One Heck Of A Ride

115 Two Memorial Hunts In Cameroon these gorillas were a subspecies called “Cross River gorillas” found only in that region.) In addition to Cameroon having more bugs and primates than Liberia, the area we hunted also had more small streams with waterfalls. I soon lost count of the number we came upon. We hunted buffalo and sitatunga by sitting in blinds over “salines” (natural salt licks) and other likely places, but for bongo we followed pygmies and two or three of their dogs. Keeping up with the little men and their mutts wasn’t easy. The tallest pygmies were no more than five feet tall and could move with little effort through underbrush. At five feet ten inches tall, I had to bend and duck a lot, and that left me with a sore back and legs at the end of each long day. Unlike hunting black bears and mountain lions in North America where trained hounds locate the scent of a bear or lion The hunting party came upon numerous unnamed waterfalls and chase the animal to a tree, the pygmies would find and follow bongo tracks and not release their dogs until they felt they were close to a bongo. We found fresh spoor of a bull bongo the first morning and set off on foot with the pygmies and their dogs taking the lead, followed by Borge and then me. A couple of hours later, the trackers released the dogs and thirty minutes later they had bayed the bongo in a nearly impenetrable thicket. Borge and I crawled to within a dozen feet of the noisy fight, but the bull bolted and was gone before I could get into position to shoot. Only half jokingly, Borge said the animal didn’t stop running until it had crossed the Congo border. The next day, after following the tracks of a big male bongo, a bongo came to bay only minutes after the dogs were released. Again, Borge and I had to crawl through the undergrowth and move around to catch glimpses of the animal even though it was less than twenty feet away. All we could see were the ivory tips of its horns. Borge was so confident that this was the big male whose tracks we were following that, without hesitation, he told me to shoot it. I didn’t wait to try to judge its horns and fired the instant the next patch of reddish-orange appeared, only to learn that I had killed a female. What had happened, we decided, was that the female had crossed the bull’s tracks and the dogs went after it instead of the male. Both sexes have horns but the horns of female bongos are much thinner and longer than those on the males. “What do we do now?” I asked. Borge took full responsibility for the mistake. “We keep right on hunting until we find you that big male,” he said. Unlike the hunters flying back to Douala on the aircraft that had flown us to camp, I had taken a bongo, albeit a female. Not everyone who has hunted the largest of the forest antelopes can say that. The hunters flying out when we arrived had hunted two weeks from our camp without taking