Into The Thorns
Chapter Thirteen
The Season of Monsters
In the year 2000, political turmoil struck Zimbabwe. The government ignited an aggressive lawless land take over for reasons which I won’t discuss here. The white farmers were beaten and driven from their land and many of them lost everything they owned. Several were unspeakably done to death and their farm workers too were beaten and tortured, their homes burned, and they were also chased off the farms.
This state of affairs basically shut down tourism in all forms, including hunting. Game which had been carefully husbanded over many years was slaughtered within months.
Our two main areas of operation at that time were the open grassland areas east of Bulawayo at Shangani, which belonged to De Beers – the diamond people – and our western Matobo base which was on the Ingwezi River on AJ Bradnick’s ranches.
Both of these areas were shut down for hunting. It was unsafe to take foreign tourists into these areas and the game was disappearing fast. On Shangani, one night a ranch manager stopped an army truck with more than a dozen dead tsesebee on board! There was no avenue of recourse at all. The devastation was ordered by the government. Gunfire across the game lands was constant. This basically killed our livelihood, and like thousands of other white Africans, I was extremely anxious about our immediate future. Eighty percent of private-land safari operations collapsed. Over the next few years more than two million people, among them over one hundred thousand whites, left the country in order to try to make a new stable life elsewhere. Lots of us though, decided to hang on as long as possible in the hope that the violence would abate. Some, like myself, were fourth generation Africans! Where would we go? Africa was the only home that we knew.
When 2001 knocked timidly at the door, prospects were still bleak. But we had to make a decision, we had to “make a plan”. Graham, who had lost nine thousand of his twelve thousand acres, suggested that I take a look at the old ARDA (African Rural Development Authority) land, and run an experimental season there.
In 1980, at the end of the Rhodesian war, the black government came into power and Zimbabwe was born. Britain, the original colonial power that had formed Rhodesia, was instrumental in brokering the peace deal between the white Rhodesian government and the communist-backed guerrillas. It should be remembered that the colonial Rhodesians had declared independence from Britain in 1965. Part of Britain’s deal when organising peace, was an offer to provide funds to the new black government so that they could purchase any and all land offered to the government, by white farmers, on a willing seller willing-buyer agreement. This way, the black government could get their hands on much-needed land without resorting to violence. This system worked perfectly in the early years following independence.
I have mentioned previously that I hunted on land in this Marula south area back in 1982, when I was working for Soren Haagensen. At that time the huge ranches I hunted on were owned by the Greenspan family. This was wonderful plainsgame country in those days and I hope that one day it can be the same again.
In about 1983, many landowners sold their huge Marula south and Kezi area ranches to the government on this willing-seller willing-buyer scheme. The Greenspan ranches, Greef ranches and Collett ranches were all sold. But surprisingly, the government failed to hand over, or develop, any of this land for land-hungry people. I imagine they simply said to themselves – “the white ranchers made money ranching this land, we will do the same!” Millions of acres stretching from the Botswana border in the west to Gwanda town on the Johannesburg road in the east, were handed to the government parastatal, ARDA, for the purpose of farming.
The fast slide into shambolic chaos was amazing. The first thing to go was the wildlife. It was poached right to the brink. The homesteads fell apart, as did all farming infrastructure like fences, gates, roads, dip-tanks, water supply tanks and telephone lines. All machinery died or disappeared. The difference between the once beautiful cattle ranches – many of which had won Natural Resources Board farming prizes – to this abandoned-looking government venture, was as stark and disturbing as if walking into a war zone. It was pitiful.
Then, in the late 1990s, many black Zimbabweans started expressing their anger and dismay toward the government regarding the land problem, in a more aggressive manner. This ARDA land was used as an example. “Why is the government sitting with millions of acres in Matabeleland south, where no proper farming is going on, yet they tell us that there is no land, the white man has all the land?” People were becoming restless. The government hastily advertised for potential ranchers who could meet a certain criteria to send in applications for “new farms”. The old white ranches, and recently ex-ARDA land, was now divided up into 3000-acre sections and allocated to successful applicants.
It should be noted that the parcelling out of the 3000-acre farms was prior to, and had nothing to do with, the illegal land grabbing of 2001. From the names of the new farmers, I recognised one. Alvord Mabena. This man had, in recent history, been head of the National Railways of Zimbabwe and lived quite near to me in Bulawayo.
I decided to take a chance and call him first, as opposed to various other political heavy-weights whose names featured in the new farmers roll, and what a fortuitous choice that turned out to be. I met with Alvord and he turned out to be a thinking man not prone to making rash decisions, and he also seemed to wield a certain amount of respect from most of the other farmers. I explained the whole concept to him. The problem was this; it is impossible to take a paying client down to an area where each separate farm is only 3000 acres. You may be hard on the tracks of a herd of wildebeest for example, and then find that they have crossed onto another farm. We needed to have a workable number of farms under one banner, which we could hunt as one concession. We called a meeting with all the new A2 farmers in the Marula south area and most of them attended. The meeting went well, and the farmers, who had no idea of how the safari industry worked, were impressed when they were shown the figures on what we would pay them for their game animals. The Ingwezi Game Management Project was formed, and we went into business.
This is not the place to describe the headaches, inefficiency, pig-headedness and sheer difficulty of trying to form thirty people into a cohesive association. My hat is off to Alvord Mabena and Israel Ndlovu who shepherded this ungainly beast. They had to deal with all the necessary things that go into running a game operation, kitting out, training and managing an anti-poaching unit, liaising with local police, the sharing out of trophy fees equitably and applying for hunting permits to the Department of Wildlife. One of the biggest problems was trying to change the culture mind-set that most of the new farmers were in regarding wild animals. They simply could not grasp the fact that game, just like cattle, has to be protected, husbanded, in order to make money out of it. These people were happier eating a wildebeest today, than making eight hundred American dollars out of it next year via the trophy fee and still getting the meat then! It was a big uphill battle. We held meeting after meeting after meeting.
