Book edited by Craig T. Boddington and Peter Flack (Safari Press, 2004, 606 pages); Review by Ken Bailey
When James Mellon’s book African Hunter was published in 1975, it was hailed immediately as a classic, a thorough and contemporary guide to hunting Africa. But, in Mellon’s own words from 2003, “My book is no longer relevant to conditions in today’s Africa.”
Enter Craig Boddington and Peter Flack, two well-respected hunters and writers. They took up the challenge and compiled what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive book dedicated to hunting Africa in the 21st century. African Hunter II builds on what Mellon started and created what Mellon suggested will be, “the standing work in its field for decades to come.”
The 600-page book is an engaging amalgam of encyclopedia, guidebook and captivating treasury of hunting tales from across all walks of Africa. Twenty-four countries are featured; for each, the editors provide a summary of the hunting regions, the game animals available, and a brief overview of the history, geography, climate and basic national facts and economic statistics. The primary species hunted in each country are covered in reasonable detail, providing hunters considering a safari some inside knowledge that will help in their planning. Clear, simple and beautifully-created maps accompany each country chapter. Once the “facts” have been covered for each country, readers are treated to some fine contemporary magazine-style writing, compelling tales of hunting in the region, some previously published, but all written by accomplished hunter/writers. In fact, if you had no interest whatever in the “guide” portions of the book, you could spend many rewarding evenings just soaking in the many well-crafted tales of African safari hunting.
There are a few add-on chapters designed to assist both the first-timer and the safari veteran alike. As might be expected with Boddington at the helm, included is a thorough overview of rifle/cartridge combinations. Other chapters provide guidance for booking your safari and what medical considerations you should be thinking about before you go. And from cover to cover, this book is well-saturated with wonderful photography of the game, the people and the places.
By their very nature all guidebooks have a shelf life, and this is no exception. Some of what was reflective of the African safari world in 2004 may not be exactly the same today. Notwithstanding that, it’s still a very relevant overview today, and the sheer volume of information about hunting in Africa makes this a treasure that will last a long time. In fact, when they eventually take away all my stuff and put me in that home, this is likely to be the one book I keep at my bedside.
Hunters Heart Taxidermy founder and CEO Ruan Viljoen is an avid hunter and conservationist with a passion for securing the sustainability of hunting in South Africa. Ruan has been a professional in the industry for many years, hunting his first African Buffalo at the young age of 13, and growing up admiring his father’s impressive collection of over 66 trophies.
It is because of this extensive background in the hunting industry that we appreciate and understand the significance of expressing each client’s memories with our custom craftsmanship, and why we focus so greatly on delivering a superb customer experience.
How many years have you been in the business?
The team has combined experience of 37 years. Hunters Heart Taxidermy is a relative new entity and brand that we are very excited about.
What are your favorite mounts & why?
Custom mounts, as this gives me an opportunity to be creative and to give the client a unique, one-of-a-kind trophy.
What are your specialty areas that you have in the business?
We specialize in custom mounting which gives us a distinct advantage when creating one-of-a-kind trophies for our client. As my artist statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. We do not rely on standard forms, we resize and sculp each form to fit the animal’s natural anatomy to the size of the skin received. Attention to detail, by a very strict Quality Control Department, on muscle definition, hide texture, eye expression, veins and pose to be anatomically correct. When you need Africa alive, you need a Hunters Heart signature.
Current processes offered:
Pick up & collect trophies: Yes (free, all over South Africa for International clients)
Maximum distance offered to collect trophies: all over South Africa
Own tanning facilities: Yes
Do you buy in forms or sculpt your own or both: Sculpt and Alter own forms
Delivery time (approximate):
Dip and Pack: 3 months after payment was received
European mounts: 3-6 months
Shoulder mounts: 8-11 months
Full mounts: 8-11 months
General Comments
The conservation of our wildlife resources, and of responsible hunting in our region is imperative to sustaining the legacy of our community. As a conservation-centred company, we endeavour to establish a total value chain in the community where the income generated from hunting practices, directly or indirectly, can be traced and measured. We therefore ensure that no part of an animal goes to waste: unutilised meat feeds the community, and skins are transformed into unique bags and other sellable products by local entrepreneurs. Every hunter contributes to this ideology and to the survival of the industry, capturing the Heart of Hunting.
