenting the bait. We had to present the meat that the leopard liked, that he would want to come back to. We had to secure the meat in such a way that we would see the leopard clearly

when the light went on, and last, we had to ensure that other meat eaters could not steal the bait or ruin the hunt at a crucial moment.

I have mentioned before that under certain circumstances, when a leopard is famished, he will eat bait in any condition – dripping with maggots, meat that’s dried in the cold wind so that it resembles wood, and sometimes even meat that has been tainted with fuel! Graham and my wife’s cousin, Neville Rosenfels, has an American friend who comes out every year to visit and do a bit of unguided hunting. A few years ago these two ended up sitting in a hide which was no more than a casually erected light grass screen. Their ‘bait’ which had been fed on, was a cow that had been doused with diesel fuel and burned. I do not know the circumstances that led to this strange arrangement, but that night they shot a large male leopard! I was incredulous when I heard this story. I can assure you this is the exception to the rule, and it reinforces what I mean about the leopard being able to eat anything when really hungry. Unfortunately we rarely come across one of these desperate hungry old cats when we really need him.

In order to save time we always hang a piece of what my trackers call ‘smelling’ in the same tree as the bait. This ‘smelling’ is usually a piece of an old rotten bait from a previous hunt, or it is a piece of meat actually rotted prior to the hunt, specifically for this purpose. In this way we have good smell drifting through the bush as soon as we hang the fresh bait. In the winter months it can take up to two weeks for a bait to start stinking, so this smelly piece of bait, coupled with our practice of pre-baiting, gives us an advantage of time in hand. Flies, and consequently maggots, are not nearly as active in winter as they are in hot months and the bacterial breakdown of the baits is slow. In October, when it’s hot, our baits only last about a week before they have been reduced to disgusting green and black slime. In the winter months some baits will last up to three weeks, saving the hunter bait money, but hanging a piece of “smelling” alongside the bait is very important.

I have mentioned here “pre-baiting”. Perhaps this would be the best place to briefly mention this practice. Our piece of “smelling” certainly accelerates matters, but two weeks is sometimes not really enough time in which to coerce a big educated private land leopard onto bait. We give our clients the option of paying for pre-baiting. Not long ago my company carried out this function as a courtesy to the client, at no charge, but costs in Africa have entered the ‘ridiculous’ column and this service now has a reasonable fee attached to it. We usually commence baiting a week before the hunter arrives, in effect turning the hunt from a 14 day into a 21 day safari, as far as the baiting is concerned. It is certainly an influencing factor and one more arrow in the quiver.

So into the tree goes a piece of ‘smelling’, and the bait itself. We always try to imagine that the leopard, when he finds the bait, is not starving. We imagine him, standing there, having followed his nose to our bait, suspicious, looking carefully for signs of people, or of another leopard. We want him to feed. We want the bait to look appetising. I have mentioned previously that we don’t spend much effort in ‘dragging’ for our leopard. Drags, to be effective, would have to be done every day, or at least every second day, as the smell left on the ground burns off in the sun and the wind. In our situation, with 15 or 20 baits to check, there is simply not enough time, and not enough guts at hand to drag. Secondly, if we have sufficient stink on the meat, then the leopard is going to find the bait anyway. We’re baiting in his backyard and if he’s in the area he will find the bait. I mention dragging briefly here because it reminds me of one young PH who had accumulated all his experience on a government concession before finding himself in the university of educated leopards. This fellow, as he had been taught, would shoot impala, open up the guts, and drag the impala behind his vehicle before hanging it. The end result was a sand and dirt-filled carcass. Not ideal for the sceptical leopard trying to decide whether to hunt down a tasty hyrax or get stuck into some venison and sand. If enough of a gut pile was handy and a hunter had time, certainly it would not hurt to lay out a fresh drag every other day, but we avoided dragging the meat itself at all costs. We want it clean, fresh and appetising.

In the mid 1980s when we were still hunting the lowveld area on the Bubye river, I was guiding Pete Olarian, a hunter from Kansas City. We bad some maggot-infested impala bait on which a leopard had taken a perfunctory nibble. We shot a fresh impala and hung it next to the old one. While we were sitting for the cat that evening, he came in, exerted serious power, and ripped the rotten bait down, dragged it away a distance of about ten yards, discarded it, and then returned and fed on the fresh impala. I was very surprised by this action and wondered if the rotten mess irritated the cat in some way, or if he was trying to preserve the fresh meat longer, by getting rid of the maggots and flies. Whatever the reason, it did demonstrate that leopard obviously prefer fresh meat and will actually waste, or discard rotten meat for fresh. Still on the aspect of trying to present a ‘good’ or attractive bait to the leopard – when we offer impala to the cat, usually the skin is left on. Impala skin is thin and no problem at all to the leopard. Buffalo and cattle skin, however, is a different story. After about a week, these skins dry hard, like a shield, and the only animal which could bite or rip through it easily would be a hyena. A hungry determined leopard will force his way under this hard skin in pursuit of a meal, but once again, we’re trying to make things as easy as possible, so we remove it.

In 1987, when I first started hunting on Matetsi Unit Two, near Victoria Falls in north western Zimbabwe, there was a resident bushman tracker there who had grown up in the area. We commenced a lion safari by taking a very nice buffalo bull which we cut up for bait, leaving the skin on. This old bushman tracker told us that these lion in ‘his’ area, preferred baits without skin, and we should remove it. I of course knew everything and left the skin on. A week went by, and when, for the third time we found where a big lion had nibbled away just a small piece of exposed meat and then left, I began to think that maybe there was something in what the old bushman had told us. We stripped the skins away exposing soft pink buffalo meat, and several days later shot our lion. There are few things worse for a young professional hunter who is trying his best to impress his client than getting dismissive ‘I told you so’ glances from a native tracker. I can only think that in an area of plentiful game – like Matetsi – lions do not have to work too hard to secure a meal and maybe they couldn’t be bothered wrestling with a hard dried old skin when they can secure a fresh meal without too much effort.

When ensuring the meat is attractively presented, we will try to secure the bait with wire as inconspicuously as possible. We try to avoid long pieces of shining wire sticking out from where we have tied the meat, and we also try to rub the wire or even hide the wire with fresh guts in order to try to help entice the leopard into the first feed. Another lesson learned long ago at Murphy’s school was to make sure that the bait was tied around the leg bone itself, as opposed to through the meat and sinew cord only. All your hard work can be undone when the big cat rips through the sinew and disappears into the hills with your bait where he can dine at a place of his choosing.

In certain circumstances where we know we are dealing with a leopard who is wary of wire and steel, we try to shoot a mature impala ram for bait and then force the head and horns between branches so that the carcass cannot be dragged away. This takes some muscle and some bush engineering, but it can be done, and there is no wire alerting the suspicious cat.

Once a leopard has fed on a rotten piece of meat we do our utmost to ensure that a fresh piece goes up right away. We have had situations where we have been reluctant to tamper with a feed, and left the rotten meat alone, the leopard has come in, nibbled a little, decided the bait is not so tasty, then left. A good fresh piece of meat will usually keep the cat interested and in position long enough for the shot.

On just about every safari we come across a situation where a leopard comes right up to the bait but does not feed. There is no way of telling why the cat chooses not to eat. Maybe he already has a fresh kill somewhere and his belly is full, maybe he is wary, suspicious of the set-up. Possibly day is breaking when he finds the meat and he intends to return at night. Who knows? In these situations we use urine, and sometimes the whole bladder from a leopard we have taken previously. About half the cats we take have a usable amount of urine in the bladder, and this we bottle and store in the freezer, marking on the bottle the sex of the cat, and date and place at which it was killed. When we are faced with the problem of the cat that arrives but does not feed, we take the urine and rub it all over the bait tree, the bait itself, and around the base of the tree. There is no way in which we can measure the success of this manoeuvre, sometimes the cat will tear into the bait the following night, sometimes he just doesn’t come back, but I believe that this new leopard smell does distract a hesitant feeder from worrying about the man-aspect of the set-up and I believe it entices the cat to feed.

When presenting the bait, the second aspect which we take into account after the ‘attractiveness’ of the bait, is the situating of the leopard, or in other words – where do we want the leopard to be?

On government concessions, as described before, no hunting at night, or with a spotlight is permitted. The leopard must be shot very early in the morning, or late in the evening. Even though the law states that ‘last light’ is thirty minutes after the sun has crossed the horizon, every second of visibility must be squeezed out of the situation. If you are hiding in really thick bush, it will be darker in there at 18.25 hours than it will be in open savannah. Unfortunately, the bait and blind will more often than not be in thick bush, because that is where the leopard feels more comfortable and will most likely hit a bait in the first place. Because of this light problem, or more accurately, the lack of light, the hunters have to do all they can to silhouette the cat against the sky. I’ve read in many articles how the leopard is silhouetted against the red sky after the sun has set. This is not always true, certainly not in Zimbabwe because the prevailing wind is usually from the south-east, which means the hunters are facing south east, not the western evening sky. However, whatever the direction, it is necessary to put the bait quite high up. One must remember that if the blind and bait are situated in dense bush, it would be necessary to get the meat nice and high in order to avoid any background ‘clutter’ of tree limbs and leaves behind the leopard. It is surprising how late in the evening a hunter can see when looking from thick hidden shadow up into an evening sky. One problem here is that even though the cat can be seen clearly in silhouette, often the crosshairs of the scope cannot, and it is necessary for the shooter to know his scope well. If a leopard is wounded and makes off into the bush on a concession area, it is going to be devoured by hyenas or lions during the night. Another factor which comes into play when considering silhouetting a leopard, is to position the bait in such a way that the leopard will feed whilst standing sideways. This is not such a crucial factor on our Matobo areas because we have the benefit of a spotlight, and we will shoot at the cat in whichever position he presents himself. The cat, silhouetted sideways at last light in a concession area will offer the shooter an easier chance at the heart and lung area and a little more leeway in trying to centre his crosshairs. Also, because of the danger of the leopard running off and being eaten by hyenas, it is preferable, in a concession area, to anchor the cat right there, and this can only be done by not only taking out the heart, but by breaking one, or both shoulders. This is easier done with the cat standing sideways.

In our western Matobo areas, even though we have the benefit of the light, we still have to pay a lot of attention to where the leopard will be when he is feeding. When we are shooting at a cat which is eating a ground bait, we have to make certain that there is no boulder, stump, or ‘dead ground’ that the cat can disappear behind when the light goes on and the seconds are ticking away. Contrary to what some people say, the leopard is not comfortable in the light and will usually only offer the shooter up to five seconds to shoot, so those five seconds need to have the cat situated where he can be seen. The old adage “the poor animal freezes like a deer in the light” is pure hogwash.

For obvious reasons the leopard cannot have a great big branch hiding his vitals from the shooter whilst he is feeding. Valuable time will be lost whilst the hunters have to wait for him to move. When we have a bait hit, I will finish the construction of the blind and set the hunter’s rifle in the sandbags. Once that has been done, I empty the shooter’s rifle and seat him in the shooting position. I then climb the bait tree and position myself in various poses in which we may see the leopard. In each pose I point to my body where the shooter should fire if I were the leopard. In this way we can check that there are no obstructions in the way and the shooter gets a better idea of what to expect. When we’ve finished this exercise I like to rub the tree where I have been climbing with some bloody meat or guts to help disguise any scent I may have left there.

Occasionally we will come across a leopard that will not take a bait which has been secured in a tree. These cats may have had experience with wire snares before. The rural folk often set snares for leopard which have taken their livestock. Usually the dead calf or goat, or part of it, is placed at the end of a gently-angled tree trunk and then a snare is set over that trunk. The leopard pushes his way forward until the snare tightens where his neck meets his shoulders, and a horrible death ensues. So it is not unusual to find one of these “wire-wary” cats ignoring our offerings.

When we find an area where one of these finicky males moves frequently, we try to bait him in the normal manner. When we find his tracks at the bait and the bait uneaten, we have to assume that this is a cat with experience of wire or traps and we try what we call a ‘dumped bait’. We shoot a large male impala and hide the animal under grass or a bush in the riverbed or near a path where the leopard is walking. We cover the meat in order to hide it from the vultures during daylight hours. The impala is not gutted, nor is it tied down in any way; we try to leave it in as natural a state as possible. Often a cat who will not take a secured bait, will drag the impala away, like it was his own kill. Although this method works well, it is full of pitfalls and potential foul-ups. When we find, or are called to calf kills, we are faced with the same problems. The leopard normally drags the dumped bait, or the calf, into the koppies; or failing that, into the thickest bush he can find. So now the leopard has unknowingly dictated where we have to put the blind, and many times there is no suitable blind position. We have to make the best out of a bad situation. There is no choice really, after all, this is a cat who won’t eat a conventional bait, and we have to try every trick we can in order to be there if and when he comes into one of the ‘dumped’ baits which he has dragged into heavy cover. We learned that it is imperative when trying this method, that a large impala is used. A giant male leopard can pick up a ninety-pound impala in his jaws, raise his head back, and carry it away leaving nothing but his pug marks. We need drag marks in order to relocate our dumped impala, and drag marks made from a heavy impala are easy to follow.