One obnoxious individual was kicked out of the project by the other farmers shortly after it started. This fellow, an educated man and ex-newspaper editor, shot four wildebeest on his farm for meat which was expressly against what had just been agreed! He then went to fetch the anti-poaching team, told them to load the poached animals onto his truck, instructing them not to say anything about the incident! When he was confronted by me about this, he became abusive and indignant, and of course had to pull out the old well-worn race card. I could not understand it. Here an opportunity had fallen into his lap to earn good money out of a resource that was not earning him money before, had to do no work at all to reap the benefits, but he still could not get it together! Simple greed. Quite amazing. Slowly most of the farmers came around to a conservation-orientated way of thinking and the project flourished. However, I have run ahead of myself.
So much for the formation of the project. We had lost AJ’s farms and Debshan, but we still wanted to operate safaris. Most of our hunts in the latter part of the nineties were plainsgame hunts with four or five leopard/plainsgame safaris per season as well. With our plainsgame areas now gone, we had to rethink how our operation was going to stay alive.
Before we actually instigated the first project meeting, Graham and I drove around the old Greef and Greenspan ranches which had been plundered during the ARDA era, and which now belonged to the A2 farmers. We spoke to as many of the cattle-herders as we could. These were the “men on the ground” and they would know about game movement. The wildebeest, kudu, impala, zebra and small game had been decimated. There were still small pockets of these animals scattered around but they were few, and they were wild. We asked about leopard. “Hau!” the cattle herders exclaimed, “the leopards are many, and the game animals for them to eat are too few. The leopards are taking the cattle all the time! We even see leopards in the daytime.” So there was bad news, and there was very good news too.
When the white farmers were still in this area in 1982, they were trapping, poisoning and shooting cattle-killing cats. The farmers left in 1983 and seventeen years had passed with very little, if any, predator control at all. We had been operating from the Ingwezi camp on AJ’s property for about twelve years by this time, and we knew how to outwit farm leopards. We decided, “The hell with plainsgame, let us try to sell more leopard”. There had to be large old leopard on the ARDA land which had never seen a trap or a hunter’s bait. A few operators had tried stop-start programmes on these areas under ARDA, but none of them had lasted. The ARDA bureaucracy was just too much to deal with when coupled with the dreadful mismanagement on the ground.
For the first time in twenty years of professional hunting, we organised an advertisement in a hunting magazine and Graham and I planned a marketing trip to America. The advertisement worked and many queries, some serious, some not, came our way.
Our angle, or focus, was total leopard hunting. We did not sugarcoat the information. We were looking for serious leopard hunters who were prepared to work hard. We had very little plainsgame to offer and the hunter would probably see very little as we hung baits, checked baits and scouted for leopard sign. But we promised these hunters that they would be in an area with many large cats and we would work until we dropped, or until we nailed one. Of course we drew hard on our established clientele and many of them came to the party. We killed fourteen leopards that season and eight of them were giant supercats. Out of these eight supercats, four were taken by my established clients which really pleased us.
The marketing trip to USA was successful. Graham and I returned home and prepared for a season of all-out leopard hunting. The “project” seemed to be straining through its birth pangs and we were very pleasantly surprised at the amount of game which had already started to come in to a “safe haven”. I should say “safer” haven, as we still had a lot of poaching problems and the area was still a long way from being completely safe. But the game was definitely increasing.
Peter, George and I scouted hard in April of 2001 and when our first safari commenced in May, we had identified several large male tracks that we were going to target. The first hunter that year was Mike Boyce from Nevada. Unfortunately he had to cut his safari short due to work pressures at home and he left empty-handed. The second hunter was a fellow from Philadelphia named John Strobel who became good friends with all of us. John arrived in early May and he and I “explored” most of our new project area, sleeping out in the bush wherever we stopped at sundown. John should have had a Supercat, and he surely he deserved one, but he went home with a young male of about one hundred and thirty pounds. He made a great shot and treasured his trophy. But he saw the leopard that should have been his, and it was a beauty. Amongst the trophies that John collected was a huge zebra stallion which we hung for bait near the Chavakadze river-road junction.
Warren Mabey was our next client and he took a strikingly marked giant male leopard near the Mangwe Pass monument on his first night. The story of this hunt is described in the chapter “Unexpected Gifts”. Whilst Warren was hunting sable with Graham, our friend from Brazil, Sidney Lovell-Parker, arrived. This was in the second half of May and Sidney had brought another hunter with him named Luis Simoes.
Sidney was originally brought to us by a fellow professional hunter and friend, Neil Lindsay. Neil is a free-lance hunter and had guided Sidney on a big game hunt with another operator. Sidney had expressed interest in a large leopard, so Neil talked him into coming down to the old Ingwezi river camp on AJ’s.
It was one of those hunts which had all the ingredients required to make it a memorable story by itself and is often recounted around our evening campfire. One would be forgiven for going to the airport to pick up someone named Sidney Lovell-Parker, and looking for a white-haired, clipped-moustached, proper old Englishman with gin-embellished cheeks and nose. To me, that’s what the name conjured up. But Sidney is a real Brazilian. His grandfather was an Englishman who fell in love with, and married one of those dusky-skinned black-haired beauties that Brazil is famous for. The double-barrelled pommy name is the only thing English about Sidney. He and Neil arrived at my Ingwezi camp in July 1993 and commenced what Sidney calls “my impala safari”. Most of Neil’s professional hunting experience had been on government big-game safari areas. He had run several successful hunts up on Matetsi Unit Two for us and he had also worked for some time in the Kariba Basin concessions. He had not yet been a pupil at the frustrating leopard school of the Matobo Hills.
Neil and Sidney trudged through a 14-day one-sided game of chess. They hung about fourteen impala and sat in a blind on nine of the fourteen days. Persistence was certainly not their failing. Two large male leopard and one female fed on some of the baits, but the hunters zigged when they should have zagged, and sat at ‘A’ when they should have been sitting at ‘B’. Swirling wind, blinds that were too close to the bait, blinds placed near fortress-koppies where the cat watched the hunters, noise in the blind, all the things that we Matobo Hills hunters have had to learn the hard way. Like Neil and Sidney were doing. And the most important factor of all, Lady Luck, had taken her capricious self a long way from the Ingwezi. One morning the hunters saw the huge tracks of the male they had been sitting for, eight yards behind the blind!