Consider two statements you could hear from your potential outfitter:
Our area has the conditions to produce large kudu; and
Our clients shot three kudu, over 55 inches last year.
The first encourages thoughts on how to find them and the enjoyment of the hunt: the second focuses more on collection than enjoyment and could lead to speculation on whether there are any left when three were taken so recently.
There is so much ‘telling’ in this world. Some of us have had enough. Our governments have told us too much in the last two years and by all accounts, this may not change.
I got into the industry when I was quite young as I had worked for a furrier when I was just a boy. I had always been interested in taxidermied animals, and first started when I used a mail order from the back of a hunting magazine for a booklet on taxidermy. It was quite accurate though I think a little tough to understand for someone not trained in taxidermy. However, the illustrations and the tools they used for tanning were correct.
Just as I was getting ready to go to college, I worked for a famous local taxidermist, Louis Paul Jonas, from the American Museum. He had a studio north of us, about an hour away, and they did very simple work. They didn’t do any advertising, but their archives and what they had there was everything and more than you could ever imagine – like a museum studio.
Jonas died while in his 40s, and his clients were dispersed. Then I got a very famous Austrian gunsmith who dropped off a chamois for me to work on, and this was just as I was starting to work at Jonas’s former commercial studio in Mount Vernon, New York, down in the city. The studio was orinally the Tiffany glass factory before it moved to Long Island, so the place had a lot of history. The Austrian said if I wanted to really learn taxidermy, I needed to work for a place in a museum studio. We didn’t know each other, but he’s still a big friend of mine, hard to believe, 30 years later.
I went down there for a job interview and looked around. There was some archival stuff there, up to the roof – a lot of businesses had been there for 50 years or 60 years. There there old collections of work to be refurbished, and stock. They were overflowing with James Mellon’s trophies, that famous author who wrote African Hunter. There was amazing sculpture work and things from the original museums. The big elephant head that was there was probably one of the first reproductions. It looked like fibreglass, but made of papier maché and it was signed by all three Jonas brothers. It was was just so amazing. I never really realised taxidermy even went to those levels.
The person who interviewed me for the job at Jonas’s studios in New York, formerly Louis Paul’s commercial studio, was Steve Horn. Once I walked in the door, I was 100% sure that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and it’s not too many times in your life you’re that clear about anything. He made me call back there seven times to come get that job. I laughed because he said to me, “Well, what do you think you’re worth?” At the time I was 20, finishing my third year of college. I told him I had worked for a fur buyer when I was a kid. I did piece work for him, so by 12 years’ old l was trained in skinning animals using a beaming knife. I was probably making $10 an hour every day and it was an erratic schedule. I put in a lot of hours, and if necessary had to work on Christmas Day. It was fine, because that was my job, even as a young boy.
So when Steve Horn said, “Well what do you think you’re worth?” I said, “Well, I don’t know – I’m just sure this is what I want to do.”
He said that someone had just left and there was an opening for the shop. It wasn’t really as an apprentice, but Steve said, “You’ll learn a lot, you can work with these other taxidermists.” I was paid $4.10 an hour. I had to drive an hour and 40 minutes to work every day. So every week I wouldn’t really even take a pay cheque, I would just buy materials because I was doing taxidermy then, so I would buy pastes and have tanning done and things like that. But I worked there for years and I learnt a lot. I met some good, interesting people, and then as I progressed, I searched out other people in the industry, people that were connected to places that were very good in certain facets of taxidermy, like African work or doing cats. I would go work for them for free and then come back and I would retrain my men and change our material. So I did that probably three or four times in my life before I was 30.
At one point we were hired to work on Cabela’s projects and there was a pretty famous taxidermist who was handling those jobs. I had a tremendous amount of inventory that I had purchased over the years, and I kind of stepped into this strange job from this eccentric guy who wanted to build a Cabela’s type store, right in-between the two Cabela’s stores in West Virginia. They were going public, so they were making a big splash. We do all North American taxidermy, but when we got an opportunity to actually work for Cabela’s, they hired me to do exclusively African work.
Of course, African work is always the hardest with the highest level of detail, and I was really fortunate, because that’s when I met Wayne. They had sent their agents to collect skins and they made some deals with some guys in South Africa, game ranchers. They said, “Oh, we need kudus and this and this and this,” and they gave a laundry list. But the problem was, the first two times the skins came back, which is what they handed me, they were average-sized animals. The problem was, they wanted record-book-size horns which could be made as reproductions, but the skins were too small.