When hunting on concession areas where the leopard (and lion) are feeding at night, one way in which they can be coerced into feeding during daylight hours is by utilising a slight variation on this “dumped” or “free” bait method. Because of the numerous hyena, the bait is draped over a branch or branches, well out of hyena reach but is not secured in any way. The cat comes in during the night and the bait is either knocked to the ground by mistake, or it is dragged away to another site of the cat’s choosing. The next morning the drag is followed and when located, a blind is built. The cat will usually come early into a situation such as this. Care has to be taken when approaching this relocated bait though, especially in the case of lion, because the cat may very likely be there guarding his meat. Not only could the hunter be in a very dangerous situation, but he could be scaring the cat enough to jeopardise its return that evening.

With the crucial aspects of presenting the leopard with meat that he will eat, and that he will eat in such a way that will enable us to get a clear shot at him, one final detail often presents problems, and that is the attention of other bait-eaters. Not only will these animals waste the hunter’s expensive bait – especially as is the case with honey badgers and hyenas, but they can create a  false-alarm situation, where the hunters turn on the light, and end up spooking the leopard which is nearby.

When “dumped bait” is used in a ground role, there is simply nothing to be done if one of these other animals finds the meat. It is unfortunately a necessary risk. Ground baiting with “dumped bait” is, after all, a desperate measure anyway, and most hunters will accept the consequences. Bushpigs, hyenas, badgers and jackals will often destroy a dumped bait in a single night. Sometimes there is a bit of meat left, but the whole “dumped bait” principle will be ruined. You want your leopard to find a natural-looking, large dead impala, so he will drag it away and stash it. You don’t want him to find a jackal-ravaged leg bone.

But the unwanted attentions are not limited to ground baits. Honey badgers and genet cats climb well and will feed on baits. Genet do not take enough meat to jeopardise a set-up, but they can trigger a false-alarm. Some PHs – my brother Sean included – utilise an electronic listening device to alert them to the presence of the leopard. They tell me that they can hear the difference between the feeding noises of the genet and the leopard and I can imagine that this would not be too difficult. I favour a warning line connected from the hide to the bait for reasons already discussed. On free-swinging bait, the genet can move the meat very easily, which in turn moves my warning stick, but we usually do not react to the gentle movement by a genet; a leopard will tear into the meat and the warning stick will gyrate in such a way that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the big boy has arrived. The problem is badgers, because they too will work the meat over vigorously, and if you’re using headphones, they sound like a feeding leopard, and if you’re using a warning line, the indicator stick will move as if a leopard is eating the bait. This, as mentioned, can trigger a false alarm and unnecessary shining of the light.

In order to get around this problem we have learned to “anti-badger” our bait. These determined animals are not in the same class as leopard when it comes to climbing, but they climb surprisingly well when you consider the shape of their body and legs and the fact that they do not have sharp retractable cat-claws.

If we have a bait hit by badgers, and we don’t want to remove the bait and start again elsewhere, there are two ways in which we ‘badger-proof’ the meat. The first is by using a length of thick (preferably 8 gauge) wire. The bait tree needs to have branches or a trunk which creates at least a three yard gap. Imagine a huge V, or an H that has not been crossed yet. We string the wire between these branches and hang the bait in the centre, equidistant from the two limbs, which create the V. The badgers cannot negotiate the ‘tightrope walk’ of the wire and they will move on. The other way is to cut a straight mopane tree about leg thickness and seven to nine feet in length. The bark is stripped off along with any little nubs or bumps which could help give a badger purchase. This pole is then greased with animal fat from the bait, then secured to the bait tree so that it juts out at about a 45 degree slope upwards. The bait is secured to the end of this pole so that it hangs about four feet above the ground. A leopard can reach it but a badger cannot, and the badgers footwork cannot negotiate the slippery 45 degree slope of the greased pole. It is hilarious to sit on a moonlit night watching these comical stubborn creatures trying every trick they can think of to get at the meat.

Hyena also create problems if the meat is hung too low. I have been surprised many times at the height that a spotted hyena can jump in order to get his teeth into a bait. Brown hyena, common in our western Matobo areas, will eat ground baits or low hanging baits, but they will not jump.

Humans, or more accurately, poachers, can be irritating bait stealers too. Many times we have had hunts ruined by people taking our leopard baits home to eat. When we target leopard which live close to communal land, or ranches where poachers are busy, we have to bait only with zebra or donkey meat. The AmaNdebele do not eat the flesh of these animals. Once I cut the hoof of a cow from a back-leg bait and in its place I wired the foot of a zebra but the poacher who found that bait was no fool. He left the zebra foot in the tree and made off with my haunch of beef.

Another spin-off from poacher activity that can screw up a hunt is the setting of long snare lines which the poacher fails to monitor. Several times we have found leopard tracks, baited the cat successfully, then found that he does not return. When we explore the area trying to see if he has made his own kill, we have found where he has fed on a dead kudu, or impala which has strangled itself to death in a wire noose. Our activity in the area has obviously scared the poacher off, but his deadly snares remain. Occasionally, when this has happened, we have taken down the bait, built a blind at the snared kudu, and have collected our leopard. Out-manoeuvring both leopard and poacher!

Vultures will completely demolish a bait when they find it. Fortunately there are not a lot of vultures in our Matobo areas but on government concessions they are numerous. All lion and leopard baits on these areas should be hung under thick canopy and the meat must be covered with leafy bushes. I have always been interested in the many theories that attempt to explain how vultures find meat. In big game areas they will glide into offal and blood remaining on the ground after a buffalo has been loaded, before the car is even twenty yards away! I read a report of a study carried out in the Amazon. These people were trying to find out how the vultures there located meat which was completely hidden underneath the jungle canopy. They finally decided that the birds could sense the heat which radiated from rotting meat! It is obvious that vultures have incredible eyesight and I understand this to have been scientifically proven. But how do these birds find a piece of meat hidden away for example in thick grass or reed-beds? The heat sensing theory aside, how do they arrive so quickly in such numbers? My tracker, Peter, and several other “bush folk” were not surprised at all by the question and were amazed that we did not know the answer. “They dream” he told me nonchalantly, “they become hungry, they dream while flying slowly in those great circles, and their dream shows them where the food is”. I see. No problem.

I believe that these sharp-eyed scavengers are constantly alert and aware of what goes on at ground level. They have to be in their line of work. They know what crows, jackals, eagles, hyenas, lions and leopards are. They even learn, in some areas, that safari hunting vehicles often produce food. This is most noticeable in Morromeau, in the Zambezi Delta in Mocambique. Consider this: a Bateleur eagle deciding to take a rest, finds your bait. He feeds on it for a few days. Two aggressive fork tailed drongos take exception to this eagle near their nest and begin to harass him constantly. A hungry sharp-eyed vulture, a thousand feet up, notices this commotion and glides slowly down for a closer look. He likes what he sees, and drops down. I believe that other vultures, each flying their own predetermined slow circle, are not only searching the ground but are jealously, constantly keeping an eye on their neighbour, and when he drops, they glide across and drop too. And so the domino effect goes on. They must watch jackal and hyenas constantly. But the staff say it is much easier for them to ‘dream’ the meat. Who am I to argue? I have seen and heard of stranger things in the African bush.

Chapter Five

In The Blind

In 1981, my first season as a professional hunter, I was based on a forty thousand acre cattle ranch between Tsholotsho and Nyamandhlovu. I did not know one other person in Bulawayo who was a professional hunter. Of course there must have been a few, but on my limited trips to the city my path did not cross with one until about 1983 when I met Ian Lennox. Ian and I became firm friends until his death in 2006. I mention this to illustrate a point. If a young, learning professional hunter is able to consort with others of his trade, he will learn about hunting far more quickly than one who doesn’t. Of course in the local rugby pub the hunting stories become far more exciting, the game becomes far larger, and the hero’s role in the recent hunt grows with each telling, but the fact remains, that by listening to other hunters successes and failures, many useful things can be learned quickly, in a warm congenial atmosphere – the easy way. These days professional hunters are numerous in Bulawayo and healthy tanned young men sporting khakis and bangles can be found in any social gathering. Unfortunately, due to the shortage of other professional hunters in Bulawayo in 1981, I had to learn through trial and error, and through whatever I was able to read. And therein lay the pitfalls.

When considering blind-hunting for leopard there are three main aspects that have to be appreciated. First where to site the blind, then the actual construction of the blind, and lastly what happens inside the blind.

Siting of the Blind

This was my first error. Like uncountable young hunters or adventure lovers the world over, when I was at school my young mind devoured any book that covered hunting or fishing or exploring of the wild places. Plumtree School boasted a well-stocked library and in my six years there I must have read every single outdoor book they had. “Hunter” by J. A. Hunter, “The Man Eaters of Kumaon” by Jim Corbett come readily to mind. Two things that I read in those days proved erroneous. One, that a leopard has a poor sense of smell, and secondly that your blind should be placed thirty yards from the bait! Had I known better, I would have achieved a lot more success on leopards than I did in my first few years of professional hunting. “The leopard has a poor sense of smell.” How on earth would somebody gauge such a thing? And why would nature, over millions of years, develop a stealthy, perfect killing-machine with one of its main requirements – sense of smell – deficient? I can only think that hunters have interacted with certain leopards, and those leopards have been downwind of the hunters, and because the leopards did not react, the fact that they were indifferent to the hunters’ presence, may have led to the belief that they have a poor sense of smell. The leopard is by far the most adaptable of the dangerous game. They live in so many different types of habitat and terrain, and they have different kinds of relationships with the humans near whom they live. In some areas, like north Africa, it would be the event of the year to see one. In other areas, like southern Masai Steppes in Tanzania, a sighting of a leopard would hardly be mentioned in the villages. The point here, is that yes, a leopard, in certain places, may be downwind of humans and not react. But that does not mean the leopard cannot smell them. In our areas of operation leopard smell well. Far too well, as we have found out the hard way.

Some years ago my wife and I were hunting the Nyaberrera -Naiburmut area in southern Masailand with Ron and Cynthia McKim from California.

The four of us bad walked in to a ground-tied lion bait, but no lion had found the offering. We did, however, see leopard tracks, and some of the bait had been eaten by this cat. We were not hunting leopard and we sat down in the open about 50 yards away to wait for the truck. It was about 5pm, and broad daylight still, when my wife noticed movement by the bait. Here was the leopard! It watched us carefully, walked to the bait, tore a piece off, then glided quickly back into the grass. It did this five times! How easy it would be if all leopard hunting was like this. But things at home in the western Matobo hills, were very very different.

The second gem was the thirty yard blind. National Geographic played a fascinating programme on how the big cats – lion and leopard, survived in the arid reaches of the dry Kalahari in Botswana, once most of the game had moved out following the weather. ln this film they showed a leopard hunting rats in the long grass. The cat would sit there still as a statue, suddenly one ear would swivel to the side, picking up the sound of a scurrying rodent. The cat would turn and slink slowly slowly toward the sound. Stop. Then pounce. One rat for snacks. I don’t know the exact distance that the leopard heard the rat’s movements. But I want to hear someone tell me that nature’s assassin can’t hear two stomach-rumbling, sniffing, moving, flatulating hunters in a blind at thirty yards!

My first bumbling efforts, back in the early eighties, came to nought. I can only think, looking back now at the first leopard I took, that it must have been absolutely desperate for food. My client and I were lying on our backs on a boulder about the size of two motorcars, about thirty yards from the bait. No hide, nothing. Just me, the client, his rifle and my flashlight. It’s hard to believe that I was that naïve about leopards. We killed that cat, and I can still remember today, 24 years later, the excitement that thrilled through me that night as I ran my hands over that beautiful silky pelt.

