By Jim Thorn

Just got back from a hunt with PH’s Ross Hare and Johnathan Rademeyer at Monterra Safaris. The goal was to complete the Black/Gold package, and I had the surprise of being able to complete the spiral horn slam, along with a couple of other extraordinary plains-game specimens.

We started off the hunt looking for a golden wildebeest, the “gold” of the black/gold package. So, taking what the bush gives you I also took a very nice gemsbok.

We were able to silently stalk to within about 30 yards of the resting gemsbok before the wind changed and it stood up to look at us. The frontal shot was true and it didn’t run far. I hoped the golden animal would happen the next day.

The following day we began our search for it. True to form and true to taking what the bush gives you, with another frontal shot at about 40 yards I had the black part of the black/gold package, a very nice sable!

Again we were off to find a golden. A new tradition was now established on this hunt – “We take what the bush gives us.”  So, when we said we were going for a golden, instead we were given a monster bushbuck!

With this beauty in the salt, we decided that the next day we would go for anything except the golden wildebeest.

You guessed it! We finally got an absolutely beautiful golden. Besides the gorgeous shimmering coat this guy also had really wide horns.

The black/gold package was complete! Unfortunately for my budget, while we were roaming around in the bush we had seen an exceptional blesbok so we decided to try for it too. We found the right group standing and lying around under some trees and when the right one decided to stand up and walk clear of his companions my shot was true and we had this beautiful blesbok.

I now considered my hunt a complete success and was very happy with the results. The guys at Monterra, however, had other plans. Ross and Johnathan decided that since three species of the spiral horn antelopes had all been taken at Monterra (this was my third safari with them) that I simply couldn’t go home needing an eland to complete the slam without at least trying for it. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse and will be forever grateful for, so on the last day we tried for the eland and with very little time to spare, the shot was true at about 80 yards and the spiral horn slam was complete. My gosh I am one fortunate fellow!

The green scores we measured at Monterra are unofficial but educated. Truly exceptional.

Needless to say, I can’t speak highly enough of the crew at Monterra. My wife accompanied me this time and they took exceptional care of her as she is not a hunter but loved birding with knowledgeable people, seeing the animals on game drives, and they had a spa day to boot. So, all in all a truly wonderful nine days in the Limpopo Province on the Limpopo River with Monterra.

By Roger Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With 5000 Broadheads to choose from, I chose to design and have mine made by a master knifemaker. These were all designed to take down hippo, elephant and rhino. All were tested on big game and all worked perfectly, though the far left one was never used. The middle one had a spiral cutting surface.

By Dr Adrian de Villiers

The reason archery and hunting with a bow is so special is because you are only as good as your last shot.

With archery there is no such thing as sighting in your bow and packing it away till next hunting season, taking it out of moth balls and going hunting with it. It takes regular practise, and it takes gym and exercise to stay in shape. Today’s bows are state-of-the-art machines with computer-designed and C&C cut aircraft quality aluminium parts – they are way better than the cast magnesium riser bows we used in the 1980s. The bows can be fine-tuned, and good archers can easily shoot a golf ball at 100m with them.

There are a number of reasons why bowhunting is so interesting. A rifle hunter can shoot an animal as soon as he sees it in a good position. But it’s just the beginning for a bowhunter. We have to know animal behavior in far greater detail, and especially herd animals.

I do not consider shooting animals at a feeder or at a waterhole as “bowhunting” although when I started I did do so quite a lot. However, all the animals I have entered into the SCI bowhunter’s record book I hunted on foot, and not over bait or from a hide, including the Big Five and a hippo. But I would urge new bowhunters to shoot at least ten animals from a hide until they get over their buck fever and to see which type of shot will have the best results.

It is thought by most hunters that the only shot is the broadside shot behind the shoulder, but that is not the case. When we are bowhunting on foot in the bush, a broadside perfect shot is not always possible or desirable, especially when you are 10 or 15 yards away.  All herbivores have their eyes on the sides of their heads, and plains game, unlike us, do not have much of a “blind spot” so to hunt them you need to be more crafty than they are.

You can’t wait till they are close by standing broadside to you and then draw the bow – they will see that immediately. You need to quickly and silently draw as their eyes pass behind a tree or bush, and you must be standing dead still in a leafy suit or Ghillie suit so they don’t recognise you as a human. lt is hard to judge the speed of their movement while they are walking, so it’s a good idea to try get them to stop and then shoot. I use a soft, small animal sound like, “Ma”, similar to a baby wildebeest.

You don’t have to kill something to be “actively hunting”. You can walk and stalk and draw on animals that you are not going to kill just for the practice and excitement! It’s a great way to improve your skills. Hunting and not shooting animals you would normally kill will allow you to get all your ducks in a row – to get into a good position and choose the right moment to draw and aim without the adrenalin pumping stress of shooting a record-book animal.