I met with Neil and Sidney at the end of the safari to complete the paperwork. Sidney was tired and obviously disappointed. It was clear to him that the leopards were there but he felt defeated.
I offered Sidney a free safari the following year if he wished to return and that was the start of a great friendship which has lasted all these years and covered many safaris.
As June 1994 approached, I found myself in a bit of a predicament. Neil Lindsay was a personal friend of ours and I did not want, in any way, to make him feel inadequate or just straight “pissed off’ at me. I had the feeling that Sidney wanted, or expected, to hunt with me, and this had actually been my intention. I could not afford to outfit another 14-day safari out of my own pocket and have Sidney fail again. But Neil was expecting to do the hunt! What to do? Neil’s feelings were important, and I asked him to go ahead as he had planned. I based myself at Graham’s farm, twenty miles north of the Ingwezi camp, and I also commenced baiting in earnest. My plan was to geta cat on bait, build the blind, and send word to Neil to come up and finish the job. I wasn’t going to hunt with Sidney, but I was going to do everything I could to make sure he got his cat this time around.
One of Neil’s pre-baits was fed on by a medium sized male. Sidney, at this time was in Johannesburg, where he stayed overnight before his connection to Bulawayo the following day. Neil telephoned Sidney at the hotel and gave him the good news, telling him to be prepared to go straight from the airport into the blind. It is a good two-hour drive from Bulawayo to Ingwezi and I was doubtful that they would make it in time.
Sidney told me later that he realised because of the failure the previous year, he must do this (go straight from the airport into the blind), but he was very unhappy about it. He felt that since he had no input at all into the hunt, this was more “leopard shooting” than leopard hunting. He should not have worried. He and Neil motored on down to the Ingwezi, checked the rifle, and entered the blind. Murphy was still on this safari. They sat in the blind until 10pm and then went back to camp. Exactly like the year before. I firmly believe that if these guys had stayed through the night, not only on this night, but the previous year as well, they would have had a leopard by now. So many of our big male leopards are killed in the late hours.
So for Sidney it was back to impala safariing. In the next four days the hunters collected and hung another six impala, making a total of nine, when added to Neil’s three pre-baits.
There is a large koppie about a mile southwest of the Ingwezi camp called Dombolefu. Over the years we have taken many leopard within sight of this prominent feature and that is the direction Neil and Sidney took on day five. Before you reach Dombolefu the road crosses a small nameless sandy streambed. It is no longer nameless. From that day on it was known as Dead Woman Creek. When Neil was halfway across, he noticed a person lying in the dry sand. He stopped the car and he and Sidney and the trackers went to investigate.
The streambed is about twenty-five yards wide and flows east into the Ingwezi about a mile away, downstream from the camp. The hunters saw that the body was that of an old emaciated dead woman. It turned out later that she had gone missing three days previously from a village fourteen miles away and she had possibly died of thirst or starvation, or both. Neil was obliged to report the dead person, so they drove an hour north to AJ’s homestead where they were able to use the telephone. The police asked Neil to meet them at the body so that they could record a statement from him and the staff. When Neil left AJ’s house they hunted hard for yet another impala to hang, but it was one of those days. Not a wild animal to be seen. Finally, after several hours, Sidney glimpsed movement in the bush. They stopped the Toyota and he snuck into the thickets to investigate. Impala. Sidney managed to find a small avenue through the thorns and took a chance. Impala number ten fell. When Neil parked the Jeep back at the stream, the police Land Rover was already there and the body was being loaded up. By the time the statements were all taken down it was 4pm, and not much time remained that day to scout around for new leopard tracks. Neil mentioned to Sidney that they were not far from the spot where, the year before, Neil and Sidney had a big leopard eat one of their baits and never return. Neil thought maybe they should just hang this impala at the edge of this streambed since it probably fell within the big cat’s territory. They decided this was as good a spot as any and dragged the impala upstream to the first bend in search of a thicket. There was none. They hung the impala anyway and returned to camp.
Meanwhile, I had managed to get a large female leopard on bait up at Graham’s place. I had built the blind and sent George down to the Ingwezi camp with a message for Neil, asking him to come up as soon as he could. When Neil and Sidney arrived back at their camp, George was waiting. They discussed the news and Sidney was sorely tempted. He did not want to fail again, but he was now determined to succeed by his and Neil’s own efforts. He had a good feeling about the Dead Woman Creek bait and decided not to come up to take the female.
The next morning Neil turned the Toyota onto the track which led to the start of the bait-checking circuit. Sidney stopped him and said, “Let’s go first to the Dead Woman bait Neil. I have a feeling.”
Neil turned the car and headed for the creek near Dombolefu. Pay day! The giant track that they had seen under their bait a year ago was back! The big leopard had fed on the back legs of Sidney’s impala but it had not eaten much. The approach and departure tracks were clear in the dry sand, and luckily, they came from, and returned to the east towards the Ingwezi river. This meant that a blind could be situated downwind to the west of the bait without problems involving the cat’s approach. Sidney decided to do things his way this year and Neil humoured his wishes. Instead of the grass sides that Neil wanted to collect from camp, Sidney insisted on using natural materials found on the spot. They built a blind about 80 yards away on the opposite side of the creek from the bait, inside a clump of guarrie bushes. The truck was sent to the camp for the mattresses, blankets and other gear that was needed and when it returned, Sidney lined the inside of the blind walls with extra blankets.
The hunters tried to rest in camp in preparation for a night in the blind but Sidney was too wound up about this cat and coerced Neil into leaving camp at 2.30! They settled in by 3.30pm, warning line attached and ready to go. This early start left them exposed to a long hot afternoon in the blind but Sidney felt that this time things were different. The sun finally slipped away and leopard time crept in. Sidney lay on his back watching the night sky and thinking about the dead woman.