When I started my own company in 1985 we were hunting in the Kenilworth Estates area north of Turk Mine. We began to hunt with clients who were on general bag safaris with the option of leopard thrown in. Luckily these were not “specialised leopard only” hunts. We failed dismally. We enticed leopard to feed on our baits, and we built our hides between thirty and fifty yards away from the bait. Our hides were constructed flimsily from broken branches and leafy saplings. Every now and then we did take a leopard by pure luck, and that was enough to hoax ourselves into thinking that we were leopard hunters! A curious incident occurred at this time which I should mention here. The ranch we were hunting on was owned by three brothers based in Bulawayo. Henry, Jeff and Mark Sommer. The youngest brother, Mark, was a big, bearded congenial man and he seemed to be the hands-on man in the running of this particular ranch. One day he came up to our camp and asked if we would be interested in assisting the ranch with a problem cat which was decimating the cattle on the northern section of the ranch. I did not have a client at the time and so Russell Labuschagne, who was working for me then, accompanied me to the area on a reconnaissance to see if we could find sign of the problem leopard. We found sign a-plenty! A big male leopard in the company of a female was using two dry riverbeds and a cattle trail quite regularly. The male’s front right track was badly scuffed, and appeared to be bleeding. Every few steps we would find tiny smears and droplets of dried blood. We guessed, correctly as it turned out, that this old male had escaped from a gin trap, injuring himself in the process.

This ranch had plenty of impala, and Russell and I wasted no time in hanging bait in five or six spots. After a few days we found that two of our baits, about a mile apart, had been hit. Although we were slap bang in the middle of the cattle killer’s area, we could find no blood in the pugmarks. We wondered if possibly the wound had healed slightly, or if this was another two cats. Showing our inexperience we decided to sit together at one bait and put poison in the other. What we should have done was take one bait down and sit on the remaining one. However, we located a bottle of Gamatox cattle dip, and liberally injected the milky contents into the shredded meat. Zimbabwe at this time was still caught in the grip of the Matabeleland dissident problem, and bandits were roaming the countryside. Although there had been no reports of dissidents in this area we decided to collect one of the ranch militia men who was armed with a semi-automatic FN rifle, and leave him in the camp to look after my wife and baby daughter, and Russell’s wife, Muffy. This fellow’s name was Tangaai. He was a pleasant individual, smiling his big-toothed smile whenever an opportunity presented itself. Our collecting him that day saved his life. The leopards did not come to our bait that night (our blind was probably too close!). Early the next morning we heard three or four bursts of automatic gunfire to the north of where we lay. Camp was quite a long way to the south, but we were uneasy. We decided to motor back to camp. We found everybody there safe, and oblivious to the automatic fire which had obviously been too far away for them to hear. Reassured, Russell and I had a quick cup of coffee and headed off to check the poisoned bait. It was clear daylight when we arrived and we saw that the bait had been torn apart! This was the first and only time I had ever seen poison at work and I was amazed that these cats ate so much of this chemically fouled meat! It seemed as if they liked it! We were both excited but we were not sure how to proceed. One of the cats had vomited out a pile of the chewed meat about a yard away from the bait. The bait itself was in a small thorn tree which grew out the edge of, and hung over, a dry sandy stream bed about 15 yards wide.

Russell was carrying a 12-gauge pump action shotgun and I was carrying Russell’s open-sighted Mauser .308. We established that the tracks moved upstream in the dry riverbed for about 20 yards and then climbed out using a well-worn cattle track. I was a bit disappointed, as I thought that any cat who had eaten poison would be laying right there, stone dead. The tracks left the riverbed, and angled toward some low koppies about 300 yards away. Soon they left the pathway and we could find no sign of them. I cannot remember the reason, but I was not wearing shoes that day, so we decided that Russell would make his way toward the koppie, looking for sign of the cats. If he saw vomit or tracks, he would whistle for me. Because I was barefoot, I was going to carry on following the riverbed. Safe from the thorns. Russell left, and I made my way back into the riverbed. I had not gone fifty yards when I saw a set of leopard tracks coming back down off of the left bank into the riverbed. I was just about to whistle for Russell, and I don’t know why I didn’t. I decided to see if the tracks climbed out of the sand again, and I began following them. Another lump of vomit. I broke it up with my finger and found that it was warm inside. I now began to move more carefully, and took Russell’s old beaten-up Mauser off my shoulder. Time to pay attention. Not many yards further on I saw a thicket created by an overhanging branch of a Buffalo Thorn tree (Zizifus mucronata). I stopped. Under the thicket, in the shade, I saw movement. For some seconds I could not make out what it was. The thicket was about forty yards from me and suddenly it all came into focus! A leopard was lying down on its side, back toward me, head and neck up, licking something! Its head moved rhythmically, lick, lick, lick. I eased the safety off and the head stopped, swivelled around toward me, and I fired. The cat simply slumped down under the bush. I took about ten steps closer and fired again, but the body lay still. Russell whistled, then shouted far off to my left. I yelled back, reloaded, and walked carefully up to the still beast. It was a beautiful male leopard in the prime of life. Looking back with more experience, I would guess that it probably weighed about 140 to 150 pounds. Russell arrived and we examined our prize carefully. Indeed it was the cattle killer. His right front foot had been broken by something – probably a trap – and had folded over, as if making a fist. The break or wound, or deformity, was old, locked up tight with time. But because of this deformity, this cat bad to walk on the top of his paw, and a large black callus which had developed there was what had been bleeding. He could no longer catch and kill his natural prey and had turned to the “slow impala” – cattle, instead. We half-heartedly looked around for his mate but all we found were two more piles of vomited meat. My shot had hit this animal just touching the inside of the right eye and blown a hole out the back of his head.

We were overjoyed at this, our first effort at problem animal control! This brief interlude unfortunately has an unhappy ending. During the early hours of the morning a dissident group had entered the farm compound where the farm security were housed, and shot to death Tangaai’s two workmates while they slept. These were the shots Russell and I had heard.

Not long after this, the disgusting cowardly dogs ambushed and killed Mark Sommer on the same section of the ranch. Mark was a jovial, amiable, mild-mannered gentleman, well-liked by all who knew him. He was mourned by the whole Matabeleland farming community. Tangaai – convinced that we had saved his life and that it would be foolhardy to continue in his present employment – promptly announced that he was now working for us. He was a good man and served us well for many years.

Once we moved our operations down to the Bubye river in the south east, we began to gain experience and question our modus operandii concerning leopard hunting. Too many fruitless nights were being spent in the blind, often listening to the irritated grunting of a leopard moving away from us. Often that sawing, hollow, pig-like grunting is the telltale sign that things have gone wrong. Over the years we have found that leopard do not call when coming in to a bait. If they do call, it means they have found you, and they are irritated. We began to walk 360-degree circles around our failed set-ups in the morning. We found leopard sign. Either we were not positioning the blind effectively, in relation to the wind and the leopards’ approach, or we were too close. Or both. Things had to change.

Ideally, for illustration’s sake, assume that the wind is blowing from the east, directly to the west. Obviously the blind has to be placed west, or downwind of the bait. No problem. If the leopard is coming to dinner from the east, or north, or south, there is no problem. He will not smell the hunters in the blind as he cannot smell against the wind. But if the leopard is approaching from the downwind, or western side, then there is a problem. These were the things that we had to start paying more attention to. When we found that a cat was coming in to the meat from the downwind, or possible blind position, we put our blind off to an angle from the cat’s approach. For example, if the cat came in from the west, or even the south west, then we would put the blind in the north, or north west quadrant, this way keeping our smell away from his suspicious nose. Occasionally, this would not be enough. If the cat was coming again from the west, but from a long way off, then even if we had the blind 90 yards away to the north, the leopard could still pick up our scent as the wind straightened out into the airflow line again many yards away. To combat this problem we learned to use a double blind. A hundred and twenty yards from the bait is about the maximum that we use when erecting the blind. So using the above-mentioned problem, we would build a blind 120 yards to the north of the bait. This blind would have to be joined to, or part of a large natural obstacle, like the edge of a small koppie, rocks, or huge fallen tree, or even a dense clump of low, well-leafed bushes, not only for camouflage purposes, but to help screen our approach from the second, or double blind. The front of the first, or forward blind must be higher and wider than normal. This is because we would now build another blind, a hundred yards behind this first blind, in the same line-of-sight. A pathway about two feet wide, cut and swept absolutely clean of vegetation, has to be made to link the two blinds. We now leave the rifle, spotlight and battery all set up in the front blind, ready for action. The PH, client, mattresses and bedding all settle down in the second, or far blind. When the leopard starts feeding, the hunters move silently, barefoot, down the swept pathway up to the front blind. This method works very well when you have to counter a leopard’s risky downwind approach, or if the client is noisy in the blind. However, it takes a lot of time to prepare, and the approach must be completely out of sight from the feeding cat. This then, took care of positioning our blinds downwind, and safely away from the leopard’s approach.

Simultaneous to addressing the nuances of wind and cat approach, we threw the old well-written-up “30 yard blinds” into the dustbin. Obviously some people are quieter, or more disciplined, and in better health than others, but even for someone who may have been a sniper in Vietnam, it is just about impossible to remain absolutely still and silent for long periods. Cats are super-predators. Watch Fluffy on your lawn at home. Cats’ ears are forever twitching this way and that, seeking prey, an animal in distress, danger. It is sheer stupidity to wilfully damage your chance of success by trying to outwit a super predator at 30 yards. We were stupid! But not forever. Just about every hunter can hit a bread-plate at 100 yards off of a dead rest, so why were we risking everything by trying to get the client within 30 yards? Why were we trying so hard to get into position to hit a target area the size of a teapot (the cat’s vitals) at 30 yards? I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. I relied on what I had read and what I had heard around the fire.

Whenever we could, we now built our blinds at 80 to 120 yards away from the bait. And we began to have more successes than failures. We began to kill old male leopards, not just hungry females.

Once we corrected the distance of blind to bait, and once we started paying careful attention to where the cat came from and where he went to, and the variables of wind direction, we found, through experience, that there were a few other factors that had to be noted when positioning the blind. A close friend of mine, Ernest Dyason, is a safari operator from South Africa. As his business grew he was forced to start looking further afield for game for his clients. South Africa does not have many leopard, and consequently, does not receive many CITES export tags to enable these animals to be hunted in any significant number, and he began to bring his leopard clients to our areas. Like ourselves, Ernest learned a few lessons the hard way. In the late nineties we were still using the rustic camp on AJ’s property on the Ingwezi river when Ernest arrived for a leopard hunt. I cannot remember the reason that led to Ernest sitting on a bait near what we called “The Armchairs”. Whether he had found fresh tracks there and placed a bait, or whether he had found a calf kill, I do not recall, but we warned him about this spot. An enormous ridge of fortress koppies lies alongside, and right next to the Ingwezi riverbed at this point. These koppies are huge, climbing up to about a thousand feet above the Ingwezi and following the river for about a mile. This ridge of hills, at its northern point, nips into the riverbed itself and over the centuries the granite has been carved out and worn into all sorts of shapes, resembling jacuzzis, hot tubs, great round lumps the size of haystacks, and giant armchairs. Hence the name. These granite formations hold Ingwezi water long into the dry season and baboons, kudu, impala and small game water there at night. And the leopard like that area too. But the leopard not only like the Armchairs because of the water, and the game which the water attracts, they like it because there is plenty of good cover.

Ernest was in the blind with his client by 5pm. Everything was looking good. Wind was steady from the east, the bush noises had settled into normal routine. Ernest’s set-up was right against the northern edge of the hills, on the east bank of the river, facing east, toward the bait.

As he lay on his back contemplating the hunt, his client napped. Way up, at the top of the koppies in front and above him, Ernest watched a Black eagle. The eagle soared, then swooped suddenly downward. as if going for a hyrax. Several times it performed this manoeuvre. The eagle was dive-bombing something. Ernest reached for his binoculars. He had not brought a book and needed something to help pass the last hour of daylight. and eagle watching would work perfectly. He focused the binos, and exclaimed in surprise. “What is it?” his client whispered, now awake.

Ernest was watching a huge Tyson-headed male leopard, which was watching Ernest. It never even looked up at the agitated eagle. It was only interested in the folks in the blind. It crouched there in the late evening sun, about three hundred yards up, only its front feet, neck and head showing. What to do? Too far for a shot. No opportunity to sneak up on him. Ernest decided to wait. Dark fell in like a giant blanket and the cold came with it. One hour, an hour and a half. The dassies began their grating, chattering warning call. The leopard was moving. Another hour. Way behind them, maybe half a mile away, maybe a full mile, the irritated sawing grunt of a leopard moving away. That leopard hunt was over.

