One Heck Of A Ride

100 South Africa had teetered on the very edge of extinction were secure in its parks and game farms. Eventually, legislation was passed that granted landowners ownership of the wildlife under their control behind high fences. Early on, when a few South Africans realized foreign hunters would pay to hunt animals that farmers had considered threats to their livelihood, a larger and more profitable industry began to emerge. Despite the gloomy report by the authors of Pan Am’s 1969 guidebook, pioneer South African hunting outfitters such as Coenraad Vermaak, Norman Dean and Garry Kelly in Natal (now KwaZulu Natal) and Frank Bowker in the Cape Province (now Eastern Cape) were advertising in magazines in the United States, Canada and Europe in 1970 and booking hunts at the annual meetings of prestigious hunting clubs such as Shikar-Safari and Game Coin. However, there were no large gatherings attracting thousands of potential clients when Safari Club International held its first convention in Nevada in 1973. Outfitters now had a major marketplace to sell their services, and South Africa’s outfitters were among the first to take advantage of it. Two other events later in that decade helped boost the return of South Africa’s wildlife and the phenomenal growth of its hunting industry, and both occurred in 1977 when Kenya suddenly banned hunting and St. Martin’s Press published Peter Hathaway Capstick’s “Death In The Long Grass.” Kenya’s closing not only forced its “white hunters” (called “professional hunter” or simply “PH” today) to move to other countries or take up other occupations, but it also sent would-be clients elsewhere. Capstick’s books, as did Ernest Hemingway’s and Robert Ruark’s books before them, influenced a new generation of hunters to hunt inAfrica and many of them eventually would find themselves hunting in South Africa. Frank Bowker was waiting for me when I landed at the airport in Port Elizabeth in May 1984, and we soon were on our way to the farm his family created after arriving in the Cape Colony with 4,000 other British settlers in 1820. I had chosen Frank’s company for my second safari after friends recommended him. He had been in business for fourteen years then, and I’d found only glowing reports about Frank Bowker Safaris when I checked the hunting reports SCI maintains for its members. During my layover at Johannesburg’s Jan SmutsAirport and on the two-hour drive northwest to Frank’s farm, the differences between South Africa and Zimbabwe, where I’d hunted just three years earlier, were noticeable and striking. From what I saw in traveling from one end of Zimbabwe to the other, it was a laid-back agrarian country with vast amounts of untouched land. South Africa had farmers growing food and fiber, of course, but it also had modern highways, fast- food chains, shopping malls and industries with high-rise office buildings and many factories, including assembly plants in Port Elizabeth for most of the world’s major automobile makers. It also had ten-foot-tall fences nearly everywhere along its roads. I don’t remember seeing a single wild animal from our vehicle before we drove through the gate at Thornkloof, the nineteenth-century homestead Frank’s great- grandparents had built. The Bowker family’s historic home had been renovated and redesigned to include en-suite bathrooms for multiple guests, and after leaving my gear in the room I was assigned, Frank drove me around to show me the farm. He was quite proud that nearly all of the farm’s workers — from skinners, trackers, drivers and mechanics to the laundry and kitchen staff – had been born and grew up on the property. Our first stop was a school for the children of the workers at Thorn Kloof and the surrounding area that Frank’s safari company had founded and supported. It provided

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