At a quarter past eight the stick bowed. The hunters eased slowly, silently, into position. Sidney whispered, “Okay”. The light blazed. The cat was sitting in the sand behind the bait, his head hidden by the dead impala. Sidney eased the scope left a little, centred on the chest, and touched off. The cat collapsed, heart shot and spine shot, into the sand. Finally. Neil and Sidney were not only jubilant at their success, they were seriously relieved. They recovered the leopard, which was a big one, and proceeded to camp where a leopard party par-excellence soon followed. The next morning as I was preparing my vehicle in Graham’s yard, I saw Neil’s Land Cruiser barrelling in like he was on a rally, dust billowing behind him. I knew then. I was happy for Sidney, and I was also damned happy for Neil. When he skidded to a reckless halt I looked in the back of the truck at the biggest leopard up until that time – that I had ever seen. It was a beauty! It was a long, well-proportioned animal, big everywhere. Thick tail, massive head and neck, and outstanding colouring. If the cat had not been gutted we would have weighed it. Looking back now, I imagine that it must have been in the one hundred and eighty pound region at least. In Murphy’s absence my friend Neil had come good.
So that is the story of Sidney’s first leopard. Back to the season of monsters. Sidney and Luis Simoes arrived in mid-May 2001. “Wayne, Luis would like to hunt some plainsgame – maybe kudu, zebra, wildebeest to start, what do you think?”
“No problem,” I answered. “But you mentioned in your letter that you want to hunt another leopard. How does that fit in? Are you going to hunt two on one, with Luis?”
“Yes, of course,” says Sidney. “We will hunt together. Have a good time. But I want to shoot a leopard bigger than the one I have already. Okay?” I stared at him incredulously. Did I detect a twinkle in the eye with that wry half-smile? I sincerely hoped so, but decided to tackle this head-on anyway. “Sidney,” I said, “you have taken one of the biggest leopards any of us have ever seen. You may shoot another nice cat, but it’s not possible to improve on the giant you took with Neil!”
“Hey, we try,” he said, and with that the hunt commenced. We had only been hunting for five days, and had taken wildebeest and zebra with Luis, when luck arrived. It is one of those strange things, but whenever my wife came out to join a safari, she seemed to bring cat-luck with her. This safari was no exception. The day after she arrived at the mountain camp, we found that the zebra leg that I had placed with John Strobel on the Chavakadze river, down on the project, had been torn apart by a huge male leopard. The cat had eaten and then drunk water from a wet sandy beach at the edge of the stream. His big tracks were clear and we measured them at ten and a quarter. The reason we had baited this spot was because during John Strobel’s safari we had found that a big cat crossed the main Mangwe-Thornville road regularly, heading west. The spoor veered around a cattle herder’s village and then walked down a long exposed granite dwala all the way to the Chavakadze. He had not followed this route whilst John was with us, but he had followed it now, and he had found our offering. There was, however, a small problem. We climbed out of the streambed, west, up a low rise and stood on a huge flat open granite dwala. We now faced east back towards the river and the bait – into the wind. On our right, about three hundred yards away, stood an isolated koppie about one hundred and forty feet high. Not large, but prominent anyway. The cat’s tracks, after feeding, had headed towards this koppie. I did not feel that the big leopard had taken refuge there, however. As we stood looking towards the stream and the bait, the koppie to our right, a dirt road linking the Mangwe road and the project farms behind us, lay on our left-hand side about 80 yards away. This road was used by the farm owners, usually on weekends when they came out from town, and itwas also used by the farm workers and other locals who travelled on foot and bicycle. I felt that this leopard would probably not want to lay up so close to the road, especially not in a koppie which did not really provide much thick cover. My worry was that if he had left this way, then it was likely he would return this way. That meant that he would possibly climb the koppie some time near or after dusk and survey the area where he had fed. If we put the blind on, or near the dwala, which I wanted to do because of wind direction and view of the bait, then he may detect us in the blind. He would be higher than us and only three hundred yards away and I did not feel good about this original choice of a blind site.
We walked north, to our left, until we stood on the road. I looked towards the bait. This could work. It was a long shot of one hundred and thirty yards or so, but it could work. A stunted, but thickly leafed bush willow (Combretum zeyheri) tree grew right next to the farm track. I decided to put the blind underneath it. If the cat climbed the hill before coming in to the zebra meat, we would now be about 380 yards away to the north hidden under good cover. We erected the blind, camouflaged it, and were done by noon. We returned to the mountain camp stopping on the way to check the zero of Sidney’s rifle at 130 yards. It was perfect.
We returned to the blind at four o’clock. The plan was for my wife, Luis, Peter and George, to camp down on the road about a mile to the north east of where Sidney and I sat in the blind. We were settled in with the rifle securely bedded and cocked by 4.45. We had hardly settled in when I heard a clanking sound followed by womens’ voices. I looked out the back of the blind and saw three women approaching the river, one carrying a bucket. They looked like they had endured a hard walk and they sat down at the water preparing to wash and take a drink. My low whistle startled them. I told them to hurry up and have a drink and get going, which they did, staring curiously into the back of the blind as they walked past.
The sun slid into the thorn trees to our right and the last evening cries of roosting francolin were suddenly joined by human voices! Sidney and I frowned at each other. They were singing voices! It was Sunday. Sundays, like Friday nights and Saturdays, are serious drinking days in rural Africa. Many of the rural Africans, no matter how poor they might be, drink themselves into a state of near paralysis on Sundays. Many times I have come across people laying next to discarded bicycles, way out in the bush, completely incapacitated by drink. This was something that I had not taken into account when siting our blind on this, a Sunday. Damn it! It was now just on 6pm. Leopard time. Sitting back and thinking about it made me realise that this was an old cat. He had lived here for maybe a decade or more. He knew the villages, the cattle, and he knew all about people. I decided this intrusion was no big deal, it shouldn’t spook our cat. The singing grew louder. I looked out the back of the blind toward the stream where the women had stopped. Two elderly fellows, completely wrecked from drink and battling to move themselves efficiently, came into view. Although they were together, they were shouting to each other as if they had been hundreds of yards apart. More singing.