We had already been taught this horrible lesson. If we can avoid sitting for leopard anywhere near big koppies, we do. Leopard are lazy. Once they have thirty pounds of meat in their bellies they don’t want to walk the marathon. They want to sleep. They want to drink and then they want to sleep. So if you provide supper right next to the fortress hotel, you should not be surprised when your blind building afternoon is watched from the window. Not only do these giant koppies provide cover that encourages the gorged leopard to stay nearby, they also play havoc with the cooling air in the evening, swirling it haphazardly this way and that. We avoid them, and now my friend Ernest avoids them too.

Another factor that has to be considered when siting the blind, especially on big game areas, is game trails. Complications can arise when elephant, hippo, buffalo or lion are using certain trails and then they find you and your hide have arrived. In big game areas, thanks to Murphy’s school, we learned that tree hides, very high tree hides, are the way to go. These are discussed in blind construction so I will not elaborate here, save to mention that one feels considerably more at ease when lying thirty feet up, above a gang of lionesses at night, than one does down in the grass, at their level.

In our Matobo areas, once I have selected the best blind site according to wind and the cat’s approach, I check that site carefully for unpleasant things like cobra holes, red ant nests and bees, all of which can disrupt a leopard hunt.

In some areas of Zimbabwe there is something else to pay attention to when siting a blind, and that is Buffalo Beans (Mucuna coriacea). This unpleasant plant takes the form of a creeper, and this creeper sports small pods, about two or three inches long which are covered with poisonous hairs. This poison is made up of an enzyme which causes a fierce burning sensation, as well as seratonin which is a toxic irritant. Beautiful.

Towards the end of the Rhodesian war my unit was involved in a large airborne operation into Mocambique, codenamed Operation Urich. The plan was to attack and take the towns of Chocue and Barragem on the Limpopo river, blow the main bridges there and then take on the military base at Mapaai. We were dropped into a forward base deep in Mocambique in the middle of a large area of deserted, dry salt pans. Some of my troops were trying to tear down a parachute which had become tangled in a small thicket. It was late evening, and as I looked up at the ‘chute, I noticed a fine golden dust drifting down out of the tree onto the soldiers. There was a lot of it. It was millions of buffalo bean hairs, and these fellows were in trouble. One of them reacted so violently to the poison that his lips and throat swelled and his eyes shut tight. His breathing became laboured and the medics dosed him with antihistamine drugs, and the following day he was casevaced back to Rhodesia by helicopter.

I have suffered several times from the bean. I was hunting buffalo in the Zambezi valley escarpment with a gentleman from Colorado. This fellow wounded a nice bull which we followed for about an hour. Finally we spooked the buffalo at the edge of a small valley, in the middle of which lay a dense thicket of jesse.

As the bull crashed off I saw a large domed anthill about 20 yards to our left. I sprinted for this hill, forcing my way through several small, dense bushes, and when I reached the top I looked down into the valley and saw our buffalo going hell-for-leather for the jesse. I managed to tumble him with a .460 bullet to the hip, and while he was thrashing around we made our way down to him and my client finished him off. It was a hot day and we were sweating like hell. We hadn’t even taken photos before I began to burn. I was on fire! Damned buffalo bean hairs covered my waist, stomach, legs and most importantly, my crotch. I couldn’t help myself and began to scratch like a madman, but the burning just got worse! ln my frenzy I ripped my clothes off and poured some drinking water onto the ground, making a small mud puddle. I then grabbed the mud and rubbed it into my crotch and rear end, but the relief was brief. Seconds later I was on fire again!

It must have been quite some sight I presented there in the bush, and everyone except me started to find it amusing. My trackers were distressed at my discomfort, but there was not much they could do, and when the client started laughing it was all they could do from not doing the same. Their hands came up to their mouths, and when I tried to lie there in the small puddle, my tormented raw genitalia completely on display, they had to move off into the bushes. It would have been very poor form indeed, to just stand there laughing at the boss’s equipment.

Finally the old government game scout came over and told me that there was only one way to fight the bean and my way was not going to work. He said that I had to just sit there, close my eyes, and not move for five minutes. He said I was definitely not to scratch. Well I was desperate, so I did what he said and it was hell sitting there I can tell you. But he was right, the pain ebbed and finally became bearable.

I couldn’t put my buffalo-bean-infected clothes back on and I must have been a picture walking through the bush, back to the vehicle, with nothing but my rifle and mud-covered nether region.

The last consideration in siting blinds pertains mainly to concession or wilderness area hunting, and that is situating the blind in such a way that you can enter the blind, and leave it, undetected. This is no easy matter. Country-wide, even on private land where you can legally hunt at night, the standard procedure seems to be to sit for the leopard until nine o’clock or thereabouts. Maybe the PH assumes that the client can sit no longer. Maybe he himself can sit no longer, or maybe that hot shower and cold beer around the fire is just impossible to resist. We changed this procedure a long time ago for two reasons. Firstly, no leopards are ever killed in camp. In order to kill a leopard, the hunter has to be in the bush. Yes, in most instances a leopard will be in to the bait between 6pm and 9pm. The majority of leopard we have taken have come in during those hours. But what about the rest? Who is so successful that they can afford to throw away twenty percent of their chance? Not us. We decided very early on that this was a whole night thing. This is, of course, much harder on smokers who need a nicotine fix, and for people who cannot keep still. Some of the biggest cats we have ever killed have been taken in the late hours. Ralph Kieley’s monster at 3.30am, and Fred Herbst’s beautiful male at 3am. I even took a cat once at 6am in the morning after sitting for four nights in a row!

The second reason we put a stop to this 9pm exodus from the blind was because several times, as the hunters stood up and started talking and packing up, the leopard, who was within fifty yards of the blind, gave a startled cough and made off, never to return! There is a way of working around this problem, however, and that is by situating the blind where the vehicle can drive right up to it. This way, as long as the hunters keep absolutely silent until the vehicle is right alongside the blind, any cat nearby who hears and sees the vehicle approach, can be duped into thinking that the danger, the vehicle, has been and gone and has not had any influence on the bait on which he has been feeding. But it is imperative when using this vehicle ‘pick up’ ruse, that the vehicle does not switch off and load and unload anything from the blind, because the cat will go and investigate if it sees activity there. The car must approach slowly, the hunters must get in quietly and quickly and the car must move off. This trick works very well on lion in concession areas when used in reverse. Lions are quite often found on the bait at any hour of the day and when this happens the hunters are faced with the problem of how to get into the blind without being seen by the lions who may be lying in long grass nearby. Once again the vehicle must drive sedately up to the blind and if possible it should park between the blind (but right next to it) and where the hunters think the lions are. This way the hunters move quickly and quietly into the blind unseen by the cats and the vehicle continues on its way. I have taken several huge old full maned lions using this method, sometimes before the vehicle is even out of earshot!

As stated, we do not enter or leave the blind during “leopard hours” unless we have taken a shot. Our leopards are wary, educated, untrusting and smart. The risk of giving away our presence is not worth it and we make the blind comfortable enough for a 13 hour vigil.

But since we are discussing cat hunting in detail I think it would be negligent to leave out this section on blind access in big game concessions. Because of the illegality of night hunting, blinds have to be sited in these areas so that the hunters can get into them and leave quietly and unnoticed by any cat who may be lying nearby. I have taken more big old lions in the early morning on baits than in the late evening. I am not sure why this is. Possibly the big old cats are too wary to come into bait in daylight, and only come in to the meat in the dead of night and are a bit tardy in departing in the morning. In all these cases we have had to make a silent approach to the blind in the

cold blackness of predawn between 4am and 5am. Because of this necessary night-time approach, it does not make sense to place a blind out in the deepest furthest reaches of bush where the clearing of the approach path turns into a major engineering task. It makes better sense to be able to use an existing road as the major part of the approach, so therefore the bait-blind set-up has to be positioned with this in mind right at the start of hostilities. Once again the influencing factors are wind and the intended trophy’s movements. The perfect set up on these big game areas for lion, leopard and even hyena is for the bait to be situated below the blind.

Imagine a large plateau with a hunting road through it. We would make a swept pathway from this road, into the wind, right to the edge of the plateau. Here we build the blind. The bait is placed below the plateau and hopefully is fed on by the fellow with the large feet and thick black hair.

At 4am we leave camp, driving slowly. About a mile from the swept pathway, we see the toilet-paper-wrapped stick which we have set up the day before to mark the place where we need to start walking in. We stop the car and disembark. Rifles are cocked in the cold predawn starlight, and we walk slowly for the measured mile along the hunting road. We come to another toilet paper marker. This is our path to the blind, and it is about two hundred yards long. We sit down and remove our shoes. Our toes are cold and our noses running, we are trying our hardest not to sniff. It is about 5am and still black.  Our eyes are now accustomed to the adequate starlight and to the east a pale hint of dawn flirts with the edge of the earth. We now stalk carefully, slowly, step by step toward the blind. We stop. Cracking, tearing comes from the bait. We shuffle the last few yards into the back of the blind, hearts hammering, the cold forgotten. I ease the hunter’s rifle onto the sandbags, he moves in behind it, looks through the scope but it’s too early still; we see only a huge grey shape moving with the hanging meat. We wait for the sky to lighten… This is how a blind approach takes place. It is one of the most exciting things that can be experienced on safari.

This foot approach obviously has a big influence on siting of the blind when hunting on big game concessions. It is a tricky thing, sneaking up on a feeding leopard – they seem to be more aware, more alert than a lion, but if the blind and the approach path have been set up correctly, it can be done. I have made a careful approach and found our leopard on the bait, already feeding, several times on big game concessions and l know of a few other PHs who have enjoyed similar experiences.

Building the Blind

I have already mentioned my feeble but surprisingly successful attempt with Borge Hinsch in the Matopos in 1983, where I had no blind at all. Obviously any blind was going to be a step in the right direction. The done thing, it seemed in those days, was to construct the blind from whatever was at hand – normally cheksaan (guarrie bush) which is an evergreen, densely leafed bush, without thorns, which breaks off easily and grows in most game country. Very handy. Spending so much time as a schoolboy in Matetsi Unit 5 with our friends the Landreys, (Denda Safaris) had exposed me to lion blinds. When Trevor, Kim and myself were not chased out of the way we loved to help construct blinds whenever the opportunity arose. Both in the Kenilworth area and the Bubye river area we used to make our blinds from bushes and then finish off the camouflage with grass. The procedure was to first clean all grass and plants off the designated blind floor area so that only soil remained. This was to cut down the noise factor of crushing twigs and other debris underfoot. Next, we would just pile the previously described bushes on top of each other in a circle around the cleaned floor. The more bushes you piled, the less see-through

was your blind. The end result was a great big new guarrie bush where there had not been one before! One of the problems with these blinds was the noise created every time somebody bumped into the blind walls (twigs, leaves and grass), and with each day that went by without success, the leaves became deader and dryer and noisier by the minute, until you were left with a brown, crackling, see-through blind! One thing which hadn’t clicked in those early days, was that we were building something new in the leopard’s front garden. He may have lived on this twelve thousand acres for more than ten years! Obviously a leopard probably does not remember every bush in his home range, but any new construction, resembling a tribal goat or cattle enclosure was going to draw attention. However, we did score some successes.

