One Heck Of A Ride

105 South Africa warnings. After two weeks with Johan, I hooked up with PH Harry Fourie of John X Safaris for my ten-day rhino hunt in the privately owned 37,000- acre Mkuze Controlled Hunting Area outside the Mkuze Game Reserve between Kruger National Park and Zululand. I could not have picked a better time for it. Trophy fees for rhinos had temporarily plummeted across South Africa, and the bull I would be hunting was very old and the reserve’s wildlife managers didn’t want it to die before a hunter could “harvest” it. I hadn’t expected there would be much of a challenge to collect a certain, closely monitored animal such as a rhino in South Africa. After all, any gamekeeper worth his keep should know exactly where that expensive animal could be found at any given time. Maybe so, but it took a day and a half of hard tracking and hiking before we found the bull in a thicket of thorn bushes. When Harry and I finally were in position to shoot, the rhino was only nineteen paces away. “Shoot him just behind the leg about a third of the way up when he turns broadside,” Harry whispered. My first shot made the bull stumble, and I was able to quickly bolt another round into the chamber and shoot him again before he ran off. We found him dead just forty-nine paces from where I’d shot him. White rhinos are huge animals, the largest of all the various rhinos, and this beast had to weigh nearly six tons with a body that would rank among the largest of his kind. Stretched out, A unique program that encourages South Africa’s game farmers to profit from hunting is helping to restore the once-endangered white rhino he was at least fourteen feet long. The top of his back when standing would have been close to six feet from the ground. His horns easily qualified for silver-medal ranking in the SCI record book. I spent a week with Harry at Mkuze, driving around the hunting area and nature reserve during the day and hunting bushpig at night. It was a great area, well known among tourists because of its waterfalls on the Mkuze River. Unfortunately, the river was nearly dry when I was there. There were other hunters in our tent camp at Mkuze, and a couple of them had brought their wives. One of the men couldn’t speak five words without using language that would make a sailor blush, and he looked at me angrily when I reminded him there were women present and asked him to cut it out. He cleaned up his language after that, though. I shot a nice bush pig, an African porcupine and a white-tailed mongoose with Harry before joining Johan van Riet again for the second part of my plains game safari. Hunting involved driving to various concessions across Zululand, the