As they reached the back of the blind I stuck my head out and asked them to quieten down and move along. If a spirit had emerged from the ground in the road I do not think their reaction could have been much different than it was when they saw this white man’s head pop out of the bush. It is probably a good thing that these two people were seriously inebriated, as I felt that their ability to register shock had been dulled somewhat, and their reaction now, although hilarious, was a lot quieter and less drastic than it could have been. Margie told me later that when the two singers had come upon our party on the road further east, she had warned them that we were hunting leopard nearby and they should hurry along and be quiet about it. I do not think they knew anything about how leopard were hunted and they definitely did not expect to see a head speaking to them from inside a bush.
When I addressed these fellows in hushed tones, the nearest fell down in shock whilst the other back-pedalled about half a dozen yards, his red eyes bulging and his heavy old car-tyre sandals clap-clapping on the hard dirt. The fallen one scrabbled around furiously before he managed to balance himself enough to get upright whereupon he made off as fast as he could walk down the road to the west. He said absolutely nothing, his rickety thin legs conveying him in a noisy zigzag manner as fast as they could go. I was choked with the urge to laugh. The back-pedalling upright singer uttered only a loud “Hau!” before he too scuffled off down the road. We did not hear them sing or talk again so they must have made off at a good rate.
I felt that the leopard would have come in sooner that night if it had not been for our two loud groups of visitors, but even with all the disturbance, we did not have long to wait. Ten minutes before seven the warning stick arched. Sidney moved into position and the light went on. At 130 yards the leopard looked small. I had warned Sidney about this, especially since the first cat he took with Neil had been much closer.
“If it’s a leopard Sidney, I will ask you to shoot – please don’t query about the size, at this distance, it will not look big!” I had told Sidney.
He did not query or waste time. I saw that it was a leopard. He was sitting in dog position facing the meat, and us.
“Take him Sidney.” Boom!
The cat roared as it sprang into the air, and it came down in a thrashing ball and then took off into the thick stuff.
Sidney felt good about his shot. “I was steady, the cross hairs looked good,” he said.
Several minutes later Margie arrived with the others and we drove right up to the bait. The freshly torn earth where the enraged cat had spun around was sprinkled with lung blood. Good news. George geared himself up to carry the battery whilst I clipped on my belt and pistol. When I had the .460 cocked, we moved slowly past the bait, Peter in front, crouched, looking for blood.
We had hardly got going when I saw the pale fur on the side of the dead cat up ahead. I sneaked up carefully to make sure that he was dead and then enjoyed my first clear look at him. He was a brute. Big headed, heavy wrinkled neck, massive arms and thick lion tail. He was a beauty in the prime of life. Sidney had shot him perfectly through the heart and lungs. When we moved the giant cat out of the bush back to the car, and all the congratulations and back slapping were done, we picked him up so that Sidney could hold him for the photographs. This cat was a lot heavier than we initially thought and it was a mission for one man to hold him up.
“Sidney, you ordered up one leopard bigger than your first one, is this the one?” I asked.
Sidney laughed, “Yes, he is bigger.”
I was not so sure. It had been a few years since I had seen Sidney’s first leopard and it still sticks in my mind as an absolute giant. I would not like to have to choose between them.
The first one taken down near Dombolefu with Neil seemed to me to have been longer than this cat. When the skull was dried though, this one proved to have a bigger skull measurement.
Two giant supercats were in the salt, and it was only May! Our next hunter was Ralph Kieley, from South Dakota, who arrived in June. The story of his hunt is told in “A Koppie Called Kevin”. Another monster of a cat, and supercat number three. After Ralph came Fred and Julie Herbst whose hunt took place in late June and early July. “Ambush Alley” recounts the details of this exciting hunt where yet another supercat, heavier than anything I had ever seen before, was killed.
After Fred and Julie’s hunt, a group of our friends from California arrived to check out our new leopard areas. Ron and Cynthia McKim arrived in July with their friends John and Denise Peck. John and Denise’s son Eric, and his fiancée Rachel, were also along on this safari.
The McKims and the Pecks were good friends and we had already enjoyed several successful safaris together. Both Ron and John had taken nice leopard with me and, interestingly, both cats had come off Graham’s farm. Both were nice mature males in the 140-pound class.
The plan on this safari was for Ron and I to hunt the new project areas in the traditional manner by baiting and blind, while Eric, in the company of his Dad, John, was going to hunt with hounds. We had contracted Tristan and his pack of dogs for this hunt and Graham was to be the PH. Their main focus was leopard and sable for Eric. Eric took the best sable we have ever taken in our Matobo areas on this safari, and I recall that the horns measured somewhere around the 42 inch mark. The hound hunt was not successful, however, and Eric did not get a look at a cat.
Ron and I had been hunting for about a week when a bait down on the project, on what used to be a Greenspan ranch called Castle Block, was taken. This bait was really back in the bush off the beaten track, near a hunting road which we had recently opened not far west of the Mangwe River. Ron and I were settled in by about five o’clock that day and the pressure was on me. This bait had been eaten by a big male leopard, but the problem was that he had a girlfriend in attendance. Ron was explicit about this. He already had a nice Tom, and he would take another, but he did not want a female. I had to sex the cat. He was prepared to accept the risk that we may spook the leopard whilst trying to accomplish this. In order to be able to use both hands on my binoculars, it was necessary for me to strap the spotlight onto a cross-pole which was braced across the top of the blind. When the cat, or cats, hit the bait, I would turn the light on, then glass the cats and decide which was the male. A task I was dreading. All was set but I still needed to wait until near dusk so that I could switch on the light and make sure that it was focused on the bait. It was not a good idea to be moving about shining and adjusting the light in prime leopard time, but I saw no other solution. As soon as it was dim enough for the light’s beam to register, I stood up, switched on, and adjusted the aim of the light. Perfect.
I sat down quietly, shifted my blankets a little, and prepared to lay down. Ron was on his back with his hands behind his head. Suddenly the warning stick lurched forward!
It was still daylight! I motioned Ron to stay down.