Thanks to good old evolution we graduated to what everyone in our camp referred to as “sides” or more accurately “ma sides” as the African staff said. If we were leopard hunting we would press down bundles of cheksaan in the shape of an oblong, about 3 yards long by 1.5 yards high. The bushes were pressed and held into place by saplings and wire. The compressing effect rendered these sides quite effective for camouflage, making the hide much less see-through. There were less noisy pieces to brush up against and they were quick to erect. We used to keep a pile of these sides ready to go in the event of one of the baits being hit. It took about four or five sides wired together at the corners to complete a blind, and minor last minute touches were carried out with bundles of grass and handy leaves. Once again drying up of the foliage limited the lifespan, and they often fell apart under rough treatment in the back of the jeep. But these sides were a big improvement as they helped cut down our time building the blind, and there was less disturbance in the bait area breaking branches and saplings. We later went on to sides constructed from bundles of dead grass. These were completely non see-through and we used them for many years with much good effect. Their only draw back was once again coming apart occasionally in the truck, and also their bulkiness. In the late nineties I started experimenting with various types of material, and I took quite a number of nice cats out of blinds made from hessian (burlap to Americans). I used to paint the outside of the hessian in various camouflage designs and then lay a few bushes and grass against it which completed the “blending in”. The main reason we went on to material as opposed to the grass sides was that occasionally, especially when hunting on government concession areas, we would come across fresh kills (especially lion). If a hunter can capitalise on this by ensconcing himself into a blind immediately, and letting the hunting car carry on, he will often be successful before the sun even approaches the horizon. We needed quick, quiet blinds. The painted hessian worked, but still had weaknesses. Branches placed against the PVA-painted surface, if blown by the wind, made a very man-made, synthetic dry scratching noise. Secondly, the shelf life was not good. The hessian tore easily at the corners, and at slits, which we had cut for the rifle to peep through. We finally moved on to what we found as the perfect solution. I now use grey blankets painted on one side with the same PVA paint camouflage designs. The blankets are durable, easily packed and transported, completely non see-through, and most important, they are noiseless. With sufficient wire and eight hide blankets we can construct a perfect hide in thirty minutes. So much for the material used to make a blind, and how we arrived there. Once again it has to be stated that this leopard hunting business is a very personal, individual thing. Each PH has his own ideas and preferences and cannot be swayed from them. (Although I must say that if someone had shown me how to make a leopard blind using blankets back in 1981, I would have grabbed the idea with both hands, and I would have killed a hell of a lot more leopards than I did!).

I know several professional hunters who use tents as a blind; both the popup variety made specifically for hunting purposes, and just normal back-yard variety tents.

In my limited experience with these, I have found that they are very noisy, both inside and outside and they (certainly some of the ones I’ve seen) create quite a significant new “lump” or feature when completed, and require quite a lot of clearing in order to set up. More noisy activity. Two advantages though which have to be acknowledged, are firstly that the wind, or smell of the hunters, is contained in a closed tent, and negates the worry of a last minute shift in wind direction, and secondly in the case of wet, cold guti weather, a tent is obviously protective and warm. Each to his own. I personally prefer to lie on my back listening to the noises of the bush, and contemplate the fascinating night sky, than sit in a closed tent.

Before moving on to an important aspect of hide building – tree blinds – I will describe our procedure in setting up a blind in order to create a clearer picture for the interested layman.

Remember, when the bait is hung, we have already chopped and cleared an unobstructed shooting lane to where we will build the blind in the event of a hit. This way there is no great noisy chopping activity once the cat has fed, which could alert him should he be lying nearby.

When we arrive at the bait and see that it has been eaten, we walk carefully around, ascertaining what manner of cat has eaten, and in what direction he has departed. Assuming that his departure or pathway does not walk to our blind site, we immediately unload the blind blankets from the truck, and take them, the wire, and pliers to the already previously cleared spot. We then rake and brush the ground, removing all remaining pieces of grass and sticks. Once this is swept clean, we wire up the blankets forming a U-shaped open-ended enclosure. The corners are all wired securely together. While two of us are doing this job, others have walked about a hundred yards or so behind the blind and are gathering camouflage in the form of leafy bushes and grass. These people are not chopping with a panga (machete) or axe, but gathering the camouflage as quietly as possible by hand. Once the blind sides are up, we lay two blankets on the floor of the blind, and we then place two foam mattresses on these blankets. The blankets muffle any scratching noises that could be made by the mattress moving against the ground. If we have the sleeping blankets (these are warm brown clean blankets – not the dirty painted ones!) in the truck, we now make up the two beds. Each bed is made up with three blankets and a pillow.

Once the beds are made we then securely wire up the shooting sticks. These are usually mopane saplings about wrist thickness. If the particular setup requires the hunter to shoot standing, they will be about six feet in length, if he is shooting while sitting, they are about three-and-a-half feet in length. We use six of them. The sticks are wired in such a manner that two tripods are made, and only two legs of the rear tripod are actually inside the blind. These run flat against the front blanket of the blind so that they are unable to be kicked over. The other tripod is set up outside the front of the blind.Once these are dug into the soil a little and wired absolutely securely with no movement evident at all, a sock filled with sand is fastened into the top of each tripod and the rifle is then tamped into these sandbags in such a way that it lines up on the bait. The sandbags (sand-socks) will cradle the front of the stock, and the butt of the rifle, not the barrel. Vibrations travelling inside the barrel, caused by the explosion in the cartridge, can throw a bullet out of line if the barrel is resting against an unresisting surface. Only the back half of the rifle now juts out into the blind. The front half protrudes through a slit in the front blanket. Later that afternoon, when we arrive to sit for the cat, we secure the rifle to the sandbags and tripods with two strips of rubber, each about two feet long. The rifle is now completely secure and even a mistaken bump in the night will not move it off line from the bait. I now check that the rifle is empty of bullets and I seat the hunter as he will be sitting for the shot. I then make my way forward to the bait and position myself in various poses that the leopard may be in when we turn on the light. The hunter aims at me, and I indicate on my body the various angles that the bullet would need to enter. I can never get used to the uncomfortable feeling of being aimed at. Once the hunter is happy with the set up, we rub down the area where I have been moving around, with blood and guts, or meat in order to disguise my scent, and we then secure my warning fishing line to the bait, and unroll it back to the blind. My tracker now takes a leafy cheksaan bush and sweeps the whole area, obliterating all tracks. This is not only for the purpose of removing our sign; we do it so we can have a clean page to read from the next morning. We can now see clearly what transpired during the night, and we don’t have the problem of arguing over which tracks are yesterday’s and which are last nights. Occasionally, when the ground and soil type are too hard to accept spoor, we will empty a bag of soft dust around the base of the tree thereby enabling us to see who has come to dinner. Once the area is swept, no one will walk there until we (hopefully) go in to pick up the leopard, or walk in the next morning to see if anybody came during the night. We now pick up all debris and wire and tools at the blind site and camouflage it carefully. It must blend in perfectly. Whenever possible we build the blind on to, or behind, a large natural obstacle like rocks, big fallen dead trees, anthills, live trees or clumps of bush; that way most of the camouflage is already taken care of. We now leave the spotlight and battery in the blind and remove the rifle and return to camp. When we return in the afternoon we will reseat the rifle, cock it, and close up the back of the blind. Job complete. So much for our standard ground blind.

Tree hides are an important, often-used part of our cat hunting strategy, with both lion and leopard. On concession areas we use them primarily for safety purposes. On private land we use them for several different reasons. Often, when a calf-kill or any other natural kill has been dragged off, it will be stuffed into the thickest brush available to the cat. Once we have followed the drag and found the kill, we are faced with the problem of situating the blind in a position where this kill can be seen clearly. Obviously if there is a hundred yards of thick brush between the blind and the kill, this is a problem. The cat has fed and may be bedded down not far away, so chopping out a shooting lane would not only drastically change the “scene”, it would create too much noise and activity. If a suitable tree is growing anywhere between 80 and 120 yards away and is downwind from the bait, we will erect a tree blind. The blind is built as high as possible in the tree and enables us to see over the brush. Another reason we like to use tree blinds is wind. In some situations, especially when we’ve followed a drag into hilly country, the wind can be influenced by these formations and can become fickle in the late evening as it cools. By getting up, as high as we can, we like to believe that we are minimising the chance of our quarry catching our wind. Most air currents flow parallel, or upward, seldom do they flow down. The third reason is related to the second. Old educated leopard, who have been introduced to blinds before, will often walk in a big circle around their kill before they come in, and if the hunters are waiting there, he will find them. If we are able to climb up to the top of koppie and find enough flat ground there to make a blind, or if we are able to put a blind thirty or forty feet up in a tree and keep  quiet enough, we can, and do, sometimes get lucky; the big cat does not detect us on his 360 degree inspection.

Once again trial and error shaped our plans over the years. For many years we used saplings and trees to make our tree platforms. These are labour intensive and cumbersome to work with and often creak when someone moves around on them. The hunters have to possess a certain amount of practical sense too, or disaster, ushered in by Murphy, is sure to appear. Some years ago a well-known professional hunter was hunting with his party next door to Graham’s ranch. These fellows were after leopard and one of their baits which was placed against some koppies about 70 yards from a farm road, was hit. The PH erected a fairly rickety tree blind right next to the road, and in order to brace it more securely, he strung a long piece of wire from the blind to a stump across the road. That evening he and his client were comfortably seated waiting for action, which arrived via the farm tractor and trailer, which was on its way back to headquarters from a nearby paprika field. The fact that the brace wire was across this road, had by this time deserted our man, and they lay there ignorant of the impending mishap. The tractor ploughed into the wire and the blind was torn from its moorings. Client, battery, light, rifles and other paraphernalia came crashing to the ground. The only thing severely damaged was the PH’s ego and reputation, but things could have been much worse.

A colleague of mine from Bulawayo, Wayne Van der Bergh, was hunting on a ranch in the Gwaai Valley with his client from Uruguay. They were after lion and managed to entice two big hairy males on to bait. Wayne and his trackers built a tree blind in a Rhodesian teak tree nearby and that evening they settled in. During the night the tree blind collapsed, and Wayne and his client fell to the ground thirty feet below along with all their equipment. Both hunters were rendered unconscious by the fall and when they came to, they discovered that Wayne had snapped an ankle and the South American had several broken ribs. Off they went to Bulawayo where they received medical attention and a few days later they were back in the Gwaai. They continued their cat and mouse game with the same two lions and finally closed accounts with the bigger of the two! Wayne’s bush engineering skills may not have been tip-top, but his hunting tenacity was faultless!

I have spent many nights in tree blinds in the African bush and I count them in the memory bank with those things, or places, or times, that are marked ‘glad, good, satisfied to have done this’. You’ve worked hard, you’ve planned carefully, and now once again you’re the schoolboy sneaking onto forbidden property with your catapult, knowing that there are big fat green wood pigeons in the thick dark orchard ahead – you have the same exciting sense of anticipation. What will the morning bring, what will the night bring? Stars seem closer, the sky cleaner, the Milky Way’s twinkling smoke seems touchable, and the African night’s symphony is acute. You can never forget the querulous sad cry of that jackal, and you will remember the first far-off lowing of the lion until you die.

I have had no collapsed tree blinds, but one embarrassing mishap doesn’t fade. I was in a tree blind in the Lowveld with a hunter named Steve White, waiting for leopard. At about midnight we decided to throw in the towel and we both snuck into our blankets and went to sleep. We emerged with the dawn and began to pack our kit. “Where’s your rifle, Steve?” He scratched around to no avail. We found the .375 Sako at the bottom of the tree, where it had fallen during the night. But now, snapped off at the stock, it resembled a long pistol. I imagine a herd of feeding brontosaurus would not have roused us from our slumbers that night! My “alert as a predator” woodsman reputation suffered badly at the telling of this tale.

As mentioned, we originally made large comfortable tree blinds, as high as we could get, from cut mopane poles. This was time consuming and heavy labour and noisy to erect. In the Matetsi concession where we were hunting lion, we got around this problem by building about half a dozen tree blinds at known good bait sites, entry points and drinking places at the beginning of the season. Obviously we could not do this with our leopard, as it just took so many different baits, their positioning dictated by so many different factors, that it was not practical.

We finally developed metal bed-like platforms, which were strong, silent and easily manoeuvrable. These are tied to the branches with good strong nylon rope and are very quick and easy to erect. The normal mattresses and blankets go on top of these and the camouflaged blanket sides are tied around the outside. They work very well and I have taken many good trophies, both lion and leopard from these hides.

If the hunter is too heavy or a little too senior to climb well, we make long ladders from mopane poles in order to get him into the blind. I have never had cause to use a dug out “bunker-blind’”. They too are time consuming and labour-intensive, but if somebody had a kill or a bait that had been fed on, and the area was devoid of cover, then this would be the option to use. Leopard very rarely, if ever, leave their kill in the open, so this would apply to lion hunting. A hole is dug large enough to accommodate the two hunters and their kit, and a roof of poles is laid over the top, leaving a slit in front to shoot from and let in air. Soil is packed on top of the structure and it is then camouflaged.

I have taken both leopard and lion from man made structures which the cats, over time, have come to accept as harmless. Structures like abandoned buildings, concrete water tanks, windmills, grain bins, mine dumps – once we even took a leopard from inside an abandoned dilapidated farm trailer! Flexibility and imagination are certainly a great help in outwitting the big cats.

