One Heck Of A Ride

106 Eastern Cape and the Orange Free State over the next two weeks. I shot a common reedbuck near Tiekiedrral, a white blesbok and a red hartebeest near Springfontein, a Cape grysbok, a Cape bushbuck and two East Cape Greater kudu bulls on Arthur Rudman’s farm near Blaauwkrantz. The two kudu bulls were running together, and one had broken off the tip of its horns. Rudman asked me to shoot both of them. As all things do, my back-to-back 1993 South African safaris ended and I returned home. The head of my southern white rhino now hangs in the trophy room in Lompoc. Without the forward thinking of Dr. Ian Player, the subspecies would have been as extinct as the quagga and the dodo years before I discovered Africa. I take pride in knowing I contributed toward the preservation of the southern white rhinoceros by hunting one old bull. I returned to South Africa one more time after taking that white rhino in 1993. InSeptember 2001, Norm Epley, and Mike Gill from Bakersfield, California, and I hunted with Jaco Du Plessis of Jaco and Roelene Safaris near Thabazimbi. The only animals I wanted from South Africa on that trip were a caracal and a genet, and I shot both of them at night on Gary Kelly’s place. From there, Jaco flew us to Namibia in his twin-engine Piper Nighttime hunt at Mkuze Falls Game reserve yielded a white-tailed mongoose and a bushpig for author Seneca and I spent several days hunting a Damara dik-dik. These small antelope have short horns, but we eventually found one Jaco said was a “trophy.” I was using one of Jaco’s rifles, and the little animal ran off when I shot and missed him. The tracks a dik-dik leaves behind are difficult to follow, but Jaco and his trackers were able to trail him around the rocky desert hills. The little ram kept jumping up and running off as we approached, but I eventually was able to collect him. Norm, Mike and I were staying on a small farm in Namibia when we turned on CNN and heard two large passenger planes had hit the Twin Towers in New City. The entire world, including an isolated farm in a far-away land, was affected. It was several hours before I could get a line to call my wife back home, and we could not leave by air for three or four days. Needless to say, we went straight home when the airports began operating again. Two years after we hunted with Jaco, I heard he and another pilot, a man named Lourens Louw, had gone missing on a flight from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Pretoria, South Africa. The last anyone had heard from them was while they were over the Selous Reserve and used their radio to say there was a thunderstorm over Lake Malawi and that they planned to stop in Mfue, Zambia, for more fuel. A couple of years later, there was a rumor going around SCI’s convention that Jaco’s plane had been found abandoned at a remote airstrip in Zambia, and that it still had fuel in its tanks. According to the rumor, it was as if the two men had landed and simply walked away. The plane needed no repairs and was flown back to South Africa without incident. I could not confirm this, though. As far as I know, Jaco’s disappearance remains yet another mystery of the Dark Continent. South Africa