“Probably a kudu or impala walked into the line,” I whispered to him. I stood up slowly with my binoculars until I could see over the top of the front of the blind.
There, in daylight, was a leopard in our bait tree! As soon as I saw him, I could see that he had a massive ‘Tyson-head’ and thick neck. There was no female present! I urgently ushered Ron up into his shooting position. “Take him Ron, take him.”
The shot clapped out over the twilight bush, echoing off amongst the koppies. The cat snagged the bait with his front left-foot claws as he took the shot and he hung there silently for a few seconds, then fell, grunted, and took off into the grass. We were jubilant. This was the first leopard that I had taken on private land in broad daylight in quite some time. It was a rare occasion. And it was a rare leopard. When the truck arrived it took us a good half hour or so to find the cat but we found him dead, shot through the heart, about ninety yards away from the bait. This was a magnificent beast, considerably bigger than Ron’s first 140 pounder. He was in perfect condition and measured 7 feet 8 inches long. Later, his dried skull would measure a hair under 17 inches. A supercat indeed.
The project land was delivering. It was only mid-July and we had now taken five really big males, one of them on Graham’s farm and the other four on the project. Surely we would not see any more giant cats this season. I was wrong.
Richard Greene, good friend, also from California, and friends with the McKims and the Pecks, arrived in the latter half of July. With Richard was John Dagle and his companion Debbie. John and Debbie would be hunting with Graham, Richard would hunt with me.
On a previous hunt Richard had endured some bad luck in his quest for leopard and we were determined to close that book now in this new area. Graham and John were the first to score. West of the Mangwe river, also on the old Greenspan property (now project), Graham’s bait, placed on the bank of a small dry streambed, was hit once again by two leopards. A mating pair. When Graham and John Dagle sat in their blind, the wind direction shifted fitfully and Graham was worried that this might spook the cats before they arrived to feed. The leopards arrived shortly after dark from the right hand, or south side, as the hunters faced the bait. At first Graham was puzzled as to what was approaching. Low grumbling, a snarl, more growling. At the time he was sure that the cats had detected the hunters and were expressing their irritation. But on piecing everything together afterwards, it seems that these sounds were the mating growls and snarls common to the big cats when with a partner in season. The cats came in and John Dagle shot a beautiful big male. Supercat number six. We all had a serious leopard party for John and Graham at the mountain camp that night. Some very sick-looking men reluctantly prepared for bait checking the following morning.
We were travelling long distances in our bait-checking and scouting duties, so Richard and I loaded everything that we would need in case we needed to sit for a leopard. There would not be enough time to make it back to camp and then back to the bait if one of the furthest baits was hit. This was fortunate.
This was the second day after John Dagel’s beautiful cat was taken. Unbeknown to us, we were using the same road that they had used to get to their bait. Peter tapped on the roof. We stopped. He jumped off the truck and walked back down the road a short distance, and he bent down. Ever watchful, he had spotted some leopard tracks in a sandy patch near the road. There were certainly large fresh leopard tracks there, made the previous night, but there were also lots of tracks made by humans and vehicles. Lots of recent activity. It did not take Peter long to work out whose tracks they were. This was where Graham and John had taken their cat! We found their broken-down blind and we walked over to their bait which was still hanging at the edge of a narrow streambed. The fresh leopard tracks we had seen on the road had also been to this bait! Two days after the death of a large male leopard, another large male’s tracks were seen in the same place! It became obvious that the female was still in heat and this big cat had come calling. We looked carefully around trying to assess where the leopard had gone after his perfunctory feed on Graham’s bait. His tracks were evident all around the disassembled blind.
Fortunately we had a fresh impala in the truck along with all our leopard blind equipment and we decided after much debate, to gut the impala, drag its stomach all around the area and hang the new bait about 20 yards north of where the old bait hung. We decided on this ploy because of the interest the cat had shown in Graham and John’s blind. We were going to put up a new blind about a hundred yards north, and hopefully, in this way, we would remain undetected if the cat came back.
Because of his half-hearted nibble on the old bait, we felt that he was far more interested in the scent of the female in heat and her now deceased boyfriend, than he was in the putrid impala meat. Hopefully the fresh bloody drag that we had made would attract his interest to our new impala. Of course there remained the big IF. Would he visit this spot again tonight? Had he already found his Juliet? We had to try.
There was much to do. While Richard helped me construct the blind, Peter and George dragged the fresh guts all over the road, the streambed, around Graham’s blind, and up and down the road covering a distance of about two hundred yards in both directions. We took down the old bait and hung the new one. We set up the shooting sticks and bedded Richard’s rifle and attached the warning line. There were still about forty minutes of daylight left when George drove off to the west leaving us in the blind. Richard had now sat for three different leopard on three different safaris. Was this the final chapter? Or was this going to be just another cold night out in the bush?
The cat came in at about a quarter-past-eight and we were ready for him.
When I turned the light on he was standing sideways to us, his head left, right paw up on the meat. It took Richard a few vital seconds to steady the scope. “Shoot Rich, shoot! Take him!” I urged.
The leopard pulled his paw down and began to move off in the direction he was facing – to our left.
“Shoot Rich!” Boom! Finally. The cat leapt, roared in the air, hit the ground, and was gone.
Richard looked up with a surprised quizzical look on his face, but the frown was not there long. We were jubilant, rehashed the shot and how big the leopard had looked, and speculated on how far he had gone before dying. My first impression was that the cat was a big male but I was a little worried about the shot. Richard had taken a long time (about four seconds) to get his shot off, and when he did, the cat had been moving. It was pointless debating the details any further. The truck had arrived, and we kitted up for a night follow-up. We went cautiously up to the bait and Peter picked up the torn soil marks where the leopard had come up out of the streambed. Tracks, but no blood. Puzzling. If a cat is shot, side on in the chest-lung area, there is always blood-spatter at the site. The bullet tears in and out of a vulnerable area full of organs with little resistance.