The archery component of the bowhunt is also tremendously entertaining, and archery is a sport that you might never master. It’s not a sport where you can shoot a perfect shot every time, even under perfect circumstances. I have seen world-class archers, who have won many world titles, shoot badly under hunting conditions. I’ve had some amazingly good days where I could do nothing wrong, and weekends where I just could not do anything right. That’s what I love about it – it’s never over till the animal is in the cooler room.

Nowadays with the drama involved in getting a firearm license, more people are turning to archery. You can buy the bow and accessories in the morning and be practising in the garden by the afternoon. I have taught a lot of novice bowhunters to shoot a bow, and within an hour they are sitting in a hide and hunting animals that same day.

Hunters that used to shoot with rifles become obsessed with bowhunting quite easily. The thought that you are supplying the energy to the arrow that kills the animal puts you much closer to your quarry, and the absence of that devastating explosion of energy and noise is refreshing. I have often shot animals in a herd without any other animal even noticing it.

Many bowhunting farms, including mine, have exemption to hunt all year around, so it’s possible to keep busy all year and thus to keep your equipment in pristine condition all the time.

3 D archery on animal-sized rubber targets is also great exercise and fun. You can choose different shooting lanes to shoot at the same target. When you get proficient at shooting though tiny gaps and being able to visualise the arc that the arrow will take on its way to the target, you can teach yourself to shoot some insane shots, whereas another bowhunter will not even see an opportunity.  Whenever I come back from a hunt I have a ritual. I take all my arrows, wash them, and spin them on a jig to make sure they are 100 % straight. If you own carbon arrows you should bend them quite harshly and listen to them – if you hear a creak or crack, discard them. They could explode on the next shot.

Fixed-blade heads and all used heads are either re-sharpened carefully or the blades replaced with new ones.  A broadhead should only be shot once and then be re-sharpened. A broadhead shot into an ethafoam butt is not sharp enough to hunt with. Once the arrows, fletches and points are checked, the arrows should be shot once more at a target to check that they are shooting true. The same applies to every new arrow you buy: test it by shooting it before you hunt with it. Every arrow should be weighed when you bring them home to make sure they are within a few grains of each other in weight. Although 20 gr difference in weight has very little effect over 30 yards, over 100 yards it could be as much as a meter higher or lower.

With a correctly placed arrow of the right weight, the correct Broadhead will take down any land animal humanely and quietly. Often the rest of the herd will not even notice.

Choose two broadheads that work for you. One for big game, where I would recommend a solid steel fixed blade, (two-blader) like the top left one. For medium game I would recommend a good mechanical three-blader like the Spitfire Maxx.

By Glenn W. Geelhoed

Kareekloof, Great Karoo Desert, South Africa

The setting sun tinted the red hartebeest an even more glowing shade of red as we tried to stalk toward it, using the slight depression of a “loof”, a long-ago run-off that had left a tangle of boulders in the thorn scrub. The hartebeest bull, which I had first got to know in its Ki-Swahili name “kongoni”, was on to us. It kept moving, keeping just beyond the 400-meter range that I felt comfortable in attempting to shoot with the .300 Win Mag. I was now looking through the scope, having been following it earlier with the Zeiss binoculars as it was edging away from us.

At five hundred meters it stopped, looked back in our direction, and apparently unalarmed, settled down to bed for the evening. Charl and I used that short window of its inattention to crouch forward another 120 meters to come to a large rock surmounted by a small shepherd’s tree stump. This might be as good  as it gets before sunset in Kareekloof. The rock and stump constituted a rifle rest, and the scope highlighted the reddish tint reflected from the hartebeest’s forequarters. This might be the magic moment in the Kareekloof desert twilight.

Kareekloof is in the heart of the Great Karoo Desert. It is a weigh station between Cape Town and Kimberly in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and served as a supply post for the British during the Boer War over a century ago. “Kareek” is an endemic drought-resistant tree and “loof” is a shallow valley, so the name reflects remarkable natural history features within the sweep of the Great Karoo, a vista that extends beyond sightline in all directions. Kareekloof is a vast tract of mixed desert scrub of well over 100,000 hectares enclosed by over 29 miles of game fencing. A long, straight, dusty road and narrow-gauge railroad that passes through Kareekloof had made it the remote supply station for the British forces of the Boer War. As we were stalking through the desert “loof”, we saw the fore- and hind-hoof horseshoes of the mount of a British officer who had been shot off his horse in the conflict, and is buried, along with his horse, in a simple grave near the roadway.