Inside the Blind

Any prospective cat hunter has got to appreciate that what he or she believes, at home, about what quiet is, is very, very different from what quiet really is. Many hunters of course have walked in true wilderness like Alaska and northern Canada, and if they have been able to get away, alone, far from the horses, other hunters, nowhere near a chuckling stream, then they may know what quiet really means. Because outfoxing Matobo leopards is all about quiet. It’s about silence. Much of the attention of our blind hunting, in construction and in siting, is focused on this noise factor, moving our noise further away. But it does not end there. There can be no noise in the blind. The whole hunt, everybody’s hard work, can be ruined in one second of ill discipline. It has happened to me many, many times, and it is infuriating. The easiest way to paint a picture of what goes on in the blind – nearly all of which is moulded around the noise factor – is to walk through the hunt, from settling in, to the actual shooting.

At around two o’clock, shortly after lunch, I introduce the hunter to Harry. Harry (there are two) is a life size cardboard cut-out of a leopard. He is in two poses, sideways and sitting front-on. Harry has beautifully placed holes around his shoulder/heart area. But he also has holes in his guts, back leg, and, in all seriousness, his tail. Some of my baits, also, have bullet holes in them. We set the hunter’s rifle up on the shooting tripods and sandbags, exactly as he will be in the blind. We do this while he is having lunch. He does not know what is going to happen. We want to put him into a situation where he does not know what to expect. We put him under pressure. A bait is hung behind the camp, and Harry is propped up as if eating the bait, or maybe nearby, as if approaching the bait. A blanket is held up by two of the staff immediately in front of the now seated rifle; these two will drop the blanket at my signal, revealing the bait and Harry to the shooter. We make sure that these two fellows have ear protection. Standing in front of the muzzle, especially of a rifle with one of those ridiculous muzzle brakes attached, is extremely dangerous if one is without ear protection. We get the shooter organised behind his rifle, round chambered, safety off. All the time I am putting him under pressure. “Jim, you’ve only got five seconds. Find the cat, centre your crosshairs, squeezeoff. Don’t waste time, don’t jerk the trigger! Are you ready?” All the staff are around us watching, and usually Jim’s hands by now are shaking. I signal the two men to drop the blanket. I start counting loudly. “One, two, come on Jim, find the cat, where’s the cat? Four, five, six”, BOOM!

More often than not the cardboard is badly hit, missed, or the bait has been shot. “I couldn’t find him, I didn’t see him, I didn’t know what to look for!” All this in broad daylight! But it is good. It helps the shooter, and many times I have had clients thank me for this preparation after they have their leopard in the salt. I think it helps get rid of the nerves and it helps give the hunter an idea what to expect. We usually do this three or four times, changing the pose each time. Then we check the zero of the rifle against a target one last time. We’re now ready for the cat. Every time we have done this, the hunter’s shots have been progressively better each time. Harry is completely and utterly dead. The client is confident.

I used to try to get the clients to nap while in camp, but it is almost impossible. They are too wired for the hunt. We check our equipment, load it up, and this is the time that any medications need to be taken. Every time I sit in the blind I will take Sinutab, or a similar product. It is not a good idea to take the red tablets – the ones with benadryl in them, as these make one drowsy. These Sinutab pills dry up the nose and sinuses and help prevent sniffing later on in the blind. I put two spare pills in my shirt pocket. Sounding like a real drug addict, I will often take one Nobese or Lem Slim, or other diet pill. These things are loaded with caffeine and will keep you awake beyond

normal duty hours. Some PHs I know take Bioplus to keep them awake; whatever works.

I should mention here a very common misconception that people have about their own abilities. When we tell our hunter “Jim, you must be awake between 6pm and 9pm. This is when most of the leopards come in. You cannot be snoring and grunting and making all the strange noises that sleeping people make when the leopard is coming in”! Just about every single client we have, chuckles dismissively and says “Hell, I don’t need to sleep so early, don’t worry about that”! and I want to tell you that my guess would be that more than 95% of my hunters will have to be jabbed in the ribs to stop them snoring, exactly in those crucial hours of six to nine! It is really quite surprising. These people are spending more than ten thousand dollars, plus considerable effort in order to shoot a leopard, but they are asleep within an hour in the blind! I cannot count the times where I have witnessed a hunter, who has spent these large sums of money, take the very real risk of undoing everybody’s hard work by giving vent to a full-volume cough in the blind! Our cat has fed the night before, the blind is built and we’re all settled in. It’s prime leopard time. But suddenly the hunter coughs out loud! I cannot understand it!

If I had spent ten thousand dollars trying to get into position to take one of the most beautiful trophies in the world, and that prize looked within reach, I would be smothering my head in blankets and pillows trying to stifle that cough as much as possible. I certainly would not be coughing out loud as if I was back at the board meeting! This idiotic move is usually followed by a half smile at the PH and a very unapologetic “Sorry”. I usually answer with something along these lines. “Don’t apologise to me, Jim, I’ve taken many beautiful leopards – you should apologise to yourself, you’ve just blown ten thousand dollars and two weeks of your own time!”

We’re packed, zeroed and medicated by 3pm and we take off for the blind. Of course some set-ups are only half an hour from camp while others can be two hours away, so we plan our departure so that we will be at the site by four thirty. We need to be settled in by five thirty at the latest, so that the birds and natural bush sounds can return to normal before nightfall. I stop on the way in to see if anybody wants to relieve themselves one last time. It is not good practice to leave the scent of human urine around the blind area but unfortunately this does have to happen occasionally.

At the blind we unload our kit. Rifles, binoculars, toilet paper, books, cough sweets, water, food and cold-weather clothing. Anything with a wrapper, like sandwiches or cough sweets, is unwrapped. Water bottles are unscrewed. We set up the hunter’s rifle on the sand socks, strap it down with the rubber strips, cock it, put it on safe, and make sure one last time that it is aiming exactly where we are anticipating the leopard to be. I check that my warning stick and line are working perfectly. I check that the spotlight is working perfectly. All this moving around and checking has to be done with the staff present. Once the vehicle moves off, there can be no movement or noise, the cat could be on his way in, believing that everybody has left. We have to presume, all the time, that he is nearby.

We now close the back blanket of the blind, the two hunters are inside, and the staff make any last-minute adjustments to camouflage. I like to stand up when I put the light on, because pushing the spotlight through a prepared hole in the blind wall can be noisy and it can restrict my view of the bait. So now I stand up, making sure there are no branches in the way of the light. We remove our shoes. It is truly amazing how much noise a human can make without being aware of it. Put your goose-down jacket on, and go with a friend at 1am into the woods where you cannot hear traffic, where there is no running water. Seat your friend 60 feet away and ask him to put on a pair of those headphones which enables you to hear better in the woods. When you are both ready, cross your arms and then your feet. This is what the leopard hears in the night. But he can hear it at a hell of a lot further than 60 feet. See what your friend says. Unless he is impaired be will tell you that if you wear those clothes you will kill no leopards on your African safari. So we remove our shoes. We clear our throats, cough and sniff for what I hope will be the last time. The trackers receive instructions about where to sleep, what time to pick us up, and they drive off. I have described to the shooter exactly what will happen if the leopard feeds. We are prepared. We click off the safety catch.

I cannot emphasize enough how important the choice of clothing is when hunting leopard, and how unsuitable most clothing that comes with hunters over to Africa is, in general. Not only for inside a blind, but for all kinds of hunting. Europeans seem to utilise far more sensible clothing than the Americans. I do not know why that is. Americans seem to consider light khaki (almost white) safari gear as necessary for Africa, and most of our clients purchase this impractical range. Europeans tend to stick with the far more realistic bush colours of green, grey and dark khaki. If one were to attempt a stalk across an open grassland, say after reedbuck, then light khaki will work. Just as someone hunting polar bear or Dahl sheep will wear white, to blend with the snow. But outside of that example of hunting in dry yellow and fawn grass, those splendid pale safari suits stick out like black coveralls on a snow field. Research says that animals don’t see colour. This may be so, I don’t know. But they also say that they do see contrast, and I believe this. A white safari suit moving in the green/grey scrub so common in Africa, is contrast. This simple lesson is brought home so often to us in a safari season. We lose the tracks of our wounded kudu. The staff spread out in a semi-circle at the far end of the open grassy vlei where we’ve lost the sign, they are maybe three hundred yards away. I lose sight of them. Later I decide to look for them. The first, and only person I see, is the one in light khaki overalls. He attracts the eye. He is not blending with the bush. The other staff, all in drab olive, are invisible. Light khaki safari gear looks great in airports, hotels and catalogues. It is not practical in the bush.

We recommend olive greens, grey-greens and dark khaki to our hunters, and we always ask them to bring a plain old ten dollar sweat suit for wearing in the blind. They are warm, and more importantly, they are silent. Back to the blind.

I have told my hunter, “Please, from 6pm to 9pm, be alert, and quiet”. Six is approaching. The evening cools quickly once the sun has been sucked into the sand in Botswana behind us. Francolin fossick around us as they prepare to roost in the trees for the night. This is leopard time. We quietly pull on our tracksuits and pull the blankets over ourselves. I have found that the more comfortable a person is, the less likely he is to move around. Seven thirty slides past, then eight.

There is a small pond, or dam about two hundred yards beyond the bait. At ten minutes past eight I hear two Blacksmith Plovers suddenly tink tink tinking their alarm call at this dam. They are ground roosters and something has spooked them into flight. Is this him? Is he drinking before coming in? A dassie calls. It must be our cat!

I move silently out of my blankets and motion my client to do the same. Rather move now, while he is still a good distance away. Eight-thirty-five… My warning stick shivers slightly. It moves just a little. Then it bends over double. All our hard work, all our plotting and planning is now bearing fruit. Our leopard is feeding.

In our early years, before we moved our blinds past the 80-yard mark, I used to rely on my ears to warn us of the cat’s arrival. My hearing like many other soldiers, had suffered damage in the Rhodesian war, but my ears were not as defunct as they would later become thanks to muzzle brakes, off-the144 shoulder shooting, and clients shooting near my head without being asked to fire. At fifty yards you can hear meat tear and bone crack. At a hundred yards my wife can hear it but I cannot. There are several warning systems used by professional hunters in leopard hunting. I had never heard of anyone using fishing line before we tried it, but we found that it worked perfectly. The line must be strong or else it snaps constantly from general wear-and-tear and also when the cat hits the bait. If you are asleep at one o’clock in the morning and the leopard snaps the line, you wake up at one-thirty or two in the morning, sleepily check your stick, find it still, and go back to sleep. Problem, he’s eating away at your bait but you don’t know it. We use 80-pound deep-sea line which has some sort of coating on it which prevents it becoming all  tightly coiled and sprung with use. I have used the same roll now for about six years. Admittedly it is 500 yards long, so I don’t know how much has disappeared with constant use. I do not go cat hunting without it. Usually we will have our bait in a hanging position so that when the line is secured to the bait and pulled up tight, any movement of the meat will move my warning stick which is secured to the other end of the line.

The “warning stick” is a thin sapling or stick which resembles a fishing rod in size and thickness. When we first started using this method trial and error again taught me a lesson. We used to cut a sapling and leave some foliage attached to it at the top. This way, if I was asleep, the rustling of the shaking leaves would wake me. On two separate occasions I stood up, turned the light on and saw that the leopard was halfway between the bait and the blind walking towards us! We never took the first one but we did take the second. It was only after the second time this occurred that we worked out what had happened. Both of these were still nights. No breeze, and no rustling of vegetation. When the leopard started pulling the meat toward himself he noticed the noisy flailing of my warning stick (bush) 80 yards away and came to investigate! Very bad. From that day on I used a cleanly stripped stick only. Lying down on the mattress, I position the stick in such a way that I can see

it clearly against the sky without my having to move around too much. On a really dark night, cloudy with zero moon, I will hang a white piece of bone about a foot underneath the end of the bent stick. This makes the movement easier to detect. Through spending many, many nights in the blind, it has become a habit to wake every half hour or so and check the stick. Quite surprisingly, I manage to accumulate enough sleep during the night to feel quite rested the next day. But my warning system is not perfect.