We found no fat, no blood, no hair and no bone. We could see the huge splayed pugmarks in the sand easily but when we reached the hard clay where the cat had gone up the bank, we saw nothing. I would have to make a decision soon. About five yards back from the edge of the streambed, we could see the beginnings of a low, dense Mopane-scrub thicket. We did not want to blunder around there in the dark, not only because of the danger it presented, but we did not want to obliterate any tell-tale signs of a lightly wounded cat that we may have to follow in the morning.
At the top of the eight-foot bank Peter found blood. Under the spotlight it was difficult to be sure as to where exactly it came from. It did not seem watery stomach blood, and it was definitely not frothy, bright, lung blood. We went forward. After an hour of painstakingly, slow tracking, I decided to give it up. We were losing concentration and I felt sure that someone was going to get hurt. The leopard was crisscrossing a thicket about a hundred and fifty yards long by sixty wide. This was good news as he was obviously in some difficulty due to the shot. If he had been lightly wounded he would be a long way from here by now and not playing hide and seek in such a confined area. We retired back to the hide where we slept for what remained of the night.
At first light we were back to the spot where we had halted the chase. We had not gone more than forty yards, when we found our quarry crouched down in the thickest part of the patch we had crawled through so carefully during the night. He was dead, but still warm. Rigor mortis had not yet set in and it was clear that this cat had died within the last hour or so! How fortunate we were that we had not continued the pursuit during the night! This was another monster. He was in the absolute prime of life with a thick dark-gold pelt, thick neck complete with dewlap and wrinkles, and he was the longest leopard I had ever taken, measuring eight feet exactly. What a beauty. My friend’s leopard jinx was finally over. This beautiful cat had been shot in the liver which explained why he had remained in the thicket. Supercat number seven was now in the salt.
I travelled north to Tanzania in August to hunt the splendid full-maned lions that live in the west of that country, and we took two more leopard as well as the lions on those successful safaris. My next appointment with the western Matobo cats was in late October. October in Zimbabwe is known as “suicide month” and it is the hottest, driest month of the year. Farmers and ranchers are not the only ones who stare crinkly-eyed to the north, hoping to see a build-up of cumulus nimbus that may bring blessed relief to the baked white land. The trees are leafless and stark, and both grass and water are finished. It is said that more suicides are committed in Zimbabwe in October than any other month. I believe it. Joe Crawley, a hunter from Missouri, favoured October for African hunts. The heat did not bother him and visibility in the game areas was good, as all the leaves, and most of the grass, was down. Of equal importance was that the hunting year was drawing to a close. Often, at this time of the year, unsold, unshot quotas could be purchased below their usual cost. Deals could pop up for elephant, buffalo and lion as operators tried to finish their quotas for the year.
But this year, 2001, end of season deals were not part of Joe’s plans. Joe was determined, and also due, to collect a supercat. We had taken several leopard together over the years but none of them passed “average” size. I do not think it was the size so much that prompted Joe to keep coming back, I just think he loves to hunt leopards, and the quest for one of our bucket-headed giants was simply an excuse. October is not my favourite leopard-hunting month. The peak leopard mating season is long since over, and the baits don’t last more than three days in the blazing heat before they are reduced to black water. The leopard themselves are not as sleek and handsome as they are in winter. But some Octobers, when the ground feels like a furnace and the rivers have forgotten how to run, the land is transformed overnight by the arrival of early thunderstorms. The official rainy season, does not commence until November or December, but the lifesaving, hope-giving first showers, often come in October. Mopane trees push out bright green leaves literally within a week and the acacia grows a fuzz of tiny leaves almost within hours, and the dishes of precious water captured in the granite, often saves the lives of gaunt game animals and cattle alike.
October may not be my favourite leopard month, but those first rains are most certainly my favourite time of the year. You can smell the thankful earth, and you can feel the start of life for another season. The year may start in January but life starts with the first rains. Joe arrived just as the first ramparts of black clouds had ballooned up over Botswana and unleashed their crashing white bolts of lightning into the dead ground. Two inches of rain fell turning dusty footpaths into fast red rivers and cracked hard clay into wet mud. Impala once more pranced about looking alive and you could see the skeletal cattle saying, “I am going to make it.”
Baits, however, were given no reprieve. October is full of flies and bugs and there are maggots and bacteria in the hot meat but we hang them anyway. After I had given Joe a blow-by-blow account of the season’s giant cats, he was a bit pensive.
“Maybe I should have come earlier, maybe all the big ones are finished,” he said. I did not say anything. I thought he may be right.
About a week into the hunt AJ radioed Graham with a message for me. A cattle herder had reported to him that a calf had been taken down on the Ingwezi River near my old washed-away camp. We were always sceptical when investigating calf-kill reports because quite often the cattle herders gave false information. When calves are killed by predators, the mothers bawl continuously, and this bawling, or a drag-mark, are what usually alert the herder to the fact that things have gone wrong in the bush. On weekends, some herders are on duty, some are not. Of course, way out in the far reaches of a cattle ranch, the boss doesn’t always know if the herder who is on duty is actually present, at work. It’s Africa, remember. So when Monday comes along and our man returns dizzy and red-eyed from drink, he assembles all the cattle and finds that a calf is missing. He works feverishly, ignoring his horrendous hangover until he finds drag marks. But now there is trouble here. He can tell by the sign, and by the state of the calf, (what’s left of it) that the murder took place on Saturday night. His dereliction of duty could be found out! Maybe not. Our man now makes the long walk to AJ’s headquarters.
“Boss,” says he, “a leopard killed a calf last night. I looked hard for the calf this morning, found some leopard tracks, thought that this leopard must be up to no good, followed its spoor, and found that it had killed the calf.” This is the kind of stuff we hear frequently. But bad luck befalls our man.
“Patson, wait here, because the hunters are on a ranch nearby and they will want to kill this leopard. I will call them here, then you can show them to the calf,” says the boss.
Patson’s eyes are suddenly downcast. The hunters and their trackers are skilled men and it will be impossible to trick them. “Possibly they will not arrive,” thinks he, and promptly sits down in the shade. But the hunters do arrive. And they walk to the calf which is no longer a calf but two femurs held together by a piece of dry skin.
