One Heck Of A Ride

116 a bongo. The third day of the hunt, we found the tracks of a small herd of bongo, and one of the animals was a big bull. Borge was reluctant to follow a bull running with a herd. He felt the odds of killing it were only about 50:50. There were just too many eyes and ears that could alert it, he said, but then added the tracks indicated this was a big bull and we shouldn’t pass it up. For the final approach, the pygmies and their dogs stayed behind while Borge and I crawled through undergrowth and vines covered with ants. When we got a glimpse of the bull’s horns when it moved into a small opening, I already had my rifle to my shoulder when Borge said for me to shoot it and I dropped the bull with one shot. I had taken a magnificent gold medal bull with heavy ivory-tipped horns. The white chevron on its forehead, the patches of black on its face, and the white stripes along its sides contrasted beautifully with its rust-colored coat. It is no wonder the bongo is prized by the world’s trophy Two Memorial Hunts In Cameroon Author and his magnificent Gold Medal bongo taken on the hunt’s third day. Its heavy horns were ivory-tipped hunters. There was no way to weigh it, but it could have gone 500 pounds or more. Bongos have a reputation for being aggressive, and it’s easy to see why many professional hunters who operate in bongo habitat consider wounded bulls to be as dangerous as an angry Cape buffalo. One of the bongos the pygmies’ dogs bayed briefly early in our hunt punched a big hole in a dog’s stomach before fighting off the other dogs and escaping. (The wound would have killed a man, but the pygmies merely put some powder in the hole and the dog kept on hunting.) SCI founder C.J. McElroy wrote that a bongo in Kenya was the only animal that had ever tried to kill him, and I believe it. He hunted East African bongos decades before I discovered I had the means to hunt in Africa, but the bongos he hunted undoubtedly were just as ornery as the variety I hunted. The pygmies skinned my bongo on the spot and packed the meat in neat packs made from the vines and large leaves they cut nearby. A vine “strap” created a tumpline, which they placed on their foreheads and walked off carrying the head, hide and quarters of the heavy animal on their backs to our truck. It’s a cause for celebration when a big bull bongo is taken, and the trackers had a special bongo song they sang on the drive back to the lodge, where Borge, Shawn Merriman (the other hunter in camp), and I continued the celebration. I had visions of lifesize mounts of my male and female bongo being the centerpiece of my trophy room, but as you will learn later it was not to be.