That road, a lifeline for the British Expeditionary Forces during the Boer War, had constituted the supply line for Kimberly 100 kilometers north,    which was booming following the discovery of the Diamond Pipe of the “Big Hole” that turned remote Kimberly into a Wild West lawless town of fortune seekers. This was before the prime minister of the Cape Colony and shrewd business tycoon Cecil Rhodes brought the lucrative wealth of the richest and 

biggest hand-dug mine on earth, (which produced 2,722 kilograms of diamonds during its production from discovery July 16, 1871 to its closure in August of 1914) into a tight cartel of  De Beers Consolidated. A similar hand-dug mine into an assumed diamond pipe had been dug in Kareekloof, but was abandoned as an unfulfilled promise of similar riches which we saw while walking around its relics during our hunt.

Besides the sparse kareek tree, the more common vegetation includes the blackthorn acacia, which blossoms in a small white flower in the southern hemisphere spring, but only if there has been a light rain, which had not happened for five years before my arrival in early September, putting the desert scrub at high risk of fire from the prolonged drought. As I arrived, the first rainclouds had appeared and a light rain at night caused the desert to appear frosted at dawn with a light snow cover from the overnight blackthorn blossoms. Among the blackthorn and camelthorn scrub trees were standout shepherd’s trees, which looked like ideal shade trees to accommodate travelers attempting to escape from the overhead sun at this location 29º S at 1,202 meters elevation. Bad idea. Large colonies of ticks got there first, to the regret of any warm-blooded creature seeking shade from the shepherd’s tree now shunned by most wildlife.

That wildlife is as varied as the terrain. We observed many desert tortoises, like the leopard tortoise, that has the unique capacity to capture the rarely available rainwater in a bursa beneath its carapace to be carried during prolonged droughts. We even glimpsed one endangered species known as the Karoo padloper. All around us was the evidence that anteaters are regular nocturnal excavators of the abundant anthills. The birdlife is worth a visit for the numerous desert species, and the totemic emblem of Kareekloof is the secretary bird.

At the apex of the big game is the largest collection of free-range rhinos outside any national park, including over 180 white (“weit”, or wide-lipped savanna grazing) rhino and a dozen browsing black rhino, monitored by a 24/7 team of anti-poaching patrols. I was invited to join as an observer on the collection of an over-aged post-breeding bull white rhino that had been selected by the South African Government Game agents for an official legal rhino hunt to monitor the process that finances the protection of the rhino conservation efforts. There was abundant sable, kudu and springbok and other antelope in huntable populations, but I had come to search for a trophy red hartebeest.

I had come to Kareekloof with PH Charl Watts who was also making his first visit to this site which his PH brother Gideon Watts manages. I got to be the first hunter guided by each of the three brothers in Watts Trophy Hunting since I had hunted buffalo with the late Gee Watts in Limpopo a year previously.

The history of Kareekloof is almost as intriguing as the natural history. As part of the Boer War British supply post history the old general store is maintained     a museum, with many artefacts on display. But there is deep pre-history as well, that includes rock pictographs of the earliest indigenous inhabitants showing the wildlife that was extant during the Bushmen’s inhabiting the Great Karoo Desert, millennia before the area became known to the world during the Boer War. While trekking through the Kareekloof, I saw and photographed the rock art lying as exposed as it  must have been in early history when the Bushmen artists created it.

As we stalked through the desert scrub on our final day at Kareekloof, our bushman tracker Abrahm kept scanning the hoofprints in the sand, not just to find  hartebeest sign, but to differentiate between the black and  white rhino prints – we did not want to blunder into the short-tempered black rhino, a solitary and belligerent inhabitant of the sparse scrub cover. When we spotted at a long distance in late afternoon a small herd of hartebeest on the horizon, Abrahm left to make a wide circle to get beyond them, while we stalked a solitary distant bull that appeared to be ostracized from the group. It looked good through the glasses, but it was a long way from us and still moving further. Between us and the hartebeest we saw four big bulky forms and a fifth smaller one – dust-covered white rhinos, at least one a cow with a calf.

We moved in a downwind arc around the rhinos and tried to close the increasing gap toward the hartebeest, as the bright reddish tint of the slanting sun burnished all the bush around us with a glow like a reflection of a distant fire. We were still a long shot away, until the hartebeest sank to the sand – perhaps the twilight was a signal to bed down for the night in a clearing. This was our moment to move, and we made it to the rock that would be the shooting platform. Suddenly the hartebeest got back up on his feet and looked in our direction…

It seemed a long time after the sound of the shot that the thump of the hit drifted back to us, but by that time the hartebeest was down. As we walked to where it lay, a cloud of dust was spiraling up on the opposite horizon – the rhinos had been put to flight by the shot. The hartebeest bull was a good trophy, old and likely two years or more past breeding. As we lifted its head with the lyre-shaped horns, they framed the setting sun that had burnished it to a red glow. It was a good portrait to conclude our visit to Kareekloof in the Great Karoo.