In the early nineties I was hunting with Ron and Cynthia McKim from California. Ron was on a general bag hunt at Marula, with leopard required, but not as a be-all and end-all. If we got one, great. We had baits out and one or two were hit by females, but Ron wanted a male or nothing. Ron had allowed one day at the end of the hunt for shopping in Bulawayo. On the penultimate day in the bush, we came across a big male leopard track on Graham’s eastern boundary about two miles from the mountain camp. It was late in the day and as hard as we tried, we could not come up with any bait. When we arrived back at camp that night we found that Ron’s friend John Peck, who was hunting with Graham, had shot a trophy impala. This animal had been completely skinned and gutted, not a very natural looking bait! I decided to make the effort and just take a chance. I sent George with the impala carcass and told him to just dump it at the gate where we had seen the track, not to worry about drags, or blood, or wire, just leave it on the ground. It must have been after 8pm by the time George got the bait down. It worked! The next morning – our last day – we went to see what had happened to our last-minute, last-ditch, effort. The leopard had found our impala, sans skin, and dragged it about two hundred yards away into thick low bush where he had fed on it. We were ecstatic. This situation called for a tree blind and we had one erected by lunchtime. We settled in by 5pm and I felt very confident. But Murphy was watching. The wind came up and brought drizzling guti with it. It was horrible, our tree was swaying this way and that and of course my warning stick was bending constantly with the movement of the tree. It was not moving erratically enough to be a cat, but twice we checked with the light just in case. At about 11pm we crawled underneath our damp bedding, tired, wet and miserable.

Cramped, stiff and furry-mouthed, we sat up at dawn. I noticed that the bait was in a different position than it had been when I had last seen it. It was bright red and well-eaten! Our leopard must have come in the early hours of the morning when we were dead to the world. I was irritated at my failure. I told Ron that we should try again that night, but he declined. He had promised Cynthia that this last day would be spent in town. We all packed up and went into Bulawayo. At about four o’clock, shopping finished and restaurant bookings made, Ron said to me “If this was your leopard what would you have done?” I answered “If that was my cat I would be in the car right now, going like a bat out of hell for Marula”.

“You mean there is time?” Ron asked.

“We would be cutting it fine, but it would be worth a try”.

We took my wife’s low-slung town car in order to travel at the speed required to enter the blind before dark. Ron shot the leopard, a beautiful hundred and forty pound male before 8pm.

So the fishing line works well, but in very windy weather it is not a hundred percent effective. When we have a calf kill or other ground bait to sit over, it requires some cunning manoeuvring of the animal’s back legs in order to set the line so that it will move when the leopard begins to feed. We do this by crossing the far leg over the one nearest to the blind and pulling it up tight. This way, if the leopard approaches any of the meat in the back end (his favourite feeding place) he will move the line. On really windy nights I bypass the stick and tie the line directly onto my hand.

One word of caution regarding using the fishing line method for early warning. If the hunters are sitting near a stream or waterhole, then it is possible that some sort of wild animal may walk into the line during the night, causing a false alarm. Cattle are famous for this. But another place not to string the line is across pathways or bush roads. I was hunting with a fellow named Chad Farace, and we put a tree blind high up in a mopane tree overlooking a stream/road junction. Unfortunately I had failed to register that it was a Sunday, ˗ drinking night for the local population. At about 8pm we heard a noisy bunch of inebriated travellers approaching down the road. Irritated, I waited until they were about ten yards from my bait, then I put the light on. Stunned hardly describes their reaction. My warning line was taut across the track and I issued instructions to the group about avoiding it. I wasn’t surprised when the cat didn’t appear and we soon nodded off. Just after midnight my warning branch began to shake and I quickly surfaced from dreamland. I could hear a thrashing about at the bait. Chad sat up too and I urged him behind his rifle.

“Something there Chad” I said “Safety off?”

“Safety off” he replied.

I hit the light. An old drunk native woman sat in the road hopelessly entangled in my line. “Jeez” said Chad quickly raising his rifle and flipping the safety back on. We were quite shaken and it took us a few seconds to recover. I yelled at the woman but she was befuddled by drink and the strange events unravelling around her, so she paid little attention to the loud voice coming out of a bright light in the sky. Her legs were not working in unison, but the old crone still managed to scuffle and stagger quickly off, dragging my now snapped line behind her. A piece of it must have still been wrapped around her skinny old shinbones because I heard her go down one more time  before she moved off once again complaining and jabbering to herself all thewhile.

We laughed like hell and realized that the night’s hunt was over. Chad took a nice cat later in the hunt, and that, coupled with the memories of the old hag sitting in his crosshairs, provided us with some fireside chatter back at the camp.

I should mention here another use for the fishing line warning system. On government concession land you have to shoot your leopard in daylight. No night hunting.

As the last of the daylight is swallowed by the coming night. and your leopard has still not arrived, you are desperate. You felt so sure that today was the day. You feel that he’s nearby, the wind has been good and steady – whydoes he not come in? Is he one of those who only feeds in darkness? It’s time for the ‘escaping bait’ trick.

Without making any noise in your blind, you jiggle the fishing line vigorously, causing the bait to swing around and agitate – almost like it is alive. If the leopard is nearby, guarding his meat, he’ll be up that tree and onto that bait like greased lightning. Maybe he thinks the bait is trying to escape, I’m not sure.

A few years ago I was hunting with a fellow named George Aldredge in southern Tanzania. We had a female and male leopard hit our bait. The first evening we sat, the female came in alone. While we were waiting and watching her, the wind changed and she left. The male did not come in. The next day we moved the blind further away and at a different angle to the bait in case we had been compromised. At last light a leopard came in, climbed the tree and promptly lay down on a big branch near the bait. I had no chance at all to sex this cat and the last of the daylight was disappearing fast. I began jerking our warning line and the leopard merely turned its head and looked at the bait.

In desperation I now really put my back into it and that hartebeest leg began to swing around in the tree like one of those rides at the fair. I was scared the line would break. The cat stood up slowly, ambled over to the meat and snagged it with his right paw – and showed us his nuts! George whacked him perfectly and he was a beautifully marked old male.

Many PHs use various kinds of electronic listening devices to alert them to the cats’ arrival. Some use a light bulb tied into the tree above the bait and wired back to a rheostat dimmer switch in the blind. The theory being that you can turn up the brightness of the bulb by such small increments that the leopard will not be spooked. All these things work to varying degrees. The reason we do not use them is that safari work is hard on equipment, and the more equipment, the more gadgets you have, the more chance you’ve got of something going wrong. And go wrong they do. Twice this last season, a friend of mine has had his equipment break down at crucial moments. First was the listening device and the second time it was the rheostat. He had to wander down to the bait at eight o’clock at night to fix the wiring! By some miracle, they shot that leopard. But once again I don’t want to lecture on what the “correct method” is. I can only explain why we choose not to go the “hi- tech” route. Another primitive, but effective way of alerting yourself to the leopard’s presence is by organising a “booby trap”. If the bait has been hit in a rocky area then a large rock can be balanced precariously, in such a way that when the meat is moved the rock falls away onto other rocks, creating significant noise. Similarly, a dead branch can be balanced in a tree. I have only used this method twice. It worked, but I would worry that an already wary, nervous leopard may scare himself with the sudden noise. I have mentioned previously how small cats could trigger a false alarm, when using a line, but with experience one can tell the difference in movement created by a genet cat and movement created by leopard.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to test several kinds of night vision equipment brought over by clients and until very recently have found them all worthless. Invariably they require too much help from another light source, like full moon, campfire or normal lights. They work around camp but not out in the bush. Some even make an ultra high-pitched squeal, obviously a no-no for leopard hunting! It would take a very serious piece of equipment to see a cat a hundred and twenty yards away on a black night. I saw such a piece of equipment in 2005. A fellow from Brazil had this equipment with him and its clarity was astonishing. Its price tag also, was astonishing, which really takes it out of our leopard-hunting box. But this would be ideal in order to confirm what was eating your bait.

Another way that we are alerted to the leopard’s approach is by alarm barks and snorts from game, such as kudu and impala. Cattle also occasionally warn us. In 2005 I was hunting with Bill Dunavant and his daughter Audsley, who hail from Memphis. We had eventually managed to entice a large cattle killer onto bait. Cattle killers are wary, and to make matters worse, it was full moon too. We erected a double blind set-up in case the cat carried out a 360 degree check before coming in. At about midnight galloping cattle with loudly jangling bells woke us. Could this be him? Fifteen minutes later Bill nailed the killer, a beautifully coloured huge male in the prime of life. All that remains, in our described hunt is to pull the trigger. I wait until the hunter is ready, when he is seated firmly behind his rifle, I stand up and put the light on. We have already discussed in camp what will happen. He is to find the cat in the crosshairs and wait for my word to shoot. This is necessary as the culprit may be a badger, or some other animal, or the leopard may be in an impossible position to shoot. Usually, however, the conversation, in a loud whisper, goes like this. “Shoot Jim, it’s the leopard. In the chest, shoot!” A few small observations on “blind etiquette” which may interest the hunter. I often hear this – “Tobacco is a natural smell, like bushfire, it is no  problem to smoke in the blind!” or “If a leopard can smell my cigarette, then it can also smell our body odour!”

Obviously these are offered vehemently by the smoker. I am not a smoker, so this point with me doesn’t apply, but some of our PHs are, and they do not smoke in the blind and we do not permit our hunters to smoke in the blind. The very act of organising and lighting the cigarette is more action, more noise. We try in every single way we can to cut down on noise, and smell. We try to be as unintrusive to the bush and the leopard as we can. Why then would we cut corners on smoking? A cat that has lived his life sneaking around trouble, around people, knows that the smell of tobacco means people, dogs and danger.

In the past twenty five years the rattling phlegmy crackle of a smokers cough has ruined more than a few of our leopard hunts. Luckily, because of the development of hound-hunts, a heavy smoker can still get his cat. Every so often we are faced with the “have to pee” client. This is just one of the things that there is no way of “banning”. Over the years we have tried various receptacles that a person can pee “quietly’’ into. There are none. We have found that the quietest way of getting this job done is by rolling to the side of the bed and urinating onto the ground. Very little hassle. Should this become a big issue, there is nothing for it, but to use the double blind, where one can move about a lot more freely. This double blind (made far away) is about the only answer to loud snoring too, although most people should be able to stay awake for four hours or so. For those folk who are able to stay awake until nine or ten o’clock but then snore like machinery, we find it best to do the “jeep to hide” trick and go back to camp.

A few years ago I was after leopard with a fellow from California. We managed to entice a notorious leopard we had named the Chavakadze male, onto a ground bait. I was thrilled as this was not a student at our University of Smart Cats. He was a professor, and I wanted him badly. The lady stayed at camp while the husband and I sat. By 5.30 he was snoring. This, though, was not snoring. It was a hideous, loud pig-like roaring that sounded painful. At first I was perplexed and worried. I woke him several times but it seemed he was not interested in the cat at all! After that I was totally angry and resigned myself to the fact that we were not going to see any leopard. The Chavakadze male added another few notes into his already bulging book on leopard hunters and never showed himself.

At ten o’clock I dragged my mattress and blankets a hundred yards away so I could at least salvage a decent night’s sleep. My hunter never even woke up. A few days later we sat on another feed, this time a medium male. Our man now knew his severe limitations as a hunter and decided that we would only sit until 9pm. We left the blind at 8.30, educating that cat too. The icing on the cake was when he arrived home and complained by letter, to me, that he never even had a chance at a leopard! Thankfully, in my business, occurrences such as this are not common.

By Craig Boddington

The zebra is Africa…but it’s not that simple!

The zebra is Africa’s most recognizable animal, requiring no description. Although related to both horses and asses and of the same Equus genera, the zebra is indigenous only on the African continent, and evidence that it existed elsewhere in prehistory is unclear. In Africa the zebra is not found continent-wide, but occupies an extremely broad range across East and Southern Africa. There are actually three species of zebra: Plains, mountain, and the Grevy’s zebra. There are, or were, seven races or subspecies of plains zebra and two of mountain zebra; the distinct Grevy’s zebra stands alone.

All zebras are primarily grazers, social animals that form into herds. Typically, these are harems with a dominant male and his mares. With both mountain and plains zebras these are permanent bonds, but Grevy’s zebra groups are temporary, with the males wandering off on their own after a few months. With all zebras, surplus males form bachelor groups. Size of the herds depends on population density and available grass and water; mountain zebras, usually in harsh habitat, are found in smaller groups—twenty is a lot—while plains zebras can form into large herds.

All visitors to Africa want to see this signature animal, and indeed they’re marvels to observe… it doesn’t take long before the seemingly nonsensical stripes make perfect sense: In shadows the zebra’s camouflage is amazing. Even in sunlight the stripes merge and blend…and imagine what a predator, sans color vision, is observing in black-and-white.

I am not a casual visitor to Africa. I love to observe her wildlife, but I make no secret that I am a hunter, always looking with a hunter’s eye. So, with zebras, I am studying the striped patterns and trying to locate the stallion in the group. This is fascinating…and often difficult! I must also make no secret that I enjoy hunting zebras! Sorting the correct animal from the herd is an interesting and sometimes frustrating puzzle. The fully utilized meat is unusually marbled, and a zebra rug seems almost an essential safari memento!