I look at what remains of the calf’s carcass and then I look at Patson. “Patson we have driven two-and-a-half hours to this place because of you. And now we have to drive two-and-a-half hours back. Because you know, and I know, and the trackers know, that this calf was killed two days ago, maybe three. It has definitely been fed-on, twice, and now it is finished! No leopard is coming back. You are a liar and a waste of a salary. I will tell your boss about this and I hope he fires you.” Two more words from me and we leave. This is how many of the calf reports end up. But we have to react, not only to maintain good relations with the rancher, but because calf-kills often offer us our best chance at a big, old cat.
Joe, the trackers and myself loaded up our leopard gear and headed down to my old camp. I hate going there. A giant Acacia albida tree, uprooted by the flood, lies through the centre of what used to be my chalet. No buildings are standing except walls of the old lounge. The Bradnicks, Graham’s family, and my family had some good times at that quiet shady spot, and we had enjoyed many a cold Castle beer sitting around the fire next to the sandy riverbed with a dead leopard as our guest.
We met a man like Patson at the old camp. We eyed each other warily, because we’d played this game before. But the information was good. It was a Wednesday, so there were no complications involving drink and absenteeism. The herder directed us upstream from the old camp for about a hundred yards. We stopped the car and followed him to the east bank of the riverbed where we found a calf which had been killed and eaten the previous night. The Ingwezi riverbed here is about eighty yards wide. The east bank, which is where the old camp used to stand, and where the dead calf now lay, was covered with dense vegetation. The west bank was not. This side was sparsely wooded with acacia thorn trees, donkey berry bushes, and a few clumps of Chinese lantern. The trackers and I quickly trimmed as little vegetation as we had to, so that we could see the dead calf. It was now about four thirty in the afternoon and we did not have much time.
Thankfully the wind was steady from the east, so we placed our blind against and behind an anthill which stood about twenty-five yards back from the riverbank. This was going to be a long 130-yard shot. The anthill was about four feet high and about twenty feet around at its base; thick bush and grass grew all around it. Perfect. Or nearly perfect. I don’t like anthills, because often, especially in this area, they are home to black mambas or huge Egyptian cobras. Every minute I sit in a blind which is next to one, I think what the snake will look like when he comes out. Will he be angry? What will he do? Shall I run? What about my hunter? Should I shoot? What if it is pitch dark and can’t see him, I only hear him? These thoughts are too troubling. But it was late and this was the best spot. We erected the blind, laid the mattresses and blankets, and Peter and I crossed the sand back to the calf so that we could secure the warning line.
We were all set by 5pm. Joe’s rifle was secured to two sets of tripods with the sandbags securely bedded. He was going to take a standing shot from this blind as we had had no time to trim the grass to enable us to see the bait whilst sitting down. He was not worried, the view was good, and the sticks were firm.
As mentioned previously, Joe and I had taken several leopard together, prior to this hunt, and we had also turned a couple down. Was this finally the thick-necked brute we were looking for? The tracks in the riverbed gave us an unreliable reading of ten inches, as they were splayed in the sand. We had found no tracks in the lush grass around the kill or on the footpaths nearby. We had to hope for the best.
Before 6pm the warning stick bent! It was still daylight, but the visibility under the foliage on the far bank was borderline. I motioned Joe to be still while I took a look through the binoculars. It was indeed the leopard! But I could tell nothing about the size of it at this distance! I gestured for Joe to come up to the rifle. He came quietly and eased up to the scope.
“See him Joe?” I asked. “He’s behind and to the right hand side of the calf, sideways-on. You see him?”
“Yeah, I see him,” he answered.
“Okay, take him!”
At the shot, the cat went straight down. I could see him no longer. This was the second leopard of the season that came in during daylight, and that pleased Joe immensely. To take a Matobo Hills cattle-killer was a prize in itself, to take one in daylight was icing on the cake.
I asked Joe how he felt about his shot, but I was not concerned. I have a handful of clients who are accomplished riflemen, and Joe is one of them. A few others, like Homer Deckard, George Ulmer and Ron McKim come to mind. These people seldom miss. In all our safaris together I think I had only seen Joe make a mistake once, and that was on a crocodile at the Gwaai River mouth. To turn the barb a little further, a giant crocodile was taken at that exact spot a few weeks after Joe’s miss, and that crocodile was measured as the new world number one. I believe it was the same crocodile. Incidentally, that crocodile, which I think was about sixteen feet long, was dethroned down to second place when professional hunter, Mark Ellement, guided his client on to an eighteen-foot dinosaur a few miles west of this spot a few years later. While we waited for the trackers to arrive in the Cruiser, I picked up the battery and spotlight, and with Joe carrying both rifles we climbed the far bank onto a small vantage point where we could view the calf. I placed the light on the ground and glassed the gloomy, shadowy grass. We didn’t need the light. There, on its side, next to his last stolen calf, lay the leopard. I was immensely relieved but still very apprehensive about the size of the cat. I went forward alone, .460 at the ready. When I stood next to this cat my feelings of relief for myself, and pleasure for Joe, were almost almost tangible.
“Joe!”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not a big male, Joe.”
“Huh,” he says, “Oh well.” Resignation. “What is it?”
“It’s a goddamned super cat that’s what!”
Joe Crawley has hunted just about every African animal and has several World Slams of sheep under his belt. He is a serious hunter. But I have never seen him as happy as he was when he saw this leopard. Not even when we nailed his fifty-pound elephant. He was split with smiling. This was the eighth, and last, giant male of the season. And what an incredible season it was. This leopard was one of the truly big ones. His head lolled like some kind of giant melon and his neck and tail were thick. He was beautiful. Joe was greedy and nearly took another huge cattle-killer a few days later, when AJ once more summoned us to another gruesome scene of a ripped-apart calf. But the rains were starting. Cracking bolts burst into the hills nearby and the rain poured down on us. When it showed no sign of letting up we trudged, sodden, back to the Jeep. I was glad. One giant leopard was enough.
Into the Thorns is now available at Good Books in the Woods