So I told him I had the inventory covered: “Why don’t you let me just supply the inventory, supply the grasses, the African birds, all the skins. I’ll do the reproduction horns so we have them from record-book-size animals. I’ll handle this for you, you don’t have any problem.” They agreed.
That helped me. Through those years I was able to do almost all African work for Cabela’s. I did a few other things for that Pennsylvania store, but they didn’t want to have one person handling everything. Africa was my thing. And then it also helped me to go to Africa and collect animals and spend a month over there with Wayne. He liked what we were getting, mostly skins, and I got the experience of hunting and vacation, and kept my own horns and skulls, and we used reproduction record-book ones on the animals in the bigger mounts in the stores. And then after that we did a lot of regular client African work, as well as North American work. On one occasion I was at Safari Club and had a big glass case with African birds in it, all the stuff that you see in a bird scene. I had maybe 15 birds in a case and a man walkedup to the case and said “Wow! I need those for my museum. Are those for sale?” I said, sure.
“How many do you have?”
“Oh, about 250.”
“I’ll take them all,” he said, shook my hand and said, “I’m Johnny Morris.” And that was the beginning of our relationship and he hired us for the African exhibits for him, and I think we did just short of 300 life-size animals for that museum. There were a lot of different parts of it that would take some expertise – not just doing it, but having the right brokers to bring these trophies in from outside that had been sitting in Africa for a long time. But we were able to get all that stuff done, as well as do some reproduction animals for him that were impossible to find, and do some restoration work on some things that were very complicated. Anyway, so it’s the African work and it’s what we do mostly.
Favorite animal? Almost everybody says cats because they’re complicated, and we absolutely have done lots of them. For me personally, my honest answer is, I don’t really have anything I would say is a favorite, but I like high detail and I like craftsmanship and natural positions on things, so I could say cats. But I don’t, because they’re probably the focal point in taxidermy. We’re not really doing any elephants or any lions, so that would have to mean leopards.
I think even though we’ve been fortunate enough to work on Cabela’s African displays and Johnny Morris’s African museum, and people with world-famous sheep and mountain scapes, we still do lots of normal work for people as far as African safaris and small safaris are concerned. We enjoy working with people when they’re new and when they start their trophy rooms and they start that journey of hunting of a lifetime. You start somewhere and start small.
And then we end up re-doing their trophy rooms, and we usually work for these people for most of their lives – and that’s true.
An admitted novice big game hunter, Robert Ruark went on an African safari for the first time ostensibly on medical orders; his doctor advised that a year’s rest would serve him well and Ruark decided that recommendation would be the impetus to fulfilling a long held dream of hunting Africa. So in the early 1950s, accompanied by his wife, Virginia, he embarked on a two-month safari across what is now Kenya and Tanzania. The tales of their exploits are captured in Horn of the Hunter.
Ruark booked his safari with the Legendary Ker and Downey Safaris, who assigned a young PH, Harry Selby, then 25, to guide their hunt. Horn of the Hunter would not only bring Ruark to newfound prominence as a writer, but also made a celebrity of Selby, who was booked solid for years to come following the release of Ruark’s book.
Horn of the Hunter is much more than just another tale of hunting Africa’s fabled big game, although there are plenty of descriptive sections detailing encounters with lions, elephants, Cape buffalo, leopards, rhinoceros, kudu, and more. What sets Ruark’s writing apart from the pack, however, is his ability to capture the feel and spirit of a safari. He had the ability, and a willingness, to reveal his innermost thoughts while camping and hunting across remote eastern Africa. He details what safari life is like in a truthful and insightful manner that has been captured in few other places within the realm of African hunting literature. His frustrations, fears, anxieties, pride, and elation take turns coming to the fore, and the reader rides along on his roller coaster of emotions.
Horn of the Hunter should be required reading for everybody before they go on their first safari. Sure, times have changed, and you’ll not likely be travelling cross-country in a beaten up old truck, putting up and taking down camps, as you hunt for weeks on end. What hasn’t changed, however, are the emotions you’ll experience, the highs and the lows, the triumphs and the tragedies. After all, it’s those emotions, as much as the game, that make us want to return to Africa again and again.