Because of their resemblance to the horses we love, anti-hunters, many non-hunters, and even many hunters are shocked at the thought of hunting a zebra. The best answer I have to the question, “How could you possibly kill a zebra?” comes easily: “Only with great difficulty!”

But, back to this matter of stripes.   

BLACK AND WHITE?

Portrait of a Burchell’s zebra, probably a mare because the neck seems a bit too thin to be a stallion. On the shoulder the upside-down “V” marking can be seen. With a broadside presentation, this chevron offers a perfect aiming point. (Photo by Dirk de Bod)

The three species and several races of zebras vary in striped patterns, but universally have vertical stripes on the body and horizontal stripes on rump and legs. The several plains zebras have stripes all the way to the belly, while the mountain and Grevy’s zebras have a white belly, their vertical stripes stopping short. It’s commonly believed the zebra is a white animal with black stripes, but recent research suggests the opposite: The zebra is a black animal, with white added during development. While some varieties have distinct striping, all are pretty much black and white, except – the young mountain zebras have undertones of brown that remain on the face in maturity. And several races of plains zebra have noticeable “shadow stripes” between the black and white bands that can be brown, gray, or muted.

So, which zebra are we looking at? There are hybrid zones, and today there are differences between historic native ranges and current distribution. The three species remain pure, at least in the wild – plains zebras, mountain zebras, and Grevy’s zebra do not interbreed! But some of the subspecies, and exactly where they range today, is a bit messy. Relatively little precise DNA work has been done because, after all, a plains zebra is not a mountain zebra, and the endangered Grevy’s zebra is very distinctive. Here’s a rough guide:

PLAINS ZEBRA: The plains zebra is Equus quagga. The type specimen, the quagga, E. q. quagga, became extinct in 1878. Once numerous, the quagga lay squarely in the path of South Africa’s settlement; the last wild quaggas were in Orange Free State. A few skins and photographs of one zoo specimen survive, so we know the quagga had vertical stripes on neck and shoulder and a dark body, perhaps with muted stripes. There are six extant plains zebra races, though not all authorities are in complete agreement.

Most widespread and numerous is the Burchell’s or “common zebra,” E. q. burchelli. This is the zebra most prevalent in South Africa, the southern three-quarters of Namibia, and most of Zimbabwe and Botswana. This zebra has the most prominent shadow striping, although zebra stripes are like fingerprints – no two are exactly alike!

Farther north is the Grant’s zebra, E. q. boehmi, found from Zambia’s Kafue (west of Luangwa) north through western Tanzania and on up into Kenya. This is the zebra I hunted in western Zambia, central Tanzania and Masailand, and southern Kenya. Grant’s zebra is slightly bigger than Burchell’s zebra, with mature stallions weighing up to 700 pounds. The big difference: This zebra lacks shadow stripes and has an extremely beautiful black-and-white skin.

This is a Selous zebra taken in coastal Mozambique. The Selous is a smaller zebra with beautiful black-and-white skin. Once seriously threatened, good management has brought this zebra back to huntable numbers.

Chapman’s zebra, E. q. chapmani, is the zebra of Caprivi, adjacent Botswana and Zimbabwe, and southern Angola. Chapman’s zebra is a large zebra, up to 800 pounds, with shadow stripes much like the Burchell’s zebra. A major difference is that younger animals are more brownish than black, and some Chapman’s zebras maintain the brownish tint into maturity.

In northeastern Zambia and on up through Malawi and into southeastern Tanzania the zebras are Crawshay’s zebra, E. q. crawshayi. This is the zebra of the Selous Reserve and adjacent areas. I have found that this is a big zebra, generally with narrower stripes than other plains zebras, but with slight shadow stripes on some individuals

The signature “Christmas tree” marking above the tail of a mountain zebra, where vertical stripes meet horizontal stripes on the hips. Both Cape and Hartmann’s mountain zebras have this characteristic.

GREVY’S ZEBRA: To my thinking Grevy’s zebra, E. grevyi (a unique species with no subspecies) is the most beautiful of all zebras, sort of a pin-striped zebra, found in northern Kenya, Somalia, and up through Ethiopia to the Danakil Depression. Grevy’s zebra is the largest of all zebras, weighing up to 900 pounds, with big ears, more like a wild ass, while other zebras are more horse-like in appearance. Regrettably, the gorgeous Grevy’s zebra lives in bad neighborhoods and is seriously threatened, and as few as 3000 remain in the wild.

CURRENT OPPORTUNITIES

A common waterhole scene at Namibia’s Etosha National Park, where Burchell’s zebras roam in the many thousands.

(Photo by Dirk de Bod)

Well, it took me 40 years, but, except for the long-gone quagga, I’ve actually seen all the races of zebra! The only time I’ve seen Grevy’s zebra in the wild was in Ethiopia’s Danakil in 1993; even then they were completely protected. The tide seems to be turning, with the remnant population stable, but it is highly unlikely Grevy’s zebra will ever return to huntable numbers. In March 2017, in Uganda’s Karamoja District, hunting along the boundary of Kidepo National Park, we saw a couple of herds of Sudan maneless zebras. The manes are not quite absent, but clearly not the long, stiff manes of other zebras.  This zebra, too, is protected and has not been hunted since 1983, when hunting in Sudan ground to a halt. The population is stable and probably not endangered, but this zebra’s range is limited, so it is definitely vulnerable.

All the other zebras are huntable today, depending primarily on where you are. Burchell’s zebra is, of course, widespread and numerous. Grant’s zebra is the zebra you will hunt in western Zambia, and central and northern Tanzania. You’ll love the black-and-white skin without shadow stripes! In Mozambique’s Marromeu complex the Selous zebra has been brought back from the brink and is hunted. The annual quota is just a handful; you need to speak up well in advance if you want this set of stripes.

Among the zebras, it is probably least clear exactly where Burchell’s zebra stops and Chapman’s zebra takes over. Without question Namibia’s Caprivi (now Zambezi Region) is the best place, and these are pure Chapman’s zebra, but, as with the Selous zebra, the quota is small, so you have to speak up.

In Zambia the Luangwa River is said to be the boundary between Grant’s and Crawshay’s zebra, so this one is fairly simple: You will be hunting Crawshay’s zebra in the Luangwa Valley, and in the Selous and adjacent areas, but Grant’s zebra lies to the west and north.

Thanks to game ranching, permits are available for the small and utterly gorgeous Cape mountain zebra, but they cannot be imported into the U.S. The larger Hartmann’s mountain zebra is readily available throughout much of Namibia, also thanks to game ranching. A huge boon to ranchers, mountain zebra and plains zebra don’t interbreed, so today many areas offer both Hartmann’s and plains zebra. I’ve never known anyone who wanted to make a collection of all the zebras. It would be impossible, and also silly: Several are visually indistinguishable. But wherever you are, the “local zebra” offers a good hunt… and a lovely set of stripes!

IT AIN’T THAT EASY

Putting things in perspective! The zebra is a large animal, weighing up to 800 pounds…but dwarfed by this eland bull, easily in excess of a ton! (Photo by Dirk de Bod)

As I said, you will often obtain that zebra rug only with great difficulty! If you’re a “horse person” or you’ve ever done any horseback hunting, you know that equines have all senses tuned and are amazingly aware of their surroundings (if only we could instantly understand what they’re telling us!). Zebras have all this, and more… they are among the wariest of animals in the African bush or, as our PHs say, “the most switched on.”

Zebras are extremely difficult to approach and difficult to fool. Unlike some animals, their eyesight is sharp, and their ears and noses are keen. All of this is compounded and conflicted by a simple physiological fact: Zebras are uniquely difficult to sex! It isn’t just that they are without characteristics like horns or antlers! The stallion’s junk is very tight between the hind legs. In open ground you might get a glimpse, but in long grass or thornbush habitat, never.

A zebra was at the top of Caroline Boddington’s wish list on her first safari. She took this big Burchell’s zebra with Carl Van Zyl. A single shot to the shoulder chevron with her 7mm-08 worked perfectly.

The absolute mandate to shoot only males depends largely on the local population and herd dynamics. There is no shame in taking an older female. Stallions fight viciously, and mares usually have skins that are much less scarred. However, all things equal, in most areas we try to take only stallions. But not always. There is evidence, especially with mountain zebras, that, depending on local population, it can take a long time for a stallion to come into the herd. So, it’s not cut-and-dried, but typically a major hurdle in any zebra hunt is to identify the stallion.

There are many clues. The zebra stallion is generally larger and has a thicker neck; mountain zebra stallions have defined dewlaps. More important is behavior: The stallion can be the leader and will frequently bring up the rear, tending his mares, but he is rarely in the middle.

You have to keep looking, waiting for that glimpse, and take in all the clues. My first Hartmann’s zebra, in then-South West Africa 40 years ago, was in a little valley straight below us – no way to see anything from that angle. We watched for three eternities, and finally took the shot based entirely on behavior. Correctly, we took the stallion. Last year, in the Eastern Cape, we had a small herd of Burchell’s zebra feeding and milling below us, it wasn’t straight down, but the brush was up to their bellies, nothing to be seen. We watched and waited; there had to be a stallion, and we thought we knew which one. After a tense hour the most likely candidate turned away, and for just an instant I saw testicles under the tail.  

TOUGH STUFF

Zebras are a favorite prey of lions. A leopard is probably unable to pull down a mature zebra, but they love the fatty meat, so zebra is preferred bait for many leopard hunters. (Photo by Dirk de Bod)

Legend has it that “all” African game is extremely tough. This is not true, but zebras are very tough! Hit a zebra poorly and you will be in for a long day with unknown chances for recovery! The books say, depending on the subspecies, mature zebra stallions range from 550 to 900 pounds. Having shot quite a few but properly weighed none, I have no idea, but I figure 700 to 800 pounds is about right. Whatever, it’s a big animal and very strong!

The target area is large, and there is often an upside-down “V” of stripes on the shoulder, offering an inviting aiming point. With or without that guide, the middle of the shoulder is the right place, one-third up from the brisket. Center the shoulder with a good bullet that gets in and does its work, and there will be no problems. Flub the shot, and chances for recovery depend only upon the exact location of the hit and good tracking. Over 40-odd years I’ve only seen a couple of zebras lost, but I’ve been on some very long tracking jobs!

Zebras are often taken for lion or leopard bait, which means you need a zebra down now. The best-case scenario is to whack a zebra on the shoulder with a .375 – game over. However, I have seen zebras taken very cleanly with mild 6.5mms, 7mms, and .270s, and the great old .30-06 is awesome. But what really matters on zebra is shot placement. You gotta do it right. If you don’t, a lot of extra foot-pounds may not matter. These animals are tough.

Both of my daughters, despite teenage girls’ affinity for horses, put a zebra at the top of their wish lists on their first safaris. (Knock me over with a feather!) When questioned, one said, “Well, my Mom tells me zebras are really tough and hard to hunt, so it sounds interesting.” Unsolicited, both copped to the real reason: “Well, I’d really like a zebra rug for my room.” Fair enough, who doesn’t?

Only partly joking, wife Donna has often said, “No girl has too many zebras.” This has created a monster. She has nine nieces… and each one now wants a zebra skin, whether as a wedding or graduation present. We’ve covered some of them, but not all. At least I have an excuse to keep hunting!

THE BEST HUNT

Hunting with PH Carl Van Zyl, Donna Boddington prepares to take a shot at a Burchell’s zebra.

Difficulty always depends on terrain, vegetation, numbers of animals, the wind… and blind luck! Once in a while a zebra rug comes easy with a quick shot, but not very often. Usually a few blown stalks and serious scrambling are needed. Honest, it’s all good, but the most enjoyable zebra hunting I’ve done has been Hartmann’s zebra in native habitat in Namibia’s rocky ridges, truly a magical hunt.

As I said, the first time was 40 years ago, in a time when game ranching was in its infancy and mountain zebras at their zenith. Ben Nolte and I climbed to the top of the Erongo Mountains, following intermittent tracks and hearing whistles. We got right on top of them among knife-edge ridges, a magic experience.

Since then I’ve done it many more times, certainly not all with me as shooter (after all, how many rugs do I need?). The mountain zebra in native terrain offers a real hunt, and a real mountain hunt! I may never fire another shot, but I’m sure I’ll make the climb a few more times!